My back ached. My head ached. So did my stomach. Even my toes ached. “If I died right now, I’m not sure I’d mind.”
The toad bit me on the face.
I swatted at it, and it fell to the floor with a thump.That was uncalled for,I thought as I pulled myself up into a sitting position, cradling my injured cheek.You weren’t supposed to bite me unless I lied.Well, perhaps I had lied, a little. But you’d think a magical toad would know the difference between deception and hyperbole.
There was no sign of the toad when I looked around. A rat, however, was scampering away. Was that what had bitten me? It occurred to me that toads weren’t noted for having sharp teeth.
Rabies transmission from rats is rare,I reminded myself.Symptoms of rabies include fever, headache, agitation, paranoia, hallucinations—Wait, am I already rabid? No. I’m not afraid to drink water. That’s the telltale symptom.
If I do have rabies, I’ll fall into a coma and die. There is no known cure. Death is all but inevitable two to ten days after first presentation of symptoms.
But I don’t haveit.
I did not feel reassured.
Angelique had vanished. She’d probably taken the toad with her when she left. Did she really think of me as a sister? I supposed I would be her sister, once I married Gervase. But she didn’t know that, did she? Or no, I’d told everyone who I was. Only no one believed me. So did that mean Angelique thought of the person that she thought was pretending to be the person who was going to be her sister as her sister?
“Hey,” I said to the rat. “Hey. Do you know my sister? My half sister.”
Where was Calla? Shouldn’t she and Jonquil have arrived in my dream by now? Maybe I wasn’t dreaming hard enough. Maybe I wasn’t dreaming.
It probably didn’t make any difference. I’d yelled at them and thrown them out the last time they’d shown up. I regretted that now. I didn’t want to be executed with them hatingme.
The rat paused a few paces from me, poised on its haunches with its forepaws in the air. A pair of eyes like black beads stared in my direction. Its hairless tail was raised like a whip. I suspected it was waiting until I fell asleep so it could try for another bite. It’d serve the damn thing right if it caught rabies fromme.
“You must know my sister,” I said. “She’s a friend to all animals. Calla of Skalla.”
I had never noticed how well that rhymed before.The name of my sister is Calla of Skalla. She rode to the gala upon an impala.
The rat tilted its head at almost the same angle as Angelique had tilted hers. I hoped that meant it was listening.
“You need to take her a message from me,” I whispered. It was time to swallow my pride, even though my throat felt too dry to swallow anything. “Tell her I’m in trouble. That her sister Melilot is in trouble and needs help.” Maybe she would come if I asked, despite what I’d said to her.
The rat licked its forepaws and began grooming its face like a cat. It couldn’t have ignored me more plainly if it were…well, if it were a cat. So much for that idea.
No one was coming to save me. They would never know I’d needed saving.
“This is quite the mess you’ve gotten yourself into,” my stepmother said.
“That I’ve gotten myself into?” I staggered to my feet. “You sent me here!”
“It was so simple. Get married, I said. I know you like to spite my wishes, but you’ve been rather extreme about it this time.”
She was as blurry and wavery as the stone walls and flickered from place to place around the room like a fluttering moth. Magic. Everything my stepmother did was stuffed full to bursting with magic. She could hardly lift a finger without leveling a kingdom. Small wonder she viewed me as insignificant.
“Real mothers don’t browbeat their daughters when they’re sick,” I complained. “They give them soup.”
“Do they?” She reached out and tapped her fingers against my forehead. Through my forehead. I felt them wriggling around inside my skull.
“What are you doing?”
“Checking to see whether you will die of your illness if youare left here any longer. Death by fever in a jail cell is too ignominious a fate for one of my own.” Her fingers stretched within me and spread through the rest of my body, wrapping around my organs, poking at my gallbladder and spleen. “I cannot compete with your rosy memories of your first mother. Who, incidentally, was more likely to categorize your maladies than offer you comfort. ‘Note the symptoms of extreme delirium in this feverish patient.’ As if you were a diagram in a medical text instead of her daughter.”
“Don’t you talk about my mother,” I mumbled around the fingers in my throat. Was that true? Had my mother been more cold and detached than I liked to believe? My memories of her had faded with time, but I had the uncomfortable feeling it might be accurate. Not that I was about to admit it. “Your own bedside manner is nothing to brag about.”
“Never good enough for you, no matter what I do,” she said under her breath. After a final, uncomfortable rearrangement of my intestines, she withdrew her hands. There was a sucking sound followed by a pop as they parted from me. “There’s no need to fetch you home. You’ll be fine.”
“Keep your sticky fingers out of my brain.”
