Chapter Twenty-Five A Fevered Imagination #2
The rat paused a few paces from me, poised on its haunches with its forepaws in the air.
A pair of eyes like black beads stared in my direction.
Its hairless tail was raised like a whip.
I suspected it was waiting until I fell asleep so it could try for another bite.
It’d serve the damn thing right if it caught rabies from me.
“You must know my sister,” I said. “She’s a friend to all animals. Calla of Skalla.”
I had never noticed how well that rhymed before. The name of my sister is Calla of Skalla. She rode to the gala upon an impala.
The rat tilted its head at almost the same angle as Angelique had tilted hers. I hoped that meant it was listening.
“You need to take her a message from me,” I whispered. It was time to swallow my pride, even though my throat felt too dry to swallow anything. “Tell her I’m in trouble. That her sister Melilot is in trouble and needs help.” Maybe she would come if I asked, despite what I’d said to her.
The rat licked its forepaws and began grooming its face like a cat. It couldn’t have ignored me more plainly if it were…well, if it were a cat. So much for that idea.
No one was coming to save me. They would never know I’d needed saving.
“This is quite the mess you’ve gotten yourself into,” my stepmother said.
“That I’ve gotten myself into?” I staggered to my feet. “You sent me here!”
“It was so simple. Get married, I said. I know you like to spite my wishes, but you’ve been rather extreme about it this time.”
She was as blurry and wavery as the stone walls and flickered from place to place around the room like a fluttering moth.
Magic. Everything my stepmother did was stuffed full to bursting with magic.
She could hardly lift a finger without leveling a kingdom.
Small wonder she viewed me as insignificant.
“Real mothers don’t browbeat their daughters when they’re sick,” I complained. “They give them soup.”
“Do they?” She reached out and tapped her fingers against my forehead. Through my forehead. I felt them wriggling around inside my skull.
“What are you doing?”
“Checking to see whether you will die of your illness if you are left here any longer. Death by fever in a jail cell is too ignominious a fate for one of my own.” Her fingers stretched within me and spread through the rest of my body, wrapping around my organs, poking at my gallbladder and spleen.
“I cannot compete with your rosy memories of your first mother. Who, incidentally, was more likely to categorize your maladies than offer you comfort. ‘Note the symptoms of extreme delirium in this feverish patient.’ As if you were a diagram in a medical text instead of her daughter.”
“Don’t you talk about my mother,” I mumbled around the fingers in my throat.
Was that true? Had my mother been more cold and detached than I liked to believe?
My memories of her had faded with time, but I had the uncomfortable feeling it might be accurate.
Not that I was about to admit it. “Your own bedside manner is nothing to brag about.”
“Never good enough for you, no matter what I do,” she said under her breath. After a final, uncomfortable rearrangement of my intestines, she withdrew her hands. There was a sucking sound followed by a pop as they parted from me. “There’s no need to fetch you home. You’ll be fine.”
“Keep your sticky fingers out of my brain.”
“Is soup what you truly want from me? Then here.” She proffered me a steaming bowl. “Have some soup.”
I grabbed it and threw it at her face.
She dissolved into hundreds of outraged, croaking toads. One of them hopped onto my head and settled in as if taking up residence.
“Confess your crimes!” the lion roared.
“You again?”
I looked at the window. The sky was a medium gray. Perhaps it wasn’t day or night. What if there was nothing out there at all?
“I have been trying my hardest to convince the king not to execute you. It would be easier to make my case if there were any semblance of cooperation on your part.” The lion squinted at me. His spectacles had slipped down his muzzle. “Is that a toad on your head?”
“Yes. It was my stepmother. A huntsman spit it on me, and then it turned into a rat.” That had made perfect sense until I said it aloud.
The lion huffed and ignored my ravings. “If you do not reveal your co-conspirators among the so-called huntsmen—”
“What is your problem with them, anyway?” I lurched to the bars, grabbing hold of them to keep myself upright. “Female lions hunt. Lionesses. They hunt more than the males do, don’t they? You should be thrilled. Hurray for the humans, acting more like lions!”
“I am a centuries-old magical talking lion,” he answered. “Not some common savannah trash. And even if I were, it would make no difference. Humans are not supposed to behave like lions. They are supposed to behave like humans. As the guardian of the laws and traditions of this country—”
“Well, see, that’s your problem right there. Centuries-old traditions fall out of date. I woke a princess from an enchanted sleep once, and she used lead paint in her eyeliner and thought arsenic was good for your complexion. Get with the times.”
“I am with the times!” He prowled forward until his face was mere inches from mine, separated from it only by the bars of the cell. “I wrote the book on humans. The book.”
“I bet it’s poorly sourced and derivative.”
“CONFESS YOUR CRIMES!” Hot lion breath washed over me as he shouted. Fangs as long as dagger blades were crammed into his mouth.
“I haven’t committed any crimes.” Only my grip on the bars kept me from falling over. I shouldn’t have talked so much. It was tiring. I certainly should never have bothered to argue with him. “I’m the princess of Skalla,” I mumbled at the floor.
“I know,” said Angelique.
I looked up to find her face as close to mine as the lion’s had been. A faint smile curled the edges of her mouth.
“You do?” My voice sounded weak and thready.
