9. To Feed the King
I n the bowels of the Undercastle, an overwhelming chill penetrated with piercing fingers to wrap around Aisling’s very bones. She rested on a damp floor of hard-packed dirt, which she couldn’t see, but could feel when her fingers curled against it.
“You’re ours now, girly,” the redcap had told her after the Unseelie King left her in their keep. The creature’s voice was guttural and his hot breath on Aisling’s face reeked of decaying meat and stale blood. “Got the perfect cell for you.”
That cell was little more than a hole carved into the stone wall of a longer cavern, scarcely wide enough for Aisling to lie down flat, and several inches too short for her to stand fully upright. Stagnant cave water trickled from the ceiling into a puddle in the corner that her hand found when they tossed her in like a discarded doll. A heavy gate locked behind her—iron, she guessed, by the thick leather gloves one of the sentinels pulled on before swinging it shut. And when they returned to their post at the top of the stairs, closing the wooden door there, she was swallowed by the dark.
It was panic that gripped her first. Though she’d never before been particularly claustrophobic, something about the way that heavy, inky darkness pressed in on her forced her breath to come in short, uneven gasps. She clawed first at the too-tight neck of her sweater, then at the ground as though she might be able to dig her way out beneath the bars. She dug and dug until her fingers ached, and when she realized she hadn’t even managed to clear an inch of dirt, Aisling’s cries grew more frantic. It was the sound of those cries, ringing starkly off the stone walls, that brought her back into her own head. Slowly, slowly, she settled her breathing. Calmed her racing heart. She’d had her time to panic; it would do little good to indulge in that feeling for much longer.
Aisling was overtaken then by the cold, sinking feeling of acceptance: she’d played the game, and she’d lost. Scratches marred the wall at her back, a haunting calendar that marked the last days of a prisoner held there long before her. There was no real light here, no circulation of air or sounds beyond the steady drip-drip-drip to her left. She worked her jaw back and forth to relieve the pressure that had built in her ears—the dungeon was deep below the surface. Impossibly, hopelessly, oppressively deep.
Everything Aisling did was cautious. Calculated. Risks were weighed, outcomes assessed. But with the king, she’d been impulsive. And it had cost her. She was nothing more than a silly human girl who thought she could play at Fae politics and come out on top. The prophecy, true or not, was a curse. It mattered very little whether she was truly the Red Woman; either way, she was a prisoner. Either way, she was completely at Kael’s mercy, and she knew all too well that he had none.
“You’re a human.” A thin voice snaked out of the shadows, breathy and low. Whether male or female, Aisling couldn’t tell, nor could she determine just how close to her they were. She didn’t answer. “I can smell you.” The speaker dragged out the s , making a long hissing sound that preceded the word.
“I am,” Aisling responded hesitantly. “What are you?”
“A prisoner,” the voice said, “like you. We’re all the same down here in the dark.”
“Are there more?” Blindly, Aisling ran her hands back and forth across the dirt as she crawled to kneel in front of the iron bars. She held onto them, leaning forward until they pressed against either side of her forehead. Her eyes scanned ahead, but she couldn’t discern a single shape or form before her.
A laugh then, bitter and weary. “It’s just the two of us, now. What do they call you?”
“Aisling,” she offered. She shouldn’t have, maybe, but it hardly mattered. In truth, though she was unsure just what she was talking to or what their intentions may be, she took some small comfort in knowing she wasn’t completely alone.
“You’d give up your name so easily?” Aisling could hear the surprise in their tone; clearly, this Fae was not well-acquainted with humans.
“My name has no power over me.”
“Still,” they asserted, “I hope you don’t expect the same in return.”
Aisling shook her head as though they could see her. Maybe their vision was better than hers. “I don’t. Why are you here?”
“Prisoner of war,” they said simply. “And yourself? What business might a human have with the Unseelie Court?”
Aisling let the question hang in the air for several minutes, considering how to answer, or if she should answer at all. She didn’t trust the owner of the voice—hiding in the murky shadows, it could belong to anyone. They could be a faerie sent by Kael to get information, or something more sinister that lurked here for the sole purpose of toying with his captives.
“I made a mistake attempting to get close to the king. I thought I had control,” Aisling admitted carefully. “But I underestimated him.”
Her admission earned her another gravelly chuckle. “The Unseelie King has a way of unraveling even the most carefully-spun webs. Count yourself lucky you’re still alive.”
“I don’t feel lucky,” Aisling muttered, her fingers tracing the wrought-iron bars.
“Survival is a gift for as long as you can hang onto it,” they advised, voice tinged with melancholy. “They’ll come for you eventually.”
