Okay, not going to lie—I donothate being lifted by a preternaturally strong male.
I grin up at him. “Maybe I should go out of my way to get punished again.”
“Perhaps,” he replies, voice far less irritated than it was over… dinner? Breakfast? Whatever this apparently nocturnal race calls that meal.
He gazes down at me with those glowing red eyes. “You will stay in the bath until the time is up.”
“Okay, no problem. I’ll stay in this terrible bath as long as you want me t?—”
He drops me.
Into a tub of freezing-cold water.
Oh. My. Weedy. Garden!!!
The tub is so deep, I slip under the surface before I can even register what’s happening. I come up sputtering, gasping for air?—
But I don’t get far. The moment I try to climb out, two large… I don’t even know what to call them. Shadow hands? Darkness molded into fingers? Either way, they press down on my shoulders, easily keeping me in place.
The water comes all the way up to my chin.
From behind me, the king speaks—his voice floating over from the direction of the throne. “As it turns out, my father was not wrong about how much you princesses dislike a perfectly normal bath.”
His smoke-and-glass tone is hard to read. But I swear, there’s amusement in it.
“Perfectly normal?” I screech. “It’s—it’sfreezing! F-f-freezing!”
In Aralysse, we have three punishments: fines, exile, or a prescribed stay in the castle dungeon.
I used to think the dungeon would be the worst—oppressively hot in the hottest months, bone-cold during the coolest.
But I didn’t know whatcoldreally was until now.
And this isn’t like a lake plunge. Those, you canswim around in. Generate body heat. Pretend it’s invigorating.
This tub is a different beast. It’s the exact depth to keep me submerged, but too tight to move in. It’s like sitting in an ice bath the Aralysse king sometimes requested during one of his mortality kicks—but without a physician timing the session to a count of 120, or anyone caring whether your toes survive.
I think of the blood sand hourglass. Sixty minutes. A full hour.
Three thousand six hundred seconds.
The shadow hands don't budge.
“I wonder if the stories are true,” he muses. “That your toes turn gray as our stone skin and have to be amputated.”
I fight the shadow hands. I fight them with everything I’ve got—though it’s not much, with no suns’ light or plant life to power my magic.
But there’s a reason no bard sings of actually triumphing over your shadow demons, just being plagued by them.
Eventually, I tire. The hands loosen. But it doesn’t matter. I can’t move. All I can do is sit in this frozen hell.
And I have never been this uncomfortable in my life.
And that includes yesterday, when I got strong-armed into pretending to be someone marked for ritualistic murder while wearing a too-tight wedding dress.
My teeth are chattering so hard, it feels as if they might crack. And though I’ve only read about how to treat hypothermia, in the many medical herb books I borrowed from the castle library to decide what to plant for my father, I’m fairly certain the numb feeling in my toes and hands can’t be good.
The Stone Fae King has won. This, by far, is the worst punishment I could ever imagine.
