VISANDER WOKE CHOKING. His chest was constricted. There was no air. He coughed and tried to heave in breath. Where was he?
His eyes opened. Blind, he saw nothing. There was no difference between his eyes being open or closed. Panic lifted his arms and he tried to push up, only to hit wood a handspan above his face. He couldn’t sit up. He couldn’t breathe, his nose clogged with the cold, heavy smell of earth.
Instinctively he groped for his sword, Ekthalion, but he couldn’t find it. Ekthalion. Where is Ekthalion? His numb, cramping fingers found wood on all four sides. His shallow breathing shallowed further. He was lying trapped in a small wooden box. A casket.
A coffin.
Cold fear at that idea. ‘Release me!’ The words were absorbed by the box as if swallowed. The sick, terrible thought came: this was not just a coffin. It was a grave. He was buried, his sounds smothered by earth above and around him.
‘Release me!’
Panic crested. Was this it? His awakening? In a sightless, soundless cavity, while no one above knew he lived? He tried to remember the moments before this, disjointed fragments: riding his bonded steed Indeviel; the Queen’s cool blue eyes on him as he spoke his vow; the sharp pain as she ran the sword through his chest. You will return, Visander.
Had she done this to him? It couldn’t be, could it? He couldn’t have returned into a grave, awakening buried deep beneath the earth?
Think. If he was buried, there would be wood above him, and then earth. He had to break the wood, and then dig. And he had to do it now, while he still had air and strength. He didn’t know how much air he had left.
He kicked at the roof of his prison, a jarring pain in his foot. The second kick was part panic. A sharp cracking sound meant he had splintered the wood. He could hear his own gasps of breath, dragging in what was left of the thin air.
Crack! Again. Crack! Earth spilled in like water breaking through a leak. For a moment he felt a burst of success. Then the leak became a collapse, a cave-in, cold earth rushing in to fill up the coffin. A desperate panic exploded in him, his hands flying up to cover his head at the thought he would be smothered. He coughed, the dust particles so thick that they choked him. When the dust settled, the cave-in had reduced his space in the coffin by half.
He lay in the small, lightless pocket that was left to him. His heart was pounding painfully. He remembered the moment when he had gone to his knees and sworn. I will be your Returner. The Queen had touched his head as he knelt. You will Return, Visander. But first you must die. Had it gone wrong? Had he been buried by mistake, those around him believing him truly dead? Or had he been discovered by the Dark King? Buried as punishment, knowing he would return, only to awaken trapped?
He imagined the Dark King’s pleasure at his suffocating panic. It would delight that twisted mind to think of Visander buried alive, his terror unseen, his shouts unheard. The spark of hatred in Visander ignited, the burn bright in the dark. It drove him, stronger than the need to live, his need to kill the Dark King. He had to get out.
He reached down to the front of his garments and tore at what felt like silk. He tied the silk around his face, to protect his mouth and nostrils from the earth that would rush in to cover him. Then he drew in a breath, all the air he could gather, and this time punched with every bit of his remaining strength at the splintered wood above him.
Earth collapsed down onto him, filling the last of the space. He forced himself to push upward into it, trying to claw up through the dirt. It didn’t work. He didn’t break the surface, and now there was earth all around him, and no air, just the stifling press of the soil, a putrid petrichor that threatened to force its way down his throat.
Up. He had to go up, but felt total disorientation: surrounded by pitch-black earth, he lost all sense of down or up; digging, but in which direction? Horror overwhelmed him. Would he die, a blind worm travelling the wrong way in the dark? Pain stabbed his lungs, his head dizzy, as though he’d inhaled fumes.
Dig. Dig or die, think of his purpose, the only thing that drove him, past the panic, past the dimming of his thoughts like the closing of a tunnel—
And then his grasping, reaching hand broke out into space. His lungs screamed as he pushed desperately towards it, breaching the muddy ground in a grotesque rebirth, pushing out his face, his torso, dragging himself from the earth.
He heaved in air – air! – great, gasping heaves that coughed and retched out a black substance, the dirt that had found its way into his mouth and down his throat. It took a long time for the retching to stop, convulsing tremors in his body. Vaguely, he was aware that it was night, that there was turf under his fingers, the empty branches of trees over his head. He lay sprawled on the ground that had just entrapped him, reassured that it was beneath him, a joy he had never appreciated before. He lifted his forearm to wipe at his mouth, saw the tattered silks that clothed him, and felt a strange wave of wrongness.
When he looked down at his hands, they were not only torn and bloodied but – they were not – his hands—
Everything spun around him dizzily. He was dressed in strange garments, thick skirts that dragged down from his body heavily. He could see himself in the moonlight – these torn, muddy hands were not his own, these breasts, these tendrils of long blonde hair. This was not his body; this was a young woman whose limbs he could not easily control, an attempt to stand sending him stumbling to the ground.
Light flared, and at first he flung his arm up to shield himself from it, his eyes unused to anything brighter than the dim moonlight.
Then he looked up into the light.
There was a grey-haired older man standing in front of him holding a lamp aloft. He was staring as though he had seen a phantom. As though he had seen someone die and then met them again after they had clawed their way back up from out of the earth.
‘Katherine?’ said the man.