Chapter 5
CHAPTER
Guards crawled all around the inner ward of the Iron Fortress, their eyes fixed on Vaasa and Ozik as the two higher-ranked sentinels outside their carriage pulled her gingerly to unsteady feet.
Suddenly, they were gentle with her.
The other fortress guards watched, and Vaasa got the feeling this was the new story.
It was unlikely anyone knew where she’d been these past six weeks.
This entire fortress believed precisely what Ozik had spun in the city square—she had been rescued from the clutches of Icruria.
Saved by Asteryan forces. Cleansed of the curse Reid of Mireh had placed upon her.
Most of the fortress staff kept straight-faced, but a few whispered to each other, and others just dropped their jaws in awe. Ozik extended her an arm. Amalie’s face flashed behind Vaasa’s eyes, and fear made a home in her gut. She took Ozik’s extended arm and hated herself for it.
The Iron Fortress jutted from the mountainside like claws reaching into the frostbitten air.
Ten black spires grew to unprecedented heights, with dangerous iron-coated points that had graced the tops since her grandfather built the monument.
It was he who had mined the deep mountains others called unworkable, he who had forged iron into steel and conquered the snow-bound bay.
The Iron Fortress was a testament to her grandfather’s strength, something her father had inherited—something Vaasa and Dominik were meant to inherit, too.
Stained glass windows reflected light in a rainbow of color, snow blanketing the patios and exterior walkways.
All the towers were connected by stone pathways arching over a garden or courtyard.
Yet within the sturdy mountain rock were carved tunnels, effectively creating a system of travel around the fortress for servants and secrets.
Her eyes caught upon the far side; a greenhouse loomed, seemingly built into the mountain itself, and behind it, the valley between peaks created a natural game park where they hunted their food.
They plunged into an empty hallway with no windows and no open air.
Vaasa put one foot in front of the other.
Eventually the pathway wound to the western side of the fortress, and they passed one of the hidden entrances into the servants’ hallways, which were a maze of dingy, connected pass-throughs that gave the servants access to most parts of the fortress at any given time.
Various tucked-away doors marked their entrances and exits.
Some were entirely secret, built behind bookcases or tapestries.
She’d snuck through those corridors more and more as she’d gotten older, avoiding Dominik, avoiding her father, or sneaking around to meet Roman.
Each inch of space here was a memory, her body recognizing every step she took. She couldn’t breathe. Not as the air of the fortress closed around her. There was so much death, so much grief and darkness splattered along these wicked halls.
She forced herself to pull deep, calming breaths the way the coven had taught her, a desperate attempt to dismiss the onslaught of memories so vivid they could have been carved into the walls as relics.
“Is there a lead sentinel?” she asked, her voice shaking.
A vice-captain, one of the highest ranks for a soldier in this fortress, and the person who would command her own personal guard.
There was normally one assigned per member of the royal family, and they reported only to the captain of the guard.
When Dominik took the throne, he likely instituted his own men instead of their father’s.
Ozik confirmed with a sharp nod. “There is.”
“And where is he?”
“Out,” one of the guards said. She glanced at his brooches; a lower-ranking sentinel, but not cannon fodder.
Vaasa sighed, but didn’t pry further. She didn’t have the energy, especially as they came upon familiar double doors: her parents’ old wing of the fortress.
While this particular hallway led to a variety of necessities, like their private kitchen and game rooms, it was the door at the end that they dragged her toward.
The emperor and empress’s private quarters. The very rooms where she had found her mother’s body drained of color and life.
Panic flared in her chest; she couldn’t go in there.
She skidded to a stop, backing up, and the sentinel who escorted them blocked her path.
In moments, he had her hands behind her back, restrained.
“No,” she bleated, trying to fight his grip.
She struggled like a toddler, throwing her body to the floor, only to be caught harshly and pulled back up.
“It’ll be all right,” Ozik told her in such calm tones. “You’ll readjust.”
“Please,” she begged, her voice a choked whisper so low she wasn’t certain anyone could hear it.
She looked to the sentinels and could tell by their drawn expressions that they would offer her no reprieve.
