Free Only the Worthy by Morgan Rice Page A

behind him, and watched as one of
them, a tall boy with a big belly and dark, beady eyes, reached down, picked up
one of the boys and held him to Royce’s face. Royce recoiled as he saw the
boy’s face was covered in boils, his eyes wide open, his tongue hanging out of
his mouth.
    The boy gave a
grim laugh.
    “Don’t think
it’s not coming for you, too,” he warned. “They don’t send us down here to
live—they send us down to die.”
    Royce felt his
apprehension deepen as a fresh wave of boys were thrown down and the mob pushed
him forward. He pushed his way as deep into the hold as he could, desperate to
get free, hoping to find a way back up. He slipped as the ship rocked, and he
heard shouts and saw a fight break out in a dark corner of the hold. Above his
head in the cramped space came the sound of thousands of heavy footsteps,
floorboards creaking, as if the weight of the world were above him. He broke
out into a sweat from the claustrophobic feeling down here; he felt as if he
had been plunged into a vision of hell.
    Royce rubbed his
wrists again, thrilled to have them free of the binds, and wondering if he
could somehow make it back above. Better to die up above, he figured, than down
here.
    He looked up
ahead and saw one of the boys with the same idea, climbing, trying to get out
of the hold and go above. Yet Royce watched in horror as he suddenly heard the
thwack of a spear and saw the boy pierced in the chest. The boy fell back below
with a thud, a spear in his chest, dead.
    A soldier’s face
appeared above, glaring down at them, as if tempting anyone else to try.
    Royce gave up on
his idea and instead retreated to the darkest corner he could find, knowing for
now he just needed to survive. He finally found a hammock, deep in the darkest
corner, in which a boy lay unnaturally. Royce looked closely and as he
suspected, the boy was dead, eyes wide open, a confused expression across his
face, as if wondering how he could die here.
    Royce
tentatively reached up, pried the boy’s stiff fingers off the net, and rolled
him off the hammock. Royce hated to do it, and he braced himself as the body
fell and landed on the floor with a thud. He had no other choice. The boy was
dead now, and this hammock would do him no good.
    But then a
horrible thought crossed his mind: had the boy been killed in this hammock
because someone else had wanted it?
    Royce had no
choice. He needed to get up off the ground, off the river of vomit and blood
and death.
    He pulled
himself up, climbed into the hammock, and for the first time he felt a feeling
of weightlessness. The aching in his feet and back momentarily subsided as he
lay there, rocking with the ship.
    He breathed
deep. He wrapped himself in a ball as he swayed, the groaning of death all
around him, and he knew, despite all that he had seen, his hell had not even
begun.
     

CHAPTER EIGHT
     
     
    Genevieve, alone
in a small cell at the top of the fort’s tower, leaned beside an open-aired
window, looked down at the masses below, and wept. She was unable to hold back
her tears any longer. She looked out and recalled how she had watched Royce
disappear from view, dragged off by the knights, melting into the chaos of the
mob as they had slowly wound their way toward the docks. Her heart had
shatterede. Watching Royce bound at the stake was more than she could take; yet
even worse was hearing him sentenced to the Pits. Before her eyes, the man she
loved most in the world, the one she had been about to wed, was being carried
away to a certain death.
    It wasn’t fair.
Royce had given up his life to save hers, had so fearlessly burst into the
castle to risk it all. She flinched as she remembered Manfor’s hands grabbing
at her, as she recalled her sense of sheer terror. If Royce had not arrived
when he had, she did not know what she would have done. Her life would have
been over.
    And yet maybe it
was still over. Here she was, after all that, still trapped, still waiting to
hear