THE AIR WAS stolen from her lungs, ripped out of her chest by the man standing before her. Freya imagined her reunion with her brother countless times before, but none of them compared to the horror, the consternation, the disbelievability of this. There was a hardness to Matthias' face as he looked down at her, the orange light from the lantern casting shadows over one side of his face. It was not hatred that coloured his eyes almost black, but Freya had looked in the faces of people who've despised her enough times to know it was close enough.

Her body felt so far away as she looked at him, at the wolf's head medallion hung around his neck, at the black and silver drüskelle uniform he wore. The drüskelle uniform. Freya felt sick.

"No." It was the only word she could say, drawn out and weak like a mother being told of her child's death. She knew if she uttered it again, it would be louder, stronger, laced with all the despair clawing at her insides. She pulled at the cuffs around her hands, but they held firm. The need to hug, punch, hold, and shove him was too great, but she was stuck chained to the ceiling with her body screaming in protest. Inside her mind, the form of the little girl she used to be cried.

Matthias' lips parted, but no words came out. His brows were furrowed, and for a moment it looked like he was experiencing as much pain as she was, but then he pressed his lips tightly together and the expression was wiped from his face.

"How could you." It wasn't even a question. Freya knew precisely why he'd donned the drüskelle uniform. It was the same reason she wore the Second Army kefta. Protection, a sense of stability, no matter how small. Still, it was impossible to think that all the images she'd conjured of how Matthias could look now were the farthest things from the truth. He wasn't a farmer, a blacksmith, or an ordinary soldier in the Fjerdan army. He was a drüskelle, trained and bred to hunt people like her. Hunt her.

Matthias' brows furrowed, as if confused, "You would've understood, once." Would she? Freya wasn't sure. She hadn't been even eight years old when she was taken. What understanding did she have then of the world? A few tales from an angry witch hunter? The words of old crones babbling about monsters across the border. She realised almost with a start that she was one of the monsters across the border now.

The Siren, a tale to keep young children from misbehaving, and also a horror to whisper into a soldier's ear to make him fight with all his might. Would she have been proud of her brother, if she hadn't been Grisha? Would she wave him off to battle and smile when he returned, congratulating him on his glory, on countless enemies put to the sword, burned on a pyre? She swallowed thickly around a lump in her throat.

"And do you understand me?" she asked, the Fjerdan rolling off her tongue, heavy as lead. Matthias' eyes wandered down to the haggard, dirty blue cloth hanging from her shoulders. It has lost all its colourful appeal, the cloth bled of its colour through salt water and dust. She didn't look like an exalted member of the Second Army, only months away from being trusted with an amplifier. She just looked like a girl, too young for the war she was thrust into, dressed in a soldier's uniform that didn't fit her.

"I don't know," Matthias admitted, the muscles in his jaw feathering. Freya would've smiled sadly at him, but she suddenly felt so worn. So exhausted and drained of life. She looked over Matthias' shoulder, just barely catching a look at the Kerch prisoner behind him. He'd gotten so tall. She barely met his shoulders.

"And what is to be done with me?" she asked, though she already knew the answer. "Will you watch as they murder me? Burn my body so I may never connect with Djel or any of our other gods?" Something flickered over Matthias' face, and he looked away from her, muscles drawn up in a disgusted frown.

"You will be out on trial as every other drusje is," he answered, steadfast in his words. He didn't even sound ashamed. "If you are found innocent you will be allowed to live your life as a free woman." At this, Freya laughed, the sound a single breathless exhale.

"And how many Grisha are found innocent in these trials?" The silence was answer enough. Freya nodded, her voice straining. "So you will allow me to die? What will our mother say when you tell her? Will you be able to look her in the eye?" Matthias' answer was immediate.

"I can't look a gravestone in the eye." The world tilted again, spinning out of control as Freya blinked at his words. They barely registered, but her throat was closing up and her chest was tightening. She felt like her head was forced underwater, and she couldn't breathe. Her lips formed the word what, but no sound came from her throat. Matthias was staring directly at her, an ice-like anger storming in his eyes. His jaw was set. "Mother is dead. So is Skadi. Your drusje friends made sure of that."

