I don’t know who I am or how I came to be in this dungeon. My face is covered by a mask of black velvet. My jailor has said I’m too hideous to look at. It is dark and the cell is cramped. The only light comes from a brazier or something burning behind the door of my lonely cell. Two doors guard my prison—my cell door and the one leading to this moldering dungeon. My jailor comes to see me but once a day, when he brings me food and that awful sweet-smelling drink that I know is poisoned. I don’t know how I know it’s poisoned. I don’t remember anything. Not my name. Not my childhood. All is lost to me.

Yet I know the door is made of iron and that the bottom hinges on the outer door are rustier than those on the inner door. I hear everything, from the scuttling of roaches and rats to the groans and cries of other prisoners. There are not so many of us. I feel loneliness and despair that I’ve lived in this cell for so long. I cannot remember anything before this smothering hood or these chains. My jailor says if I take off the hood, I will be executed. He says if I try to escape, I will be executed. I think I am mad or have done some terrible crime. The only things that soothe me are the pieces of broken stone on the floor. I stack them up in rows and then knock them down. I feel compelled to do this. If I keep doing it, maybe I will remember something. Or maybe I am truly mad.

PART I Wizr

PART I

Wizr

CHAPTER ONE Chandleer Oasis

CHAPTER ONE

Chandleer Oasis

Traveling the ley lines was like plummeting over a waterfall. It sent Tryneowy Kiskaddon’s heart racing whenever she stepped into a fountain in one corner of the kingdom, only to almost instantaneously appear somewhere else. In the past, that mode of travel had given her a strong sense of queasiness that would not dispel for hours, but she’d practiced enough that she no longer grew sick to her stomach. No, what was disorienting Trynne was the fact that she’d left Averanche in the morning and arrived at her destination close to sunset.

She had appeared inside a fountain at the front of a palatial manor. As the mist dissolved around her and she heard the bubbling of the waters, she was struck by an oppressive heat that nearly took her breath away. The location was foreign to her, and her eyes filled with wonder as she stepped to the edge of the stone lip of the fountain. She didn’t want to leave the protection of it yet, just in case her summons there had been a carefully laid trap.