Every time Serali woke, she expected to find herself back in a cell in the dungeons. But every time she woke, the bed, the soft sheets, the blankets, the warmth from the fireplace, they were all still there.
Her wrists were still bound.
She spent most of her time alone. She counted her breaths, waiting for the footsteps, the voice, the next interrogation. But every time the door opened, it was only the same maid, bringing her more food. The helplessness was absolute. She could not leave the bed, could not even scratch an itch above her elbow without leather restraints arresting her movement.
The iron bangle kept her magic locked tight behind a wall. She was trapped, somewhere in the Sun Fae palace, with no clue what they planned to do with her.
And she was the most comfortable she had ever been in her life. It was ridiculous, the comfort juxtaposed with the terror of not knowing what came next, of not having the slightest control. Although, she supposed, she had never had much control to begin with. This was, in every conceivable way, the best she had been treated since she was thirteen and dragged away from her world.
It was, according to her careful counting, nearly time for the next meal. A moment later she was satisfied to find that she was right, as she heard soft voices at the door and the distinct sound of a key sliding into a lock. The maid entered with a tray. She did not glance at Serali right away. Instead, she crossed to the side table and set down her tray, arranging the porcelain in perfect angles before turning to the bed.
“You’re awake,” the maid said. Her voice was a little too soft, as if she was worried about breaking something fragile. “Good. I thought I’d have to bring the broth again, but the Lia said solid food would be better today.”
Serali looked over at the tray, curious about what “solid food” meant. On the plate was a perfectly symmetrical piece of roast chicken, three slices of bread (white, the kind she’d only ever seen at royal banquets), and a bright pile of greens so fresh they glistened.
Serali eyed the food with suspicion, eyes drifting from the crisped skin of the chicken to the even, impossible slices of the bread. “What is this?” she asked, the dry rasp of her voice belying how long it had been since she’d last spoken.
The maid blinked, thrown. “It’s… chicken?” She said it as if it might be a trap, as if perhaps the rules of food had changed overnight and she’d been set up to fail. “The kitchens said it was very fresh.”
Serali looked at her, unblinking. “Why are you giving it to me?”
“Because you’re supposed to eat. The healer said you should have meat. She said you’d need it, for your blood.” The woman looked around, as if expecting rescue from the plaster ceiling, or perhaps from the Queen herself. “Do you not like chicken?”
The question, do you not like chicken?—was a wire-serrated hook in the soft tissue of Serali’s composure. For a half-second, she nearly laughed. The impulse tripped, then reversed itself, and instead she found her throat locking around a noise that was all inhale, no exhale, as if she’d swallowed her own tongue. Her vision blurred. Her eyes leaked. It was so ridiculous that she almost did laugh, but what came out was a wet, choking sound that was neither laughter nor the kind of sob that earned sympathy in kitchens or back alleys. It was the sound of a body, unpracticed in receiving comfort, trying to metabolize it as poison.
The maid went white. She hovered, uncertain, then perched gingerly on the mattress, bringing the bowl and spoon as if they might shield her from contagion.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered. “Is it the chicken? I can bring something else, porridge, or eggs, or maybe, if you’re not supposed to have chicken, I could—”
The maid’s urgency hit a wall as Serali shook her head, hard, once, then again.
“It’s fine,” she said, and had to clear her throat to finish the thought. “It’s just been awhile. Since I had anything like this.”
The words hung awkward between them. The maid’s face to something dangerously close to mothering. Serali would have preferred terror.
She tried to reroute the moment, to drive the pity out of the room before it could root. “Really,” she said, “it’s good. I like it” She forced a smile, or the closest her face could manage, “it’s just, not really the kind of food you give to a prisoner.”
The maid shrugged, a movement that would have been casual if not for the way she kept her own hands visible at all times. “You’re a guest now,” she said, as if reciting something memorized. “Of the Queen. You’re to be treated with… dignity.”
Serali almost laughed, but it caught in her throat and became a cough. “A guest?” Serali raised her eyebrows, a flicker of the old sarcasm threading through her exhaustion. She looked down at where her wrists were crossed and lashed to the bedframe, then back up at the maid, whose face had gone so alarmed that for a moment Serali feared she’d startle and drop the entire tray.
“Is this how sun fae do hospitality?” Serali asked, in the tone of someone evaluating a truly questionable meal. “Tie up the guest and then fatten her for market?”
The maid flushed, but didn’t flinch. She looked at Serali's hands, then at the leather that held them, and for the first time, some small pride crept into her voice, as if she’d been waiting for someone to notice her handiwork. “It’s to keep you from hurting yourself. Or from using magic. The Queen said—” She stopped, as if realizing she’d said too much.
