Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
FRANKLIN
She stayed all day, lighting the dark, dreary dungeon with her internal sunshine as she has every day this week.
When she wasn’t talking, she hummed. I don’t know the songs, but each one was more beautiful than the next.
She captivated my senses until dusk, when she had to return to dress for supper.
Do I dare hope she’s developed a routine around her visits?
Right now, she’s probably pushing around her food to fake eating it and demanding cake or another sweet confection.
She loves her sweets…
I chuckle to myself as I stroke the horn of my hubull doll.
If I stay locked up much longer, my hair will grow to match the brown tuft the doll has between its horns.
Then it will be an exact replica of me. How did she make such an accurate prediction when she had never met a hubull before?
It’s like she knew me before she met me.
Are the dolls she makes for the newborn Fae as accurate, or is it something special bonding us?
Oh, for Seelie’s sake, my heart has no right to warm to that idea. She’s a Fae Princess!
What was that noise? I hide the doll within my pillowcase, seconds before a shadow looms down the hallway. Folding my arms beneath my head, I recline to look as nonthreatening as I can when I’m three times the mass of the approaching Fae guard.
“I don’t know how you’ve won the favor of the royal family, but good for you,” says a dark-haired guard I don’t recognize.
I do recognize the layers of pastry with vanilla crème and raspberries between them.
We had slices of it after lunch. Lilyfair must have demanded the same after her supper and requested a slice be sent to me.
Does she provide sweets to all those in her circle or just me?
With a shrug to answer the guard’s question, I rise from my bunk and approach the bars to accept her gift.
The plate is too wide to fit between the rods of iron.
“Hold on a sec while I get a key from the rack,” says the new guy.
Of course, I’ll hold on. What else am I supposed to do? I’m trapped in a cell.
I smirk to myself and wish Lilyfair were here to share the joke with her giggles.
Half her stories are about incompetent guards and sneaky staff.
She knows all the illicit affairs and forbidden romances in the castle from hiding in the cabinets.
While I never participated in gossip in the hucow sanctuary, it was mainly because I had too much work to do.
I do love a good story, especially when told with sound effects and funny voices.
If I ever meet these Fae in real life, I will hear her imitations of them in my head.
“Got the key, fork, plate,” the guard says to himself on his return. “I’m not armed. You wouldn’t attack a male with cake, would you? I mean, the first thing I’d do is drop your cake in the dust, so it’s not worth the effort.”
I release a wheezing chuckle that startles the guard. After we exchange smiles, he fiddles with the key in the door.
“Should I have someone sweep or at least bring you a broom…well, we can’t arm you with a broom. I just feel terrible that someone will eat royal cake surrounded by dust and filth.”
Oh, I think not. If he clears the dust, he will take away my means of communicating until King Marigold fulfills his promise of parchment and a quill. I kick the dust into a pile, catching his attention with the clouds. I write in harried letters, “This is how I speak. Dust = My Voice.”
“Oh, cool,” he says after mouthing the words I wrote. “Must be a pain to write everything, and in Fae, too. I doubt anyone—even our scholars—would be able to translate hucow.”
Try impossible. Hucows and hubulls don’t have a separate, written language.
Since before I was born, all the creatures of Magmell were taught to speak Fae as the common tongue.
No other languages are permitted by King Marigold’s orders.
Very few took the time to learn to read and write it.
Those hucows who knew the hucow language didn’t break the law and pass it down verbally.
Those with the smarts to preserve it in writing were too busy running the sanctuary.
The same cows who fed the herd, preserved food for winter, maintained the barns and silos, and paid the taxes were the same cows who could read, write, and plan—No wonder Bessy and Daisy disappeared.
How are the remaining cows doing without them…
without me…to do the work? Will Maribelle, Petunia, and Clarence step into our shoes, or will their self-centered upbringing be their doom?
Perhaps their demise is our fault…for not forcing them to take care of themselves while we were there to teach them how.
Or perhaps it's karma for the way they treated Bessy and her leprechaun…
Jingling jolts me from my maudlin thoughts.
