CHAPTER NINE

Caledon

NIGHT TURNS TO DAY, AND then to night again. And again. Soon enough Cal’s imprisonment has lasted nearly a week. To him it feels more like a year. The days drag on and on endlessly. Mornings are spent doing push-ups and pacing the perimeter of his round cell, what he has come to assume is a converted bedchamber in the fortress’s east turret. He considers stuffing his wool blanket with hay to create a fighting dummy so he can keep in shape, but he’s reluctant to make his sleeping conditions any worse than they already are, especially since he’s no longer so certain this will be a short stay.

There are no books to read, and no letters arrive in the post. He has no idea what’s happening outside the prison walls, no way of knowing when he will be released. It’s maddening.

He examines the handkerchief over and over again. Holds it up to the bit of sunlight that streams in the tiny cell window every morning, in case there’s something he missed, perhaps a secret message written in milk or lemon juice—but there’s nothing.

Maybe the handkerchief itself was the code, and her words: You’re not alone. He may be reading too much into the encounter—she could have merely been a sympathetic bystander. But there was something familiar about her . . . When—if—he finishes the task in Montrice, he decides he’s going to find her.

In his isolation, he tries to keep his mind nimble. He runs over the list of courtiers at the palace. It’s impossible that the grand prince was acting alone. There are surely other traitors at court, and what good is Cal if he’s trapped behind bars? He can’t do his job here. There aren’t even other prisoners nearby he can extract information from. That may be for his protection; but it could also mean Queen Lilianna is keeping him isolated to protect others. He doesn’t want to believe that, but under duress his mind is going to dark places.

Cal scratches a mark into the wall for every night he sleeps on the cold floor, on top of the increasingly filthy hay. Good thing I didn’t wear my best clothes to Violla Ruza.

Though he tries to keep the thoughts away, at night Cal’s mind wanders to his father. When sleep finally comes, Cal dreams of him. They’re usually sitting in front of the hearth back home together. Sometimes Cordyn speaks to Cal, though when he wakes he can’t remember anything the man said. Sometimes all Cal sees is the back of his head, looking up at it, like he’s a child again, following him on a crowded street, scared they’ll be separated and he’ll be lost.

Cal wakes and sighs. If he wasn’t bound to Queen Lilianna, he wonders what his life would be like now. It certainly wouldn’t include a stint at Deersia. But there is no escape from a blood vow; he’s learned that the hard way.

It first happened after his father was killed. He was only thirteen. Rash and angry, old enough to desire freedom but young enough to feel orphaned, abandoned. He knew about the vow by then, of course, but he figured he could flee from it; perhaps, if he hid from it long enough, it would die with him instead of being passed on. At least, that’s what he thought.

He’d packed up a few necessities, or what he considered necessities at the time, laughable to him now, the perishable food and inadequate footwear. But he’d made it pretty far, farther than he’d ever gone away before. Then the headaches began.

He shook it off at first, faulted hunger and the long days of walking, but they grew more intense with every mile he traveled from Renovia. He stole fresh meat off a butcher’s slab and cooked it up in the woods, drank fresh water from a crystal stream, spent an entire day resting his feet, and still, the piercing throb in his head would not cease. Next came the nightmares. Those were vague enough when they started, visions that vanished from his mind as soon as he startled awake, but soon became worse—something chasing him, and he’d run and run, but no matter how much he ran it was always right on his heels, ready to grab him. He’d wake up drenched in a cold sweat. After the worst dreams he’d find himself far from camp, disoriented from sleepwalking. When he didn’t heed these warnings, the shapeless threat on his heels turned into an actual monster, and then one night he was visited by an angry vision of Queen Lilianna herself. When he woke, he found himself perched on a cliff—ready to dive into the inky depths below.

He returned that very morning. The blinding pain, the visions—it all subsided as he drew closer to Renovia. Cal had learned his lesson. He never attempted to abandon the vow again.

