The Cartographer Who Unmade a Priestess
The Undermarket breathed around them, a slow exhalation of rot and brine that never quite left Corin’s lungs. He pressed his back against a wall slick with algae, the bounty notice crumpled in his fist, and tried to remember what clean air felt like. The memory wouldn’t come. Three days of hiding in the flooded bazaar had stripped away everything but the constant, patient sound of water dripping from a thousand broken pipes.
Sable moved ahead of him, her boots silent on the wet stone. She’d traded her priestess robes for a smuggler’s oilskin coat, but she still carried herself like someone who expected the floor to open beneath her feet. Bram followed last, his massive frame barely fitting through the narrow passages, his palm pressed flat against the wall as he read the stone’s vibrations like a blind man reading scripture.
“They’ve stopped moving,” Bram said, his voice a low rumble that Corin felt more than heard. “The hunters. They’ve stopped at the old cistern.”
Corin nodded, though Bram couldn’t see it. The deaf soldier read the world through his fingertips, and Corin had learned to trust that silent language more than his own eyes. The cistern was three levels up, a dead end where the Choir’s hunters would find nothing but drowned rats and the echo of their own breathing. It bought them an hour, maybe two.
“We need to talk,” Sable said, stopping so abruptly that Corin nearly collided with her. “Not here. Somewhere the water doesn’t carry sound.”
She led them through a gap in the wall that Corin had mapped twice and still couldn’t find without her. The passage twisted downward, past the level of the Undermarket’s floor, past the layer of silt and broken pottery that marked the old city, until they emerged in a chamber that shouldn’t have existed.
It was dry.
Corin blinked, his eyes adjusting to the absence of damp. The room was circular, perhaps twenty feet across, with a ceiling of vaulted stone that had once been painted. Faded frescoes of ships and whales and crowned figures covered the walls, their colors bleached to ghosts by centuries of salt air. A single oil lamp sat on a stone pedestal in the center, unlit, and beside it lay a stack of yellowed papers.
“I used to come here,” Sable said, her voice different in the dry air. Softer. Younger. “When I was a novice. Before I learned what the songs really meant.”
Corin watched her cross to the pedestal, her fingers brushing the lamp but not lighting it. Bram stayed by the entrance, his hand on the wall, his eyes closed. He was listening to the stone, to the city above them, to the slow pulse of water that never stopped moving.
“You were a priestess,” Corin said. It wasn’t a question.
“I was more than that.” Sable turned to face him, and in the dim light filtering through a crack in the ceiling, he saw something he hadn’t noticed before. The faint lines of gill-slits on her neck, barely visible beneath her jaw. He’d thought they were scars. Now he knew better.
“I was a Cantor,” she said. “A junior Cantor, but still. I sang the tides.”
The words hung in the dry air like dust. Corin felt the floor shift beneath him, not physically but in the way the world does when everything you thought you knew turns out to be a painted backdrop.
“You sang them into submission,” he said slowly. “That’s what the Choir does. That’s what you told me.”
“That’s what I believed.” Sable’s laugh was bitter, a dry rasp that didn’t suit her. “For ten years, I believed it. I stood in the Choir’s chamber beneath the palace, surrounded by the others, and I sang the songs that kept the leviathan asleep. I felt the water respond. I felt the beast’s consciousness brush against mine, vast and ancient and so tired. I thought I was helping.”
She picked up the stack of papers, leafing through them with hands that trembled slightly. Corin stepped closer, close enough to see what she held. They were maps. Crude, hand-drawn maps of the city’s canal system, annotated in a script he didn’t recognize.
“I found these in the Choir’s archive,” she said. “After my first year. I was curious, so I stole them. I thought they were old flood charts, records of where the water had been. But look.”
She held one out to him. Corin took it, his cartographer’s eye immediately picking out the inconsistencies. The canals were drawn correctly, the districts labeled in the same hand. But the flood lines were wrong. They didn’t match any tide he’d ever charted, any pattern he’d ever observed.
“These aren’t records,” he said slowly. “These are plans.”
Sable nodded. “That’s what I realized. The flood lines aren’t where the water has been. They’re where the water is going to be. The Choir doesn’t sing the tides into submission. They sing them into position.”
The lamp on the pedestal flickered, though no one had lit it. Corin looked at it, then at Sable, then at the maps in his hands. His mind was racing, trying to fit this new piece into the puzzle he’d been assembling since the night he’d drawn that first flood map.
