It was only then she realized her own fingers were twitching against her will, clawing at the dirt as if trying to dig her way down to the center of the world. Tears blurred her sight again, burning with humiliation. She fought the urge to sob, but the sound escaped anyway—a stifled, animal whimper, ugly and childish and impossible to control.
She had never in her life been so helpless. Not as a child, not as a princess, not even last night when dragged from her family and everything she knew. This was worse. She was not just a prisoner to Kael, or to the cave, but to something deeper, a force that animated her limbs against her will, that froze her tongue in her own mouth and made her a puppet.
He watched the emotions roll over her face, eyes sharp and unblinking.
“Let me go,” she rasped when she finally found her voice. It came out as a hiss, more plea than demand.
Kael did not respond at first. He reached out and, with surprising gentleness, brushed a tear from her cheek. His hand was warm and steady. “I can’t,” he said. “Not yet.”
Alina closed her eyes, defeated. She tried to remember her lessons in composure; the tricks her mother had drilled into her: Breathe. Hold your posture. Never let them see you break.
But those tricks were no match for this.
When she opened her eyes again, Kael was still there. He looked at her not as a captor looks at prey, but as a teacher waiting for a student to accept the lesson.
“You can kill me if you want,” she said, the words hollow. “I don’t care.”
He stood, straightened his shirt, and shook his head. “Well, first of all, we both know that is not the case. And second, death is not your fate, Princess.”
“You don’t know my fate,” she spat back at him. “You’re just a thief and a murderer.”
That, at last, made him smile. “Maybe. But I know you better than you think.”
She glared, but the tears wouldn’t stop. “Why can’t I move?” Her voice cracked. “What have you done to me?”
Kael was silent for a moment, and then dropped to sit cross-legged on the ground before her. “It’s not me,” he said. “It’s you. It’s in you, deeper than you know. I just… nudged it awake.”
His words were nonsensical, but something in his tone told her he truly believed them.
She shook her head, or tried to, the motion barely perceptible. “You’re mad.”
“Perhaps. But you’re still here. And you will come with us.”
Alina shut her eyes again and let the tears run down her cheeks, dripping from the edge of her jaw. She had no energy left for anger, nor for pride. She was simply, utterly, trapped.
She didn’t remember when she fell asleep again. Only that, in her dreams, she ran through endless tunnels of blue and green, always chased by something she could not name, always caught in the end by hands that were hers and not hers at all.
And when she woke, it was to the same cold, the same drip of water, the same unbreakable grip holding her in place. Only now, she knew it was not the cave, or Kael, or even her own fear that held her captive.
It was something older, something truer. It was in her blood, and it wanted out.
5
You're Back to Finish the Job?
The transfer from the cave was abrupt, as if she had closed her eyes for one moment and opened them the next to rough hands, a blindfold, and the stink of leather pressed over her nose. She tried to fight, but her limbs still quivered from that earlier display of force, and the men who lifted her had none of Kael’s measured gentleness. They handled her as one might a troublesome sack: grip, heave, and done. She yelped, and not a single one seemed to even notice.
She was loaded into a wagon, a plank biting her spine. The blindfold held tight, cinched at the back of her head, and over it a hood for good measure. The effect was total. With sight gone, her other senses rose like crows to pick at her nerves: the jolting rattle of the wheels, the way every rut in the track snapped her neck back, the sharp tang of horsesweat and resin, the distant, barely audible voices in a dialect she could not place. Her only constant was thecold, creeping in under her ruined dress and up her legs, turning her skin to gooseflesh.
She tried to keep time by the changes in terrain—first the shudder of stone, then the thick, wet drag of mud, then long stretches where the wagon pitched and yawed as if rolling over the broken bones of the earth itself. At intervals, the men would pause, perhaps to shift the horses or confer, and during these moments Alina could make out the metallic clink of weapons and, once, the soft mewling of an infant, quickly shushed. She was given food and drink during those stops to consume awkwardly under her hood, and a female rebel guided her into the bushes to relieve herself.
She thought of her mother and felt nothing. She thought of her father and tasted bile. Mostly, she thought about the ever-increasing distance between herself and anything she had ever known. What would await her at the end of that journey?
Eventually, when Alina had lost track of any sense of time or direction, they came to a halt. The wagon’s gate dropped open with a splintering crash, and hands gripped her again, positioning her upright. She wobbled. Someone steadied her with a palm against her back—too large, too rough to be Kael’s. Where had they taken her? There was a command, then a brief and vicious jerk that sent her stumbling forward, blind.
The air here was different: it carried not the floral fragrances of the palace, nor the living warmth of human habitation, but a mineral density that settled instantly in her lungs. They led her through a series of sharp turns, then a final, ascending path that left her calves burning and her chest rattling with the effort.
Someone rather unkindly removed the blindfold. The first moment of vision was pure agony, even though the light was minimal—just a scatter of torches, their orange splatter amplifiedby the mirrored slick of cavern walls. She squinted and blinked until tears ran freely. When her vision cleared, she found herself in a corridor not of hewn stone but of living rock, its surface veined with black and blue, and alive with the slow creep of water.
