DARKHAVEN | "Three Sisters" Book One

Chapter Fifty

Blodwyn

The sisters slept only when they'd sobbed themselves into exhaustion.

They'd been thrown back into their bedrooms—which had been stripped of the enchantments the Lords had previously used to personalise them—and the doors had been locked from the outside. 

Ashen-skinned thralls in robes, shrouds, and habits of thick black gauze, tattered and unravelling, brought each of the sisters new clothes. "Wear them," instructed each of the thralls to each of the sisters, and then the sisters were alone in their rooms.

The sun set, and when the sobbing stopped, they slept.

And then they woke again, faces swollen and aching from a night spent crying.

Blodwyn lurched to her feet instinctively at the three heavy bangs that echoed through her room from the thick oaken door separating her from the horrors without. "OPEN," commanded a far from friendly voice on the other side. 

There was no way of knowing what time it was, or if the sun had risen, or if there was even a sun to rise at all. The unseen hand of magic had shuttered the windows in the night and for all her trying, all her prying, Blodwyn had not been able to open them again. She'd felt her way back to her bed in the candleless, absolute dark and stayed there. 

Knowing there was no point in disobeying, Blodwyn went to the door, tried her damndest to still the shaking in her hands, and opened it.

A man that might have been half-bat waited in the hall: winged, grey-skinned, noseless, and sporting veiny, translucent ears. "COME."

So Blodwyn went.

In the hall, both of her sisters were being pulled from their rooms at the same time. They, too, appeared to know there was little to be accomplished in whatever weak fight they may be able to put up.

Only Blodwyn held her head high, her jaw set tightly.

"WALK."

Blodwyn walked.

They were paraded back into the Great Hall and out rang an uproar of voices. The thralls had provided the sisters with shifts of black satin that were near entirely see-through and split to the hips up both sides. They were left barefoot and with no smallclothes. Little was left to the imagination. This itself was cause for much of the commotion. The things said were terrible, lecherous things, crude and cruel and crass.

Ahead waited the three Overseers who had previously claimed the thrones for themselves. "DOWN," said the bat. Down went the sisters—Blodwyn to a crouch, and Gia and Roslin to their knees. Again, only Blodwyn dared look up. It was as if they were kneeling before the embodiment of all their worst nightmares.

"Devotees!" called out Wicklowe in greeting to those gathered in the hall. "What a treat you're in for today."

Devotees, Blodwyn thought, that's what they call themselves? Devoted to what, exactly? An old man on a stolen chair?

The Orchestrator, in that unnervingly calm voice that made the sisters' skin crawl, spoke. "Look at you, sisters. You kneel before me now not as the champions prophesied to spell doom for the First Evil, but as mere playthings, broken and defeated."

Not one of the sisters could hide the faintest shadow of confusion that passed over their faces.

When Wicklowe spoke of a prophecy—was he being serious? Blodwyn had thought he was rambling in the facetious way he seemed so apt to do, but thinking about it now...she'd been so frantic that she'd not properly processed all he'd been saying yesterday. Had Roslin? Had Gia?