Page 25

My body aches from sleeping on the hard floor, and my joints crack as I sit. Familiar patterns of mold and grime trellis up the corners of the room. The bars that keep me trapped here are locked tight.

My clothes are the same worn and tattered rags that I’ve been in for months.

Heavy with filth, they cling to my skin.

I run the fabric between my fingers, the rough texture both familiar and foreign.

A far cry from the silks and leathers Kaelis had gifted me—finery I’d already been growing accustomed to.

Or, at least, thought I’d been growing accustomed to. I put a palm on my aching forehead.

Kaelis…Why would I be thinking of the second-born prince?

As if summoned by the thought of him, a flicker of light flares into existence.

My heart races, and I rise to my feet, staggering as my head swirls.

The hunger pangs and dizziness that follow are nothing new, and yet they feel foreign.

My palm presses into the concave arc of my abdomen and my bony ribs.

Did this place finally break me? I stare at the growing light dancing on the wall opposite my cell in wide-eyed horror.

My mind feels torn in two, trapped both in the present—the cell before me—and in the academy that seemed so real moments ago.

I can feel the weight of Kaelis’s palm on my hip, tugging me ever so slightly closer.

The powerful and defensive aura that perpetually surrounds him envelopsme.

But this, too, is undeniably real. I can hear the guard’s footsteps echoing through the hall. I feel the damp chill in the air. Was my time in the academy just a premonition? A dream of the future? The guard comes into view.

“Come,” the guard commands gruffly as he unlocks the door to my cell. I stand, wide-eyed. “Now.”

That spurs me to motion. I fall into step as they lead me down the dim corridor. The echo of every step seems to scream, This has happened before. But it hasn’t…has it?

The shadows close around me and threaten to choke me. Had I been so desperate for freedom that I’d invented it for myself in my dreams?

The journey is short but familiar. I’m not taken up a stairwell whereI can catch a rare glimpse of the outside world before ending in a new section of the prison where Prince Kaelis is waiting for me. Instead, I’m escorted into Glavstone’s office and left alone with the man.

“What are you waiting for, girl?” Warden Glavstone snaps at me without so much as looking up from his desk. Pillars of curtains behind him block off what I’ve always assumed to be a window. He would never give me the satisfaction of catching even a glimpse of thesky.

I pull a hidden lever on one of his bookshelves and head into an adjoining chamber. This room—closet, really—is sparser than his office. A bare floor, stone walls, a chair, and a table covered with the minimum supplies necessary to ink tarot. I take my seat.

“I need ten copies of the Two of Cups.” Glavstone moves so whisper-silent I didn’t even hear him coming up behind me. With a look of disapproval that borders on disgust, he slowly closes the bookshelf door. I hear the mechanism lock in place.

It smells better here than down in my cell. And sometimes, I get small nibbles of food I wouldn’t otherwise. At the least, it keeps my mind sharp. The constant scratch of the pen against paper fills the air.

Glavstone returns periodically, and each time, he seems more agitated than the last. “Faster,” he barks when he sees I’ve done only five of the ten cards.

I’d like to see him ink faster than this. I’ve done half the cards in an hour. Anyone else would be gushing over my speed.

The next time he comes back, I am just putting the finishing touches on my eighth card. He hovers over me, inspecting my work. Without warning, he grabs my hair by the roots and pulls my face up toward him. I barely suppress a yelp that is part surprise and part pain.

“This is sloppy work. Do better.” He releases me, slams a bottle of ink on my desk, and leaves.

With each visit, he grows more erratic…and more violent.

My thanks for finishing ten cards is a demand for five more, of the Two of Swords this time.

He comes back only thirty minutes after that, brandishing a hot poker, threatening to Mark me with an A himself and throw me to the mills if I’m not faster and my work doesn’t improve…

even though the inks he’s giving me are barely usable.

Twenty minutes later, he makes good on his threats.

I swallow screams as the burning iron meets my flesh. Glavstone pulls the metal away and then immediately presses it to my other biceps.

“You are nothing, ” he snarls. “Trash. Not even worth the cell I’ve given you. I should throw you into the lowest level of the dungeons and show you what the real horrors of this place look like. You thought the first level was bad? There are two deeper.”

