Page 31

The prison of wool was pulled back from my body, cracking scabs that had formed into the blanket, and fused me with it. The sensation of my skin coming away with it shot me straight up, new life in unused muscles. A scream rattled through desiccated vocal cords that hadn’t had the touch of water in too long.

“There she is,” the child whispered, like a mother hen clucking at her favorite chick as it pulled a worm free from the dirt.

I tried to force my eyes open, but only one responded. The other laid there like a lazy lump. The world was a series of blue, black, and white blobs slamming together too quickly to track into more appropriate shapes. The vivid purple eyes of the living doll at my side came into the single plain of my view and narrowed on me.

“V-Violet?” I asked, unsure of what was going on and less about who she was.

“Mmm, there you are, Cricket.” I was swaying, losing balance, as the world around me uprooted itself like a pinwheel in a hurricane. “Easy, easy . . . You haven’t sat up in a long time. Maybe try it a little slowly. Lie down now.”

Small icy hands touched my back, and I screamed as a fire brand exploded across broken flesh. She audibly winced, and I heard water splashing in a wooden bucket before I felt the press of its chill trickling down the crack of my back. It felt like heaven. It felt like nothing I had ever felt before. I groaned into it and sighed, letting my body crumble into the euphoria of comfort.

“Where am I, Violet?”

My voice was foreign to me. It was weak, soft, humorless, and defeated. I had never sounded defeated, even when I was.

“You’re in the Temple of the Ascended, Cricket. You are in the land of Magh Meall, the land of Aos sí. Fairies.” Her tone was soft, like she was explaining it to a dandelion that might blow away with fright if she spoke too harshly. “Except not the winged kind. The bastard kind.”

Fae. Magh Meall. It was all starting to come rushing back. The horrifying three days I had spent as a slave. Three days. Had it only been three days? It had felt like seven lifetimes and more. The march through the palace to the King’s quarters with my escort shivered into view, and I jerked.

“The King!”

“Shhh, shhh. He’s not here. It’s okay. You’re okay. It’s no one but us, Cricket. It is just us and the lamps. The Fae have all gone to court. The high priestess is making some sort of proclamation or another that all the dandy little Fae wanted to attend. You’re safe. I came when I could.”

“How long have I been here?”

“The better part of a month. Would have been more, but they finally decided to spend the magic to heal you up from the brink of death. Not entirely sure why, but they did. You’ve been sleeping it off for the last few days since. Emerald wasn’t specific about the details of who and what . . . You know how she is. Brains of a gerbil. Oh! No . . . Cricket, you need to stay still . . .”

She was talking too much. And I needed to move. More importantly, I had to piss really bad. The pressure on my bladder felt like an entire herd of elephants had stomped it, and all that was left was the gooey pulp I was about to explode with.

“You can’t walk yet . . .”

The sympathy and pity in her voice ripped me apart.

“Wh-What?”

“They only used enough magic to heal the missing pieces from your skull and some on your face. Left eye is still busted pretty bad, but they stabilized your brain enough for you not to die. It was dicey for a while there.”

She was speaking like she was whispering to the weeds again.

“He . . .”

“Not sure which he you’re about to curse, but either one, you had best leave it. The King beat you for several days, off and on like. Whenever The Raven was pulled away, he’d come down to the Temple and beat you some more.”

I let my one good eye roll up as I let go of my muscles and flopped back down. What was the use of trying to scurry off to the nearest bucket when I’d be dragging half of my body along with me?

The pressure in my bladder didn’t go away, though. And as tears of frustration and self-loathing built in my eyes, I grit my teeth. As the tears broke the dam of my lashes, so too did my bladder.

Violet had the heart not to mention it as we listened to it trickle into some sort of bucket.

“I hate to ask this, Cricket, but what did you do to piss the King off so badly? I’ve seen him in moods since after the war, but I’ve never seen him this wroth with a single one of us before.” A damp cool rag was pressed to the busted eye that radiated heat from the other side of my face.

“Gave him a shitty blow job, apparently.” I snorted with as much amusement as I could.

The small doll woman clucked in the back of her porcelain throat. “That’ll do it, I guess. I’ll tell the others to bring you notes on how to give throat properly. Since, apparently, you have the oral skills of a dead toad. You’d think a young thing like you would know how to properly suck down a dick. You came in here all hot-assed and sassed up like a girl who knew how to fuck a man dry and leave him crawling from his casket to get more.”

“Anyone ever tell you that you have a foul mouth?”

“Oh, they’ve called my mouth foul before, but they’ve never called it unskilled.”