Page 144 of Spring Guardians & Songbirds

She sighed. “Are you certain you wish to see this?”

“Though I did faint before you, Moriko of Hanai, I am not faint of heart.”

She nodded and led me through further underground until we reached a grand cave about the size of my castle. The ceiling was hanging with roots and bright with a lime-coloured stone that shone like the starry night. In the middle of the room stood a body dispensed in the air, burning unburnt inside a crisp blue fire. The boy was young. Too young. His body slashed all over and mutilated in such a form that his features were completely gone.

“The everflow of his magic will keep his body young forever. He will burn as such till the end of Numen. We can’t even bury him. But Ryuu will keep the outside safe from his magic by absorbing it.”

“Anything on whose son it might be? It could point us to the elder Crafters.”

“We looked in the archives after finding him here. It didn’t take us long since there are not many Ybrises born in our time. His mother had sold him to a Dark Crafter right before he’d bloomed his blessing, no name was noted.”

Sold. A mother had sold him. My eyes drew shut when I noticed the little makeshift bed at the far corner of the cave and the many wooden toys scattered here and there. Five hundred years. This little boy had been here for five hundred years. Alone. Scared. In the dark.

Moriko rested a hand on my shoulder. “Calm, Kilian.”

I let the dark unravel from me and envelop the boy’s body, death flying inside the hearth of life and around an unending well of magic. The fire began dousing and his body dropped from the height, powerless—entirely lifeless. The gift of my magic. It could take life from anything and anyone.

“Don’t,” Moriko warned right before I faded to catch him.

He was light. So light. Barely bones and no flesh.

I laid him on the ground while I knelt and dug out the soft soil with my dagger. I dug and dug till I’d made enough space for his body. Wrapping him with my jacket, I put him on his resting place and spread the soil over his body. There were no remnants of a soul inside him that I could send to the skies. Nothing. He couldn’t be happy in the heavens either.

Moriko kneeled beside me, resting her palm over the scattered soil. A bed of gypsophila blooming in the purest white.

The world had failed him. His mother had failed him. Everyone had failed him.

Chapter twenty

Anguis

Snowlin

Dressed in Adriatian rags, hair dishevelled to a mess, fresh scars across my whole body—I looked like the perfect victim as Sebastian carried me in his arms down the corridors of Tenebrose castle.

The doors opened as Sebastian brought me inside the meeting chambers. Gasps and loud murmurs floated between those in the room.

A strange large rough hand rested on my face. Barely holding myself from flinching away and cringing, I cracked an eye slightly open enough to make out the stern features of my enemy. Father stood there, observing me with both doubt and a strange frown on his face.

“How was she found, where?” he questioned Sebastian who lowered his head, closing his eyes with distraught—like I had taught him.

“Tortured and imprisoned by the Adriatian king’s prison quarters when we were looking for His Highness, prince Aryan. We lost twenty men trying to bring her out, but she is alive. Our Adriatian prisoners said she had disappeared the night before her wedding,” he answered, just as I had instructed him to.

A lie twisted with another lie to deceive the liar of the whole lie himself.

My father would hardly fall for this, but I only needed him to doubt himself long enough to keep me here till I had my answers.

He said nothing and out of the sudden took me in his arms, bringing me to his chambers, shouting orders to his guards to call for a healer and not letting anyone disturb or hurt me.

Different from before, there was a thick light barrier and a metallic tinge of dark craft surrounding him. Protection? Was father that afraid? Oh, my.

The moment after he left, I opened my eyes to the real prison I had brought myself to, the chambers that once had really been my cage.

The healers came not long after father had called for them, they tended to my injuries which the liquid cuts elixir had done a marvellous job in carving. To my good luck, for the past few months I had lost weight enough to hollow my cheeks, so I did look the tortured and imprisoned part. Servants had come to tend to me, but I had kicked them all out, half shouting like a madwoman till they had been so afraid they had almost run out of the room. I bathed calmly and dressed in my mother’s floaty grey dress brought by the servants at my request. I wanted to show my poor condition to my father who was the most distrusting of all.

I sat by the bed in silence, staring at the blessed frost storm raging outside. It was the end of February and spring had a foot out, yet winter didn’t seem to have fainted at all in Isjord.

The doors of the room opened, my heart beating the sound of the drums of death as I slowly turned to face him.