by Tom Hansen
Ynya held her breath.
“I’ll tell you what. Your sister will be dragon, the boy will be the spike, Joanne will be the clover, and the failed Skarmyord will sub in for the fane. How does that sound? Shall we leave it up to the Gods to determine fate?”
Ynya gritted her teeth. She couldn’t count how many times she wanted to jump across the table and tear him limb from limb. How many times she had dreamt about doing the same things to him as he did to her.
If only she had her magic.
But I don’t. I don’t have any magic, and I’m going to have to get out of this without it.
The Warden dealt the cards, then paused before playing.
“I did tell you that I’m very, very good at this game, right? In fact, one of the abilities enhanced in my Skarmyord training was that of card counting. I already know where every card in this hand is, and I will complete the whole game in less than a minute. Shall we time it?”
A violent explosion rocked the yard outside the building. The ground shook like an earthquake. Above them, timbers lurched and groaned. The interrogation room walls cracked, throwing shards of plaster through the middle of the room.
Ynya fell back as her chair buckled.
Rumbling and cracking continued as the whole building shook around them. Outside, a terrible noise raged through the camp, like a hurricane running aground.
Prisoners screamed, and soldiers shouted.
“Get her out of here,” the Warden yelled.
Two guards grabbed Ynya and hoisted her to her feet. They removed the shackles and one threw her over his shoulder.
“Back to the Pit!”
As they ran outside, Ynya realized it wasn’t an earthquake that hit the building.
It was wind.
A torrential gale blew throughout the entire compound. Fences bent, rocks and ice chunks flew through the air. Windborne detritus pelted Ynya’s exposed skin, cutting her in a dozen places.
“Get her back! We need to head to section four!”
Just one guard escorted Ynya, while a torrential storm raged all around them. If she could get away from this guard, she might have a chance to escape.
Escape.
The word was practically foreign to her at this point. Too long she’d been captured and toyed with by the Warden and his soldiers. Too long, she’d been a part of the system and not part of a solution.
Ynya kicked out with her knee, connecting with the man’s stomach. She twisted and scraped at his face, her fingers catching soft flesh. She must have caught something because he dropped her with a scream.
“You bitch!”
He reeled for a second, which was just enough time for her to get to her feet.
Ynya ran, into the wind. The horrific gale tore at her clothes and pelted her with dirt and debris, but she closed her eyes and kept going.
The solder grabbed her foot and pulled. She toppled, hitting the ground.
“You’re not getting away that easily!”
He seized her from behind, his thick arm choking her tiny neck.
The wind stopped.
Ynya opened her eyes, expecting to see the compound before her, but all she saw was a sheer wall of wind in a tube, reaching to the sky.
She was in the eye of the storm.
“You will leave her alone.”
Something hit the man with a sickening crunch of bone and squish of blood. The man choking Ynya went limp and fell away.
She felt his body crumple behind her, no longer a threat.
Ynya looked into the middle of the eye, and was surprised to see a girl standing in front of her.
It was her sister.
“Finny?”
Finny’s wild red hair danced on end, reaching into the sky as the violent winds surged around her. Her little hands clenched into white fists as she stared with blank eyes at Ynya.
She was terrifying and beautiful at the same time.
Ynya’s heart broke. Finny is alive! She finally saw her sister after all this time. Her knees wouldn’t support her weight anymore and she fell to the ground.
Around them, the storm raged on, people screamed, and soldiers yelled, but for one terrifying moment, the two sisters stared at each other as their red hair whipped with the wind.
Finny blinked and the eye disappeared.
The tempest overtook Ynya and pulled her into the storm, into the violent miasma of the wind.
Everything faded into nothing.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Ynya awoke to the dark. It was warm, silent, and cozy.
Too cozy.
She remembered hitting her head on the timbers last time she’d woken like this and took some time to feel around with her hands.
The ground was stone. The walls were a mixture of wood and plaster but rough, not like the smooth walls she had grown accustomed to. The walls were also incredibly close together, with barely enough room for her to sit sideways between them.
Where the hell am I?
Then she remembered.
“Finny? Finny, are you there?”
That was Finny, right? Or did I hallucinate?
Ynya didn’t feel a ceiling, so she slowly stood, constantly probing out with her hands.
Every part of her body hurt. Hundreds of little cuts across her skin had scabbed over, a couple of them probably still oozed blood, but she was alive. Her hair was a tangled mess with hundreds of small objects in it.
She needed water. She needed food. She needed a bath.
The cuts across her body, while painful, were also evidence that the storm had been very real. Ynya grabbed her neck, still feeling the lingering soreness from where the soldier had choked her.
If the storm and the soldier choking me were real, was Finny real too?
Ynya stood fully erect, feeling the walls beside her. It was just wide enough to walk through with her shoulders brushing the side. What sort of room is so narrow you could stand and walk, but only in one direction?
