CHAPTER 10: THE FIRST ASCENT

  By late afternoon, the library floor resembled the frustration in Irena’s head. Papers everywhere, inked lines and diagrams, and the same problems chasing their own tails in increasingly exhausted handwriting, again and again and again.

  The old scroll still lay pinned in pride of place on the desk, its brittle parchment stretched taut under its little weights. Copies and diagrams bloomed around it. Some sheets held careful transcriptions of the archaic script. Others dissolved into a snarl of arrows, tiny chairs, crude stick figures, and question marks. An entire stack of pages had been devoted to levitation alone.

  Irena sat hunched over that stack of pages now, elbows braced on the desk. Her bandaged hands throbbed whenever she flexed her fingers.

  On one page, she had sketched the stairwell shaft: a small circle for the landing where the stairway ended, a larger circle above for the unreachable level. She drew two stick figures at the top of the lower circle and labelled them us.

  Lira was smiling.

  Self-levitation, read one neat heading. Under it, she had slashed a swift, uncompromising cross.

  Irena had tried it earlier. She had shaped the spell, which she had taken to calling Sta Suspensus, and aimed the levitation incantation at herself instead of at a chair or cup. The moment her weight loosened under her feet, her body panicked and corrected: muscles tensed, knees bent, arms shifted. That instinctive adjustment made the spell-shape judder in her mind and nearly immediately failed.

  She hated that sensation. She hated how quickly her own grasp on the spell, her own mind, had betrayed her.

  “No,” she muttered now, and tapped the inked cross with the tip of her quill. “That will not work. I need a new approach…”

  Another page showed a rope dangling in the stairwell, with a little sketch of herself clinging pathetically halfway up, annotated FAILED. Beside it, she had drawn Lira, much smaller, reaching the landing with unflattering ease. Irena’s palms pulsed in painful memory. Even with Lira’s salve, the skin stayed tender. She could copy sigils, but climbing the rope was another matter entirely. She looked at this Lira and sighed.

  The most promising pages were now stacked in front of her. She had drawn levitation sigils, partially ringed. Around them, she had written fragments of the ancient wording, their modern equivalents, and notes like load = inertia and motion breaks balance.

  She frowned at the line that read: people squirm.

  Even the small involuntary movements of a frightened body, the reflex to protect itself, tugged at the invisible balance point she had to hold. Lira had done well once she stopped flailing, but holding the spell alone as she lifted her up through that oculus, longer, higher… Any mistake would be very dangerous.

  Irena’s gaze drifted to a margin where she had idly drawn a bucket between two stick figures, carrying it together and smiling.

  Her quill stopped.

  The spell did not care who cast it. It cared only that someone shaped the pattern, held onto it, and fed it power. When she had lifted Lira, she had done all of it by herself.

  But what if she did not have to?

  She leaned back slowly. The chair creaked beneath her.

  If Lira learned to cast the spell, they could both lift something at the same time. Two hands sharing the same burden. Two minds working together to solve the same problem.

  The idea of teaching a halfling magic sounded ridiculous.

  Her stomach fluttered, giddy and complicated. She imagined Lira’s face when she proposed it: a halfling from Low Market, who had probably only learned her letters from temple lessons, asked to take wizardry into her own hands. Every story Irena had ever heard insisted that people like Lira scrubbed floors in towers. They did not reach for magic and stars.

  And yet—

  No one in Irena’s own house had ever shown a gift for magic, despite the grand tales about their elven founder. No trace of promise in her blood had helped her learn those spells. Ink and persistence had brought her here, and that simple, infuriating refusal to give up.

  “Fine,” she said aloud to the tower. “If stubbornness is what this requires, that we possess in abundance.”

  Irena gathered the most coherent of her levitation notes into a stack, left the rest spread in their chaotic constellation, and pushed back from the desk. Her hands protested as she levered herself upright. She hissed softly through her teeth and flexed her fingers until the sting settled into something she could ignore. Then she took her notes and went to find Lira.