The lock sticks, and the keys are bent from what I suspect are decades of use.
From the tallies on the wall, Sirius used this cell for a long time.
For Seelie’s sake, I can’t count with that racket.
The clanging of the lock with the muttered curses of the guard is distracting, to say the least.
Should I help him? Would he see my approaching the bars as an attack?
He’s struggling so much, he’s gone red in the face.
If I advance and he returns the cake to Lilyfair out of fear, she may think I rejected it…
and thereby assume I’m rejecting her kindness.
I can’t risk my fragile relationship with one of the two Fae who seem to care about what happens to me.
If Lilyfair never visits again, I won’t be able to explain my side of things…
but this guy will be here all day if I don’t help him.
Huff.
“Can I help?” I write my question in the dust, but he’s too focused on the keys to see it. How annoying!
Maybe I should rob him of his keys. It would serve him right—and the person who trained this imbecile.
I’d take the keys and show myself out…and go…
where? I don’t want to return to the hucow sanctuary, where I slaved all my life for them to trade me to strangers.
There are stories of banished hubulls who were welcomed into the centaur herds.
I’d have to earn their trust, though…by more slave work…
Isn’t there anywhere I can exist without working myself to death? Why aren’t I ever enough?
I am enough…for Lilyfair. She welcomes everyone to the Fae Village around her castle with a doll.
She doesn’t see me as another Fae, but as a hubull with value.
If I join the centaur herds, she will die.
Whether she ages rapidly to death, or the Fae kill her for being a hybrid, determines how violent her end will be…
but death is her only future without a hubull.
The idea of her wearing another male’s claim scorches my insides and dries the inside of my mouth to ash.
In a way, she’s caged me more than the iron bars with her sweetness and acceptance.
She makes me dream of being Fae and claiming her in marriage, so every Fae bastard she meets will know she’s mine.
If she were in the hucow sanctuary, they would smell me on her and know instantly.
Would they congratulate us or treat us as they did Bessy and her mate, Finley?
No question, they’d ransom her if they figured out that she could relieve them of their tax burden forever.
Oh, for Seelie’s sake, the bastard drops the keys again, spraying our eyes with dust.
“Sorry, sorry,” he says, grinding his fist into his eyes. He swats on the floor, engulfing himself in dust. Tears track through the dirt on his cheeks. The front of his black hair glitters with particles. “Achoo!”
That’s it. Bastard just sneezed on my cake.
It’s time to take control of the situation before it slides off the plate and onto the floor.
I swipe the keys from the floor and insert the longest key into the lock at an angle.
Watching the more proficient guards, I learned that the back end of the key must be tilted upward almost thirty degrees before it will engage with the tumblers within the lock.
Next, the key must be lowered, turned a half turn, jiggled, and turned the rest of the way.
It’s a very specific sequence that should have been a part of this idiot’s training… because I can open the door in seconds.
“Oh, thanks, man,” the guard says when I remove the plate from his hands. “I’m new. I mean, I’m Cypress, the newest dungeon guard—much better than twiddling my thumbs in the barracks as a member of the army.”
I leave him on the floor as I take the plate to my waste bucket.
Good thing it’s a layered dessert, and I can scrape off the sneeze-tainted crème from the top for disposal.
I wipe the fork on my shorts—not because they are cleaner than the plate, but because it will remove any droplets he sprayed upon it.
He jumps to his feet when the door slams shut on its own.
“Hey, wait! Oh my Seelie, thank you for not trampling me on your way to freedom. I mean it. You could have traded our places and run for the hills. I won’t ask you why you didn’t…that’s your business. Just know, by staying in your cage, you saved my family.”
I’m glad he doesn’t ask why I didn’t run, because my answer makes me a love-besotted fool.
The family I’m saving is King Marigold’s, but I doubt this young guard knows about their problems. The fact that King Marigold has me give my sample to him directly, within the confines of the dungeon, tells me even the highest-ranking guards are unaware of Lilyfair’s affliction.
