I shivered and shut my eyes. Did they always keep the lanterns lit? I fingered my sword hilt. I wish I’d spent more time down here to know. I kept waiting for some trainer to come through the door at any moment. Every growl of a tiger made me freeze, listening for boots running toward us.

After what seemed like an eternity, Dimic cried, “I got it.”

A great cranking echoed through the room. The tigers fought against the chains around their necks, but slowly they were pulled backward toward the walls. There was just enough room between where their paws could reach for us to walk single file through the room.

Dimic opened the door to the cage as quickly as he’d gotten my shackles off.

Cion was the first to step into the cage. He held his sword at the ready. The beasts tugged at their collars, but they couldn’t reach him.

Dimic and I hurried after. Long claws fell just short of our shoulders. Teeth glinted against the light. But for the first time, I noticed the missing fur and scarred skin around their necks where their collars had dragged them back so many times. My father was choking the life out of them, out of the desert itself, as much as he was the rest of us.

The tigers’ sides heaved with effort as they continued to pull at their chains. Their ribcages were visible since my father had kept them underfed to make them more aggressive in the arena—just like he hadn’t fed me the truth about my mother in order to motivate me to fight.

I looked away before the pain in their eyes reflected too much of my own.

Dimic scooted forward and unlocked the door faster than any of the others, probably because he didn’t like the tigers being so close.

We all pushed through the door, eager to be away from the tigers. We ended up on a ledge overlooking a vast underground lake contained in a bowl-shaped ring of rock. The whole cavern had to be at least four or five times the size of the palace grounds. I could barely make out the ceiling above us. A narrow staircase of about thirty uneven steps led down the side of the ledge, toward the lake.

What a lake it was. I’d never seen so much water in my life. From one tunnel at the far end of the cavern, even more water poured into its depths.

“A waterfall,” Dimic said in awe.

The end of the lake closest to us had a gap in the rock face about the size of two of my arm spans. Ten or so long beams of wood and clay dammed it up. A small amount of water trickled over the beams and down into one of four grooves, each leading toward a tunnel about the size of a doorway.

Those must lead to the wells.

All of the tunnels had slabs of thin rock raised to various heights that, once the dam was removed, would allow a certain amount of water through. The slabs were held in place by ropes that looped upward toward the ceiling of the cavern and down to a spot below us.