  The scent of baking struck Irena the moment she pushed open the kitchen door.

  It was, as ever, a small miracle: warmth and yeast and something almost like home, if home had ever been one room with a broken oven and no windows wide enough to see the palace gardens. Come to think of it, she had never entered the kitchens of her family home in all her years…

  How many women like Lira had toiled away there, and she had never met them?

  The thought suddenly made her quite sad.

  Lira stood at the scrubbed table in the centre, sleeves rolled to the elbow, hands buried in pale dough. Her cheeks were dusted with flour, and a smudge of it stood stark on the side of her nose. Someone had left the door to the little bread oven ajar. Faint heat lapped at Irena’s ankles.

  Irena paused in the doorway and watched.

  Lira worked the dough with a steady rhythm: push, fold, turn. Push, fold, turn. Her shoulders and arms followed a pattern so practised she could hum under her breath as she kneaded, some half-remembered song.

  “Lira,” Irena said.

  The humming cut off. Lira’s head snapped up. Dough clung to her fingers in a thick band.

  “Your Highness,” she said, too quickly, as if concerned. “Is everything all right? Did the— did anything happen with the scroll? Is it the dragon?”

  “No,” Irena said. “No dragons in the library. Yet.”

  Lira’s shoulders loosened a fraction. “That’s good,” she said. “Because I don’t know what I’d do if it tried to steal the, err… scroll.”

  Irena’s mouth twitched despite herself. “I doubt it reads much,” she said. “Although I admit I have not asked.”

  Lira let out a small, breathy laugh, then dipped her head and resumed her kneading. Irena crossed to the table and laid her stack of notes on the clearest corner, as far from flour as she could manage.

  “I need your help,” she said.

  Lira froze with her hands pressed into the dough. “My help?” she echoed, as if she had misheard.

  “With the magic,” Irena added, because she saw no sense in tiptoeing around the subject. “With levitation.”

  Lira’s eyes widened, but she still did not stop her kneading. “I— I bring your ink and dry the papers, Your Highness. I don’t know how I can help more than that.”

  “You could learn magic in the same way that I have learned,” Irena said.

  For a heartbeat, hurt flashed across Lira’s face. “I’m not saying I’m stupid, Your Highness…”

  “I know,” Irena said, and softened her tone. “I meant exactly what I said. I did not know how to do any of this when I arrived. I had to figure it out, line by line. I still do not quite understand how it works.” She tapped the papers with a bandaged knuckle. “But I know that if you do certain things, magic happens.”

  Lira’s gaze flicked to the ink-stained pages, then returned to Irena. “But—” she began, and stopped as the dough squelched faintly under her fingers.

  “But what?” Irena prompted.

  Silence filled the kitchen, but for the faint sounds of the oven and their breathing.

  “It’s not for the likes of me,” Lira said quietly.

  Irena realised it wasn’t defiance, insolence, or deliberate refusal. Lira genuinely believed that. She had been told so many times in her life that her place was that of the smallfolk and that she did not deserve any better. She had been broken down by those words, repeated by countless mouths, to her, her family, her people, without cause to refute them.

  “Magic is for the High Houses,” Lira continued, eyes on the dough, “For scholars in their robes with their big books. For priests. For people with the right blood. For real wizards. Not for halflings who scrub their floors and carry their chamber pots.”

  Irena felt an old, dull anger stir. Not at Lira, but at the world that had put that certainty into her.

  “I bet that it was the priests who told you that,” Irena said.

  “And everyone else,” Lira answered. “They say when common folk meddle with it, it drives them mad. Turns their eyes inside out, or blows their souls away, or—” She stopped herself sliding back into superstition in front of the princess. “It’s not meant for us,” she finished weakly.

  “Then why am I not mad?” Irena asked.

  “You’re barmy, Your Highness. I keep asking you to be more careful…”

  Irena instinctively felt some affront at that, but then she looked at Lira, who was averting her eyes, and realised that it came from a good place.

  “But you’re not wizard-mad,” Lira continued, then finally looked up properly. “You’re a princess.”