“The leviathan,” he said. “The Choir says they’re keeping it asleep. Feeding it to keep it docile.”
“That’s the lie.” Sable’s voice was hard now, stripped of its softness. “They’re not feeding it. They’re draining it. Every flood, every district that drowns, every life that’s lost—it’s all going into the beast. They’re siphoning its power, storing it in the water, using it to fuel their own magic.”
Corin thought of the child who had drowned in the district he’d marked as safe. He thought of the merchant who had paid him for that map, who had laughed at his warnings and then wept when the water came. He thought of the way the flood had come early, exactly as he’d drawn it, and the way the Choir had arrested him for “false prophecy” when the truth was far worse.
“Why?” he asked. “Why would they do that?”
“Because they want to wake it,” Sable said. “Not to destroy the city. To use it. The leviathan is the most powerful creature in the world, Corin. Its blood can build cities, its bones can power machines, its breath can command the tides. The Tideborn Council has been draining it for a century, storing that power, waiting for the moment when they have enough to control it completely.”
She set the maps down on the pedestal, her hands steady now. “I didn’t believe it at first. I thought I was misreading the charts, misunderstanding the rituals. But then I saw the High Cantor’s private chambers. She had a map of her own, drawn in ink that glowed like the water in the Choir’s lungs. It showed the leviathan rising, not as a monster but as a weapon. A weapon she was going to aim at the rest of the world.”
Bram shifted by the entrance, his eyes still closed. “Someone’s coming,” he said. “Not hunters. Someone else. A single person, moving fast.”
Sable’s face went pale. “How fast?”
“Fast enough.”
She grabbed the maps, shoving them into her coat. “We have to move. If it’s who I think it is, we have maybe two minutes before they find this place.”
“Who?” Corin asked, but she was already moving, her hand on his arm, pulling him toward a crack in the far wall that he hadn’t noticed before.
“My old mentor,” she said. “The woman who taught me to sing. She’s the only one who knows about this chamber.”
They slipped through the crack, Bram following, his massive shoulders scraping the stone. The passage beyond was narrow and dark, and Corin had to trust Sable’s memory of the path, her hand guiding him through the blackness. Behind them, he heard the chamber door open, heard a voice call out in a language he didn’t understand.
Sable didn’t stop. She moved faster, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps, and Corin realized she was afraid. Truly afraid, in a way he hadn’t seen before. Not of the Choir, not of the hunters, but of this woman. This mentor.
They emerged in a flooded corridor, water up to their knees, and Sable finally slowed. She leaned against the wall, her chest heaving, her eyes fixed on the darkness behind them.
“She knows,” Sable whispered. “She knows I took the maps. She knows I’m with you.”
“Who is she?” Corin asked again.
Sable turned to face him, and in the dim light of the Undermarket, he saw the gill-slits on her neck flare slightly, as if she was struggling to breathe.
“The High Cantor,” she said. “My mother.”
The words hit Corin like a wave. He stood in the knee-deep water, the cold seeping through his boots, and tried to process what she’d just told him. The woman who had ordered his arrest, who had declared him a heretic, who had sent hunters to kill them—she was Sable’s mother.
“She didn’t know,” Sable said, reading his expression. “When I fled, I didn’t tell her why. I just left. She’s been looking for me ever since, but she doesn’t know I’m with you. She doesn’t know I’ve seen the maps.”
“But she’ll figure it out,” Bram said. His voice was calm, matter-of-fact. “She’s seen the chamber. She knows someone was there. She’ll connect the dots.”
Sable nodded. “That’s why we have to move fast. She’ll flood the Undermarket to flush us out. She’s done it before, when she was hunting other heretics. She doesn’t care about collateral damage.”
Corin thought of the maps in his pack, the ones he’d drawn of the Undermarket’s hidden currents, the sealed door that only opened at the lowest tide. He thought of the Dry Throne, the control room beneath the palace, the answer to everything. They were so close. He could feel it, the way he could feel a map taking shape in his mind before he put pen to paper.
“We need to find the Dry Throne,” he said. “Before she finds us.”
“We need to survive the next hour first,” Sable countered. “She knows this place better than I do. She knows every passage, every hiding spot, every dead end. If she wants to flush us out, she will.”
Bram moved to the wall, pressing his palm against the wet stone. His eyes were closed, his brow furrowed in concentration. “The water’s rising,” he said after a moment. “Not fast, but steady. It’s coming from the north, from the old cistern.”
