Page 19 of Son of the Drowned Empire

Chapter Eighteen

I think time passed. I wasn’t sure. In the darkness of my prison cell, my eyes had eventually opened again. Traitors.

At least… one eye had. My left had been bandaged shut and greased with sunleaf paste. Stitches ran from my forehead to my cheek, which gradually became full of stubble. I didn’t know who’d healed me or why they had. I’d broken a blood oath. I was supposed to die.

But I had lived. And she had died. And my body was covered in bandages.

I knew she’d been buried. I knew there’d been a service. I knew he’d already selected a new wife. Once the official period of mourning ended, he would remarry, and I would rot down here. I was finally how my father wanted me: powerless, useless, under his complete and utter control. Oath or no oath, it didn’t matter in the end. He’d won.

Bowen watched over me. That first night, when I’d opened only my right eye, he’d cried. I’d never seen him do that before. He’d turned away from me, weeping, his aura so full of soul-crushing grief I thought I’d die from feeling it.

Then, he stopped. His aura had stilled. He’d gone silent and begun staring past me, toward the window, to the moon. At night, his reddened eyes reflected its glow. He didn’t speak to me, or acknowledge my presence. Sometimes he walked off, his gait determined as if he were possessed. I could hear him pacing the halls before he returned, silent, his lips pressed together.

My tunic grew too big for me. I didn’t have the strength to take it off nor to bathe when they brought the tub of cold water to my cell. Everything felt like too much. I resigned myself.

Until the day Bowen spoke for the first time. “Your Grace,” he said.

I was not Your Grace anymore. I was not Lord Rhyan either. I was forsworn. An enemy. Exiled from my Ka and station even if I wasn’t yet exiled from my country.

I shook my head—the most exercise I’d had in days. “Just Rhyan,” I mumbled.

Bowen sucked in a breath. “You have a visitor.”

My heart sank, my one eye closing. The left still remained concealed behind a bandage, though the stitches had been taken out. I’d been told I was perfectly capable of seeing out of that eye, but I didn’t feel like I could. In fact, I couldn’t feel that part of my face at all, so I’d left the bandage on.

“A visitor?” I rasped, dread coursing through my veins. There was no one in Glemaria who wanted to visit me. There was no one in Glemaria allowed.

Which meant it was him.

I rolled onto my side, facing the wall, and drew my knees into my chest. There was a soft thud on the cell bars, someone resting their hand. I was going to be sick. I didn’t want to see him. I didn’t want to see anyone.

But then I didn’t feel his aura, and it wasn’t his voice that spoke. It was soft and feminine and warm: “Rhy.”

Kenna.