13. Chapter 13
Chapter 13
T he voices all faded, echoing off the stonework all around me. Each footfall was swallowed by the hungry stone and sent skittering across my shattered mind like the falling pieces of a stained-glass window in an ancient ruin.
I was left with my sacred silence, and as soon as I was, my head began to remind me that it had been abused. I shivered down into the sweltering heat of the sarcophagus wrapped around me. Each slight tug of my skin against the rough woolen blanket was a cheese grater sliding against a raw open nerve. I needed to move in the worst way, but I knew the agony awaiting that decision was not worth it. So, I laid in misery, letting it seep into me and punish me. For what I was being punished, I didn’t yet know.
I tried to remember how I had gotten here, when I had gotten here. But all I could remember was that door and soft leather brushing against me.
A gentle thunder rumbled against the tambourine of my mind and whispered words that formed small daisies in the landscape of my heart. I tried to grip onto them but could not. I could not even make out who the voice belonged to. It was the summer sky on the open Oklahoma plains.
I succumb to sleep after too long, unable to maintain my eyes being open. I tried to fight it as valiantly as I could, but with the agony of being unable to move and the aching shred of pain throughout my body, there was no real reason to stay awake.
The dreams that came to me were split images of blackness braided together with a secret I kept trying to unravel. A secret I could not riddle out.
I woke again, this time to darkness all around me and the soft red glow of a brazier that had been drawn close to me. It was too hot. I was too hot. I was melting into the tight woolen sarcophagus that held me down and snickered at my suffering. I would die in its sweltering arms.
Water , I tried to call out. All I wanted was a single ice cube. Even one would do. I just wanted to feel it melt on my tongue and let its chill subsume through me.
No sound came out.
I tried again, and this time, a small dry, hoarse rasp slid past my teeth and fell on my chest. It sat there, dancing a merry jig around the tuck of the blanket. It went no further than that, though, and even that took all the strength left in my body.
I awoke again, dawn streaming into my chamber from a window that had not been there before. The scent of warm black leather was close to me. I couldn’t open my eyes, though. I couldn’t find where it was coming from. All I could see was the dawn breaking in the field of my heart.
“Wake up, you lazy bitch,” hissed a playful child’s voice. A dull pain bloomed at my shoulder as a small hand was pressed there, and I was shaken. I groaned, the loudest sound I had made in years if you asked my throat. “That’s enough of that, you whiny baby. You’ve been on this slab for over a month. I’m tired of lugging your shit off and wiping your ass. Do you know how heavy you are?”
“Did . . . did you just call me fat?” I asked with all the spirit of a broken hammer.
“Stupid too. And lazy. And gross. Who shits themself at your age?”
The child’s voice was close, inches away from my ear. Though it was cursing me and condemning me, fear danced along the edges of it.
Fear I knew, fear I was familiar with. It had laid in this bed with me for as long as I could remember. It had held my hand through the sweltering nights, and it had mopped my brow when no one else did. Did someone actually mop my brow? Where was I? How did I . . .
The prison of wool was pulled back from my body, cracking scabs that had formed into the blanket, and fused me with it. The sensation of my skin coming away with it shot me straight up, new life in unused muscles. A scream rattled through desiccated vocal cords that hadn’t had the touch of water in too long.
“There she is,” the child whispered, like a mother hen clucking at her favorite chick as it pulled a worm free from the dirt.
I tried to force my eyes open, but only one responded. The other laid there like a lazy lump. The world was a series of blue, black, and white blobs slamming together too quickly to track into more appropriate shapes. The vivid purple eyes of the living doll at my side came into the single plain of my view and narrowed on me.
“V-Violet?” I asked, unsure of what was going on and less about who she was .
“Mmm, there you are, Cricket.” I was swaying, losing balance, as the world around me uprooted itself like a pinwheel in a hurricane. “Easy, easy . . . You haven’t sat up in a long time. Maybe try it a little slowly. Lie down now.”
