Her hands weren’t working. They were heavy and far too cold. Color and sound were all mashed up, the sound black, the color screaming.
“Stillness, Mia. A dark corridor. An empty room. You must keep her still.”
She couldn’t breathe. Her body was an avalanche. Cold. So cold.
The princess’s eyes flew open as her body seized violently. She looked so betrayed. Then she went still.
“Karri?” Quin clutched his sister’s hand. “Karri!”
Mia couldn’t feel her heartbeat. She couldn’t feel anything. The ruby wren was silent at her chest. The princess’s large body seemed impossibly small, slumped across the forest floor. How had she never realized Karri was beautiful? Mia had been seduced by the river kingdom’s idea of beauty: lithe waists, long hair, doe eyes. But in that moment Princess Karri was the most beautiful woman Mia had ever seen.
And now her heart was silent.
“You killed her.” Quin’s voice was so low she had to strain to hear it. “You killed my sister.”
Karri’s blue eyes stared up at the night sky, seeing nothing at all.
Quin wouldn’t look at her. Moments before they had been twined together, two delicate instruments of desire. How easy it was for love to turn to hate.
Mia saw herself kneeling on the floor of their cottage, clutching her mother, desperate to call life back into a lifeless body.
“Mia,” Zaga said coldly. “You have failed.”
Men’s shouts flooded the forest. Either King Ronan’s guards had been waiting for them, or Tristan had returned and summoned them quickly. There was no time to react. The guards rode into the clearing, crushing delicate saplings and blackthorn blossoms beneath their horses’ hooves.
Mia heard Dom bolt through the forest, but Pilar hesitated, torn. Zaga was rooted to the spot.
“Mother?” Pilar’s voice was tight with panic. “We have to—”
The head guardsman charged toward her. Mia could feel the honeyed enthrall oozing off Pilar as the girl summoned every ounce of her magic, reaching her hands toward him.
He struck her hard across the face. His glove opened a seam in her cheek, her cheekbone weeping blood.
Mia saw what she hadn’t before: his glove encrusted with blue stones. She scanned the other guards and saw they all wore armor studded with uzoolion. Someone had told them about the protective properties of the stone.
“Dirty little Gwyrach,” snarled the guard, and Mia heard the word as if for the first time. Gwyrach. It was harsh and biting, consonants carved from fear and hate. So different from the smooth, mellifluous vowels of Dujia.
“Bind them all.” The head guardsman pointed to Mia. “But take her first.”
She tried to catch Quin’s eye, but he was lost in anguish, crouched over his sister like a feral animal. The ropes bit into Mia’s wrists as the guards bound her arms together. They threw her over one of their horses as carelessly as a sack of grain, bruising her ribs.
The thunder of hooves swallowed every sound.
Chapter 55
A Family of Maggots
THE STENCH IN THE dungeon was foul, like putrefying flesh. Mia was surrounded on all sides by the carcasses of prisoners decomposing in the dark. How long until she joined them?
She didn’t know how many hours had passed—maybe two, maybe twenty—since the guards thrust her into a stale, lightless cell. There was no way to pass the time; unsurprisingly, the dungeons did not come furnished with a library.
She kept thinking of the journal. The last piece of her mother languished on a bed of needles on the forest floor. She clasped the little ruby wren to her chest. Four chambers in a wren’s heart, just like a human’s, but even four chambers were not enough for all the grief and love and losses of a life.
In the dark, she saw Karri, the light seeping out of her eyes. If Mia hadn’t touched her, she might have lived. Before she laid her hands over her heart, the princess was still conscious, still fighting.
Zaga had trusted Mia, and Mia had failed.
It was the worst failure of her life.
Where was Quin? Did he accompany Karri’s body back to the castle? Had he taken her home?
When she thought of him kneeling by his sister in the forest, her heart cleaved in two. He’d been right to be afraid of her. She’d tried to save his sister and failed miserably. Mia was a killer, and that would never change.
She had no appetite, but her throat was parched. She knew a jailer sat at the top of the stairs, even if she couldn’t see him.
“Please,” she begged. “Can I have some water?”
“If the queen wants you to have a drink, she’ll have a carton of horse piss delivered special.”
She wished she hadn’t asked.
She assumed Ronan was the one who’d had her imprisoned, but perhaps Rowena had taken a more active role in their absence. If the queen thought Mia was responsible for her son going missing, of course she would want her under lock and key. And if Queen Rowena knew Mia was the reason her daughter was dead, then it was a wonder she hadn’t asked for her head on a plate.
“Please.” She clanged her shackles. “Just one sip of water. I’m dying of thirst.”
The jailer laughed.
Her breathing was ragged and irregular; she tried to remember her mother’s lesson. She pressed her back into the filthy wall and planted her feet on the ground, placing her left hand over her heart and her right over her belly. She tried to conjure the wind. But she couldn’t remember the sound.
She didn’t deserve comfort. She deserved to be thrown in a dungeon, to rot in a dark room. The thought of Quin’s naked grief wrecked her. She hadn’t intended to kill his sister, but what did intention matter when the deed was done? Mia was a danger to herself and others. Had she really thought she could keep her own sister safe when her very touch was fatal?
Quin would never forgive her. She couldn’t forgive herself. Lauriel had called her an angel; now she scoffed at the idea. She was a demon. Death with auburn curls.
Her hands were stained brown with Karri’s blood. She couldn’t see it, but every time she raked her fingertips over her skin, she felt the dried grains. She drew her fingernail down the lines in her palms, tracing a bloodied map of If Onlys.
If only she’d leapt in front of Karri to shield her from the arrow.
If only Zaga hadn’t forced her to feel instead of think.
If only she had never journeyed to Refúj.
If only Pilar hadn’t shot the prince.
If only her mother were still alive.
If only Mia didn’t have magic.
“You. Thirsty rat.” The jailer clanked his stick against the iron bars of her cell. She hadn’t heard him trundle down the stairs. “Got a gift for you.”
She braced herself for a carton of horse piss. Instead he handed her a bundle wrapped in white crinkled paper.
“Looks like you got yourself a friend in high places. Don’t eat too fast—I won’t be moppin’ up your sick if you spew bile all over your cell.”
He had the decency to wedge a small torch into the wall, leaving Mia with a dribble of light to eat by. She tore open the paper. A hunk of bread tumbled onto her lap, followed by a flask of clear liquid that nearly slipped through her fingers and shattered on the hard stone floor. She caught it just in time. She uncorked the flask and sniffed, only to find the liquid odorless. Poisons were odorless.
She tipped back the flask and drained it dry.
It was only water. And what did it matter if someone were trying to poison her? She was doomed to die in this cell one way or another. She ripped off stale hunks of bread and devoured those, too, hungrier than she thought.
Only after she had consumed the bread and water did she realize the crinkled paper was not blank.
Mia’s eyes strained against the dim torchlight. She gasped.
She was holding a page from her mother’s journal.
That was impossible. The book was back in the forest, buried under a mound of pinecones.