Whisper of the Darksong: Heir to the Darkmage, Book 3 (paperback)

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Chapter 1

Lira stared fixedly at the manacles around her wrists. Time seemed to slow to a crawl as her Taliath guard took a key from his pocket, slid it into the lock, and turned it. Behind him, two more Taliath watched carefully. To them, her expression would appear distant, but inside she waged war. Her body was rigid with the force of her internal struggle, her heart thundering as she wrestled with herself.
Longing battling with reason. Anger with the need for patience.
In a second, a heartbeat, she could set the guards alight, use her telekinesis to grab the nearest one’s keys, unlock the cell door, and leave. That’s all it would take. A single moment and she could be walking free down the hall.
But then her manacles opened, the sharp click snapping the moment. Lira blinked. Took a steadying breath. The guard yanked the metal off her wrists—clearly wanting to move away from her as quickly as possible—but Lira barely registered the sting as she withdrew her hands from the slot in the bars. She’d grown accustomed to the pain.
Even if it had been unbearable agony, Lira still wouldn’t have made a sound. She never showed an ounce of expression to any of her guards. It was one of her rules.
The three Taliath left without a word, the manacles clanking all the way back down the long hallway to the single door at the end that they closed behind them.
As soon as they were gone, Lira let out a long breath, body shuddering with the adrenalin reserves that flooded through her. She fought this same internal battle every single day: desperate fight-or-flight versus rational understanding. It would be foolish to try to fight her way free unless she had a good chance of succeeding.
Three times Lira had attempted to escape from this prison.
Three times she’d failed.
But she’d gotten a little further each time. Learned a little more. Lost herself to despair with each failure before dragging herself out of the darkness and starting to plan all over again.
One thing Lira Astor had learned behind these walls was the value of patience. Determination she had in endless supply, but without patience, she would never escape. Without patience, one day the depression and despair would hold her down and never let her resurface.
She’d come to hate the word with a fierce passion but learn it she did. It was the key to her survival. And Lira was nothing if not a survivor.
After her first escape attempt, when she’d made it through the door at the end of the hall before being overwhelmed, they’d added two heavily armed Tregayan soldiers to her Taliath escort whenever she was taken from her cell. This occurred daily for her allotment of fresh air and sunlight in a small yard, three times weekly to bathe, and when necessary to see the prison’s healer.
Her second thwarted escape had killed both soldiers, disabled the Taliath, and gotten her down two levels—not to mention taught her more about the layout of the prison. That one had earned her the manacles for every trip out of her cell.
She had been surprised to find the restraints were made from normal iron. She’d expected them to use bindings made from the melted-down remnants of the Hunter medallions the Mage Council had recovered after the war with the Darkmage—the lock on her cell door was, and it seemed an obvious thing to use in a prison designed for holding mages. Early in her sentence, she’d thought about asking why, but had decided it wasn’t worth giving the guards her attention. Or betraying her interest.
Perhaps Lucinda and the Shadowcouncil had stolen the medallions from the council at some point? But Lira had long theorised that the Shadowcouncil had found a way to bind razak blood with metal, thereby providing the medallions worn by their Shiven warriors—designed and trained in the same mould as Shakar’s Hunters.
The Shadowcouncil … fury stirred within at the thought of what they’d done to her, and Lira ruthlessly forced all thoughts of them aside. Not dwelling on the corrosive bitterness inside her was another key to maintaining her sanity.
In her third escape attempt, Lira had taken brutal advantage of their assumption that the Taliath and their backup guards would be enough to subdue her should she break free of the manacles, that they’d be on her before her telekinetic magic could unlock them. That time, she’d almost reached the front entrance of the building that housed the prison. Almost. That had marked Lira’s first visit to the prison healer, and it had been several weeks before the broken bones and other assorted injures had healed.
After that, they’d added two more Taliath to her guard escort and started locking her ankles in manacles as well. Not only that, but they changed the locking mechanism on both sets—complex ones that would take upwards of an hour for her to pick with her magic. Her telekinesis could probably still rip them off, but it would take a significant amount of magical energy, probably everything she had in one concentrated burst. And she’d need her magic to get farther than just her cell door. Especially if she managed to get out of the prison.
