Chapter 1 of the Queen's Hand [Fantasy, 1700 words]

I would love to get feedback on the first chapter of the second book in my fantasy/romantasy series.

I am trying to write with very little exposition, sort of like in the Dark Matter trilogy, where the world makes more sense as you keep reading, but I also want the story to be exciting, and for the reader not to be confused right away.

Please critique the pacing, the characters, the escalation of events and the tone and anything you feel is worth bringing up!

Also, English is not my first language, and I usually write in Swedish, and I translated this myself, so if you have feedback to improve my English too, please don't hesitate.

Chapter 1

It was one of the bad days for Thallis, Ilaria realized as soon as she climbed down into the cave and heard him mumbling to himself in the dark.

“No, no… Sloane, you cannot!”

Ilaria’s stomach knotted. Thallis had his good days, and his bad days. Sometimes, he was fully there, sharp and cunning, and other times, he was consumed by rage, or bitterness. But the days when he spoke of Sloane were the worst ones.

She reached the cavern floor and without making a noise, she stepped off the half ruined stone staircase. The underground lake was completely still, except for the splashes where Thallis walked around near its edges until he stepped into the moonlight seeping in through the hole in the ground above them.

“Who’s there?” He called when she stepped out into the water.

“It’s me, Ilaria, as usual,” she answered and forced softness into her voice. To get irate or impatient on days this bad could end badly. “We were to meet by the full moon, remember?”

He walked toward her in his hurried, janky way, and once he stood before her, she could finally see his eyes. They should be a warm brown, but in the last few years they had drained of color, and one the worst of days, there was nothing left beyond the pupil and the thin, black ring surrounding the bleached iris. Today, barely even that ring remained.

“I thought, perhaps you were Tariel,” he said, sweeping his gaze over her curls that fell over her shoulders and chest.

“Tariel is dead…” she said carefully. You saw me kill him.

Thallis nodded, as if that confirmed a question he had not asked, and lowered his head so that the dark, damp hair fell in his face. He wasn’t much taller than Ilaria, and he leaned his forehead to hers. She closed her eyes and let him find his grip on the world again through her. The fabric of her knee length riding tunic got cold when he placed his hands on her waist and pulled her closer.

She pressed their mouths together and spread her lips as he pushed on.

This helped ground him, to keep him more human than curse, and it gave her something too. Sometimes, it confirmed that she had her own feelings, that she wasn’t just a mirror for others. Sometimes, it pushed away the emptiness in her chest, gave her something to focus on that didn’t really matter, something that only felt good in the moment. Perhaps she too needed the reminder that she was more than a curse.

But then he pulled at the lacing at her neckline, and the feeling of his hands against her bare skin made her stomach lurch. She tore herself from the kiss and the water splashed around them as she took a step back.

“Not today.” Her cold voice, the water and his breath echoed through the cave. No sound from the forest above reached down there.

He gave her a surprised look, and then it was like his true self finally returned to him. His eyes did not regain their color, but the confused, frantic look in them was replaced by sharpness. His shoulders lowered and he straightened his back.

“Oh yes, that’s right,” he said. “He’s found you.”

The way he spoke, with such sudden clarity and consideration, made her take another step back. She’d known him for years, learned from him long before they found other things to take from each other, and she knew the stark turns his mood could take. But him finding his footing, coming back to himself, so abruptly after a moment of weakness was new.

Where was his mind?

“Who’s found me?” she asked. Sloane. Tariel. What would trigger thoughts about them?

Thallis stepped closer and she swallowed. Would he suddenly throw their deaths in her face? Would he slip into rage and blame her for everything he’d lost again.

“You know who.” No one had found her. No one ever found her, because she found them first. “He who marks mages, binds them to his will.”

Ilaria shook her head.

“You killed the one he loved the most, and I betrayed him. For you.”

“You did it for your own sake,” Ilaria snapped. “Do not put your every choice on my shoulders. I’ve gained nothing for all that you’ve done.”

He laughed. “Is that so? The mere fact that you’re standing here right now, alive and still free, is my doing. Without me, you would be like me.” The calm was leaving his gaze, something sharp crawling in to take its place. “And now you will be, despite all I’ve done for you.”

