Page 6 of The Prince's Mage

If not Marcella’s saving miracle, then maybe it could be someone else’s.

She drifted off again into nothing. She couldn’t feel anything. Not even her pain.

Everything went cold and still. It was just emptiness. A void.

Then she was ripped back into her pain, hoarsely crying and begging to go back to the nothingness.

Or maybe that had never happened.

She was certain at some point early on the heretic shoved a glass to her lips and forced her to drink the bitter liquid. She couldn’t tell if it was water or wine or something else. All she knew was it was disgusting and made her already weak, heavy limbs even heavier and her vision darker.

She tried to shy away, whined and whimpered now that she could no longer scream, but it always went down her throat.

She wasn’t sure what she was hallucinating or not. She thought she saw Hypatia or maybe it had been a silver-backed raven. Or maybe it had just been herself standing there in her cousin’s bridal outfit.

The whole idea had been be so no one could tell them apart. It had worked.

She even imagined Gavril.

Several times. She hallucinated him rushing through the door like he had last time, freeing her from the straps and wrapping her in his cloak. He would pull her into his arms and promise it wouldn’t happen again, just like before.

He’d been wrong.

She didn’t even care. She’d take him. She’d take his empty promises he couldn’t keep as long as they came with him.

If they were going to kill her once they were done, she at least just wanted to make sure Gavril knew she hadn’t taken the cloak off willingly. She’d kept it.

At least she could tell her hallucinations. Or she could if she wasn’t silenced by runes on her throat.

She was on her seventh hallucination of Gavril when she realized there was something different about this time. He’d paused at the doorway like he usually did, freezing at the sight of her. But there was no relief when he saw her.

It was hard to see beneath her ratty curls covering her face, and she was barely breathing. Being deathly still helped keep the worst of the pain at bay. A minuscule difference, considering how beaten and bloody she was.

But his face fell at the sight of her. He choked and stuttered over the word, “N—no, no—”

There were other voices out in the hallway. One of them was the heretic. All in the Inimicus tongue, but Marcella caught just enough to translate. “—late—seven days—lasts longer than five—body going—tomorrow—orders—”

Her hallucinations of Gavril didn’t usually include the heretic. Everything was too hazy for her to even remember the last time she’d seen the heretic. But given the state she was in, maybe the last time the heretic had seen her was supposed to be the last. Marcella had the feeling she didn’t have long left. An hour, maybe?

Maybe that was why this hallucination was different.

Gavril took a slow, stumbling step into the room as another voice started arguing in the hallway with the heretic. He closed his eyes, and his hand fell from the doorway. When he opened them, they burned in a way she hadn’t seen since he’d nearly beaten the silenced mage to death.

Then he was moving so much faster than she usually imagined him to. He was usually calm and composed when he knelt down at the head of the table and looked up at her and murmured soft, comforting words in his thick accent. She would hallucinate him reaching forward and brushing his fingers over her cheek in a way she couldn’t really feel but pretended she could. He would take her left wrist and it wouldn’t hurt when he did so, just run his fingers across the lines and make it glow in whatever strange thing it was that bound them. Right before he would move to let her up and finally tell her why he had bound them together, he would vanish.

Now…

His face was red and his hands were shaking as he ripped through the room. He knocked things over and fumbled with items as he scrambled to grab things. He was yelling something at someone in his tongue. It was so loud.

She heard another voice, and then there was a rune lighting up the air nearby. The light from the vitae blinded her sensitive eyes. Whatever had been forced down her throat that made her weak also made light brighter and darkness deeper.

When she recovered enough to make him out again, he was hurling a glass vial at a marble wall. It shattered, and Marcella watched the dark red liquid slowly drip down it. More glass shattered, but in the seconds between she could hear his voice under his breath, muttering in his language.

Once there was no more glass to shatter, the sound of paper ripping filled the air. Marcella, in her hazy vision, only saw a few of the scraps float to the ground. Not that she had a hope of deciphering the Inimicus writing. But once there was a pile of scraps on the ground, Gavril cast another rune and they went up in flames.

She caught a hint of his face in the glow of the fire.

She’d never seen him so furious.

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