Adela never imagined her life would end here: alone in a filthy spare room with a bucket for a toilet after days on days of torture.
But she can wait a few days for her captors to tire of her—or she can save them the trouble. Not that they left anything for her to use for those purposes.
Of course, a third alternative might exist. She knows the nephew of this house’s owner, after all…
A dark, heart-twisting story that proves that even the darkest tales can have happy endings, for everyone who believes in hope—and unexpected allies.
CONTENT NOTIFICATION: Mentions of torture; allusion to rape.
Anamata
Adela huddled in the corner, praying nobody would remember she was there. The bedroom-turned-prison-cell was dark enough that she had trouble counting her fingers in front of her face, and the whole place stank of fear and misery, of human waste left to rot and fester, acrid urine burning her nose even as tears stung her eyes.
Her fingers were crammed into her mouth, something that usually would have been enough to make her puke with just the thought of what they might be covered in—but it was that, or let the sobs right out, and if she cried, someone would hear her, and if someone heard her, they’d take her out and torture her some more.
Probably they would anyway, and every tick and creak of the house cooling—it must be going night again; how many was that now? Three? Four? Something like that—might have been the sound of footsteps in the hall outside, coming to get her.
The first day hadn’t been so bad. That was before they’d taken her and tried to break her—tried, because everyone always underestimated teenage girls, and they hadn’t reckoned on her mental strength. She hadn’t stayed alive for this long while war ravaged the countryside by being soft, or flighty.
And so: the first day had been bearable, even when she’d had to relieve herself in the corner, without even a bucket, because the room had been stripped of furniture except for the bare bones of the wooden slat bedframe and a single sheet—which, in her darker moments, Adela guessed was there purely so that someone desperate enough had a way to end it all, saving their captors the trouble.
The second day had been tolerable, because for a brief interval, she’d had company: an elderly, wizened man so stooped he was shorter than she was—which, given she could maybe hit five three in a decent pair of heels, was saying a lot.
He hadn’t talked much, and he’d smelled of sour sweat and vomit, and the bright red scars over his back and shoulders and arms—torture wounds, sliced open and immediately healed by magic, but healed wrong, so they never stopped burning—had brought bile in the back of Adela’s throat. That was what waited for her, eventually, when they ran out of other, slightly less painful ways to make her talk. Ripping out her fingernails, for example.
But regardless, he’d been someone else to talk to—talk at, anyway—and something to care for other than her own pitiful situation.
Because the truth of the matter was, the only way she was getting out of this was dead, or else if they broken her mind so hard she’d never be of use to anyone, in which case they might decide to be done with her and throw her out into the woods beyond the enchanted fence—but then she’d be dead within the day anyway, of exposure or thirst or caught in the crossfire of yet another skirmish.
A few months ago, the worst thing she could possibly imagine was failing her exams, because that would mean admitting that she wasn’t a real sorcerer, that everyone else was right and genetics mattered after all, and the fact that she and she alone could use magic but not detect other people’s lies like all the other sorcerers meant that she was somehow lesser, inferior, unimportant.
The day she’d arrived at the famous Sibelius Sorcery Academy, she’d vowed that no one would ever have an excuse to call her inferior again, not after that prat Jiri Tahallin with his white-blond hair and ocean-dark eyes had stood up in front of the whole school after the welcome dinner and denounced her as a dud while the scent of candle smoke and pumpkin pie spice mix filled the air, and the taste of despair and homesickness filled her throat.
Screw him. He hadn’t known her then—and he hadn’t learned any better in the interim, either, even though she’d been top of every class, always spreading rumours about how she must be cheating, must be getting help, or—in the last twelve months, about halfway through sixth year when he’d turned dark and broody—that maybe she was sleeping her way to the top.
Although, to be fair, it was his awful crony Hydrant—red of hair, ruddy of skin, prone to gushing—who’d come up with that one, and the black-haired idiot Gully who’d done most of the spreading, probably to try to get into Tahallin’s good graces.
But right now, it was easier to be angry than to try to make excuses for him; no, not just easy, but possibly a matter of life and death, as Adela sat cross-legged, alone in the dark, trying to breathe shallowly against the urine stench, leaning her forehead against the cold, splintery leg of the bedframe, picking at the skin around her fingernails because physical pain was concrete, measurable, tangible, and it sure beat the vague, amorphous anxiety thrumming through her head.
The door opened.
Adela’s heart contracted, and for a fleeting moment she wondered if this was the end, if she was going to die of a heart-attack before anything else could even happen, never to know how the war ended, or whether everything they’d done had been worthwhile after all.
Then her breath caught in her throat, because the man at the door wasn’t a man, he was lean and still a little gangly, his white-blond hair almost bright in the light shining from somewhere way down the passageway, away from where they’d stashed her.
Of course. This was his uncle’s house, after all; it made sense that Tahallin would be around somewhere.