“She’s already started,” Sable said. “She’s not waiting to find us. She’s drowning the whole level.”
Corin’s mind raced. He pulled out his map of the Undermarket, the one he’d been working on for days, the one that showed the hidden currents and the sealed door. His eyes traced the lines, looking for a path, a route, anything that would get them out before the water rose too high.
“There,” he said, pointing to a spot on the map. “The old drainage channel. It runs beneath the cistern, connects to the main sewer line. If we can reach it before the water fills it, we can get out.”
“It’s a dead end,” Sable said. “I’ve been there. The grate at the end is rusted shut.”
“Then we’ll unrust it,” Corin said. “Or we’ll find another way. But we can’t stay here.”
Bram nodded, already moving. “I’ll lead. I can feel the water, feel where it’s moving. If there’s a gap, I’ll find it.”
They moved through the flooded corridors, the water rising from their knees to their waists, then to their chests. Bram’s hand never left the wall, his face a mask of concentration as he read the stone’s vibrations, the water’s pulse, the distant thrum of the city above them.
Corin followed, his map clutched in his hand, the ink beginning to blur as the water soaked through the parchment. He tried to memorize the route, to fix it in his mind, because he knew the map would be useless soon. He could feel the current pulling at him, the water moving faster now, and he knew the High Cantor was not just flooding the level—she was directing the water, guiding it toward them like a hunter guiding prey into a trap.
They reached the drainage channel just as the water reached their chins. Bram pulled himself through the opening first, his massive frame barely fitting, and then reached back to haul Sable through. Corin came last, his lungs burning, his map dissolving in his hands.
The channel was dark and narrow, barely wide enough for one person. The water was moving fast, rushing past them, and Corin had to brace himself against the walls to keep from being swept away. Bram was ahead, his hand still on the stone, his voice a low rumble that Corin could feel through the water.
“The grate is ahead,” Bram said. “It’s rusted, but I think I can break it.”
“Do it,” Sable said. “Before the water fills the channel.”
Bram moved forward, his hands finding the grate in the darkness. Corin heard the groan of metal, the strain of muscle, and then a crash as the grate gave way. Water surged through the opening, pulling them with it, and Corin found himself tumbling into a larger chamber, gasping for air as he broke the surface.
He was in a cistern, half-full of water, with a domed ceiling and a single shaft of light coming from above. Sable was beside him, coughing, her oilskin coat slick with water. Bram was already climbing out of the water, his hand on the wall, his eyes scanning the chamber.
“We’re safe,” Bram said. “For now.”
Corin pulled himself onto a ledge, his body shaking with cold and exhaustion. He looked at the map in his hand, now nothing but a sodden pulp, and felt a pang of loss. All that work, all those hours of charting the Undermarket’s hidden currents, gone.
But then he looked at Sable, at the gill-slits on her neck, at the fear in her eyes, and he realized the map didn’t matter. The Dry Throne didn’t matter. What mattered was the truth she had just told him, the truth that changed everything.
The Choir wasn’t keeping the leviathan asleep. They were draining it, feeding on its power, planning to wake it as a weapon. And Sable’s mother, the High Cantor, was the one leading them.
“We have to stop her,” Corin said. “We have to find the Dry Throne before she does.”
Sable nodded, her jaw set. “I know. But we need a plan. We can’t just walk into the palace and demand to see the throne room.”
Corin thought for a moment, his mind already working, already drawing the map of what needed to happen next. He thought of Master Oren, of the spiral map, of the single dot at the center. He thought of the sealed door, the one that only opened at the lowest tide.
“The door,” he said. “The one I found. It opens at the lowest tide. When is the next low tide?”
Sable’s eyes widened. “Tomorrow night. Just before moonrise.”
Corin nodded. “Then we have until tomorrow night to figure out how to open it. And we have to do it without your mother finding us.”
Bram stepped forward, his hand on the wall, his eyes closed. “The water is receding,” he said. “She’s stopped the flood. She thinks we drowned.”
Corin looked at Sable, and for the first time since they’d fled into the Undermarket, he saw something like hope in her eyes.
“She’s wrong,” he said. “We’re not dead yet. And we’re not going to be.”
