Chapter 8
Eight
Morgan
It’s not an easy ride to the castle.
The ropes chafe permanent grooves and rough spots in my skin, and the carriage is anything but comfortable as I glance behind at the only home I’ve ever known. Within an hour, even the mountain where we’d hidden is a blur in the distance.
The men split into two distinct groups, one led by Tristan and the other by Kieran.
My luck put me in Tristan’s caravan.
Kieran led the rest of my survivors off with him toward the capital. And Fallkirk is reduced to nothing but a memory, lost to history and time’s decay.
Screw them.
Fresh tears sting the corners of my eyes and I reel them back. As soon as it’s safe. I’ll cry when it’s safe.
The choked sob is another story and the next rut the carriage bounces over on the road to DragonSpear pushes it out of me. The guards can’t be bothered to look. As long as I’m secure, as long as the ropes hold, then I’m not their problem.
Unless I make myself one.
I tried to escape the first night. My lessons were learned the hard way that although Kieran had spoken for me, something I never asked him to do, his cousin is a different sort of man. The kind you avoid on dark nights and lonely streets.
The marks are hidden beneath my clothes where no one can see his expertise in finding which tendons and veins will sting the most when he pays them attention.
After several days of breakneck pace, we round the final hill with only miles to go to our destination.
One of the guards clears his throat and points. “Ahead.”
His voice is husky, knocking me out of my head long enough for me to force my bones into motion. I’ve frozen from being in one position too long. The fabric tent protecting the carriage from the sun’s glare pulls back under his scarred fingers.
There.
My mouth dries and the excitement I always thought I’d feel repositions solidly into unease.
DragonSpear Academy is a blight on the landscape. Or maybe my overactive imagination paints it as such.
The massive castle dominates the sharpest spear of the mountain range and rises above the rest of the smaller cliffs. Five distinct levels terracing higher, piled on top of each other, twin spires bookending the bulk.
The grand, fairy-tale castle was built by an earlier king to educate the kingdom’s youth. Once, in another life, I pored over books on its medieval architecture and opulent rooms.
Each arched gothic window is a black hole absorbing light rather than reflecting it and there are thousands of them cutting through the storm gray stone exterior.
We traverse the gorge below it until the rocky hill comes into clear detail.
That life is over. The sight of the structure sets my teeth clacking again.
The guard settles back into his slumped, cross armed posture, his eyes closing behind the slits of his helmet. The carriage joints pull and squeal as we take the first switchback up to the castle, the incline sharp.
A jolt sends me careening toward the railing and the guard reaches out to grab the ropes around my ankles before I topple over the side. My breath catches.
If he hadn’t grabbed me—
He keeps the rope in hand while we rise, the air thinning and the flapping fabric granting glimpses of the valley below. The road we took thins out then disappears between the press of trees.
We’ll be there soon enough. Every exhale is a countdown to doomsday for me.
The school I’d thought would be a fresh start, a way for me to hone my skills, to make myself into something worthwhile, it’s all twisted now.
“Whoa!”
Tristan pulls up beside the cabin, working the reins of his horse between his calloused palms, and his smile freezes the blood in my veins.
“We’re here, gorgeous.” He leers at me and somewhere in the distance, his red beast of a dragon gives a roar of acknowledgement.
Andromeda, I’d heard him call her.
“I’ll knock your pretty nose out of joint if you come any closer.” My voice hardens. “It might add character.”
He leans closer. “We both know I’m gorgeous. And you’re ruined.”
Tristan drops the flap and the clatter of hooves against cobblestone marks his departure. The moment the wheels stop turning, the guard spurs into action, the others dropping from horseback to escort me into the bowels of the castle.
It takes three of them to get me out of the back of the carriage. I rear back, kicking out against open air, my legs tethered together.
Twin attendants man either side of the open doors, their shapeless uniforms blending into the stone at their spines. They nod at our approach but their eyes stay averted. Off of me.
Why the front door?
I snarl, twitching and tugging against the men holding me by the elbows, the other at my knees.
The open doors of DragonSpear are thick enough, heavy enough, to need more than those two attendants to draw them closed.
Then I’m swallowed, my pulse a primitive rhythm.
Wincing, I take in everything I can, determined to memorize the surroundings and find my exit. The main hall shoots straight back to the rear of the castle without obstacle and the ceiling stands over twenty feet high I’d guess.
Panic floods me and bile burns my throat.
