Keira
She felt the weight of the brutes stepping into the carriage, moving cautiously. They had learned better than to think her harmless, no matter how wretched she appeared.
“Sit up,” a familiar voice commanded her.
Her surroundings spun dangerously around her as one of them pulled her up to her feet, holding her so that the other could force her to drink.
Her mouth clamped shut like a vise. She couldn’t.
Not again. That foul potion drained her strength, muddled her mind, pulled all the color out of the world until she was nothing but a husk.
Refusal screamed through her, rattling her bones.
“Bring the cursed potion!” the man called behind them, his considerable weight pressing down on her.
She had spent enough time with her captors to know both of their voices well, yet this voice was unfamiliar to her.
Keira had caught her breath by the time they turned her, trying once more to shove the potion down her throat.
“If you see that bird, shoot it!” Another stranger called as they tried to wrench her mouth open.
All her efforts, clawing and snapping, kicking and growling, only prolonged the inevitable. Weakened as she was, Keira could not hold both of them back for long. She coughed and sputtered as the potion worked down her throat.
At once, even the faint whisper of her magic fell silent. Around her, the world became slow and grey and heartless. Her body grew heavy, her thoughts only fragments which didn’t seem to fit together.
After a moment, they pulled her upright, practically carrying her.
She couldn’t have managed more than two steps on her own.
As she stumbled, pain shot up her ankle.
She did not have the clarity of mind to tell anything about these strangers in their midst, and it took longer than it ought to for her to realize they were not taking her back to the wagon.
Instead, she saw the light of torches. The air smelled of sea salt and ash.
Around her they were speaking, voices strange and familiar… This was wrong.
A hand gripped her hair, lifting her head up. Keira opened her eyes, an extraordinary effort. A bald man with a hooked nose was studying her in kind. He held a lantern before him. Its light glinted off the golden pin fastening his cloak. It was in the shape of a starred compass.
Fear gripped her, honing her muddled thoughts into a singular impulse of clarity: she needed to run.
Her body jerked back in response, but nothing more.
The hand dropped her, and Keira’s head lulled on her shoulders.
They kept talking, their words dancing incomprehensibly around her as a wave of nausea swam through her mind.
“Hold her.”
A firm hold gripped her hair again, this time from behind, inflaming the bruise on the back of her skull. A cry ripped through her throat.
Before she could close it again, something cold and metal was thrust into her mouth.
Keira gagged and tried to pull away as it pinned down her tongue.
The tang of iron and rust filled her senses.
Her heart hammered against her chest as she saw metal bars closing around her vision.
Keira struggled with all her strength. As the metal closed in around her, she felt the click of the lock like a snap of her bones.
She couldn’t speak, couldn’t open her mouth more than a fraction.
Everywhere she looked, she saw the world through the iron cage.
The hook nosed man nodded in a sickly satisfied way. “Bring her.” He turned away, toward what her blurred vision couldn’t perceive.
“Watch her,” one of her captors warned. “She near took Glenn’s ear off.”
The bald stranger turned, the amusement in his wrinkled smile etching her very bones with rancor. “Worry not, we’re more than capable of accommodating her kind.”