“Out,” one of the guards said. She glanced at his brooches; a lower-ranking sentinel, but not cannon fodder.
Vaasa sighed, but didn’t pry further. She didn’t have the energy, especially as they came upon familiar double doors: her parents’ old wing of the fortress. While this particular hallway led to a variety of necessities, like their private kitchen and game rooms, it was the door at the end that they dragged her toward.
The emperor and empress’s private quarters. The very rooms where she had found her mother’s body drained of color and life.
Panic flared in her chest; she couldn’t go in there. She skidded to a stop, backing up, and the sentinel who escorted them blocked her path. In moments, he had her hands behind her back, restrained. “No,” she bleated, trying to fight his grip. Shestruggled like a toddler, throwing her body to the floor, only to be caught harshly and pulled back up.
“It’ll be all right,” Ozik told her in such calm tones. “You’ll readjust.”
“Please,” she begged, her voice a choked whisper so low she wasn’t certain anyone could hear it. She looked to the sentinels and could tell by their drawn expressions that they would offer her no reprieve. They likely saw her reaction as nothing more than a consequence of her time in Icruria; there were so few sentinels at the prison compared to the fortress, so few people who knew the truth. Ozik needed it that way.
To them, she was broken.
“You will be the empress of Asterya,” Ozik told her as if he were soothing some wild animal. “This wing belongs to you.”
Ozik touched her arm gently, but she flinched.
“Please, don’t make me do this,” she whispered, and she wished they were alone. With anyone else around, every reaction he had would be measured, intentional, and planned. He and her father had taught her that very mechanism.
He tilted his head as if he were speaking to a child. “In time, you will have a better understanding of the strength that can be gained from remembering.”
Every inch of her body was a cavern: a place where love and hope and magic had until recently resided, but no longer. That space was filling with adrenaline, agony, terror. All familiar friends.
Ozik turned away from her and wandered back down the hall. He disappeared around the corner, not bothering to stay to make sure she entered the rooms—he knew perfectly well that she would. That she had no choice.
Because Amalie was dead if she refused.
As the sentinels opened the doors, movement caught her eye. At the end of the hall was the familiar frame of someonespeaking to Ozik, but they disappeared before she could catch sight of them in full. Then she was thrown into her parents’ quarters, the door slamming loudly behind her.
Vaasa did not move from the foyer.
She stared down the hallway, her back pressed to the entrance door, and slid down to the marble floor. All the doors down the right hallway belonged to her mother, all the ones down the left to her father. No matter which direction she went, the outcome was the same.
Vaasa saw herself, young and afraid, hiding in her mother’s closet while Dominik ran around the fortress like a malevolent king. Her mother’s coolness flashed behind Vaasa’s eyes.
Come out from there, she’d said.You are too old for this childish game.
Dead.
Everyone who once lived in these rooms was dead.
Vaasa did not move. Fear was unwilling to release her from its clawed grasp, its talons curled around her heart.
You will die here, too.
Vaasa squeezed her eyes shut. It all crested over her then.
Mathjin’s voice as it cracked on “grandfather.”
Amalie’s screams.
Her brother’s head, severed from his body.
Reid’s lifeless weight in her lap.
Ozik’s snarling lip as he stole her magic.
The cold of the prison.
