Three full days after the cure, I still hadn't learned the shape of my own cage.
It was a comfortable one, as cages went. Silk sheets. A standing wardrobe of gowns Petra swore were "gifts," though no one had asked me what I wanted. A door that opened from the inside, which still felt like a small miracle every time I tested the handle. But a castle this large, full of corridors I didn't know and wolves who didn't want me breathing their air, was its own kind of trap, and I had spent too many years not knowing my own walls to make that mistake a second time.
So that morning, while Valerius was shut in council with his border generals, I went looking for a way out of not knowing. I had learned, in my first life, that a woman who did not know her own exits was a woman waiting to be caged ag
