Page 14

My cage, once again, came to a stop and was set down. Only this time, when the fog lifted, the bars melted away, and the cage that had held me shifted in a swirl of velvety fur into a cat the size of a golden retriever. It began licking its paws, ignoring me while I took in my surroundings.

The room I was in was tiny, barely a room at all, with space for a single cot-like bed, a small three-legged stool, a nearly spent taper candle, and a bucket in the corner. The half walls were solid stone, roughly hewn and damp from bedrock weeping for its wards. The only source of light was torches burning beyond the open maw where a door should’ve been.

The chill in the air bit through the sheer gown and settled on my prickled skin as if to mock me.

“Well, there she is. How’s it, princess?” asked a woman’s voice from behind me.

I turned and scowled. I didn’t know this person, and I certainly wasn’t a princess.

“Ah, yes. ’Tis I, the Princess of Slaves.” I rolled my eyes and crossed my arms as she took my stock.

“Had the Masters eating out of your hand the entire journey from the Night Market. Must be some sort of princess,” the woman bit back.

“Look, lady. I don’t know what your issue is, but I’m down here just like you. Just because a bunch of dickheads liked looking at this flesh suit doesn’t make me a princess. But, by all means, call me princess again.”

A small gathering of people had wandered toward us, interested in the power play. I wasn’t interested in playing games, though, certainly not games I didn’t even know the rules of.

“Is it true that The Raven of the Dawn bought you from the Night Market?”

It was the soft whispered voice of a young girl, something odd twisting in the way she formed her words.

I nodded. “That’s what I was told.”

“How’d you survive so many nights with him?” another person asked.

A shiver of fear wound its way through the crowd as all eyes turned to me like I had the secret to some sort of riddle. One that would unshackle each one of them and release them back to their lives as surely as dawn would release you from the grips of a nightmare.

“I mostly ignored him.” The dull light showed only the large soft violet eyes blinking up at me in confusion. “Sorry. I’m not clever. If I was, I wouldn’t be here. All he did was feed me.”

A collective sigh of disappointment washed through the assembly, and one by one, they began to peel off into the warrens lurking outside of the torchlight that lit up the central room. Bodies disappeared into the dark, where hallways led deeper into the quarters. Some disappeared behind sheets of soiled fabric strung up with makeshift ropes that led to what I assumed were rooms like mine.

I turned back to retreat myself, wanting to hide in my own little hole while I figured out what to do next, but my hand was caught by the small girl. I sighed. A child should not be here. I’d lived through enough bad homes and shit living conditions to have my heart breaking when I looked down into her young face. She had to be all of maybe five or six. What horrors had she already seen?

“Did The Raven really not bother you?”

Her voice was so soft, pitched low, and conspiratorial I could almost sense the unnatural edge to the whisper, as if her voice was unable to lift to louder sounds.

I nodded and crouched to be on the same level with her. “Do you know much about him?”

She nodded, looking up to the two figures joining us, shielding our conversation from the others. “I’ve been here almost as long as the Laundress. I remember when The Ard Rí brought him back from the coronation ceremony. No one spoke to or of him for years—well, none of the Fae, that is. We saw things and heard things, though. We knew things.”

“Years?” I chuckled.

She frowned, the ire crunching her cherubic features into an expression that seemed to sit uncomfortably on her face.

“Violet is well clear of two hundred fifty years, princess,” one of the two who had joined us said in a masculine voice.

Beside him, a woman with gemlike skin the color of rich emeralds nodded. Ghostlike images of flowers in a bucolic meadow warmed by a midday sun played on candle smoke beneath the reflective surface of her naked body.

“She’s . . . what? That . . . that can’t be,” I hissed, fighting the urge to push up to my full height.

“You come into Magh Meall and get sold at the Night Market, arrive to an Ard Rí’s castle in a kin’tha cage, which now sits at your foot purring like a giant house cat. And I bet you didn’t get pushed out into the world looking like a tawdry gold pearl to boot, and you think Violet being over two hundred fifty years old is beyond belief?”

The scathing recounting of my exact circumstances came from the man who seemed to be made of rich green leaves, his eyes of ivy bark, and his hair of spears of a wild hemlock’s leaves.

He had me there. It was by no means the most unreasonable thing I had encountered since I stepped off the pavement and fell down the rabbit hole. I just needed to start accepting that my old bullshit meter needed to be recalibrated.

“Fair enough. I’m sorry, Miss Violet. I’m Cricket. Can you tell me more about The Raven of the Dawn?”