I struggled, grasping his wrists with my chained hands and trying to escape his grip. But my body was weakened by the lack of nutrients in the food they’d given me in the dungeon, weighed down by the iron stealing what remained of my energy.
In one last bid for freedom, I shoved a single leg off the foot of the basin. Angling my body up and lowering my head deeper in the water, I watched Malachi’s moment of confusion before my knee hooked around his throat. I used his surprise to pull him back, to shove him toward the opposite end of the bath until his hands left my shoulders and I was able to rise to the surface.
I pulled him lower until his spine struck the edge of the tub, his body twisting with the force of my leg. Air filled my lungs as I took greedy breaths, watching as Malachi crumpled to the floor. He got to his feet only a moment later, his expression murderous as he lunged for me.
“Enough,” Mab said, raising a hand. I turned my eyes to her. “I believe you’ve made my point, Malachi.”
“But my Queen…” Malachi trailed off, the implication obvious.
“What fun would it be if she just took your punishment lying down and begged for mercy? How dreadfully boring it would be to have my new plaything behave the same way everyone else in this forsaken court does,” she said, smiling at me. Something lurked in her gaze that I knew I would come to dread.
“Set them free, and I’m sure a great many of your servants would be more than willing to give you the entertainment you seek,” I said, dancing around the truth. If she wanted people to stand against her, then she shouldn’t have bound them to her will.
“There is a difference between a plaything and an uprising. Fear not, Little Mouse, you’ll be like them soon enough,” she said, tapping a nail against her chin. “Even the brightest of lights fails to remain entertaining for long.”
I swallowed, keeping my thoughts of the ferryman as far from any room Mab occupied as possible. I didn’t think she could hear my thoughts, didn’t know of any Fae who could do such a thing, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t exist.
What would she make of the Ferryman insinuating I was something creatures would use?
Malachi reached into the tub, forcefully pulling me from the water and dragging me out of the basin. He shoved a towel at me, and I hurriedly dried myself off as he grabbed a dress from the back of a nearby chair. I winced when he shoved it over my head, trying not to offer any physical sign of the comfort that came from no longer being nude. I wore no underwear beneath it, nothing to accompany it as he grabbed the two sides of the fabric that would make the sleeves and wrapped them around my arm. They secured around each one with ribbons, making my shackles irrelevant for the time being.
“Come and eat, Little Mouse,” Mab commanded.
I turned my back on Malachi in favor of the bigger threat in the room. She perked up as I turned toward her, walking to the table slowly and taking the chair she’d pulled out on the other side of the small round table. I lowered myself into it slowly, keeping a wary eye on her as she chewed.
“You must be hungry.”
“I’ll live,” I said, not daring to eat the food she offered. Even the food in the dungeon had been a great risk to eat, something I only indulged in when the hunger pangs in my stomach became too much to bear.
Everyone knew humans weren’t to eat the food of the Fae, that it was a way to trap us within Alfheimr for the rest of our days. Eating food provided by Mab herself seemed like an even greater folly, increasing the potential risk of poisoning.
Mab tipped her head to the side, studying me curiously before her frown shifted into a scoff. “What is it they tell you about the Fae in the human realm?”
“That you’re tricksters who will stop at nothing to get what you want,” I answered, shrugging my shoulders as if it were inconsequential.
I’d already learned that I could trust nothing the Priestesses had taught us of the Fae. Some of what they’d said might have been rooted in truth, but the bias toward the Fae was undeniable and colored everything with their hatred.
“And you still believe this to be true when you are so clearly in love with your mate? I assure you, he is not immune to the ways of the Fae,” she said, making Malachi laugh. I had no doubt he wasn’t, not when he’d lied and manipulated me into falling in love with him in the first place.
“Just because I love him does not mean I do not see his wrongdoings. Caldris is far from perfect. I can, however, trust him with my life,” I said, glancing toward the guard, who never seemed far. Malachi wouldn’t leave Mab and me alone, as if our power imbalance wasn’t enough on a good day, let alone with me shackled in irons.
“I’ve no intention of killing you. If I wanted you dead, I would choose a far more brutal method than poison. Poison is the way of cowards,” she said, reaching over to the glass goblet at my side. She lifted it, taking a sip of the wine before placing it beside me again.
At least we agreed on one thing: poison was the way of those who wanted their killings to remain a secret.
Mab and I both wanted ours to be known to the world, wanted to wear our crimes like badges of honor.
“It is not poison I worry about, but what you might have done to it that could trap me within Alfheimr for the rest of my life,” I admitted, taking the goblet in hand.
I glanced down at the wine, waiting for the response I knew she would have. She raised her head into something akin to respect, and then let out a sharp bark of laughter that hinted at the evil within her.
“Faerie food can trap a human on Faerie soil for a lifetime, but I think you are forgetting one very important thing in your considerations of what may harm you,” she said, leaning forward slightly. She rested her elbow on her knee, placing her chin in her hand as the leg crossed over the other one bounced. The delicate, cruel heel of her shoe glittered in the light, looking more like a weapon than footwear. “But you, Little Mouse, are not human.”
The words struck me in the chest, rendering me unable to hide the flinch that made my wine slosh against the edges of the cup. I’d acknowledged it. I’d had to make my peace with the fact that no matter what I had become in my cycles of life, I hadn’t originally been born into this world as a human.
None of that prepared me for the stark realization, for staring down my enemy and having her point out that my entire life as I remembered it had been a lie. I was not what I’d been born to believe, and all the things I’d learned about myself over the years were now irrelevant.
That meant I didn’t know what was a weakness and what was a strength. It meant I had to fear things I didn’t understand but not the things I’d always been taught to fear.
It meant I didn’t know who I was any longer.
“Oh no, Sweetling. Had you not realized that already?” Mab asked, her tone mocking.
Clenching my jaw, I tried to fight the response bubbling up within me. I tried to combat the fury of being humiliated in a moment when I wanted to grieve for what I’d lost of myself.
“I realized I was not human weeks ago, but would you like to know what really solidified that knowledge?” I asked, lifting the goblet to my mouth. I took a sip of the wine, letting the bold flavors of it dance over my tongue as I swallowed and resisted the urge to go back for more in my thirst. “It was the moment I cut you. Listening to your people whisper about you, knowing some mortal girl could not bleed the Queen of Air and Darkness.”