Page 60 of A Dance of Lies

I’ll have nowhere safe to disappear to.

It used to be idle talk. Slurred rants by the fireplace after he’d returned from his station, the scent of cognac sour on his breath.All nations should follow our order,he’d say. He’d speak of their avarice, their wretched ways. The absurdity of the last vestiges of piety some clung to—as ifhewere all-knowing.

And I might have bought into his reasonings, had it not been for Emilia. Yet it seems King Rurik may have caved under my father’s influence.

If Brisendale is the Beast of the North, then my father is its fangs, already coated in blood. And if I am helping to enable his war—

I have to know.

I’m supposed to retrieve Annais by midnight, but this might be my only chance to seek answers. I’ll just have to be quick.

Feeling faint, I use walls for support, jumping when something spindly crawls across my fingers. Adrenaline chases my heartbeat into a sprint, slowing only after a few long minutes of uninterrupted travel. Just when I’m about to turn around, the tunnels lift, taking me higher into the palace itself.

And then they narrow.

And darken.

Dark like my cell. Cloying darkness, stale and never-ending. Eternal.

Swathes of it.Layers.

A familiar panic hurtles through my chest. I press my hands to my heart as if I could push it back down, but it grows thicker until my lungs feel heavy, as if I’m gulping seawater. Sap. I slink against the wall, the ghost of my shackles weighing down my wrists. I can’t seem to draw in air—

No. I can’t let this happen. Not here, not now. I thrash around in my mind, fighting to regain the body slipping from my control—

Copelan.

His arms, the way it feels to be held by him. The way it feels to be touched, even if it takes me hours to recover from our rehearsals. And our last one was as exhilarating as it was exhausting. An escape—maybe the only thing holding me together.

Until I fail him.

Because I cannot balance the way I need to. I lack the strength or stamina required for many of the moves, forcing him to compensate with his own strength.

I never tell him how humiliated I feel.

A broken toy has no worth.

I am weak and brittle as century-old bone.

No—breathe. Please, breathe.

A glimmer catches my eye, just beyond the corner. I round it slowly, brushing dampened hair from my forehead to clear my vision.

Because surely my sight is deceiving me.

Shivers of prismatic light dance along the walls ahead like leaves in the wind, and it takes me several moments to understand.

Themosaics.

Or the backs of them, because I am on the other side.

And I can see straight through them.

Figures stride by, tapering the light as they pass. And not only that, I can even make out fragments of conversation.

“Anton,” I say under my breath.

Instead of paintings, the palace is decorated with sea glass mosaics. They line every hallway, garnish every room, and from my brief explorations, I know they’re opaque from the other side. But here, certain panes are thinner, near translucent. They must be the new additions to expand the tunnels Laurent spoke of. And it’s brilliantly done. Being that they extend only slightly off the wall, who would know there’s a walkway behind them?