Prologue

IT’S DARK AND COLD and wet– the room is a bone-chilling experience of silence and anger. Outside the thick stone walls of this isolated part of the palace, no one knows what is really happening.

Citizens are baking, singing, tending to animals or dressing for parties, servants and the rest of the working class are getting their hands and feet a little dirty for money to feed themselves and their families, children are out running in the fields, singing folk songs and laughing until they fall off their balance, but as for Princess Ericia... there is no such opportunity as freedom.

Her hands are closed into tight fists –the metal surrounding Ericia’s wrists rub and twist and tear her delicate skin until it bleeds. There’s fresh blood dripping out from her nostrils, dry blood on her Cupid’s bow and upper lip just where the blood stopped running, her breaths are shaky. Ericia could feel her heartbeat moving through her otherwise lifeless body. She would not be standing were it not for the chains keeping her lifted off the ground.

Ericia had grown too numb to all of this –to the feeling and the smell of her own blood, the thousands of slices on her back formed from vicious lashes made with a leather and stone whip. Her skin, torn apart, is now open to the frightfully cold world once again.

Ericia barely budges as another lash is struck just at the bottom of her spine. She feels it –she always feels it, but she clenches her teeth and releases a silent groan in the form of a reserved sigh.

It is always like this. It has always been like this. Ericia was always in trouble. Ericia was always wrong. Ericia was always ‘out of control.’ Once again, Ericia has done something wrong.

“Have you learnt your lesson?” asks King Charles Avington II, her father.

She can’t bring herself to look up at him. If she does, the response would be the same –another lash to the back, or endless ones, depending on whether or not her father is feeling generous.

She nods slowly. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Louder,” commands King Charles, slapping the whip unto the stone flooring. The echo of the whip around the stony walls is always enough to shake something inside of Ericia.

“Yes, Your Majesty,” says the Princess, loudly.