My bladder, sadly, didn’t have that patience. Frightened, and not knowing when it would be able to relieve itself somewhere respectable, it loosened and spilled itself all over the floor under me, until I sat in a pungent, yellow puddle with islands of mushy sawdust floating about in it. Just one more shame to add to the mounting list.
Millie drew her ragged skirts away from the spread of it, but surreptitiously, as if she didn’t want me to know she had noticed. That small kindness wrenched at me, from someone in such dire straits themselves, and a child at that.
From the looks of the stone and straw in one corner, now that I could see better with the daylight, she too had been reduced to relieving herself almost where she sat. That bastard the king wasn’t content with snatching sprouts and slicing them up to make sorceresses, or however he did it—he treated them like animals in the process it seemed.
“Wasn’t shepretty,” gushed Millie, startling me. Her little face was glowing. She gave a great, gusty sigh, as if yearning after the sorceress.
“Handsome is as handsome does,” I heard myself say. One of Da’s sayings.
“They’re soshiny,” said Millie.
“They’re not to be trusted,” I said, more sharply than I had intended. “Do you hear me? Don’t trust them.”
Millie recoiled, folding into herself, her face going still again.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I had been too harsh. If a grown adult fell under their spell as easy as winking, how much more deeply would a little girl fall in love with the beautiful ladies? Especially a little girl who had seen few shiny, beautiful things in her short life, and probably saw in these women the sort of sweet and pretty mother she had dreamed of having since she was little. I know I had had the same dream, once upon a time, although I had never mentioned my missing of my mother to Da for fear of hurting his feelings.
I don’t know how long I sat there in my own filth—it was hard to gauge time down there, especially with the last groggy dregs of magic oozing out of my mind—but after some time had passed, a fellow in a fancy uniform came and unshackled me. Millie watched expressionlessly as he turned a key in the metal at my wrists and ankles.
“Wait,” I told him when he hauled me to my feet. I held out my hand to Millie.
“Come with me,” I said, more from desperation than any hope I would actually be able to help her. “I’ll take you away from here.”
“Girl stays,” said the guard.
Millie shrank back from me, tucking her bare feet under her skirts, flicking an apprehensive glance at the guard. I didn’t know what exactly I planned to do if she came with me, but I felt a desperate need to keep my eyes on her and, therefore, somehow, stop whatever horrific thing the king had planned.
“I am a friend, I promise,” I said to her, wondering how frightening a sight I was to the small child in my current state—filthy and half-dressed, and stinking of my own urine. I wouldn’t trust me, either.
“Please,” I said, trying not to let my desperation creep into my voice. “I’ll make sure you’re safe.”Somehow.“You’re not safe here. I’m sorry I was short with you before.”
“Girl stays,” repeated the guard, grasping me by the arm and pulling me after him. Millie kept staring at me with her big eyes.
“I will come back for you,” I told her as I was pulled away, but the words rang hollow.
The guard very determinedly avoided looking me in the eye as he led me out of the dungeon and up several flights of stone steps, and I was very conscious of the stench of urine that wafted up to him from my soiled skirts. Still, he probably deserved it.
Just as Sylvester’s House had been unmistakably a part of its master, I could sense the character of the king all around me. The palace was made of the usual human materials, as far as I could tell, but there was a sharp, cold quality to it all.
The stones were laid in thin, vertical lines, and the width of the steps up which the guard was pulling me felt pinched and ungenerous, with cunning little pits and bumps placed perfectly for tripping. I stumbled up thousands of them, it felt like, the guard gripping my upper arm so hard that I could almost feel his fingerprints impressing themselves onto my skin.
We walked on, and the absence of any other human began to nag at me—just at the back of my mind, at first, and then becoming more and more prominent as we passed through dozens of rooms and passageways without seeing another living soul.
I had imagined that courts would be full of people: the king himself, of course, but also all sorts of courtiers, ladies-in-waiting, seneschals, guards ... Where were all the servants, even? The guard who had brought me out of the dungeon was the only such person I had seen.
I knew that servants, especially those of very high nobility, were meant to stay out of sight as much as possible, but I would have expected to run across at least one under-housemaid or a scurrying pageboy. I neither saw nor heard so much as a whisker of anyone. It became eerie.
The guard was silent, and all I could hear was the slap of our footsteps on bare stone, turning to a soft shushing when we crossed carpet. We spiraled up and up through the palace, until I wondered whether he was trying to walk me in circles so that I wouldn’t be able to find my way back.
Finally, we reached the end of the last hallway—not black and stark, like Sylvester’s, but paneled in rich wood and hung with tapestries—and faced an ornate door. He pushed me through it.
Another long, unfriendly corridor, and another door, and then I was in a surprisingly luxurious room: a reception room of some kind, with a large, long table surrounded by perhaps a score of chairs, uncomfortable-looking sofas against the walls, and a puce carpet that prickled at my bootless feet.
Unusually for a room like this (I thought, at least, although who knew what royalty got up to behind closed doors), there were more shackles set into the walls, and the guard fastened me into them again.
I had recovered myself enough by now to feel thirsty, my whole body shriveled up with the want of water, and when he offered me a skin of cheap wine, I drank it gratefully—if clumsily, without the use of my hands—feeling it spill over my face as he tipped it into my mouth.
His face twisted in disgust as he poured out the skin, but I did not care. I was so grateful to have the liquid; I felt myself coming to life again, like a plant greening in the rain. After that, he left me alone and seemed relieved to do so.
