26
Ilinca
I counted the days by the guard rotations, since the cell they'd given me had no window and the wolfsbane smoke they burned near the door most evenings left my sense of time markedly less reliable than it should have been.
By my best count, I had been Costin Drell's prisoner for six weeks, give or take a handful of days I couldn't fully account for.
The cell itself was simple — stone walls, a straw pallet, a bucket, a door with a small barred window through which my captors occasionally studied me with the specific clinical curiosity of men assessing whether their prize had begun to break yet.
I had not broken. I understood, somewhere around the second week, that not breaking had become the entire architecture of my remaining self-respect, the one thing Costin Drell's patience and his wolfsbane and his particular, methodical cruelty hadn't yet managed to take from me.
Costin visited most days, always brief, always with the same careful, unhurried menace of a man who'd learned long ago that fear compounded more effectively over time than it did through any single dramatic gesture.
He asked the same questions, variations circling the same core information — what did I know of the Wardstone, what had the Frostmark records actually said, could I activate old wards on command or did the ability require preparation.
I gave him nothing useful, six years of careful wardsmith's discretion serving me considerably better in that cell than it had ever served me at a market stall.
"You're stubborn," he observed, on what I judged to be the forty-first day, studying me through the bars with an expression that carried no particular heat, only the same patient, professional assessment he always offered.
"Most captives break far faster than this.
I find myself almost curious what keeps you holding out so thoroughly. "
"I've had considerable practice being stubborn. Ask anyone who's ever tried to cheat me on a ward price."
Something that might, in a different man, have been the ghost of amusement crossed his face, gone as quickly as it appeared. "The Prince is searching for you. Did you know that? Six weeks now, and he hasn't slowed the effort once, whatever the Council's growing impatience suggests he should."
I didn't answer that, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of visible hope, though something in my chest tightened at the confirmation regardless — that Kason hadn't stopped, that six weeks of silence from my side of this particular divide hadn't meant six weeks of abandonment from his.
"He won't find you," Costin added, almost gently, before he left. "This valley's held secrets considerably older and better hidden than one wardsmith's location. I'd advise against holding onto hope you can't currently afford."
I was not entirely alone in that stretch of cells, though the guards took considerable care to keep the captives separated enough that conversation required real effort to sustain.
A woman two cells down, whose name I eventually learned was Sela, had been held nearly four months by her own count, taken during a raid on a rogue encampment far to the north, and it was Sela's low, careful voice through the stone that first confirmed what I'd already begun to suspect about the scale of Ossendrei's operation.
"There were others before me," she said, one night, when the guards' rotation left enough of a gap for whispered conversation to pass unnoticed.
"I heard voices in the dark, my first weeks here.
Six, maybe more. I don't know what happened to them.
They stopped answering, one by one, and I stopped hearing anything from that direction at all. "
"Do you know why they were taken? What Ossendrei wanted from them?"
"Tested. That's the word the guards used, when they thought I wasn't listening closely enough to understand it.
Something about a curse, and whether ordinary rogue blood could be made to carry it the way they apparently believe your blood can carry something else.
" Her voice carried a exhaustion that went much deeper than physical tiredness.
"I don't fully understand what you are, wardsmith.
I understand only that whatever it is, it seems to matter enough to this place that your presence here has changed how the guards behave.
Less careless. More afraid of losing you, somehow, than they've ever been afraid of losing the rest of us. "
I carried that conversation with me for days afterward, understanding, with a grief I hadn't fully let myself feel until Sela gave it shape, exactly how many lives the search for my bloodline had already cost before I'd ever understood I carried anything worth searching for.
Katra. The recovered survivor from Kason's own report, months ago.
Whoever Sela had heard vanish into silence during her own first weeks of captivity.
The weight of it settled into something I carried alongside my own fear, a debt I did not yet know how to begin repaying.
I began carving the night after that visit, in secret, using a shard of stone I'd worked loose from my cell's wall over the course of several patient days, into the wood of my own straw pallet where the guards' cursory inspections rarely thought to look.
Small work, at first. The kind of carving I'd spent six years teaching myself to keep deliberately weak, the same old instinct toward smallness I'd carried since Katra died protecting me from exactly this kind of attention.
But something in six weeks of captivity had worn that particular instinct thinner than it had ever been, and I found myself, working by touch in the dark, carving considerably stronger lines than I'd allowed myself in years.
Concealment, first. A ward small enough not to register against the guards' casual inspection, strong enough to hide the growing collection of carved lines beneath a straw pallet's ordinary shadow.
