Trish smirked before biting some skin on one of her fingers. “You’ve always been week, Kat. You know that?”
“Where is the boy’s mother?”
“I spent half my life trying to teach you. To make you strong, to try and make you into a capable woman so that you could take back what was yours from your treasonous-”
Katryna bashed her fist against one of the iron bars, creating a sudden bang which made Trish jolt.
“Where… is… she?”
Trish shut her mouth in defiance, turning away.
Katryna huffed. “This will be your one and only chance at freedom, I can assure you. The people want you forcibly poisoned, as a sort of poetic justice. The High Sword claims that regicide in Camridia is punishable with hanging and beheading. Others, however, claim that such punishments are too… quick. Too painless. I am inclined to believe them myself.”
Katryna noticed a slight twitch in some of the small muscles in Trish’s face. For the first time since their childhood, Katryna could see a look of fear overtaking her usually calm, collected demeanour.
She is afraid to die. Afraid of the pain.
“There is nothing left for me anymore,” Trish said rather sombrely, bowing her head down.
“Please,” Katryna said unexpectedly.
She felt her eyes beginning to sting as her stomach-churning emotions began to take the better of her. She clenched her fists as she stared at the woman she once would have died for.
“Please, Trish. After everything we went through, everything we suffered together. Don’t make me do this. I don’t want you dead, even after everything you did. Just… tell me where Sniff’s mother is, and you will be given an escort out of the kingdom. You will never be allowed to return, but you will have your freedom.”
Katryna wiped her tears away with a sniffle. Trish took a moment, seeming to consider the offer. She breathed in the stale, shit-smelling air, felt the dirt and filth smothering her skin, and the cold biting at her bones.
“Tell me, Trish. Where is she?”
Trish appeared to be getting more anxious by the second, perhaps from the realisation of her impending fate. She bit her lip nervously before deciding to respond.
“The bitch is dead.”
At first, Katryna thought she had misheard, yet the burst of sudden rage that was surging through her muscles could not be denied. She found her lips speaking before her mind could come up with something to say.
“How?”
“Chained her wrists and ankles to blocks of stone, the night we arrived back in Ravenrock. Figured she was a liability. So, Edrick and I threw her into Blackstone Rush under the moonlight.”
Trish spoke with cold calculation, an emotionless tone. The action she described appeared to have no effect on her whatsoever.
In fact, she almost sounded proud of it.
“She’s… she’s dead?” Katryna repeated, unable to comprehend what she was hearing.
She felt the loss real hard, for Sniff. All this time he had believed his mother to be alive and had participated in the attacks on her family only to save her.
Katryna, however, realised that there would have been nothing anyone could have done. The cold-heartedness of Trish and Edrick’s actions could realistically only point to one outcome.
But hearing it for real sealed the awful anticipation once and for all.
There were no words she could say. No way to possibly comprehend or to empathise. There was only the pure hatred, the anger, the guilt, and the awful truth that in some sick way, Trish had already won.
Katryna looked down at her shoes, shaking her head. “I knew there would be no saving you.”
Katryna slammed the cell door shut. Trish leapt up from her huddled-up position in the corner of the cell.
“What are you doing?” Trish said angrily as Katryna locked the cell door with her ring of keys.
The clinking of the metal echoed down the long, torch-lit corridor as Katryna hooked the keys back around her belt. Trish held on to the bars in each hand, sticking her face between the gap to sneer at Katryna. Her greasy blonde hair was swept aside, her old scar down the side of her face clear as ever.
“You liar,” Trish hissed.
Katryna took one step back, crossing her arms calmly behind her back and staring back at her old friend.
“You said you’d let me free if I told you,” Trish said. She began to thump her fists against the metal.
Katryna nodded. “You were right about one thing, you know?”
Trish grimaced, before tilting her head as she awaited an answer from her captor.
“You did teach me. More than you care to realise, and perhaps more than I care to admit. But now, I can finally have some peace, knowing you will be down here forever. My people have suffered enough. My family has suffered enough.”
Katryna spoke without a hint of feeling, taking the handle to the bucket of water she had brought down to the dungeon before turning to leave.
“Wait… wait!” Trish begged, but the princess did not turn back. “You can’t leave me like this! You can’t leave me down here!”
“I think I have decided an appropriate punishment for your crimes,” Katryna said. “The rats will be justice enough.”
“Get me out of here!”
With Trish banging against the cell door, hurling all sorts of curses and threats to anyone who could hear it, Katryna approached the nearest lit cresset. She lifted the bucket of water before tipping some of it out over the flames and fuel.
The fire was immediately extinguished with a sizzle.
It was then that Trish began to panic, her horrific fate becoming starkly real.
Katryna went up to the next cresset on her way to the exit, dousing the light as she had the first.
“Wait! Please, don’t!” Trish howled,