Small icy hands touched my back, and I screamed as a fire brand exploded across broken flesh. She audibly winced, and I heard water splashing in a wooden bucket before I felt the press of its chill trickling down the crack of my back. It felt like heaven. It felt like nothing I had ever felt before. I groaned into it and sighed, letting my body crumble into the euphoria of comfort.
“Where am I, Violet?”
My voice was foreign to me. It was weak, soft, humorless, and defeated. I had never sounded defeated, even when I was.
“You’re in the Temple of the Ascended, Cricket. You are in the land of Magh Meall, the land of Aos sí. Fairies.” Her tone was soft, like she was explaining it to a dandelion that might blow away with fright if she spoke too harshly. “Except not the winged kind. The bastard kind.”
Fae. Magh Meall. It was all starting to come rushing back. The horrifying three days I had spent as a slave. Three days. Had it only been three days? It had felt like seven lifetimes and more. The march through the palace to the King’s quarters with my escort shivered into view, and I jerked.
“The King!”
“Shhh, shhh. He’s not here. It’s okay. You’re okay. It’s no one but us, Cricket. It is just us and the lamps. The Fae have all gone to court. The high priestess is making some sort of proclamation or another that all the dandy little Fae wanted to attend. You’re safe. I came when I could.”
“How long have I been here?”
“The better part of a month. Would have been more, but they finally decided to spend the magic to heal you up from the brink of death. Not entirely sure why, but they did. You’ve been sleeping it off for the last few days since. Emerald wasn’t specific about the details of who and what . . . You know how she is. Brains of a gerbil. Oh! No . . . Cricket, you need to stay still . . . ”
She was talking too much. And I needed to move. More importantly, I had to piss really bad. The pressure on my bladder felt like an entire herd of elephants had stomped it, and all that was left was the gooey pulp I was about to explode with.
“You can’t walk yet . . .”
The sympathy and pity in her voice ripped me apart.
“Wh-What?”
“They only used enough magic to heal the missing pieces from your skull and some on your face. Left eye is still busted pretty bad, but they stabilized your brain enough for you not to die. It was dicey for a while there.”
She was speaking like she was whispering to the weeds again.
“He . . .”
“Not sure which he you’re about to curse, but either one, you had best leave it. The King beat you for several days, off and on like. Whenever The Raven was pulled away, he’d come down to the Temple and beat you some more.”
I let my one good eye roll up as I let go of my muscles and flopped back down. What was the use of trying to scurry off to the nearest bucket when I’d be dragging half of my body along with me?
The pressure in my bladder didn’t go away, though. And as tears of frustration and self-loathing built in my eyes, I grit my teeth. As the tears broke the dam of my lashes, so too did my bladder.
Violet had the heart not to mention it as we listened to it trickle into some sort of bucket.
“I hate to ask this, Cricket, but what did you do to piss the King off so badly? I’ve seen him in moods since after the war, but I’ve never seen him this wroth with a single one of us before.” A damp cool rag was pressed to the busted eye that radiated heat from the other side of my face.
“Gave him a shitty blow job, apparently.” I snorted with as much amusement as I could.
The small doll woman clucked in the back of her porcelain throat. “That’ll do it, I guess. I’ll tell the others to bring you notes on how to give throat properly. Since, apparently, you have the oral skills of a dead toad. You’d think a young thing like you would know how to properly suck down a dick. You came in here all hot-assed and sassed up like a girl who knew how to fuck a man dry and leave him crawling from his casket to get more.”
“Anyone ever tell you that you have a foul mouth?”
“Oh, they’ve called my mouth foul before, but they’ve never called it unskilled.”
“Bitch.”
“Oh, aye. And more too. But at least I know how to suck a dick.”
“Are you planning on harassing me to death? If so, grab a knife and make it quick.”
