“—if she breeds true, I’ll have a human in my bed in less than a week after the announcement?—”
“—if she breeds at all?—”
Some of their comments feel eerily familiar. It makes a sour taste coat my tongue. I had my own disdain once. I wore it like armor. Humans were trouble, soft as bread and twice as quick to mold. Sympathy makes poor warriors, and being a warrior was all I had ever been.
Until Arlet came into my life.
I push the memories down, only to find, to my surprise, that they don’t stay down. They float up again and stare back at me with Arlet’s eyes.
My eyes burn unexpectedly, and then my Fuegorra rumbles deep in my chest cavity. Heating, and likely lighting up under my thick cloak. With that, I move on.
Off to find Neryth.
I cut away from the tavern front and into a vein of an alley that smells like salt and charred wood. The shop signs tilt more here, andthe windows hold on to the last daylight the way certain people hold on to their dignity. Two blocks in, I find a lane that’s lost one of its stones.
Above the street, I see a sign that says “Salt End.” It hangs from a crusting rope, and beneath it, I see the first of many shops. I start walking, looking into the strange, magical glass—somehow superior to what I had seen in Enduvida—until something catches my eye.
A string of tiny mirrors dangles inside one of the windows, catching lamplight and spitting it in jittery pieces across the door. The glass shows false images of my face. There is a smear of pale where my cheeks should be, a gray eye, a shadow where my nose is.
I glance once back down the lane. It’s empty, but I still pull my hood lower. I raise my hand. This seems exactly where a woman who glamours faces would live. So, slowly, I raise my hand and knock.
Chapter 18
ARLET
Three arduous mornings pass. Or perhaps, it’s four. Time turns thin and shiny and slippery like the fibers of gold thread that I used to weave with at the loom. I rise when my ladies-in-waiting clap, sleep when they leave to attend to their regular lives, and in between, I am arranged, adjusted, and appraised.
No one else tries to kill me.
Exhaustion becomes my constant companion, and every day, every hour, every minute, I must make peace with its existence. This is my life now. I must make it to my wedding, and then…endure until death.
The elves teach me moves beyond walking, turning me into something as refined as the brushed silk I wear. On polished floors, I am a hinge, opening and closing at the exact angle Kiala Fereleaf dictates.
I practice smiling with my eyes unlit and my mouth untrusting—trying to master the cold, aloof ability all the court elves possess. They weave my hair into braids and then in coils and then, to test my neck, in a heavy knot decorated with chains, gems, and polished wood. It drags at the base of my skull until my spine complains.
Thorne comes to my room every night, as promised, and forcesme to drink that dreadful tea. I do it willingly, noting that there are already changes happening in my body. I bled yesterday, for the first time in many years.
In the morning, before my lessons, there are health checks, just as the pale-haired elf had promised. The physician weighs me, takes samples of my urine, and feeds me tonics based on the results. The first time, my palms sweated, and I nearly doubled over from nervous dry heaving.
But it was fine. He didn’t say he suspected anything about my fertility and…I’m not dead yet.
I try not to think any more of babies, or pregnancy, or blood. I just do what I am told.
Hunger also follows me around, taking turns tormenting me. I once ate slop from large pots reserved for human use. But my food is measured to the last gram and presented as if it’s a delicate gift and not a light form of starvation. When my belly growls, I look at the ceiling, waiting for the noise to quiet so I can exist in a sort of empty silence, devoid of the pleasure and satisfaction food can bring.
The lack of food can’t be good for my health. I have to trust in Thorne’s herbalists.
While I learn about their cultures and customs, I learn a new sort of hunger, too. Not just for food, but for stillness. Satisfaction. True rest and the sweetness of doing nothing.
Between drills, I am taken past more of their elven amusements. One day, I see a contortionist painted in frost colors who bends until she stops breathing, a falconer whose bird snatches rings from boys’ fingers with expert precision, a game where two ladies balance knives on the bridges of their slippers and try to tilt the blades into bowls without letting them fall. The crowd claps when the knives miss and the porcelain shatters.
I hate their laughter. I hate everything about this, and I stuff it all down into the deepest depths of my soul.
“Look pleasant,” Merlina says when my mouth looks wrong—either too smiley or too somber. “You were educated, were you not?”
After particularly rough days, Eslina presses salves into my arms—cool, then stinging, then cool again. “This will keep the skin even,” she murmurs. “We don’t want you marked up by bruises.”
Bruises they’ve given me during these lessons.