Page 9

B RIONY GASPED INTO CONSCIOUSNESS . Her body shot upright, and she blinked her eyes open into a dark room. It was moving, undulating, writhing.

And then Cordelia was in front of her, holding her face between two cold hands.

“Briony, it’s me!”

Sound slammed into her ears. The room was shifting and slithering toward her.

No. It was bodies. The room was full of bodies. People. She wasn’t alone.

“Are you all right?”

“What does she remember?”

“Is she injured?”

Briony shoved Cordelia away and gasped for air, feeling suffocated by the darkness.

“Water!” Cordelia shouted.

Briony’s eyes adjusted, and a silhouette moved in the meager light. There was the sound of water being poured.

Briony held her hand over her chest, trying to slow her heartbeat. She was no longer at Claremore Castle.

“Where am I?”

“We don’t know.”

Briony turned to the dark-haired woman on her right. It was Phoebe, one of the cousins of the Rosewood family. Finola’s younger sister.

Cordelia grabbed the water cup from someone and pushed it to her lips. Briony reached up to take it from her and found her hands shackled. She coughed, sputtering the water.

“What is this?” She tugged at her hands. The chains gave her only a few inches between her palms.

That might limit the spells she could cast—

“There’s something special about the neckpiece,” Cordelia said.

Briony spied a collar on Cordelia’s neck. She reached for her own, a cool metal with no discernible lock. Every woman in matching collars and chains.

“It might be infused with the Gowarnus herb from Shurtarth, or it might be something entirely new, but whatever it is, it cuts off our magic.”

Briony blinked at the collar, mind whirring.

The Gowarnus herb worked to dampen and dissolve the connection between the magician and their magical thread.

Briony had never experienced it firsthand, but her father had described his meeting in the Shurtarth region as unsettling.

I’ve never felt more vulnerable in my life than while that damned herb cut off my magic.

She breathed deep, trying to find the string behind her eyes, the hum of her magic. But reaching for it was like trying to pull back a dream upon waking. It was gone.

Briony looked up at Cordelia and found her own devastation reflected back to her from blue eyes. What were they going to do with them?

She assessed the room. There must have been fifty people. All women, and most she recognized from her court. Katrina sat across the room with her arms around a girl who could be no older than sixteen.

“Where is everyone else? The men?”

Phoebe reached for her arm and said gently, “Rory isn’t—”

“I know Rory is dead,” Briony said sharply. She listened to the silence echo afterward. She cleared her throat. “Didion and Sammy? The generals?”

“They’re holding them separately. We caught a glimpse of them a few days ago.”

“Days?” Briony’s eyes widened. “How long was I unconscious?”

Cordelia and Phoebe exchanged glances. “You were just dropped off today,” Cordelia said.

Briony’s jaw dropped. She scanned herself. No injuries. But there was something on her arm. Black ink that seemed to glisten gold when she twisted it under the moonlight.

Hap Gains. A tattoo of sorts. It was his signature.

The blood drained from her head.

“That’s who captured you.” Phoebe nodded at the tattoo. Briony’s eyes drifted down to Phoebe’s arm, where she saw Lag Reighven .

Cordelia cleared her throat. “What was the last thing you remember?”

Briony’s mind flickered through images—Rory’s boundary falling; Anna’s body on the stairs; the maid who helped them; Toven Hearst’s eyes inches from her own, the speckles of blue in them—

“The day of the battle. The boundary falling.”

A collective gasp shivered through the room.

“Briony, that was days ago—”

“Three days? Maybe four?”

“Have you eaten at all?”

Phoebe hushed the room, jumping to her feet. “Let’s get her some food.” Her voice was authoritative, and Briony saw a glimpse of the older cousin who taught her defensive magic in the days following King Jacquel’s assassination.

Briony’s mind cleared. “Food?”

And suddenly a tray of fruit was pushed in front of her face. Grapes, apples, pears.

“They’re feeding us?” Briony asked. “What in the name of the waters are they planning on doing with us?”

“Oh, someone just tell her. This is maddening.” The voice rang out as clear as a bell, and Briony recoiled in recognition.

She leaned around Cordelia and Phoebe, and there—across the room, in a corner by herself, with no friends surrounding her for the first time—was Larissa Gains, collared and shackled like the rest of them.

Briony hadn’t seen her in the four years since the war began, but it was clear she would recognize that perfectly symmetrical face underneath any amount of dirt and blood. Her hair was still lustrous in the minimal light, though limp. Larissa’s cold eyes glinted at her.

