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CHAPTERONE

Most of her body is bloodstained.

Old blood, dried and flaking in strange patterns. Dawsyn can trace the outlines. Landmarks on a map. It makes brittle ropes of her hair, and clings to the inside of her nose. It is all she can smell despite the rot on the walls and the fetidness of her own unwashed body. Nothing can mask the scent of blood that is not one’s own.

Ryon’s blood.

She bites down on her tongue. Each time his name rises, she tries to bury it like a body in water. But the thought is buoyant; it floats to the surface each time, the assault of memory with it.

A sword hilt glints from his chest and a creased hand wrenches it out; he is spilled out onto the floor.

“Lock her away,” the Queen calls.

“No!” Dawsyn howls, and her body revolts against hands that haul her from the ground, dragging her away from Ryon. His glassy eyes do not turn to the sound of her call.

“Hybrid, get up! GET UP!”

“I am sorry, miss,” whispers Ruby, the captain of the guard. The woman shoves a gag in Dawsyn’s mouth and ties a band around it. Dawsyn kicks and lands a blow to Ruby’s shin, but the woman is sheathed in armour. She grunts but does not buckle.

Dawsyn looks her last at Ryon Mesrich, at the face she’ll fail to carve from her mind. Then, she is pulled down a corridor, into a stairwell.

Dawsyn bellows and chokes out a promise, but the guards cannot hear it. The gag traps the vow instead.

“I will cut out her throat! I will cut your Queen’s throat!”

She’s learnt that the images dissipate quicker with pain – an infinite resource in her current holdings. Dawsyn scrapes her fingers along her cheeks, collecting the grime beneath her nails. She strikes her head against the wall, letting the crash of pain flood her senses, washing over the memory, dissolving it into the recesses. Dawsyn sighs, relieved.

It is dark, there in the cell where she waits, but her eyes have grown used to the shadows. She sees clearly, even if she’d rather not.

A dead rat lies in the corner. One of its eyes protrudes from where she stomped on it earlier. Bastard was brazen enough to gnaw on her toes as she slept. Dawsyn imagines the thing was used to encountering more dead prisoners than living, here below ground. The smell, which impregnates the very walls, lends truth to it.

Dawsyn is no stranger to captivity or dungeons, yet this prison is different – or perhaps she is. Thoughts of the ceiling caving in, of being buried alive, plague her. A useless preoccupation. One that will not serve her escape.

And escape she must. The blood, the rat, and thoughts of suffocating fill her with a darkening dread, and Dawsyn can’t allow it. She has survived too much to be thwarted by walls and bars. She will survive this, too.

With a grunt she rights her posture, pushing her back from the wall. Her legs are stiff from too many dormant hours on cold stone, but she stands, and her stare finds the lock of the cell gate.

“This time, stubborn bastard.”

She grips the rusted iron lock tightly. By now it is familiar. She closes her eyes, as one does in prayer, and she tunes out the smells, the voices. She forces a different string of thoughts to bind. She makes one singular bid loud enough to wake every molecule, calling to every corner of her body.

Summoning the magic.

Open!she thinks, shouts, pleads.Open it!

There. Slinking in the shadows of her being she feels it, dull and resistant. It does not crawl into her fingertips as it once did. Instead, it grips her edges and stays buried, a refute.

Dawsyn grinds her teeth.Open the fucking gate.

It doesn’t. It grows ever distant, and she hears its silky voice as it turns away, breathing its answer back into her veins.Release me.

Go!she says, pushing, shoving at it.Unlock it!

The magic merely quivers. A laugh. A taunt.

Dawsyn shrieks. The sound clangs off the walls and ceiling, and her hands pound on the gate.

“DO IT! NOW!”