The castle fed him its dead, and the shadows fed him her image. He didn’t know which frightened him more. His eyes had grown darker; black veins pulsed faintly beneath the skin of his arms, moving when he breathed. Each day the boundary between healing and corruption blurred a little further.
He feared the thing that waited below—and the thing growing inside him—and yet his thoughts returned, again and again, to her.
What if she condoned this?
The question was poison. It spread through him, slow and sure. What if she had turned him over to these torturers? What if this captivity was her will, not Thalorin’s?
Rage rose, hot enough to make the shadows stir. The ward-sigils flared in answer, holding the darkness back. He pressed his head against the cold stone until the fury ebbed, leaving only a hollow ache.
Even if she had betrayed him, he still wanted her.
That was the deepest wound of all—the one no amount of shadow could heal.
He closed his eyes and listened to the whispering dark, the voices of the dead mingling with the memory of her breath. His body trembled once, caught between anger and longing, between the will to endure and the pull to surrender.
The dungeon sighed around him, ancient and alive. Shadows coiled at his feet like waiting serpents. He could feel their patience thinning.
Endure,he told himself, hearing Azfar’s voice as clearly as if the old shaman still stood beside him.You must endure. Only then can you break free.
The words settled into him like the last steady heartbeat before the storm.
Chapter
Thirty-Seven
They called her ill.
The word went out on soft feet and came back to her in the scrape of trays, the murmurs beyond the door, the way footsteps slowed when they passed her chambers. Her rooms smelled of beeswax and winter roses; her windows looked down on the hard glitter of Maidan’s spires. The door never opened unless someone else’s key turned it. A gilded prison could still be a prison.
The guards outside changed every few hours. She learned them by their weight on the floorboards: the heavy-heeled veteran who cleared his throat when he was bored, the younger one who hummed under his breath until his partner elbowed him, the woman who walked like a cat and never once shifted her stance. None of them spoke to her. When they slid the latch to allow a maid through, they stared studiously at the opposite wall.
The veteran she recognised—Captain Rorrick. Scarred over one eye, his limp distinct even through the thick door. He had ridden beside her father during the border campaigns, once lifted her onto a horse when she was too small to reach the stirrup. The sound of his step brought back that memory withevery pass. It pained her, the ease of his loyalty’s turn. But power was always tentative when one had worn the crown for only a handful of months.
Her meals arrived on silver trays. The soup gleamed like thin gold, the bread steamed when Brenna tore it open. Eliza’s mouth tasted of ash and old grief. She ate enough to live. Not more.
The queen is unwell,the city had been told. A sick queen could not rule. A sick queen could not speak.
The first hours she spent obeying what the room demanded—washing, dressing, standing at the window to watch the flags burn red in the wind. Above the roofs and chimneys rose Thalorin’s tower, a black thorn against the sky. Eliza imagined the woman there, ink on her fingers, ink on her tongue, rewriting the kingdom’s truth one neat line at a time. The thought tasted of iron.
Brenna came at dawn and dusk, under escort, with a curtsy too deep for a mistress others had declared a patient. Her face was pale from lack of sleep, her hands trembling as she poured tea, yet the tray never rattled. They spoke in riddles—sheets turned back as if for fresh air (news?), a second cup on the sill (danger), the hairbrush laid spine-up (wait). Domestic language, invisible to the guards.
“How is the broth, my lady?” Brenna asked on the third morning, eyes low.
“Too salty,” Eliza replied, meaningthe city’s mood?
“Ah. I’ll tell the cook,” Brenna said. “He has a heavy hand today.” The mages. Everywhere.
By the fifth day the pattern faltered. Brenna’s fear hollowed her eyes. When she folded gowns, her fingers snagged. When she turned back the blankets, she lingered, head bowed, as if listening for something beneath the stones.
Eliza waited until the guard’s step receded down the corridor and the click of the second latch sealed them in. “Tell me,” she said quietly.
Brenna’s mouth trembled. She set the tray down, wiped her hands on her apron, poured a cup she did not offer. She stared into the steam until it stilled.
“They go below,” she whispered. “Every day, the tower mages. They carry cases and knives and stones that hum like—like bees. They sayvivisection.They saycontainment.” Her voice broke. “They laugh when the torches go out by themselves.”
The room tilted. Eliza gripped the back of a chair until the wood dug crescents into her palms. “Who gives the orders?”
Brenna hesitated, as though speaking the name might summon its bearer. “The Lady Thalorin. She comes herself some mornings. She meets with the guard captain. They whisper. And… the wards don’t hold. The castle leaks. The air below turns colder every night.”
