Chapter 5
Pip
Aeldryc was reading a document as I pushed stew around my bowl, the same questions spinning in my head: When can I leave?
When can I go home? When can I get out of these fucking wool pants?
But he wasn’t looking at me, and didn’t seem to notice that the restlessness inside me had become a living, breathing thing.
As soon as he was done eating, he’d locked me back in that room.
I’d been trapped in this weird medieval fantasy camp for five days. Had Sky noticed I was gone? Would anyone? My phone was probably claimed by another dancer by now. The club would hire a replacement. Another desperate twink with a flexible schedule and even more flexible hamstrings.
I paced the small room, running my hands through my hair until it stood on end.
The floor was cold under my bare feet. A strange bell tolled in the distance, followed by the cry of some creature that definitely wasn’t a bird.
I pressed my face to the window, trying to see.
The night sky was dense with stars I didn’t recognize.
There were too many, and they were too bright.
It should have been beautiful, but it was freaking me out.
I’d always thought I’d like to travel, but not like this.
My stomach still felt tight from dinner. The stew had been good. Better than anything I could’ve made. There’d been real herbs in it, actual chunks of meat. Not like the frozen Trader Joe’s meals I ate while standing in my shoebox kitchen.
Aeldryc had been treating me well, for a prisoner.
I had a bed, food, and a toilet that didn’t work anything like the ones I was used to, but it worked.
But there was nothing for me to do. No one to talk to except Aeldryc, who spoke in four-word sentences and looked at me like I was a bomb about to go off.
There was no music, no TV, no internet, no dancing.
Just four stone walls, a few sheets of paper, and the crushing weight of being completely, utterly alone.
I pressed my forehead against the cool stone of the wall and tried not to cry.
I wasn’t a crier. I was the guy who made dick jokes while getting dental work.
I twerked for drunk straight girls at bachelorette parties.
I’d survived three foster homes and a year of couch-surfing.
But being so far from everything I’d ever known, with no way back, made my chest ache.
The knock on the door was so soft I almost missed it.
I jerked upright, heart pounding. No one knocked on my door except Aeldryc, and Aeldryc never came back after dinner.
He’d established that routine the first night: food, awkward silence, lock the door, leave.
I wasn’t even sure why he insisted on eating with me.
He could have just slipped my food under the door or something.
The knock came again, a little louder this time. “Come in.” I cleared my throat, wiping at the tears. “It’s not like I can stop you.”
The door swung open. Aeldryc stood in the doorway, his massive frame silhouetted by the lantern light from the corridor.
He’d changed out of his usual leather armor and into a simple linen shirt that did absolutely nothing to hide the breadth of his shoulders. His hair was damp, as if he’d just washed it, and his eyes looked almost black in the dim light.
He hesitated in the doorway, one hand on the frame. “May I enter?”
I shrugged. “It’s your house. Your prison. Whatever.”
“If you tell me to leave, I’ll leave.”
Please don’t leave me alone. “Fine, come in.”
He stepped into the room, filling it with his presence. He was too big for the space, too solid. The air around him seemed to vibrate, charged with something I couldn’t name. He was carrying a woven basket with a cloth covering the top.
“I wanted to check on you,” he said, setting the basket on the small table by the window. “You didn’t eat much at dinner.”
I hugged my arms across my chest. “I wasn’t hungry.”
He watched me, his expression unreadable. “You’ve been pacing. I… hear you.”
“There aren’t a lot of options for entertainment in here.”
Something flickered across his face, too quickly for me to read. “I’ll speak with the Queen. Perhaps she’ll permit you to walk in the gardens, with an escort.”
“Great. A field trip to the yard. I’m sure the Queen has nothing better to do than worry about whether or not I get some fresh air.” That had come out sharper than I’d intended. I took a deep breath. “Look, I appreciate the... whatever this is. But there’s nothing for me here. I want to go home.”
The words hung in the air between us, raw and honest in a way I rarely was. I looked down at the floor, mortified.
When I looked up, Aeldryc’s expression had softened. Not much, not even enough that I was sure I wasn’t imagining it. But his mouth had relaxed from its usual stern line.
“We’re working on it,” he said quietly. “But this has never happened before. Not that we’re aware of.”
Aeldryc stepped closer. For a second, I thought he was going to touch me, brush the hair out of my eyes the way Sky did when I was having a meltdown. But he stopped just short of contact, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating from his skin.
“I know this is difficult,” he said. “I can’t imagine what it’s like to be so far from everything familiar.” He paused, as if searching for the right words. “But while you’re here, you’re under my protection. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“It’s not about protection. I’m safe here.” I gestured helplessly at the room, at myself. “But there’s nothing for me to do. No one who wants me here. I’m just... in the way.”
Something in his expression shifted—a subtle tightening around the eyes, a barely perceptible straightening of his spine. “That’s not true. But I’m here because I thought you might want these.” He reached for the basket and set it in my lap.
I lifted the cloth and gasped. “What is this?” I picked up a roll of paper, then a small leather pouch of different sized brushes. A collection of small clay pots sat beneath it.
“Art supplies,” Aeldryc said, as if it were obvious. “You said you were bored, and I thought perhaps… the charcoal I gave you wasn’t enough. They’re making you something so you can read, but it may be a few days.”
I lifted the lid from a clay pot and found it filled with paint. This one held a blue pigment so deep it was almost purple. “Where did you get these?”
He paused. “The palace has an artisan’s workshop.”
I picked up one of the brushes, running my thumb over the bristles. They were soft but firm and made of real animal hair, something I’d never been able to afford. “Why would you do this? You don’t have to be kind to me.”
Aeldryc flinched as if the word ‘kind’ was an insult. “It’s my responsibility to ensure your comfort.”
“Well-being, maybe. Comfort? Not so much. You could’ve just left me in here to rot until someone figures out how to send me back.”
His shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch, and he sighed. “No. I couldn’t.”
Our eyes met across the small room. Something passed between us, something that made my chest feel tight. Aeldryc looked away first.
“You cannot control your fate, Pip. But you can control what you do with your time while you have it.”
I stared up at him, desperately trying to resist the urge to hug him, to ugly cry into his crisp linen shirt. Something told me he wouldn’t be super into that.
“I should go. It’s late.” He moved toward the door, then paused. “There’s more in the basket. Under the cloth. Scissors and paper, that sort of thing.”
And then he was gone, the door closing softly behind him. I didn’t hear the lock turn.
I turned back to the basket, lifting the cloth to see what else was hidden beneath it. My breath caught in my throat when I found a small pair of scissors, their metal blades glinting against leather-wrapped handles.
I picked up the scissors, testing their weight in my hand. They felt perfect in my hand—not too heavy, not too light. Balanced. The kind of tool I’d dream of owning. I ran my thumb along the edge of one blade, feeling the slight resistance as it caught on my skin. The blade was incredibly sharp.
I set the scissors down carefully and picked up one of the paint pots, removing the lid to smell the rich, earthy scent of the pigment.
The blue was even more intense up close—the exact color of the sky just before sunset.
I dipped the tip of my finest brush into the paint and made a small mark on the corner of the paper.
The color spread evenly, soaking into the fibers without bleeding.
For the first time since I’d arrived in this strange, impossible world, I smiled.
Maybe Aeldryc was right. Maybe I couldn’t control how or when I got home. But I could control this—the brush in my hand, the color on the paper. It wasn’t much. But it was something. And right now, something felt like everything.