Page 10 of Angel in Absentia (Light Locked #2)

THE INSEDNIAN

T HAD TO be Ryson. There was no other possibility. Only Ryson knew her.

She thought back on her conversation with Iris. Had Iris spoken with him? Who else had? Who else knew? What had he said?

The Insednian in the dungeon.

“That rumor is true?” Clea said, remembering Dae’s words from the night of their arrival. She began to panic. None of this made any sense, but she could feel the secrets of her journey surging back to the surface.

Catagard grimaced at the mention of the rumor, the grimace looking a bit more like a flinch before dissolving into the often calm mask of his face. “The servants and their mousy noses and less mousy mouths. You can see why I preferred to speak with you out here.”

“And the prisoner has been completely secured?” she asked, trying to remember what questions she might ask if she felt threatened instead of eager.

Ryson? Could it really be Ryson? Beneath it all, she couldn’t resist feeling thrilled.

As afraid as she was for the scrutiny of her city, she had missed him dearly and had often considered his well-being.

She had sometimes questioned if Prince should have been trusted after all to ferry him off in his last moments of apparent madness.

“Yes,” Catagard said, his footfalls softening as they moved from the ashen forest to a beaten-down path near the wall. “In the Lodain fashion. He can do you no harm. Can you think of anything that might have prompted this?”

“No,” Clea said, and she meant it. She really didn’t know why Ryson might have returned as a prisoner of all things, if it was him, after all.

“And you are sure he’s…” She hesitated and then nodded to Catagard.

“Partially,” Catagard said. “Mostly silver eyes, but there is some red.”

Clea remembered when she’d seen spots of dull red in Ryson’s eyes, when he’d depleted his power so thoroughly that it nearly killed him. It had been over a year, and it wasn’t like he’d had the medallion to help feed him cien any longer. Had he come for help of some kind?

As Catagard explained the ways in which they had tried to torture the Insednian for information, her concerns only swelled until her heart ached.

The journey back to the castle felt longer than it had ever been, and to get to the deep dungeons, they had to travel corridors that even the servants did not explore, hidden back passages that filled the elaborate interior of the castle.

Clea took paths she hadn’t taken since sneaking into her mother’s carriage years ago.

Catagard at last led her to a single bolted cell, dressed in gold trinkets that reflected the light of freshly lit torches. Venennin didn’t need food or water, so these deep cells had been used, on the rarest occasions, to imprison only them. These cells were meant to be forgotten.

“Are you sure?” Catagard asked, reaffirming if she wanted to enter the cell alone. They both watched the bolted cell, and she ached, thinking of the weeks Ryson had possibly been abandoned in this darkness alone.

Clea nodded to the door before pulling the hood of a blessed Lodain robe over her head that had been prepared on a hook near the wall.

Catagard put gold trinkets on her wrist and blessed them with seals that could ward off cien.

It was more ceremony than anything else, but ceremony soothed the superstitious soul of the Lodain people, and right now Clea was being prepared in all ways to resist the dangerous and little-understood black power of the Insednians.

They were a different kind of Venennin after all, and few understood those differences.

Many of the stories about them were still steeped in myth: that they sacrificed Veilin on full moons, that in larger numbers they leveled mountains, that they worshipped death, or carried the bloodline of the Warlord of Shambelin.

It wasn’t like anyone had ever sat down and conversed with one—well, not until Clea, but she’d done so by accident and apparently skipped all of the important questions.

Clea’s heart pounded as she approached the cell and Catagard prepared to unlock it.

She swallowed hard as the door was opened with a screech.

She stepped into the holding cell and gestured for Catagard to close it behind her.

The thick iron would at least give them some privacy, something she had insisted on strongly for the sake of ushering out the Venennin’s true intentions.

The holding cell was dark and paved with blessed earth and thin chains of gold. There was no evidence that the earth had any restrictive effect, nor the gold, but in the absence of concrete evidence of protection, sometimes these sufficed.

