Page 82 of Hearts Lost

ALOSERIN

NOT THAT SIMPLE

I’m too slow.

I know I’m going to be too slow even as my feet slam into the stone, even as breath tears at the inside of my throat and my dagger reaches toward the far wall like it could close the distance between us, like it could somehow carry my intentions forward or defeat the dragon who ruined my entire kingdom. The magic of the portal is still hot and thick, but I know it’s gone. I taste it on my lips and tongue, like smoke and oil.

And then I slam into the wall.

Pain explodes across my shoulder and arm as my head snaps back and my vision goes white. The room spins around me, twisting through wild gyres of magic and searing heat. Somewhere, my dagger clatters as it falls to the floor. The taste of blood seeps across my teeth.

And then it’s just me, panting as blood drips through my split lip and my shoulder rings with pain. The room already feels colder. Much colder. My dagger glints hopelessly on the stones at my feet. I turn around.

“Open it back up!” I scream.

My words bounce off the walls, as hollow as an echo. Archibald is standing with his back to the door, almost like a guard, his face as perfectly expressionless as always. King Galan’s magician Nyana, his betrayer, is watching me with an expression of disdain so powerful it could probably freeze water.

“What are you waiting for?” I yell. “Open it back up!”

I turn to my parents. They’re standing together in the middle of their horrible, horrible room, close but not quite touching. Something rolls over inside my gut.

How many people have they sent through this portal? How many trekkers from the Crystal City, how many brave adventurers ready to make the best of our miserable situation and explore our new homeland, have my parents thrown into the claws of Rensivar the Wicked? And for what? For a new set of dwarven china?

The back of my mouth turns bitter. I spit on the floor, blood mingled with revulsion.

“It’s not that simple,” my father says.

I turn to him with a snarl, but whatever words I might have said die on my bloody lips. I should hate him. I should hate them both for what they’ve done.

But all I see standing in the middle of this darkened, cold room are my mother and my father, rich and old and sad and somehow smaller than they’ve ever been. I remember one of the many parties of my childhood when I had to dress up and remain quiet so I could be admired like another one of their many valuable possessions. Someone was talking about settling the Outer Ring, I think, or perhaps about King Galan’s plan to house everyone in the kingdom by creating farms near the warmth of the void. My mother had laughed; I remember how beautiful she looked with her sparkling jewels and her elegant hair.

“Oh, I could never,” she’d said. “Could you imagine? Me in some shack?”

Another memory tumbles in on the heels of that one, an actual shack filled with the scent of bacon and tea. Rowan holding his mug in both hands and watching Arryn with such blazing affection that it almost hurt to watch. And that image is followed by yet another, nighttime in the palace, cornering Rowan as he tried to break into King Galan’s inner towers. Arryn spreading her arms wide, offering herself instead.

I’d never seen anything like that in any of the grand estates in the Crystal City. There seemed to be no room for love or passion among the high-born families of the Kingdom of the Fall. No, there was only a restless churning for more power, more prestige. And beneath it all was the bitter fear of losing the riches we had, of ending up in some shack. Some shack like the one that housed Rowan and Arryn.

I suck in a breath, then shake my head at my parents.

“You bastards,” I spit.

My mother flinches like I’d slapped her. My father doesn’t respond at all.

“Aloserin.”

A cold voice cuts through the room. I look up and find Nyana staring at me with her lips curled back in a snarl, and some small, bitter voice in the back of my mind wonders how many of the magicians are aligned with her. How many of the men and women King Galan trusted to build a new world down here, to give everyone a decent life, are sliding into this hidden basement behind his back? How many have made a deal with the dragon Rensivar? How many have new sets of dwarven china in their homes?

“If you tell anyone,” Nyana says in a voice like ice, “you’ll never see her again.”

A thread of fear winds its slow way through my numbed, throbbing brain, and I can feel the weight of the entire estate sitting above me, all its cold stone and marble, its empty hallways and locked doors and elegantly displayed artifacts from a void my parents will never see, never smell, never touch.

“I know,” I manage to growl.

“But,” my mother says, in a voice like the fluttering of a bird’s wing. “When you bring that low-born Rowan here—”

I snort and wave my hand in the air between us, cutting her off. I don’t even have the strength to feel offended by her relentless categorization of the world, the ruthless sorting of people into high-born or low-born slots. And I sure as hell don’t need her to point out the walls of my new cage.

A trade, Rensivar the Wicked said just before he pulled Ithronel out of this world and into some other place. Trading Ithronel, he’d meant. Trading her for someone who could wield the power of the void. Someone my parents would have overlooked, of course; he was low-born, orphaned, and living well beyond the borders of respectable society. Someone who claimed to have traveled the void, but who would believe him? He was a nothing person, just another shack-dweller living out there in the darkness.