Chapter 106: Telling Things

“Can you keep it a secret?” I asked.

My voice was barely louder than the crackle of a candle. I even glanced at the door first, a small, nervous flick of the eyes, the kind of habit a boy picks up after being scolded for talking too much.

Camila put her spoon down. “Of course.”

“Yes,” Hazel said quietly.

Charolette only tilted her head, her steel box balanced on one bare knee. “Depends on the secret.”

“Charolette,” Camila said.

“I am being honest. That is a virtue.”

“It is an annoying one.”

“Those are not mutually exclusive.”

I let a small, shaky laugh escape, as though their bickering had loosened something in me. Then I lowered my eyes to my soup and said, “Rudy and I only found out because we were scared. Please do not tell anyone. Not the guards, not Bianca, not anyone. If this leaks, I think…” I swallowed. “I think they would hang us.”

That was a lie dressed in truth, and it was the best kind. Every word of it could have come out of a real boy’s mouth.

Camila’s face softened immediately. “We will not say anything. I promise.”

“I promise too,” Hazel said.

Charolette studied me for one long moment, the lazy amusement in her eyes thinning into something sharper. Then she shrugged. “Fine. Say it.”

‘Three promises.’

I counted them the way a merchant counts coins.

There is a rule about secrets that most people never learn, because learning it requires being the one who plants them. A secret does not stay in the mouth of the person who is told. It sits there, heavy and warm, like a coal held in the palm, and the only way to ease the burn is to pass it on to someone trustworthy. Asking a person to keep a secret does not seal it. It hands them a very small, very exciting duty, which they will carry to the nearest person they love.

Camila would tell someone by tomorrow’s breakfast. Hazel would hold out until the evening. Charolette, perhaps, would never tell a soul, which was fine. Two out of three was a fire.

I took a breath and made my voice thin.

“Before I say it, can I ask something first?”

“Ask,” Camila said.

“Has anyone ever…” I trailed off, glanced at the wall, then lowered my voice further. “Has anyone ever fought against the King? Tried to? Before us?”

The room went very still.

Camila looked at Hazel. Hazel looked at the floor. Even Theodore, who had been playing the part of a nervous fool so well that I had nearly forgotten he was acting, went rigid beside me, though I suspected that part was real.

It was Charolette who answered. She did it without any change in her expression, which was how I knew she had told this story before.

“Yes,” she said. “Many times.”

“And?” I whispered.

“And their skills are in his throne room.”

The words fell into the room like a dropped plate.

“Their… skills?” I asked.

I had not needed to feign the confusion. The phrase snagged in my mind like a hook.

“Their gifts,” Camila explained quietly, hugging her knees. “Everyone who has ever stood against him has lost. The ones who did not die were taken to the throne room, and he…” Her voice cracked slightly. “He takes what they have. All of it. There is a hall behind his seat, they say, with glass cases, and every gift he has ever stolen is kept in there like jewelry. You can feel them if you pass near it. It hums.”

“Which is why nobody tries,” Hazel said, still looking at the floor. “He is not only strong. He is every person who ever tried to beat him, all at once.”

I let my face drain of color.

It was not very hard. I only had to stop controlling it and think about what the words meant.

‘He collects them.’

Not only fear, then. Power. A person who fed on terror, and who kept the abilities of anyone brave enough to challenge him in a gallery behind his throne. Every rebellion this place had ever known had not only been a failure but also a harvest. Culex had probably welcomed them, even encouraged them, the way a farmer waters a field.

And that explained something that had been bothering me since the swamp.

‘He is not afraid of an uprising. He is hungry for one.’

My plan had been built on a single assumption, that Culex’s pride would send his captains after a small band of intruders. Now I saw that the assumption was both right and dangerous. He would want to see us. He would want to touch what we carried. That did not change the plan. It only changed the price of failure, and made it more important that the people beside me were numerous enough that he could not take them all at once.

I put a trembling hand over my mouth.

“That is… horrible,” I whispered.

“Yes,” said Charolette. “So whatever you were about to say, think carefully before you say it.”

I looked up at her. Her blue eyes held mine for a heartbeat longer than necessary, and I saw a warning in them that was almost kind.

‘She suspects I will say something foolish. She is right. I am going to say something very foolish. On purpose.’

“Rudy,” I said, turning to Theodore. “Should we tell them?”

He had been waiting for his cue. His shoulders hunched, his mouth twisted, and he looked at me with the pleading face of a boy who wanted to be told no.

“I… do not know, Peter. If it gets out…”

“But it might help.”

“Or kill us.”

“Rudy.”

“Fine,” he muttered, throwing up his hands in a perfect imitation of defeat. “Tell them. If we die, it is on your head.”

‘The theatre of it,’ I thought, fighting a smile. ‘Truly a viscount’s son.’

I turned back to the three of them, and made myself small. I pulled my shoulders in and leaned forward, my voice trembling.

“When we were coming up the mountain, we met someone.”

“Who?” Camila breathed.

“A man. In a mask.” I said it slowly, drawing each word out, letting the fear carry it. “He was wearing a cloth mask, made out of torn strips, and his eyes were…” I shuddered. “We did not even see him arrive. One moment the road was empty, and the next he was standing in front of us. Rudy nearly fainted.”

“I did not nearly faint,” Theodore protested weakly.

“You did.”

“I sat down very quickly.”

“On the ground. Because you fell.”

Camila giggled nervously, then clapped her hand over her mouth. Hazel’s lips twitched.

I continued, quieter now.

“He told us he was from the Twilight Order.”

The air changed.

