Beside her stood the red-headed archer from the raid, instantly recognizable even in this weird, warped light. Seraphina; she had overheard Kael calling her. She looked taller without the mask, or perhaps more dangerous. Her jaw was marked by a recent bruise, and her knuckles were raw where skin had been peeled away. She met Alina’s gaze with a look of perfect contempt.
“You walk,” Seraphina said, voice devoid of accent or warmth. “Or I drag you.”
Alina walked.
The hall narrowed, then widened, opening into a chamber as large as the palace’s library. Its floor was packed with straw and dried moss, and the air vibrated with a dull, persistent hum, the sound of people living just out of sight. Alina was led down a side tunnel, every footstep echoing twice, until they reached a door that was more a slab of petrified wood wedged into the stone.
Seraphina shoved it aside, ushered Alina through, and closed the slab behind them.
The room was bare but for a few scarce items: a wooden bed with a straw mattress, a wooden stool and a rickety table, and upon this a thin candle stub that Seraphina lit with quick, economic motions. The ceiling pressed low, giving the room a claustrophobic feel. There were no windows, no ornaments, not even a bucket for washing.
“This is your cell,” Seraphina said. “Try not to make a mess. You would have to clean it up yourself, for a change.”
She turned to go, then paused. “If you scream, no one will come. If you try to run, you’ll freeze before you reach the tree line.” She said it all with the indifference of a person discussing the weather.
Alina’s voice emerged ragged but unbroken. “Is this your idea of civilization?”
Seraphina arched an eyebrow. “We survive. It’s more than your kind ever gave us.”
With that, she left, the heavy door sealing out what little light there had been.
Alina stood perfectly still for a long minute. She thought of sitting, but the mattress was a sad, collapsed thing, and the stool looked ready to splinter under the weight of a thought, much less a person. Instead, she paced the perimeter of the room, fingertips grazing the walls. Six steps from the door to the bed. Five steps from wall to wall. The stone was cold. And even though the marble floor of the palace had been cold, too, it hadn’t radiated dampness.
She tried to remember the last time she had been alone, truly alone, with no staff, no maids, no guards lurking at the margin of her existence.
The answer was never. The thought made her knees go soft, and Alina sank, not to the bed or stool, but to the cold stone floor, solid and certain beneath her.
A knock on the door, soft, but not shy, broke through her racing thoughts. Before she could react, it opened, and a woman entered carrying a bundle in one arm and a bowl in the other. The woman had the build of a palace seamstress—slight, with clever hands—and hair pulled back into a neat bun. She neither looked at Alina nor acknowledged her presence, merely set the bowl on the table and placed the bundle beside it.
Then, wordless, she turned to go.
Alina called after her: “Wait—please.” The word felt alien in her mouth.
The woman paused, just barely. Her eyes flicked to Alina’s, then away, as if the very act of seeing the princess was a violation.
Alina reached for some semblance of dignity. “What is your name?”
A pause, then: “Mira.” Flat, final.
“Mira, may I—may I have a blanket?”
“Already there,” she pointed with a callused hand at the bundle. Alina wondered, fleetingly, if she would ever develop such hands.
“Thank you,” Alina said, more quietly.
Mira left, shutting the door with the softest click.
Alina wrapped herself in the blanket. The scratch of it was instantly overwhelming, but also oddly comforting, like a memory of being swaddled, or maybe just the unfamiliarity of discomfort as a sign she was still, in some way, alive.
She eyed the rest of the bundle: clothing. Practical, unadorned, sized for someone her height but with no consideration for shape or color. A tunic of rough-spun wool, brown leggings, a pair of linen underclothes, and boots with mismatched laces. On top was a note, written in a slanted hand:
Change, eat, rest.
Nothing more. She could not say why, but she knew Kael had written the message. She wondered why that should matter at all, but somehow it did.
She took the bowl and, finally daring to trust the stool, sat down to eat. The stew was thin, more water than anything else, but it had the faint flavor of onion and game, and by the thirdspoonful she could not stop herself from eating every drop. She licked the bowl, then laughed grimly at the animal nature of it, the sound—genuine, shocked, absurd—echoing in the tiny room.
She looked around at her kingdom: the shabby mattress, the ancient furniture, the stub of candle already drowning in its own wax. Then at her body, so completely at odds with the silk and jewel of yesterday. She thought of her mother, her father, the palace—the gold and the cruelty of it. She tried to summon hate, or longing, or any feeling at all, and found instead a hollow so vast she nearly wept.