He pulled out a fresh sheet of parchment from his pack, the last one he had, and began to draw. Not a map of the future, not a prediction, but a plan. A route from here to the Dry Throne, through the flooded tunnels and the hidden passages, past the Choir’s hunters and the High Cantor’s water.
He drew the path, and for the first time in days, he felt like he knew where he was going.
Sable moved ahead of him, her boots silent on the wet stone. She’d traded her priestess robes for a smuggler’s oilskin coat, but she still carried herself like someone who expected the floor to open beneath her feet. Bram followed last, his massive frame barely fitting through the narrow passages, his palm pressed flat against the wall as he read the stone’s vibrations like a blind man reading scripture.
“They’ve stopped moving,” Bram said, his voice a low rumble that Corin felt more than heard. “The hunters. They’ve stopped at the old cistern.”
Corin nodded, though Bram couldn’t see it. The deaf soldier read the world through his fingertips, and Corin had learned to trust that silent language more than his own eyes. The cistern was three levels up, a dead end where the Choir’s hunters would find nothing but drowned rats and the echo of their own breathing. It bought them an hour, maybe two.
“We need to talk,” Sable said, stopping so abruptly that Corin nearly collided with her. “Not here. Somewhere the water doesn’t carry sound.”
She led them through a gap in the wall that Corin had mapped twice and still couldn’t find without her. The passage twisted downward, past the level of the Undermarket’s floor, past the layer of silt and broken pottery that marked the old city, until they emerged in a chamber that shouldn’t have existed.
It was dry.
Corin blinked, his eyes adjusting to the absence of damp. The room was circular, perhaps twenty feet across, with a ceiling of vaulted stone that had once been painted. Faded frescoes of ships and whales and crowned figures covered the walls, their colors bleached to ghosts by centuries of salt air. A single oil lamp sat on a stone pedestal in the center, unlit, and beside it lay a stack of yellowed papers.
“I used to come here,” Sable said, her voice different in the dry air. Softer. Younger. “When I was a novice. Before I learned what the songs really meant.”
Corin watched her cross to the pedestal, her fingers brushing the lamp but not lighting it. Bram stayed by the entrance, his hand on the wall, his eyes closed. He was listening to the stone, to the city above them, to the slow pulse of water that never stopped moving.
“You were a priestess,” Corin said. It wasn’t a question.
“I was more than that.” Sable turned to face him, and in the dim light filtering through a crack in the ceiling, he saw something he hadn’t noticed before. The faint lines of gill-slits on her neck, barely visible beneath her jaw. He’d thought they were scars. Now he knew better.
“I was a Cantor,” she said. “A junior Cantor, but still. I sang the tides.”
The words hung in the dry air like dust. Corin felt the floor shift beneath him, not physically but in the way the world does when everything you thought you knew turns out to be a painted backdrop.
“You sang them into submission,” he said slowly. “That’s what the Choir does. That’s what you told me.”
“That’s what I believed.” Sable’s laugh was bitter, a dry rasp that didn’t suit her. “For ten years, I believed it. I stood in the Choir’s chamber beneath the palace, surrounded by the others, and I sang the songs that kept the leviathan asleep. I felt the water respond. I felt the beast’s consciousness brush against mine, vast and ancient and so tired. I thought I was helping.”
She picked up the stack of papers, leafing through them with hands that trembled slightly. Corin stepped closer, close enough to see what she held. They were maps. Crude, hand-drawn maps of the city’s canal system, annotated in a script he didn’t recognize.
“I found these in the Choir’s archive,” she said. “After my first year. I was curious, so I stole them. I thought they were old flood charts, records of where the water had been. But look.”
She held one out to him. Corin took it, his cartographer’s eye immediately picking out the inconsistencies. The canals were drawn correctly, the districts labeled in the same hand. But the flood lines were wrong. They didn’t match any tide he’d ever charted, any pattern he’d ever observed.
“These aren’t records,” he said slowly. “These are plans.”
Sable nodded. “That’s what I realized. The flood lines aren’t where the water has been. They’re where the water is going to be. The Choir doesn’t sing the tides into submission. They sing them into position.”
The lamp on the pedestal flickered, though no one had lit it. Corin looked at it, then at Sable, then at the maps in his hands. His mind was racing, trying to fit this new piece into the puzzle he’d been assembling since the night he’d drawn that first flood map.
“The leviathan,” he said. “The Choir says they’re keeping it asleep. Feeding it to keep it docile.”