“Then it will be because you refuse to give me the name of he who marked you.” It was rare that Ilaria got angry. She experienced it often enough through others to waste her own time on such a useless emotion, but sometimes she couldn’t even rise to her own level. “You speak of everything you’ve sacrificed and lost to protect me, to protect mages, but you won’t give me the name of the one who hunts us.”

“He doesn’t need to hunt you!” A vein cut through Thallis’ forehead and he growled. “You’ve been foolish enough to walk right to him. He didn’t even have to mark you to get exactly what he wanted, don’t you see that? To own us is valuable, but can you imagine the power in controlling how magic is born? To grant a noble house with magic blood?”

And then she understood. Now she knew exactly who had marked Thallis, and it was a man she could not just kill.

“How could you say nothing?” She shoved at his chest, but he barely even budged. “Had I known, I wouldn’t… I would have done things differently!”

Thallis threw himself forward, gripped her wrists and lowered his face to hers again. “I have broken so many orders for you, and you see the prize I pay.” His eyes, devoid of color, seemed to glow in the moonlight, and it sounded as if it hurt him to speak. For each passing year, his voice grew hoarser. “Excuse me if I don’t want to die just to give you a name.”

She gasped as he bore his nails into her wrists, and tried to rip free of his grip, but the mark had not stripped him of his physical strength yet.

“Alright, I understand. Of course you don’t want to give your life for mine.” If she could disarm the situation, soothe Thallis’ wounded mind, they could fix this. “You’ve already given so much to me.”

The grip on her wrists did not let up, but she dared to step closer to him, bringing their bodies tight. Carefully, she kept her breath steady.

“Now I know, and I can handle him. You did not lose everything for nothing. Do you hear me, Thallis? Sloane and Tariel did not die for nothing. He will not get what he wants, because I will not give it to him.”

A tortured sound tore itself through Thallis. His grip loosened and she saw her chance to close the last bit of distance between them and kissed him. Nausea rolled up her throat, but she forced it down. She needed him to land fully in his body before his mind could deal with this. That was the only thing that mattered.

One of his hands came to rest by her throat, his thumb grazing her exposed collarbone. A shiver went through her, and this time, he broke the kiss. She gripped his tattered, damp tunic, keeping him from stepping away from her.

Their eyes met and she wished, for probably the hundredth time, that she could feel him. People were a lot more manageable then.

“He’s any enemy you cannot outmaneuver, Ilaria,” he said and her stomach dropped. “But I can’t let him mark you.”

The hand at her throat closed. “I’m sorry,” he whispered and pressed his thumb to her larynx. “This is the only way I can see.”

She couldn’t make a sound. The water moved around her legs, and the edge of her vision darkened. She hit his arm, his chest, but to no avail.

Think! Act!

She brought her knee up, hit him in the crotch and pushed herself away from his as he went down. Roaring, he got hold of her ankle and the cold water hit her like a brick wall when she fell into it.

Her hand grasped at the water’s edge, her fingers digging into the stones there, and found a sharp-edged stone, almost the size of her fist. Thallis pulled himself up over her body, pressed against the stone bottom, and his hand made its way to her neck, even as he still quinced with pain.

She put all her strength into the swing, hit him in the temple, and he toppled down into the water next to her. Pushing her legs back under her, she rushed for the stone steps. Her hands tore at the moss covering most of the steps as she half ran, half climbed toward the surface.

Summer’s heat hit her when she threw herself out of the cavern and into the meadow, where her horse, Willow, waited. Ilaria wasted no time on a saddle or bridle for the horse, just threw herself onto bareback and pushed her heels into her sides, and Willow shot off.

Maybe Thallis was dead. Maybe she had hit him hard enough to, for the first time in her life, take a life without the help of magic. Most likely not. But he couldn’t reach her on Willow. He was the only person she couldn’t use her magic on, but she didn’t need magic to escape him.

Willow brought them through the light night, and the wilderness passed them by in blurred bands of trees and meadows. Ilaria stayed leaning over her neck as the wind ripped at her wet hair, and thought of nothing but to keep moving.

Just before she reached the plains outside of Valhane City’s walls, she heard the cries.

A large bird soared above them, black against the sky, and its shriek pierced the air and made Willow jerk. Ilaria pressed her thighs harder around the horse, turned her gaze to the sky in the east, toward the burgeoning dawn. She felt it before she had a reason to know it. A certainness rose through her chest without warning.

She sighed deeply. The spirits be cursed.

The king was dead.