Prologue
Year 1139 of the Banishment Era
Captain Marcas Halvor hadn’t always done the grunt work of personally guarding the prisoner cells of the Castle Peldenar dungeons. Since the injury he’d taken to his knee in the first battle of Berlaith, he’d done little more than oversee guard training and assign schedules—a change in routine for which his wife had been grateful.
But this prisoner was different. This prisoner was the Lord General’s own daughter, and Marcas was one of the very few men trusted to know she was here.
Marcas arrived early to begin his shift, as usual. It set a good tone for his men, and so it became a habit that followed him even to an assignment like this. He nodded to the guard at the dungeon entrance, who was sitting on what was affectionately called the Throne of Splinters. The men complained about how worn and uncomfortable the wooden stool was, but it had become enough of a long-running joke that they were all loath to replace it.
“Captain Halvor,” the guard said, with a stifled grimace that immediately made Marcas concerned.
“Lieutenant,” Marcas responded. “Is everything well?”
Bartek nodded. “Well enough. This bloody headache keeps getting worse, is all.”
Marcas frowned. Bartek hadn’t been the only one complaining of headaches over the last few days. Marcas himself had gotten one just yesterday, and it had taken all night for him to sleep it off. “And the prisoner?”
He didn’t have to specify which one. There was only one prisoner currently being held in the dungeon of Castle Peldenar. The rest had been discreetly transported to the city’s holding cells.
Bartek shifted uncomfortably, and Marcas knew it had nothing to do with the Throne of Splinters. “Not much different. A little louder than usual.”
“Well, then. Another few hours, and you can head home to your wife,” Marcas said. “Get some sleep. Maybe some of that bluefern tea. My daughter-in-law brings some over when my leg gets bad, and it does the trick.”
Bartek smiled, though it was clearly pained. “Forgive me, sir, if I think this one may be better cured with a few pints.”
“Short-sighted as ever, Bartek,” Marcas said with a chuckle, clapping the guard on his shoulder. “Just don’t blame me when your head feels like a blacksmith’s anvil in the morning.”
Bartek laughed, but Marcas could see a trickle of sweat coming down from the man’s brow. He considered sending him home early—Bartek’s replacement would be here before long, anyway—but the Lord General had been specific in his orders. One guard inside the dungeon proper at all times, watching the girl, and one guard at the entrance, keeping out anyone not authorized to enter—which was pretty much everyone save Marcas and six other hand-selected soldiers. And the Lord General himself, of course, though he didn’t visit much.
In a way, Marcas couldn’t blame him. No man could endure seeing his young daughter like this.
Bartek stood to open the door for Marcas, and though the lieutenant’s posture was straight and proper as ever, Marcas couldn’t help but notice how he slumped back onto the stool as soon as the door started to close.
If Bartek was suffering some sort of illness, Marcas truly hoped none of the other six men were likewise plagued. They were already stretched thin enough as it was in their rotating shifts.
Of course, none of them had expected this particular assignment to stretch on for almost a year, with no end in sight.
Marcas was used to the dungeon stench by now, though it didn’t make that first whiff of piss and rat dung and gods knew what else any more pleasant. Even with only one prisoner in here for the past ten months, the smell hadn’t lessened any. Centuries of use had baked it into the walls.
Far more disturbing were the sounds the girl had started to make the last several weeks. Bartek had been right; she was louder than usual today. A thin, reedy shriek echoed around the dungeon hall, and Marcas winced as he approached her cell door.
“Has she eaten?” Marcas asked Sten, the guard standing outside the door, peering in through the barred grate. Sten startled at Marcas’ arrival.
In any other situation, Marcas would have severely reprimanded one of his men for being caught off-guard like that. But this was not any other situation.
“No, sir,” Sten said. “It’s like yesterday and the day before. She’s just picked at it and mashed her hands in it.”
Marcas sighed. “At least she hasn’t thrown it against the wall yet.”
“Not yet,” Sten agreed, turning back to stare in through the grate even though Marcas had arrived to take over his shift. Marcas understood all too well. After months of watching an innocent little girl possessed by the evils of blood magic, there was always a gut-wrenching relief at the end of a shift. And yet it was difficult to pull his eyes away, to know that while Marcas would go home to his wife and children and warm hearth, this poor child would stay here in the dark and cold and dungeon stench yet another night.
Marcas drew in a deep breath to steady himself—piss scent be damned—and looked into the cell just as the girl let out another loud shriek.
The torchlight in the hallway behind him allowed him to see the small room clearly enough. A child’s bed in the far corner, with a thick blanket wadded up on one end. A chamber pot in the other corner. A cloth doll on the ground beside a pile of books whose pages had been ripped to shreds just last month.
A girl with long red hair huddled in the center of the room, her small, pale hands in front of her face, ripped pieces of paper littering the ground around her like patches of dirty snow.
The lady Daniella, only eleven years old. Nearing twelve now, Marcas reminded himself. Almost the age of Marcas’ youngest. Not tucked away in some country estate to recover from illness, as the populace thought, but imprisoned here to protect her from herself.
And the Lord General from her.
In between those piercing cries, she babbled to herself, nonsense words and sounds like an infant might make, which were almost more difficult to hear. Marcas remembered well the girl who he’d been tasked to bring into the dungeon ten months ago—crying then, too, but also pleading, begging for her governess, promising that whatever she’d done to make her father mad, she wouldn’t do it again.
Fortunately, Lord General Diamis had prepared Marcas beforehand that she’d beg, that she’d say anything which might gain her enough sympathy to be released. Or rather, that the blood mage controlling her would make her do those things. For that was what Marcas had to remind himself every day—this wasn’t a little girl in there, but the shell of a little girl being controlled by the vilest of magics. All of this even now, all the hysterics and seeming madness, was merely a trick by the blood mage to get them to set her free, where she would do the mage’s dark will.