  “And? So what if I am a princess?” Irena said. “No one in my family has cast so much as a candle flame in living memory. If bloodline was sufficient to do this, my house would be full of aunts and cousins turning the walls into gold, and I would not be here. I am no more blessed than you are.” She paused and realised that admitting that to a halfling was making her face turn red. “In this, at least,” she added quickly.

  Lira’s mouth pressed flat. “But you— you’re clever,” she said. “You had tutors. Books. I had… temple stories and letters scratched on meat-wrapping paper.” Her gaze dropped again. “I’d do something wrong. Or get you hurt.”

  Irena thought of Lira hauling herself up a rope hand over hand. She thought of Lira scrubbing whole floors until they shone. She thought of Lira quietly coaxing tea out of Ser Ralfus by prodding his conscience until he submitted.

  “I have watched you mend torn things other people would throw away,” Irena said. “You know how to take something broken and fix it. This is not so different. The pieces are simply… sounds and shapes, rather than cloth and wooden doodahs. You are tenacious, and beautiful, and far more clever than you give yourself credit for.”

  Lira flexed her hands in the dough, a nervous movement threaded now with curiosity. “Beautiful, Your Highness..?”

  “I—” Irena faltered, then blurted out, “Of course. And most capable.”

  Lira blinked. Irena drew a breath and stepped closer.

  “I will not order you to do this,” she said. The words felt strange to say; she had spent most of her life issuing commands without giving them a second thought. “This goes beyond what anyone has a right to demand of you. So I am asking. Not as a Princess. Not as Lady of the Three Rivers, or the third heiress to the Masque of Lisse. As just a woman. As myself. As Irena.” She swallowed, then forced the next words out. “Do you want to try?”

  And now Lira stared at her.

  Flour clung to her lashes. Her eyes reflected every old story that promised ruin to anyone like her who dared to touch magic. To damn her, to ruin her, to forever set her apart.

  Yet beneath that worry, something else shone: the memory of beauty and music floating on luminescent currents, of a night full of celebration and shared laughter, of waking from a nightmare to find someone there. Someone who cared. Of the feeling when this prison had not been able to take those simple joys away from her.

  “I’m scared,” Lira said, voice catching.

  “So am I,” Irena said. “Most of the time. I have simply learned to shout at other people instead of admitting it.” Irena turned her eyes down. “It is a terrible habit of mine.”

  Lira made a small, broken sound that might have been a laugh. “Will you be there?” she asked. “If… if something goes wrong?”

  Their eyes met again.

  “I am not about to leave you alone in the middle of some spell,” Irena said. “You have my word. I shall be there.”

  Lira swallowed. “Then… yes,” she whispered. “I want to try. With you, Your Highness.”

  The with you struck somewhere behind Irena’s ribs, sharp and strange.

  “Good,” she said. “When you are ready, wash your hands, and we shall start with the words.”

  They did not begin by trying to levitate anything.

  Later, in the entrance hall, after they cleaned away dinner crumbs from the kitchen and cleared the space, Irena faced Lira and recited the incantation in short, careful tones.

  “Per chordam ascendens,” she said. “We shall take it slowly. ‘Per.’”

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  Lira repeated it cautiously. “Per.”

  “Shorter,” Irena said. “Not ‘purr.’ You are not a cat.”

  That coaxed another little laugh out of Lira. “Per,” she tried again, clipping the vowel.

  “Better. ‘Chordam.’ The ‘ch’ is like in ‘chorus,’ not ‘church.’”

  “Chordam,” Lira echoed, brow furrowed.

  Irena stepped closer without thinking, lifted a hand, and very gently pressed her thumb against the soft point just under Lira’s chin.

  “Loosen this,” she said. “There is no need to be nervous.”

  Lira went stock-still.

  Her eyes flicked up. From this distance, Irena could see tiny flecks of darker brown around Lira’s pupils. Heat crawled up the back of Irena’s neck as she realisedthe intimacy of the touch, however practical her intent.

  She snatched her hand back as if burned.

