Escape the Palace
Sinisa
Left behind in the steaming bathhouse, I watch the king’s rotund belly float above the waters. The aacsi unlatches from its parasitic bite. It skitters across the dead king’s face and clambers back onto the stone floor, twisting to face me, ready to lunge.
Baring my teeth, I step toward its challenge with my arms out wide. “Go ahead. I dare you to taste the flesh of a Reaper…”
The taunt fizzles on my tongue like a torch dipped in water. I’d nearly forgotten that I am no longer a Reaper. Despite failing to save Acari, death does not linger beneath my skin anymore. If I truly wanted to kill this aacsi, I’d have to use force—the heel of my boot, some other blunt object, or whatever it is that the mortals use to kill.
The problem is that killing this creature now wouldn’t bring Acari back. It would only make me a Reaper again. Once more, I would forget everything I’d learned about the Reapers, about their crows, about the Guardians; I’d forget about Acari and Gem, and the promise I’d made to look after her.
Becoming a Reaper again is not an option.
Shuffling backward, I move slowly, hoping that the aacsi will ignore my initial challenge. It blinks at me for a moment, the tentacles around its mouth twitching and dripping with saliva. But to my great relief, it pivots and crawls away, wedging itself between the stones lining the walls.
I hold my ear up, listening to see if anyone screams when they cross paths with the aacsi now roaming the Halaud Palace halls. None do. The people outside go about their cheerful and busy day as if nothing has changed, as if the Festival of Wings will continue on as planned, as if their king isn’t already dead.
Once they discover his body, I’m fairly certain the palace environment will change. For me, where I stand in my Reaper tunic, it might even become hostile.
I head for the bathing house door and yank on the iron handle, surprised when a girl with a horse’s mane of hair nearly falls into the room.
“Where is he?” Hayliel asks. She straightens to the tips of her toes to see past me and into the dim bathing house. When she finds no one following behind me, she steps aside so that I may pass. Her eyes pool. “W-where is Acari?”
“He’s in Veltuur now,” I say sharply.
The statement is meant to cut through her to get her off my back so that I can move on with my life. But despite the fond memories I have of my time in the gloomy forest of the underrealm, lounging beneath my familiar and twisted tree, when I utter the words, they stab my heart unexpectedly.
I couldn’t stop Acari.
I couldn’t save him.
He, of all people, shouldn’t be in Veltuur.
And yet, he is.
He killed his father to save his sister. He did what he had to do just like I had done all those years ago. And although I could’ve saved him if I had been a moment sooner, now there is nothing else I can do for him. He is in Veltuur, and I am here in Oakfall, in Tayaraan, the mortal realm, left to pick up my life from where it last left off.
I blow past her.
Outside the bathing house, the courtyard is alive with servants and guests. They notice me in my Reaper red instantly, horrified by my presence and what it might mean for them. Few glance at the runes on my forehead, though they don’t get to look at them long enough to draw any conclusions because I keep moving. I can’t stay here. Once the king misses whatever activity had been next on his schedule, someone will come looking for him. They’ll discover his floating corpse in one of the deep pools, but they won’t find Acari standing over him, nor the aacsi that he’d unleashed. All they’ll see is a girl in Reaper’s clothing and a king slain for no reason.
I can’t allow them to find me. Reaper or not, the people would demand justice for losing their monarch. Kings, queens, and other royalty are normally exempt from a Reaper’s contract, unless they are in poor health or they’ve committed a crime so atrocious that they are to be publicly executed.
But Acari’s father was neither unwell nor a known tyrant. The people will uprise when they hear of his death. If they find me beside him, they might imprison me and demand to speak with someone from the underrealm. And of course, now that I am no longer a Reaper, I wouldn’t be able to faze away, nor would the Councilspirits come to free me. I would be locked away forever, or at least until I faced what would most certainly be an unfair trial and they sent for a Reaper to execute me.
What a miserable existence to return to after everything I’ve endured.
Balling my hands into fists, I march down the pebble path, away from Hayliel’s silent whimpers, and head toward the secret passage that, if memory serves, is just down the next corridor.
Only a few steps into my stride though, Hayliel chases after me.
“Where are you going? Are you going to save the prince?”
I falter, if only for a second. “No. I already tried that, and clearly, I failed.”
She jogs in front of me, prepared to stop me with a gentle grip on my shoulders, but she recoils before her skin meets my tunic. Apparently, even she still sees me as a Reaper.
Her hands fall to her waist instead.
“But you’re going to try again, right?” she asks, staring me down. “You said that you did what needed to be done to end your service with the underrealm, which means you yourself know what it takes to…to change back. You can help him.”
“No, I can’t. The underrealm and the Councilspirits will shelter him until they’re ready to send him out to claim his first soul, but even then, I’d have no way of finding him. They send Reapers to every corner of Tayaraan, to every kingdom and small village between the Magrok Mountains to the Corraeda Isles. I doubt they’ll be in a hurry to send a former prince back to his own kingdom any time soon.”
Clutching her skirts, she raises them higher to try to keep up. “Then where are you going?”
The memory replays in my mind: Acari unleashing the aacsi onto his father, the king thrashing in the dark waters until the Wraiths finally came for them both—one to become a Reaper in flesh, the other to have their soul trapped inside a crow. But just before they were taken to Veltuur, just before Acari would forget everything he’d ever known, I did the only thing that I thought a good friend could do.
“To uphold a promise,” I tell her.
“Gem?” she asks. “Is she still with the Guardians?”
Her astuteness surprises me, but I answer both questions with a simple, “Yes.”
Hayliel’s silent for a stretch of time, long enough for us to make it to the corridor I need. The painting concealing the hidden passage, completely inconspicuous to the unknowing eye, hovers on the wall. In a few short strides, I reach for the gilded frame. As I shove it aside, I catch a glimpse of the guard just up ahead, the one I saw during my first visit to the palace when I thought my mark might be in a garden and he wouldn’t let me enter.
As he strides to meet us, I notice that he looks just as he did the last time our paths crossed: his thick brows are permanently set downward, his beard groomed to a point, like one of the very conifers growing in the courtyard behind me. Given the various leather straps and drapes of fabric he’s bundled in, I’m surprised he’s as swift as he is to reach us.