“That’s the lie.” Sable’s voice was hard now, stripped of its softness. “They’re not feeding it. They’re draining it. Every flood, every district that drowns, every life that’s lost—it’s all going into the beast. They’re siphoning its power, storing it in the water, using it to fuel their own magic.”
Corin thought of the child who had drowned in the district he’d marked as safe. He thought of the merchant who had paid him for that map, who had laughed at his warnings and then wept when the water came. He thought of the way the flood had come early, exactly as he’d drawn it, and the way the Choir had arrested him for “false prophecy” when the truth was far worse.
“Why?” he asked. “Why would they do that?”
“Because they want to wake it,” Sable said. “Not to destroy the city. To use it. The leviathan is the most powerful creature in the world, Corin. Its blood can build cities, its bones can power machines, its breath can command the tides. The Tideborn Council has been draining it for a century, storing that power, waiting for the moment when they have enough to control it completely.”
She set the maps down on the pedestal, her hands steady now. “I didn’t believe it at first. I thought I was misreading the charts, misunderstanding the rituals. But then I saw the High Cantor’s private chambers. She had a map of her own, drawn in ink that glowed like the water in the Choir’s lungs. It showed the leviathan rising, not as a monster but as a weapon. A weapon she was going to aim at the rest of the world.”
Bram shifted by the entrance, his eyes still closed. “Someone’s coming,” he said. “Not hunters. Someone else. A single person, moving fast.”
Sable’s face went pale. “How fast?”
“Fast enough.”
She grabbed the maps, shoving them into her coat. “We have to move. If it’s who I think it is, we have maybe two minutes before they find this place.”
“Who?” Corin asked, but she was already moving, her hand on his arm, pulling him toward a crack in the far wall that he hadn’t noticed before.
“My old mentor,” she said. “The woman who taught me to sing. She’s the only one who knows about this chamber.”
They slipped through the crack, Bram following, his massive shoulders scraping the stone. The passage beyond was narrow and dark, and Corin had to trust Sable’s memory of the path, her hand guiding him through the blackness. Behind them, he heard the chamber door open, heard a voice call out in a language he didn’t understand.
Sable didn’t stop. She moved faster, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps, and Corin realized she was afraid. Truly afraid, in a way he hadn’t seen before. Not of the Choir, not of the hunters, but of this woman. This mentor.
They emerged in a flooded corridor, water up to their knees, and Sable finally slowed. She leaned against the wall, her chest heaving, her eyes fixed on the darkness behind them.
“She knows,” Sable whispered. “She knows I took the maps. She knows I’m with you.”
“Who is she?” Corin asked again.
Sable turned to face him, and in the dim light of the Undermarket, he saw the gill-slits on her neck flare slightly, as if she was struggling to breathe.
“The High Cantor,” she said. “My mother.”
The words hit Corin like a wave. He stood in the knee-deep water, the cold seeping through his boots, and tried to process what she’d just told him. The woman who had ordered his arrest, who had declared him a heretic, who had sent hunters to kill them—she was Sable’s mother.
“She didn’t know,” Sable said, reading his expression. “When I fled, I didn’t tell her why. I just left. She’s been looking for me ever since, but she doesn’t know I’m with you. She doesn’t know I’ve seen the maps.”
“But she’ll figure it out,” Bram said. His voice was calm, matter-of-fact. “She’s seen the chamber. She knows someone was there. She’ll connect the dots.”
Sable nodded. “That’s why we have to move fast. She’ll flood the Undermarket to flush us out. She’s done it before, when she was hunting other heretics. She doesn’t care about collateral damage.”
Corin thought of the maps in his pack, the ones he’d drawn of the Undermarket’s hidden currents, the sealed door that only opened at the lowest tide. He thought of the Dry Throne, the control room beneath the palace, the answer to everything. They were so close. He could feel it, the way he could feel a map taking shape in his mind before he put pen to paper.
“We need to find the Dry Throne,” he said. “Before she finds us.”
“We need to survive the next hour first,” Sable countered. “She knows this place better than I do. She knows every passage, every hiding spot, every dead end. If she wants to flush us out, she will.”
Bram moved to the wall, pressing his palm against the wet stone. His eyes were closed, his brow furrowed in concentration. “The water’s rising,” he said after a moment. “Not fast, but steady. It’s coming from the north, from the old cistern.”
“She’s already started,” Sable said. “She’s not waiting to find us. She’s drowning the whole level.”