They likely saw her reaction as nothing more than a consequence of her time in Icruria; there were so few sentinels at the prison compared to the fortress, so few people who knew the truth. Ozik needed it that way.
To them, she was broken.
“You will be the empress of Asterya,” Ozik told her as if he were soothing some wild animal. “This wing belongs to you.”
Ozik touched her arm gently, but she flinched.
“Please, don’t make me do this,” she whispered, and she wished they were alone. With anyone else around, every reaction he had would be measured, intentional, and planned. He and her father had taught her that very mechanism.
He tilted his head as if he were speaking to a child. “In time, you will have a better understanding of the strength that can be gained from remembering.”
Every inch of her body was a cavern: a place where love and hope and magic had until recently resided, but no longer. That space was filling with adrenaline, agony, terror. All familiar friends.
Ozik turned away from her and wandered back down the hall. He disappeared around the corner, not bothering to stay to make sure she entered the rooms—he knew perfectly well that she would. That she had no choice.
Because Amalie was dead if she refused.
As the sentinels opened the doors, movement caught her eye. At the end of the hall was the familiar frame of someone speaking to Ozik, but they disappeared before she could catch sight of them in full. Then she was thrown into her parents’ quarters, the door slamming loudly behind her.
Vaasa did not move from the foyer.
She stared down the hallway, her back pressed to the entrance door, and slid down to the marble floor. All the doors down the right hallway belonged to her mother, all the ones down the left to her father. No matter which direction she went, the outcome was the same.
Vaasa saw herself, young and afraid, hiding in her mother’s closet while Dominik ran around the fortress like a malevolent king. Her mother’s coolness flashed behind Vaasa’s eyes.
Come out from there, she’d said. You are too old for this childish game.
Dead.
Everyone who once lived in these rooms was dead.
Vaasa did not move. Fear was unwilling to release her from its clawed grasp, its talons curled around her heart.
You will die here, too.
Vaasa squeezed her eyes shut. It all crested over her then.
Mathjin’s voice as it cracked on “grandfather.”
Amalie’s screams.
Her brother’s head, severed from his body.
Reid’s lifeless weight in her lap.
Ozik’s snarling lip as he stole her magic.
The cold of the prison.
The cut of Lord Vlacik’s blade.
Vaasa tried to stand. She searched for courage or strength or rationality, but could find none of them.
The only thing left in her was the faint trickle of magic that seemed to wind around her abdomen.
Ozik was there on the other side. It was a simmering power just below the surface, like a thin layer of gauze over a wound curdled with infection.
Vaasa shook. She rocked back and forth. Every time she thought she was ready to stand, her body simply… wouldn’t.
At some point, she rested her cheek upon the cold stone floor.
At some point, her body gave out completely.
At some point, she slept.
Vaasa had no taste for sunlight or crisp air or the way snow glistened when it fell.
She had once known these as a reprieve, a moment of peace cut through the violence of her surroundings.
But she did not long for peace anymore. She craved blood and steel cutting through skin and a cry so piercing it would bring the snow on the mountains plummeting down.
She stared at Ozik across the dinner table.
For a week now, he had forced her to hold court at the Sanctum like a pathetic stand-in for her father.
She had met with the other members of her father’s advisory council and judicial body.
For hours, she listened to their placating compliments and slimy reaches for power, all of them wondering if they would keep their positions when she took a husband.
If there was a path to the salt. Half of them looked to Ozik for answers, the other half to her.
This was uncharted territory—Vaasa wasn’t the emperor, but she was the closest thing to it, and they likely assumed she would have her eventual husband’s ear.
Yet Ozik was a man. For many of them, that mattered more.
“Eat,” Ozik commanded, forcing Vaasa back into the present. His golden eyes didn’t budge from her, like a hawk’s focused on prey. “Take advantage of the quiet meals before the rest of the nobility arrives.”
Stained glass windows covered the perimeter of the room and soaked the table in a treacherous orange and red, the sunset bleeding through the patterns that overlooked the angry, churning ocean.
A small feast was sprawled across the oak table: a mild white fish drenched in a steaming broth made from golden leeks and bloodred beetroot, potatoes swimming alongside it, and a loaf of warm bread.