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PRELUDE

There was a room, little more than a cell, far beneath his father’s mist-shrouded keep.

It was his room—his pen, his older half brothers liked to sneer—and only once a day was he allowed out into the chill damp to breathe in the song of the craggy, wind-battered mountains and feel, if he was lucky, a kiss of sunlight on his cheeks.

His mother was not allowed inside the pen. Visits with her were limited to once a week, when they would eat a small breakfast together in her own cramped chamber many levels above. One hour—that was all they had. He’d carry the trays up himself so her too-thin, overworked hands didn’t have to ache any more than necessary.

Not that his hands were much better. Not after what his half brothers had done three years ago. He assumed it was three years ago—time was meaningless down here, marked only by how large his wings were getting, how they could now brush either side of the cell walls if he stretched them fully.

There were nights when he’d bolt awake screaming, certain his hands were still burning, skin melting—and find that thick, gnarled scars remained.

He’d been young enough when it happened that his wings had spanned barely half the space.

He only remembered flashes. The laughter as they slathered his small hands in oil. Then the piercing terror at the sight of the burning braziers, their sizzling coals audible even from across the room. The deep dread in his bones as he realized that there was nothing he could do to stop his half brothers from shoving his oil-soaked hands into the flames. The heat of that fire reaching his straining fingers before they went in, then the instant shock of not feeling anything. That was the last glimmer—how he felt nothing for a moment.

And then pain so complete that everything went black.

He’d awoken to his mother’s sobbing; he lay cradled in her lap with such pain in his hands, in his fingers, that the merest twitch had cast him into oblivion once more. That was how it was for a time: pulses of consciousness, a wave of agony, and then nothing.

Maybe the shadows kept him under, locked in their dark embrace. Maybe it was a kindness. But when he’d finally awoken for good, he found his hands changed. They were the same shape, but new flesh had crept over the burns. Where once his hands had been smooth, now the skin was shiny and rough and tight.

They’d thrown him back in the pen soon after that. And as before, his mother was not allowed to tend to him. To comfort him.

He knew why his mother was kept elsewhere most of the time. Why there was a small, discreet stairwell at the end of her hall that wound to the upper levels, where his father dwelled.

His half brothers made sure he knew.

Son of a whore—we’ll fuck your mother one day, too.

Their own mother had personally locked him down here the first time he’d retaliated for the insult. The second time, they’d burned his hands beyond recognition.

So he was left with shadows for company, left to listen to the faint song of the wind that sometimes wandered into the depths of the mountain keep. He flexed his wings as often as he could, going through exercises he’d marked his father’s warriors repeating in the courtyard.

He’d learned them all, noting the details during that one hour he was allowed out. How the warriors moved, how they handled their blades, how they stood, how they took off without a running start.

He had never flown. Not once.

His half brothers mocked him for that, too. But he practiced as best he could in the pen. His hands, once healed, had proved able to function as they had before the burns—albeit stiffly for the first few months, sometimes aching, but soon returning to their full range of use. So he trained. And trained.

He was an Illyrian; he could do nothing less.

His mother often reminded him of that, whispering so the other keen-eared chambermaids didn’t hear, didn’t report the words to their impetuous mistress.

You are an Illyrian, Azriel—the wind sings through your very blood. You cannot be caged. You cannot be broken. They lock you away because they fear you.

He sometimes forgot his name until he heard his mother say it. Why? he’d ask her, over and over. Why do they fear me? Why do they hate me?

She would kiss his brow once, twice. Because you are different. They could all feel it, from the moment you were born. And one day, you will show them why that is a wondrous thing.

When he’d been younger, the words had never made sense. But as the years passed, Azriel knew she was right.

The shadows in his pen—his cell—had become his friends. They had their own stories, their own accounts of events in the keep above.

The wind was his most trusted adviser, bringing him tales of the world beyond. Of wide-open fields where sunshine gilded wildflowers; of rushing rivers that cascaded down mountains; of a violet-eyed boy around his age toward whom the entire world seemed to gravitate, a winged boy—another Illyrian—clawing out an existence in the mud and snow far from here, and . . . her. A golden-haired girl, lovely and bright, encased in darkness akin to his own, trapped within a city beneath a mountain, dreaming of the open sky above.

But they were far from him, as unreachable as the moon.

So the shadows and wind kept him company. Shadows and wind and stone. Azriel came to understand the quiet, rumbling language of the rock, how it caught the voices and words of those who dwelled in the keep.