“That’s nae whit yer mirror’s bin saying.”
“That isn’t my mirror!” I wrapped my arms around my legs and shuddered. It was so very, very cold in the cell. I pressed my forehead against my knees. “Clem, listen—”
“I’m not Clem. I’m Jack.”
I tried to fix my blurry gaze on the hunter. She was still squatting on her heels outside my cell. “If you’re trying to drive me insane,” I said, “you may be a bit late.”
“Is that why you did it?” Jack grabbed the bars, her grip so hard her knuckles turned white. “You’re mad? Is that your excuse?”
“That was a joke, Jack. Do you have any sense of humor?”
I lay back and watched the arched ceiling heave and flow like the shore of a lake. I’d been a lake, once. It had been peaceful. When bugs crawled over me, they’d made tiny ripples. They hadn’t hunted for fresh portions of my flesh to bite. I raised my head to glare at them, but I couldn’t see any; I only felt them scuttling across my skin.
“I just want to know why,” Jack said. “I want to know what possible reason you could have had to try to kill Gervase. To kill his family. To kill the Skallan princess.”
“Oh, the Skallan princess and I have issues going way back,” I murmured.
Jack pounced on that, once again missing the joke. “Why did you hate her? Why do you hate Gervase?”
“I don’t hate him. I don’t hate anybody.”
“Well, I hate you!” she shrieked at me. I whipped around at the change in tone and regretted it when agony stabbed through my head. “I hate you for what you’ve done to Jack! Her love for Gervase is beautiful and pure, and they’d be married by now if it wasn’t for you.”
The hunter I’d thought was Jack spat a toad at me through the bars. It thumped into my chest and flopped onto the floor.
“You’re not real,” I muttered at it as it hopped around the cell. “The lion is real. You’re not.”
Ignoring me, it speared something small and skittering with its tongue and swallowed it with a satisfied crunch.
“Could you please just tell me,” I said, turning to the masked hunter, “if Sam is all right?”
“Who’s Sam?” Angelique asked.
The sky outside the window was dark again. They were changing day and night on me. To keep me disoriented, no doubt. But they’d have to do more than that if they wanted me to talk. I’d been held prisoner by better than them. I’d been locked in the shifting prison of the Shadow King and entombed beneath the ice by the Queen of the Northern Snows. A bit of petty trickery wasn’t going to make me spill my secrets.
Come to think of it, the joke was on them. I didn’t remember which secrets they wanted me to spill.
“Excuse me,” I said to Angelique, and crawled over to throw up again in the overflowing bucket. I vomited until my torso felt hollow and wrung out.
“I’ve been doing my best to help you,” she said as I collapsed onto the floor, panting and sweating. “You’ve made it rather difficult. Everyone is frightened of your powers. The hunters say you were the one who turned them into birds. That you moved the very trees to attack them.”
“That’s an exaggeration.” They’d only slid in a little bit closer when I’d threatened Jack.
“Gervase wants to execute you in some suitably horrible way.”
“Thrown in a barrel of poisonous snakes? Forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes until I perish? Roasted to death in my own child-cooking oven?”
Angelique seemed puzzled. “You have a child-cooking oven?”
“No. You’ll have to use someone else’s.”
I looked around for the door leading out, but I couldn’t see it. Someone had hidden it. I peered into the dark corners in case they’d made it very, very small.
Angelique cocked her head to one side, watching me. “I’ve argued with my brother day and night, trying to convince him to let you live.”
“Really? You and I barely know each other.”
“You’ve…become like a sister to me. Truly.” She paused, waiting for me to fill the silence. I didn’t know what she wanted me to say. “Looking at the state of you,” she went on, “you might not survive long enough for him to kill you.”
