Chapter 4
You're Mad
Princess Alina surfaced from a black, humming sea.
At first, she was only dimly aware of her own body, the way an echo is aware of the shout that creates it.
She tasted blood—her own, thick and metallic on her tongue—and felt the cold, first as a vague suggestion, then as an aggressive, full-body assault.
When she tried to move, her entire body groaned in protest.
The floor beneath her was neither carpet nor stone nor any surface she had ever collapsed upon in her life.
It was uneven, slick, and, she realized with growing horror, alive with a gentle, pulsing chill.
Her cheek pressed to it, she inhaled damp, fungal air, and opened her eyes to a darkness that was at first total, then revealed itself to be a deep, malignant blue-green.
A ceiling, low and bulging, crouched above her.
It sweated condensation that ran in thin, viscous rivulets down the rock and plopped, with excruciating regularity, onto the floor beside her neck and shoulders.
The walls surrounding her were not so much walls as they were veiny membranes, their surfaces laced with the rainbow-shine of mineral deposits.
A series of bulbous stalactites hung from above, each terminating in a bead of water poised for the next silent drop. She was in a cave.
Her silk gown, or what remained of it, was shredded and plastered to her skin in wet, intimate folds.
The elaborate embroidery had been ruined; the once-immaculate blue fabric was now the color of a storm, with stains spreading outward from her knees and elbows and a large, almost obscene gash.
The flesh beneath, so carefully cosseted all her life, throbbed with bruises and the threat of worse.
Her hands were numb, fingers wrinkled and filthy, the nails rimmed in black.
Nevertheless, someone had taken care to put a blanket on her, even if it was but a rag. Still, it was better than nothing.
Memory crashed in.
The storm, the abduction, the impossible sprint through woods and the bone-shaking gallop.
She remembered the arm—a man’s, strong and unfamiliar—locking around her ribs, the way she had fought and then, somehow, fallen asleep mid-struggle.
She remembered the cold, and the smell of animals, and then nothing.
Alina tried to sit up, but her body rebelled; her vision swam, and she nearly retched from the effort. She forced herself upright anyway, bracing with one palm against the cave wall. The slime was revolting, but she kept her hand there, knuckles whitening, until the nausea passed.
The cave widened around her, revealing more of itself by degrees.
Somewhere, a fire cast a sickly, insistent glow over everything.
Shadows shifted and reformed across the walls, painting monstrous silhouettes that danced in time to her ragged breath.
Every noise—the drip, the echo of her own shivering, the shuffling further down the cave—seemed magnified a hundredfold.
She became aware of a figure, standing perhaps ten paces from her.
He leaned on a long staff—no, a spear, its metal head catching the light and gleaming like the tooth of some predator.
The man was lean in the way of a wolf: narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered, all cords and angles.
The only warmth in him was in those curious gold eyes of his, bright and alive and not even remotely kind. Kael Stormborne.
He was watching her. Not in the way a person watches another, but in the way a sentry watches a storm cloud rolling over the horizon: tense, alert, braced for violence.
Alina took this in with the numb pragmatism that had always followed her most intimate failures. Her next move would matter. She needed to make it count.
She gathered what remained of her composure (because composure was a princess’s greatest weapon, wasn’t it?), squared her shoulders, and spoke in the voice that had, until yesterday, commanded servants and cowed courtiers.
“Where am I?” she demanded. Her throat was hoarse, but the question came out clearly.
The man’s eyes flicked up, a brief acknowledgment of her attempt at control.
“Safe,” he replied after a beat. The word dropped between them like a stone into a well.
Alina stared, waiting for more. When it didn’t come, she pressed, “Who are you?”
He considered her, as if weighing the necessity of an answer. “For now: your jailor,” he said, voice as mild as it was final.
It was not the answer she expected, and it nearly broke her resolve. She bared her teeth in what she hoped was a smile, the one her mother had called “impossible to refuse.”
“Am I to be ransomed?” she asked.
His lips twitched, suggesting almost a smile. “You are now among your true people.”
