A guard passes us with a bucket in his hand. He stops at a cage ahead of us and upends it through the bars, sending gray slop splattering across the dirt floor. The fae inside, a small female, doesn’t move toward it.
“It’s feeding time.” The guard grins at my questioning look. “It contains everything they need to keep them alive. More than they deserve, if you ask me.”
I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to draw blood, because if I open my mouth right now, I’ll say something I can’t take back.
We near the end of the row, and I stop. The male in this cage is different.
He’s standing at the front of the cage, his fingers wrappedaround the iron bars, and he’s looking at me. Not past or through me, but directly at me. There’s nothing empty in his eyes. They’re filled with intelligence and fury, and a malice so strong it raises the hair on the back of my neck.
While I watch, his lips peel back from his teeth. It isn’t a smile. It’s a warning. If this one ever gets free, he’ll tear through as many humans as he can before they bring him down. And he’ll enjoy every second of it.
He reminds me of Cairn.
I drag my gaze away from him, and keep walking, but I can feel his eyes on my back long after I've passed his cage.
Cowen leads us down the second row, and three cages in, I stop again.
This female is different too. She sits in the center of her cage with her spine straight and her shoulders square, her posture as perfect as if she were holding court in a palace instead of sitting in filth. The cage has tried to break her, it's there in the collar wounds and the gauntness of her frame, but somehow, against all logic, she’s kept hold of her dignity.
Her head lifts when we stop in front of her cage, and her eyes meet mine. Contempt fills them. She looks at me the same way I might look at something I’d scraped off the bottom of my boot. I should look away. I should keep moving.
Instead, I step closer to the bars.
Her chin lifts higher, her lip curls, and then she spits at me. The gob of mucus lands on my boot. Before I can react, a guard is there with an iron rod in his hand. He shoves it through the bars and slams it into her ribs.
She doesn’t make a sound, and she doesn’t move. She just keeps looking at me with those cold, contemptuous eyes while the guard hits her again and again, the iron rod thudding against her body with a sound that makes my stomach lurch.
“Apologies, my lady.” The guard is breathing hard, his face flushed. “This one has always been trouble. It attacks anyone who gets near.”
But I deserve it, and she doesn’t. The thought rises and won’t be pushed back down. I came here to kill one of her kind for sport. She is right to spit at me. They’d all be right to spit at me. Every single one of them.
“Princess?” Brennan’s hand touches my elbow, and I realize I’ve been standing too long, staring at the female while she stares back. “You’ve gone quite pale. Perhaps we should?—”
Cowen is saying something about difficult stock being worth more because they provide better sport during a hunt, and I turn to look at him.
“Show me the rest.”
More cages, more faces, more bodies. My boots are coated in mud and excrement and who knows what else. My eyes burn from the ammonia stench of old urine. But I keep walking. I keep looking. I keep witnessing what my people have done, what my father pays for, and what I came here to participate in.
The melody reaches me before I see her.
It drifts through the smell and the misery, and when I hear it, my chest constricts so tight I can barely breathe. I stop walking, searching for the source.
A female in a cage near the end of the row. She’s sitting cross-legged, with her eyes closed and her face tilted slightly upward. Her humming rises and falls—a melody I don’t know, in a scale that doesn’t quite fit any music I’ve ever heard. It’s beautiful. Heartbreakingly, impossibly beautiful. Her voice is rich with grief, with longing, and with a sorrow so deep it brings tears to my eyes.
“That one.” There’s irritation in Cowen’s voice. “It hums constantly. Nothing we do stops it.”
“It’s beautiful.” My voice comes out thick.
She doesn’t seem to know I’m here, or if she does, she doesn’t care. She’s somewhere else entirely, lost in that melody and whatever it means to her. And as her voice rises and falls, another voice whispers through my head again.His voice. As clear as if he’s standing right beside me.
My people. I will not leave them to rot.
I close my eyes and let the humming wash over me. I’ve reached the end of what I can bear. I’m shaking, and everything inside me feels tight and fragile. If I have to look at one more cage, one more face, one more collar, I’m going to shatter into pieces.
“I’ve seen enough.” My voice sounds like it’s coming from far away. “Take me back.”
We pass an empty cage on the way out. I don’t mean to stop, but my feet falter of their own accord, and then I’m standing there, staring at the open door.
