Chapter 1: The chains

Serena's POV 

The snow burned my knees through the holes in my trousers, and I had been kneeling for what felt like hours, though time moved differently when you were waiting to die, and I had been waiting to die for as long as I could remember.

The chains bit into my wrists, and the metal was so cold that it felt like fire, colder than the snow beneath me and colder than anything I had ever felt in my twenty-three years of surviving a life that had never wanted me.

I did not look up at the Lycan nobles who lined the courtyard of the ice Castle, and their golden eyes were glowing in the dim light of the frozen torches, and their smiles showed teeth that could tear me apart in seconds. I had learned long ago not to give them my tears, because tears were weakness, and weakness was punished, and I had been punished enough for one lifetime.

"You were always good for nothing," my father's voice echoed in my memory, and they were the last words he had said to me before they put me in the chains and dragged me north across the frozen border toward the castle where monsters lived. "Now you are good for something."

I was twelve years old when my mother died, and I remembered everything about those final weeks with a clarity that had never faded, no matter how many years passed or how many times I tried to bury the memories beneath layers of survival and silence. She had been sick for a long time, the kind of sick that eats you from the inside out, and it turned a woman who was once vibrant and warm into something thin and pale and fragile. I had sat beside her bed every night, and I had held her hand, and I had told her stories, and I had made her promises I could not keep.

"You will get better," I had said, because I was twelve and I still believed in things like hope and healing and happy endings, and because I had not yet learned that the world did not owe me anything, least of all mercy.

She had smiled at me the way she always smiled, even when the pain was bad, even when she could not keep food down, even when her fingers had grown so thin that her rings fell off and rolled across the wooden floor of our small cottage. "You are a healer," she had said, and she touched my face with hands that trembled. "Like me."

But I was not like her, not really, because she could look at a wound and know exactly what it needed, and she could mix herbs and create medicines that worked when nothing else did, and she could save lives with nothing more than her knowledge and her hands and her quiet, steady faith that the world could be mended. She was magic in a way that I had never been, and I was just a girl who did not want to be alone, who did not want to lose the only person who had ever looked at her like she mattered.

She died on a Tuesday, and the snow was falling, and I remembered standing outside for hours after, and I let the snow cover my shoulders and my hair and my face, and I wanted to freeze, and I wanted to disappear, and I wanted to follow her into whatever came next because the thought of staying in that house and in that life without her was worse than any death I could imagine.

My father remarried within a year, and his new wife had sharp teeth and sharper nails and a smile that never reached her eyes, and she did not like me from the moment she stepped through the door. She did not like that I looked like my mother, with the same dark hair and the same grey eyes and the same quiet way of watching the world from a distance, and she did not like that I carried my mother's herbs in a small leather pouch around my neck, the last thing she had given me before she died and the only thing I had left of her.

"You are worthless," my stepmother said to me on more than one occasion, and her voice dripped with a sweetness that made the words cut deeper. "Just like her."

And my father, the man who had once loved my mother enough to marry her and to build a life with her and to give her a daughter, did not disagree. He did not defend me, and he did not even look at me most days, and I learned to make myself small and to be invisible and to move through the rooms of my own home like a ghost that no one wanted to see.

The beatings started small, a slap here and a push there, nothing I could not handle and nothing I had not already learned to brace for. But they grew worse over time, and they became more frequent and more creative in their cruelty, and I learned that tears were a weakness and that crying only made them hit harder and that the best way to survive was to feel nothing at all.

I stopped crying.

I stopped hoping.

I stopped being anything at all, because being nothing was safer than being someone they could hurt.

And then the demand came, the one that would change everything, though I did not know it yet. The Northern lands needed a sacrifice, as they did every season, and a human had to be sent north to the Lycan King's castle to be used and broken and discarded like all the sacrifices before her.

No one knew what happened to those humans once they crossed the border, but everyone knew they did not come back, and that was enough to fill the southern territories with a fear that clung to the walls like frost.

