Chapter 2
CHAPTER
Something rattled the iron lock of Vaasa’s cell.
Faintly, she recognized the sound as a key turning.
Her vision only registered the hands, cold and harsh and far sturdier than her own, coming toward her as they found her.
A sentinel gripped her forearm and neck, slamming her already-injured cheek into the grimy floor so she was face down and unable to move.
She thrashed, but his grip was too tight.
Another sentinel took a fistful of her dirty hair and tugged, her scalp screaming as he forced her to look up.
Her wrists were bound in front of her, and once again she felt an ache in her body where her magic used to be.
Footsteps echoed against the floor. Slow and menacing, someone appeared at the entrance to her cell, stepping through the doorway into her small confinement.
Lord Vlacik wore a royal blue Asteryan uniform that winked with iron brooches—none of them earned in war, all inherited from his late father.
With a well-kept blond beard and beady ice-blue eyes, he looked as frightening as he had every other time Vaasa had seen him.
He was only about ten years her senior, but she remembered the way he’d circled her like a shark the moment she had come of age.
She wanted to lift her head and spit in his face, but she couldn’t muster the strength. As it was, it would take all she had to pull herself from the floor. Fear curled in her gut. The cuts along her upper arms and thighs stung.
“Cover her,” Lord Vlacik commanded, eyes raking over her torn woolen pants and shirt. Someone draped a cloak over her shoulders, the warmth of it almost useless with how cold she had become. “On your feet,” he said.
Strength wavering, Vaasa struggled to stand. Harsh hands dug into her upper arms as a sentinel dragged her upright, forcing her to balance on wobbly legs.
Lord Vlacik looked disgusted at her weakness, his upper lip curled and his nose scrunched at the undeniable smell of piss and blood that permeated the prison.
He turned on his heel and started back down the hallway.
The sentinels holding her ropes tugged, and she had no choice but to follow.
They led her across the slick floor, out of the cell and down a cold, dark walkway lined on either side with wood-and-iron doors much like the ones that had held her captive.
They plunged into the narrow stairwell and dragged her down a set of steep stairs, then through a set of double doors, bathing the hallway in bright white.
Light reflecting off snow could be beautiful, but it could also be blinding. She squinted, and her eyes watered. Bitter coldness assaulted her uncovered face as she stumbled onto one of the many iron platforms that wrapped around the prison of Mekes.
Wind lifted her knotted, greasy hair in tendrils, salt stinging her lips.
Different from the salt she had known, the Icrurian scent she had come to love.
The smell and taste of this salt was acrid, fishy, without a hint of warmth.
Her eyes adjusted as they pushed her forward; sprawled on the horizon was Mekes’s shoreline, the trade port a full and bustling thing, separated from her by the frigid ocean, which churned angrily in the wind.
The prison was built upon an elevated island in the Iron Bay.
Only reachable by boat, it was as inescapable as the cold itself.
The east side of the prison held the cells, three enormous towers surrounded by steep cliffs, the tops of the stone structures covered in iron spires.
The west side of the prison held the offices where the prison guards, the higher-ranking sentinels, and the warden gazed over the bleak scene from a tall watchtower that jutted into the sky like an angry index finger.
Today, the prison appeared empty. Only Vlacik and his trusted sentinels were privy to her movements, she presumed.
Four of those sentinels led her over an arching bridge that connected the two sides of the prison.
“The Last Crossing,” people called it. Jumping from this very bridge was a rite of passage for the fortress and city guards—to dive into the water and survive was one of the ways they proved themselves to their peers.
Vaasa peered over the edge, a sentinel muttering a warning to her in Asteryan.
She wondered if she could even escape the Iron Bay if she somehow survived the jump.
Likely not. She was already too starved, too cold. That swim would leave her as nothing more than fodder for the sharks.
But she could see all of Mekes from here—the granite and iron city covered the mountainside.
The enormous trade port led into winding streets covered in snow.
The city hugged the coastline of the Iron Bay all the way to the entrance to the Loursevain Gap, the untenable river route winding through the Iron Peaks.
After ascending the throne, Dominik had gone to Mireh under the guise of building ships that could navigate that canyon, that would grant water access to the entirety of northern Asterya.