It dawned on her. She was inside a wall.
She was in the space between walls inside a building.
The realization was both freeing and terrifying at the same time.
What wall in what building am I in? Why am I here? How did I get here? Did someone help me?
Ynya crouched down once again, feeling around. After a bit of crawling, she surmised she was in the wall of a room at least twelve feet across. Both ends of the wall turned in two directions.
That didn’t give her much to go off of, but she could at least figure she was safe.
Voices sounded in the distance, along with clomping boots.
Ynya sat back down and pulled her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around her legs to make herself as small as possible. She tried not to move.
Muffled, but still audible, she listened to two men come into the room. Whatever they sat on squeaked, most likely some rusty chairs. After they sat, Ynya tried to hear their conversation.
It was difficult to make out what they did while they spoke, but it sounded like they changed shoes based on the clomp of items dropped to the floor.
Mostly, they talked.
They spoke about repairs and lost prisoners. They spoke about the destruction and even complained about how many hours they were being forced to work to fix everything. They complained that the Warden was on a warpath and how it would take days or weeks to fix the destruction caused by the storm.
The last part made Ynya smile.
The storm was real, and there had been massive destruction throughout the encampment.
Maybe, if all of that was real, then she had actually seen Finny.
The thought warmed her heart in a way she hadn’t felt in days. Knowing that one of her sisters was out there, alive, filled her with a joy she could barely contain.
Despite the pains in her body, the cuts all over her skin, and the sickening pit in her stomach from lack of nourishment, Ynya sat in the dark with a wide smile on her face.
Ynya fought
the urge to cry with relief. She fought the urge to shout for joy.
She remembered she had other sisters.
She didn’t know what had happened to Synol. She still didn’t know where Meki was, or if she was alive or not.
She didn’t know where any of her fellow prisoners were, either. Joanne hadn’t been seen in days. Little Tyrain had been taken again and she worried about him handling the game the Warden liked to play with his prisoners. Finally, Ynya worried about big hulking Gustave. The Warden had said he would leave him alone, but that was before she’d gone missing.
A shudder wormed up her spine. She was missing from the camp.
That meant the Warden would be furious.
After seeing first-hand what sort of twisted tortures the man used, Ynya couldn’t bear the thought that he might unleash his rage on the entire camp because she was missing.
Ynya shoved down the thought. Worrying about what one madman did was a waste of time. She was free. She would be able to help from the outside. She would be able to sneak around at night through the chaos of the repairs being done to the camp. She would help everyone else escape.
She would find Finny, and Synol, and all the rest of her friends, and get them out of here.
Then she and Synol would turn around and bury this place. The location and the people who ran it would never harm another mage ever again.
Chapter Twenty-Three
After the guards left and there was no more sound, she risked moving around again.
The first thing Ynya did was map out the area in her head. She knew one wall was about twelve feet to one side. She rounded a corner and found that the next wall was twelve feet on the other side.
Square rooms.
In the distance, she heard the soft sound of springs creaking. Maybe I’m in their barracks?
Loud snores confirmed her suspicions. The thought terrified her to her bones. It meant she was in the midst of her enemy.
But it was also brilliant. Where would a prisoner go to hide? Would it be toward the soldiers, or away from them?
It might have been the most brilliant location for her to sleep, deep in the belly of the beast, inches away from the soldiers from which she hid.
She could be side by side with them, without them even knowing it.
If only she knew how she had arrived here, then she might be able to puzzle how to get out. There was the problem of her thirst and growling belly.
Ynya kept mapping out her space. Her way became blocked and she realized she’d found a doorway. She went the other way.
She was in a wall between identical rooms. The spring sounds and snoring came from only one room.
Sleeping soldiers on one side, silence on the other.
They must be working in shifts.
That also meant she needed to be quiet in here, because there were always soldiers around.
Ynya sat and listened, silent and still as a terrified little mouse. Had she not been so still, she probably would have never noticed a slight draft of cold air against her skin. She crawled forward until she found where she had come in.
A small, low cutout in the wall led to the barracks where all the soldiers slept. An inch in front of it, probably blocking it from view, Ynya felt cool metal. Some sort of dresser or box blocking the hole? There was no light in the room outside, or Ynya might have found the entrance with her eyes and not by feel.
There was no way Ynya could have made it all the way into the barracks, found a hole hidden behind a metal box, and crept into this hidden space behind the walls on her own.
She had help getting here.
It’s the only explanation. The question is, who helped me? Why?
She couldn’t explain any of it. She hadn’t befriended any of the soldiers here. In fact every last one had been incredibly professional while they dealt with her. No small talk, just orders and follow-through.
If she snuck out now and ran into the wrong guards, it would be all over. Ynya didn’t know who to trust, so she needed to make sure when she did, it was safe.