She chuckled, the sound of it strange, like two pieces of porcelain clinking together and grinding against itself. “I would be right next to you on this slab if I tried that. Oh, no, dear little Cricket. Someone is obsessed enough with you to keep you alive. And when I tell you the state of your injuries, you will know that was no easy thing. I would say that if you were back in Human, you’d have been dead ten times over by now. Don’t rightly care how good the medicine has gotten in my absence. I was watching your brain think your dreams for a few days there. If you ask me, a person should be wise enough to think their thoughts quietly enough that their little brain doesn’t wiggle about with it. No human, not even one such as us, should have to be privy to watching another’s thoughts be thought.”
She was talking too much, and with every new word, I was being pulled further and further away from the handy disassociation with my body. We had made a tidy little peace, where I would keep myself all nice and tight in the black den my mind had created, and it would keep its yucky pains away from my bubble and experience it all on its own. I didn’t need to be pulled back down the eternal thread that connected us and seated straight into the heart of the agony it was experiencing.
I wished Violet would shut up, but instead, I heard the telltale creak of a wooden stool being dragged a few feet over the stone floor, and I heard her ease her doll body into it like she was feeling all two hundred and fifty of the years she had lived in that tiny little girl’s body.
“We were worried over you, Cricket.”
She was back to whispering again. This time, I could almost hear the tears in her voice. Unshed and unrelenting, nonetheless.
“Sorry.”
My voice was trembling as the aches seeped into my bones and into my psyche. I could feel each blow that my body had experienced all over again. Some of them, I didn’t even remember. Hell, most of them, I didn’t remember. But my body remembered, and it would remind me even if I begged it not to.
“I assumed for a while there that you had mouthed off to the King. I was proud of you. That bastard could use a peg or two taken out of him. When the Laundress never came back, we assumed maybe you’d killed her. Or she, you. But then that damned kin’tha of yours came and kept pestering us. We were ready to write you off, you know, but it came and snatched me up and brought me here. Remind me to kick your ass for that, by the by. I saw that bastard of a king was kicking the shit out of you. You weren’t even awake. How can someone mouth off by flopping about like yesterday’s fish? Can’t. I got the measure of it from there.” The chill of her replacing the rag on my eye slithered through me and kissed me. If being on drugs was like that sensation, I suddenly understood the appeal. “I sent Green Man and Emerald in to keep watch from the rafters when I couldn’t be here. They reported back to me everything they could. We watched over you the best we could, Cricket. I promise it to you we did.”
“You don’t owe me anything, Violet.”
“I’m matriarch in those warrens. That might not mean much to daora—especially not a warren that doesn’t remember when this land was ruled by the greatest of Queens—but it means something to me. You’re one of mine now. You hadn’t earned it the last time you saw me, but you’ve earned it now.”
“All it took was nearly dying.”
“Not entirely convinced you didn’t die a few times there. ”
The pain was worth it to chuckle along with her. It split my cracked lips, and I tasted my own blood blooming on my thirsty tongue.
“But, yes, you could have done or said anything to earn that beating, and any single one of us would have said that you had earned your place in the warrens. None of us have gotten through this life without catching a beating or two. None of them have been as bad as yours, though.”
“What can I say? I’m an overachiever.”
“That, you are, Cricket. That, you are.”
I felt the chill of her glass-like hands slide under me, one at my hip and one at the center of my back. “Now, overachieve in letting me roll you over and clean you. None of the Fae fuckers are going to do this, and you’ll get sores if you lie in your own piss and shit for too long. Nursed my nan into the grave back before this place. Learned quick how what comes out of us can eat through skin and bone while trying to crawl back in.”
“I’d prefer not to be in a grave when you’re done.”
“Not properly sure you can even fit in one at this stage.”
Misery rippled through me as she pushed me onto my side and slid something out from underneath me. I felt weak. I felt disgusting. I felt anger that the most I could do to help her was not fight against her. I could barely move the body that had been given to me, though I imagined that, even if it had been my own body, I would not have fared very much better in the effort. I would probably be more dead than she had proclaimed me had it been my actual body.
