CHAPTER 1
SERIS
The iron burned.
It always burned, but this morning it felt like liquid fire wrapped around my wrists, eating through skin that had already scarred and healed and scarred again.
I pressed my face against the stone wall of my cell, breathing through the leather straps that cut into the corners of my mouth. The metal bit sat heavy on my tongue, rusty and bitter, designed to stop me from speaking. From screaming. From doing anything that might let the magic slip free.
Three months. Three months since Mira had smiled at me over breakfast, her dark eyes soft with what I thought was friendship. Three months since she pressed a cup of tea into my hands and watched me drink it down, chatting about the weather while poison coursed through my veins. Three months since I collapsed in her tiny cottage, paralyzed but conscious, listening to her count the silver pieces they’d given her for my location.
“Fifty silver for information,” she whispered to the soldiers who came for me. “But you promised a full gold piece if she was the one you were looking for.”
The leader called over a mage. He placed a hand on my shoulder and closed his eyes to sense my magic.
“She’s the one,” he said, and Mira had smiled wider than I had ever seen. “The last of the Veil-touched line.”
The last. Because they burned all the others.
Now I live in a cage built for monsters. Blackstone Keep squatted on the edge of the kingdom like a diseased growth, all black stone and iron spikes, designed to hold the worst of the worst. Political prisoners. Rebels. Things that used to be human. And me.
The guards called me “the Wretch” because I wouldn’t tell them my name. Because I bit the first three who tried to touch me, leaving teeth marks that scarred. Because I’d rather be nothing than give them the satisfaction of knowing who I really was.
But I wasn’t nothing. That was the problem.
The magic stirred under my skin like a living thing, restless and angry. It had been doing that more and more lately, pressing against the iron shackles that were supposed to suppress it. The chains were inscribed with runes that should have been enough to contain any Fae-blood’s power, but mine was different. Older. Wrong.
I’d always known I was different. The otherworldly magic pulsing through my veins and steaming off my skin put most on guard. Even before they knew what I was, I was an outcast. Other children had thrown rocks at me, calling me cursed, demon-spawn, freak. Their parents crossed the street when they saw me coming and made warning signs behind my back.
My mother tried to hide it. She taught me to keep my head down, my mouth shut, my magic buried so deep it felt like drowning. “You’re special, Seris,” she whispered on the nights when the power writhed under my skin like snakes. “But special things get hunted. Promise me you’ll be careful.”
I promised. Right up until the day they dragged her through our village, tied her to a stake, and set her on fire for the crime of being a Fae of the Veil.
The memory came with a familiar stab of pain, sharp enough to make my magic flare. The iron chains hissed against my skin, steam rising where they touched. I bit down on the metal bit, tasting blood, forcing the power back down. Control. Always control. Because the alternative was burning everything to ash.
Footsteps echoed in the corridor outside my cell. Heavy boots on stone, moving with purpose. I counted them out of habit, four guards, based on the rhythm. They’d been coming more often lately, checking on me, whispering to each other when they thought I couldn’t hear.
The King’s impatience echoed in the guards’ shorter tempers and the increased frequency of their visits.
I’d caught fragments of their conversations over the past week. Something about rebel settlements in the north. Places that needed to be pacified. The king’s war with the neighboring kingdoms was going badly, and he needed a weapon that could tip the scales.
He needed me.
He deemed the remaining Fae perfect targets to test his new weapon.
The thought made my stomach twist. I’d heard stories of Fae who were forced to use their magic for the crown. They burned out from the inside, their minds shattered by power they couldn’t control. The lucky ones died quickly. The others spent their last days drooling and empty-eyed, more ghost than person.
But I wouldn’t get that mercy. My magic was too strong, too old, too connected to things that shouldn’t exist anymore. They could use me for years before I broke. Maybe decades.
The footsteps stopped outside my cell. Keys jangled against the lock, and I closed my eyes, breathing through my nose. The leather muzzle reeked of the last person who wore it, fear and desperation and the metallic tang of blood. I wondered what happened to them. I wondered if I wanted to know.
The door creaked open. “Time to go, Wretch.”
I didn’t look up. Didn’t give them the satisfaction of seeing the unease that must have been written all over my face. Instead, I focused on the way the stone felt against my cheek, cold, rough, and real. Solid things. Simple things. Things that weren’t magic or prophecy or the weight of a dead bloodline pressing down on my shoulders.
“I said, time to go.” A boot kicked my ribs, not hard enough to break anything, but hard enough to hurt. “King’s waiting.”
Four guards. I’d been right. Two with swords, one with a crossbow, one with a staff that hummed with suppression magic. They weren’t taking any chances.
