Chapter 2 What the Road Brought

Cian

“Hill above me. Stone around me. Road below me, remember me. Name within me, stay.”

“He’s chanting again,” one of the guards says with a laugh. I keep my forehead against the wall and force the words through split lips.

“Hill above me. Stone around me. Road below me, remember me. Name within me, stay.”

The lash bites across my back before I can finish the next breath. Pain tears through me so hard my vision blurs white, and a roar rips out of me. My chains snap taut above me, and iron bites deeper into my wrists. Their laughter fills the cell as my head drops forward again until my brow knocks against the stone. Blood runs warm down my back, then colder as the air reaches it. They will not break me.

Another crack of the lash tears over half-healed flesh and opens it again.

“Still pretty enough for a prince,” the guard says. “Though less every day.” I lift my head just enough to look at him over my shoulder. He stands beyond my reach in silver-threaded leathers and polished boots, whip loose in one hand, glamour smooth over every ugly thing beneath it. Bright Thorn always did love silk over poison.

“Where are the remnants of Hollow Hill?” he asks. I say nothing. He grabs my hair and yanks my face back. “Where did they run? Who shelters them? Which roads still answer you?”

A pulse of laughter rises in my chest, but it catches on blood instead. The roads do not answer me here. That is the point of this place. They built it deep. Stone packed with rowan ash. Iron worked into every seam. Wards under the floor, through the walls, through me. They buried me where the old paths go thin and strangled, where no doorway opens fully, and no silence belongs to me. Except for the ward-stone set into the middle of the cell. That they left. That they carved for me. A single place where the roads can still be reached, if they spill enough of my blood to make them listen. 

The guard lets go of my hair, and my face strikes the wall. Stars burst behind my eyes. I close them anyway. There was a time I could hear the roads beneath the world. Feel them under root and hill, old hidden ways folded between one breath and the next. My mother taught me to listen for them beneath Hollow Hill, her hand over mine, her voice low in the dark. Listen first. Always listen first.

The first cuff around my wrist gives with a hard metallic crack. My arm drops, and pain tears through my shoulder as blood rushes back into it. The second wrist follows, then the cuffs at my ankles. The guards drag me back from the wall, laughing as I stumble.

“Careful, prince.”

I would kill him with my teeth if I could reach him.

They haul me into the middle of the cell and force me down into the ward circle carved into the floor. I dig my heels in, but one hand fists in my hair while another slams into the back of my knees. Stone smashes into bone, and my breath leaves me in a sharp grunt.

“Hold him.”

Hands lock around my arms and shoulders, pinning me flat. My left hand is forced forward, fingers spread over the smooth black centre of the circle where too much blood has stained the stone darker than the rest. I wrench against the hands holding me, but there are too many of them and too little of me left.

“Open it.”

The Hollowing is not meant for this. It is not a door handle. It is blood and instinct and listening. It is dark soil, remembering your feet. It is the world loosening at the edges because it knows you. But these butchers know only how to cut until something tears.

The humming beneath the floor rises. The roads shiver, far and thin and angry. I brace against it with everything left in me, shoving the pull down, locking it behind pain and rage, behind the ruined cage of my own body. My hand spasms against the stone as my blood floods the circle, the ward lines flare, and the world loosens. No.

I feel a seam catching. A path straining. Dragged wider by force. The edges of the walls bend, and somewhere beyond the stink of iron and rot, another scent slips through. Green things. Wet earth. Sun-warmed grass. My eyes snap open. That is not one of ours. It is definitely not the deep, dark under-road of Hollow Hill or any buried fae passage.

“Hold him steady,” the guard snaps, and I hear the thin edge of triumph in his voice. They think they are reaching my people. They think if they tear the Hollowing open wide enough, one of the hidden roads will answer and hand Hollow Hill to them. Fools. The roads do not work like that.

The seam trembles beneath the floor. For one suspended heartbeat, all I can feel is bare feet on soft ground, summer air, a presence light and alive at the edge of an old road. How? I do not know. The guards do not feel the difference. They do not know what is brushing the torn edge of the seam. To them, it is only another flare of ward-light, another pulse of blood through stolen stone. The circle hums once beneath my hand, hard enough to shake the carvings. Then the pressure snaps, and the ward lines dim. The guard in front of me swears.

“Nothing,” one of the others mutters.

“No road,” says another.

The one with the whip stares at the blood in the carved lines, jaw tight with anger. Then he rises.

“Chain him back up.”

Hands drag me from the floor and haul me backward across the cell. Iron bites when they wrench my arms high above me again. My ankles are forced apart and fixed in place. Pain tears through me, but I barely feel it. My focus is locked on the ward-stone. On the seam they cannot see. One by one, I hear the guards leave—the door slams. The key grinds in the lock. Still, the path remains, trembling in the dark, and I fight to keep my eyes on it. To stay awake. To hold on to the mad, impossible hope that this time, something will come through and drag me out of this hell.

The room blurs, and the stone swims in my vision… Then the seam opens, and the figure drops onto the ward-stone with a sharp breath. For one impossible second, I think the prison has finally split my mind clean through. She is tiny. Soft skin. Wide blue eyes. A tumble of blonde hair spilling loose around her shoulders. So small I could crush her. So beautiful, she does not belong in a place like this. She looks up at me… And darkness takes me.