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The drawbridge thumped down, and three guards in leather and mail came out to meet us. They were old and weathered—old enough to have known the first queen, old enough to be able to spot any family resemblance. As soon as Sara pulled off her shawl and they saw her face, the oldest of the three said, “Take her.”
Though I had tried to mentally ready myself for this moment, I was totally unprepared for the fucking horror of feeling her hand grip mine until they yanked her away from me. I flung myself off my horse to go to her as she shrieked my name.
“Get your fucking hands off of her,” I snarled.
All three of them, though, were battle-ready and used to working as a group. Two of them seized her and dropped back, while the third moved forward, with his long sword at the ready, creating more and more distance between me and Sara. My horses felt my fury and started to whinny and rear.
“Step back! In the name of King Rowan, step back!” Said the long swordsman, driving me backwards until he was on the drawbridge, but I was not. I caught a glimpse of Sara’s face over one of his armored shoulders. I’d never seen her look so scared or so uncertain.
I’m not sure what I had expected, but it wasn’t this goddamned heart wrenching goodbye. And yet, as I had known all along, I wasn’t worthy of even being in her presence and this proved it.
As the drawbridge started to rise, the long swordsman tossed me a sack of coin as his companions ushered her into the castle. As I watched her go, it felt like every one of the archers in the towers had loosed their arrows straight into my chest.
I had wanted to do the right thing. But now she was lost to me. And it was all my own fucking fault.
Sara
Once the guards carried me into the castle, everything became a fast-moving blur of stone stairways and gargoyle faces. I had seen such carved stone faces before, on the corners of our chapel in the village, but these faces were angry and menacing, like the stuff of nightmares. They streaked past, grotesque and unkind, mocking me in their imitation: screaming as I screamed, crying as I cried.
I tried desperately to keep track of where we were going, in case I had a chance to find my way out to Bors, but one hallway turned into another and one spiral staircase twisted into the next until I didn’t know north from south or east from west, but only had the sensation of moving down, down, down.
I fought the guards with all my might, but they were too powerful and too experienced for my panicked fury to have any effect. I had the feeling this was certainly not the first time they had carried an unwilling person through these many hallways and secret corridors, nor would it be the last.
“Please,” I begged in a brief pause while the guards opened yet another massive oak door and locked it behind us as we went. “I’m simply here to see the king. I wish no one any harm!”
They gave no reply. They never made eye contact with me, nor gave any indication that they knew who I was or wasn’t. As they dragged me along, it was strange to think that I had, perhaps, been somewhere in this massive castle once before. But I had been too little to remember, of course.
If any of what Bors had said were true, it was a lifetime away, as if it had happened to a fairytale version of me, and not the real me at all. And I wondered how many young women had been seized as the missing royal in the years since then, each one around my own age at the time, perhaps never to leave this castle alive.
The guards came to a halt in front of a curved doorway, with huge iron bars locking it in place. The oldest guard, gray in the beard and temples, took hold of the huge latch by its handle and tried to wrench it free, working against years of scaly orange rust. Wherever we were, it had been an age since anybody had passed through this door. And that realization filled me with terror.
The second guard made as if to help him, but with one quick maneuver, the oldest guard dropped to his knees with a gurgle. I looked down in horror to see a gaping, hemorrhaging wound at his throat.
The guard who had done the killing wiped his blade off on the sleeve of his shirt, with no more emotion than a butcher dispatching a hog. The smell of human blood cut through the mildew of damp stones and turned my stomach. “Mark my words. That’s what loyalty to King Rowan will get you, girl,” he said.