Freya didn't know what to say, what to think. For a long while she only stared, feeling like she wasn't even inside her own body. She drifted along the silence, like an autumn leaf torn from its branch by a gentle wind. Except what she was feeling was far from gentle. It felt more akin to a sailor being thrown overboard by a storm, tossed around in the enraged wave below. A slow death, filled with cold and pain and futile fighting to just reach the surface.

All this time, she thought, the words a strange fleeting thing in her mind. How long had she imagined her meeting her mother again? How long had she clung to that hope, to the vague memory of her mother's warm embrace and her slender fingers in her hair? She'd imagined Matthias and Skadi there as well, welcoming her home, happy that she was alive and back with them.

Only one of them was here now, and he most certainly wasn't welcoming her home. The scar on her jaw felt like it was being freshly burned into her skin. A taut, searing sensation.

Twelve years. The number resonated inside of her, floated before her eyes, bruised itself on Mathias' skin and etched itself into the wood of the ship's hull. Her mother and sister had been dead for twelve years. Her eyes burned with fresh tears, and she stubbornly didn't let them fall.

When she didn't say anything, Matthias continued to speak, "And now you are one of them. You wear their clothes, you speak their language. You kill for them, your own people." He spat the last words with such contempt that it burned. Like venom in her veins. "You even speak Fjerdan with an accent."

Oh, she realised, so she did. With so few instances for her to use her mother tongue, she hadn't even realised her pronunciation shifted. He is right, she thought as she searched his face, you are more Ravkan than you ever were Fjerdan. She thought of the safety of the Little Palace walls, of the dining room where she sat surrounded by friends, by people like her. She thought of the tilt of Zoya's grin, Vanya's laugh, Luca's brilliantly silver-quartz eyes, Fedyor's lazy smile, and the furrow between David's brows. Djel, she even thought of Ivan's stern impassive face. They were all a part of her home in a way she couldn't explain. She didn't even know how it happened, just that it did, and that she would do everything again a thousand times over if it meant she'd be able to see them, just one last time. Her eyes fluttered shut.

She thought of everyone she knew in Ravka, of a dazzling grin, sparkling hazel eyes and golden hair, strong arms around her, hard chest beneath her head, warm lips on her skin. This time, she couldn't stop the tears. Everything came crashing into her, all at once. A hard hammer to her chest, a blast of power that sent her reeling. The air hitched in her throat, then came out as a choked cry.

She would never see any of them again.

When she looked back at Mathias, his face was no longer the stone-like picture of hatred it had been before. Something had broken in him too, and now his brows were furrowed and his lips downturned. He looked to be in pain, and Freya didn't understand why.

"Freya, rëv–"

"You hate me," she said the words lightly, full of an indulging understanding. When Matthias didn't answer, only stared at her with his lips parted, she nodded and closed her eyes again. "Leave me. Please."

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* 　　 *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

The next day, they docked on the Wandering Isle. Freya's hands were untied, and she received only a few moments of reprieve before new constraints were placed on her wrists, attached to a metal pipe-like cylinder. They left only an inch between her fingers when she tried to touch them together, but it was enough to keep her from summoning.

The prisoners were led off the ship in a single file line, a drüskelle close enough to every one of them to stop them from taking so much as a step out of line. There was no escaping this, not even the slightest opening. Freya considered taking her chances regardless, but then she spotted Matthias waiting on the docks below the ship beside a man. The fight seeped from her almost in an instant. The man beside her brother had long blond hair and a bushy beard. His strong nose and firm jaw was one she knew. She'd seen them drawn a dozen times in the Little Palace, a warning to all Grisha.

Jarl Brum, the commander of the drüskelle. A shiver coursed through her at the sight of him. If she hadn't been sure who he was before, the cruel smile he sported as she was led down from the ship was telling enough.

"You recognize me, drusje?" he asked, and she did not reply. That cruel smile of his widened. Freya clenched her jaw, pouring all the hatred she'd ever felt for men like him into her glare. He didn't so much as flinch. "Are you afraid?"