Cal’s silent days at Deersia are punctuated by three meals shoved quickly through the doorway. He has no human interaction aside from the gruff words—“Breakfast!” “Dinner!” “Supper!”—yelled through a narrow slot in the door.

The food at Deersia is terrible—typically some kind of gruel, or if he’s lucky, a porridge of peas with a hard square biscuit made of crudely milled, cheap flour and a bit of salt—and on more than one occasion, a few grubs—but he eats most of it anyway, to keep up his strength. He’s eaten worse to survive. The trick is not to look at it or think about it much. Consider it a sort of medicine, awful but necessary.

He draws a simple map of the prison interior on the floor so he can push hay on top to hide it. He’s not sure he’ll need to use it, but it gives him something else to focus on. Makes him feel like he has some control.

He does his best not to think of the momentous task that lies beyond his release.

And if I confirm the king’s involvement?

You are the Queen’s Assassin, are you not?

Regicide. The thought chills him more than his current imprisonment, though his circumstances are already enough to drive a man mad. How long must he wait? The queen promised that she would send for him, but if she does not, he will take matters into his own hands.

Cal spends hours at the barred window, observing the mountains and tracking travelers as they pass through roads in the distance, making note of any who have a routine. He scratches a crude calendar of sorts low on the wall where he sleeps and uses symbols to mark patterns, a D for the local draper who delivers flour and ale and other kitchen necessities at the beginning of every week, G1 and G2 to mark the various guards and their shifts, and so on. Far off in the distance Cal can see townspeople on their way back and forth from the marketplace and to worship.

From each meal he saves half the biscuit, when he gets one; if the porridge is fresh and filling enough, he’ll save the entire thing. He stores them in a pouch he fashioned from the blindfold scarf. He’ll need hardtack on the road should he have the chance to flee. A bit of water is all it takes to make them palatable, and palatable is all it takes to ward off starvation when decent meals or fresh meat are difficult to find.

Each day he tears a bit of the wool blanket, rolls squares of the rough fabric into tubes. He stuffs handfuls of hay inside. Since he has no needle or thread, he ties them closed with thin strips of the fabric. These can be set on fire easily, which might be useful for many reasons.

At night Cal wraps the remains of his blanket around his shoulders like a shawl and curls up in the corner with his knees against his chest to retain body warmth. Not ideal, but it works well enough. The smaller the blanket gets, the colder the nights feel, functioning as a sort of countdown. He decides that once he’s run out of blanket, it’s time to go.

He puts himself to sleep recalling tales from his childhood. His favorite was the one his father used to tell him about Omin of Oylahn, the origin of all magic, blessed by Mother Deia Herself. According to legend, Omin was the most powerful mage who ever lived, a master of both the physical and ethereal arts, and served the ancient Queen Alphonia during the time when Renovia was still a tiny, weak dominion of Avantine.

Nobody knows who Omin’s parents were—if they were even human. At that time, people still spoke of the fae folk, before their kind either went into hiding or became extinct. Omin was found as an infant in the woods, so some stories said the great mage simply sprang from the dirt itself, a creature too divine to be human and too human to be a spirit.

“Of course,” Cal’s father would say, “this is just a story, and stories are always a little bit true and a little bit false; we just don’t know which is which.”

Young Cal chose to combine them all and believe that Omin was both human and fae—a being part heaven and earth—and that version satisfied him.

He can still hear his father’s deep, melodic voice, recounting the same scenes over and over from memory. Omin was an unknown orphan, a nobody, and grew up to establish a mighty kingdom, to become a great monarch with a loving family, loyal liege lords and knights, adored by thousands. Cal closes his eyes in his prison cell and pretends he’s six years old, when life was simple, before he knew what the future held for him and before he was left adrift and alone in the world. Those days, his father would tuck him in under his mother’s faded quilt and Cal would listen to the story, picturing each heroic character as he drifted off to sleep.

He does this now and recalls the words he always heard last:

The lesson, my son, is that we alone, no matter how skilled or how smart or how rich, are but spokes, and cannot move the wheel alone; only together can we do that.