"There," he said, but didn't immediately step away. "Hold that position."
She held it, hyperaware of him standing just behind her, of the way the marks pulsed with his proximity. Finally, he moved back.
"Adequate. We'll continue tomorrow. Memorize the first three chapters."
"What if I can't?"
"Then you'll learn through other methods." His smile was sharp. "Pain tends to improve retention."
She gathered her things, muscles aching from the unfamiliar positions. At the door, she paused, working up courage.
"Thank you again," she said without turning. "For last night."
Silence stretched long enough that she thought he wouldn't respond. Then, quietly: "I told you. Your nightmares were disruptive. Typical human."
"Still." She glanced back to find him watching her with that unreadable expression again. "Thank you."
Something flickered across his face—annoyance, maybe, or something more complex. "Go. Before I decide you need additional lessons in gratitude."
She fled down the corridor, the weight of his gaze following her until she turned the corner. Her legs shook from more than just the exercises. The thorn patterns still pulsed with residual heat from his proximity, and that warmth in her chest whispered questions she didn't want to answer.
Days passed in a blur of parchment and pain.
The books Eliam assigned seemed to shift when she wasn't looking. Rules that made sense in morning light became gibberish by afternoon. Never eat red fruit on the thirdday of the moon cycle. But another text claimed red fruit was required for certain rituals. Iron burns the fae. Except when it didn't. Except when they wore it as jewelry to prove their power.
Her head ached constantly.
Between studying, she wandered the castle under the pretense of stretching her legs. Really, she was mapping. Learning which corridors led to dead ends, which stairs descended to locked doors, which windows opened to drops that would kill and which she could survive.
The castle seemed to sense her intent, hallways rearranging themselves when she tried to retrace her steps. A door that led to the kitchens in the morning opened onto a room full of mirrors by afternoon. The servants' stairs she'd discovered simply vanished, leaving a blank wall where she'd sworn an opening had been.
Still, she persisted. There had to be a pattern. A weakness. Some way out that didn't involve dying or completing an impossible bargain.
Briar had also discovered that the castle had moods. Today it felt hungry. She'd started carrying breadcrumbs from breakfast, leaving trails that vanished within minutes but at least gave her the illusion of control. The walls seemed to pulse sometimes, as if digesting something just out of sight. Doors would creak open as she passed, revealing glimpses of rooms that shouldn't exist, like a chamber where gravity worked sideways and a hallway that stretched infinitely in both directions.
She avoided these invitations. Whatever the castle wanted to show her, she doubted it was freedom.
The other residents watched her when they thought she wasn't looking. Servants scurried away when she approached. Courtiers whispered behind raised hands. Even the bark-skinned woman who brought her meals wouldn't meet her eyes anymore.
She was a plague carrier. Untouchable except by the one who'd claimed her.
During one particularly desperate evening she discovered a balcony that overlooked the forest. For a wild moment, she considered jumping. The trees below looked almost soft from this height. But as she leaned over the railing, vines grew from the stone, wrapping around her wrists with gentle insistence. Not restraining, not really, but rather a warning.
The message was clear: even death wasn't an escape he'd be inclined to permit, at least not until it suited him to do so.
She returned to her books with shaking hands, trying to lose herself in contradictory rules and impossible etiquette. But her mind kept circling back to the truth that became clearer each day:
There was no way out.
Only through.
The mark had spread past her elbow now, thorned vines creeping toward her shoulder with patient inevitability. Each morning brought new tendrils, new thorns.
She tried not to think about what happened then.
The days were unbearably long, but the nights? The nights were worse. When exhaustion finally drove her to the bed that embraced too eagerly, and silence cradled her, that’s when the tears came. Silent, bitter things that soaked into pillows that probably reported back to him. She missed Allegra's laugh and her mother's distracted humming. The simple pleasure of making coffee for strangers who didn't want to own her.
A week had come and gone, at least she thought it had been a week. She sat at the vanity and studied her reflection in the water-mirror. The face looking back was hers but different. It was sharper somehow, as though the forest had already begun to change her, carving away the soft human edges.