"No," she answered, voice surprisingly even. Her eyes skidded to Matthias for only a second. "You are forsaken. A murderer who put thousands to death. Men, women and children alike." As if fate wanted to prove her point, one of the other drüskelle led a young woman down the ramp. Behind her, a boy of no more than six was weeping. He couldn't have known about his powers longer than a few years. At most. "You will get what's coming to you."

A promise, not a threat, but Jarl Brum only smiled. "You first," he said, and then Freya was pushed forward and forced to walk further down the dock. The red-haired inhabitants of the Wandering Isle stared at them, but no one bothered to raise a hand to help. And they won't, she told herself, looking away from them. They hate Grisha as much as the Fjerdans do. She recalled Harshaw kneeling above her in Mosava, trying to staunch her bleeding. He'd survived the hate of his home country. She missed the dangerous sparkle in his eyes when he played with fire.

They were forced into a rundown storage house that did little to protect them from the cold. Freya clung to the lapels of her kefta, drawing the fabric as close around herself as possible. The corecloth isolated her from the elements enough for one night, but she didn't think she'd be so fine if it lasted longer than that.

She was the only one among the Grisha to wear a kefta. The others were only citizens, not prepared to fight back against the drüskelle even if she tried to employ them to do so. The little boy and his mother huddled together in the corner, muttering an old Suli song Freya recognised from Zoya. It was a lament, a cry from inside one's soul. It made Freya want to cry.

"That drüskelle you spoke to," the Kerch man from the ship asked her when they both couldn't find sleep. "Do you know him?" Freya sniffed.

"He was my brother." Was, because the Matthias she'd seen on that ship was not the same Matthias she'd known as a girl. There was no gentleness to him, no love for her. Only hatred and disdain. It burned more than the Inferni fire pressed to her jaw ever had. Silence stretched between them, until eventually, Freya asked, "What is your name?"

"Henrik, Durast," he answered. "You?"

"Freya, Sound Bender." She gestured to the violet embroidery on her kefta. Henrik raised a brow and nodded, surprising her by not asking any questions. They spent the rest of the night in silence.

In the morning, the drüskelle came, and they were all hoarded back on a ship. A different one this time, with a slightly bigger hold. Freya curled her lips in disgust, because what reason did they have for a larger ship other than hoarding more Grisha below decks? Still, they weren't forced to stand this time, closed instead behind a wall of iron bars, which was a mercy on her aching body, and the hold was cleaner, drier. The bars ran from the floor up to the ceiling, the space between them so thin that Freya couldn't even fit her arm through them.

She sat down on the floor next to the bars in the corner, far enough from everyone else. Only Henrik bothered to sit anywhere near her. Everyone else looked terrified of her. She couldn't blame them. The kefta slung onto her shoulders was a blaring warning sign. She was a weapon, she was dangerous. The rest of them probably hadn't seen a single fight in their entire life. The only thing she could offer them was a small smile, but even that seemed ill-advised when they were all in chains.

She spent two nights there, almost unmoving, only staring. She thought of the endless barren fields close to the village she grew up in. The trees there were so thin and lifeless that they looked like jagged forks grasping at the sky. They lived too close to the permafrost for any plants other than a thin sort of grass to take root in the hard cold earth. That was why Freya enjoyed going to the market at Halmhend so much. Market stalls were filled to the brim with colourful things she so rarely saw. Most of the time, the fruits and vegetables sold there were basic, grown on Fjerdan soil. But sometimes, a trader's ship would bring exotic fruits from Novyi Zem and the Southern Colonies, and if they had enough money, her father would buy one for them all to share. She could still feel the stickiness of fruit juice running down her fingers.

The only other plants Freya ever saw in her village were the herbs her mother dried and hung from the ceiling in the kitchen. Her cooking was always a burst of taste in Freya's mouth, but meals weren't the only use for her mother's herbs. She made ointments and teas for the sickly of the village, chasing away the fevers of little children and soothing the aches of old men. Freya always thought her mother was a miracle worker, but now she knew she was just a woman clinging to old wives' tales. Miracles didn't happen in their small cabin, they happened in a palace in another country, on the frontlines of a war by the women and men Freya's father hunted.