Aisling let her eyes fall closed as her heart sank. When the bars began to hurt her face, she crawled back to her place against the wall and slid her hand out across the stone until it found the rivulet of water. She collected some in her palm, then brought it back to splash across her cheeks. It was undoubtedly dirty, but it felt good all the same.
“What happened to the others?” she asked into the void.
“They were taken to feed the king,” the voice responded.
Aisling’s blood froze solid in her veins as a dagger of fear plunged through her gut. She hadn’t thought she could feel any more afraid, but those words once again sent her heart hammering violently against her ribcage. “What do you mean?”
“Just that.” Their tone was dispassionate; they’d long since accepted this as their fate. “His magic is an entity unto itself. It needs to consume. Life—breath, blood, bone—makes it stronger. That’s if it doesn’t tear you apart first. He was born to carry it, both a blessing and a curse. It hungers, it yearns, and it demands sacrifice.”
The weight that had settled on Aisling’s chest constricted her lungs once more and her hands balled into tight fists in her lap. The thought of Kael’s insatiable magic feeding on the lives of those who crossed his path filled her with dread. No longer could she deny the dangerous predator lurking beneath the king’s allure: she was trapped now below the den of a monster both ancient and formidable.
Unable to quiet her racing thoughts or slow her speeding heart, Aisling stared out into the unrelenting abyss. The voice didn’t speak again, but neither did Aisling engage it further. She counted the seconds in her head as they passed, a distraction at first from the silence, but as the number crept higher and higher, so too did her anxiety grow. She quit somewhere around four thousand and instead focused on the sound of the water. She kept one hand underneath it, catching each droplet and letting it flow from her palm, concentrating on its coolness. Its steady, consistent rhythm. She willed her pulse to match it. At one point she might have even dozed off for a while, but in that darkness, it was hard to discern when the color behind her eyelids was just as black as it was with her eyes open.
When the door at the top of the stairs opened once again, the barest light that filtered in was very nearly blinding. A figure descended—not one of the redcap guards, but a slight male in a robe that looked several sizes too large. Aisling watched him approach, eyes wide and fearful. Through the bars, careful to avoid touching the metal with his bare skin, he tossed a wad of white cloth towards her.
“Put it on,” he ordered. Aisling held it up in front of her. It was a shift dress made of paper-thin cotton, already marked with dirt from where it had landed on the ground at her feet. The male turned his back so that she could change, her movements awkward in the small space. “Remove everything.”
A fresh wave of paralyzing fear resigned Aisling to comply. Her cheeks burned with shame as she unhooked her bra and slid down her underwear, utterly exposed beneath the diaphanous fabric. She cupped shaking hands over either breast, shielding herself from the male’s gaze when he turned around. But he didn’t so much as glance at her; instead, his eyes seemed to look straight through her. He stopped her before she could step out of the cell and shook his head.
“Shoes, too.” Aisling kicked off her shoes and balled her socks into them, as though she’d be back. She doubted she’d be back .
“I am sorry, my friend,” the reedy voice whispered from the depths as the male led her up out of the dungeon.
Aisling didn’t bother attempting to get her bearings as they walked, but she imagined where he could be leading her. The throne room, maybe. There would be a crowd there to watch her execution at the hand of the king. Or would she be eaten? It hungers, it yearns, it demands sacrifice. Was she to be the sacrifice? The loose skirt of the dress rippled around her violently trembling body. She thought of her friends. Of Rodney, of Briar. Only Rodney would know what had happened to her, the rest would wonder if she’d returned to the mainland without saying goodbye. Briar would think she’d left him alone. The tears she’d refused to shed in front of the king were unstoppable now, carving new tracks over her dirt-stained cheeks.
The male, who kept a slower pace than Kael had, led Aisling to the foot of the spiral staircase and beckoned for her to climb it ahead of him. The soft swishing of his robes sweeping across the stone behind her was oddly soothing.
Back above ground, it was night—whether again or still, Aisling wasn’t sure. But it was frigid, and even though the fresh air was sweet as it filled her lungs, the cold gripped her and intensified her shivering. She hated, hated how weak she would appear when she finally stood in front of the king: reduced to a shuddering, tear-soaked mess in a dirty, too-thin garment. More still, she hated how much pleasure it would likely bring him to see her this way—afraid. Afraid of him. So Aisling raised her chin. Straightened her spine. Squared her shoulders. There was little she could do about the shivering, but she clenched her jaw shut so hard it throbbed to stop the noisy chattering of her teeth.
The male took the lead again, directing her toward the tree line. Her eyes darted across to where she thought the Thin Place waited, and suddenly she understood why he’d made her remove her shoes. She couldn’t outrun him barefoot, not when each stick and jagged stone that dug into her soles made her wince with every step.