  “Sorry,” she said stiffly. “I didn’t— I wasn’t—”

  “It’s all right,” Lira said, which didn’t help at all. Both of their cheeks were pink now. “I… I know I speak like a common girl.”

  “It is quite all right,” Irena said hastily. “You simply have not had proper diction drilled into you by some tedious old master with onion breath for twelve years.”

  Lira’s mouth twitched. “Onion breath?”

  “My royal tutor adored stews and appeared to regard soap with no small amount of contention,” Irena said. “My elder brother and I made wagers on whether he could recite the genealogies without fogging the windows.”

  “You had brothers who made wagers with you,” Lira murmured. A strange ache slipped into her tone. “That sounds… nice.”

  “It was less nice when I lost,” Irena said. “Edric never let me forget it.” She forced her attention back onto the matter at hand. “Let us try again. ‘Per chordam ascendens.’ Slowly.”

  They worked a long time on those few words. When Lira stumbled, Irena made herself find patience instead of snapping. She broke phrases down into syllables, and they relearned them together.

  And when it became time to talk about how to use the magic itself, she gave Lira images.

  “Think of the spell like carrying a load,” Irena said, pacing through the hall as she spoke. “When you carry a bucket, you do not yank at it. You lift evenly, or the water sloshes and you end up soaked. This magic spell behaves in much the same way. If I pull harder on one side than the other, what you are lifting shall tilt. The more unsteady the object you are carrying, the harder it is to keep the spell going.”

  Lira nodded slowly. “So when you want me to help you with the spell…”

  “We shall both be taking hold of one another,” Irena said. “And when we cast, we shall lift each other up at the same time.” She caught Lira’s gaze. “You can do this. Trust that it is the same principle as some bucket, only… stranger.”

  Lira swallowed. “All right,” she said.

  The first time Lira held even the faintest echo of the spell in her mind, her whole body betrayed her. They both stood in an empty circle, hands at their sides.

  They stood in the circle, empty of any objects, hands at their sides.

  “Say it with me,” Irena said. “Softly. Do not try to aim it anywhere just yet. Just say the words and focus.”

  Together, as loudly as Lira dared, they spoke:

  “Per chordam ascendens, pondus solve et tolle;

  By the ascending chord, loose the weight and lift it.

  “sta suspensus in aere, donec vox mea cadat.”

  Stay suspended in the air, until my voice falls.

  Irena felt the familiar tightening behind her eyes as the structure assembled itself out of word and intent. For a moment, she doubted her judgement. She thought that something might go wrong, or that it would prove that only she was able to learn this magic.

  Then Lira sucked in a small, startled breath.

  “I— it’s—” Her hand flew up, pressing to her brow. “Your Highness, there’s—”

  “A shape,” Irena said quietly. “Like you’re holding something carefully folded inside of your mind.”

  “Yes.” Lira’s voice shook. “Yes. It’s… heavy.”

  “That is the spell,” Irena said. “You have it. Do not release it yet. Just hold on to it. Test its weight.”

  Lira held herself as still as she could, eyes squeezed shut, lips parted, pulse racing in her throat. “I was wrong,” she whispered. “It doesn’t feel like it’s going to… escape. It’s just… there. Waiting.”

  “Exactly,” Irena said. “Nothing will happen unless you choose it. What happens next is up to you.”

  On impulse, she reached out and took Lira’s hand.

  Lira’s fingers clenched around hers, hard, like someone gripping a railing in a storm. For a moment, Irena was worried she might be hurting her. Then she realised Lira did not squeeze out of pain. She squeezed because she did not want to let go.

  “Breathe,” Irena murmured. “In. Out. When you are ready, you can release it.”

  “How?” Lira whispered quickly. “Where?”

  “Gently,” Irena said. “Imagine putting it back on a shelf. Let the pattern unwind on its own.”

  Lira’s brow furrowed, then smoothed. Her grip loosened. She released a long, shaky breath.

  The weight behind Irena’s eyes eased in the same instant, as if their minds had been tethered without her noticing.

