3. Chapter 3
Chapter 3
T he blackness around me was soft and velvety. I wanted to nuzzle my face against it like a fat house cat, lavishing in its embrace.
The piercing pain that started behind my left eye and radiated out wouldn’t let me, though. It pulled me from the warm, soft depths back to a grey world filled with bitter cold and icy agony.
When I opened my eyes, I was sure I was still dreaming. Nothing made sense.
Nothing about the shapes around me seemed to flow and fit into place in a world I was familiar with. It was all disjointed, indecipherable edges that confused me. I recognized the bars of a cage but only on the most surface level. When I touched the blackened bar, it quivered like the thighs of a newly plucked virgin. It was not cold metal, not the unyielding force of a cage that belonged in my world. It was soft and plush, warm to the touch, and moved into my finger.
The chilling idea that I was inside of a living thing shot me to my feet, and I slammed my head against the low ceiling.
“Do be a dear and hold fucking still.”
Mr. Ben’s voice split the silence as he stepped into view. The face I saw before me was not the face he had worn in the small office. Gone was a smirking man in a well-tailored suit with a cigar, and in his place stood a creature with eyes too large for his head, pointed ears, and ash-grey skin with course black-as- night fur sprouting along a rat-like snout. His mouth was a hatchet slice into the flesh of an otherwise horror-laced image.
I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out. Not even the croaking whistle of primal terror.
His hatchet mouth stretched across pointed teeth into a barking laugh. “Am I not beautiful, darling?”
He pressed himself against the living bars and stroked it, causing my cage to tremble. I lurched back from the gnashing teeth of the creature before me, falling onto my ass. He snapped his long claw-tipped fingers, and the cage twisted, the bars moving to wrap around my arms and legs, my head dangling out from an opening.
“Now, let’s take a look at what we have here. Do be a dear and get her a change of clothing. She looks like a school marm. One of those gauzy numbers, I think,” he mumbled to someone I couldn’t see in the gloom of the space as he came around to appear in my upside-down view. “Eyes are too small. Boobs too. Ass too. Stomach as well. Legs too short. Let’s do something with this nest she calls hair, too. Do we know who will be at the Market tonight?”
I shuddered as his claw sank deep into my hair and lifted. He moved my head around as if inspecting a prized lamb. I tried to scream, tried to shout and call for help, but nothing came out. I struggled against the iron grip of the fuzzy-bars-turned-shackles but could not move.
“Our only confirmed clients are The Emerald Scythe and Lady Syphon.”
The voice sounded like that bitch that had greeted me at the That-Should-Not-Be-There house.
“Hrm. A small gathering this evening, then.” He turned his head to gaze down into my eyes. “Not good for you, I’m afraid. We will have to do significant work to ensure your sale. You don’t mind, right? Do speak up if you disagree with being reformed.”
I screamed in my mind, pushing the sound as hard as I could. I could feel myself straining into the words until, finally, I whispered out, “Fuck you. ”
The large black depths of his eyes rounded at the hissing whisper, and he leaned in close to inspect me. “A better tongue lock, it seems, too. Willful little bitch, aren’t you?”
An unseen fist gripped my throat and squeezed, phantom fingers curling around my voice and clamping it down until I was choking on silence.
“As for fucking me, no thank you. I prefer my own kind. You humans are disgusting. Dripping all over the place, oozing with your own foulness.”
The hours stretching out before me were snapshots of abject horror. I watched, outside of my body, as Mr. Ben and his assistant butchered me. They carved and contorted my flesh like it was clay. Sculpting new features, exaggerating others. When blackness claimed me, I sank into it and prayed for it to never end. I gripped onto it with a desperation I hadn’t known before.
Pain had always been an unwelcome constant in my life. From beatings to hunger to loneliness so sharp it carved deep ravines in my psyche. I was not unfamiliar with its bite, an old familiar shoe as much as anything else. This was something else, though. The searing agony that seeped into my flesh and shattered my bones went so much further than anything I had ever known. It stabbed into the very essence of who I was, and when I thought I could take no more, when I thought that the next breath I took would be my last, the blackness would claim me, sure that I would wake no more.
