CHAPTER 1
Duncan lay on stone.
Damp, dead stone.
He had not managed to find a way to escape it. Yet.
Not that he’d managed to escape even before he’d been chained to a stone floor.
But he had been close, and they had known it.
They had moved him here a month ago.
Maybe.
Time had begun to lose meaning.
He brushed his fingertips over the cold, hard surface. There was nothing here for his magic to latch onto.
At least before, even if he knew it would do him no good, he could feel the spark inside him.
But the rock was dead.
There was, however, one single upside to the move.
Now he was in the middle of the prison. Surrounded by the other inmates, where before he’d been kept on his own, separate and isolated in his own hut.
The hut had been in poor condition, and had been set near the fortress wall, with the forest right up against it on the other side. It had been a sweet madness to have the keys to his escape so close, and maybe he had gone a little crazy at the end, trying ways to escape that he would never have considered had he not been desperate.
They had decided he might just manage to do it.
So now the whisper of the trees and the smell of growing things was gone, replaced by the murmurs and weeping and conversations of his fellow prisoners, deep in the heart of the prison.
He had missed the sound of human voices, he realized.
He hadn’t been around people much since he had come fully into his power at seventeen, but the few encounters he had day to day had been more important to him than he’d realized, until they were taken away.
Some of those trapped with him wondered about him. About why he was chained up like a rabid wolf in the central tower.
Others saw his treatment as just more of the same cruelty that had put them in this place along with him.
Some tried to speak to him, and he welcomed the contact.
It humbled him to realize that he was the same as everyone else.
Despite what he’d told himself, he needed contact, too. Needed to find connections.
And he suspected most of those around him were like-minded citizens of Grimwalt. Some might even be as magical as he was.
This was the Speaker’s way of hiding his dirty secrets.
The way more and more people had arrived in the time he’d been chained here, shocked and shaking with fear and, sometimes, anger, at their unjust imprisonment, those secrets had to be getting harder and harder to keep.
A shoe scraped against the stone of the floor, and Duncan went still.
“Dunc.” Tomas kept his voice to a loud whisper.
Duncan rolled up into a crouch.
“Catch.” Tomas tossed him a piece of bread, and even though the light from the torch far down the passage barely reached his cell, Duncan snatched it from the air out of instinct.
He glanced at it, then looked up at the old man on the other side of his bars, waited for an explanation.
“Velda and I don’t need as much to eat. Not like you. Never seen a man so tall and broad get so thin.”
Velda was around the same age as Tomas, late sixties, Duncan guessed, and of everyone here, they were his closest allies.
They knew a spell caster, he guessed. Knew and loved them.
A child, he wondered? A grandchild?
This was the first time they had given him their food, though.
There was little enough to eat here as it was. And no one cared that much about his wellbeing, even if they sympathized with him.
Even if they were spell casters themselves.
And if they were, they wouldn’t out themselves if they could help it.
Admitting to magical prowess had a bad habit of making people disappear in the last few years, he gathered from the whispers.
And wasn’t he the living proof of that?
Duncan studied the old man. “What they feed us here isn’t enough to satisfy anyone, Tomas.” He held it back out to his friend.
“That may be true,” Tomas shrugged shoulders Duncan guessed had not been so boney before he arrived at this hidden compound deep in the Grimwalt forest. “But you’re looking too thin. You’re fading and if anyone needs their strength to get us all out of here, it’s you.”
Duncan picked up the chain that anchored him to the stone and moved closer, careful not to let it clink.
When he reached the furthest it would let him get to the bars that were set ceiling to floor, he sat down cross legged.
“Why do you think I’ll be the one to get everyone out?”
“You know why.”
“Who’s there?” The guard’s call had Tomas melting back into the darkness.
Duncan knew Tomas had found a way to get the door to his cell open, although that only gave him access to the tower, not to an escape route out into the yard. And even if he had been able to manage that, there were still the walls or the front gate to negotiate.
When the guard arrived at his cell, torch lifted to light the way, Duncan was back in the middle of the stone floor, curled up, eyes closed.
The light played over him for a bit, lighting orange and purple behind his eyelids.
Then he heard the guard walk away, and counted the steps back to his watch station.
Thirty six.
When darkness settled back around him, and the cold of the floor clutched at him like a bitter lover, he lifted the bread to his mouth and began to chew.
He must look bad for Tomas and Velda to give up their food for him.
It was his fault he was so thin, though. Not the guards.
He was using up too much magic trying to find a way out of the stone.
And there was no way out.
As he shivered himself to sleep, he decided to start saving his strength, just as Tomas said.
If there ever came a day they could escape, he would not be let down by a body too thin and starved to meet the challenge.
CHAPTER 2
Massi found the dogs in the fifth week of her mission.
She had had difficulty believing Ava’s story about how she had turned them from a hunting pack for the Kassian military into her faithful companions, and even more difficulty believing she would find them after Ava had been away from them for so long.
But after she had made it through the mountains, done what business she needed to do in Grimwalt’s capital, Taunen, and then headed to Ava’s family’s estate to pick up the trail, they were actually relatively easy to find.
People tended to notice a large pack of hunting dogs wandering around.
She had not even had to ask around about them.
Grimwalt taverns were cozy, warm, and a hotbed of gossip.
It seemed everyone on the route she had taken from Ava’s grandmother’s estate to the north had a story about seeing the dogs. The theories about what had happened to Tomas, the groundsman on the Yngstra estate, had been just as interesting.
Ava believed he and her grandmother’s housekeeper, Velda, had been imprisoned because of their connection to Ava, and it was clear they had disappeared.
The dogs were blamed, in some versions of the story.
Ava herself was a suspect, as well.
Massi paid attention when that version came up. Looking long and hard at who might be spreading that untruth.
Anyone pointing the finger at Ava was most likely an agent of the Speaker of the Court, Grimwalt’s leader. Or foolish dupes who had been fed the story by agents.