The Black Towers rose from the cliff face like a wound in the earth.
Lya had heard of them, of course. Every noble child grew up on stories of the Black Towers, the place where the kingdom sent its worst monsters, its most irredeemable criminals. The place where souls went to die before their bodies did.
She had never imagined she would enter them alive.
The iron carriage rattled to a stop in a courtyard choked with grey mist. Guards hauled her out, her chains clanking against the cobblestones. Around her, other women were being processed, some weeping, some silent, some already hollow-eyed and vacant. Lya tried to hold her head high, but her legs shook beneath her.
A female warden approached, her face as hard as the stone walls behind her. "Name."
"Lya Varnath."
The warden's eyebrow twitched, recognition, but she said nothing. She scratched something onto a ledger and pulled a metal tag from her pocket.
"Number 734. From this moment, you have no name. You have no title. You have nothing." She shoved the tag into Lya's hand. "That is all you are now."
The guards stripped her in a cold, damp chamber. Her sage green dress, the last remnant of her old life, fell to the floor in a heap. She watched them take it, watched them paw through her few possessions. The journal from the groundskeeper. The book on medicinal herbs.
And the wooden hairpin.
A guard held it up, turning it between his fingers. "What's this? Pretty thing for a pretty prisoner." He grinned, revealing missing teeth. "I'll keep it safe for you."
He slipped it into his pocket. Lya felt something inside her chest crack.
They shoved her into a coarse grey uniform that smelled of mildew and fear, then marched her into the tower itself. The corridors were narrow, lit by guttering torches, the walls slick with moisture. On every level, she heard sounds, sobbing, screaming, laughter that wasn't quite sane.
Her cell was on the seventh level. A narrow slit of a room with a straw pallet, a wooden bucket, and a window no wider than her hand that showed only grey sky and grey sea.
The door slammed.
The lock turned.
And Lya was alone.
---
Three Weeks Later
She learned the rules quickly.
Silence was survival. Looking at the wrong person could earn you a beating. Food came twice a day, thin gruel, stale bread and the strong took from the weak.
Greta was the strong.
She was a mountain of a woman, her arms thick as tree branches, her face a roadmap of old scars. She had murdered her husband and his mistress, or so the whispers said, and she ruled the cell block with casual, brutal efficiency.
On Lya's third day, Greta appeared at her cell door.
"New meat." She smiled, revealing a missing tooth. "You'll give me your blanket. And your bread ration. And when I say jump, you'll ask how high. Understand?"
Lya, who had not eaten in two days, who had not slept in three, who had forgotten what hope felt like, nodded silently and handed over her blanket.
Greta laughed. "A princess who knows her place. How refreshing."
She took the blanket and left. Lya sat on the bare stone and stared at the wall until the grey light through her window turned to darkness.
---
That night, she dreamed of a garden.
She was nine years old, running through the palace grounds with Elias at her side. His grey eyes sparkled with laughter as he chased her between the rose bushes.
"You're too slow, Lya!" he called.
"I'm letting you win!" she shouted back, giggling.
He caught her by the waist and they tumbled into the grass, breathless and happy. He was her best friend. The only person in the world who looked at her like she mattered.
"You know," he said, still holding her wrist, "when we're older, I'm going to marry you."
She blinked. "What?"
"My father says I have to marry someone from a noble family. And I choose you." He grinned, boyish and earnest. "You're the best person I know. You're smart, and you're funny, and you don't care that I'm a prince. You just... see me."
Her heart had swelled so big she thought it might burst. "Really?"
"Really." He squeezed her hand. "Promise me, Lya. When we're older. Promise you'll say yes."
"I promise," she whispered.
---
She woke with tears on her face and a sob caught in her throat.
The memory twisted in her chest like a knife. She had kept that promise in her heart for years. And then Amy had decided she wanted him.
It had been subtle at first. Amy "happening" to be wherever Elias was. Amy laughing at his jokes, asking about his day, bringing him small gifts. Amy, golden and perfect and everything Lya was not.
And then one day, Elias had stopped seeking Lya out. He still spoke to her, still smiled, but there was distance now. A formality that hadn't been there before.