Corin’s mind raced. He pulled out his map of the Undermarket, the one he’d been working on for days, the one that showed the hidden currents and the sealed door. His eyes traced the lines, looking for a path, a route, anything that would get them out before the water rose too high.
“There,” he said, pointing to a spot on the map. “The old drainage channel. It runs beneath the cistern, connects to the main sewer line. If we can reach it before the water fills it, we can get out.”
“It’s a dead end,” Sable said. “I’ve been there. The grate at the end is rusted shut.”
“Then we’ll unrust it,” Corin said. “Or we’ll find another way. But we can’t stay here.”
Bram nodded, already moving. “I’ll lead. I can feel the water, feel where it’s moving. If there’s a gap, I’ll find it.”
They moved through the flooded corridors, the water rising from their knees to their waists, then to their chests. Bram’s hand never left the wall, his face a mask of concentration as he read the stone’s vibrations, the water’s pulse, the distant thrum of the city above them.
Corin followed, his map clutched in his hand, the ink beginning to blur as the water soaked through the parchment. He tried to memorize the route, to fix it in his mind, because he knew the map would be useless soon. He could feel the current pulling at him, the water moving faster now, and he knew the High Cantor was not just flooding the level—she was directing the water, guiding it toward them like a hunter guiding prey into a trap.
They reached the drainage channel just as the water reached their chins. Bram pulled himself through the opening first, his massive frame barely fitting, and then reached back to haul Sable through. Corin came last, his lungs burning, his map dissolving in his hands.
The channel was dark and narrow, barely wide enough for one person. The water was moving fast, rushing past them, and Corin had to brace himself against the walls to keep from being swept away. Bram was ahead, his hand still on the stone, his voice a low rumble that Corin could feel through the water.
“The grate is ahead,” Bram said. “It’s rusted, but I think I can break it.”
“Do it,” Sable said. “Before the water fills the channel.”
Bram moved forward, his hands finding the grate in the darkness. Corin heard the groan of metal, the strain of muscle, and then a crash as the grate gave way. Water surged through the opening, pulling them with it, and Corin found himself tumbling into a larger chamber, gasping for air as he broke the surface.
He was in a cistern, half-full of water, with a domed ceiling and a single shaft of light coming from above. Sable was beside him, coughing, her oilskin coat slick with water. Bram was already climbing out of the water, his hand on the wall, his eyes scanning the chamber.
“We’re safe,” Bram said. “For now.”
Corin pulled himself onto a ledge, his body shaking with cold and exhaustion. He looked at the map in his hand, now nothing but a sodden pulp, and felt a pang of loss. All that work, all those hours of charting the Undermarket’s hidden currents, gone.
But then he looked at Sable, at the gill-slits on her neck, at the fear in her eyes, and he realized the map didn’t matter. The Dry Throne didn’t matter. What mattered was the truth she had just told him, the truth that changed everything.
The Choir wasn’t keeping the leviathan asleep. They were draining it, feeding on its power, planning to wake it as a weapon. And Sable’s mother, the High Cantor, was the one leading them.
“We have to stop her,” Corin said. “We have to find the Dry Throne before she does.”
Sable nodded, her jaw set. “I know. But we need a plan. We can’t just walk into the palace and demand to see the throne room.”
Corin thought for a moment, his mind already working, already drawing the map of what needed to happen next. He thought of Master Oren, of the spiral map, of the single dot at the center. He thought of the sealed door, the one that only opened at the lowest tide.
“The door,” he said. “The one I found. It opens at the lowest tide. When is the next low tide?”
Sable’s eyes widened. “Tomorrow night. Just before moonrise.”
Corin nodded. “Then we have until tomorrow night to figure out how to open it. And we have to do it without your mother finding us.”
Bram stepped forward, his hand on the wall, his eyes closed. “The water is receding,” he said. “She’s stopped the flood. She thinks we drowned.”
Corin looked at Sable, and for the first time since they’d fled into the Undermarket, he saw something like hope in her eyes.
“She’s wrong,” he said. “We’re not dead yet. And we’re not going to be.”
He pulled out a fresh sheet of parchment from his pack, the last one he had, and began to draw. Not a map of the future, not a prediction, but a plan. A route from here to the Dry Throne, through the flooded tunnels and the hidden passages, past the Choir’s hunters and the High Cantor’s water.
He drew the path, and for the first time in days, he felt like he knew where he was going.