Chapter Twenty-Five A Fevered Imagination
Chapter Twenty-Five
A Fevered Imagination
At first, I thought I was hallucinating the lion on the other side of the bars, pacing back and forth outside my prison door.
Then I remembered there really was a lion living in the castle.
Although that didn’t necessarily mean this one wasn’t a hallucination.
If you imagined there was a toad sitting on your head that would eat your face if you told a lie, it wouldn’t mean every face-eating head toad was imaginary.
They’re quite real, as it happens. I once met someone who had one.
It was inconvenient; he was never able to find a hat that fit properly.
Now I was hallucinating a toad on my head.
High fever, I thought. Elevated skin temperature, shivering, sweating. Delirium and confusion. Recommendations—keep the patient hydrated. Prepare willow bark tea. In severe cases, cool the patient in a bath.
My throat actually felt a bit better than it had. It was only everything else that felt worse. I regretted not chewing on any willow trees when I’d had the chance.
“Tell me who your confederates are,” the toad said.
The stone walls of my cell shimmered and swam, as if distorted by a heat haze. I wasn’t hot, though. I was cold, very cold, unless I touched my palm to my forehead. That was so hot it burned.
Through the one small window up near the ceiling, I could see nothing but a slice of dark night sky. Never before had I so longed for the power to make a window into a somewhat larger window. At least the one in my stepmother’s tower had a nice view.
Stone surrounded me on three sides of my narrow cell.
On the fourth was a row of iron bars serving as the door.
In the dim light beyond, a stairway built from the same stone as the walls spiraled upward into the unknown.
I vaguely remembered being dragged down it, but my memory did not stretch to whatever might have lain above.
The undulating walls were making me nauseous. I had already thrown up once—two times? More? However many times it had been, I’d managed to get most of it into the bucket someone had left in the corner, but the whole cell reeked of vomit.
“Tell me who your confederates are,” the toad repeated. “Is it the women? The women in disguise?”
“I don’t have any confederates,” I told it. “I didn’t do anything. Get off my head.”
“If you reveal your allies, the king may yet have mercy.” It wasn’t the toad talking. The toad wasn’t real. It was the lion. It shoved its muzzle closer to the bars and peered at me through its spectacles. Lion real, toad fake. I had to remember that.
The whole room pulsed, closing in and drawing back, like lungs. The scattering of straw across the floor shifted and writhed. Or no, wait. Those were insects. They’d left bite marks all over my legs. So they were actually there, crawling around, not just in my mind. Weren’t they?
I closed my eyes. If I was lucky, the insects would be gone when I opened them. “I’m not who you think I am. I’m the princess of Skalla.”
“Thare wis a time whin ah micht hae believed ye,” someone said.
I cracked one eye open and saw a masked hunter squatting on her heels outside my cell. The lion was gone.
“Ah wis hauf-convinced ye were tellin’ th’ truth. Till we fun th’ sketches. Drawings o’ th’ monsters ye created.”
A weak stream of winter sunlight trickled through the window, brightening the room from dark to dim. Dust motes danced a slow pavane in the beam. I wondered if sunrise had somehow come while I blinked. It didn’t make me feel any warmer.
“Those drawings aren’t mine. I told…” Who had I told? The lion? Gervase? I wasn’t sure I’d had a chance to talk to Gervase. “I told someone. I found them. We have to go there before—”
“That’s nae whit yer mirror’s bin saying.”
“That isn’t my mirror!” I wrapped my arms around my legs and shuddered. It was so very, very cold in the cell. I pressed my forehead against my knees. “Clem, listen—”
“I’m not Clem. I’m Jack.”
I tried to fix my blurry gaze on the hunter. She was still squatting on her heels outside my cell. “If you’re trying to drive me insane,” I said, “you may be a bit late.”
“Is that why you did it?” Jack grabbed the bars, her grip so hard her knuckles turned white. “You’re mad? Is that your excuse?”
“That was a joke, Jack. Do you have any sense of humor?”
I lay back and watched the arched ceiling heave and flow like the shore of a lake.
I’d been a lake, once. It had been peaceful.
When bugs crawled over me, they’d made tiny ripples.
They hadn’t hunted for fresh portions of my flesh to bite.
I raised my head to glare at them, but I couldn’t see any; I only felt them scuttling across my skin.
“I just want to know why,” Jack said. “I want to know what possible reason you could have had to try to kill Gervase. To kill his family. To kill the Skallan princess.”
