He’s not laughing now. His eyes are empty,dead. Whatever made him Caelum has been scooped out and discarded, leaving only a husk behind.
Every instinct screams at me to move now, to act, to burn through the building I’m hiding beneath. But I hold still.
The vision shifts to another cage. This fae is sitting upright with their face turned away, but I can see the shape of the skull beneath the skin, and the bones jutting out from beneath the thin fabric of a tunic that might have been white once.
Revulsion floods through me as her stomach lurches, bile rising.
She’s walking along the rows of cages, and unwittingly sending everything she sees through the bond to me. This is an unexpected opportunity, and I take it.
A female with empty eyes, standing at the bars. A male curled on his side, his body twitching. Another female, this one pacing the narrow length of her cage. I know that pacing. I spent enough years doing the same thing.
Then she stops in front of a cage, and the familiar face that fills my vision takes my breath away.
Vel.
For a moment I forget I’m seeing through borrowed eyes. She’s right there, close enough to touch … and she looksold. Vel was ancient before the Sealing, older than me by at least a thousand years, but sheneverlooked old. She carried her age with grace and power. Now she looks like something that’s been worn down by cruelty, eroded to a shadow of what she once was.
But her eyes …theyhaven’t changed.
She’s looking right at Alleria, and there’s nothing broken in that gaze. Her eyes are full of contempt and cold fury that centuries of being trapped by iron hasn’t managed to extinguish.
Vel spits at the princess, and a guard steps forward to bury an iron bar into her ribs.
My body goes rigid beneath the grain store, fingers curling into fists, silver light flickering across them. I force myself to calmness, but my nails are cutting into my palm, while Vel takes blow after blow for her defiance. I can do nothing but lie here, watching through the consciousness of the woman she spat at.
Alleria’s horror slams through me. Her nausea and outrage, and a desperate wish to do something. But she just stands there and watches, because what else can she do? I can hear the thoughts unfiltered in her head. She chooses to move on without speaking. She has to, because if she doesn’t she will say the wrong thing.
She passes more cages, then stops again. This time she’s in front of a male, and I have to grit my teeth against the surge of fury that threatens to break my concentration.
Therin.
He’s standing at the front of his cage, hands wrapped aroundthe bars, ignoring the pain they will be causing him. He watches Alleria approach, head tilted slightly to one side, eyes tracking her the way a predator tracks prey. The look on his face sends fear spiking through her. She doesn’t understand what she’s seeing, but she knows he’s dangerous.
Therin smiles.
Alleria hurries away.
More cages, more bars, more of my people reduced to shadows of themselves. I catch glimpses through her vision of a male with no teeth, a female whose hands shake without ceasing, another curled into such a tight ball, it’s impossible to tell if they’re male or female. Each one comes with the pain of knowledge that I failed to protect them.
And then I hear Serath’s humming.
Alleria stops, and the melody winds through the bond toward me. She doesn’t understand what she’s hearing, or that the song is older than this world humans have built on the bones of mine. It belongs to Underhill, to the deep places where the wild magic runs sweet and slow.
She sang it the night we fled Therison Vale, her voice rising over the sounds of the dying.
Serath opens her eyes.
For a moment, she and Alleria just look at each other, then the fae’s eyes close again, and the humming continues.
The bond is a wildfire of emotion, so strong I can barely separate her feelings from my own. Horror and guilt and shame. Fury and despair and disgust.
Then she stops in front of another cage. The door is open. The interior empty.
My cage.
It’s strange seeing it from the outside. I spent so many years staring through those bars, memorizing each rust spot,every flaw in the iron. I know the exact place where the metal is weakest. I know how many steps it takes to cross the width and length. I know the patch of ground where water pools when it rains.
She stares at it for a long moment, while Cowen speaks beside her. The straw on the floor is matted and stained. There are scratches on the ground where I tried to claw my way out, and a groove worn into the floor where I paced, back and forth.