But wake, I did. And I kept waking up. Kept being pulled back into the misery that existence had become. There was no escaping it. There was no inch of my body that they did not alter. One would think that knowing your own identity, the face in the mirror you’d taken for granted was no longer your own, would be unsettling enough. But when long black nail-tipped fingers forced themselves inside of me, and I felt the barbed wire of my flesh being changed where only a few others had ever been, I was shattered.
I wanted to die. I wanted to cease to exist. I wanted to have never existed to begin with. There was nothing about what was being done to me that I could escape from and nothing I could do to stop it. I could only watch, focus on the smear of something brownish on the wall, and hope that eventually the agony would end . . . or I would.
“That should do it. Sell this one for more than the others.” The twisted features of Mr. Ben, the creature who had become the stuff of nightmares, came into my upside-down view, obscuring my friend Smear. “You’ve cost me a lot of magic, little sun. When you go on the block tonight, you’d better glow. And if you do not?” He leaned down, the point of his nose stabbing into the raw flesh of mine. “Then what has happened here tonight will be the sweetest dream you have ever had. And this was easy for me. Remember that, should you wish to rebel. This, remaking you into a pleasing image, was only an hour of my time.”
Had it been only an hour? It had felt like a thousand years of nothing but burning and misery.
I had no witty remarks left. I had no smart-ass words to give. My rules had gone silent.
I had gone silent.
The cage shifted and reformed into a more cage-like mass, and I was left alone. Every fiber of my being ached like I had been run over by a steamroller. Shaking fingers reached up and gingerly touched at the edges of my new face. I didn’t know who she was, and she didn’t know me. I felt my eyelashes longer, fuller, around eyes twice the size as I knew.
The shaking tips of my fingers explored the uncharted planes of a face completely foreign to me. Every centimeter my fingertips grazed screamed as if I were nursing an especially vicious sunburn. My nose was smaller. I once had an aquiline nose, and now it was dainty and narrow, with a slight depression on the tip. I wondered how it sat on my diamond-shaped face. Vanity was never one of my vices, but I would have killed to have a mirror handy, even if I was terrified to my very marrow to see what the evil little creature had done to me.
I cried out when my fingertip bumped a metallic plate that resonated through my skull with the nudge. Panic laced through my blood as I followed its edges with a ginger touch. It spanned the width of the center of my face from the edge of one eyebrow to the other and ventured halfway up my forehead and halfway down the bridge of my new nose.
I was no longer Sóna Mac Raith. I didn’t know who I was any more, but the Sóna I had once known was dead. The aching beast left in her place was someone unknown to me. I hoped she was someone I’d like.
I didn’t like many people.
I curled into a tight ball. The throbbing in my skin from core to toe echoed my hollow heartbeat as fat tears rolled down my new cheeks and soaked into the living cage’s velvet lining.
“Shhh,” a voice called from the darkness. “Stop that racket! You’ll make them come back! And if they come back, we will all be punished for it.”
There was someone else in this gloom? I wanted to be hopeful, but the last petals of the woman I once was crept up. Sonny’s Rule #1: No one is coming to save you. Whomever was in here with me was just as fucked as I was. Had they watched silently as I was tortured? Had they witnessed that grimy little beast finger fucking me and scrambling my organs? If so, they were just like everyone else.
I wouldn’t cry in front of company. Sonny’s Rule #10: No one sees your tears. Who cared if they couldn’t see them—it wasn’t the point of the rule. Never let anyone see the pain you were in. It was a weapon to be used against you, and there was no point in arming an unknown enemy.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, pushing the burning acid tears away from my too-large eyes. “Who are you?”
“The Rook,” the man hissed.
“Like the chess piece? What sort of name is that?”
Oh, that sarcastic tone, I knew her. That was the Sonny I knew.
“Like the bird, you idiot. And it’s the name they gave me when they took mine. None of us have our own names anymore. What did they give you?”
“That is stupid,” I hedged.
Was it the same? Mr. Ben had called me little sun. Was that the name he’d given me ?
“And yet it is the way things work here. What did he call you? I couldn’t hear over Maw’s hissing.”
His voice was pitched low, but I recognized the weave of fear and anger, the same weft my voice usually held.
“Who the hell is Ma? And what does that mean? Where the fuck am I? Who the fuck are these people? What the fuck is going on ?”
