Read Online Emerald Sceptre by Thomas M. Reid - Free Book Online

trapped.
    Emriana fought against that image. She needed to remind her senses to work, needed to keep moving, functioning. She had tried singing—when? how long ago?—thinking that hearing herself would help, but she was unnerved by the way her voice sounded in that place. Instead she reached out around herself.
    The walls imprisoning the girl were certainly real enough. She could feel them when she pushed out with her hands. Beyond that sensation, though, they had no substance, no qualities. They were neither hot nor cold, smooth nor rough. They simply held her in the midst of the nothingness. She could follow the surface with her hands, rising to her knees and finding eight corners. She could not quite stand, for the ceiling was too low. And she could not quite lie down, either. It was a box just big enough for her to sit, to draw her knees up to herself protectively, to waste away.
    Junce Roundface had not been lying when he had told her she would spend a long, long time in there. That thought nearly made her start screaming again.
    “Please,” the girl pleaded, her voice resounding in her skull but nowhere else. “I want to get out.” She waited, listening, but there was nothing. No sounds, not even the roaring in her ears. “Please!” she screamed.
    Nothing.
    Emriana curled up into a ball and lay on her side. She would have liked to sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come. She was simply left with her thoughts.
    Later—an hour? a year?—Emriana became aware of something. It was not clear what she had noticed, but just the fact that she was noticing anything at all snapped her out of a sort of stupor. She rose up onto her knees, turned her head, tried to determine which sense had detected something.
    It was light.
    Very faint, above her, a pinprick of light had appeared. The light grew, became a window, grew still more, dazzlingly bright, making the girl cringe. It became one whole side of her prison. It burned her eyes with its brightness, but she was oh, so thankful just to feel pain in her eyes.
    Emriana blinked repeatedly and managed to, focus on the scene beyond her prison, through that window.
    She spied a room, one that she vaguely remembered from another time. A large bed stood against a distant wall, with a couch to one side and a dressing table beside that. It was a woman’s room, draped with bright, colorful tapestries and illuminated by numerous pierced lanterns hanging from the walls and ceiling. Textures, temperature, length, and form all seemed wonderfully welcome right then, even if a recollection nudging at the edge of her memory was vaguely unsettling. Emriana knew that if she could
    just think hard enough, it would come to her.
    At that moment, a woman dressed in a formal gown stepped into view in front of her precious window, blocking out the rest of the world. The owner of the room, triggering all of those memories.
    Lobra Pharaboldi.
    Denrick’s sister.
    Emriana gasped and shrank back. The look on the woman’s face told Emriana that she was not being rescued.
    “Hello, Emriana Matrell.”
    , “Please let me out,” the girl began, crawling right up against the window, pressing her face as close as she could, hoping she looked sufficiently anxious that Lobra would take pity on her and not blame her for what had happened to Denrick. “I don’t know how I got in here, but if you could ask someone, or have a wizard perform a divination, I’m sure you could let me out, and—”
    “Hush,” Lobra said, her voice soft and yet commanding. “Not just yet.”
    Emriana felt tears on her cheeks. “Please?” she begged, and she thought she sounded rather pitiful, like a child. “Please?” she repeated.
    “Oh, I will let you out in a moment,” Lobra said, smiling just a bit. “To serve your penance for the crimes you and your family have inflicted upon me.”
    “I didn’t mean to do anything,” Emriana began, feeling frantic to convey remorse, anything to win Lobra over. “It was an accident, a