Page 70 of Thorn Season (Thorn Season #1)

M arge had come to learn that terror was a wet emotion. It was sweaty palms and watery bowels. It was tears and urine and hot, rising bile.

But mostly, mostly , it was blood.

This new prison already reeked of it. Judging by the amount of stale bread the wardens tossed into the cells at regular intervals, Marge had been here longer than she’d been in the last prison before it had started to collapse.

But in all the weeks combined, this was the longest he had waited between visits.

The trials, as the wardens called them, usually took place once or twice a week. He never came in his finery. He dressed in a light shirt and trousers and walked up and down the rows of cells as if choosing a dog from a kennel.

On Marge’s first night, he’d picked a Parrian woman in the opposite cell.

Marge had watched open-mouthed as the wardens had dragged the woman out screaming, her bare feet kicking up dirt as she tried to break free.

The other prisoners sobbed and Marge had joined them, caught up in the horror of it all.

Only afterward did she realize they’d been sobbing with relief.

The wardens returned from the trial hours later and flung the Parrian woman back into her cell, her tunic stained red.

Marge didn’t understand. Hadn’t they reached a verdict on the woman? Couldn’t they prove she was a Wielder?

He turned the corner then, wiping the blood off his hands with a silver-embroidered handkerchief. He noticed Marge watching and smiled at her, slow and wide, his pale blue eyes creasing at the edges.

He chose Marge for the next trial.

She confessed immediately, pleading guilty to the crime of Wielding before they’d finishing tying her to the table. Better a quick execution than an agonizing survival.

But he only laughed at her confession. And then he began.

He sliced her skin all over, first with a silver blade, then with obsidian, then with an iridescent metal he called eurium. He frowned while he worked, clearly disappointed, as though he expected something other than the steady trickle of her blood or her wild screaming filling the room.

That was when Marge understood what sort of trial this was. Not a criminal trial.

An experimental trial.

There would be no verdicts or executions.

There would be no reprieve. She couldn’t even hope for an accidental death because he made the cuts with expert precision, minimizing blood loss.

The wardens sealed the wounds afterward with a thick salve, and the subjects were left to heal for at least a week before he chose them again. It was a clinical kind of torture.

But his absence had been the worst torture of all.

The wardens stroked the bone-white handles of their weapons, itching for bloodshed. The prisoners didn’t mention him, from a shared and unspoken fear that his name might summon him sooner.

But superstitions were wasted here. Eventually, a door squealed open in the distance. And because Marge had grown accustomed to the sickly taste of terror, she knew that those lazy, predatory footsteps didn’t belong to a warden.

The whispers died out. The rattling chains stilled. The silence became an anxious, bloated thing, as if the very air knew it too.

That the wick of their luck had burned through.

The king had arrived.