Hysteria was starting to inch into my voice.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Rook, just tell the new girl the abridged version and shut the fuck up. Some of us are trying to sleep before they finally ship us back to the Market.”
Another man’s voice, this one annoyed, came from my left.
I turned my head, trying to breach the darkness outside of my cage to see any sort of shapes in the gloom. But there was nothing. I couldn’t even see my friend Smear anymore. It was like I was hovering in the inky pool of midnight’s heart.
“Alright, new girl. Listen carefully because I don’t know when Rictus will come back, and if he catches us talking to you, we’re done for.” I heard the whistle of him taking a deep breath before he pushed on. “Never give them your name. I imagine, like us, you already made that mistake once. Don’t do it again. Never agree to anything. Not even a simple thing. Never give them anything. Maw is the woman. Rictus is the man. These people don’t use their names. Ever. If you hear their name, remember it. Use it. It’s the best weapon you’ll ever have. I don’t know what’s beyond the Market. Cypress, that’s the other guy you heard, and I have been to the Night Market twice and haven’t sold yet. From what the others there managed to tell me, it’s a land of nightmares. You’re a slave now, girl. A daoire in their tongue. Get used to it. There’s no running. There’s no escape. You are a thing now. You don’t even own your own body anymore. They can and will, as you’ve experienced, change it and everything else about you to their whims. And they have a lot of whims. Rictus did a number on you. The magic on my cage is fading. I got to see a few moments here and there, but he’s invested a lot of magic into you for some reason. And he’ll expect you to earn it back. So, do what he says. Keep sharp. They can do whatever they want to you, but the one thing they can’t touch is your mind. Remember that. Shit, he’s coming. Shut up!”
Magic. Slave. Rictus. Night Market. No escape. Words slammed into the walls of my mind, crashing into it as I tried to find something I could grip onto to stay above the smothering waves of confusion.
Rictus, the creature I had once called Mr. Ben, appeared before my cage. “Healing up?”
There was a tint of manipulation in his tone, as if he were trying to coax a startled bird into the palm of his clawed hand before he wrung its neck. I reached down deep inside of myself, pulled together the scraps of my sanity, and welded them together into armor. I had been through hell before and came out the other side hardened, tested, and ready for battle. This was just another war I needed to fight. And fight, I would. I hadn’t survived my entire life with no home, no family, and nothing to my name to be beaten by a rat-faced fuck and his bitch of an assistant.
“Perfectly fine. It hurt a bit at first, but it’s better now.” I leaned forward, still getting used to the way my new body moved. My limbs were longer, thicker proportioned, with a glint of health that was false and only skin deep. He hadn’t bothered to flush me with muscles and toning that would fill out the body he had molded me into. “What now?”
He chuckled, a slimy thing that slid over my too-tender skin and settled like a wet film of kitchen mold. “So eager for the block, eh? What shall we call you, little sun?”
He was tilting his head, appraising me and his handiwork. I saw a distorted image in the oil slick of his eyes, and pearly-gold reflected back at me.
I leapt at the chance to seize something back, even if it was the smallest of victory. “Cricket.”
“Like the bug?” His already twisted face twitched more with distaste.
“Like the bug. It’s what my mother called me all my life.”
I hoped the lie was as sweet as honey .
A devious smile slid into the jagged slash that was his mouth. “Is it now? A mother’s love is oh so delicious. Thank you, Cricket. You’ll be Cricket, then.”
I heard the muffled hiss of disapproval in the distance. Was it Rook or Cypress this time? Or were there more of us lurking out in the black?
Rictus extended a hand and slid it across my cheek, stroking me like his favorite pet cat. He tilted his head left and right, watching me. “With a little more pushed into that tongue lock, you’d be fit for the Ard Rí’s palace, you know. Shame to sell you off to árus Aine. Cheap bitches. I could see you curled at the Ard Rí’s foot himself. Would you like that, Cricket? To be the favored pet of the Ard Rí?”
He had fallen into petting me like that same cat I had imagined. The urge to bite down as hard as I could and rip off each one of his gross ashen grey fingers boiled beneath my skin. My teeth itched to taste his flesh, and my ears longed to hear him scream the unshed agony he had visited upon me. I held back, shivering with the effort to hold myself still.
