Liar.
The soft carpet muffled my footsteps as I walked around and around. I was surprised that I hadn’t worn away the looped fibers with my endless pacing the past few days.
Silence was welcome.
Silence filled my head, pushing everything else out.
I welcomed the emptiness of my mind. The nothingness.
My skin wasn’t warmed by sunlight or caressed by moonlight. A breeze didn’t slink around my limbs or kiss my cheek. Just the steady, controlled flow of conditioned air flooded my lungs and skated over my flesh.
As the next few days passed, I could only tell what time of day it was from Penn’s arrival, carrying her godsdamned silver trays of breakfast, lunch, and then supper. I didn’t speak to her. It was too exhausting to even bother trying, and she’d merely tell me what I already knew. Graysen hadn’t come back.
There was nothing but endless time and the same curved walls that seemed to press in on my very soul. Lethargy sank into my body. A racking cough had prevailed, and I shivered constantly as if I’d leeched an ice-biting chill from the stone walls and it had settled deep inside my bones.
There was nothing to do but stare at stone and wait.
Was this to be the rest of my life? An eternity spent staring at stone walls?
No.
In a few months’ time, I’d step upon an auction block, my body prodded and poked at like a cow while I was deliberated over. Which parts would be best carved up, ground down, the fat boiled and rendered off. The pieces that could be woven into spells to lengthen their lifespan or cast aglamourof beauty over their repulsive features, or twisted into other abominations of magic.
I dragged myself into the closet that served as my makeshift bedroom, closed the door, and slid into bed.
I slept, and when I awoke I wasn’t hungry, but I tried to force a few bites of something small to eat.
And I went back to bed and did not rise.
Not the next day, nor the next, nor the one after that.
And each time I was roused to consciousness, a glass of water or a spoonful of broth pressed to my lips, it was too much to bear. I didn’t want to face where I was or what was to become of me. I wanted to sleep it away.
There were almost-lucid moments. Brief windows of reality breaking through my dream state.
Penn staring down at me with worry…
Her voice drifting like music being played in another room, begging me to wake…
Hands as hot as a burning furnace on my forehead, my cheeks, my upper arms.
As I fell back into blissful nothingness, even I recognized my lungs rattled in my chest, the wet rasping of my breath, and how shivers racked my body. It was too hard to raise a limb that felt weighed down as if it were bound with iron chains.
And on I slept.
10
Graysen
The pounding footfall on stone, echoing down the pitch-black twisting tunnel, was a bass beat to the melody of splashing water. My breath came in ragged pants, my lungs on fire. I drove myself faster,harder, faster, a blade in either hand.
A fierce battle cry—
An explosion of a chittering-sawing sound—
The slash of blades raking across jagged rock—
A scream of pain—