Does the captain—whatshisname, ah, Snapdragon—know she wears my seed when he’s as love-struck as I am?
I shouldn’t feel smug about that…but I do.
“Look, I have no shame, and you seem a decent fellow. Maybe you will help me and put in a good word with the royal family? I know I’m asking a prisoner for favors…
but you didn’t run. You sit there eating a dessert with berries that take five years to grow until harvest on a plate worth enough money to feed my family for years, holding a fork that has touched the lips of every Fae monarch to exist. So you’re not dumb to stay…
and I’m not dumb to tell you my story…and ask you for a favor. ”
He uses the cell door to rise to standing before stepping beneath the sconce in the hall. I know Fae don’t age past their prime, but this guy hasn’t reached his. How young is he? Why isn’t he trailed by a senior member of the guard? No wonder he accidentally gave me the opportunity to escape.
“My mother died in childbirth with the twins. While she was pregnant, the villagers called my parents “the miracle” because we had four kids in the family. I’m the oldest, then Merrily…
well, not…” He pauses to clear tears from his throat.
“Merrily died that first winter after they were born. A virus burned through the village, and by spring, it took my father too. I had two newborn Fae—miracles—and no job, food, or caregiver for them.”
“I’m so sorry,” I write in the dust. I hold the plate of cake out to him—in case he’s still going hungry—but he waves it away.
“My story’s not a sad tale. You see, I’d been sweet on Blossom since I first laid eyes on her.
She offered to marry me as a means to escape her father.
He liked to teach with his belt, and she was finished with his lessons.
Of course, we eloped to escape needing his blessing.
She manages the twins—now four-year-olds with the temperaments of demons—while I work.
Before I was old enough for the army, I did odd jobs to avoid having the entire salary taken by taxes. ”
Taxes…again. The cake gums in my mouth and sticks to the roof.
Lilyfair’s wasting of savory food and indulging in desserts costs the villagers she loves their money…
in taxes. What other habits does the royal family possess that could be cut to save costs?
The number of guards wandering around aimlessly for starters…
but this unfortunate Fae would be first on the chopping block. What’s the answer?
“I’m sorry,” I write again in the dust, because I don’t know what else to say. I want to help him, but all my ideas result in his losing his job.
“Don’t be sorry, be helpful,” he says with a little more vigor.
“With my salary down here, I still need odd jobs to make ends meet. If the king could reduce the property taxes on my parents’ place, we could live comfortably.
Half my salary goes to taxes. We’re trying to sell the surrounding land, but with no new families, nobody is building homes. "
“I can ask,” I write in the dust. I know who to ask too.
King Marigold won’t consider this to be a small favor if I put it on my list for him.
It may inflame his temper…but Lilyfair would show compassion to the young man, raising his siblings while sheltering his neighbor.
The young man risked much telling me his story, so I must give him something in exchange.
I set down my fork and retrieve my doll from the pillowcase.
His eyes widen when I wiggle it in front of the bars.
“Do the twins have dolls?” I write.
“Of course, they are the only toys the girls have,” he replies with wide eyes. “Blossom and I have them, too. Merrily was buried with hers. How do you—where did you—who made one for you?”
“Lilyfair, she loves her people,” I write.
As soon as he nods, I brush my words away.
“When I talk to her, she will help. I just know it.”
“Oh, oh, thank you,” he whispers, reaching through the bars to shake my hand. “I had worried we wouldn’t survive the winter…we have no extra money to preserve winter rations…but now, sir, I’ll tell Blossom to start pickling!”
A gift for a gift. The boy—and now I can see he’s a scant day over boyhood—scampers down the hall. He clicks his heels with joy as he rounds the corner and out of view. Yes, I’ll talk to Lilyfair on his behalf…sooner than he thinks.
For he’s left the key in my possession, and the guards change shifts in half an hour. It won’t be on his watch, but the next watchman will have one less prisoner to mind.
If I have my way, I’ll spend tonight in the Princess’s room…