So, every single day, Lira probed the locks with her telekinesis, learning their inner workings, getting closer and closer to the solution.
Two more Taliath to deal with in addition to being unable to run freely did pose a stronger impediment to escape. Not to mention that the daily rubbing of rough metal edges on her bare wrists and ankles left reddened raw skin that had, over the months, turned into calloused scarring. The prison healer worked only on serious illness or injury—prisoners were left to deal with minor cuts, bruises, or illnesses on their own—so those scars marked her forever now.
A door somewhere else on her level, out of sight, slammed, pulling her sharply from her thoughts. Lira blinked, giving herself a little shake. That happened often, the drifting of her mind. She tried to keep herself in the present as much as possible, but that was hard when one day bled into another without any obvious passing of the time apart from the gradual shifting of the seasons outside her window.
Once the echoes of the slamming door died away, she turned and faced the interior of her cell. Morning sunlight filled the small space. She’d just had her weekly bath, and her damp hair dripped down the back of her neck, the shorter ends curling around her ears and forehead. The limited sunlight she received had changed the colour of her hair from light brown to a darker shade, and her skin had turned sickly pale. She might almost pass for Shiven now, if it weren’t for her grandfather’s pale blue eyes.
Now the day stretched before her, long and unending. And another day after that.
And then another. And another.
Just over two years down. The rest of her life to go.
Her spirit quailed at that thought, teetered on the edge of complete despair before she took hold of herself. A deep breath in. Out. Another.
Settled, she lowered herself to the floor and began her morning routine. She performed the same movements every day, stretching out every muscle in her body slowly and deliberately, keeping herself as limber as possible. Ready.
Strength exercises came next—push-ups, sit-ups, squats—over and over until the sun reached the apex of the sky outside. No matter how tedious, how boring, how tired and sore her muscles became, she pushed through. No matter how much sweat slicked her skin or how she hated every second of it. She made herself continue until she filled that time. Anything was better than simply staring at the walls—she’d learned she would lose herself if she gave in to that.
This ruthless routine to fill time and pass the days was how she’d kept herself sane. But it was a constant battle, and some days she came perilously close to losing.
At midday, the door would open at the end of the hall, and the steady footsteps of a Taliath guard would echo down the corridor. She rarely saw the same face more than once a fortnight, and the guard would always stand several steps away from the bars of Lira’s cell until she backed up to the window. Once she was at a safe distance, the guard would shove a tray of food through the inch-high gap under the bars, his or her eyes fixed on Lira the entire time.
That measure had been instituted after her first attempt at escape involved leaping out as the guard was in the process of opening the door to bring her tray in, shoving it hard into his body and sending him staggering away before she fled down the hall.
Now Lira watched, a little smile on her face, as today’s Taliath backed up as quickly as she could after leaving the tray of food, then walked away with too-fast strides.
She waited for the door at the end of the hall to close and then sat to eat her food slowly, deliberately, taking up more time from the day. Once finished, she moved to her small desk and read the latest parchment she’d requested.
Prisoners weren’t treated badly in Carhall, not under the new Mage Council led by Tarrick Tylender and founded by Alyx Egalion. They were able to request reading material from the great library nearby in Centre Square and given parchment, quills, and ink when they wanted. The guards were silent, distant, but never cruel.
Even after Lira’s escape attempts, they’d continued allowing her access to the library. She could never settle on how she felt about that. Contempt for their softness, or grudging respect for their refusal to lower themselves to the level of those they’d imprisoned. Maybe it was both.
But the mage prisoners were never allowed to use magic outside their cells. And the most dangerous ones were always guarded by a Taliath immune to their magic whenever they were allowed out. Or three Taliath now, in Lira’s case.
What the council might not have realised was that no Taliath was immune to Lira’s fire magic—a secret she held close. If they hadn’t already guessed, they eventually would, given they had to have figured out by now it had been her that had burned the razak to ashes at DarkSkull Hall. But either way, it was the best advantage she had over them, and she was reluctant to squander it until it was critically necessary.