  “It’s gone,” Lira said.

  “For now,” Irena said. “You will call it back again soon.”

  Next, they aimed it. They chose a spoon, partly because it felt harmless, partly because they owned an absurd number of them.

  Lira insisted on using one of the more battered ones. “In case it explodes,” she said.

  “Nothing is going to explode,” Irena replied, with more confidence than she felt. “At worst it will jump and hit something. Or someone.”

  “That is not reassuring, Your Highness,” Lira said.

  But she stepped into the circle anyway.

  They loaded the spell together and felt the familiar shape lodge in their minds. This time, Irena held hers in reserve and gestured for Lira to cast first.

  “Focus on your target,” Irena said. “The spoon. Only the spoon. Look at where it lies. Imagine its weight. Then… invoke the spell with the words. Just as we practiced.”

  Lira nodded, throat working.

  She fixed her gaze on the spoon. For a moment, nothing happened.

  Then she whispered, “Sta suspensus.”

  The spoon shot straight up like an arrow loosed from a bow. It struck a ceiling beam with a clean metallic ping, ricocheted, and clattered down behind them. Both women stared at the empty spot where it had been. Silence held for one stunned beat.

  Very slowly, Irena turned her head. The spoon lay bent on the floor several paces away, looking faintly offended.

  “You did it,” Irena said.

  Lira’s knees wobbled. “I nearly killed us with a spoon,” she despaired.

  “Perhaps a lump on the head at worst,” Irena muttered.

  Then the absurdity of it caught up with both of them at once, and they started to laugh. Real laughter, all breath and shoulders and helplessness, the kind that left Lira hiccuping and Irena clutching her side.

  “Magic is so stupid,” Lira managed at last, wiping at her eyes.

  “Yes,” Irena agreed. “And we are, apparently, quite good at it.”

  Days blurred. They still kept the tower’s ordinary work moving; it demanded cleaning, food, warmth, and water, whether they felt like providing them or not. But between chores and sleep and wary glances at the dragon’s far peak, they carved out hours to sit on cold stone and wrestle with something no one had meant them to touch.

  Lira struggled with some sounds and not others. Once she turned pondus into pundus so decisively that Irena had to walk away for a moment before she could correct her without giggling. Irena, for her part, discovered she had been making a tiny stabilising gesture wrong the entire time and that Lira’s clumsy imitation of it accidentally made her realise so that she could correct it.

  They misdrew sigils and smudged ink. Once, memorably, Lira made a jug of water hop sideways off a table and spill into Irena’s lap instead of floating up. Irena, without thinking, tackled Lira for that, and they ended up in a dripping heap on the floor, tangled in skirts, arguing about whether Lira’s spellwork or gravity deserved the blame.

  The more Irena explained, the more she discovered how much she had not understood at the beginning. Forcing herself to anchor concepts in things Lira knew by touch and habit, buckets, ropes, laundry lines, hauling sacks, stripped conceit from her own thinking. The spell stopped feeling like a mysterious knot and began to resemble a tool she could examine from multiple angles.

  Lira, in turn, began to look less like she expected the ceiling to fall on her every time they spoke an old word aloud. The first time she loaded the levitation pattern and held it all by herself, her whole face lit in a way Irena had never seen before.

  “You did it. You are amazing, Lira,” Irena said, again and again, and meant it more each time.

  Lira started to believe her.

  They kept one particular exercise as a daily ritual. In quiet hours, usually when light slanted just so through the high tower slits, they stood facing each other in the library or entrance hall with hands clasped. They spoke the levitation spell softly, let the magic settle in their minds, and then simply held it together.

  It felt like balancing something fragile between their palms. Irena sensed Lira’s focus waver in a wordless way, as a faint wobble in the mental shape, a ripple in the air. Lira, for her part, seemed to feel Irena’s temper flare and threaten to scatter her thoughts. They learned to steady each other with small squeezes of fingers, shared breaths, a murmured, “I’m here. It’s okay.”