Serali shook her head, or as much as she could with her arms trussed to the bed frame. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I’ve had worse.”
She tried to inject the words with a wryness that might spare them both the embarrassment of her earlier reaction, but she could tell she’d failed by the way the maid’s shoulders hunched, as if she had absorbed the awkwardness directly into her bones.
They sat in silence for several long breaths, the only sound the tick of a clock somewhere just out of sight and the faint hiss of the fire in the grate. The maid stared at the floor. Serali stared at the ceiling, counting the cracks. The quiet was not hostile, just thick, heavy, like a blanket damp from rain.
At last, the maid seemed to gather herself. She picked up the knife and sliced off a perfect bite of chicken, balancing it on the tip of a fork and offered it to Serali. The taste, herbs, salt, actual fat under the skin, was so overwhelming that she had to close her eyes, just to keep from sobbing.
The first few bites made her jaw hurt, as if her body didn’t remember how to eat real food. But after a while, the pain faded, replaced by a bone-deep warmth that spread from her stomach to her hands and then to the tips of her ears. She finished the chicken, then the bread, then the salad.
The maid poured water into a thin-lipped cup, then helped her bring it to her lips. The water was clean and cold.
“Thank you,” Serali said, awkward with the words.
The maid cleared her throat. “If you want to bathe, I can help. Lia said it would be good for the skin. The scars.”
Serali looked down at her hands, at the faint red line that ringed each wrist. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“It does,” she replied, very quietly. “It matters to them.”
Serali almost asked which “them” she meant, but the question withered before she could form it.
The maid lingered by the door “If you need me, just shout. I’m supposed to come if you call.”
Serali watched the door close behind her, and for a long time, she just laid there, unsure of what to do with the silence.
She heard footsteps in the hall, heavier than the maid’s, and her heart hammered. She braced herself, but the footsteps faded, and there was no one at the door.
For hours, nothing happened. No threats, no commands, not even a change in the light. The maid entered a few more times, giving her water and a bit more food.
The water, she realized after a while, was different. There was something in it, not a taste, exactly, but a faint, floral note that lingered at the back of her tongue. She tested the feeling, let it bloom in her chest, and knew, with a kind of grim amusement, that they were still sedating her.
She did not care.
The world softened at the edges, and even the chain at her ankle became a distant thing, not quite real. She lay on the bed, arms outstretched, and watched the sun trace its path across the ceiling.
When the maid came to check on her the last time that day, Serali did not pretend to be asleep. She watched the maid clear the tray, smooth the sheets, and adjust the candle so that its light would last the night.
“Will you be all right?” she asked, lingering at the foot of the bed.
Serali wanted to say yes, wanted to reassure this stranger who’d been assigned to her comfort. Instead, she said, “Are they going to kill me?”
The woman held her gaze.
“I think,” she said carefully, “that if the Queen meant to kill you, she would not have sent for someone competent.”
Serali almost smiled.
Almost.
“And you are competent?”
The woman’s mouth twitched. “So I have been told.”
“By the Queen?”
“Yes.”
Serali closed her eyes.
That was not reassuring.
That was not anything.
The maid only smiled, then left, closing the door as gently as before.
Serali stared at the ceiling, the water and the sedative and the warmth making her heavy, slow, almost content. She tried to hold on to the fear, the memory of the Queen’s grip on her throat, the sound of Everly’s voice in the hallway, but it all seemed far away now, like a story that had happened to someone else.
Serali still didn’t know what they wanted from her, whether this was some kind of new tactic to break her: giving her luxury only to deprive her of it suddenly when she least expected it and shove her back into the cell. Or maybe they were giving her a reprieve before her execution. She had no idea, and the maid wouldn’t answer questions.
The Queen had not been in the room. Serali knew she should be relieved, but every time the door opened, she found herself hoping that Allandra would walk through the doors. Not because she wanted to see her, Serali scolded herself, but because the Queen would maybe at least give her answers about whether she should kill the hope that had been steadily growing in her heart despite her best intentions to expect nothing.
She watched the candle gutter and then right itself, a tiny sun in the darkness.
Eventually, she slept.
Chapter 32: Not by My Hand
Allandra stood outside the door for a full three minutes before acknowledging that she was stalling. She traced the spiral of her right thumb with her left, again and again, the motion so automatic she was surprised to see the skin already worn red from the friction.
Daravan loomed to her left, hands behind his back, boot heel counting time on the flagstones. He did not speak, but the angle of his jaw, the calculated way he fixed his gaze above the door frame, made it clear he was waiting for her to stop being a person and start being Queen again.
