The Death-Made Prince (Runewitch Saga #1)

Chapter 1

Between the bars of my cell, I could just make out the reassuring silhouette of the gallows.

Nine hours to go.

Nine hours until a swift, clean end. Nine hours until I’d never be afraid again.

Nine hours, most of all, until I’d finally be reunited with Lark in the foggy darkness of Niflheim and admit he had, as always, been right on that moonless night in the palace gardens – You wouldn’t survive a week without me, Thraga …

They might as well have been nine years.

I let my head sag back against the cold stone wall and closed my eyes, breathing in the stench of hay and sweat and woodsmoke, wishing the fall of dusk would hurry up for once.

Idle hope, of course. Nothing happened swiftly in Svein’s Creek, a full week’s travel from any civilised place.

It had taken three days for the village’s provost to give his obvious verdict, two more before his cronies had gotten around to scheduling my execution.

The noose hung idle outside my window, and yet the bastards had insisted they wait the customary week to put an end to the misery …

Eight days, and I’d spent every minute of it fearing they had another, more dangerous reason to delay the inevitable. Now, with nine hours to go, it finally seemed—

A lock screeched.

I stiffened on the hay-covered tiles.

Rough voices came down the corridor, muffled through the thick wood of the door. The thuds of heavy boots followed, the tinkling of keys.

Dinner?

No, as little as my rumbling stomach liked to accept it, I’d been served what went for dinner hours ago – a bowl of fish broth and a chunk of bread stale enough that one could break a skull with it.

The guard who’d chucked it at me hadn’t thrown me any unusual glances, either.

Nothing that suggested he or his fellow fuckheads might return for me – but they were coming closer and closer now, at least four of them, and there weren’t that many cells in this small village prison.

Every muscle in my body coiled, bracing for a fight.

They might be planning what their sort of men always seemed to be planning. Helpless girl, doomed to die. A waste not to take advantage. Or it would be worse, and it was that possibility that wouldn’t let me breathe for ten, twenty heartbeats as their rumbling voices grew louder outside my cell …

They might have sent word to Aranc.

Perhaps that was why they’d endlessly delayed my meeting with the noose after all. Perhaps they’d been waiting for their king’s reply.

We’ll be worse than dead if he catches us, witchling …

I knew far too well what Aranc was like in one of his vengeful moods.

Didn’t think he’d want me back either – not after I’d escaped his clutches, then killed one of his most promising pupils in the process.

So if they’d written to him, would he have told them who I was?

What I was? Were these guards on their way with their knives and their razors, ready to chop off my fingers and shave my hair, to load me onto a cart and—

The door bolt thumped.

I recoiled, fingers trembling around my heavy steel chains … and then the hinges creaked, the door swung open, and a gravelly voice barked, ‘Just put him in there! Cell will be empty soon enough.’

Him.

In there.

Mists take me. A new prisoner.

And that was all?

A shivery breath escaped me as I slumped against the uneven wall, skin suddenly clammy, heart stuttering with relief. No knives, then. No razors. Just another sorry sack of shit, locked up to wait for his imminent death …

There was a dull thump outside, the sound of fist meeting flesh. The newcomer was shoved into the darkening cell.

My heart stood still again.

He did not look like a sorry sack of shit.

He looked – all I could come up with in the fraction of a moment between his first step and the next – like impending doom.

He barely even stumbled at that violent shove between his shoulder blades, striding into the cold cell as if he was the king of the hell-cursed place himself.

Dark-clad. Lanky. Taller even than the bear-sized men hurrying in after him, although not half as broad – all sharp angles and billowing black to their fur-covered brawn, reminding me vaguely of a carrion crow surrounded by a herd of bulls.

I’d once seen a crow gouge out a bull’s eye on one of my missions, and this bastard, unarmed though he may be, carried himself with the exact same air.

The guards caught up with him three steps in.

Grabbed his shoulders, dragged him to the wall opposite me.

The prisoner complied so easily it almost looked like mockery, holding out his arms for the chains without being prompted to – sinking into the dusty hay on the floor when one of the guards kicked out his knees from beneath him, and even then he managed to make it look like he had merely decided to sit down at an opportune moment.

