AT A VERY ungodly hour, with exhaustion weighing her eyelids down, Maarit was awoken for the second day in a row by knocking on her front door. Upon opening her eyes, she noted that she had broken into a cold sweat in the middle of the night. Hearing the loud knocks disturbing the tranquility of the night frightened her immensely.
In a torpid daze, she sat up in her bed. Her eyes gleamed with fright, nearly breaking through the darkness. As she threw her legs over the side of the bed and stepped onto the cold floor, her knees nearly gave out. Her heart had jumped from her chest to her throat. A sickening thought suddenly crossed her mind—that she would be mercilessly tortured and executed, just as the servant boy with the midnight skin had been.
The door continued to rattle with each insistent knock. Every night, Maarit locked the front door with a series of enchantments that only a witch or warlock would be able to surpass.
She was safe.
She had to be safe.
Then, she heard the clicking of a lock and her door was thrown open.
Maarit nearly screamed—her immediate response was to throw an attack spell at the intruder. She knew for certain that it was not Keion or Helios, for they would not have been able to get past her enchantments. The Valence brothers were the only two that were welcome in her house.
The precise moment the person at the door been thrown backwards from the force of Maarit's spell, two more came running at her. She had no time to react a second time; through the obscurity, the two figures threw her to the ground. Her head hit the hard stone floor, giving her transient vertigo. She writhed violently, kicking and punching anything within reach.
Her left arm was held down by a man with an iron grip and something was latched onto her wrist. She did not know what, but she did not want it to be there.
Over and over again, Maarit attempted to use a spell—any spell. She threw curse upon curse after them, but nothing was happening. When, at last, she came to the conclusion that something they had done to her was prohibiting her from using her powers, she put another tool to use—her voice.
With everything that she could muster—every fibre in her being, every vein beneath her skin, every bone in her body—she screamed. Amidst the moving shadows that blurred together as a result of her dizzy delirium, she silently pleaded for someone to find her before she died at the hands of these strangers. Her voice broke through the fog that rolled over the village of Fribois. The shrill, ear-splitting sound pierced the surroundings and everything they encompassed—the air, the cold, the darkness and the fog.
Her vocal chords were on fire and her entire throat was raw.
Still, she continued to shriek in the hope of being heard by anyone—until she could no longer.
As though her voice itself had been stolen from her, her screams were silenced immediately. She could still breathe, but could not force a single sound to escape her lips. If she had been able to make a noise, her body would have betrayed her by whimpering.
Exhaustion suddenly numbed her thrashing limbs. Maarit did not want to give up, but she physically could not move. She knew instantly that some form of sorcery was being used on her.
She felt herself being lifted from the ground. Her head was still fuzzy where it had struck the floor. A small amount of blood dripping from the cut at the back of her head stained the stone floor.
Her heart rate had slowed due to whatever magic that had been performed on her, but her mind still worked just as frantically. Through heavy-lidded eyes, Maarit could just barely make out a lanky male figure as she held the front door open. As she was dragged along by two men, Maarit desperately wanted to ask where they were taking her; but she still could not find her voice.
The outside looked as though all of the clouds in the world had lowered from the sky to the ground. There was fog as far as Maarit could see, but the starlight in the sky was still plainly visible. The stars coruscated so much that Maarit was not sure whether she was hallucinating—perhaps they were not actually there and her injured mind was conjuring up reveries of its own.
What she definitely did not imagine was being hoisted atop a horse. Her hands were immediately handcuffed behind her back by a beefy man who got on the horse behind her.
"Hello beautiful," he whispered in her ear, his breath tickling her skin in a way that made Maarit's stomach flip in disgust. She wanted so badly to throw him off the horse, but she could barely stay upright. "You're a little criminal, aren't you?" the man continued to coo in her ear.
Criminal.
She instantly knew just what was happening—his words gave it away. These were the king's men. The two men were guards and the warlock that had attacked her was a sorcerer that the king had on his side. Maarit was being taken to her designated place of execution. King Theodoracius had to have received word of what she had told the entire village the day before. This was it; she would never see daylight again and would be executed before sunrise.
The thought made her want to leap out of her own skin. She shook, feeling the urge to vomit.
"They never come this pretty, huh?" the guard said to no one in particular, grabbing a lock of Maarit's hair between his meaty fingers.
Even through her daze from the enchantment, Maarit managed to glare ahead. The glare was meant for him and she struggled against the invisible restraints, but to no avail.
There were two horses besides the one that Maarit was mounted on—one for each of the two remaining people who had taken her away. Three people had taken her from her home: two male guards and a witch. She should have been able to fight them off, but she had only disappointed herself.
As the horses began to trudge along, the guard that Maarit was sharing a horse with snaked his arms around her waist—she swallowed the bile that had begun to crawl its way up her throat. Her teeth chattered from the cold because she wore nothing but a dressing gown.
However, they did not seem to be headed towards the village's centre. They were headed up De Montfort Mountain, on a trajectory towards the castle.
Accepting that there was nothing she could possibly do to escape was the most difficult thing for Maarit to do. However, it was all she could do as she approached the castle. Perhaps they would execute her there. She hoped it would be quick.
Maarit had never seen the castle so closely in her entire life. While it loomed over the village, it positively towered above the young woman, rendering her insignificant. It was beautiful—there was no other way to describe it. It was everything that Maarit had already known—marble columns, a solid gold portcullis, stone ramparts—but somehow more alive. It was as though the entire castle itself was living and breathing with grandiosity.
The fog did not reach all the way up to the castle. Everything was serene, despite the fact that a cold-blooded murderer sat inside contently.
Maarit was yanked off the horse violently, as though her crime had been theft or murder rather than telling the truth. She found that she was able to walk—barely.
The warlock dismounted his horse and walked over to the portcullis. He muttered something under his breath that opened it.
The first guard remained at Maarit's right side while the second one moved to stand on her left. She was shoved forward, forced to enter the castle along with the guards.
The hallways within the castle seemed endless. Maarit did not have much of a chance to inspect her surroundings; she was much too immersed in her own fears to admire the paintings on the walls and the beautiful architecture. With every corner they turned, with Maarit trotting clumsily at the guards' sides, she gritted her teeth harder and clenched her fists tighter.
They finally reached a room, which she was forced to enter.
It was quite possibly the most beautiful room that the young witch had ever seen. Everything was either red or gold; the walls had been painted a gorgeous shade of burgundy, along with many intricate gold designs. A grand chandelier hung from the high ceiling at the very centre of the room. The ceiling itself made the room look like a cathedral with its dome shape. There were more paintings adorning all four walls, and an enormous round carpet with a sublime pattern of obsidian, verdant and violet.
At the very front of the room was a breathtaking throne—but it was the man standing next to it, rather than the throne itself, that took Maarit's breath away in the most repugnant of ways.
His mouth curled at the sight of her, making Maarit shudder.