Dorian set his palm to the center of the door, and like the ones below it opened inward. He stood aside, eyes on me. He jerked his chin toward the interior. “Are you hungry?”
Not in the least.
I didn’t move. Questions rattled through me like dice, but none of them felt like they would be answered. One of them found its way out, though—the one I’d been asking myself since the nightof the battle.
“What are you?”
His chin lowered, his under-eyes becoming dark-purple hollows in this light. “You know what I am. You’ve known since the start.”
CHAPTER NINE
He did not haveto force me into the room; I went in myself.
There was no hope of escape. Not right now.
When the door shut, I turned to it. No knob or handle, no obvious way to open it. I couldn’t even get my fingers under the edges. A room with no exit was a cell.
You know what I am.
I did not, but I did. As soon as he said it, an inkling had slithered through my head. Pieces had begun to fit together. Monster, yes, but that was as imprecise a word as predator, as prey.
I turned toward the room. Plush brown animal skin covered the floor. At the far end stood a four-poster bed draped with a gray-and-black-furred skin. Two fat green pillows, their cases bound with bramble-cord, sat at a headboard carved with a forest scene of tall trees and dark hollows.
Maybe not a cell, then. But any place could feel like a prison.
To my left sat a dresser that looked like it had been coaxed from the tree itself, its edges gnarled and uneven with knotwork handles for the drawers. Beside it was a curved doorway into a smaller room. To my right, a tall, uneven bookcase of the same woodwork had been filled with books. A dark-green armchair sat beside it, and an elaboratetapestry had been hung across the rest of the wall. I stepped up to the tapestry, which was twice as tall and wide as me. The bright-colored thread felt like a declaration and an invitation.
Before me was a bird’s-eye scene, the sun’s rays enormous over a land that appeared divided into four sections. At the center, the radials of a compass pointed north and south and east and west. My finger touched the bottom left corner, where a dense forest grew over the whole area, and I traced a bramble spire rising out of the trees.
The very spire I stood under now. The place Dorian had called Sylvanwild.
My hand drifted upward. At the top left, another spire emerged like a crooked gray finger from a treeless, barren land. The tapestry’s threads were gray and black and purple.
At the top right, a mountain range offered waterfalls. And out of that a gray stone spire rose from the mountaintops like a peak.
And at the bottom right—adjacent to Sylvanwild—a fourth spire. White stone, not unlike ours in the southern district; it sat amidst a wide, grassy plain, and here the sun seemed to shine brightest. The land was dappled with lakes and forests.
Not my land. Not my people.
And none of them would come for me. My mother was dead, probably my sometimes-father, too, and Theo and maybe Elisabet were gone. Nobody otherwise cared about a greenhorn guard. And while the horror of their deaths felt like a thousand-ton weight, I didn’t feel that way over my disappearance. It was better to know no one would come than to live in hope.
If I was ever going to escape, it would be on my own feet, by my own hands.
Through the curved doorway, I found a wash basin, a mirror, and a fat stone tub with a full bucket of water beside it. The closest thing I had ever seen to a tub was the horse trough at the barracks. Only the king bathed—we washed ourselves like statues, with sponges we squeezed back into our bucket of rationed water.
I approached the wash basin. It was large and deep and full ofclear water; so clear, I could see down to the sanded-wood bottom. I almost didn’t want to touch it, to dirty it with my hands. I lifted my palms and found them brown and red with dirt and dried blood.
My blood, and maybe other people’s.
I stepped over to the mirror and sucked in air. My blond hair was matted and dirty and my clothing was ripped. I could barely make out my own features, but my eyes were a startling blue.
Some crooked part of me relished the image staring back. The dirt and blood were proof. And there was something else I saw, too—a thing I couldn’t really describe, but it made me press my shoulders back and lift my chin.
I stared into the mirror and wondered if I was in shock. I should be curled on the floor, bawling into the fine wood. But the longer I stood there and waited for it, the more I realized it wasn’t coming. Not tonight.
I crouched by the wash basin and lowered my face to it. At first I simply set my lips to the surface and allowed my tongue to touch the water. It was cold and smelled divine. Then I gave in, dipped my mouth into it before I could stop myself. The water was the best I’d ever tasted. Once I started, I couldn’t stop—I drank and drank until I gasped for air, and then I drank more.
It felt like a religious act. It felt sacrilegious.