Clea entered the dark cell covered from head to toe in the blue and white garb, with the small gold chains around her ankles and wrists.

On the opposite cell was the body of a tormented Venennin, cut in small, scant places.

Tormenting them never required drastic measures as the cien in their system did most of the work, preserving their pain long after the wound healed.

If Clea was right, then the cutting had no effect, because if Ryson was low on cien, he would heal normally, and if his cien had been restored, then he was sifted and incapable of feeling more pain anyway.

His head hung, his wrists captured in gold-plated shackles that bound him like a bird in flight to the back wall.

Ryson. Clea wanted to say his name out loud, but it felt trapped in her throat.

The sheer possibility of being able to talk to him again, to be able to look into the eyes of someone who knew her story, knew who she was, and be seen again, made her heart lift in anticipation.

Already, she wondered how she could set him free.

“Another come to torment me?” the voice rasped.

Surprised by it, Clea remained completely silent against the door. She questioned if she’d heard wrong, for as the voice echoed harshly through the cell, she found that she recognized the voice, but it wasn’t Ryson’s.

Her mind flew through the voices of her past. It wasn’t Ryson, and yet as the Insednian’s dark head of hair hung in front of her, she could think of no one else.

She stepped across the earth and rows of gold chains. The man lifted his head from where he hung.

She stopped when she saw the silver glow on a face she’d known hadn’t once possessed it.

Myken.

She almost said the name out loud but knew her words wouldn’t hide the distaste her face likely showed.

He was the Venennin Dark Market slave trader who’d once played host to a set of vicious red eyes.

As she watched him now, she struggled to recognize his face beyond the new set of silver eyes that eclipsed all but a few sections on his left iris.

“You aren’t an Insednian,” she whispered.

He laughed bitterly. “Princess Clea Hart at last. The rising mad queen of Loda.”

“What happened to you?” she asked firmly, surprised, disappointed, and appalled. It was hard for her to pick a feeling, but she knew she disliked the lot.

He looked at her for a long time.

“I suffer,” he barked, the words accompanied by a bearing of fanged, Venennin teeth.

Clea swept out a hand, and a flash of light blasted across the cell, a quick and perhaps excessive sweep of power that opened and mended the cuts on his body. She didn’t have time or patience to pinpoint and heal them one at a time, and right now, she had more than enough ansra to spare.

Myken stared as if surprised she’d consented so easily, his mind clearly reeling from the sudden release of his pain and the lightheadedness that dispelling cien invited.

When alertness settled back into his eyes, he seemed to assess her in the darkness with a newfound hunger.

He analyzed her, perhaps trying to understand if her mercy was a sign of weakness he could manipulate.

“Impressive,” he said with a slight sense of honest wonder.

“You can heal that quickly and from a distance,” he seemed to reassess her, not as a person, but as an object that had just increased in value.

A salacious grin crawled across his face.

“My, my, what your conquerors could one day do with you.”

“We can easily cut you again. Now talk,” she demanded, cutting off any attempt he might make to rattle her.

“Explain yourself. The silver.” She was suddenly eager to get to the point, to get to the message, frustrated that it wasn’t Ryson, and alarmed that a Venennin who knew about her travels with him was but a few feet from her now.

As if he could sense her concern, he continued.

“Your journey and its more…particular details are safe with me,” he said, his expression growing serious again.

That gave her little comfort. He was a slaver and a vicious Venennin. She doubted much was safe with him.

“Awfully kind of you,” she replied with a raised eyebrow, impatience still fresh in her tone.

“I see you’ve developed that healthy suspicion of our kind after all.

” He laughed, shifting in his chains and rags.

He’d likely come dressed in more presentable attire, but it was clear that his Veilin tormentors had made quick work of it.

Torture didn’t always work on Venennin; in fact, some of them seemed to like it.

Those were the ones they eventually abandoned in isolation here, and Clea wondered briefly if that had been the case for Myken. Likely.