My father signed the papers without hesitation, and his hand moved across the dotted line with a speed that told me he had been waiting for this opportunity, that he had probably been planning it for weeks or maybe months. My stepmother smiled as she packed my things, and she threw the clothes into a bag with no care for how they landed, and she gave me nothing but the rags on my back and the leather pouch around my neck.

"You were always good for nothing," my father said one last time as the guards pulled me toward the waiting cart, as the chains closed around my wrists with a sound that echoed in my ears like a death sentence. "Now you are good for something."

They drugged me after that, and I did not remember much of the journey north, only flashes of snow and ice and the cold that seeped into my bones and stayed there. I woke up on my knees in the courtyard of the ice Castle, and the chains were still biting into my wrists, and the snow was still burning my knees, and I realized that I had not died yet and that I was still breathing and that somehow, against all odds, I was still alive.

The Lycan nobles lined the courtyard around me, and they were beautiful and terrible in equal measure, and their golden eyes glowed in the dim light of the frozen torches, and their smiles showed teeth that could tear me apart in seconds.

One of them threw a piece of bread at my face, and it bounced off my cheek and landed in the snow, and another spat at my feet, and someone called me a human whore, and laughter followed, cruel and bright and utterly without mercy.

I did not look up, because I had learned long ago that the best way to survive was to give them nothing, no tears and no anger and no fear, nothing they could use against me. If you gave them nothing, they would eventually get bored, and boredom was the only weakness I could exploit.

The snow fell harder, and my knees were numb now, and I could feel the blood freezing on my fingers where the chains had broken the skin. I thought about my mother, and I thought about the leather pouch around my neck, and I thought about the dried herbs inside that she had given me with a smile and a promise. "These will protect you," she had said, and I had believed her because I was young and I still believed in things like magic and protection and the idea that a mother's love could shield you from the cruelty of the world.

But the herbs had not protected me from my father or from my stepmother or from the beatings or from the chains or from the cold. They had not protected me from any of it, and yet I kept them anyway because they were hers and because she was the only person who had ever looked at me like I mattered and because letting go of her meant admitting that I was truly alone.

The great doors of the throne room opened with a groan that echoed across the courtyard, and hands grabbed my arms, rough hands and cold hands, hands that belonged to monsters who saw me as nothing more than a gift to be presented and then discarded.

They pulled me to my feet, and my legs did not want to work because they were numb from the cold and the kneeling and the fear that I refused to name, and I stumbled, and they dragged me anyway through the doors and into the warmth and into the light and into the heart of the monster's domain.

The throne room was enormous, and the ceilings disappeared into shadows, and the walls were made of black stone that seemed to absorb the light from the fires burning in iron sconces along the walls. The heat hit my frozen skin like a physical blow, and it hurt because everything hurt, the warmth and the light and the eyes of the nobles who lined the walls, dozens of them and hundreds of them, all watching and all smiling and all waiting to see what would happen to the latest sacrifice.

They dragged me to the center of the room and forced me back to my knees, and the stone floor was cold against my skin, colder than the snow had been, and I stared at the black stone with its red veins running through it like blood, like the blood of all the sacrifices who had come before me, who had knelt in this same spot and waited for the same fate.

"The sacrifice," someone announced, and their voice echoed off the high ceilings and bounced back at me from every direction. "From the southern territories. A gift for the king."

More laughter followed, cruel and bright, and a woman's voice called out, "A gift that breathes," and a man's voice answered, "Not for long," and I did not look up but kept my eyes on the floor, on the red veins, on the blood of the dead, and I waited.

And then the nobles went silent, all of them at once, as if someone had reached into the room and stolen the sound from their throats. The laughter stopped, and the whispering stopped, and even the fires seemed to burn quieter, as if they too were holding their breath.

Someone was coming.

I could feel it, a presence so heavy and ancient and powerful that it seemed to press against my chest like a physical weight, and it made it hard to breathe and hard to think and hard to do anything but kneel there and wait. This was someone who made monsters hold their breath, someone who had ruled these lands for centuries, someone who had killed more humans than I had ever met.

I did not look up, but I felt his eyes on me, and they were burning into the back of my neck like a brand, and I knew somehow, with a certainty that had no rational explanation, that everything was about to change.