‘Feet, too?’ a guard asked the others.

‘Would wrap a chain around his fucking neck if I could,’ the kicking one muttered, and there were some sniggers as they went to work, yanking the prisoner’s feet towards them, hooking cuffs around his high, black boots.

He didn’t move throughout any of it, legs leisurely stretched before him, head cocked a fraction as if to say, how quaint. In the deepening shadows, his dark hood concealed all but the lower half of his face … but the barely noticeable twist of his lips looked almost, almost like a smile.

It was not a pleasant sort of smile.

It was the sort of smile that slid down my skin like the chill of the grave.

That uncanny, stilted amusement did not falter even as a boot landed in his side one more time, forceful enough to shove his entire body aside a few inches.

It did not falter as a guard sneered a see you on the scaffold.

The door clicked behind their broad backs, the iron bolt scraped over the wood again, and even then he was smiling – an expression that was all mechanics and none of the heart beneath.

Death’s arse.

The gallows had never seemed a more inviting prospect.

I still had my fingers, I desperately reminded myself.

That was the good news. Nine hours left, and apparently no one had told the Svein’s Creek wardens of the all-revealing rune mark on my shoulder – which should have been the only relief I needed, and yet my pulse refused to come down as I sat against the hard, irregular stone wall for what felt like hours and tried not to move or look or breathe too loudly.

King Aranc Estien had taught me nothing if not the instincts of prey, and right now, every bone and sinew in my body was screaming predator.

The nameless man’s clothes were too luxurious.

Black, knee-length boots. Leather, fur-lined gloves.

That heavy felt coat, purple embroidery along the hems, a gold-and-amethyst brooch at his throat – not a commoner’s attire, but what in the world was a nobleman dressed for the fireborn courts doing in a place like Svein’s Creek?

What was he doing in a cell? For a small town provost to lock up a lord with so little regard for his station …

It must have been ugly. And people who got ugly once rarely held back the second time.

I no longer felt my hunger. My guts were knotting for entirely different reasons now, cold sweat trickling down the back of my neck despite the biting cold of the spring night.

Sooner or later, the village would go to sleep.

The guards would drink their mead by the gate at the other side of the prison complex. If he tried to reach me …

Were his chains long enough to cross the width of the cell?

It was hard to say without peering at him too obviously, and looking at him seemed even more dangerous than the uncertainty. They might be long enough. He might be able to reach me. How much muscle was hidden beneath that heavy black cloak – how easily would I be able to kick him off me?

If I screamed, would anyone hear?

If only the bastards hadn’t taken my knives …

Shit. Wrong thought. I knew it the moment it arose, felt the familiar forceful urge set its teeth into my muscles before I could push the source away.

They weren’t there, my knives. Even the sheaths were gone, I knew they were gone, and still my fingers strained with the need to make really, really sure of it – to run through that soothing sequence of checks just once more.

Ehwaz. Uruz. Isa. Which was ridiculous. I knew it was ridiculous, and yet—

My breath was quickening.

You and your fixations, witchling …

I could be stronger than this. I had to be stronger than this, because I would draw attention if I moved, and attention was the very last thing I needed, locked in a small, witness-less room with a man who might well be waiting for me to make a single mistake.

But the urge was turning into an unbearable tension beneath the skin of my fingertips.

The unfocused, undefined notion of danger was closing in on my chest, and if only I could just check my fucking knives …

Perhaps I could do it very, very quietly.

Perhaps the smiling, crow-like creature opposite me had already dozed off. I couldn’t even see his eyes beneath that hood. Perhaps—

‘Been here for long?’ he murmured, breaking the silence as if he’d read those thoughts in my mind.

I froze again, and the panic froze with me.

The world was almost entirely dark now. A single whale oil lantern was burning on the wall outside, a few paces away from my cell; the warm glint of light falling in through the window was all that illuminated my cellmate’s pointy chin, the menacing twist of his lips.

If I hadn’t seen those same lips move, I might have thought I’d imagined the sound of his velvety soft words.

They had sounded … interested.

What little I’d gleaned from him so far had not given the impression of a man concerned with the trials and tribulations of anyone else’s prison stay.