Page 124 of A Kingdom of Wild and Power
Rio froze.
Rowan’s laughter rang out beside her, bright with mischief. He delighted in moments like this, in catching her unguarded.
‘Oh yes,’ he said, unable to contain his pleasure. ‘We’rehere.’
The wind roared again,as if in greeting.
‘Welcome to the Kingdom of Darkness.’
Cruelty is not without reason.
It stems from generations. A mother may despise her daughter because her own mother despised her. Perhaps mothers that spit vile words in their daughters’ faces have never learnt what it might mean to hear and feel the soft caress of a kind word, or the tender kiss on the forehead at night. How easy it would be to wipe cruelty from existence, if only we learnt to tenderly care for the new generations. How easy it would be to erase from the world the very thing that poisons it.
Tabitha Wysteria
Ylva found it harder and harder to escape the dark place.
It came for her every night now, drawing her beneath its shadowed veil the moment sleep claimed her. She always arrived in the same stretch of land. A realm dim and silvered, where the air tasted of mourning and memory. And she was no longer mortal there. Sometimes she would lope towards a river, its waters black as ink, and peer at her reflection.
A giant white wolf stared back.
The dreams were beyond strange, and yet she did not recoil from them. In that other place she ran beside a man named Zagreus, and sometimes Kage would appear too, pale andthoughtful, like a ghost who had forgotten he was one. Over time she had begun to know them, to understand their sharp edges and quiet sorrows. To enjoy them.
They never called her Ylva.
It was always theothername.
Wren.
Ylva was not foolish. She had already pieced it together: in another life she had been called Wren, and she had been wolverian. It had not taken her long to suspect that she had once been princess Wren Wynter. But she forced such thoughts down whenever she was awake. The runes carved into her skin would burn if she lingered too long upon the past—a cruel warning not to tug at threads better left buried.
Yet in these dreams, the runes were silent.
There, she could listen freely.
She had heard Zagreus and Kage speaking with Rio about Eris, about plans to move against Velunthar. The knowledge coiled inside her like a scream. If it were true, if Eris meant to drive the witches into Fae lands, then the drakonian keep stood dangerously close to that border.
And if the witches were to move…
If the prisoners were moved with them…
A spark flared in the darkness of her thoughts.
Perhaps this nightmare could be turned to her advantage.
If Eris gathered them all and marched them elsewhere, then perhaps, just perhaps, Arden and her might find their moment.
And run.
The moment Ylva woke, pain throbbed behind her eyes.
It always did after the dreams, after running beneath that dim, mournful sky. It did not come every night, but lately it had begun to claim her more often than not. The ache lingered, deep and splitting, as though part of her had not entirely returned toher body.
A terrible thought had begun to haunt her.
What if one night she did not wake at all? What if she remained there, fur and fang and white shadow trapped in the Underworld, unable to claw her way back into her own skin?
‘I think we might be moving soon,’ Ylva said, leaning her head against the warm stone of her cell, eyes half-closed.
