Page 1 of With Wing And Claw

Chapter 1

Disappointingly, the world hadn’tended while Thysandra slept.

She woke groggily, unwillingly, from the sounds of clanging chains and shouting voices –faevoices, most of them easily recognisable even through the thick alf steel plates on her cell door. Some of them were howling in anger. Others in unmistakable pain. In this underground rebel prison, their presence could only mean one thing: that the war had been lost. The fae empire defeated, the Crimson Court taken at last.

She could no longer manage to care.

A dull headache was pulsing beneath her skull as she pushed herself up from the wooden bench that had served as her bed for the past few weeks, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Her own chains tingled with the movement. She barely felt their cold weight on her wrists anymore, the white-gleaming alf steel blocking her magic; the throbbing, smarting ache in her chest was a far more urgent injury than the bruises on her skin.

A traitor’s daughter.

She still saw the letters, black ink gleaming on smooth parchment, whenevershe closed her eyes.

Outside her cell, the hubbub seemed to be coming closer, doors banging louder and louder as whatever was happening spread to her side of the corridor. She heard other voices too, now, speaking with the distinctive northern accent of alves and the guttural timbre of vampires … It seemed they were rounding up prisoners, taking them all at once from the cells in which they’d been locked up over the course of the last twenty-four hours. Public executions, maybe. Trials. Who even knew what the Alliance might come up with, in revenge for a century and a half of life under fae rule?

Thysandra huddled her knees to her chest and slumped against the wall, her wings shivering as they pressed into the cold stone. Presumably, she ought to feel fear at whatever was happening outside her cell. Grief, maybe. At the very least, some sort of desperate anger. Four centuries of slaving away for the empire, four centuries of unwavering loyalty, and now this was all that had come of it – ashes and rubble?

Still the feelings wouldn’t come. No matter how hard she reached for them, there was nothing but dull, hollow emptiness in the persistent thudding of her heart.

A traitor’s daughter.

Perhaps she should never have tried to be anything else.

The knuckles against her door didn’t jolt her – she was too numb to be jolted, even her battle reflexes dulled to the point of non-existence. The door swung open a long five seconds later, as if whoever stood outside had hoped for a reply or permission to enter.

For one heart-stopping moment, she expected to see the pink, flowery silhouette she would have killed to avoid on this miserable morning.

Instead, the figure stepping into her cell was tall and winged and decidedly male – Agenor, her mind registered a dazed heartbeat later, his familiar face grim, an ink-black snake wrapped around his forearm. She didn’t avert her eyes swiftly enough to miss the way his gaze shot over her dishevelled appearance – her tangled hair, the scrapes and bruises on her wrists, the red dress she’d worn since the Alliance had captured her. But no matter what he was thinking,no matter the painful contrast of his own well-groomed refinement on the edge of her sight, all that left his lips was a perfectly restrained, ‘Morning, Thys.’

She wished she felt enough to punch him in the face.

At the very least, she wished she felt enough to cry.

She sat motionless, hunched up on her narrow bench, as the male she’d once called her ally nudged the door half-shut behind him and crossed the ten feet towards her. The last time he’d visited her in this cell, he’d kept his distance even with the alf steel blocking her magic, likely for the justified fear she might try and scratch out his eyes. There was none of that caution now. Either he trusted that bloody snake of his to deal with any aggression from her side, or he assumed she would no longer feel the urge to commit violence in the first place.

Even her spite at knowing he was right was not enough to make her move.

A glimpse of light reflected off the key between his fingers. For a moment she thought he would free her entirely, but he merely unlinked her metal cuffs from the chains lodged in the walls – quiet, patient motions as outside the door, the clamour of shouting and crying voices swelled to an increasingly loud roar.

‘Can you stand?’ Agenor asked in his deep voice, stepping back as the last chain fell to the stone floor. ‘They tell me you haven’t been eating much.’

She glared at him, unmoving.

He sighed and threw a look over his shoulder, as if to estimate how the rest of the Alliance was faring without him. Then, turning back, he added, ‘We’re taking everyone back to the Crimson Court, Thys. I figured you might want to come, too.’

Back?

To thecourt?

It wasn’t surprise, the small spark of interest that flickered to life for the first time in days. It certainly wasn’t curiosity. But it was enough to make her lift her head and frown at him. Enough to make her wonder for a sliver of a moment whether he was joking, or lying, or otherwise tricking her into some elaborate fae scheme only a mind like his could come up with.

He looked fully earnest, though – a glimpse of weary concern breaking through the stoic mask of his face.

‘Why?’ she croaked.

‘Reasons,’ he said, absently lifting his arm a fraction to allow his snake to slither onto a silk-clad shoulder. A small smile quirked his lips, there and gone again. ‘I’ve been instructed to, mostly.’

Instructed –he? Agenor Thenes himself, former Lord Protector of the Crimson Court, who had promptly become one of the Alliance’s leading figures after he’d turned his back on faekind and joined the rebellion instead?