Then, slowly, over days of patient, secret work, something significantly more ambitious — the beginning shape of a warding pattern I recognized from Katra's oldest teachings, the kind meant to weaken a lock's integrity from the inside, given enough time and enough careful, cumulative work.
I did not know, precisely, what I intended to do with a weakened lock, alone in an Unbound stronghold with no clear path to freedom even if the door itself gave way.
I understood only that the carving gave me something considerably more valuable than an uncertain escape plan — it gave me back a piece of myself Costin Drell's patient cruelty had been slowly, methodically trying to erode, the particular, stubborn fact of my own capable hands, still mine, still working, regardless of what six weeks of captivity had tried to take from me.
Varak Ossendrei visited on what I believed was the forty-fourth day, and I understood, the moment he stepped through my cell's door rather than simply studying me through its barred window, that whatever came next carried noticeably more weight than Costin's usual routine.
He was older than I'd expected, silver threading heavily through dark hair, his bearing carrying the weary dignity of a man who'd spent his entire life certain of a cause few others shared his conviction in.
He studied me a long moment before he spoke, something almost sorrowful moving behind eyes that held none of Costin's clinical detachment.
"You look like her," he said finally, quiet, more to himself than to me. "The old portraits. I've studied them my whole life, and I still wasn't fully prepared for how closely you carry her features."
"Who?"
"Ilyra Frostmark. The First Queen." He settled onto the room's single stool, uninvited, with the distinct ease of a man accustomed to taking whatever space he required.
"My great-grandmother was her cousin. Passed over for the succession generations ago, when the Draguvane line seized the throne through a war neither side has ever fully accounted for honestly.
I've spent my entire life hearing the story of what was taken from my family, wardsmith.
I don't expect you to sympathize with it.
I only want you to understand that I'm not the villain your prince has likely painted me as, in whatever version of this story he's given you. "
"You've kidnapped me. Interrogated captives about my bloodline for years.
Trafficked wolves as test subjects for a curse that turns people into mindless weapons.
" I kept my voice level despite the fury building beneath it.
"I don't require a villain's monologue to understand what you are, Voivode Ossendrei.
Your actions have already told me plainly enough. "
Something flickered across his face — not anger, closer to genuine grief.
"You think I don't understand the cost of what I've done?
I've spent decades watching good people suffer for a cause I still believe is just, and I carry every one of those costs, wardsmith, whatever you currently believe about my capacity to feel their weight.
The Draguvane throne has ruled for two centuries on ground that was never rightfully theirs to claim.
I am not seeking power for its own sake.
I am seeking to restore what was stolen from a bloodline that deserved better than the erasure it received. "
"By stealing my life in return? By threatening an entire market town full of people who have nothing to do with a war fought two centuries before any of them were born?"
"By any means the cause requires, however much I regret the specific costs along the way.
" His voice had gone harder, the grief giving way to the particular unshakable conviction I understood, with a cold clarity, was the true engine behind everything Costin Drell had done to me over six weeks.
"You carry the blood that could restore what was taken, wardsmith.
I don't expect you to volunteer that restoration willingly.
But I intend to have it regardless, one way or another, because I have spent my entire life believing this cause is worth whatever it costs to see it through. "
He left without further explanation, and I sat alone in my cell a long while afterward, understanding, with a clarity that frightened me considerably more than Costin's clinical cruelty ever had, exactly what kind of man I was truly up against — not a monster who'd convinced himself he was righteous, but something substantially more dangerous: a man who might, in some other version of history, have actually been right, whose grievance carried genuine weight even as the methods he'd chosen to address it had curdled into something no cause could fully justify.
I felt the bond that night more clearly than I had in weeks, a distant, persistent thread running somewhere beneath the wolfsbane's dulling effect, and understood, sitting in the dark with my carving shard warm in my palm, that whatever distance currently separated Kason and me, the bond itself hadn't weakened with it, only stretched, patient and enduring, exactly the way Katra's letters had once described it holding across years of separation between the rejected mates the old stories spoke of.
I did not know if he was close. I did not know if six weeks of searching had brought him any nearer to this valley than the first desperate hours after my capture had managed.
I understood only that the thread was still there, faint but unbroken, and that some stubborn, hopeful part of me refused to let Costin Drell's careful warnings convince me otherwise.
I returned to my carving that night with renewed, focused purpose, understanding that whatever came next, I intended to face it with every piece of myself Costin Drell and Varak Ossendrei had not yet managed to take.