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Wilder staggered. The wave of violence, his wave of violence was over, and it settled around him like a heavy weight. He collapsed against a column, sliding to the blood-soaked floor. As the shock ebbed away, he felt the keen pulse of pain in his chest and the sting of the cuts across his knuckles, noted the blurred vision of his left eye as it started to swell shut.

He gasped through the sharp stabbing sensation across his ribs. He couldn’t put a face to the blow that had potentially cracked a bone. In fact, he couldn’t recall a single face from the brawl at all.

With his one good eye, he stared out at the pit.

It was empty.

Though the bloodstains remained.

Wilder rested his head back against the column, breathing through the fire in his chest and cursing the manacles at his wrists and ankles, his skin shredded beneath the iron there.

That voice from his cell came back. ‘You don’t remember me,’ it repeated.

Wilder peeled open his good eye. The man before him was practically a skeleton in rags.

‘Should I?’ he rasped. Gods, what he would give for some water, mind-altering substances within it or not.

As if reading his mind, the man pressed a tattered waterskin into his bloodied hand and helped him lift it to his lips. Cool water cascaded onto Wilder’s cracked lips and parched tongue. He nearly moaned as it soothed his throat.

‘Perhaps not,’ the man said. ‘I didn’t look like this when you put your spear through my cloak and detained me in the Great Hall of Hailford…’

Frowning hurt Wilder’s face, but his brow creased anyway. ‘Who are you?’

His new companion gave a hollow laugh. ‘I’m the man who tried to poison King Artos… The man you and the would-be shieldbearer condemned to this place.’

Somewhere in the back of Wilder’s mind, realisation dawned. Crushed Naarvian nightshade, Thea had said in that hall, pointing at the blue stains on a nobleman’s fingers.

The man now watched him intensely. ‘The name is Aemund.’

Artos’ voice came back to Wilder. ‘Well, Aemund… You have a choice… You can choose death… Or you can choose the Scarlet Tower.’

‘Death,’ Aemund had choked out. ‘I choose death.’

Wilder remembered how King Artos had studied the man, a predator sizing up its prey.

‘Take him to the dungeons. Interrogate him. We need to know who he is working with. Then, he goes to the Scarlet Tower.’

‘No! Your Majesty, I beg you —’

‘The time for begging has long passed, Aemund.’

That had been over two years ago. Wilder focused his blurred vision on the figure before him. Aemund looked utterly ravaged, thin skin hanging off his bones, deep purple circles beneath his eyes. His hands shook at his sides and his knees knocked together, but he seemed alert – haunted, but not quite a husk of his former self, not like the other prisoners.

‘You’ve been here all this time?’ Wilder managed.

Aemund nodded. ‘I’m the last new prisoner who has survived what they do here.’

Wilder blinked, his swollen eye throbbing. ‘How?’ From what he remembered, the man before him had been an oily-haired nobleman, not a stoic warrior.

Aemund didn’t answer. Instead, he stared at Wilder. ‘My guess is that if you’re in here, you couldn’t beat him either.’

‘Who?’

‘Artos. Had you and your shieldbearer not interfered, neither of us would be here now.’

Wilder spat blood on the stone, thinking back to that time at Harenth. The irony was not lost on him that he’d lectured Thea about actions having consequences. Here they were. He had helped detain this man, and now they were cellmates in the Scarlet fucking Tower.

‘They say this is where they send the monsters of the midrealms, but it is their birthplace,’ Aemund told him.