Page 34 of Requiem of Silence

Not even in your youth were you ever brought so low as to tolerate hand-me-downs. But to rise again, sometimes we must first fall. So you accede to the garments because they keep out the biting cold.

Instead of the prison cell, you are brought to what was oncea lavish guest room. Now it is in tatters like all else in this place. But it has a fireplace crackling with heat, and you stand before it, warming yourself for hours.

Echoes of wailing winds moan their ragged songs. You rub your hands together to keep feeling in them, and don moth-eaten mittens so your fingers do not cramp and fall off from frostbite. At least that’s the warning one of the guardians gives.

The waiting game continues. Regardless of your captor’s words, you don’t cease your attempts to draw blood and conjure. Just a drop is all you need to be free. Every creature with blood flowing warm through their veins can harness its power with the proper education. But you have been cut off from even that.

Now, but not forever.

When Nikora finally returns, days later, you are ready. You rise to face her, belly full and mind sharp. If she sees the resolve darkening your eyes she does not let on.

“Come with me,” is all she says. The guards step aside, letting you out of the room that is just another kind of prison.

Only a small part of the building is even moderately livable. The castle was cut into the mountain, so the rough-hewn rock walls have stayed secure. But the man-made parts of the structure have submitted to age and decay. Large sections of roof are missing, in addition to many walls. You cross a courtyard where crumbling spires loom overhead, threatening to fall at any moment. The heavy furs buffer the chill in the air, but you miss the warmth of your desert land.

Finally, after negotiating a set of decaying stairs completely open to the elements on all sides and held up by hope more than any visible architectural buttress, you pass through a shallow cave to reach a top level with no walls at all.

There is no exit from what is essentially a platform hovering in midair except the cavelike hallway you stand in, barred with an ancient iron gate.

A fine layer of snow carpets the stone ground where at least a dozen men sit chained together. They all wear tattered army uniforms, the green of Lagrimar. But they have been given no furs, no boots. Still, they all have their limbs intact. Frost has not bitten their skin away.

You peer more closely to find they are members of the Wailers. You recoil. Their necks are bare.

“You have uncollared them!” Your voice is far more powerful than you intend. Rage explodes inside, bringing a modicum of heat to your skin. “Are you mad?”

Nikora raises a hand. “They are no danger to me. Or you,” she adds. “We have ways of subduing them.” The Wailers sit side by side, rocking slightly, vacant expressions on their faces.

“What did you do?”

These men belong to you, onlyyoumay do with them what you wish, and it would be wasteful to allow them to freeze to death here. But not affixing the blood magic collars that prevent them from accessing their Songs is lunacy.

“Collared, they could not heal themselves of the effects of the cold and the hunger,” Nikora explains patiently. “These Singers must not be allowed to die, yet we have few resources to waste.”

“But without their collars what keeps them here?”

The Wailers had always been a nuisance. The Singers, whose Songs were spared to be used for battle, had to be controlled via complicated blood spells that could be invoked only by their regiment’s commandant, the Cantor, or the king.

“They are meek as mice,” Nikora says. “Whatever you did tothem leaves them barely able to do more than follow orders. And before your thoughts race too far ahead, these men cannot be used to harm me or any of my people. Gentlemen, lift your sleeves.”

As one, the men lift their right sleeves. A small wound of crisscrossing lines has been cut into each of their forearms.

“It won’t counteract your blood spell, but it keeps us all safe. In case you had any ideas of manipulating them against me.”

You feign ignorance, but disappointment claws at you. “And what do you want me to do?”

Nikora raises a brow. “I want you to give their power to me. Take their Songs and put them into a caldera so that I may use them.”

You jerk back at the audacity of her statement. “And why should I do that?”

Her smile is a brittle, delicate thing. “Because if you don’t do it voluntarily, I will force you. You are not the only one who understands compulsion blood magic.”

You force a chuckle. “Do you think I cannot withstand the pain of a blood spell? Do you think I have not spent hundreds of years inuring myself to that particular weakness—the one thing any of my people could have used against me?”

Her eyes darken. “And you think that pain is all we can conjure?”

Her tone is merciless. The Physicks have spent centuries studying magic and innovating it. You are still using the primitive spells you were taught generations ago. It is very possible—nay, probable—that they have come up with something that you have no defense against.

“I cannot make a single caldera from all of their Songs, not unless I absorb them first.”

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