“Of course.” She trailed one hand down the bars, almost but not quite touching mine.
“Only a true princess has trouble sleeping if a pea is hidden beneath her mattress. And once I found out you were a sorceress, well—everyone knows about the Skallan royal family. It’s the reason you’re here, after all.
” There was a sound like a flock of birds fluttering their wings, and suddenly she was standing next to me, dabbing at my wounded cheek with a damp cloth.
“I was suspicious from the very beginning, naturally. Why would a mere handmaiden arrive in a magic carriage?”
The cool, wet linen was so soothing I almost moaned. “Are you really here?” I asked.
“Why are you surprised? I have my ways of getting where I want to go.”
“Oh. Your ring of keys. You have one for the dungeon? Then why don’t you let me out, if you know I’m telling the truth?”
She shook her head. “It isn’t that simple. I might believe you, but convincing everyone else is trickier.” Her smile tightened. “It would have been easier when I was regent, even as reluctant as they were to accept my rule. I suppose I have you to thank for my thirty days on the throne.”
“You’re welcome, I guess.”
“I’m doing what I can for you.” She gave my cheek a final delicate wipe and leaned in close. “In the meantime, is there anything that would make you more comfortable?”
“A feather bed?” My thoughts oozed through my head like thick syrup. “A cup of willow bark tea? With honey, if you can manage it. Or how about a bath? I’d love a bath.”
“A bath,” she mused. “Perhaps that could be arranged. Do you need someone to soap your back?”
I blinked. “Are you…are you flirting with me?”
“Certainly not!” the hunter snapped.
I peered through the bars, looking everywhere, trying to find Angelique again, but she was gone. I wanted to punch the wall in frustration, but I’d only hurt my hand. Or miss. “Where does everyone keep going?”
“Flirting with you?” the hunter said. “Hardly. You’ve got vomit on your shirt, and something’s been chewing your face. Also, I despise you.”
The temperature in the cell had dropped precipitously. Snow drifted in through the window. The bars felt like ice under my hands.
I let go and stepped away before my sweat could freeze. “Put your hat on, Max. It’s like an icebox in here.”
“I’m not Max,” she said sullenly. “I’m Kit.”
“Oh.” It wasn’t supernaturally cold. It was just winter in an unheated prison. “How’s Sam doing? No one’s told me.”
“He…” Kit hesitated. “He fell unconscious not long after we got back to the castle. He isn’t waking up.”
“What?” That was bad. That was very bad. I had to get out. I had to do something. “I need to see him! Now!” There had to be a treatment, a cure, if only I could examine him, if only I could leave this place and go somewhere I could think. “Will you let me see him?”
“You’re not getting anywhere near him!”
“It wasn’t me who blew him into a tree, Kit!”
“I’m not Kit,” the hunter said.
I put my hands against my face, pressing the palms into my eyes. “I was right. You really are trying to drive me mad.”
“I should tell Gervase to put you to death,” she said. “He’d do it, if I asked him.”
“Ah. Jack.” I wasn’t able to speak above a whisper at this point. “That is you, isn’t it?”
“Your name is the one in question here. First Clover, now Melilot. Who will you claim to be next?”
“Tell me something. Are you more worried that I might be here to murder Gervase or that I might be here to marry him?”
She didn’t answer.
I peered at her through spread fingers. “Murdering your rival isn’t very heroic. It wouldn’t be living up to the name you’ve taken. You’re the one who chose to call yourself Jack.”
She flinched back from the bars. “I had good reasons for coming to Tailliz in disguise.”
“Oh, I know. So did I.”
“That’s hardly the same—”
“Isn’t it?” I shrugged, my hands falling from my face. “But really, it doesn’t matter what your reasons were. Whether you started as a Jacqueline, a John, or a Gnoflwhogir, you can’t turn away from it now. Once you take on the mantle of a Jack, you’ve put yourself into the story.”
I could barely keep my eyes open. So I stopped trying. My lids fell like lead weights, and I sank to the floor.
Something urgent still tugged at me. “Sam needs treatment,” I said, my voice scarcely audible even to myself. “I can help. You have to let me out.” No one answered.
My cheek stung where I’d been bitten. I’d just have to hope it wouldn’t become infected. At least Angelique had cleaned it. If I hadn’t imagined her; the seduction attempt at the end was giving me serious doubts about her reality.
I heard footsteps, ringing louder and louder as they approached. A key turned in the lock with a clank, and the barred door creaked open.
Someone stepped beside me. I didn’t look up to see who it was.
“I’m not sure what I should do with you,” Gervase said. “All of my advisers except Jack have said I should execute you. If only for turning me into a swan. Which was…strange.”
I shuddered in the cold, my legs pulled up to my chest. There seemed to be a weight pressing my head against the floor.
“But I’m still uncertain,” he continued. “I’m not sure what’s true and what isn’t.”
That made two of us.
He said nothing for so long I thought he was gone. Or that he’d never been there to begin with.
But then he said, “Why is there a toad on your head?”
When I didn’t answer, he left. The door slammed closed with a resounding clang that echoed across the cell. His footsteps grew quieter until they were gone.
I was alone. Trapped, with no way to help Sam and no way to help myself. With nothing to do but lie on the hard stone floor and listen to the silence.