It is a subtle thing, the moment a name lands in a room and begins to spread. Nobody gasped. Nobody moved. But Hazel’s head came up sharply, and Camila’s hands tightened around her knees, and even Charolette’s relaxed posture shifted, a fraction at a time, like a cat sensing a shadow overhead.

“The Twilight Order,” Hazel repeated.

“Yes,” I said, in a very small voice. “But he said there are a lot of them. Many. Not all of them strong, he said, most are quite ordinary. But there are so many that if they all came together, it would be like a flood.”

“How many?” Camila asked.

“I do not know. He only said that they are in this area now. All of them. Waiting.”

“For what?”

I took a long, trembling breath.

“For the right time,” I whispered, “to wage war against Culex.”

The silence that followed was the loudest I had ever heard.

Outside, the red light had begun to fade, and the window had gone the color of a bruise. Somewhere beyond the door, a distant bell chimed, soft and lazy. None of us moved.

“War,” Camila said at last, in a hollow whisper.

“He said they want to free everyone.” I let my voice crack, as though the idea were too large for me to carry. “Everyone here. All the people who work because they are afraid. He said they do not want to fight us. They want to fight him. And he said…”

I paused, and I made it a long pause, because the best secrets are the ones that arrive slowly.

“He said that if anyone here wanted to help, they could.”

I watched them.

The effect was gradual, like sunrise through a dirty window. At first, nothing changed. Then Camila’s eyes began to shine.

Her fingers uncurled from her knees, and she drew a slow, careful breath, as though she were afraid that breathing too hard might scare the possibility away.

Hazel had lifted her head entirely now. Her face was transformed, the shy, downcast quiet gone, replaced by a stunned, dawning brightness that she was clearly trying and failing to suppress.

“Free,” Hazel said. “Free to go home?”

“I think so.”

“But he erases our memories,” Camila said. “The King. If you give him five Bound gifts, you can leave, but you forget everything. Nobody has ever left and remembered. If the Twilight Order really…” She stopped. She pressed her lips together, and her eyes brimmed with moisture. “Do you know what it would mean to leave and still remember my mother’s face?”

Nobody answered.

I did not need to. The question was an answer in itself.

I felt something unpleasant stir in my chest, and I realized that it was guilt.

‘They are not just tools. They are people.’

It was easy to forget that when one thought of a hundred and fifty frightened souls as a number. It was harder when the number had freckles and a braided plait and had been holding her breath for who knew how many months.

I made myself remember the thing I had told Sera beside the fire. We would not burn them for warmth. We would give them a door.

Charolette had not spoken.

She sat with her back against the wall, one leg folded under her, her steel box forgotten on the bed.

The mocking glint had left her eyes. In its place was something stranger. Not hope, exactly, but its quiet cousin, a wary, fragile attention, the look of a woman who has been disappointed so many times that she has learned to treat joy like a stranger at the door.

“A masked man,” she said slowly. “From the Twilight Order. Who happened to be waiting on the road to the palace.”

“Yes.”

“And who happened to tell a pair of newcomers, who he had never met, his plan to overthrow the King.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it, and let my face fall into the confused panic of a boy whose story had sprung a leak.

“I… I think he thought we looked harmless,” I stammered. “He said we reminded him of his little brothers. He said that people like us would never be suspected.”

Behind me, Theodore made a faint choking sound. I did not turn around.

Charolette stared at me for a long beat.

I could see her thinking it through.

The gaps in my story were real, and she was not a fool. She was an Inferior Awakened in a mountain full of Fighters, and she had survived here long enough to learn the weight of every rumor. Yet she was also tired, and some part of her, buried deep, wanted very much to be wrong.

Slowly, she exhaled.

“Harmless,” she said. “Yes. I can see that.”

Camila giggled, wetly, through a half sob.

“If this is true,” Charolette went on, her voice low, “then you are going to be very careful. You will not repeat this to anyone you do not trust with your life. Not to the guards. Not the men on the stairs. Not the women’s club.” She looked directly at me. “Not even a rumor. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said, gulping. “I promise.”

“Good.”

She leaned back, and a ghost of a smile touched her lips.

“Then if it is real, I would very much like to meet this masked man.”

The hope had taken root.

I could see it in the way they sat now.

Camila had unfolded herself and drawn her knees to her chest with a girlish excitement, whispering something to Hazel that I could not hear.

Hazel nodded rapidly, her braid swinging. Charolette was staring at the ceiling, lips moving silently, as though she were already counting the days. It was a quiet, glowing thing, almost fragile, and it filled the room more completely than any fire could have.

Beside me, Theodore leaned closer and breathed, so softly that only I could hear:

“You are a terrible person.”

“I am an excellent person.”

“You are an excellently terrible person.”

“Thank you.”

His shoulders shook silently. He pressed his lips together and stared very hard at his soup.

I picked up my spoon and finished my meal slowly, savoring the white tomato, pleasantly sweet against my tongue. Across the room, Camila had already begun a hushed argument with Hazel about whether the Order would send a hundred or a thousand.

‘By tomorrow’s breakfast,’ I thought, ‘it will be in a dozen mouths. By lunch, fifty. By the end of the week, every Fighter in this palace will have heard the same story, from a different friend, with a few new details they invented themselves.’

Rumors do not need to be true to take root. They only need to be wanted.

And Culex, sitting in his gallery of stolen gifts, would not hear it from me. He would hear it from the very people who had sworn to keep it hidden. A hundred and fifty frightened people, all whispering the same lie, each of them believing they were the only one who knew.

I set down my spoon.

Outside, the last of the red light slid from the window, and the long dark of the mountain settled over the palace like a hand closing slowly around a stone.