Alina blinked. That made even less sense than the first answer. She tried again, forcing her voice to the steadiest register she could manage: “You must realize my father will kill you for this.”
He shrugged, casually. “He can try.”
She realized, with a jolt, that she recognized his type.
Not as a palace guard or a lord, but as something much older.
A feral animal, caged and beaten until it learned to speak with its masters, but never truly tamed.
She knew the breed. Her mother had warned her about them, though only in whispers and parable.
She looked down at her gown, then back at the man. Although she heard Lord Rowan say his name, she was irked that he didn’t tell her who he was. “Do you have a name, or do you prefer to be addressed as ‘villain’?”
That got a genuine reaction: a snort, short and sharp. “Call me Kael. Or Stormborne, if you like the sound of it.”
“Kael,” she repeated, rolling it around in her mouth as if testing for poison. “I assume you have a purpose beyond showing off your cave?”
He didn’t answer, just watched her with a patient, predatory intensity. It was infuriating.
Alina realized she was shaking, not from fear—never from fear, she insisted—but from exhaustion and the cold. She wrapped her arms around herself, pulled her knees up and put the rag-blanket around her shoulders, drawing what little warmth she could from her own battered body.
“I presume you haven’t gone to all that trouble just to let me die of thirst.”
He tossed her a flask, the gesture so effortless she almost didn’t catch it. She drank, the liquid sharp and mineral-rich. It stung her cracked lips, but she forced herself to finish.
The silence grew heavy again.
At last, Kael said, “We’ll move at dawn. Sleep if you can.”
She thought to protest but it seemed pointless. Her body was already sagging toward the floor, the tremors now so constant they felt almost normal.
Before she slipped under, she looked up at him, one last time. “If you’re going to kill me, do it now. I’d rather not be toyed with.”
Kael looked back at her, and for a split second, there was a flicker of something—maybe pity, maybe recognition. “I’m not here to kill you, Princess,” he said, almost gently. “I’m here to set you free.”
It made no sense. But she held onto it and allowed herself to sleep.
When she woke briefly, the fire was out and the cave had turned even colder, but Kael was still there, unmoved, his golden eyes fixed on her like the morning sun.
Alina woke hungry, cold, furious at herself for having slept so deeply and thoroughly annoyed by it all. Strangely enough, she was not overly afraid. Maybe because for her whole life she had been untouchable and she could not even imagine anyone would dare to.
Her senses came to in a slow, miserable trickle.
The world was in shades of mildew and blue ice.
The fire had sputtered out, leaving only a few glowing cinders and the stink of burned moss.
She pulled herself to sitting with some effort, her arms aching as though she had been wrestling wolves, and peered around. She was alone.
Or so it seemed.
Then, from behind a thick column of stone, Kael emerged, not at all surprised to find her awake.
He had shed the spear in favor of a dagger at his belt, its blade dull and blackened except for a single nick of silver near the tip.
His clothes were no longer pristine; mud and torn fabric marked him as a man who had run all night and fought for every mile.
Alina’s heart leapt into her throat when she realized the mouth of the cave, no longer veiled in darkness but painted with the faint, sickly glow of dawn, was completely unguarded.
Why was there no guard? These people seemed to be either over-confident or under-intelligent.
She needed to keep her wits about her now, needed to think this through.
What was outside of that cave? She had the feeling that they were deep in the wood, meaning there would be trees and underbrush enough to hide.
If she managed to quickly disappear into the undergrowth, she had a chance at escaping.
She didn’t know in which direction the palace was, but that would be a problem for later.
Who knew what they had in store for her?
There was a chance now, and she had to seize it.
Quietly, she changed her position and tensed her body.
She shot a glance at Kael, calculated the distance, and bolted.
The move was not graceful, but it was effective. She sprang to her feet, bare legs slipping on the moss-slimed floor, hands and feet pounding for the jagged oval of the exit. Her bare feet scraped and slipped with each desperate step.
Kael didn’t chase her; he simply watched, an expression on his face that might have been amusement, or pity, or both.
