Awake, Maybe
The first thing I know is pain. Everywhere. It is the kind that has been happening for some time and has only now found me conscious enough to register it.
I am on a bed.
The ceiling above me is low and damp. There are sounds I cannot immediately place. A low keening somewhere to my left. Something rhythmic and wrong. There is the sound of women moving, of fabric and footsteps and the scratch of something being written.
I turn my head.
The room is full.
Women in various states of undress. Some pacing, their lips moving around words I cannot hear.
Some pressed against the walls with their knees drawn up.
Some strapped to beds identical to mine, leather straps worn soft with use.
Several are pregnant. Several are screaming.
One is laughing in a way that has nothing to do with anything funny, a sound that goes on and on without pause for breath.
Servants move between them. Administering something from small vials. Adjusting restraints. Writing in ledgers with the calm efficiency of people performing a task they have performed so many times it no longer requires thought.
Their fingers.
I notice their fingers first. The tips gray, the skin at the knuckles pulling in a way that does not belong to anything living.
Deathmages.
Serving as maids.
I sit up and immediately regret it. Everything hurts. My abdomen most of all, a deep pulling wrongness that is not the same as a wound but is not nothing either. I press my hand to it.
Two servants cross to me.
"Where am I?" I say before they can speak. "Where is my husband? My children. Where are my children?"
They look at each other.
"The North Tower," one says. "You must have failed to give His Majesty what he needs."
"I do not know what that means. I need to know where my husband is."
The second one shakes her head, almost sympathetically.
“You are in the yellow room. His Majesty only puts the daughters of value in the yellow room,” the first one says.
She smiles and points at the walls. “You should be honored. Look at these walls, are they not beautiful?” She points to the yellow walls.
I look. They are old and stained and on furthest wall is a very obvious bloodstain.
Where the fuck am I?
Her face darkens. “You must behave or you may get sent to the blue room.” A pause. “Or the gray room.”
“Fuck you,” I say before I can stop myself.
They ignore me. “You are likely with child," the second one says, reaching for my wrist. "You must not exert—"
I pull my wrist back. "I already have children. I need to know how I got here."
They look at each other again. One of them opens her ledger.
I stop listening.
I think about Colsar. About the Great Hall and the harpist and the clock reading six thirty-one. About whether he is looking for me. He is looking for me. He does not know where I am and neither do I and I cannot afford to fall apart here.
I open my eyes.
"I need to leave," I say.
I stand.
The guards are at my arms before I finish standing.
Two of them, appearing from somewhere behind me, lifting me and carrying me back to the bed.
The straps go around my wrists. Good leather.
Well made. Buckled with the care of someone who understood that the people they were restraining were not ordinary.
I stare up at the yellow ceiling. It is only now that I realize that I hate the color yellow.
The woman strapped to the bed beside mine looks at me. "It gets easier," she says. Her voice is perfectly level. "After a while you stop trying."
I look at her. Then I look at the straps.
I close my eyes and find my lightcraft.
It is there. Dimmer than it should be, pressing against something, but there. I let it come up slowly, just enough to work along the inside of the leather where the stitching runs. The straps split. I pull my hands free.
I stand.
A deathmage maid turns and looks at me with those gray-tipped fingers and that empty face.
I hold my lightcraft ready and meet its eyes.
It steps aside.
The others do not react. They continue their rounds. I walk through the room and not one of them moves to stop me and I do not know if that is because they cannot or because something else is at work here.
I do not have time to find out which.
The corridor is long and cold. Yorali banners on the walls. Silver and blue, a sigil of two swords crossed.
I stop.
I am in Yorali.
How? Was I kidnapped?
The last thing I remember is the Great Hall. Avaneer leaning against the table with my wine in his hand. The clock reading six thirty-one. Edrin walking in. Something bitter on my tongue. My knees going.
I do not remember coming to Yorali.
Someone has taken me. I am in a tower full of women who have been here so long they have stopped trying to leave and I do not know if my husband is alive and I do not know if my children are safe.
I start moving.
They had mostly ignored me inside the room. Here, they did not.
The deathmages are at the first exit. My intunar rises just enough and I press my lightcraft at them before they can stop me.
I move to the second exit, but this time is different.
My lightcraft presses and presses but whatever is dampening it is stronger here.
They simply stand there looking at me with those empty eyes and I cannot get past them.
I look up.
There is a gap where the ceiling does not fully meet the wall. Dark. It runs the length of the corridor. Not large, but large enough.
I drag a bench from the wall. A deathmage maid turns to watch me. I pause. Why is no one stopping me?
A chill runs down my spine.
I climb onto the bench and reach up and pull myself into the opening before it or anyone else can decide what to do about it.
Inside is narrow and dark and smells damp. My abdomen pulls with every movement and I breathe through it and keep moving. I follow a thin line of light until it becomes a crack and then an opening and I pull myself through and drop.
I land badly. Both hands and one knee hitting the floor. I stay there for a moment taking inventory of what hurts only a little and what hurts more.
When I open my eyes I am in a bedroom.
Small. Candlelit. Another Yorali banner on the far wall.
On the bed sits a young girl. Perhaps nineteen. Her hands grip the bedsheet at her sides and her eyes are very wide and she has not noticed me yet because she is looking at the woman sitting across from her in a low chair, talking to her in a voice too quiet to hear from here.
I know that voice.
I look at the woman in the chair.
Ivanoxa.