She made another circuit around the walls, looking for any spot that could have been another egress to this little space, but she found none. There was only one entrance and it was apparently well-hidden. Whoever had put her here would most likely check on her at some point, and she could learn the identify of her captor then.
She hoped it was a friend, and not a foe.
Ynya dreaded the idea that someone was keeping here and she had no idea who it was.
For a moment, she wondered if this was another one of the Warden’s tricks. Maybe he had put here in here to see what she would do.
She shoved out the idea. If it was a trick, there wasn’t much she could do about it. If it wasn’t, she didn’t want to miss any opportunities that might arise out of worry that she might get punished for stepping out of line.
Ynya had nothing to lose and everything to gain by assuming this was real.
Besides, if it was all a trick, then did the Warden trick me into seeing Finny? She couldn’t allow herself to believe that. She had to hold on to that faith that Finny was there.
She decided the only thing she could do was sleep. Ynya tucked herself around the corner with only her head sticking out, opposite the wall with the cutout so she could watch the opening. She wanted to see who came to visit before they saw her.
With that, she fell asleep.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Ynya awoke to some slight scraping sounds.
As long as it’s not a mouse.
Luckily for her, it wasn’t a mouse. Her plan to see her captor first, worked.
But it wasn’t anyone she recognized.
A large head of dark curly hair pushed into the small space, followed by one of the nighttime glowing orbs.
At first, she was only able to see the back of his head as he looked away from her down the cramped little hallway. Then when he faced her, Ynya saw he was a man with incredibly dark skin.
Ynya scooted around the corner, out of sight.
The man chuckled. “I see your red hair, Ynya.”
Dammit!
“It’s okay, it’s safe now. You can come out. I brought some food and water, and I bet you need to go to the toilet.”
Her insides roiled. She needed all three really badly, especially the last one.
“We need to hurry though. The other guards will be back from their shift shortly and will go to bed. Luckily, the Warden’s issuing free vodka rations to the troops to quell the discontent from working so hard. We have about ten minutes until they are here. I couldn’t break away until I had at least one drink with them, otherwise it would have looked suspicious.”
It was time to make a decision. She couldn’t stay here, and even if this man had plans for her, she still could move through the walls faster than he could.
She stuck her head out. “Who are you?”
She could see his features now that he faced her. His hair was even curlier than hers, but much shorter. He had a wide, burly face and broad, squished nose.
He smiled at her, showing off his large, white teeth.
She had never seen someone with such dark skin before. She knew that the farther south you went, the darker-skinned the people got because of the extra sun. Up here in the pale, cloudy north, it was all fair-skinned people who burned when the sunlight touched their skin too much.
I have to admit, he’s kinda cute.
“My name is Thore. I am Joanne’s friend. I work the gate to the compound.”
Thore. She’d heard that name before.
“How do I know I can trust you, Thore? That’s a pretty common name from up here, but you don’t look like you are from the north.”
He smiled again. “No, Miss. I’m from down south. I was adopted as a baby. My family found me in a basket on the edge of town after troops had killed or enslaved everyone there. They weren’t sure where I came from, but they suspected my family had immigrated from farther south before the Feond went
up.”
Ynya frowned. There were so many stories similar to his, that she was beginning to get an idea of how the Frost Queen operated everywhere. She wondered how the Frost Queen was going to have any subjects to rule over if everyone was either in prison, or a conscripted soldier.
She crept around the corner.
“Let’s get you to the bathroom first. I can sneak you over to our facility, but we’ll need to do it quickly.”
Thore rushed her over to the commode inside a small room at the back of the barracks. He waited outside while she did her business, just in case any other soldiers came by.
Ynya felt pretty embarrassed with a man only inches away through the door, but she had no choice. If she didn’t do it now and make it back safely, then all her hiding would be for naught. Besides, her only other option was using a corner in the walls that would get her found out anyway.
Plus it was incredibly gross.
The barracks looked to be exactly what she expected from the outside. Each room was about twelve by twelve with a wall in between. Four bunks filled each room, wooden frames with metal springs underneath to suspend a straw mattress. Each barrack faced a hallway, and the smaller hallways connected to a larger corridor. The barracks were very dark, with occasionally placed orbs casting barely enough light to see without tripping, so Ynya wasn’t able to get a good look at the place. She would have to sneak back out during the daytime.
The cutout to her wall hid behind a footlocker beside Thore’s bed. The entrance was just small enough that the cutout fit entirely behind the metal and wood trunk. Thore must have really squeezed to get in.
Thore handed Ynya a small burlap bag. “There is some food in there, but you better get inside, the troops are coming.”
She tossed the bag in, then paused. “Thank you for hiding me.”
Her ‘thank you’ seemed to make him pause. “You’re welcome, but please hide. I can’t risk you being found out.”