"I think Amy likes me," he said one afternoon, almost apologetically. "She's very... sweet. Everyone says we'd make a good match."
Lya's heart had plummeted. "I thought you promised..."
"People make foolish promises when they're children, Lya." He wouldn't look at her. "You must have known it wasn't... that you and I weren't..."
He had trailed off, unable to finish the sentence. Unable to say what they both knew: she was the shadow. Amy was the sun. And no one chose the shadow when the sun was available.
The betrothal was announced three months later. Lya watched from the back of the hall as Amy curtsied before the King, as Elias took her hand, as the court erupted in applause.
She had smiled. She had clapped. She had gone to her room afterward and cried until her eyes were raw.
And that was the beginning of the end. Because once Elias belonged to Amy, once her sister had what she wanted, the campaign to erase Lya from his memory truly began.
---
One Month Later
Lya stopped eating.
The gruel was tasteless. The bread was hard. And Greta took most of it anyway. What was the point?
She spent her days on the stone floor of her cell, staring at the ceiling, counting the cracks in the mortar. The world outside, the trial, the accusations, the lies, felt like a dream now. A nightmare she couldn't wake from.
Greta came for her eventually.
"You've been avoiding me, princess."
Lya didn't answer. Didn't move.
Greta crouched beside her, close enough that Lya could smell the sour stench of her breath. "I gave you three days to decide. It's been longer. I'm losing patience."
Lya stared at the ceiling. "I have nothing to give you."
"Oh, you have plenty to give." Greta's hand closed around her jaw, forcing her to meet her eyes. "You're young. Pretty. There are men who would pay for a taste of noble blood. I could make arrangements. Or you could be smart and make this easy for both of us."
Lya's voice came out as a whisper. "I said no."
Greta's smile vanished. She backhanded Lya across the face, hard enough to split her lip.
"Three days, princess. Three days, and then I stop asking nicely."
She left. Lya lay in the darkness, tasting blood, and wondered if there was any part of her left worth saving.
---
Two nights later, Greta came back.
She wasn't alone.
Lya was dragged from her cell, her arms pinned by two of Greta's women. They took her to a storage room at the end of the hall, a place where the torches didn't reach and screams were muffled by thick stone walls.
What happened there, Lya would never speak of. Not to Marta, not to anyone. But when morning came and she was found curled in the corner of her cell, her face bruised, her uniform torn, her eyes completely empty, every woman on the block knew.
No one spoke of it. No one helped. That was the rule.
But someone left a blanket outside her cell that night. Someone else left half a bread ration.
It was not kindness. It was not courage. But it was something.
---
Two Months
Lya did not speak for three weeks after that.
She moved through the days like a ghost. She ate when food was placed in front of her. She went to the exercise yard when the guards commanded. She did not look at anyone. She did not react when Greta passed her in the corridor, did not flinch when the woman laughed.
She was hollow.
And then, one day in the exercise yard, the Whisperer sat beside her.
The Whisperer was a gaunt, twitching woman who paced the cell block at night, muttering about "the ones who come through the walls." No one knew her real name. Most believed she was mad.
She sat beside Lya on the cold stone, her fingers twitching, her eyes darting. For a long time, she said nothing.
Then: "You're going to leave."
Lya did not respond.
"You're going to leave, and you're not going to come back." The Whisperer's voice was a rasp, barely audible. "That's good. This place eats souls. You'll need yours where you're going."
Lya turned her head, slowly. "Where am I going?"
The Whisperer smiled, a cracked, unsettling smile that didn't reach her eyes. "Somewhere cold. Someone with red hair is waiting. He's angry. But not at you."
"How do you know this?"
The Whisperer tapped her temple. "The ones who come through the walls. They tell me things. About the ones who leave." She leaned closer, her breath cold against Lya's ear. "Your sister's not the one you should be watching. She's just the blade. Someone else is holding the handle."
Lya's heart stuttered. "Who?"
But the Whisperer was already standing, already drifting away, her lips moving in silent conversation with ghosts only she could see.
Lya sat in the yard, the grey wind cutting through her thin uniform, and felt something stir in her chest for the first time in weeks.
Not hope, exactly. But the absence of despair.
Someone with red hair is waiting.