Her mind tripped over the possible reasons Larissa was in this dungeon with them, but she refocused on the conversation first.

“Tell me what? Why are we being held here?”

Larissa smiled cruelly. “It’s for the auction.”

A shiver crested over her skin. She wished she could say, What auction ? But memories bubbled up to the surface of her mind, and she was once again in the familiar hallways of the Bomardi school.

It had been just over six years ago, only a few weeks before the man on the Bomardi Seat was assassinated.

Veronika Mallow’s name was hot on every tongue in Bomard already, and that would have been the first clue that change was coming if only it didn’t seem a completely preposterous idea.

A Bomardi Seat hadn’t been assassinated in ten generations.

But Veronika Mallow had found a way to speak to the hearts of the succession line.

We are the true magic , she’d said. Mind magic isn’t an evolved magic.

It is conniving and duplicitous. The Eversuns want to keep you weak, to take away your familiars, and to sever your heartspring bonds.

But we are stronger than them, and they know it.

We must do everything we can to keep them down.

In their third year of study together, all the Bomardi were humming her words, threatening the Eversun students around every turn.

It had been Liam Quill who’d brought up the idea of an auction first.

“My father says it’s only a matter of time before we chop off King Jacquel’s head,” he’d said loudly one day in late spring, when it was just warm enough for everyone to eat lunch outside.

They were gathered in the farthest corner of the Bomardi school’s courtyard, where the sun was strongest and the breeze nonexistent.

He was reclined back on his tan elbows, chewing thoughtfully on an apple, shaking his raven hair out of his eyes every few moments.

“And what do you think will become of you, Princess?”

Briony had been reading in a covered alcove. She’d been there first, and Liam, Finn, Toven, and a meaty, thick-headed, pale-skinned Bomardi named Collin Twindle had all sat down not ten feet from her. She turned a page instead of responding.

“We’ll chop her head off, too,” someone said.

“I have a few better ideas of what to do with her head—”

“You’ll have to come into quite a bit of gold for those ideas, Collin,” Toven had said, stretching catlike.

“Haven’t you heard?” Liam said, more to her than to Collin Twindle. “We’ll be selling them off to the highest bidder. Just like they used to do in Daward in ancient times.”

Briony snapped her eyes up to find them all grinning at her.

Toven’s shirt had pulled free of his trousers, baring a sliver of pale skin as his arms reached over his head.

Now at eighteen, he was becoming impossible to ignore in the hallways with his towering height and shock of white-gray hair that seemed to gleam silver.

Her gaze landed on his stomach before looking away again. If she left, they’d win.

“Wouldn’t mind having my own Eversun,” Liam continued. “I’d make ’em clean my house and clean my cock.”

Briony pressed her lips together as laughter reached her ears.

“You’re missing the point, Liam,” Toven said disapprovingly. “You’re not buying a whore . You’re buying power. A heartspring to keep all for yourself. A secondary supply of magic to pull from.”

“I think you’re missing the point, Tove,” Collin said, chuckling. “You’re forgetting about Sacral Magic.”

“Yeah, Tove ,” said Liam. “That heartspring magic will be good, but Sacral Magic will only enhance—”

“—when freely given,” Toven finished, correcting them. “Good luck getting your Eversun to beg you for it.”

Briony snapped her book shut. “You’re talking about people. Human beings.”

“An Eversun isn’t a human being, love,” Liam said.

The only person who didn’t laugh with him was Finn, who was peeling his apple with a knife. His mother was Eversun.

Briony shook her head of the memories, refocusing, readjusting to the dark of the cell.

Cordelia didn’t even turn to Larissa. “Don’t listen to her. If she knew what was going on, she wouldn’t be in here.”

“What is she doing here?” Briony asked, voice hoarse.

“She was dropped off when you were,” Phoebe said.

Briony watched Larissa examine her nails as if there weren’t dirt underneath them.

She turned back to Cordelia. “What happened to you?”

Cordelia blew out a breath. “The passageway collapsed, and that maid and I tried for a bit to get the rocks cleared. She finally ran when I said I wasn’t leaving without you.”

Briony closed her eyes, feeling tears blossom. “You should have gone.”

“Too late to be helped now,” Cordelia said, brushing Briony’s hair away from her face.

Briony’s fingers flew to her mother’s brooch, hidden between the folds of her dress. She said a silent thank-you to the waters that she’d kept it with her.

Glancing to the only door, Briony said, “What do we know? How often do they drop people off?”