My father’s last words to me echo forever in my mind, uttered on our hilltop as the sun sank west and the wind blew leaves in my hair. “You are of the Iljaria, Brynja,” he told me. “You could live three hundred years, perhaps more. Time does not bind us like it binds others. Our kind doesn’t even feel the passing of time—it will be nothing to you. Remember that. And be true to our cause. To our people.” My father was wrong. I do feel the passing of time, in my iron cage in the king’s mountain. I feel it acutely. Every second, every heartbeat—they pierce me through like swords, and leave me
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