I laughed ruefully. “You would think that, Ellowyn. But it’s never the case. There’s always something worse, something more heinous than the last.”
“Boiling babies is probably the worst thing I’ll ever encounter,” she almost whispered, and I hesitantly reached out to touch her. Surprisingly, she let me and even leaned into my palm where I’d placed it against her shoulder.
“Admittedly, that was one of the worst things I’ve seen as well,” I said, though I didn’t mention what my own Mages had done in my name in the Valley.
A necessary evil she wouldn’t understand.
“What’s behind that door will give me the answers I need?” she asked, pulling away from my hand. My palm was still warm where it had touched her, and I flexed it unconsciously.
I sighed. “I’ll be there with you to help wade through any lies or half-truths.”
But only if they come from those locked inside. I can’t read you, wife.
The thought was still unnerving, though I was growing to understand what it meant.
“Then I’m ready,” she said, her icy mask back in place, her voice cool and unaffected.
I gestured for her to follow me and unlocked the door that led into the prison beneath the Academy.
Chapter 58
Ellowyn
The first thing I noticed was the overwhelming, noxious smell; human excrement and the tanginess of blood were intermixed with wet hay and the distinct scent of mold and decay. Breath and bile caught in my throat with an audible sound before Alois gestured for a guard to cast an air bubble around my nose and mouth.
Fuck, that was a stench.
My eyes watered from the memory of the smell still caught in my nose, and I nodded my wordless thanks to the Lord of Vespera. He smiled thinly at me, the motion tugging at the corners of his eyes. There was something different about him lately—he was always chaotic and a little cold, but now he seemed almost resigned and repentant.
I shook away the errant thought; I no longer had the capacity to care about what my husband wanted or felt. It was more than evident that he cared little for me beyond how he could use me. Even now, dragging me down to this dark and wet dungeon as a “favor” was a way to manipulate me; he dangled information in front of me, and I knew he would want something in return.
Even as my heart thudded erratically at what favor he would come to collect, I couldn’t resist the pull to find out what secrets were guarded here.
The short hallway opened into a large room, though it was still dark as night. The walls on the right held barely illuminated Mage Orbs spaced at odd intervals, the cast of their glow never fully reaching the cells that consumed the entirety of the left half of the room. There was a faint, constant dripping like a pipe was leaking somewhere nearby, but it was nearly completely muffled by the muttered groans of pain and incoherent rants of the prisoners.
I stepped lightly into the shadows on the left and squinted to gain a better view of what—or whom—was inside.
The cells—if you could call them that—were not tall enough for a grown person to sit straight in, nor were they long enough to allow a person’s legs to stretch out completely in front of them. Water and wet, maggot-filled hay adorned the bottom of each of the cells, and it was abundantly clear that there was no room for the prisoners to move around to relieve themselves.
That explains the smell.
“Why did you take me here?” I whirled on Alois, my stomach roiling with the truth of what the Lord of Vespera did to other people. It was all here, plain as day—he tortured and imprisoned Mages and Vessels; cut off their access to their magic and reduced them to nothing more than whimpering piles of bones and flesh.
Barbaric.
He was no better than the monsters who destroyed Cellia.
Alois’ face was grim but unrepentant; there was no remorse for those trapped inside the cages. It was clear he saw them as little more than rabid animals.
“These . . . prisoners,” Alois began as he adjusted the cuffs of his tunic, before making unnerving eye contact again as hardand unyielding as the rest of him. It was a wonder that I had found any qualities redeemable in him.
“These prisoners arepeople,” I admonished, my voice cracking like a whip in the silence of the space. “And you have chained them like dogs. Reduced them to nothing. They aredyinghere, and you do not care.”
Alois set his jaw, his molars cracking with the effort of restraining his tongue, before he gestured to a cage behind me.
“That man there raped his neighbor. They were friends and she trusted him. His neighbor was eleven.”
My eyes widened and the muscles in my back tensed.
