Time ceased to exist underwater.
Had it been hours? One day? Two days? An entire week? Leena did not know, and she did not care. Her stomach growled, but she ignored it. Her limbs ached for their weight, but she continued to drift, to float, ambivalent.
Down here, it was easier to pretend. To let her memories take over, to let her dreams unfurl. Sound was muffled. Light was softer. The world seemed far away and out of reach.
Leena was happy to leave it that way.
Without Mikza to save her, Leena could just drift until the end of her days. No one else dared enter her quarters without permission, not while she was inside. He had been the only one willing to save her, to ignore protocol. The servants might inform the guards of her silence, the guards might inform the king of his daughter's deep mourning. When she started to miss events, balls or dinners, he might be angry enough to intervene.
Leena almost hoped her father would be the one to discover her, to see her at the bottom of the pool. Maybe he would think her drowned, defiant until the end. Maybe then she would be free of him.
As if reading her mind, a body slid under the surface, distracting Leena, tearing her eyes open for the first time in she didn’t know how long. Arms encircled her, and for a moment, she let herself dream it was Mikza, let her heart soften and her body curl into the warm chest.
And then they broke through the surface, and the dream shattered. Noise jerked her senses, unwelcome after all the silence. The roar of waves, the tinker of metalworking, the hum of human voices screaming from below. The sounds of her city infiltrating her peace.
The sun was bright, painful, and its heat stung her cold skin, sizzling the water droplets away.
"He said you would be in the water," a soft voice said, and he gently placed her on the ground.
"Mikza? He's alive?" Leena turned over, rolling up from the ground to face Tam. She recognized his caring voice, but his face seemed older, somehow aged since the last time they had met.
Tam nodded, but held something back, words he seemed unable to bring himself to say aloud. "Come, Princess, there isn’t much time. He is to be moved from the palace dungeons in a few hours."
Leena needed no other prompting. Despite her protesting muscles, soft from so much time spent unused, she stood and then raced into her bedroom for dry clothes. Within minutes, hair unpinned and face free of powder, Leena met Tam outside her quarters. Mikza wouldn't mind. He preferred her this way, simple and uncovered, more like the girl she wanted to be instead of the princess she was.
"Follow me, my Princess," Tam whispered.
Leena noticed that there was no new guard stationed outside her door. Maybe Tam had inherited the honor, or maybe he had bribed someone away for an hour. Leena did not question, she was beyond her area of expertise.
The palace might be her home, but it still seemed foreign in many ways. And the farther Tam led her down the open corridors, the more she realized just how small her life truly was. These were halls she had never walked.
There was an entire world outside the palace, but aside from a few trips to silver levels or maybe even to the bronze merchant plateau, she had never seen it. The ocean lay just outside her balcony, but she had never dipped her toes in the cold currents. Never stepped foot on the docks at the base of her city. Never ventured to any of the other islands in their kingdom, let alone to foreign shores.
But today was a start, and Leena followed Tam down to a part of the golden palace that the sun did not illuminate, a place where cages did not pretend to be anything but prisons, and chains did not masquerade as jewelry.
The place Mikza had been damned to because of her.
"Tam?" A dry voice whispered. A voice she remembered as clearly as her own.
"Mikza," Leena sighed, searching for him in the dark. Tam had come to a stop outside a gate, and inserted a key into the lock.
"My Leena," his deep voice sighed, pain etched in the words. "You should not be here."
"I had to see you," she said, reaching for Tam's torch. But he stopped her and walked deeper into the cell, leaving Leena at the entrance.
With every step, she waited for Mikza to come into view, his strong legs, his soft eyes. Tam continued, not pausing, not searching, until he reached the back wall and placed the torch in a socket. Then his head shifted, his gaze slid across the stone to the corner of the room.
Leena gasped, her hand automatically rising to catch the cry on her lips.
Mikza was there, huddled in the corner, covered in dry blood. His back was striped with deep lines, marks left over from who knew how many lashes. His cheeks were swollen, enlarged enough to almost close his eyes, red and raw.
But the worst were his arms.
His unmarked arms.
Mikza's tattoos had been removed. His skin had been cut deeply, burned and shredded apart so it still bled just a little around his wrists.
Leena stepped forward, but he flinched away. Too proud to want her to see him in such a state. But Leena cared little for his pride right now.
"Why?" She asked softly, continuing to move closer. "Why did you have to confess? Why couldn't you let me fight? I don't care about my face. I don't care how deep my father would have cut me. It would have been better than this. Oh, Mikza, I love you. Why did you give that away?"
Leena knelt down, hand floating an inch beside his wounded cheek, unsure if it would only bring more pain for her to touch him. He didn't need to answer, she knew the truth already. He would never let anyone hurt her. He would give anything to protect her, to keep her safe.
And he had.
"I am no longer Mikzahooq." His words contained no bitter edge, only the emptiness of defeat. The unmarked had no name. No identity. No individuality. With their tattoos, so went everything about their former lives. They were less than human in the eyes of the Ourthuri.
"You will always be Mikza to me." Leena caressed his face with the back of her fingers, and despite the wounds, Mikza leaned into her touch. "We can still find a way. I'll leave tomorrow, I'll go wherever you want. We can figure something out."
He pulled away.
"You must forget me, Leena. You must move on with your life. I want better than this for you. I want you to be happy. So…" he paused.
Leena's throat caught. What have you done? A mounting sense of dread filled her chest.
"I made a promise to your father."
"No." Leena winced, gripping his arm. "No, Mikza, what did you do?"
"He didn't want to kill me. He said it was too quick—not enough of a punishment for me and that it would only make you more defiant. Instead, he did this, and he is sending me away. I don't know where, very little was explained, just that I am to be gone from Da'astiku on a ship leaving in a few days time."
"I will come," Leena interrupted, eyes shifting across his bruised features, trying to read the emotions on his swollen face. "I will find you."
"No." He shook his head, wincing. "No, Leena." He gripped her hand, moving slowly to entwine their fingers one last time. "I promised him that I would let you go. That I would never return. That I would never speak to you again. And if I defy him in any way, break that promise—"
"He will kill you," Leena finished his sentence—solemn, stuck.
"No," Mikza squeezed his eyes shut, letting one wet tear slide free. "He will kill you."
I am already dead, Leena thought but kept silent. It would be no use. Mikza had already sacrificed everything for her, and she would not let him know it was in vain. The girl he knew was dead, and Leena could only guess at the woman she was about to become.
"I love you," she whispered. That was the only certainty left in her life, a truth she would hold onto and let guide her into the future.
"I love you, too."
There was nothing else that needed to be said, not then, not in their final minutes together. So Leena sat back against the wall and pulled Mikza's head into her chest. Running her hands along his
limbs, she tried to soothe his pain, to pour out all her love so the memory of this moment would last.
He hugged her close and they stayed like that. Intertwined. Not moving. Barely breathing. Just being.
But in the silence Leena's mind spun. She had a promise of her own to make. A promise to never stop fighting until her father was in the ground, buried, dead, unable to spread any more cruelty into the world.
If he was the hard rock of their island kingdom, she was the water crashing into their shores, slowly breaking it down, slowly chipping the stone away until there was nothing left. If he believed that love had weakened her, he was wrong. If he thought this would break her, he was wrong.
Leena felt strong for the first time in her life.
Empowered.
Love was her weapon.
Love would bring the king to his knees.
~~~
Want more? The story continues in The Shadow Soul (A Dance of Dragons #1) – Available for free wherever books are sold!
The Golden Cage (A Dance of Dragons #0.5) Page 6