I bite my tongue and fight my trembling to keep my pen steady even as the pain shoots between my eyes. My knees knock together. But my lines are as sharp as a dagger’s edge.

It’s relentless. The hours drag on, and I grow more exhausted with each card I finish. A body wasn’t made to pour out this much magic, or to focus this hard for this long, on nothing more than sheer willpower.

But I will not let him win. I have endured everything he’s thrown at me. Always. I will not stop enduring it now.

Don’t let the bastard win.

“Sloppy,” he growls. “Sloppy. Sloppy. Sloppy!” With a roar, Glavstone scoops up one of my silver-tipped pens and stabs it through my hand, pinning it to the table.

I stare at my hand, wide-eyed. My hands are my skill. My opportunity. My magic. While this wound would not be the end of me—I’ve taught myself how to ink with both hands, and some can ink with their mouths or with prosthetics—it is the end of my patience.

My uninjured hand grabs the first thing it can—a bottle of powder—and smashes it against his temple.

With a dark chuckle that sounds almost like he’s been waiting for this moment, Glavstone brings his fist to my jaw.

I take the punch, focused more on how much pain I can inflict on him rather than worrying about my own.

Besides, I suspect I have a much, much higher pain tolerance than the carefully coiffed Glavstone, and life in Halazar has only honed it.

He lunges for me, ripping my impaled hand off the table. My backslams against the wall. I bring a knee to his groin and duck out of his grasp. He’s on me faster than I would expect, and I barely have time to swipe for his neck with a shard of glass from the smashed bottle.

I miss, and Glavstone has me pinned to the table, both hands around my throat. Squeezing. Tighter and tighter.

I wheeze. The shadows have come alive once more. Alive like Kaelis is near… Kaelis? What does the void-born prince have to do with any of this?

My thoughts scattered, I frantically reach for anything, and my fingers close around the one thing that has ever been my lifeline: apen.

With a closed fist, I swing. The pen meets little resistance and plunges through the flesh of his neck effortlessly.

Glavstone’s hands relax. There’s a little gap to his lips as if he’s sighing.

He’s unable to form a word, his eyes wide and dulling.

I kick him off me. He slumps against the wall and slides into a heap.

My throat is swollen. Rubbing it nearly pricks tears into the corners of my eyes. Glavstone’s shape softens and blurs more and more every time I blink. I don’t think I could scream even if I wanted.

Everything begins to tremble. I killed him; the bastard is finally dead, and I was the one to do it. But…what does this mean for me?

I scramble off the table. The cards I was inking were common, run-of-the-mill cards everyone would ask for from an Arcanist—the ones the average person would need in their day-to-day that could beeasily sold.

They don’t need combat cards—the only battle they’re fighting is for basic survival.

I’d have to ink another, or several, if I wanted to use them for an escape.

Did the guards stationed outside of his office hear our scuffle?

I scramble for supplies. For my pen, now slick with blood.

My lines aren’t straight. Why won’t they draw straight? I scream within my own mind. The magic won’t come. The shapes are blurring together.

Every shadow has come alive with nightmarish undulations. The evil that has seeped into the bedrock of this place will swallow me whole. I must leave or I’ll finally be claimed by these walls.

Heart thundering louder than the banging on the door, I shove a handful of inking supplies into the waistband of my pants. There’s no time, and if I can’t get the inking done now, I’ll do it later.

The door looks as if it’s about to be ripped off its hinges. So I’m not going that way. I shut the bookcase and race to the curtains behind Glavstone’s desk, pulling them open.

There’s no sunlight. No sky. Only bars…looking into a familiar cell. My cell.

What…what’s happening? This can’t be real.

The door bursts open, revealing guards.

No! I launch myself toward a door in the back corner of the office and throw myself inside.

There’s a trapdoor hidden in the back corner.

One that leads to the dungeons. It’s the last place I want to be, but Glavstone tells few guards about the basements of Halazar.

Glavstone is the only one to hold the key, but, lucky for me, the trapdoor is unlocked. It opens to a decrepit staircase.

Every step I take down the stairs and hall is overshadowed by the thundering of feet behind me.

They’re still on my tail. Down and down I spiral to the depths of the dungeons of Halazar.

Every passage turns, funneling me in that direction.

It’s the last place I want to go, but it’s the only place I have left.

It looms large, yawning, swallowing me whole.