Prologue V #2
“Thank you.” I extended my arm, and he hopped on it like he understood perfectly. Then I opened the window and stuck out my arm. “Make haste.” I watched the starlight reflect off his shiny feathers for a second before he was gone.
I closed the window then left the aviary, picking up the torch that I had left in the dirt.
The castle was a mountain that loomed above, once my home and now a prison of my suppression.
I hurried back, taking the right path because I’d memorized those gardens from pacing them so many times, searching for a place to shed my grief and quickly realizing I could never release it, not when it followed me so closely, not when it pressed so hard against me it suffocated me.
I returned the torch to the wall before I stepped inside the castle.
“Queen Hanne, what are you doing?” One of the soldiers had returned to his station.
Alarm shot through me first, but then my wits kicked in. “I heard a window break. It woke me up from a dead sleep. I think someone was aiming for my window, and I wanted to see who it was.”
He seemed to accept my explanation without suspicion because he said, “We checked the perimeter and beyond the wall, and no one was there. Couldn’t find the rock they used to break the window either.”
Because I’d thrown it outside—not inside. “Must have been a stupid prank.” I turned to the stairs. “I’m headed to bed. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Queen Hanne,” he said from behind me.
I returned to my bedchambers without another interference. When I was behind my bedroom door, I shed my coat, realizing I had sweat on my skin for the first time that winter. It wasn’t from the walk or the coat, just the crippling anxiety.
I sat at the edge of my bed and looked out the window, wondering if I’d made the right move…or selfishly put my own interests before my people’s. I was powerless to combat my own situation, but a mighty king fused with a dragon was not powerless at all.
Days passed, and I wondered if I’d gotten away with it.
Dragons didn’t appear in the sky. Our scouts didn’t report an army marching on our borders.
There was a chance the crow had never made it to its destination.
And there was a chance that King Acana either didn’t believe my words or simply didn’t care.
With his dragons in his arsenal, King Acana might not see Vulgaris as a serious threat to him.
I was constrained by the length of the scroll, so my message had to be brief.
I couldn’t explain every detail, so perhaps my tale wasn’t believable.
I seemed to have gotten away with it, but I’d accomplished nothing.
My father would have been proud of me for trying, for doing more than sitting on my ass and not taking action. I would find another idea after I’d spent my time mourning my first one. I sat on my terrace, my breakfast only half eaten, and I bathed in the rivers of my self-pity.
Then a group of soldiers arrived—and my life changed forever.
There were twelve of them, in steel plates of armor, broadswords at their hips and across their backs, like they’d come to my chambers to fight a Mammoth rather than a woman who was only five feet tall. “Queen Hanne, by the hand of King Vulgaris, you’re under arrest for treason.”
With my wrists secured behind my back with rope, I was marched to the throne room, where the king and queen usually sat at the top of the dais to pass judgment on their enemies, to hand down verdicts on the disobedient, to hear the pleas of their citizens.
Vulgaris sat there, the chair that my mother must have sat in removed because he didn’t want me to sit beside him.
It was the first time I’d seen him in the uniform of the king, which was black rather than blue, not stitched with the images of flowers, but with a blade across the chest, like he’d made his own crest.
With his knees wide apart and his gold crown on his head, he looked upon me like he never knew me and he certainly never loved me. “I warned you.” He wore no sympathy as the soldiers forced me to my knees by kicking me.
“Fuck you, asshole.”
He extended his palm to his general, and the scroll I’d written was placed there.
He unrolled it, eyes on me the whole time, and once it was straight between his fingertips, he began to read out loud.
“King Acana, I wed my father’s best friend under false pretenses, and he’s taken the crown for himself.
He’s already preparing his army to challenge yours in the spring.
He wishes to claim the dragons for himself, to become king of all kings, and to destroy anyone who’s in his path.
Please come to my aid and rid Baccara of this ruthless poison before it seeps into the ground and kills us all.
” He released the scroll, and it returned to its rigid coil.
“Come with haste, Queen Hanne of Baccara.” He handed the scroll back to his general and looked down at me just the way he accused King Acana of looking down upon his citizens. “Do you deny this?”
I probably should, but I had too much pride to lie. “Will you really kill your wife? Your niece?” I rose to my feet and shrugged off the hold of the guards.
He stared with that same ruthless look. “That’s for you to decide.
” He stood and walked down the stairs, his cape dragging behind him the way a snake slithered through the grass.
“This is a treasonous offense, the highest there is, and the punishment must fit the crime.” He stopped before me, over a foot taller, a monster dressed like a man.
“I will let you decide. Would you like to be executed by my blade through your neck—or exiled to the Depths?”
The Depths were mysterious craters spread throughout the land, massive holes that led to the darkness below.
So deep, a lit torch never reached the bottom.
No one had ever ventured there and returned.
Under Vulgaris’s command as General of the Kingdom of Baccara, the Mammoths had been forced into the chasm to the west of our kingdom.
Driven back by our army, they fell into the hole, thousands disappearing from sight. “The Depths are synonymous with death.”
“None knows what lies below.”
“You’re the snake in our garden. You’re the one who should be banished to the Depths.”
“Even if that’s true, I would never send a missive to another kingdom and ask them to lay siege to my lands. My interests and ambitions have always been in line with my people, to make Baccara the Kingdom of All.”
“You only care for yourself—”
“Choose.”
With my wrists bound behind my back, I couldn’t run.
Without a living relative or someone close, I had no one who would save me.
Vulgaris would cut my head from my shoulders, and I would bleed into the ground before I was dumped into a shallow grave beside my father.
Our legacy would fade—and Vulgaris would triumph.
But the Depths weren’t a much better solution, a fall so great it would break my neck instantly.
I wouldn’t know when it was coming, not when it was so dark I wouldn’t be able to see the ground rising to meet me.
But the Depths were still a mystery, an unknown, so there was a chance. “The Depths.”