The Bride Is Collected

As soon as I got back to the palace, I walked straight back to the room, not bothering to meet my father's furious gaze or Dorian's worried brow lift.

I was kept locked in my room. I couldn't deal with anything right now, just staying as a prisoner in my own home.

Not chained, actually not literally, just two guards outside my door who wouldn't meet my eyes, and a ward on the windows I could feel humming faintly against my skin whenever I got too close. My mother's doing, probably. She always did like to make sure a lesson stuck.

I would have found a way to break out of it, but the combination kept changing every time.

I was still furious about it.

Not the confinement itself; I’d expected that, but the fact that I hadn't been able to fight past her blood magic at all. Not for one second. All that raw, useless power I’d never been able to properly wield through reading, and the one time I actually needed it, my body had simply obeyed her instead of me.

I hated how easily I’d folded.

The maids arrived before the sun was fully up, three of them, moving around me with the brisk, careful efficiency of people who’d clearly been warned not to engage me in conversation. I let them. I didn't have anything to say to them anyway. They were useless kiss-asses and would even snitch on a newborn if it meant they would get a reward.

I was quiet while they worked, but it wasn't the quiet of a girl who’d made peace with anything. It was the quiet of a girl doing arithmetic.

If I couldn't get out of the palace, perhaps I could manage it somewhere on the road — a supply stop, a river crossing, some moment when the guards' attention slipped.

If the road gave me nothing, perhaps Duskmere territory itself would be less watched than everyone assumed, some blind spot in unfamiliar land that worked in my favor precisely because it was unfamiliar. If the escort was Lycari and not fae or human, perhaps I could compel one of them the way I’d tried on my own guards a hundred times as a girl—badly, but perhaps badly was enough if I only needed a few seconds.

I was still building that ladder of maybes, rung by rung, when my mother came in.

I knew immediately something was wrong. She didn't sit. She didn't even fully close the door behind her, like she wanted an easy way out of whatever she was about to say.

"Your magic will be sealed before you leave," she said. No preamble. No apology in it either.

"What?" I stood abruptly.

"Temporarily," she said, like that softened it. "Until you reach Duskmere and the escort has safely delivered you."

"You can't be serious."

"After last night, we cannot risk you using magic against the royal escort. It would be seen as an act of aggression. It could unravel the entire alliance," she said in her “queen” voice.

"So instead you'll unravel me," I said, my voice shaking, which I hated immediately. "You don't trust me enough to let me leave with what little magic I actually have."

She didn't deny it. That was somehow worse than if she had.

"It's for your protection as much as the alliance's," she said, which I didn't believe for a second, and I don't think she entirely believed it either.

I wanted to fight her. I knew, even as the thought formed, that it wouldn't matter — she'd proven as much several times over. So I stood still instead, chin up, and let her do it, because refusing to give her the satisfaction of seeing me struggle was the only power I had left to spend.

The sealing didn't hurt, exactly. It was worse than hurting.

It was absence.

A door I'd spent eighteen years barely managing to crack open, sealed shut so completely I couldn't even feel the shape of it anymore. I reached for that familiar ache in my chest, the one that had always meant magic was close even when it refused to answer me, and found nothing there at all. Just quiet. Just a version of myself with something missing.

I have never in my life felt so hollowed out by an emptiness I couldn't even properly grieve, because grieving it would have meant admitting how much I’d needed it.

I let myself be furious for exactly one minute.

Then I made myself stop. There's not much a witch can do without her magic.

Fine, I thought. If they've taken the one thing they were afraid of, I'll simply have to become something else they should have been afraid of instead.

My intelligence hadn't been sealed. My observation hadn't been sealed. Whatever tongue I had left to talk my way through a locked door, whatever patience I had to watch and wait and learn the shape of a new cage before I tried to find its bars—none of that could be taken from me with a spell.

They'd have to work harder than that.

The sound of horses reached the palace not long after, hooves and wheels on stone, and I felt my stomach drop even though I’d known this moment was coming since the second I was caught at that gate.

The maids finished dressing me in silence. When I finally looked at myself in the mirror, I didn't recognize the girl looking back. Not because the dress was beautiful, though it was, but because there was nothing left in her face of the girl who’d never assumed her life would turn like this a week ago. Everything went off after that stupid letter, that letter Father won't let me see.

I inhaled sharply as I remembered what had gone wrong recently, from the impromptu meeting to the dining news, and now I'm here standing like a bride supposed to be happy that she was about to go into the monster's land.

This girl looked like something being handed over. Because she was.

A herald's voice rang out from the courtyard below, announcing the arrival of the Lycari delegation, and I made myself walk to the window, ignoring the buzzing beneath my skin, and looked down at the banners snapping black and silver against the grey morning.

"Is the Alpha King here?" I asked the maid nearest me, my voice steadier than I felt.

She hesitated, glancing toward the door like she hoped someone else might answer for her.

"His Majesty is not among them," she said finally.

"What!"