Page 43 of Blade of the Nightking

“Hold on to her tightly, my Lord. We wouldn’t want the wards to flay the pretty flesh from her Eidra bones.”

Then he stepped forward and passed straight through the earthen wall, as though it offered no resistance at all.

Aedric’s hold on my hand tightened, and he drew me forward with him without hesitation.

The wall gave way.

The sensation was brief and disorienting, like walking through a sheet of cold water. Then my shoes struck stone, solid beneath me.

We were inside a cell.

It was larger than I'd imagined, torchlight flickering across bare stone walls slick with moisture. At the center of the chamber, a seamless oval of wards rose from the floor, translucent and faintly luminous, humming with contained power. Inside them, shadows churned, a twisting vortex of black chaos, like a storm trapped in a bottle. The shadows whipped and folded in on themselves, a constant, furious motion, as though seeking escape.

And at the heart of it⁠—

Veylan.

He sat on the stone floor, back straight, unnaturally still amid the violence around him. The shadows surged and recoiled, circling his body in frantic arcs, like a flock of birds battering against invisible walls. They obscured him again and again, revealing only parts of him at a time.

Even so, I saw it—the grotesque sag to one side of his face. The iron ash I'd slipped into his wine had done its work, leaving behind damage that Fae healing should have erased. One eye was swollen nearly shut, his nose crusted with dried blood that had spilled over his split lip, and angry bruises mottled his pale skin. His once immaculate white-blond hair was in disarray, standing in uneven peaks, stripped of its usual slicked-back precision. His tattoos writhed freely across his skin like worms.

The shadows surged again, swallowing him from view.

Calantha stood against the far wall, one shoulder resting lazily against the stone. Her circlet sat perfectly in place, her uncovered eye fixed on Veylan, bright with the hungry fascination of a cat watching a wounded mouse.

"Have you learned anything?" Aedric glanced her way.

Calantha pushed herself from the wall with unhurried grace, her gaze finally tearing itself from Veylan.

"Nothing useful," she said. "He refuses to speak."

Hamish and the two remaining guards slipped through the wall behind us, soundless as smoke.

“Have you tried to… persuade him?”

Calantha smiled—a slow, unsettling thing. “Not to my satisfaction.”

“The Shaedr-Kyn is proving surprisingly resilient,” Sairus said with a smirk, folding his arms. “Though my daughter will break him soon enough.”

The word was unfamiliar to me.

“Shaedr-Kyn?” I leaned closer to Aedric, lowering my voice.

Sairus heard me anyway, his amber gaze settling on me. “Soul-Eater.”

Something inside me lurched.

Aedric moved closer, drawing me with him toward the warded cell. The shifting light caught the curve of his mouth, and for a moment the expression there looked wrong. Pleased. Cruel.

“Hello, dog.”

At that, the storm inside the ward shifted. The shadows parted just enough to reveal Veylan at the center. His stormy eyes opened and found me first, lingering just a moment before sliding to Aedric.

He said nothing.

Aedric placed both hands against the barrier, leaning into it as casually as if it were glass. The gesture was deliberate. Taunting. I knew what that ward would do if Veylan so much as brushed it. The memory of my own time in a similar cell in Solmire rose without warning.

“You’re far from Levinica, Veylan,” Aedric said lightly. “I suppose you’re seeking your master? Surely he’s called for you by now.”