Through the entire ordeal of her cleaning me, I cried silent, angry, frustrated, bitter tears. I had never been wounded enough to require someone to tend to me like this. It was humiliating. It was more dehumanizing than having Rictus shove his fingers inside of me and rearrange my most intimate of parts. I thought I had known humiliation when I had learned that Rook and Cypress had been able to see that entire thing happen. I had not known true humiliation until this moment.
I wanted to choke on it. I wanted to bury myself in it and let it consume me from head to toe.
When she was done, she sighed softly as if to apologize and then covered me in a fresh blanket. This one didn’t reek of my own bodily fluids leaking into it. This one smelled like a crisp spring day. Somehow, it was worse than the one I had been bound into.
“My arms? And legs?” I asked when she was done tucking the blanket in around me, delicately folding the top of it under my chin like she was tucking in the most precious child.
“Both legs shattered in multiple places. Emerald overheard them saying that, when someone comes in to pay for your healing, that will be the next thing taken care of. Not entirely sure which one of the bastards is paying, but someone is. As for your arms? The left one, the joint was shattered by an anvil. Twisted fuck dragged an entire fucking anvil into the temple and dropped it on your shoulder a few times. The other one? We think it has to do with your back. He was damned near jumping on that for a while there. Once the legs are done, the back comes next.”
“Why?” I asked through a racking sob.
The accounting of my wounds was shocking. All because of a bad blow job? And not even a bad one! It was one of the better blow jobs I had ever given in my life.
“We’re still trying to figure that out, Cricket. But it should be over. He hasn’t been back to you for a while. And the Bandrui told him if he spills more blood in the temple, she will string him up from Faolán’s statue by his balls.”
Zaps of memory of the conversation I had overheard sizzled across my brain. Those were terms I had heard before.
“Faolán is a god?”
Violet shuddered to a halt and dropped the rag she had been squeezing out. “How’d you know that, Cricket? You haven’t been around long enough to know of their gods yet. Hadn’t had a chance to tell you before this all happened.”
“I . . . I think I overheard it. And more.”
“Yes, Faolán is the patron god of the Bláth an Earraigh, the Spring court. And as its king, that bastard is dedicated to Faolán. There’s nine of them. Well. Was. ”
“Mabh’s son is dead. Who is Mabh?”
I felt her lean back on her stool, heard it rock on uneven legs under her slight weight. “Let a girl’s brain air out some, and she suddenly comes back with all sorts of dangerous questions.”
I huffed a laugh.
“Mabh is the former matriarch of the Fae. The former Goddess of Magic. Then it was her son, Mordin, or Túathal to the penitent. Mordin’s been dead for over two hundred years. That’s what kicked off the War of Thorns. He was the patron god of the House of Magic. Each house has their own patron god. I’ll introduce you to them when you can manage your legs again.”
“What is Canny eater Drew . . .”
“Canai eter Duthracht. It was the House of Magic. It means ‘Song Between Desires.’” She picked up the rag and was hesitantly dabbing at my head again. “That’s enough questions now, Cricket. It’s dangerous for someone as pretty as you are to think this hard.”
“I’m not pretty.”
“Little girl, even beaten and bruised, you are the prettiest thing in this temple and certainly the prettiest thing in Sceach Gheal an Bith.”
“That’s not me. That’s what Rictus made me.”
“Aren’t we all what the people around us have made us? I’m a bitter old woman in the body of a five-year-old girl’s doll. I don’t even remember what I looked like before they did this to me. So, this is as much who I am as the other ever was. More so, I’d imagine. Truth be told, I’ve been a doll for two hundred and fifty-eight years. I was the other woman for forty-one. By any measure, I would be a doll more than a human woman with children, a husband, and a grandbaby on the way. I don’t even remember their names. But I remember the names of every little Fae girl who has ever played with me. Every single one.”
“We cannot own what they made us. We are who we make ourselves. And one day, that will be true again.”
“From your lips to the gods’ ears, young one.”