Chapter Two
Andraste
Sometimes I think the silence is the worst.
It’s a time when you’re alone with your own thoughts, your eyes blinded to the world, and nothing but the incessant drip-drip-drip of water in the distance offers any respite from the horrors of your memories.
Pain can be ignored. Pain is nausea twisting your stomach. Numbness flooding through your hands. Pain is an old friend, and maybe my mother thinks she can use it to break me, but she doesn’t know the truth.
I’m not afraid of pain.
But silence is the whip that breaks my soul.
Silence. Loneliness.
Memory.
The look in my sister’s eyes as she realized I’m the one who betrayed her is my least favorite memory, but it’s the one that keeps playing in my head, over and over and over.
I try to shift on my toes, and agony flares through my shoulders like a pair of knives driven deep. The chains around my wrists remain stoic, and though I’ve tried, I know they’re anchored to the ceiling above me and nothing I do will shift them.
I will endure.
I will not scream.
I will not beg.
It’s not my first time in the oubliette. Nor will it be my last.
And somehow, that thought makes me want to laugh.
Or cry.
Because I don’t know how long my mother will leave me chained here, and I don’t know what condition I will be in when she finally allows me to go free.
It takes me a long time to realize I can hear footsteps.
I tilt my head in the darkness, my heart suddenly racing. I don’t know how long I’ve been hanging here—time means nothing in the ever-present dark—but surely this is not long enough? I spent months in these chains when I fought for my sister’s freedom the first time. Months that broke me.
This could only have been… maybe weeks?
Maybe it’s not freedom that beckons. Maybe it’s torture. Mother will never dare whip the crown heir, but there are other ways to torture a body. Or a soul. And they don’t have to even leave a bruise.
I tense as keys rattle in the lock and the door squeals open. Everything sounds so fucking loud after the silence.
But then there are no further sounds, and I know that someone watches me, even if I can’t see them, and maybe that’s worse….
Heat flares, and I turn my eager face to it even as my abdomen tenses.
“You’re a mess,” Edain says coldly.
Not him. Anyone but him.
My heart’s in freefall, my throat closing over as if to contain a startled gasp. But I don’t dare let him see it.
I tilt my chin, trying to shift the blindfold, but all I catch a glimpse of is his boots. “My apologies, my lord.” My lips feel too dry, and they mangle the words, but I continue. “I seem to have misplaced the servants.”
My stepbrother stalks closer, and my cold skin yearns for the heat of his torch, even as I grind my teeth together.
“Surely you’re not here to bring my meal.” My stomach growls at the thought, shockingly loud. “Nor my bath.”
The clink of sound tells me he’s set the torch in the wall. “Your mother is still furious with you, so I would try not to be so witty when you’re brought before her.”
My heart skips a beat. “The Queen wants to see me?”
“Would I be down here for any other reason?”
And there it is.
I never quite know if he enjoys taunting me or if he’s merely stating a fact, but Edain being Edain, I’m fairly certain he’s mocking me.
I don’t know what my mother was thinking when she brought him into her court.
Though I can imagine.
I was young when my mother married his father, Reynar, and barely eighteen when Reynar died in a hunting accident. They say Reynar’s beauty stole my mother’s tongue the first time she laid eyes upon him, and she had to have him for herself, regardless of his wife or young family.
And Reynar, perhaps wise enough to see a path to power, tempted her and wooed her for years, before he finally succumbed to her bed.
Before the sun rose, my mother vowed to marry him, and jokes still linger about the size of the prince consort’s cock.
For years, Reynar was all she could see. He came from the Far Isles, and left a family behind to become her consort. I was ignored, as step-children often are—he had no use for me—but I do remember my mother constantly cajoling him to bring his son to court.
“We will show the Alliance that we are a family to be reckoned with,” she had said once, when I was allowed to brush her hair. “No more of these nasty rumors about your previous wife…. I will not suffer them to be heard.”
Reynar unleashed a dangerous smile upon her. “Let Letithia keep the boy. It’s safer for him to stay in Akiva. And I would not want to divert my attention from you. Not even for my dearest son. You are my sun. You are my heart. Let it not know another.”
Safer, always safer.
From the lies and vicious rumors that circulated about a handsome young fae male stolen from his faithful wife.
I remember the day it all changed.
There was a masked ball at court to celebrate my seventeenth birthday and a strange minstrel came calling, wearing nothing but black. He won the court with his voice, and my mother was delighted.
“Reveal yourself,” she cried, “for your beauty must echo the gloriousness of your voice and we must know it.”
I will never forget that moment—the horrible breathless feeling in my lungs as the stranger lifted his hands to slowly lower his mask. It felt like Fate trailed her frozen fingertips down my spine.
The stranger threw back his shining black hair, the mask in his hands, and every fae at