While she could burn a Taliath, her flame magic quickly depleted her energy levels, and Taliath were warriors with a speed, skill, and strength that she simply couldn’t match. She might succeed in burning one, maybe two, before they were on her, but not all three. And by careful memorisation of faces, and noting the resistance she’d encountered during her escape attempts, she estimated there were at least fifteen Taliath rotating through the prison, though it was impossible to know exactly how many there were on duty at any one time.
Even more importantly, if she killed a Taliath with magic—thereby proving the extent of the danger she posed to the council—more stringent measures would be implemented that would probably make getting out impossible. Not to mention how afraid it would make them of her. Even if she did manage to break free, they would never stop hunting her.
None of the escape plans she’d tried so far had worked, but each time she’d gotten further than the time before, a fact she held on to whenever the inevitable wave of despair came to try and claim her again.
A little smile flickered at her mouth. She doubted any prisoner had ever tested the prison’s defences so thoroughly.
And she would keep testing them until they broke. Lira had absolutely no intention of remaining inside this cell for the rest of her life.
Which brought her back to figuring out her next plan … such as it was. There was no hope of banding together with other imprisoned mages, combining magical strength to try and escape, as Lira was kept isolated from everyone else in the prison. Her window was too high to jump out of, even if she could melt the bars outside it with her fire magic. And there was no way of getting a message outside even if she had someone to write to, someone who would help her. Which she did not.
She closed her eyes; the smile faded as quickly as it had come, smothered by the wave of despair threatening to rise again. As hard as she’d tried, she still hadn’t succeeded. And nobody was coming to save her. Nobody ever would.
Spending over two years in prison had proved to Lira that, despite foolishly hoping otherwise, she remained utterly alone in the world. The quill trembled in her hand as that gaping void in her chest opened up, and it took several minutes to battle it away. Even then, the heaviness still hung over her.
She used focus as a weapon to fight it, a ruthless focus on escape. She continued reading, scrawling notes as she went, until her eyes glazed over with boredom—no matter how hard she’d studied at Temari to catch up with her classmates, Lira would never be a scholar. Then, she spent the hours until dusk practicing her magic.
There were limits to what she could do inside this small cell. She certainly couldn’t use large amounts of magic without drawing the attention of the guards. Every single day she cursed the fact she hadn’t inherited her grandfather’s depth of magical power—with that, she could have brought the walls of the prison down around her and simply walked out.
Instead she practised subtlety and skill, honing control over her magical abilities, which now numbered three. Her third ability—a result of the razak-blood injections she’d been given during her kidnapping by the Shadowcouncil—had broken out only a few weeks into her sentence.
Liquid and gas were two forms of matter that telekinetics could not manipulate—she’d sat in classes at Temari where one of the masters had explained the common theories on why this was the case, but she’d quickly grown bored and now couldn’t remember any of it.
But one afternoon, a snap of temper had resulted in the water inside the cup on her lunch tray suddenly exploding into the air.
Lira’s anger had died in a blink and she’d leapt out of her chair to stare at the droplets all over the floor.
She’d made water move.
Now, each day, Lira played with the cup of water delivered to her cell with every meal—frustration always gnawing at her to have so little to experiment on. She had no idea how strong her ability was, or how much water she could manipulate at one time, but at least she could practice her control.
The more she practised, the more she realised that she could sense the water too, when she focused. At night, she’d lay on her narrow cot and sense the water flowing through the pipes in the kitchens, drawn from a deep underground well nearby. When she focused and summoned more magic, she could sense the water in nearby buildings too.
Months and years on, Lira hungered for more magic, for powerful magic, but she didn’t know enough about this ability yet to decide whether it would be useful.
But it was something.
Finally, in the hour before dinner, she allowed herself to stare out the window and watch the life of Carhall unfold below. The prison sat on the northern side of Centre Square, a stone’s throw from the domed Mage Council building on the western end. Her window looked out over the gleaming square and the streets beyond its southern edge, and her cell’s floor was high enough that she could just see over the Carhall outer city walls toward the haze of distant hills to the south.
If she watched too long, despair would claim her. But for the short periods she allowed herself, it gave her an all-too-brief escape from the confines of her cell. And as she watched the world outside carry on without her, she let it reinforce her determination to escape. She would be free. And when she was…
A cold smile spread over her face at the thought. She’d been planning for that. Meticulously.
There were many scores to settle.