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was said. Only a human of descendent magick whose spark would
soon find flame could gather the spores to themselves as she must have done
with the mists of the Vale and guard them within a radiant soul.
    Though what a radiant soul was, she wasn’t certain. She knew
only that it was what Elvetta Crae’all had sworn she’d glimpsed within
Arabella.
    Basically it had meant then exactly what it meant now. She
was doomed.
    Her mother had warned her as a child that the time of a
reckoning would come, that hiding the magick of the family of Crae’all would
end with her.
    Yet her mother, Elvetta Crae’all, had not just sought out
the king’s attentions as a young woman but sought to merge her line with his,
hoping perhaps Alistair would soften in his hatred of magick.
    Who knew what her wayward mother had thought to accomplish
by not just wedding the perverted king, but giving him a daughter as well? A
daughter of magick. A child he would…
    Bile rose in her throat.
    She could not countenance such a destiny.
    The father who had rode her upon his shoulders as a toddler,
who taught her to ride and to hunt the stag, who he had claimed such favor in,
he would now pervert?
    It could not be.
    Yet here she stood, clad in one of her finest gowns, chained
to the icy, damp wall of a dungeon she had not known existed far below the
castle.
    She a princess, cherished and adored, had watched her
father’s gaze turn cold, his expression suddenly hardened with a fury she could
not bear the sight of as he condemned her a magickal “get”.
    She had cried her tears.
    She had raged. She had begged the guards who had overseen
her care since the death of her mother many years before. Yet it was as though
they heard her not. They stared at her now as they would stare at the barely
dressed barmaids she had oftentimes glimpsed them preparing to ride.
    A shudder raced through her as a ragged cry nearly fell from
her lips.
    Never could she have imagined such betrayal. Never could she
have imagined she would ever find herself without a single champion to aid her
cause.
    And perhaps she would not be so adrift had she heeded her
warriors’ demands the many times they commanded her name and that of her house.
But she was the daughter of Alistair the Perverted. Who would wish to admit to
such a family line?
    At that thought, the great iron doors to the dungeons
clanged open and rattled with steely purpose.
    “You have company.” Trine, a guard whose daughter she had
been friends with all of her life, spat the words out as though in distaste.
    He was burly, his face square and possessing no beauty at
all. Still, she had always seen him as stalwart and dependable. A good father
to Maylana, and a firm hand to his son Brine.
    Behind Trine came near a dozen guards dragging the hefty
weight of two warriors such as she had never glimpsed in but one realm.
    Easily half over six feet tall with heavy muscle and
powerful forms, the warriors looked as powerful as the sturdy oak. Far too
powerful to have been taken by the likes of these guards. Yet they did not
resemble the warriors she’d given herself and her magick to either.
    “What manner of crime have they committed?” she asked sadly
as Trine opened the door and the guards dragged the lax bodies into her cell.
    Was there actually room for both? Not hardly, for two
well-muscled arms flopped through the iron bars to fall to the stone floor
beyond.
    “The crime of breathing,” Trine grunted. “They say they’re
from the Rinah Pass Province, but warriors such as those do not exist in
Secular.”
    “They do not appear to be Wizard Twins,” she observed,
regret filling her that her father had found other victims to torment.
    “Wizard Twins? I think not,” Trine mocked. “The king’s liege
sensed no magick in them as they sensed building in you, only the ignorance of
having stopped in Eldorah. Of being giants among men in a land where no giants
exist.”
    With that, he locked the cell doors once again