He mistook my shaking for enjoyment and dug his fingers deeper into my hair. As it dusted over my shoulders, I noted its new length. It had once been shoulder length, manageable, and easy to care for. I was now aware of it pooling down my back and around my feet as I kneeled in my living cage.
“Aelin, send a message to the birds. I think that Bastard still owes us a favor. Call in the boon. I think the Ard Rí or his bitch sister would love this new pet of ours. Be sure to have our agents in the crowd when she climbs the block, bidding against them. I imagine The Emerald Scythe and Lady Syphon will also be bidding. I’ve done some of my finest work on our little sun here. Be sure that they drive up the price to get that butcher’s attention. The Ard Rí likes only the most coveted of creatures to serve at his foot.” He was running his fingers through the length of hair he had pulled from my scalp while he tortured me to warp me into whatever it was that this heinous creature found beautiful. He pulled a length into my view, and it shone lustrous and almost pearl white in the dim light. Where the light would bounce from the gloss, it shone a burnished gold.
I hated it.
He rolled the lock of hair in his fingers, as if lost in thought, as he watched the soft light dance on his handiwork. “Yes, my finest work. I wish I could keep you, little sun. I would parade you before my peers. Show them what Old Rictus can do when given the right materials. Materials that bend and break so easily, that mold so easily to my hand. Even your ears bent to my hand as easy as soft clay. Strange, that. Usually have to pull as hard as I can to reshape your ears. It’s the hardest part, you know, little sun. Making crude little human ears into points that can pass for Fae ears. Did you know that? It’s like your ears themselves resist the magic, as if they know it is foreign to them. But yours? They nearly sighed with delight to be stretched into shape.”
A sharp glance was tossed up to me, accusation hovering in the bottomless wells of darkness as he scrutinized me as if seeing me for the first time. I stayed utterly still, utterly silent. Rule #3: Act when action is needed. Watch and listen when it is not. I had made that rule when I was thirteen and deep in my own anger. I hadn’t encountered a higher-stakes situation than this. Rictus had already proved he held perfect dominion over my flesh when he was amused with me. I didn’t want to imagine what he could do with it, what horror he could visit upon me, when he was no longer entertained.
He leaned in close again, the sharp point of his nose digging into my newly formed one.
“Why is that, little sun?” He let the silence draw out between us, hanging on the rise and fall of my breath as I tried to hold perfectly still. “Speak, Cricket.”
I didn’t want to speak, didn’t want to tell him a damned thing. I wanted him to give me all his secrets and give him none of my own. Not that I had an explanation for him. But I had no control over my mouth, and words came spilling out of me before I could hold them back. It felt like Rictus had reached into my throat and yanked them from me, the pressure in my throat and the heaviness of my tongue burning as I spoke.
“I don’t know. I didn’t even know you existed before today. I don’t know why my ears liked your magic!”
Rictus watched me before leaning back and nodding, seemingly satisfied with the answer he had pulled from me.
A ball of gossamer, wine-colored fabric was thrown at me as Rictus moved away. “Get dressed, little sun. We leave for the Night Market.”
He faded into the murk, and his footsteps were swallowed by the dark as I began to unwind what was thrown at me. Despite the length of the gown, there was very little left to the imagination. The gossamer was a mere suggestion of a dress, diaphanous despite its modest cut.
I dressed as I was told to do, watching as foreign hands maneuvered the planes of a stranger’s body. Whose legs were these? Long and plush, with silk and the faintest hint of burnished gold beneath the surface of pale skin.
When I was ten, I had fallen off a bike and embedded gravel into my left knee, leaving three large, raised scars. I knew those scars as well as I knew the sound of my own voice . . . They were gone. The clover I had gotten tattooed on the top of my foot as a joke when I was nineteen was also gone. It was all gone. The map of scars, marks, and tattoos that had told the story of Sóna Mac Raith was washed away.
Remembering what Rictus had said about my ears, I shot my hand up to trace their outline. The lobes were the same, though I could no longer feel the three divots where earrings would rest. But as I traced my finger up the shell of my ear, my hand began to shake. Where once a soft rounding I had punctured with a bar was now a smooth plane that tilted up into a point.
I wanted to scream.
Would I even recognize myself when I saw my reflection? Who was I now? What did I look like? Was I some twisted form of a doll?