She told herself she was giving the prisoner time to recover. A week of food, medicine, and clean sheets might make Serali more likely to talk. Absence might remind her what she owed to mercy.
The truth was uglier: Allandra did not want to look at her.
Not after the thing she had done, and the thing she had not done. She was not afraid, not of the Night Fae, never of that, but of the certainty that in the next encounter, she would see herself reflected in the woman’s eyes, and that whatever she found there would be impossible to walk back.
She nodded once, and Daravan took it as signal. He stepped forward and twisted the key in the lock. He waited until the last click echoed down the hall, then pulled the door wide with a flourish that was almost theatrical.
The guest suite beyond was absurd: plush, sunlit, a parody of hospitality. The bed faced a green-gold window glazed with the queen’s own crest, and the sheets were so violently white they seemed designed to shame anything that bled.
Serali lay atop the covers, hands cuffed to the headboard, one leg drawn up beneath the other as if she’d forgotten she was bound. Her hair, freshly washed, still wet in places, clung to her neck and jaw, making her look younger than before, and weaker. But her eyes, when they found Allandra’s, were alive with the same animal calculation, the same unwillingness to surrender.
She startled at the sound of the opening door, the movement automatic, but then she seemed to remember her audience and immediately became still. For an instant Allandra caught the tremor, the quick narrowing of the gaze, but by the time she’d crossed the threshold, Serali had already recomposed herself into something brittle and unimpressed.
It was the first time they had seen each other since the cell, since the not-beating and the aftermath. For all the words Allandra had prepared, none fit the shape of this moment.
Daravan followed her in and posted himself at the foot of the bed, gaze fixed just to the right of Serali’s shoulder, as if looking directly at her would be an admission.
Allandra took three slow steps, closing the distance, and stopped at the side of the mattress. She looked down at the woman, registering with precise disinterest the bandages, the faint green-blue bruising still at her throat from where Allandra had grabbed her. Serali did not speak. She only blinked, once, and waited.
The silence stretched. Daravan shifted his weight, the leather of his uniform creaking audibly, but did not prompt. Allandra realized, to her dismay, that she was expected to open.
“How are you feeling?” she asked, and the words tasted like wood ash in her mouth.
Serali blinked again. There was a long pause as she processed the question, and in that silence Allandra watched her face rearrange itself, first into shock, then a deep, unguarded sadness, and finally into something sour and cold.
“Truly, Majesty?” Serali said, the title spat with clinical precision. “Never better. Your hospitality is the talk of the continent. Word is you treat your prisoners so well they beg to come back.”
Allandra felt her jaw clench, the familiar flex of irritation as her only defense against the humiliation of being mocked in her own house. “You could be back in the dark,” she said, voice low and sharp. “Would you prefer that?”
Serali’s lips twisted. “This is fine. It’s less honest, but I can adjust.”
Daravan, whose loyalty ran more to the chain of command than to the Queen’s pride, finally spoke. “She’s been good, Majesty. No trouble. The healer says the wounds are—” He caught himself, darted a glance at Serali, and amended, “—progressing.”
Allandra ignored him. She let her attention rest on the woman’s face, searching for the flicker of threat, the shadow of magic, anything that would allow her to believe this was a routine interrogation and not some personal reckoning.
She found nothing. Only a stubborn, exhausted alertness, like the look of an animal too smart to walk into a snare twice.
“I brought you here,” Allandra said, “to talk.”
Serali gave a thin, dry laugh. “I think you brought me here to die. Maybe both, if it’s a busy day.”
“If I wanted you dead,” Allandra said, taking care to make each word slow and precise, “you’d have never left the dungeon.”
Serali looked at the ceiling, then back at Allandra. “Why am I alive, then? I have no value to you. Your people would sooner burn me than feed me, and you—” Her gaze flicked to the Queen’s hand, then her throat, then to the bedpost where the silk was tied in an elegant knot. “I’m not sure what you want from me. Revenge? Gratitude? A confession?”
Everly’s voice rose, uninvited, from the dinner table.
Not a queen sorry.
Allandra’s throat tightened around the words she had not yet managed to say. I am sorry. There. Simple enough for a child. Impossible, apparently, for a queen standing beside a bed she had ordered guarded.
She looked at the leather cuffs, the silk cords, at Serali’s throat where her own hand had left bruises beneath the skin.
An apology would not unlock the door. It would not remove the anklet. It would not put Serali on the ship whose ticket lay folded in Daravan’s possession.
Worse, it might ask Serali to do something with Allandra’s guilt.
So Allandra did what cowards and monarchs had done since the first crown was hammered into shape.
She chose a sentence that sounded useful instead. “You’re not in Lyehira anymore. I don’t require you to thank me for treating you like a person.”