As it stood, only pirates ever dared enter the canyon.
Vaasa’s eye caught on a single iron statue depicting her late grandfather, who had conquered this very bay and relocated Asterya’s capital here.
The view from this bridge was both a beauty and a tragedy, because prisoners that crossed it were said to stand here and stare at the expanse of the city, knowing it was the last time they would ever see sunlight casting its colorful rays upon the smooth granite buildings of Mekes.
A sentinel pulled on her ropes again, and Vaasa stumbled after him.
They plunged through a stone archway that led into the western courtyard, which was entirely empty of sentinels.
The prison felt like a graveyard, ghosts dancing in the walkways, sounds echoing off the walls.
Ozik must have removed any prying eyes; every hallway or turn they took came up just as empty as the last. They emerged on the opposite side of the administrative building, facing the ocean once more.
Soon, Vaasa was on the pathway that led directly to the ocean.
Waiting at the bottom was an Asteryan ship.
Flurries of snow fell from the sky, cloaking the air in front of her and blurring her sight. Her legs burned as they walked. At the bottom of the pathway, she tried to halt, digging her heels into the ground to keep from going any further.
A sentinel’s hands slammed between her shoulder blades and sent her careening down the last few steps of the stone pathway, knees cracking against the stone. Her chin followed suit. Jaw thrumming with pain, she thought herself no different than a sheep being herded into a pen.
“Enough,” a voice snapped, the edges of it sharp, the tenor of it so frighteningly familiar.
Ozik. She looked up through her lashes to see him glowering at the sentinel who had struck her.
“She is to be your empress,” Ozik snarled, taking a step forward. Vaasa heard shuffling behind her and wondered if the sentinel had… retreated.
Ozik reached for her, but she ground out, “Fuck you.” Vaasa put her hands beneath her and pushed herself to a kneel.
Ozik stood in front of her, wearing a snow-white cloak clasped with an iron brooch depicting Asterya’s sigil—a single mountain with a sword plunging through it.
He wore the emblem with the same pride that Vaasa’s father had.
His chin lifted, and an ease washed over his features.
He reached for her, rings of every color decorating his fingers.
Red rubies and green emeralds, even a dark black stone that didn’t shine like the others.
Vaasa recoiled. Panic sprung to life in her chest. Memories of the recent weeks’ torture flooded her mind, and the way Ozik was watching her, it was like he could see them, too. Rage lit within her; there was nothing else to cling to, and Vaasa nursed that heat because everywhere else was cold.
Ozik lifted his hands, palms forward. “I only want to help you to your feet.”
The oily slick strings between them tugged lightly as if to say, Cooperate.
Whatever magic linked them, he was stronger than her right now.
His fingers curled around her arm, and he lifted her to her feet, bearing her weight for a moment until she found her balance.
He immediately started to undo the ropes around her wrists.
The moment they slid to the floor, Vaasa took two steps away from Ozik.
Across the small distance she’d created, he assessed her with keen golden eyes.
No doubt he took in her tattered prison attire, which had torn at her left collarbone and down her right arm.
She must have been covered in dirt and blood, a wreck compared to his royal blue finery with stark iron buttons that gleamed, catching the sun.
Ozik turned to face Lord Vlacik, who narrowed his icy eyes at Vaasa as he marched down the pathway to meet them on the dock. A group of men followed him, their steps out of cadence. These guards were less refined than Vaasa remembered of the men who earned the rank of sentinel.
Vaasa shook her head so her hair would unstick from her cheeks and forced her expression into a soft, bored apathy. Every bone in her body weighed like a ton of bricks, but she squared her shoulders anyway.
The lord didn’t mutter a word, but the two sentinels who had helped Vlacik torture her day in and day out stepped back when they realized she was no longer tied up.
“You can go now,” Ozik told the lord, dipping his head in a small gesture of respect. “We’ll see you when the others arrive.”
The others?
Ozik gripped just above her elbow and started to guide her to the waiting ship. She wanted to frighten. To clamp her teeth down on his hand and rip through his skin. Fury burned in her chest at his audacity in touching her.
He had taken everything from her.
What did she have to lose?