It couldn’t be an accident. She must have known he would come searching for her, and this was the message she’d left him: that Ana was safe, and that he would find her in Goldwater Port.
Ramson left the painting in the parlor, flames crawling closer and closer to the center of the room until there would be nothing left but ash.
The back garden was surprisingly peaceful: a world of snow and ice and stars. It almost felt as though it had a spirit of its own, waiting for him quietly as he stumbled out and inhaled lungfuls of cold, clean air.
Ramson paused by a wooden trellis. Winterbells had grown on it, delicate vines winding steadfastly to the pale wood. If he believed in the gods, he might also have believed that a small soul rested beneath.
Still, he couldn’t help but bend down and touch a hand to the ground, to the quiet earth slumbering beneath it all. “Take care of the old woman, all right? Leave the rest to me.”
As Ramson straightened, a small wind stirred. The winterbells nodded; drifts of snow brushed against him.
It was good he didn’t believe in the afterlife, Ramson thoughtas he turned to leave, or he might have believed that there, behind the scene of so much violence and sacrilege, a small soul protected the sanctity of the garden and had just spoken to him.
Linn was going to die.
That was what the prison guards said, anyway—the ones who rotated shifts before her blackstone-enforced cell. The mineral, she knew, was mined from the Krazyast Triangle of the north, prized by the men who conducted trade in their caravans across the frozen tundras of this empire. The men who had traded her.
She remembered the sensation of sitting in those caravans for weeks on end: that slight, swaying motion, the uncertainty of day and night, the knowledge that she could be beaten at any point in time, and the darkness—the type that smothered your sight more fully than a blindfold and seemed to swallow you whole until you doubted your very existence.
That was what this prison felt like—as though she’d taken a step back and fallen right into the fabric of her nightmares.
But the Wind Masters had always taught her to hone her weaknesses into her strengths. The darkness had become her training ground, forcing her to sharpen her other senses. The chains had become her friends; she’d learned to fight without her hands within a confined radius, and to adjust to a different center of balance. And the beatings had taught her to numb her mind to pain and made her body more resilient.
No, it wasn’t any of these that made her hate this place. It was the space she feared.
The space—or lack thereof—in her tiny, cramped cell, in which she could barely stretch out her legs without touching the other end. The space that pressed against her in the silence and the darkness until it seemed to become a living thing, breathing against her face and neck and threatening to devour her.
She’d spent the first few days curled against the wall, thinking of the high mountains of Kemeira that rose into the skies, mist weaving between them like a Moon Dancer’s sash. She’d known those mountains since her connection to wind had manifested at the age of five. There had been a time when she’d jumped off those cliffs and flown as easily as a bird, soaring with the wind in her ears and the sky at her back.
When her brother disappeared, it had felt as though her entire life had shattered.
She’d stopped flying after that.
A wingless bird,her Wind Masters whispered.What warrior cannot master her affinity to her own element?
Yes, she had been a wingless bird—and a caged one, now.
She’d broken her wrist and twisted her ankle in that jump off the Salskoff Palace. The river—and her winds—had saved her from a swift death, and she’d crawled out half-frozen, half-conscious. She had worked her way down the Empire village to village, until she’d run into a group of Imperial Patrols, freshly dispatched by the new Empress herself. Half-feverish and still injured, she’d barely put up a fight before they’d taken her down.
Now, here she was, in a prison they called the Wailing Cliffs, far from freedom and even farther from Goldwater Port. To be tried for treason and executed as a Kemeiran spy.
They had tried to beat some confessions out of her, and she had told them what they wanted to hear. Because the petty crimes she’d admitted—of spying on Cyrilia and attempting to sabotage the Empire—were nothing compared to the truth.
That she was a friend and ally of the refugee Crown Princess Anastacya, and that she was plotting to find her way back to her.
A muffled clanging sound filtered through the blackstone door. The guards were coming for her. It was time for her daily interrogation.
The thought sent a wave of nausea through her stomach, but Linn brushed off the fear that tugged at the back of her mind. Silently, without even a single clink of her chains, she slipped from her straight-backed meditating position into a fetal position on the floor.
A rattle of keys at her door, and then it slid open.
Torchlight blinded her. She dragged a heavy hand across her face to cover her eyes. A jangle of metal as keys were pocketed again. Footsteps rang sharply against the floor, and someone knelt by her side.
“She still alive?” She recognized this as the voice of her guard, Isyas. Twice a day, he slipped a tray into her cell in a small, rectangular opening in her door, splashing the contents of her cold porridge and hard rye bread onto the floor. They’d laced her food through with Deys’voshk, the poison that inhibited Affinities. That was how they kept their Affinites in check—a lazy yet horribly effective method. Nobody could survive without water or food. And the dosage of Deys’voshk they added lasted at least two days.
There was a snort of laughter from a second voice. “If you kill her, you don’t get to play with her anymore.” Her interrogation officer—Vasyl—was bred for cruelty. Her first day here, he’d hurled her into the cell and dumped a bucket of cold water on her. She’d spent the rest of the night shivering from the cold; she’d been sick the next week.
But that had been a petty act of malice he’d inflicted on her to teach her the rules. It was during her interrogation sessions that the true monster he was really came out.
