The dark hours before dawn were supposed to be silent.
For Lucian, they were an execution.
He woke with a start, his small chest heaving as his fingers clawed at the heavy summer sheets. It wasn’t a nightmare that broke his sleep this time. It was the noise.
Beneath the heavy oak floorboards of his bedchamber, the scratchy skittering of mice sounded like a cavalry charge. Two long stone corridors away, the gravelly murmurs of the morning-shift servants scraped against his eardrums like coarse wool. Miles down the mountain, the heavy thuds of the vanguard warriors training in the dirt courtyard rattled inside his jaw. Higher still, the whistling wind rushing past the wings of migratory birds miles above the frozen pine canopy pierced his skull. Deep within the core of the mountain, an ag