“Oh, the Skallan princess and I have issues going way back,” I murmured.
Jack pounced on that, once again missing the joke. “Why did you hate her? Why do you hate Gervase?”
“I don’t hate him. I don’t hate anybody.”
“Well, I hate you!” she shrieked at me. I whipped around at the change in tone and regretted it when agony stabbed through my head. “I hate you for what you’ve done to Jack! Her love for Gervase is beautiful and pure, and they’d be married by now if it wasn’t for you.”
The hunter I’d thought was Jack spat a toad at me through the bars. It thumped into my chest and flopped onto the floor.
“You’re not real,” I muttered at it as it hopped around the cell. “The lion is real. You’re not.”
Ignoring me, it speared something small and skittering with its tongue and swallowed it with a satisfied crunch.
“Could you please just tell me,” I said, turning to the masked hunter, “if Sam is all right?”
“Who’s Sam?” Angelique asked.
The sky outside the window was dark again.
They were changing day and night on me. To keep me disoriented, no doubt.
But they’d have to do more than that if they wanted me to talk.
I’d been held prisoner by better than them.
I’d been locked in the shifting prison of the Shadow King and entombed beneath the ice by the Queen of the Northern Snows.
A bit of petty trickery wasn’t going to make me spill my secrets.
Come to think of it, the joke was on them. I didn’t remember which secrets they wanted me to spill.
“Excuse me,” I said to Angelique, and crawled over to throw up again in the overflowing bucket. I vomited until my torso felt hollow and wrung out.
“I’ve been doing my best to help you,” she said as I collapsed onto the floor, panting and sweating. “You’ve made it rather difficult. Everyone is frightened of your powers. The hunters say you were the one who turned them into birds. That you moved the very trees to attack them.”
“That’s an exaggeration.” They’d only slid in a little bit closer when I’d threatened Jack.
“Gervase wants to execute you in some suitably horrible way.”
“Thrown in a barrel of poisonous snakes? Forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes until I perish? Roasted to death in my own child-cooking oven?”
Angelique seemed puzzled. “You have a child-cooking oven?”
“No. You’ll have to use someone else’s.”
I looked around for the door leading out, but I couldn’t see it. Someone had hidden it. I peered into the dark corners in case they’d made it very, very small.
Angelique cocked her head to one side, watching me. “I’ve argued with my brother day and night, trying to convince him to let you live.”
“Really? You and I barely know each other.”
“You’ve…become like a sister to me. Truly.” She paused, waiting for me to fill the silence. I didn’t know what she wanted me to say. “Looking at the state of you,” she went on, “you might not survive long enough for him to kill you.”
My back ached. My head ached. So did my stomach. Even my toes ached. “If I died right now, I’m not sure I’d mind.”
The toad bit me on the face.
I swatted at it, and it fell to the floor with a thump.
That was uncalled for, I thought as I pulled myself up into a sitting position, cradling my injured cheek.
You weren’t supposed to bite me unless I lied.
Well, perhaps I had lied, a little. But you’d think a magical toad would know the difference between deception and hyperbole.
There was no sign of the toad when I looked around. A rat, however, was scampering away. Was that what had bitten me? It occurred to me that toads weren’t noted for having sharp teeth.
Rabies transmission from rats is rare, I reminded myself. Symptoms of rabies include fever, headache, agitation, paranoia, hallucinations—Wait, am I already rabid? No. I’m not afraid to drink water. That’s the telltale symptom.
If I do have rabies, I’ll fall into a coma and die. There is no known cure. Death is all but inevitable two to ten days after first presentation of symptoms.
But I don’t have it.
I did not feel reassured.
Angelique had vanished. She’d probably taken the toad with her when she left.
Did she really think of me as a sister? I supposed I would be her sister, once I married Gervase.
But she didn’t know that, did she? Or no, I’d told everyone who I was.
Only no one believed me. So did that mean Angelique thought of the person that she thought was pretending to be the person who was going to be her sister as her sister?
“Hey,” I said to the rat. “Hey. Do you know my sister? My half sister.”
Where was Calla? Shouldn’t she and Jonquil have arrived in my dream by now? Maybe I wasn’t dreaming hard enough. Maybe I wasn’t dreaming.
It probably didn’t make any difference. I’d yelled at them and thrown them out the last time they’d shown up. I regretted that now. I didn’t want to be executed with them hating me.