4
You're Mad
Princess Alina surfaced from a black, humming sea. At first, she was only dimly aware of her own body, the way an echo is aware of the shout that creates it. She tasted blood—her own, thick and metallic on her tongue—and felt the cold, first as a vague suggestion, then as an aggressive, full-body assault. When she tried to move, her entire body groaned in protest.
The floor beneath her was neither carpet nor stone nor any surface she had ever collapsed upon in her life. It was uneven, slick, and, she realized with growing horror, alive with a gentle, pulsing chill. Her cheek pressed to it, she inhaled damp, fungal air, and opened her eyes to a darkness that was at first total, then revealed itself to be a deep, malignant blue-green.
A ceiling, low and bulging, crouched above her. It sweated condensation that ran in thin, viscous rivulets down the rock and plopped, with excruciating regularity, onto the floor beside her neck and shoulders. The walls surrounding her were not so much walls as they were veiny membranes, their surfaces laced with therainbow-shine of mineral deposits. A series of bulbous stalactites hung from above, each terminating in a bead of water poised for the next silent drop. She was in a cave.
Her silk gown, or what remained of it, was shredded and plastered to her skin in wet, intimate folds. The elaborate embroidery had been ruined; the once-immaculate blue fabric was now the color of a storm, with stains spreading outward from her knees and elbows and a large, almost obscene gash. The flesh beneath, so carefully cosseted all her life, throbbed with bruises and the threat of worse. Her hands were numb, fingers wrinkled and filthy, the nails rimmed in black. Nevertheless, someone had taken care to put a blanket on her, even if it was but a rag. Still, it was better than nothing.
Memory crashed in.
The storm, the abduction, the impossible sprint through woods and the bone-shaking gallop. She remembered the arm—a man’s, strong and unfamiliar—locking around her ribs, the way she had fought and then, somehow, fallen asleep mid-struggle. She remembered the cold, and the smell of animals, and then nothing.
Alina tried to sit up, but her body rebelled; her vision swam, and she nearly retched from the effort. She forced herself upright anyway, bracing with one palm against the cave wall. The slime was revolting, but she kept her hand there, knuckles whitening, until the nausea passed.
The cave widened around her, revealing more of itself by degrees. Somewhere, a fire cast a sickly, insistent glow over everything. Shadows shifted and reformed across the walls, painting monstrous silhouettes that danced in time to her ragged breath. Every noise—the drip,the echo of her own shivering, the shuffling further down the cave—seemed magnified a hundredfold.
She became aware of a figure, standing perhaps ten paces from her. He leaned on a long staff—no, a spear, its metal head catching the light and gleaming like the tooth of some predator. The man was lean in the way of a wolf: narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered, all cords and angles. The only warmth in him was in those curious gold eyes of his, bright and alive and not even remotely kind. Kael Stormborne.
He was watching her. Not in the way a person watches another, but in the way a sentry watches a storm cloud rolling over the horizon: tense, alert, braced for violence.
Alina took this in with the numb pragmatism that had always followed her most intimate failures. Her next move would matter. She needed to make it count.
She gathered what remained of her composure (because composure was a princess’s greatest weapon, wasn’t it?), squared her shoulders, and spoke in the voice that had, until yesterday, commanded servants and cowed courtiers.
“Where am I?” she demanded. Her throat was hoarse, but the question came out clearly.
The man’s eyes flicked up, a brief acknowledgment of her attempt at control.
“Safe,” he replied after a beat. The word dropped between them like a stone into a well.
Alina stared, waiting for more. When it didn’t come, she pressed, “Who are you?”
He considered her, as if weighing the necessity of an answer. “For now: your jailor,” he said, voice as mild as it was final.
It was not the answer she expected, and it nearly broke her resolve. She bared her teeth in what she hoped was a smile, the one her mother had called “impossible to refuse.”
“Am I to be ransomed?” she asked.
His lips twitched, suggesting almost a smile. “You are now among your true people.”
Alina blinked. That made even less sense than the first answer. She tried again, forcing her voice to the steadiest register she could manage: “You must realize my father will kill you for this.”
He shrugged, casually. “He can try.”
She realized, with a jolt, that she recognized his type. Not as a palace guard or a lord, but as something much older. A feral animal, caged and beaten until it learned to speak with its masters, but never truly tamed. She knew the breed. Her mother had warned her about them, though only in whispers and parable.
She looked down at her gown, then back at the man. Although she heard Lord Rowan say his name, she was irked that he didn’t tell her who he was. “Do you have a name, or do you prefer to be addressed as ‘villain’?”
That got a genuine reaction: a snort, short and sharp. “Call me Kael. Or Stormborne, if you like the sound of it.”
“Kael,” she repeated, rolling it around in her mouth as if testing for poison. “I assume you have a purpose beyond showing off your cave?”
He didn’t answer, just watched her with a patient, predatory intensity. It was infuriating.
Alina realized she was shaking, not from fear—never from fear, she insisted—but from exhaustion and the cold. She wrapped her arms around herself, pulled her knees up and put the rag-blanketaround her shoulders, drawing what little warmth she could from her own battered body.
