I thought, no, Ibelieved,I was one of them.
Clearly, I was wrong.
The ache bloomed again, low in my stomach, then rising, familiar now. Almost routine. But no less sharp.
I picked up my hands again and tried to remove the shackles around my wrists.
They were suppressing my magic, so if I wanted to have any chance of getting out of here, I’d have to get these off.
Footsteps echoed through the dark cellar, but I kept my head low.
I wasn’t interested in what any of them had to say to me.
I lifted the shackles up over and over again and tried to slam them hard onto the ground, hoping the material would crack. My wrists were burning in pain, but I kept going.
The wounds from the battle had been tended to, but the bandages were already covered in dirt again. The bruises on my legs and lower stomach looked vile.
The whole dungeon was filthy and the smell was almost too much to bear.
Someone moved closer to the cell and their figure cut a shadow on the floor.
I glanced up and took her in from head to toe. She was still dressed in her fighting gear, her hair arranged in a bun atop her head, and she looked almost like the woman I had fallen in love with.
“Have you come to finish what you started?” I asked quietly.
She shook her head.
“No, I just wanted to make sure you were locked away well and good, I wouldn’t want to wake up with a dagger to my throat,” she responded coldly and anger flared in my stomach.
“You truly think I could do that to you, Maelis?” My voice came out quieter than I expected. “After everything we’ve been through?” I gave a dry, humorless huff. “Of course you do. Because that’s exactly whatyouwould do, isn’t it? If the roles were reversed. Tell me. Was this your plan fromthe start? Stage an attack by the Heralds, so Caelan would fast-track your entry into the continent? Play the part of the terrified, gifted outsider just long enough to catch my attention?” I shook my head, as if trying to reason through it like a formula that wouldn’t compute. “Or was it more gradual? Did it shift somewhere along the way, when you realized how easy I was to read? How badly I wanted to believe someonesawme?” A beat. “Did you even hesitate, Maelis? Before you made your deal with the Fraction? Before you set fire to everything we built?”
She stayed quiet for a heartbeat.
“I knew for a while what I was. But when Caelan came to me and told me about the prophecy, it all made sense. You Gods are so out of touch with the mortal world that you didn’t even stop to think about how I would feel with being tasked to save you. So no, I didn’t have a plan when you brought me here. But the whole ‘no touching, or you will ruin the prophecy’ part made it easy to get to you. I didn’t know if I could fool Lydia or the Abbot and sometimes I thought they were onto me. But you immortals are so vain that you are blind to see what’s around you. I don’t care for the Heralds and their thirst for power, I only care about the people that matter to me. The ones that I love.”
Her last words hit me like she had just punched me in the face.
The message couldn’t be clearer: ‘You are not one of those people.’
My breathing had steadied. But I didn’t bother hiding my anger.
“I pity you, Maelis. Say what you want about me. About how I felt. At least those feelings were genuine. At leastI meant them. When this ends, you’ll have nothing. Not because someone took it from you, but because you threw it away.”
I turned without waiting for her response and went back to the chains, gripping the iron as if she were no longer in the room. As if she’d never been there at all.
* * *
At some point, a servant entered my cell and started to clean me up.
It wasn’t a proper bath, but at least they cleaned me with soap and bandaged up my wounds again.
A bag was lifted over my head, and I was led out of the dungeons and up the stairs into Somnaris court.
Someone pushed me to my knees and ordered me to crawl forward.
When the bag was removed from my head, I could see that they had brought me into an expansive ballroom.
They had placed me in a fucking cage, like some dog in a kennel.
