The female stops rocking, eyes snapping open—glossy bold-blue orbs staring at him through the gloom. “You will release me,” she bites out, dashing the tear from her cheek.
Arkyn clicks his tongue, glancing around her cell, taking in its plush details: a crumpled blanket, a straw pallet, a tray bearing an empty bowl from one of her regular meals. She even has a wooden bucket so she’s not forced to shit where she sleeps. More home comforts than he offers other prisoners.
She is, after all, his niece.
Not that she knows that. Not that any of his half-brothers knows he exists, as far as he’s aware.
But they will.
“That’s exactly what I’ve come to offer,” he says, crouching before the curve of bone bars and easing his hand through, a piece of parchment pinched between two outstretched fingers. “Release.”
Her eyes widen.
She scurries forward in a clatter of iron chains, snatching the piece of parchment and smoothing it on the ground. She frowns up at him, tucking strips of matted hair behind her pointed ear. “It’s blank.”
“I need you to sign your name,” Arkyn states, threading a runed quill through the bars.
She takes it, scratching out her signature while he studies the pretty skin on her hands, stuffing down the urge to burn it … if just a little bit. See if she, too, refuses to scream.
He certainly doesn’t acknowledge that it’s more complicated than that. That he’s resentful of her plush life. Of the way her pah dotes on her.
Loves her.
Nor does he acknowledge that he’s curious to see how she would fare were she cast into the Boltanic Plains and told to run while a roar of fire nips at her heels. Sizzles her flesh.
Would she carve out a life for herself in the barren hollows of an unloved terrain? Would she forge her weakness into a fearsome strength?
Would she thrive?
She passes the note and quill back through the bars, a hopeless sheen to her eyes.
No wonder his half-brother protected her so. She’s but a pretty ornamental flower, and flowers singe in the face of flames.
He decides she would not thrive at all. She would die as he almost did too many times to count.
He leaves without words or flair, the torn hem of his cloak fluttering in his wake as he moves through the elaborate tangle of cold, dark burrows, only stopping once he comes to his personal suite. He sits at his perfectly polished desk lit by a blazing candelabra stolen from someone long ago and spreads the parchment upon the tabletop.
He studies the bounty of treasures surrounding him—his suite a conglomeration of only the best, most interesting bits he’s scavenged over the phases.
The Princess had fallen into his lap as a sign from the Creators, he was certain. Too good an offer to pass up, given she immediately demanded he send a lark to the Burn King himself.
Not a single mention of her doting pah.
Handy, seeing he has no interest in The Shade. The only seat he cares about is the bronze throne of The Burn that rightfully belongs to him.
This is it. The very moment he’s been channeling toward for so long.
Arkyn sits straighter, quill poised as he looks down. For the first time, he examines the flat of parchment, pausing.
Smiling.
She signed, yes … but amongst the scrawl, in a tiny, almost indiscernible script she did well to meld with the shape of her name, is a single sentence:
He chuckles, scratching his own note upon the empty space before folding the parchment lark down its activation lines, giving it life, whispering a name upon its fluttering wings.
She has more bite than he’d anticipated.
Perhaps he was wrong about her. Perhaps she would survive after all. The same, however, cannot be said about her uncle.
No …
He has plans for the great Kaan Vaegor, who took Arkyn’s revenge for himself, and none of them are pretty.
The parchment lark takes flight, soaring from the Scavenger King’s personal suite and out into the halls. It weaves through the underground warren toward the world outside, bypassing a different lark on its way past the cells …
A small, wobbly one with a tear in its wing and a blood splotch on its tail.
The damaged lark dips between two bars to where Princess Kyzari is bound on the ground in a ball beneath her filthy blanket, the scoop of her hand a landing pad the little lark dives toward—face-first, crushing its nose against her fingers.
Kyzari flinches. Opens her eyes.
The lark flips onto its back, bearing three small, perfectly scripted letters upon the underside of its belly …
Click here for the When the Moon Hatched playlist.