Doors leading off the central hallway are more than likely classrooms or main areas for the students to congregate. But the space is noticeably absent of life at our approach.
Black marble floors with veins like rivers of gold decorate the foyer and hallways. Everything is made from the finest materials, from the corbels in the doorways to the ribbed vaults delineating the ceiling structure.
“Let me go!” I buck again. “Don’t touch me!”
“Tristan, control her mouth.”
The guards pull up short as Kieran steps out of the shadows of one of the highly decorative alcoves. The glimmer of sunlight illuminates the strands of hair so dark they’re blue around his temples.
My eyes instantly track the way his throat works, and I pause. Surprised.
He’d beaten us here.
How?
Tristan huffs and a smile snakes over his handsome features. “I like it when they scream.”
“I bet you do. I’ll take her from here.”
Kieran’s steps are sure. With a flick of his finger, the other soldiers set me on my feet. The impact of the closing front doors rockets through me. But he holds my gaze.
Without blinking, without breaking, he takes the strap of rope linking my wrists together and wraps it around his fist.
“Come on, girl.”
I still haven’t told him my name. If he knows it’s a power play, he doesn’t let on.
Tristan throws his hands in the air. “Fine. You want her? She’s your problem anyway. You’re the one who insisted I bring her here.”
“What have you done with the others?” I mutter.
A flicker of emotion colors Kieran’s cheeks.
Rather than answering, he says to Tristan, “I’ll take her down myself.”
Tristan stomps off muttering something about job completion and lack of respect.
“Well?” I press hotly. “Where are they?”
Kieran gives a tug and I lurch toward him, colliding with his back when he turns to drag me down the corridor.
“Don’t worry about them.”
Dismissed, again. Like a child tugging at the hem of a mother too distracted to pay attention.
“They have names. They’re people, like you. Like me. Nen, and Emory. Lanai. Celeste. Brian. Digby. Whit. Solange.”
I name off every face I remember saving. The ones I see in my dreams when I finally close my eyes and sleep twists fantasy and reality together.
“Are you done?” Kieran replies when I finish.
We walk to the end of the grand hallway together and when we reach a paneled door hidden in plain sight, he offers me a scowl.
I search him for some scrap of remorse and come up against a brick wall.
“I’ll never be done. You people think you can do whatever you want and trample on others but you don’t even know their names. Is that how you justify it? You pretend they aren’t human just because they aren’t you?”
Without fail, Kieran marches through the paneled door and down the first set of steps.
His long strides are too much for my deadened muscles to match and I lose my balance, fall.
Skip several steps until we meet a shallow threshold and he slides me along the floor.
A wake of dust, cobwebs, and grime mark my trajectory.
“You’re making this harder than it has to be,” he grunts when he lifts me back up.
“Your other prisoners don’t fight back?”
I spit at his face, and he dodges the spittle.
“I never said that.”
“You don’t say much.”
He turns and tugs. “For a good reason.”
If he’s frustrated with me, then there’s a greater chance I’ll find some kind of weakness in a man who shows none. He’ll snap eventually. The one thing I do well, without fail, is needle people.
“I get it. You annoy people by speaking. It’s understandable, given how grating the sound of your voice is,” I tell him with false cheer.
Kieran reaches the bottom of the second set of steps and breezes through an archway into the bowels of the castle. And when he dumps me, unceremoniously at the feet of a stout woman with pigeon-like features, I scramble after him.
“You can’t leave me here!”
The woman silences me with a targeted kick of her pointed boot to my kidney. “Hush, girl. Hush now.”
I gurgle out a retort, curling into a fetal position against the pain.
“You’re not to speak to him like that, stupid girl. Do not address the son of the General in such a manner.”
“Thank you for your loyalty, Mrs. Milkin,” Kieran calls back. “You know what to do with her.”
“Of course I do, sir. Thank you, sir!” She sends Kieran on his way with much ego stroking.
Her simpering might have made me sick if she hadn’t aimed such a precise blow to my lower back.
I’ve never seen an expression change as quickly as Mrs. Milkin’s did. The second Kieran disappears from sight, she rounds on me, her thin lips pulling back from large gums.
“Let’s go.”
The pigeon woman, Mrs. Milkin, is the head of the housekeepers, and forces me into a large rectangular room.
The maids all share one open area instead of getting their own bedrooms. Cots and bunks line what seems, on my closer inspection, to be a dilapidated underground gym.