On the third night, when everyone else in the hold was asleep, Matthias came to see her again. She didn't move as he shuffled over to where she sat, lowering himself to the floor and leaning against the wall just like she was. She didn't know why he was there. Hadn't they said enough? She couldn't utter even a single word. There was no point in it.

"How is your nose?" he enquired after a few minutes of long, painful silence. Freya didn't glance up at him, staring at her palms resting on her knees.

"It hurts," she answered stupidly. The ache of the break had hardly faded in the days since she regained consciousness. She wondered if the pale skin of her nose bridge was painted blue and green.

"I set it for you," Matthias said, shifting on the ground as if he was uncomfortable, nervous. She couldn't blame him. She didn't quite know what to say or ask, or even if she wanted the answers. She hummed and nodded in response, hoping he understood that she was grateful for that small mercy. Hopefully, it would heal right. She supposed it didn't matter. Death would come for her soon.

They sat in silence for another few minutes. "Why did you?" Freya asked eventually. "Set it, I mean. I thought the drüskelle thought of me as a monster. Why would you help?" She looked at him finally. A deep frown was etched into his face, accompanied by the tightly set jaw he seemed to always have now.

"You aren't a monster," he said. "You're my sister."

"But I am also Grisha." She leaned her head back until it rested against the wood behind her. "And you hate us. Kill us. What would a little more suffering be?" Matthias shook her head, but he didn't voice any argument. Freya sighed. This wasn't a conversation she wanted to have again. "Tell me about your life. Please. I have wondered for so long."

Matthias watched her for a long while, but then he nodded. He told her of everything, from the moment their village was attacked to the day his drüskelle brothers brought her unconscious to their camp, and he realised the Grisha they'd captured wasn't a stranger to him at all. She listed as he spoke about the hours of training he went through, of how Jarl Brum – that cold, cruel man – treated him as an addition to his family. Something he needed, Matthias claimed, after seeing his mother and youngest sister murdered in front of him, after returning to the village to find his father's burnt corpse and his other sister missing. He had his own isenulf, one of the great white wolves bred and trained to hunt alongside the drüskelle. Eventually, when there was little more to say, he turned to her.

"And what of you?" he asked. His eyes ran along the length of her nearly dismantled braid. "You braid your hair. So you're not married?" Freya breathed a laugh. There was little time for that in the Little Palace. There were so few married pairs in the Second Army ranks that it was an otherwordly thought to even consider it. She wouldn't have been able to anyway, not with the man she would've wanted.

"No, I'm not. There was a man I cared for though. Loved, maybe even," she told him. The admission almost brought tears to her eyes. She hadn't ever been able to tell him. And now she would never even have the opportunity. She closed her eyes and tried to summon his face before her. It caused her heart to ache.

Matthias raised his brows slightly. "What was his name?"

"Nikolai Lantsov." Matthias' face instantly screwed up.

"Do not jest with me." Freya shook her head. A genuine smile played at her mouth, and she exhaled heavily through her nose to suppress the giddiness that overtook her. You're exhausted, she told herself. That was why she felt the sudden wave of joy.

"I'm not," she said seriously. As quickly as it came, the mirth was gone. Her smile died away, and she felt like crying again. What she wouldn't give to have Nikolai beside her then. "We met at the Little Palace. And then we fought together in the war. He's studying in Ketterdam now."

Matthias' eyes were wide, a scandalised look taking over his face. "You were in love with the Prince of Ravka?" he asked disbelievingly. Freya shrugged, rubbing at her temple.

"When you say it like that, it does sound rather made up." She paused, staring off for a moment. "He was kind when the world was cruel. He listened when I felt no one else did. He was the comfort and care I needed most."

"He was kind?" Freya nodded.

"Incredibly so." There was no more word of Nikolai for the rest of the night.

A/N

Freya: I love the Prince of Ravka

Matthias, clutching his pearls: you WHAT