This metal collar… it extinguished every breath of magic within her, a smothering leash. Once they had it on her, there was no escape. She was chained to the table, powerless.
“I said get her back on the table,” Lord Vlacik’s voice snapped, “and secure the straps tighter this time.”
Instinctual fear knotted in Vaasa’s stomach as her vision spun from the floor to the wall to the ceiling. A blond-haired man in a royal blue Asteryan uniform stood beside the table that held her, and she was on her back again, too tired to fight. Too confused.
A door opened. Ozik’s voice floated through the air. “Enough.”
“Sir—”
“I saidenough,” Ozik repeated.
Through the haze of her pain and adrenaline, Vaasa realized where she was. Or, more precisely, where shewasn’t.
She wasn’t in Mireh. Or Dihrah. She wasn’t in Icruria at all.
And Reid wasn’t here.
Tears welled in her eyes. He wasn’t coming to find her. His footsteps had never sounded down this hall. It was just a place Vaasa retreated to in her mind when she couldn’t handle the reality around her.
Vaasa released the tension in her neck and let her head fall to the side, pounding cheek finding a semblance of relief on the cold iron table. Around her was a dimly lit chamber in the bowels of the prison, filled with exactly five other people. Ozik and two sentinels whose names she didn’t know stood by the door, iron keys hanging off their hips. Lord Vlacik stood to the right next to a wrinkled clergyman who sat at a metal countertop, hunched over a notebook as he scribbled observations. On that countertop were sharp objects: Thumbscrews, pronged forks, iron hoops with protruding spikes all sat waiting for the lord’s terrible touch. They gleamed in the candlelight.
Vaasa’s body recoiled at the memory of each of those tools against her flesh.
They did this almost daily. It had taken only once for Vaasa to realize that Lord Vlacik was working with the Asteryan clergy to uncover the secrets of Veragi magic—seeking answers Vaasa herself didn’t know. Where did this magic come from? What caused it to manifest in a person?
And Lord Vlacik’s personal mission: How could it be weaponized?
Vaasa was a mouse, the sacrificial subject of their experiments.
“Unless you want what we know—” Lord Vlacik started, but Ozik cut him off.
“Careful with your words, my lord, or you will find yourself as dead as your father.”
The room went silent.
Vaasa and Ozik’s connection came and went like the tides since she had ceded her powers to him to save Reid; some moments Ozik was silent to her, others his oily, slick magic was all she could feel in her veins. Whatever linked them was shaky and unpredictable. Each day Lord Vlacik did this to her, she lasted longer and felt more of Ozik’s magic tangling with her own. There were moments she swore it fueled the manifestations of her magic that Vlacik pried out of her. Ozik never intervened until she was at the edge of her tolerance, tipping over the side of a cliff.
As if while the lord tried to uncover what caused the magic to manifest, Ozik was building her endurance.
The treacherous advisor stepped forward to loom above her. Since the election, the traces of black in Ozik’s veins had disappeared, leaving only pale, porcelain skin and a cunning smile with far-too-straight teeth. His white hair brushed his shoulders, trimmed neatly and in direct contrast to the tangles of greasy black hair upon her own head. Ozik appeared stronger. Healthier. Perhaps even younger. His appearance was far closer to how she remembered it in her youth. By linking her magic to his, he had regained something that had been lost since her mother’s death.
His menacing gold eyes caught upon her cheek. Perhaps a bruise had already started to form.
“She has lasted longer than any of the other witches,” the lord muttered to the clergyman, who nodded in agreement.
“Of course she has,” Ozik said. “She is her mother’s daughter.”
Vaasa closed her eyes again. It all weighed on her weary mind; that Ozik had loved her mother—and that they’d been having an affair when he’d served as their family’s closest advisor—yet he’dkilled her. Vena Kozár had made some kind of twisted bargain with Ozik to murder Vaasa’s father, but instead of then handing Ozik the throne, she sent Vaasa into the safety of a betrothal abroad and helped Dominik become ruler of Asterya.
And Ozik had murdered her for it.
Every day Vaasa spent in this prison, she wondered what her mother had been through. What she had faced alone while Vaasa’s resentment of her only grew. It was not lost on Vaasa that her mother was a relative stranger to her; she knew little of the truth.
“Did you do this to her, too?” Vaasa croaked out. “To the woman you loved?”
Ozik stared at her, lips drawn. Just as Vaasa’s magic had at the Icrurian election, it wrenched from her insides in a terrible tug. Each time he returned her magic to her, it burrowed into her bones and muscles as if hiding itself from him. Yet without even a flick of his hands or a shuttering of his eyes, Ozik took the power from her again in an instant. Vaasa groaned in pain, throat hoarse from the screaming she had already done.
“We’re making progress,” Lord Vlacik insisted. “Let me continue.”