  Irena had never shared her mind like that with anyone. Council meetings did not count; those were clashes, not cooperation. This was different. This was trust, given and received in a language older than their kingdom. Lira had never been invited to hold anything so delicate, from someone who felt so important.

  And both of them, in their different ways, found the world less hostile when they faced it together.

  When the day came to attempt the ascent properly, the tower seemed to hold its breath.

  They chose the late afternoon, when the day was quiet, and no supply train was due. Shadows lay long and even in the hall. The light was turning warm and orange through the slit windows, but on the highest landing, under the oculus, the stone was cool under their boots.

  The rope they had prepared earlier lay coiled near the edge, ready to be secured once they reached the upper level. Irena had tied and re-tied climbing knots until Lira had taken it from her hands and checked them herself.

  Now the rope waited, neat and coiled, while they stood on the landing facing each other.

  “Are you sure we’re ready?” Lira asked, for perhaps the twentieth time. She picked up the rope and wrapped it around her shoulder to carry it.

  “No,” Irena said. “Though, if we waited until I felt certain, we may well both die of old age in this tower.”

  “That’s not reassuring,” Lira said.

  “I know,” Irena replied. “But we know the spell. We know how to use it. We have practised until our heads ache and we are nearly out of good spoons. We are as ready as we will ever be.”

  Lira looked down through the central shaft to the entrance hall far below. She could just make out the flagstones where they had first called upon The Song That Plays Itself, far below.

  “I don’t want to fall,” she said quietly.

  “I do not want you to fall either,” Irena said. “I prefer you quite upright, in fact.”

  Lira huffed a tiny, nervous laugh.

  Irena reached out her hands. “Last chance to decide this is utterly foolish and tell me no.”

  Lira looked at those hands. The same hands that had held her steady in the night. The same hands that she had seized when the floor collapsed underfoot. Then she looked into Irena’s face.

  “This has been utterly foolish from the start, Your Highness,” Lira said. Then, softer, she added, “But I trust you…”

  Lira took her hands. Irena’s fingers curled around hers, warm and firm.

  “Then let us be foolish together,” Irena said.

  They stepped close until their toes nearly touched. The oculus loomed above them, a stone ring around a circle of shadow. Below, the shaft yawned.

  “Deep breaths. In,” Irena inhaled. “And out. On ‘out,’ we recite the incantation. Ready?”

  Lira nodded, throat bobbing. They drew breath together. They released it slowly. On the next exhale, they spoke, voices joining in a slightly uneven but earnest chant.

  “Per chordam ascendens, pondus solve et tolle;

  “Sta suspensus in aere, donec vox mea cadat.”

  The spell took shape behind Irena’s eyes as it always did, but brighter now, stronger, fed by two bodies instead of one. She felt Lira’s presence inside it, not as mere words, but as a second force, a matching presence in the magic.

  She held the spell in her mind. So did Lira.

  “Now,” Irena said, voice low.

  “Sta Suspensus.” — “Sta Suspensus.”

  They lifted their joined hands in a small, mirrored gesture and released the spell toward each other. The landing did not rush away beneath their feet. It simply forgot some of its claim on them. The first hand-span of lift felt the strangest: their boots leaving the floor whilst every instinct inside them screamed to find purchase.

  Lira’s fingers crushed Irena’s.

  “Do not flail,” Irena hissed through clenched teeth. “You will pull us sideways.”

  “I am not flailing,” Lira whispered back, eyes huge. “I am— reacting sensibly—”

  “Breathe, Lira. You can do this. I believe in you.”

  They locked eyes as their feet drifted higher. The shared spell wobbled, then steadied as Lira matched Irena’s breathing.

  “In. Out,” Irena said. “Think of the bucket. We are lifting it together.”

  Lira exhaled steadily and forced her shoulders to loosen. Her grip stayed tight, but tension eased from her arms. The wobble in their motion smoothed out…

  The landing dropped away beneath them.

