“I’ll return in a few hours with more bone broth,” Bronwyn says. Carefully, she tilts my chin. “Your throat is closing nicely. Receiving nourishment should be a much different adventure now.”
I see genuine happiness on her face. I’ve also heard it in her voice over the past few weeks as my healing has improved. Not an enemy. I find myself thankful that I can infer such things at all anymore. That my raging hatred is compartmentalized inside my heart and mind, saved like a bottled hurricane to be unleashed on the one being who deserves my wrath: Thamaos.
Even if I must see him raised from the dead to do it.
Bronwyn stands and takes up her torch. When she turns to go, I notice that she pauses at the cell next to mine. Whispers scrape the air, and this isn’t the first time. I can’t make much of it, other than the prince’s healer shouldn’t be secretly fraternizing with a prisoner. Yet she is. Which is curious.
After a few more moments, Bronwyn leaves, and the dungeon door clangs closed.
“I must say, you’re looking much better than when I first saw you. It won’t be long until you’re ready to take over the world. Literally.”
I glance at my roommate. What I can see of him. Colden Moeshka.
During my first few days in this prison, I second-guessed how many years I believed had passed, though I’d felt so certain before, as the Ancient Ones whispered their promises on the wind. Colden Moeshka lived in my time, a bane to the gods, one of Neri’s cursed soldiers from the Northlands. It felt as though I’d fallen back three hundred years in time rather than three hundred years having passed.
But then I remembered the truth of it all. Here was the Frost King, telling me his name. Telling me that he knows Alexi. That he’s heard Alexi speak of me.
That Alexi lives. As I had once been informed he would.
Alexi told me about Colden too. I recall clearly when my friend was sent to spy on the North, how he met the new northern king and even went with him to the Summerlands. Alexi did no harm there, much to Thamaos and King Gherahn’s dismay. Upon his return, he confessed that he didn’t dare reveal himself amid a city of Summerland mages.
The truth was that his journey changed him. He came back a different man. A conflicted man. A man who was about to face the most trying year of his life and didn’t even know it.
Colden leans against the bars that divide our spaces. He’s kind to me, but he talks a lot, his accent strange to my ear, his humor even more so. I long to tell him that I don’t want to take over the world. That I never wanted that. And I ache to the dark pit of my core to ask him about Alexi, or perhaps to rip open the air and find my friend myself. But that isn’t how things will unfold. This I know. And besides, I haven’t been so lucky as to regain my voice or my magick.
And even when I do, if I do, it won’t matter.
The prince keeps me collared, though the collar I wear now is thinner than the last. Less iron allows for faster healing. But it still serves its purpose, like the bracelets my father had his blacksmith weld around my wrists ages ago: to keep me pinned like a butterfly that would otherwise fly away.
But I wear another collar too. An invisible torque of magick. It stayed my tongue and even my hand three hundred years ago, when I had so many truths to share with the world, truths that might have saved my dearest friends.
After all this time, I still feel the torque’s dominion over me.
The door creaks open, and then clangs shut again. I know it isn’t Bronwyn by the sound of our visitor’s feet. That soft, lazy slip of his boots on the stone steps as he makes his way into the dungeon. He’s always dressed in dark-colored clothing, a smear of red around his feet.
His Highness, everyone calls him.
Except for Colden.
“Well, if it isn’t the prince with no name. Back again.”
“Fuck you, Moeshka,” the prince says as he lets himself into my cell, though his words seem to hold less and less bite with each time he comes here.
“Oh, don’t you wish,” Colden jabs.
The prince’s voice is the shadow of a voice I once knew. Given our current circumstances, the sound shouldn’t make me feel comfort in the least, and yet it does. I long to see his face more clearly, but he never enters my cell with a torch in hand, like he doesn’t trust me near open flame.
The prince squats at my bedside, hands clasped between his legs. “Bronwyn was right. You’re healing so very well.”
“What’s her purpose here?” Colden asks. “I think I know. If the stories our very dear friend, Alexus, told me are true. But I also think you should tell her the gruesome details. That way her wrath is properly placed.”
I can hear the mocking laughter in his voice. He thinks I don’t know what I’ve done, why I’m here. They both do.
I made a deal. It had occurred to me when the prince stood over me in the pits, offering freedom for my aid, that I could say no. But I already knew I wouldn’t. I know our future. I have seen it. This story began such a long time ago. I know the names and faces of the main players in our tale, one of whom is kneeling before me, lost to himself as he has ever been.
It’s a thoughtless thing to do, but I reach out and touch the prince’s face, tracing my finger over the soft curve of his strong cheekbone, remembering. Everyone’s little prince.
Colden had called him the prince with no name.