He stopped her in a moonlit clearing, where a handful of other males in similar robes stood on a circle carved into the dirt. Thick, snaking tree roots wove under and over the ground around their feet. One of the robed figures was stooped over, lighting candles one by one. At the head of the circle was an altar of sorts—a large triangle formed of branches lashed together with fibrous twine. It was with this altar at her back that Aisling was forced down onto her knees. In front of her, sitting cross-legged amongst the roots in the center of the circle, was the Unseelie King. All the resolve that she’d mustered on the walk over disappeared at once. Aisling dropped her head to study the ground and squeezed fistfuls of the dress against her thighs.
There was a heaviness in the clearing, one that wasn’t entirely natural. The air was difficult to breathe in a way that it hadn’t been just on the other side of the tree line. Aisling squeezed her eyes shut and tried to force deep breaths into her lungs. Her chest and back ached with the effort.
Then, the silence was broken by a low voice at the altar uttering an invocation in a language entirely unfamiliar to Aisling. It flowed lyrically, the lilting words almost entrancing in the way they were woven together in one long, unbroken phrase. The air grew thicker still, squeezing her from all sides in a suffocating embrace. Against her better judgment, curiosity and dread drove Aisling to raise her head just slightly to take in the scene in front of her.
Kael was dressed simply in black cloth, a contrast to her dress and the silver-white of his hair that flowed loose down his back and framed either side of his face that he kept tipped slightly forward. The expression he wore wavered somewhere between concentration and pain and his knuckles blanched white as his long fingers dug into his knees. His lips moved along with the voice behind Aisling to form the shapes of consonants and vowels, stringing them together voicelessly.
The night around Aisling shifted and flexed with the power of the incantation and a strange dance of shadows began to unfold around Kael— from Kael—wisps of darkness that swirled and pulsated like living things. Aisling’s breath hitched; this was the magic the voice in the dungeon had warned her of. That insatiable, sentient thing that needed to consume. As the currents reached out to her, she was frozen in place. She felt a scream building in her throat, but no sound escaped her lips.
Tracing the path of his magic as it moved, Kael’s frosted eyes met Aisling’s and for a second, less than a second, the air stilled. The shadows pouring from his skin slowed their tempestuous dance and hung suspended, frozen, inches from where they had begun to curl towards her arms. The connection between them was ephemeral, yet it sent electricity coursing through Aisling’s body. She felt both drawn to and repelled by this unfathomable force that resided within the Unseelie King. His eyes widened, almost imperceptibly, before he dropped them back down. The moment he did, his shadows resumed their aggressive movement.
Aisling, too, lowered her head once more, transfixed by the threads of shadow that now drew roughly across her skin. Her body could scarcely register the power that was ensnaring it, and the touch of the magic felt somehow both searing hot and ice cold. The shadows slid along her bare arms, writhing against her, creeping ever closer to her neck. Aisling squeezed her eyes shut and pursed her lips, imagining the tendrils seeking out a way to burrow into her. To strangle her from the inside out.
A tremor rolled through the clearing and even the roots of the trees seemed to tighten their grip on the earth, grasping for stability. Over the chanting that filled the air around them, calling to the twisting shadows, Kael growled: “Finish it.”
Aisling braced herself, but her end never came. The invocation slowed, quieted, then stopped altogether. Though she kept her eyes closed, she could feel the shadows sliding back down her arms, the energy being drawn away from her. The pressure eased and breath flooded back into her lungs in a loud, ragged gasp. Angry red abrasions on her skin oozed blood that dripped down her wrists into the soil. When she dared to open her eyes, she saw that Kael remained hunched over and out of breath. He may have been trembling harder than she was.
“Return the tether to its cell,” the leader of the rite commanded as he stepped away from the altar. Without looking at her again, Kael pushed himself to his feet and disappeared from Aisling’s narrowing field of view. She was dizzy, and when hands grasped her arms to pull her up, her knees buckled beneath her. The male who had delivered her to the clearing waited impatiently for a moment before trying again, this time supporting her around her waist and half-dragging her back to the Undercastle.
It wasn’t until they were nearing the dungeons that she could walk without his aid, but all thought of escape had gone out of her mind anyway. All thought of anything, really, besides those sinister shadows that snaked out of Kael as easily and naturally as the blood that flowed from the wounds on her arms. They were all she could see, and the chilling fear they’d suffused into her veins was all she could feel.
Once again behind those thick iron bars, Aisling found an odd sort of solace. While they confined her there in the darkness, she was reassured by her belief—however untrue it may have been—that they might also serve as a shield that would keep Kael’s potent magic at bay.
The other prisoner murmured softly then, to no one in particular: “Lucky, indeed.”