Page 17 of Tangled Sails

I shook my head. “I’ve never heard of it.” I scrubbed at my forehead and blew out a frustrated breath. “Tell me again. How did you end up in Lantis?”

She looked off, distress tugging on the edges of her face. “I don’t know.”

“What happened right before I found you in the water?”

She looked back at me and took an unsteady breath. “I fell from the tower.”

I blinked several times, stunned by the answer. “You fell from a tower?” She’d mentioned a tower last night, but I thought I’d misheard her or that she’d been babbling nonsense.

“Yes.”

All right. Perhaps she had hit her head. Maybe she was knocked unconscious from the fall. “But…what were you doing in a tower?”

“It’s where I lived.”

Odd. “How did you fall?”

She shook her head and looked down, but I could still see the way her cheeks paled. “It was foolish of me. I’d practiced climbing the stone walls inside the tower many times. I was good at it, but I’d never done it with the full weight of my hair pulling on me, so when I climbed down the tower—”

“Wait,” I said, holding up a hand and trying to wrap my mind around what she was saying. “You were climbing down the outside of the tower?”

“Yes, to get down.”

“Why didn’t you just walk down?”

Lyrielle blinked up at me, as if confused that I would question her circumstances. She tilted her head as she looked up at me, like my reaction was new and unexpected. After several moments of hesitation, she said slowly, “The tower was where I lived all the time.”

“Right…” I prompted, still not understanding what that had to do with her apparent need to scale the outside of a tower in order to leave it.

“What I mean is…I never left,” she clarified. “I stayed in that tower all day of every day of every year since I was nine years old.” There was a hollowness to her voice as she said it that sent a chill through my bones.

My mouth gaped and my face went slack as confusion morphed into doubt and then settled on utter horror. My jaw flapped uselessly several times before I got one word out. “Why?”

She gave a small shrug. “Those were my aunt’s rules. She was trying to protect me.”

“From what?” I asked.

“From everything and everyone.” Lyrielle looked down and plucked a few tiny flowers from the ground.

Last night when I’d pulled her from the ocean and she said she was trying to get away, I thought she’d encountered ruffians of some sort. I thought it had only been a temporary danger that she’d fled from. Never would I have imagined that this maiden had been imprisoned by her own family member. And though the way she said it made it clear that she had resigned herself to her aunt’s reasoning long ago, I could also tell that it had never been all right with her.

“How old are you now?”

“Nineteen.”

My fist clenched. Ten years. “You never left?” I had to ask, hoping she’d give me a different answer this time.

“Never.”

“What of your aunt, did she leave?”

She gave a little nod, chin tilted up in defiance even as her jaw tensed and the remnants of pain and betrayal made her eyes glisten. “There was one door. She would lock it from the outside when she left.”

I tried to hide my disgust, but I was certain I failed. “And when she was there? Could you not leave when she slept?”

“She would move her bed in front of the door. Every night, I hoped she’d somehow forget, but of course that never happened. She would move it into place, always with a smile and a placating word about how I must be protected.”

Fresh indignation rose up, but I shoved it down. “Did you feel protected?”