Chapter 2 #4
My vision dims. There’s a rushing sound in my ears. My lungs are burning from lack of air.
The door slams open.
“Captain Brennan.” A voice cuts through my gurgling attempts to breathe. “The king has summoned the prisoner. He requests she be brought to him immediately.”
Darkness creeps closer. His hands don’t stop squeezing. My fingers claw at his wrists.
“Captain! The king! Now!”
His fingers loosen, and air rushes in. I cough so hard, pain explodes behind my ribs. Brennan stares down at me, his lip curled in disgust. Then he stands, adjusts his shirt, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Fetch a healer. Tell them to meet me at the king’s study.” He glances down at me. “Bring her.”
As the guards haul me off the floor, the fractured bones in my chest grind together. The agony is blinding, and darkness finally rushes up to swallow me. I gladly let it pull me under.
Consciousness returns slowly.
First, the familiar smell of ink and melting beeswax.
Then the pulse of my own heartbeat pounding against my skull.
I force my eye open. The room tilts, and slowly resolves into the heavy oak of my father’s desk.
He’s looking at me. His gaze moves from the damaged eye to the bruises I’m sure are darkening my throat, then drops lower, over the torn dress and shift.
His expression tightens, and hope flares painfully in my chest. But he looks away, fussing with a pile of papers on his desk. When he looks back at me, there’s no sign of my father, only the king of the realm.
I look away, unable to bear the sight of the one person I thought loved me unconditionally, and find Brennan standing beside him. His eye has been patched, and the white cloth is already soaked with blood. His remaining eye is fixed on me, cold and hard, and filled with the promise of retribution.
On my father’s right sits a scribe. I frown at him.
Why is he here?
“Alleria.” My father breaks the silence. “You have assaulted the captain of my guard—”
“He was going to rape me.”
He clears his throat and continues speaking as though I never said a word. “And left him maimed for life. You have refused a direct command from your king to share what you have learned. You have consorted with fae animals.”
The scribe’s quill scratches across parchment, recording his words.
“I am willing to give you one final chance to redeem yourself and show your loyalty to your king and kingdom. Supply the information we need to find the creature that violated a princess of the realm.”
“He didn’t … He didn’t violate me.”
“I want to know where the fae animal that took you by force from the palace has gone.”
I stare at him. This man who told me I had my mother’s eyes. The same man who sold me to Brennan without my knowledge.
“No.”
The quill stops moving, ink dripping onto the parchment beneath it.
“Alleria.”
“No. I won’t tell you anything.”
“You will—”
“No! You cage them. You collar them. You grow things out of their skulls and hunt them for sport. Yet you want everyone to believe that they are the animals.”
My father’s hand slams down onto his desk. The scribe jumps.
“I am your father. Your king! You will obey me.”
“My father would never have let a mage or Brennan do what they’ve done to me.”
The silence that follows my words is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. My father’s features empty of all expression, and he turns to the scribe.
“Write this exactly as I speak it.” He looks back at me.
“Alleria Caldris is no longer acknowledged as the daughter of King Torvald Caldris. All titles, including that of Princess of Shentari, are to be stripped immediately. She is to be charged with treason against the crown, conspiracy with enemies of the realm, and assault upon a commanding officer of the king’s guard.
For those charges, she is sentenced to death by hanging. Carried out at high sun tomorrow.”
The scribe pauses, eyes rounding as he stares at my father. When the king’s gaze turns toward him, the man bows his head and continues to write.
I don’t beg or plead for my life. I swallow every sound that threatens to rise up. I refuse to let it out. Because once I start, I won’t stop.
“Remove her.”
I’m dragged from the room without a care for the wounds I’ve suffered. The hallways blur. The stairs are agony. And by the time the cell door opens and they throw me through it, I can no longer tell which parts of me aren’t broken.
The door closes, the lock turns, and darkness gathers around me.
High sun.
I don’t know how much time that leaves me. I have no way to measure it. There are no windows in the cell, and the curtains were drawn in Brennan’s quarters.
I shuffle across the floor until I can press my back against the wall, and close my eye, automatically reaching for the barrier inside my mind. I let out a small sigh of relief when I find it there. Not that it can save me now. Nothing can.
Resting my forehead against my knees, I visualize reaching down the wall inside my mind.
They’re going to kill me. They’re going to hang me at high sun.