The young woman was still on her knees. She had tears on her cheeks and a glazed look of pain in her eyes. She staggered to her feet as the guards reached for her. Her lips and fingers were bloody.
At Mother Shade’s signal, the guards surrounded us and herded us forward from the bedroom and into the hall. We went, mute and docile after the show of cruelty, like sheep. Like ghosts to their graves.
Anger hummed in my belly, making me feel ill. I cut glances at the others as we walked. There were more of us than there were of them. I took a moment to fantasize about somehow grabbing a weapon and skewering one while some of the other Chosen girls—Enna, maybe—did the same. We’d overpower them, and subdue Mother Shade with her own whip, and… then what?
It was here that my fantasies always stalled. We were housed in a tower of steel in the middle of the capital city of the Sworn. We were guarded and surrounded on all sides by the enemy. We were like doves in this den of wolves—fragile, defenseless, any efforts to fight back ineffectual as the beating of wings against the swift crush of canine jaws. Even if we somehow managed to overpower these Sworn sympathizers, there were dozens more below, and hundreds more beyond that. Even if we did manage to escape the city, a vast and tangled wilderness surrounded us, a wilderness swarming with deadly treecrawler corpses and murderous, cannibalistic bandits. These young women had no hope of surviving a mile in such a place, let alone the journey back to whatever place they’d used to call home. And should they miraculously make it back, their villages would not accept them. They were ruined now. Marked, taken, and soon to be bred to the enemy.
They weren’t going to rebel.
And Mother Shade knew it.
We approached the elevator.
The man who operated it didn’t look at those of us who filed onto the elevator. He turned the crank, and my stomach flipped as the floor lowered. There wasn’t room for all of us, and some of the Chosen girls waited in rows, flanked by guards, as we descended until they were out of sight and all around us were walls of stone and steel. A clawing feeling pressed over me, and I shut my eyes until it passed.
Selene and Enna were near me, and Selene was crying silently. Whether it was because of the whipping we’d just witnessed, or from fear of meeting the Alpha, I didn’t know.
I wanted to reach out to her, but did I dare? Mother Shade was still seething from the last girl’s defiance, and she hated me.
And I couldn’t rescue my mother if I was maimed or dead.
Anger burned in my stomach. I hated my submissive stance. I hated my silence.
But right now, it was necessary.
When we reached the bottom floor, we filed off again. Like good little sheep. Our cruel shepherds herded us toward the doors, and there we waited again for the rest of the young women to join us before we left the building.
I hadn’t been outside since I’d arrived. Fear and anticipation constricted me. I found it suddenly hard to breathe.
The doors were made of wood, and they blocked any view of the city outside, but the place in the wall above them had been glass once, and it was now open to the elements, with leafy tendrils of Thorn Trees invading, the ends of the branches twisting down the walls and curling along the edges of the room like the reaching tentacles of a strange, woodland monster.
I stared upward at those curling branches, and the way they cast shadows against the stone transported me via my memories to another time that now seemed like a dream. A time when Vixor fought alongside me to survive in the forest. A time when he was my friend, and I was full of stupid hope that I was going to find my best friend alive and well, ready to be rescued. Flashes of scenes flicked through my mind unbidden—memories of keeping him warm while he shivered. Of sitting beside a fire with him while he spoke of his childhood and I spoke of mine. Of fighting side by side against the treecrawlers.
As always, the thought of kissing him leaped into my head before I could stop it. I closed my eyes as a feeling like cold water filled my insides. Pain lanced my heart. Thinking of it threatened to suffocate me as thoughts I’d been suppressing rose in my head, whispering to me.
He was not my Kassian any longer. The Sworn had taken him, changed him, corrupted him. He had been made into one of them, and he was unrecognizable to me. That was what I needed to remember, even as I dreamed about him every night.
The elevator returned, bringing the rest of the Chosen girls and Mother Shade, who strode forward and commanded us to walk in a voice that wrenched me from my grim thoughts and back to the even grimmer present.
The doors swung open, held by guards, and we filed into the daylight.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE CAPITAL CITY of the Sworn stood in the midst of a forest of giant Thorn Trees. The magical trees grew thick, covering the city, their upper branches as twisting and sinuous as vines, their roots equally greedy. The trees coiled over the towers and spires of the ruined city that had belonged to the humans before the magic destroyed everything, making the city look as though it were formed from the trees—a vertical forest of strange, unsettling beauty.
The light that filtered through the canopy of leaves glowed green, and roots formed tunnels over the streets. Towers covered in verdant green rose all around us, the vertical forests forming lush canyons. Bridges stretched between some of them, hung with lanterns.
I hated that it was beautiful because I wanted to loathe this place. It was cruelty and horror mingled with the most awe-inspiring things I’d ever laid eyes on, and that juxtaposition of horrible and beautiful split me down the middle.
If only we could rid the place of the Sworn and give it back to the humans, then perhaps I could love this place despite what it had been. But I knew that my people would want to burn this place to the ground. These streets were too tainted from history.
We took three coaches drawn by white horses through the streets, and eyes followed us as we passed by. Younger Sworn watched us with hungry, respectful attention—we, their potential future mates—and older Sworn with a kind of cold benevolence. The few humans I spotted—all servants in one way or another—watched us with either pity or loathing. We were isolated curiosities amid the crowds. We were both sacred and reviled, it seemed. Not Sworn, but not quite human anymore, either. Something else. Something other.
The Alpha’s tower loomed in the distance, the tallest of the towers in the city. It alone was not covered in trees and roots, but scraped clean as a blade. The sides glittered in the sunlight like black diamonds.
When we dismounted from the coaches at the end of the ride, I tipped my head back to see where the top of it pierced the sky, but the spire was swathed in clouds.
How could a building be so high?
“Keep walking,” a guard said to me gruffly.
They were not kind, but they were not cruel to us either. Cruelty was the domain of Mother Shade.
Sworn soldiers stepped forward and opened the doors for us, admitting us into the Alpha’s tower. They treated us with distant respect. One day, one of us could become their mate, after all.
I followed the line of Chosen girls into the Alpha’s tower. As I crossed the threshold, my stomach tied in a knot of apprehension.
Sunlight streamed in through windows of unshattered glass and made golden streaks across a flood of stone. Our feet whispered across it as we marched. The Sworn ushered us through an echoing set of antechambers until we paused before the doors of the Alpha’s throne room.