Chapter 4 The Rose Suite

The rose suite was nothing like Thessaly expected.

For starters, there were actual roses. Real ones, not painted or carved or embroidered—living flowers in crystal vases that shouldn't exist in a realm called "Shadow." They were deep crimson, almost black at the edges, and their scent filled the room with something that reminded her of funerals and wedding nights all at once.

The room itself was bigger than her entire tower back home. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over gardens she could barely make out in the twilight, and the furniture was all dark wood inlaid with silver that caught the lamplight. The bed could have slept six people comfortably. There was a bathing room with a tub large enough to drown in.

It was a guest suite fit for royalty.

Thessaly stood in the middle of it all and felt like an imposter.

"Will you require assistance, Princess?" The guard who'd escorted her—not the young kind one from the journey, but an older woman with scars on her knuckles and eyes that missed nothing—stood at attention by the door.

"I..." Thessaly looked down at her bound wrists. "Could someone maybe..."

The guard crossed the room in three strides and cut the ropes with a knife that appeared from nowhere. The relief was immediate and painful—blood rushing back into her hands, pins and needles dancing up her arms. Thessaly bit back a gasp.

"Thank you."

"Food will be brought shortly. The king requests your presence at breakfast tomorrow morning." The guard's expression didn't change. "I'd recommend getting some sleep. You look like you're about to fall over."

That was probably fair. Thessaly couldn't remember the last time she'd slept in an actual bed, and her entire body was one giant ache from four days of riding. But every time she closed her eyes, she saw Davorin's face when he'd touched her. That moment of absolute shock, of fear—

What had he said? Everyone I touch dies.

And she'd survived.

The guard left, closing the door with a soft click that sounded too much like a cell locking. Thessaly waited thirty seconds, then tried the handle.

It opened.

She stood there for a long moment, hand on the brass knob, staring into the empty corridor beyond. No guards stationed outside. No chains. No bars on the windows. She could just... walk out. Try to find her way through this maze of a palace and maybe, possibly, if she was incredibly lucky, make it outside before someone stopped her.

And then what? She was four days' ride from home, in a kingdom she didn't know, without supplies or a horse or any idea which direction to go. They'd catch her before she made it a mile.

Thessaly closed the door.

She was a hostage, but apparently a well-treated one. That should have been comforting. Instead, it made her skin crawl with questions she didn't have answers for.

The bath was too tempting to resist. She filled the massive tub with water that came out hot—actual hot water, not lukewarm or cold like back home—and sank into it until only her nose was above the surface. Everything hurt. Muscles she didn't know she had were screaming, and there were bruises blooming across her thighs from the saddle.

But under the pain was something else. Something warm and strange that she'd felt the moment Davorin touched her.

Thessaly held her hands up, studying them in the lamplight. They looked the same as always—small, pale, nails bitten short because she'd never been able to break the habit. No marks where his fingers had made contact. No sign that anything unusual had happened at all.

Except she'd survived something that should have killed her.

She'd survived, and now there was this heat in her chest that hadn't been there before. Like a coal that had been dormant for nineteen years suddenly remembering it was supposed to burn.

Magic?

No. That was impossible. She'd been tested a dozen times as a child—by healers, by mages, by her desperate mother who refused to believe her daughter could be so fundamentally broken. Nothing. Not even a spark. The conclusion had been unanimous: Thessaly Ashenheart had been born without magic in a world where magic was everything, and no amount of wishing would change that.

But something had definitely changed.

Thessaly ducked under the water and screamed. It came out as bubbles and muffled sound, and when she surfaced she felt marginally better. Not good. Not okay. Just... less like she was going to shatter into a thousand pieces.

Someone knocked on the bathing room door, and Thessaly nearly jumped out of her skin.

"Food's here." A different voice—younger, female, uncertain. "Should I... do you want me to leave it outside, or..."

"Just a moment!" Thessaly scrambled out of the tub, grabbing a towel that was softer than anything she'd ever owned. There was a robe hanging on the back of the door, plush and warm, and she wrapped herself in it before padding back to the main room.