Prologue
Elias
T
he rough patch of road they travelled along made for a particularly uncomfortable journey. Elias’ now-too-frail frame ached fiercely as the carriage rocked, rattling his bones. He took a deep breath in and exhaled, reminding himself that no good came from dwelling on his ailments. It wouldn’t make the pain go away, and it would only cause his mood to plummet. Henrik was miserable enough for the both of them, and he needed to keep them alive long enough to escape the hell they’d been thrown into.
Elias and Henrik hadn’t thought it could get much worse than the silk mill, but when it shut down due to their owners’ bankruptcy, the two of them and several others were sentenced to an even worse fate.
Bought and paid for, they, along with two dozen other slaves, were on their way to serve in the Queen’s castle, forced to bend the knee for the cold and unforgiving ruler herself.
The only things Elias knew about the Queen were based on rumours, but none of them were good. While a famine wasstarving her people, she supposedly imported food from other lands and lived lavishly in her ivory tower. She was infamously cruel for no reason beyond her own entertainment, and Elias felt sick at the thought of himself and Henrik being in her clutches.
The ten other elves, crammed into the small cage atop the carriage with them, were silent for the duration of the journey. Only two of them, Hans and Ansel, had also come from the silk mill; the others appeared more recently captured, their cheeks yet to become gaunt and their skin not yet sallow.
Equal numbers filled the second carriage; their transporters unconcerned with packing all the elves so tightly into a confined space for over a full day with neither food nor water.
By the time they entered the Dark Forest, darkness had fallen. The slavers driving the rickety carriage began ringing a bell. Despite not knowing its purpose, the eerie sound made all the fine hairs on Elias’ body stand on end.
He peered through the bars that trapped them inside. The moon cast a silver glow through the tree branches, creating the illusion of glittering spiderwebs covering the road before them. For a second, when Elias glanced ahead to the bushes in the distance, he was sure he spotted a flash of red fabric, but his eyes must have deceived him.
They hadn’t been in the forest long when they came to a sudden stop, and the slaver driving the carriage shouted, “Halt! Ten-minute break!”
The greasy-haired man stepped down from his driving seat, jostling all the elves inside in the process. He rattled the cage bars as he passed them, sneering before heading to the bushes to relieve himself.
As they waited, a warm body pressed extra closely against Elias’ side. He glanced at his begrudging companion, Henrik, and smiled. Rik had spent less time than Elias in captivity, and it showed. He still retained some muscle on his exposedarms, and his face wasn’t quite as gaunt. Despite the deep scowl that marred his face on a near-permanent basis, Henrik was stunning. His pointed ears were unusually smooth where they poked out from his long, pale-white hair, and Elias frequently soothed himself by running a fingertip along them.
Predictably, Rik frowned at Elias’ wide smile. He rarely welcomed Elias’ endless optimism in the face of their dire circumstances, but Elias was fairly sure he would collapse under the weight of fear and dread if he didn’t cling to any shred of hope that he could.
Henrik had hoped for a while, too, but Elias remembered the night it’d died all too well—could still feel the way Henrik had shaken in his arms as he’d sobbed. A year prior, Henrik had been captured upon returning from a fishing trip in the early hours of the morning back in their home country, Varinien.
During the first several months of his captivity, Henrik had regularly explained to Elias that his family would discover what had happened and rescue him at any moment, saving Elias as well. Elias had agreed it was a nice thought but had never given it the weight that Henrik had, and so when nobody had appeared to rescue them a year later, Elias had been considerably less devastated by the fact than Henrik had been.
Elias pushed the memories of that night away and returned to peering out between the bars at their surroundings. There was an unnatural stillness to the forest. Overseers at the mill had spoken of how empty the land had become in recent years—that hunters returned empty-handed more often than not—but witnessing the lack of life where there should be an abundance unsettled Elias.
The slavers laughed and bickered amongst themselves with a lightness that had anger burning like a furnace inside Elias. He hoped he would never understand how a person could reach the point of being so callous about the lives of others. The fact thatthe scariest things in this world were not the monsters from the frightening tales he’d been told as a child, but simple, ordinary men who would sell their souls for some coin, chipped away at Elias’ resolve that there were still good people to be found in this life.
“One minute, folks! Get ready to move out!” the slaver yelled to the others, startling Elias back to reality.
Elias shuffled from foot to foot in an attempt to ease the shooting pains that reverberated up his legs.
Another slaver approached them; Elias recognised him as the man who’d shoved them in here in the first place by the sinister smile revealing a mouth of mostly rotten black teeth.
“Thirsty, little elf?” he sneered.
Elias narrowed his eyes but didn’t reply.
“Here, have a drink,” he added before tugging his cock from his breeches and spraying a stream of piss through the bars. Elias grimaced as it landed mostly on his bare legs.
Elias seethed in silence, one more act of degradation to slice into whatever was left of his soul.
“Do not give him a reason,” Henrik whispered.Reason to kill youis what he meant.
The rest of the men were returning to the carriages when some sort of growling came from nearby.
“What was that noise?” Elias whispered to Henrik. He was certain it could only have come from an animal. He felt almost relieved at the sign of life, and his ears twitched, searching for the sound. As if to confirm its presence, the animal let out the loudest howl Elias had ever heard, and Henrik tugged Elias away from the bars, embracing him protectively.
“Wolf,” Henrik replied, his voice shaky.