She made it three full paces before disaster struck.
A spur of rock snagged her already ruined sleeve and ripped it nearly clean from her arm, the pain sharp but nothing compared to the humiliation of being undone by a fucking cave.
She wrenched free with a snarl and surged ahead, now so close to the opening that she could smell, through the stench of rot and minerals, the faint green promise of outside air.
She was, for a heartbeat, almost free.
Every muscle in her legs seized. Her arms snapped to her sides as if bound by invisible cords. She toppled, hard, to one knee, her face inches from the gritty, damp stone. She tried to scream, but her jaw locked; the only sound that escaped was a thin, choking gasp.
Her vision blurred—not from pain, but from rage.
She tried to turn, tried to see what was going on, but she could not move an inch.
She remained on her knee, on the ground, unable to control only a single one of her muscles.
He had done that. Somehow, he had fixed her in place without so much as laying a single finger on her.
Kael slowly approached and looked down on her, face unreadable.
She glared back at him, hate crystallizing behind her eyes, but Kael only walked closer, his shadow stretching long and monstrous across the floor.
He circled her, a slow predator, and knelt so they were eye to eye.
“You needn’t hurt yourself,” he said, voice perfectly flat. “No one will harm you here.”
She would have spat at him, but she couldn’t even manage that.
Kael cocked his head. “Your body knows the truth,” he said, softly now, “even if your mind does not.”
It was only then she realized her own fingers were twitching against her will, clawing at the dirt as if trying to dig her way down to the center of the world.
Tears blurred her sight again, burning with humiliation.
She fought the urge to sob, but the sound escaped anyway—a stifled, animal whimper, ugly and childish and impossible to control.
She had never in her life been so helpless.
Not as a child, not as a princess, not even last night when dragged from her family and everything she knew.
This was worse. She was not just a prisoner to Kael, or to the cave, but to something deeper, a force that animated her limbs against her will, that froze her tongue in her own mouth and made her a puppet.
He watched the emotions roll over her face, eyes sharp and unblinking.
“Let me go,” she rasped when she finally found her voice. It came out as a hiss, more plea than demand.
Kael did not respond at first. He reached out and, with surprising gentleness, brushed a tear from her cheek. His hand was warm and steady. “I can’t,” he said. “Not yet.”
Alina closed her eyes, defeated. She tried to remember her lessons in composure; the tricks her mother had drilled into her: Breathe. Hold your posture. Never let them see you break.
But those tricks were no match for this.
When she opened her eyes again, Kael was still there. He looked at her not as a captor looks at prey, but as a teacher waiting for a student to accept the lesson.
“You can kill me if you want,” she said, the words hollow. “I don’t care.”
He stood, straightened his shirt, and shook his head. “Well, first of all, we both know that is not the case. And second, death is not your fate, Princess.”
“You don’t know my fate,” she spat back at him. “You’re just a thief and a murderer.”
That, at last, made him smile. “Maybe. But I know you better than you think.”
She glared, but the tears wouldn’t stop. “Why can’t I move?” Her voice cracked. “What have you done to me?”
Kael was silent for a moment, and then dropped to sit cross-legged on the ground before her. “It’s not me,” he said. “It’s you. It’s in you, deeper than you know. I just… nudged it awake.”
His words were nonsensical, but something in his tone told her he truly believed them.
She shook her head, or tried to, the motion barely perceptible. “You’re mad.”
“Perhaps. But you’re still here. And you will come with us.”
Alina shut her eyes again and let the tears run down her cheeks, dripping from the edge of her jaw. She had no energy left for anger, nor for pride. She was simply, utterly, trapped.
She didn’t remember when she fell asleep again. Only that, in her dreams, she ran through endless tunnels of blue and green, always chased by something she could not name, always caught in the end by hands that were hers and not hers at all.
And when she woke, it was to the same cold, the same drip of water, the same unbreakable grip holding her in place. Only now, she knew it was not the cave, or Kael, or even her own fear that held her captive.
It was something older, something truer. It was in her blood, and it wanted out.