Angry, bitter tears burned in alien eyes as I stared down at my chest. I had always envied the attention women with larger chests received. Somehow, I had gotten it into my head that I would have been far more successful in my romantic life if I had larger boobs. And now that I had them, I wanted to claw them off me. I wanted to rip and tear them off my chest and throw them into the gulf of blackness outside of my bars. These were not mine. I didn’t want them, and I didn’t ask for them. I didn’t need them.
I was shaking, buttoning the sheer burgundy gown up over the offending flesh I was being forced to live in. Hate rolled through me and pulsed as I did the last button at my throat. The slight ruffle of the dress irritated already chafed and raw skin.
“It’s okay, Cricket. We all know. It was the same way for us. None of us look like we did when they took us.” Cypress’s voice was soft, consoling, like he was talking to a child, and I hated him the more for it. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. Rook and I didn’t get it as bad as you did. You’ll see in a little while. We’re on the move, not long until we get to the Night Market.”
I was panting with the effort not to howl my anger into the darkness.
Rook chimed in, filling the silence that Cypress had abandoned us to. “When I see you, Cricket, if you let me, I’ll hug you. You won’t get many of them where you’re going.” His voice tipped down into a soft whisper, almost as if he were asking for himself more than for me. “Will you let me hug you?”
“No. I don’t want to be touched. Ever again,” I hissed. The next creature to touch me would feel the new pale fingernails that Rictus had given me. “How can you see me? You said you saw me, Rook. How? It’s pitch black.”
I could sense him recoiling from my denial, so it was no surprise when my answer was from Cypress. I was becoming familiar with their voices. “It’s not. It’s full day out. Sun’s pouring in from the eastern windows of the hold. I can feel it on my skin. But Rictus’s cages are built to keep us in darkness. It’s fake, though. He can see in perfectly fine. The whole crew can. There’s two of them gawking at you outside your cage.”
I recoiled from the bars, away from the unseen leering eyes. I didn’t like that one bit. I was blinded to the world around me. It was unsettling and sat in my bones as an eerie feeling. I wish he hadn’t told me.
“Well, that pissed them off. Can’t you hear them? They’ve been talking to you this entire time.”
“It’s probably for the best that she can’t hear them, Cypress,” Rook muttered.
He was wrong. It was probably better for them that I couldn’t hear them.
Cypress harrumphed and plowed on. “Rictus is a shady fuck. Sounds like him to let her only hear us,” he grumbled, the words an acrid old hate. “Since you’re only talkin’ to Rook and me, I’m guessing you can’t hear or see the others, too. There’s twenty of us. Ten women and ten men. Four crew members are in the cargo hold with us. We are on a floating ship, moving what I think might be northwest, chasing the setting sun to get to the Night Market before they close the gates to slavers. You’re in a kin’tha. I don’t know what language or what it means, but that’s what the crew calls them. It’s a creature of some sort. Looks like a black tiger made into the shape of a canary cage. I don’t know much about them aside from the fact they adore the crew and can change into whatever shape they want and are stronger than three men. Oh, and don’t piss it off. It can and will eat you if it gets it into its mind to do so. I’m telling you this shit not to scare you, Cricket, but because no one told me before they took my eyes. And it scared the piss out of me to not know what was going on around me. Humans don’t do well in the pitch black.”
“Th-They took your eyes?” I whispered, feeling like an idiot and an asshole.
Rictus had tortured me, had cut me up into pieces, and reshaped me into his perfect little doll, but he hadn’t taken anything from me but my sense of self. He had taken Cypress’s eyes.
“Stop scaring the new girl, Cypress,” Rook barked with authority in his voice. A mumbled apology answered him robotically and then I heard Rook’s soft cajoling voice again. “Look, Cricket, life is going to get very weird from here on out. And I’m very sorry for it. It’s going to get weird and hard and painful. There’s going to be times when you don’t think you’ll survive it. You’ll even wish you didn’t survive it. You’re going to see nightmares and heaven. All of it is real. None of it is safe. And I’m so fucking sorry, kid. You deserved better from life. Don’t trust any of us, not even me and Cypress. Once we’re out of the hold, we are all trying to survive. Remember that. You do the same.”
In the silence that stretched out between us, I wrote a new rule. One I never had to tell myself before and one that I had a suspicion I would need to cling to.
Rule #21: Just survive.