By the time they pulled me from the carriage, it had been long enough that my body disdained the movement. My skin was thick with dirt; blood crusted in places that made it feel like I was tearing a new wound open when I moved. It felt like the arrowhead shot into my shoulder hadn’t been removed, even though they snapped the shaft off. Every muscle ached and cried, and I could hardly stand on my own two feet. Long enough in the carriage, long enough with my despair, and my feet almost failed me.
It was a whole new heartbreak when my body was already crowded with others.
I knew by the smell of the air that we were near the mountains. We were on a narrow path covered by dense forest, and in front of us a sheer rock face loomed with a small door in it. The door opened, and torchlight flickered, the only light I had to see by.
A single guard took me now, carrying me in his arms. I curled my fingers, searching for the threads, but they were still gone.
Without a way to fight back, I let myself be carried.
He took me into a long hallway that burrowed neatly into the rock. I couldn’t tell how long he walked; all that caught my gaze were the moving, jumping shadows of the light on the ceiling of the tunnel.
I heard metal clinking and moving, a low, dark sound somewhere ahead.
A high-pitched scream rang out, strangled and disembodied, sliding over the walls like a ghost. The guard’s hands tightened on me, but he didn’t stop or show any other reaction.
The tunnel widened, and the jumping shadows on the ceiling receded from me.
“There,” I heard Calix say. The guard turned and moved into an open room. The rock here was gray, not like the warm red of Jitra, and the light on it made everything look wet and slick. There was a huge stone altar in the center of the round room, hooks hanging above it with lanterns swinging, illuminating the girl who was lying on top of it.
She wore a dirty dress that might have been blue to start with, and part of her hair was cut off, revealing wounds that had been stitched up on her head. One arm was splayed out, and her skin was an indecipherable mass of bruising, blood, and cuts. Blood puddled beneath her on the ground.
I stopped looking at her long enough to notice six or more doors around the circle where the girl was.
One guard strode ahead of us to open a door directly behind the girl’s head, and the guard holding me walked in and put me gently down on a hard bench with a pillow and a thin, small blanket.
“Get the quaesitori,” Calix said, standing in the doorway.
The guard left without a word, and I didn’t move, glancing at Calix before staring at the wall.
“Comfortable?” Calix snarled.
I shifted my hips a little, but it hurt, and I stopped moving.
“You’re going to die in here,” Calix told me. “But not before I discover all your secrets. You are the first sorceress who can command the earth that I’ve ever seen. And before you die, I will know everything there is to know.”
“You are your own end,” I whispered. “You have struck out against the desert. Against your queen. Your people will revolt, and they will unseat you. They will kill you.”
“Really?” he snarled. “They never seemed to mind before.”
I stared at the wall. I wanted to ask him what he meant, but he wanted to tell me. He wanted to gloat about his sick deeds, and I wouldn’t play into such desires, even now, when I had nothing.
“My king,” someone murmured, and Calix stepped aside. A man in black robes came into the room, and his eyes swept over me, slow and assessing. “I will examine her, my king.”
“I’ll stay,” Calix said, not leaving the open doorway.
“My queen,” the man said, dragging a stool to the bed. “Could you lie on your back?”
“If you think I’ll let you touch me, you’re mad,” I snapped.
“I mean only to see if your baby is alive,” he said. “I’ve been well trained in such arts.”
My body shook, but that if—if my baby was alive—made me put aside my fears and indignity. I lay flat on my back, and he put his hands under my skirt. I wanted to shut my eyes, but instead I looked at Calix, tears coming out of my eyes as the man told me my body had ruptured and the baby couldn’t survive like that. When he took his hands away, I shut my eyes, curling toward the wall.
“Very well,” Calix said. “Dress her shoulder. Feed her something. She will need her strength for later.”
I shut my eyes and must have slept for a while, but it never felt like sleep. It felt just like being awake, the same numbness, the same pain, only that I was in darkness.
But I woke with a start, jumping to the door. There was a tiny grate that was too high for me to see out of, but I could hear a girl—the same girl? I had no way of knowing—wailing in pain.
“Again, Dara!” I heard a male voice yell. She cried out again, and it trailed off into piteous sobs. Dara. The girl from the ship on the communes, the girl whom my husband promised to try fairly. A girl he’d clearly been experimenting on for as long as he promised me he hadn’t.
“Again!” The answering scream was different, more raw, like she had reached a new level of pain.
“Again!”
I fell back from the door as, instead of a scream, a ball of fire rose up in the chamber, blazing fast and extinguishing.
“Write that down,” I heard a man murmur.
I couldn’t sleep the rest of the night. The screams ended not long after that, but there were still grunts, shuffles, noises that haunted me.
Six doors, at least. I wondered how many of us he had to torture. I wondered where my brothers were, mourning without me. I wondered if anyone was able to burn the bodies of my family so they could return to the Skies.
I wondered how I was supposed to return a child to the Skies when there was nothing to burn.
Hours later, a guard opened my door. “Come,” he said, and gave me a cloth and a chip of soap. There were other women coming out of their cells, and one young man who, for a wild moment, I thought was my brother Aiden.
It wasn’t, of course. I would never see Aiden’s face again, and imagining him into this hell didn’t change that.
The guards led us deeper into the rock. I heard the rushing water before I saw it, and they led us into an underground river. The others didn’t need to be told what to do. They took off their clothes, putting them in neat piles, and waded into the water.
Slowly, I followed their example, glancing at their bodies without trying to be rude. I saw scars before I could really look at faces; long, thin lines from a whip, or maybe a knife. Long, deep wounds that were crusted with blood. Missing hair, missing fingers, missing eyes.
My skin could barely feel the cold as I stepped into the water. The river was moving fast enough that it plucked painfully at the things crusted to my skin, peeling the day before away without my consent.
“You’re the queen,” one said, looking at me. She was small, everything about her tiny, with dark hair that was long and knotted. She covered herself up, like suddenly this made our nudity inappropriate. “What—what are you—you’re the queen,” she said again.
A taller, older woman touched the girl’s shoulder, and I saw her hand was missing two fingers, raw red stumps where they used to be. “And just the same as us, it seems. I’m Iona,” she said softly to me.
“Shalia,” I murmured.
She nodded grimly. “Do you have the natural powers?” she asked.
I nodded. “Earth,” I told her. “You?”
She swallowed. “Water,” she said, running her hands into the river.
“You haven’t healed yourself ?” I whispered, looking at her hand.
The younger girl looked up at Iona, and Iona looked confused. “Heal?” she breathed.
“I know someone with your power,” I said. “She can heal people through it.”
“I’m not very strong,” she said, shaking her head.
“Wash!” the guards bellowed at us.
The women flinched, turning to scrape their bodies with the soap. The young man was already finished, climbing out of the water to take his cloth and dry off, then slowly put his clothes on. He was ashen and weak.
I scrubbed slowly at the dirt, ash, dust, and blood that was all that remained of my family. The river took it, folding every little piece of horror into its waters until I had none left, until my body was frozen and clean. I didn’t want to be clean. I didn’t want to ever move on from the last moment when the world was safe, when my family was smiling, when my baby was alive.
Blood still wept out of my body, and the river stole it from me.