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Drew watches the man’s smile curve with the familiar sickness of forgone lovers and groans. “Lucky bastard.”

Brockner laughs.

“I have a message for you from your beloved. She says to prepare to move. The Queens want us scouring the kingdom for the Sabar girl.”

Brockner’s features darken. “When?”

“Tomorrow,” Drew says. “I’m to join you.”

Brockner swears, spitting onto the stone floor. “We’d be better to let her go. Truly, I do not see the threat. She no longer has her Glacian to protect her.”

Drew shrugs. “Perhaps she has more of those strange half-breeds stowed away.”

“Perhaps.” Brockner sighs. Collecting his lance, he juts his chin at the locked gate to the keep. “Are you to take sentry until dawn?”

“I am,” Drew replies, propping his own lance against the stone wall. “Weep for me, brother. I’ll have had no sleep when we set off tomorrow.”

Brockner raises his eyebrows. He looks once more into the keep, where a lone form lies unmoving on the cell floor. “I got a few hours in. I cannot imagine you’ll see much trouble from this one. Hasn’t moved an inch since I took my post.”

Drew grimaces. Whether the shape moves or not, he is loath to take his gaze off a Glacian.

“Go find your bed, brother,” Drew says. “Give my regards to our captain.”

The figure on the floor remains unmoving for another night, and the guard allows himself some sleep. It will be another day before the captive rouses.

The captive is, however, aware. He can hear the guard’s even breaths. He can smell the stench of mildew and piss. He can’t move. Can’t speak. Can’t fight. But he can hear. He can think. Ryon Mesrich never truly lost consciousness at all.

Had he been felled? Instantly.

The Queen’s sword had thrust deep enough to sever any ability to fight back. He had not felt the shatter of his knees on the mosaic floor. The tether between his mind and body had already frayed, softening the ordeal of death. He lay with a hole in his chest, knowing his end had come, and waited for everything to become nothing. But his mind, in all its obstinacy, did not fade entirely.

He could not see, but he could hear.

He heard her voice.

He heard her scream.

He knows now how sound can hurt. Where the hole through his chest had seized him, paralysed him, that wail made him want to rip away his skin, tear through the blackness. Find the surface.

Did they hurt her?

Who hurt her?

He could not count the times she’d known pain in recent days. Too many. He remembered the way her body had felt in his arms as he’d dragged her from the river, small and cold. Again, when her blood had been riddled with the Glacian poison. He had promised himself not to let anyone touch her again, sworn it.

But then she was screaming, like a thousand hot pokers were being held to her skin. Yet he could do nothing to change it. The pain of enduring those screams was more excruciating than any wound.

Now, it is the dread that keeps him awake. Immoveable and unrested. Days and days of wakefulness where his body is not his own.

He wonders at times if this might in fact be death. Frozen in a static body, reliving his trauma through the sound of his memories. He commands his body to move, over and over, but nothing works. It reminds him of the Pool of Iskra, suspended in the viscous liquid until a voice lulled him to a sweet, numb end.

But this mustn’t be the end. He can still think. He can battle against the dark in his mind as it tries to drag him under for good. He pushes back, searching for a way out of this limbo.

At times he can’t discern, voices reach him. Guards, mostly. Quiet, meaningless conversations. He only catches fragments. Sometimes they mention the Queens, or Dawsyn, and he revolts from within.

“Ryon, you say?” a muted voice sounds. A careful one, but he hears it clearly. This speaker – a female – is closer than the guards were.

“A half-breed,” comes a voice much more familiar. Queen Alvira. “How much do you know of them?”