Serali’s face went pale, and for a moment she seemed to draw inward, making herself as small as the cuffs would allow. “You don’t know anything about Lyehira,” she whispered. “Not really.”
Allandra leaned in, letting the faint heat of her voice do the work. “Try me.”
The words hung, and Serali, unable to look away, found herself caught in the net of the Queen’s attention. She tried to say something, failed, tried again. “You think this is mercy. It’s just a different flavor of punishment.”
The Queen did not smile. “If you don’t want my mercy, what do you want?”
Serali looked away, eyes wet. “Nothing,” she said, and the word was so empty it seemed to fall straight through the floor.
For a moment, Allandra wanted to shake her, to force her to fight back, to prove that her own cruelty had not succeeded so thoroughly. Instead, she took a breath, then sat at the very edge of the mattress, a gesture that was calculated to unnerve.
“You are not useful to me as a weapon,” Allandra said. “Not like this. I cannot trade you, cannot parade you, cannot even make an example of you without proving something ugly about myself.”
Serali watched her, the calculation momentarily replaced by confusion.
Allandra shook her head, then turned to Daravan. “Give us a moment,” she said. He hesitated, but at her glare he withdrew, closing the door behind him.
The quiet that followed was different: thicker, unmediated, the kind of silence that forced both parties to account for the sum of their wounds.
Serali’s voice, when she spoke again, was a whisper. “Why did you stop?” Her eyes did not leave the Queen’s hands.
Allandra answered with the truth, because the lie was suddenly too exhausting. “Because I saw your back.”
Serali closed her eyes.
The Queen let the silence settle, and for a while neither of them moved.
When Serali finally opened her eyes, she looked at Allandra as if seeing her for the first time. “What now?” she asked, and there was nothing left of the sarcasm, only a battered, almost childlike hope.
Allandra spoke the words as if they were new to her: “You’re not going to die. Not by my hand.”
Serali stared, unmoving, for a long time. Then, in a voice so thin it nearly vanished, she said, “Thank you.”
Allandra nodded, not trusting herself to say anything more. Serali looked away, and the gesture was so naked in its defeat that Allandra found herself, without thinking, shifting closer. The edge of the mattress bowed under her weight.
Serali’s hair, still damp from washing, smelled faintly of lemon and medicine. The scent reached Allandra before any words could: clean, sharp, unsweetened. Unexpectedly intimate.
For the first time since the dungeon, she was close enough to hurt Serali or comfort her, and she no longer knew which impulse had brought her nearer.
Serali tensed, feeling the shift in the mattress, and looked up to find the Queen within striking distance, a proximity of anatomy she understood only through violence or threat. Serali’s flinch was so small an ordinary observer might have missed it, but Allandra’s senses had been recalibrated by weeks of watching for the tremor, the incipient refusal, the spot, always just below the eye, where the will to resist broke or doubled down.
The recoil landed on Allandra’s skin like a slap. She jerked her own hand away, suddenly aware of its position, as if she’d been about to touch a wound she’d only meant to study. The moment yawned silent, and in it, Serali’s face rearranged itself into something that tried for neutrality and failed, a confusion of shame, apology, and the anger of having been caught out as vulnerable.
Allandra withdrew, not in cowardice but in a kind of private panic, the kind that leaves the body only in the slow ache behind the teeth. She heard herself say, “You don’t have to be afraid of me,” and then she could no longer tell if it was a command or a plea.
It hovered in the air, brittle and raw, a note of unfinished music. Serali looked at her, long and unblinking, and for the first time there was no sarcasm in her gaze, only the mute, grinding calculation of a creature who could not believe in safety, but had lived long enough to recognize its imitation.
Allandra, embarrassed by her own inability to find a proper exit, stood. She smoothed the cuffs of her jacket, then took a step back, as if the physical distance would allow her to reassemble the Mantle’s armor. “Rest. We’ll talk more tomorrow.”
Serali nodded, and Allandra could not help but notice the involuntary relief in the motion,as if she’d been holding her breath for weeks and now at last the world had allowed her a single, clean inhale.
Allandra closed the distance to the door in three clipped steps, signaled for Daravan with a flick of her wrist, and waited for the click of the latch. Daravan shut the door with more force than was strictly necessary, then locked it, the mechanism’s finality ringing through the corridor. For a moment neither moved. The silence between them was less companionable than the one she’d left behind.
“Majesty,” Daravan said, his voice lower than before. Not a question, but full of questions.
She waited a beat, then exhaled. “I’m fine,” she said, and knew at once that he would not believe it.
She was not fine.
She had gone in meaning to be queen, nearly become a woman, and fled before either one could apologize.