Map of Ember and Moonlight

Chapter 34

Chapter 34

"Lyv, darling," her father said, his voice wavering as he reached for her through the bars. "Lyv, you have to wake up."

"Daddy?" she murmured.

He laughed. "You have not called me that since you were little."

She groaned, pushing herself up as Gideon helped her. "Amory was supposed to get you. We were going to run."

"It would not have worked. We have been down here for almost two hours now. They came in quietly and chained and gagged me before I even was out of bed. Balian was thrown in here a little while after me," he said.

Indeed, her father was still dressed in his loose pants and tunic he normally wore to bed.

"Someone drugged my breakfast," Balian offered. "The fucking cowards. They knew they wouldn't be able to take me any other way than that."

Lyv moved slowly to the bars of their adjoining cells, grasping onto her father's hands. "Amory was supposed to get you," she whispered again. "We were going to run. We were going to go to Dalcaine and send someone back to get Ada, Sora, Rhea, their husbands, and the kids. Then we were going to come back with an army."

"We were too late," he told her, putting a hand against her cheek. "We will figure something out."

Figure something...

Lyv turned to Gideon and saw that his chains were gone. "Gideon, you can get us out of here."

"How?" he asked, raising a brow.

"Magic."

He shook his head, not daring to go near the bars of the dungeon. "Can't, princess. It's iron. And you don't have your knife anymore, so I can't exactly pick the lock."

"Magic?" Balian asked, eyeing him. "What in the hell...?"

Gideon pulled back his glamour, showing both Balian and the king his true Fae form before turning human once more. "Sorry for not exactly being truthful, your majesty."

"That is perfectly fine," he told him, wide-eyed. "And Amory?"

"Him, too," Lyv whispered then, looking back at her father. "He had just asked...just told me the truth...but then they came..."

It was then that he looked down at the ring on her left hand. "Oh, Alyvia, he finally asked you."

She nodded, swallowing hard. "And now he's...he's..."

"He's resourceful. He will figure something out."

Lyv sagged against the bars and Gideon caught her before she could fall. He was more than worried about her, especially with her magic being stifled.

As they sat in silence, he tried fiddling with the iron cuff once more. Even her father and Balian took a crack at it, but nothing ever worked. It was seamlessly put on, with no hinge they could break.

"It's definitely magic. A siphon, maybe? The best I can tell is it basically halts your magic in place, stifling it so you can't use it. Like with Amory's glamour, since he's got one on as well, it wouldn't take that glamour off. You have to use magic to shift back into your true form. He can't do that...so he's basically stuck in that form until the cuff comes off. And it's not exactly draining you. The queen wouldn't want to do that, not after what she saw. She just wants to...keep you contained."