  They rose through the stairwell slowly, tower walls sliding past on either side. Dust motes spun in their wake and caught light in a lazy spiral. They were struck with the sensation of being watched, as if the tower itself had taken notice that they moved through a space it had not meant for them to reach.

  Lira made a small sound, not quite a sob and not quite a laugh. “I’m flying,” she breathed with wonder.

  “Technically, we are levitating,” Irena said, because petty accuracy felt safer than admitting her own exhilaration. Her heart hammered. Strain ran through every line of her body and mind as she held the spell together.

  “I’ll take levitating,” Lira said, eyes shining.

  The upper level’s railing approached.

  They misjudged the speed. Not badly, but enough that, by the time Irena realised they came in a little high, she had no time left for grace. They bumped the stone lip of the upper gallery with a jolt that knocked breath from both of them.

  “Sorry,” Irena gasped.

  “Better than falling,” Lira managed.

  They scrabbled.

  Lira, nimble and deft, hooked an arm over the railing first, fingers gripping onto cold stone. Irena focused the spell for a final correction and gave Lira a brief extra lift. Lira kicked a leg up, heaved, and rolled onto the upper floor with a grunt.

  The spell tugged at Irena’s mind and frayed at its edges. With Lira no longer fully sharing the load, the pattern wanted to collapse.

  “Rope,” Irena said through her teeth.

  Lira dragged herself upright, grabbed the rope she’d brought, looped it around the nearest sturdy point, a heavy stone bannister built into the railing, and tied it with the kind of knot she trusted with her own life.

  “I’ve got it,” she called and looked over to Irena.

  Irena drifted forward. With intense focus, she levitated over the railing before releasing the spell with a conscious impulse. She dropped the last short distance, knees jolting as her boots hit solid floor. The spell’s lingering lightness spared her the worst of it, but exhaustion still hit hard. She gasped, breathless, muscles screaming, head aching from sustained spellcasting. She collapsed beside Lira with as much dignity as she could manage, lying back and staring up at the ceiling.

  There was silence for a moment, but for their laboured breathing and the faint shiver of their bodies catching up with what they had done.

  Then Lira began to laugh. She rolled onto her side, clutching her stomach, giggling with sheer joy in a way that would have made any of Irena's decorum tutors faint on the spot.

  “We did it,” Lira said. “I can’t believe we did it.”

  Irena turned her head to look at her. Lira’s hair had half escaped its braid and fell around her face in dark waves, her cheeks flushed pink from exertion. Tears leaked from the corners of her squeezed-shut eyes under the force of her laughter and from catching her breath.

  Warmth surged through Irena’s chest and filled her with such relief. She laughed too, helpless and delighted and a little wild, the laughter of someone who had expected death and found adventure instead, and who had just begun to understand that life meant choices. Choices about what came next, and who she shared it with.

  “We did,” Irena said. “We really did.”

  Their laughter died down into breathless aftershocks. Lira flopped onto her back again and threw an arm over her face.

  Irena rolled onto her side and pushed herself upright, elbows shaking. The upper chamber rose around them with sudden clarity: dark shelves, the glint of glass, the outline of some strange construction at the centre. Dust lay thin and undisturbed until their rolling about scattered it. They had not only survived the spell. They had reached a place no one else had reached in years.

  Lira sat up too, still dazed, curls wild, ears tilted forward. “It’s not been touched,” she realised with a gasp.

  “The baron’s men stripped everything they could carry from below,” Irena said. “They must have never found their way up here.”

  Something fierce twisted pleasantly in her chest. She imagined greedy hands rattling locked doors, hefting away tables and chairs, and emptying out chests, only to give up because ladders over a steep drop required actual effort and perhaps a little risk, and Irena’s petty satisfaction sharpened into something close to joy.

  Good, she thought, surprised by her own viciousness. This is mine now.

  Ours, something in her corrected, immediate and steady.

  Lira’s hand hovered at her side, fingers twitching with the urge to reach for something solid. Irena took it. Lira squeezed back, small and firm and absolutely present.

  “Well…” Irena shared a smile with Lira. “Shall we take a look around?”