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She frowned more and nodded her two guard dogs down. She might be stuffed into the package of a five-year-old girl with too-big eyes, soft white hair, and rose petal lips, but some instinct told me Violet was fiercer than the Laundress, who I assumed was the woman who’d called me princess. Sonny Rule #13: Listen to the whispers that tell you who someone is. And those whispers were screaming that Violet was a force to be reckoned with.

“In good time, Cricket. Ask me again with a treat in your hand. I don’t sell my stories for a simple question mark. But I will tell you this, of all the villains that lurk the corridors above, The Raven is the worst of them. He earned his reputation. All of it. From being the rake to being the Ard Rí’s executioner. If he has taken an interest in you, do whatever you have to do to get out of his focus.” Her eyes darted to the sleeping kin’tha. “And don’t trust those. They say when a kin’tha sleeps, its true master listens. Haven’t had one of them in the warrens in decades, but enough blood seeped into the stone from the last one to tell me this one is just as dangerous.”

I narrowed my eyes and the innocently napping black cat. “Noted.”

“Get some sleep, Cricket. Tomorrow will be your worst day here,” said the living bush man.

“What’s tomorrow?”

I should not have asked. Just because you see the gun and know the bullet is coming doesn’t mean you can dodge it any better.

“You’ll find out why you were bought from the Market.”

Chapter 7

The night was cold. I had slept in cabins in the Michigan woods with drafts in the dead of winter and had spent one particularly chilly spring on the streets of Detroit in a tent. I knew cold intimately. She and I were old bedmates.

But this was the type of iciness that sank into the very marrow of your soul and leeched away any hope, desire, or joy. I felt it pouring out of me into the dead air all night. It was a night damp with unshed tears and regrets. I had no more to give to the dungeon-like warrens I would call home. All I had to give its ravenous need for sacrifice was the twitching of my flesh and jerking of my exhausted muscles.

The tiny flame of the candle I had been afforded warred with the gloomy ice, but it was a losing battle. The damp and cold was too mighty of a foe, and it, too, finally succumbed to the bone-rotting frigidity sometime in the night. With its dying gust of smoke, I also fell to my battle with exhaustion and chill. I felt every cell in me, heavy and hanging, from my new body as sleep claimed me.

It wasn’t a restorative rest. I’d slept better on dirty concrete than I had on that cot. It was the sleep only someone familiar with emptiness could truly understand. It was the body surrendering and dismissing the ghost of a fight for survival. A sleep that never fully guaranteed the dreamer would wake in the morning.

When I woke, though, it was to the scent of cloves, cardamom, rosemary, cedar, campfire smoke, and the scent of clean, masculine skin with warmth radiating from my body and returning to me. I shot up, fear lancing through me, ready to claw the eyes from whomever owned the small quilt that covered me.

There was no one, though. Just the dozing black cat curled up at the entrance to my small cell. The smoke of the candle lingered in the still air as if it had just been snuffed. I could have sworn I had watched the flame die at my back, its light waning smaller and smaller on the wall before me, until it finally welcomed the void.

I glared down at it, the cooling wax winking back at me with a brassy star bead.

“You know, for a guard cat, you’re doing a pretty shit job,” I whispered to the cat as I plucked the bead from the candle and turned it over.

It was a simple thing. Just a fingernail-sized brass bead with a hole down the center. Tiny bits of rope clung to small burs in the metal from where it once hung on a string of some sort.

“Not meant to be a guard to keep others out,” a small whisper replied.

I nearly jumped out of my skin, whipping my gaze to the still sleeping cat. “The fuck.”

“Not the kin’tha,” it said. I looked up to the top of the rudimentary wall of my cell where the leaf man’s face was barely visible over the edge. “The kin’tha is there to keep you in, not others out.”

“Whomever is paying me the compliment of assigning me my own personal jailer needs to work on their romancing skills.”

The leaf man snorted a laugh and disappeared from the edge of the wall and appeared again, stuffing a thread bare shirt into a pair of breeches. “Trust me, if you are ever so unlucky as to have The Raven romancing you, you’re better off embracing the kiss of a dagger than his.” Our gaze went to the giant cat, who was stretching from his long nap. We both frowned. “I’m Green Man.”

“The names are a bit on the nose, don’t you think? The Laundress probably does the washing. Violet has purple eyes. You . . . well, you look like a bush.” I tucked the blanket around me, savoring in the duality of the biting chilled air and the warmth against my skin.

“Why waste a perfectly good name on a daoire? Just one more way they remind us that we are nothing to them,” hissed the soft whisper of Violet, as if I had summoned her. She cast her gaze around our little trio, taking in each, as if catching the measure of them for the morning ahead. When her gaze settled on me, I felt the weight of an elder’s appraisal and wondered how I’d ever mistaken her for a simple little girl. “As for you, you’re being taken up today. You’re going to be taken before the Ard Rí, I would wager. I couldn’t get much from the guards. The fact they are tight lipped about what is intended for you isn’t good. Be alert. Be smart. Listen. And remember, the stakes here are higher than back in Human.”

“Right. Twenty-one.” I sighed and pushed up from my cot. “Do I at least get a bath before I have to go shit on a King?”

The corner of Violet’s rosebud lips twitched as if she were fighting a smirk. “Of course not. You’re to be presented as the filth you are.”

“Boring,” I quipped and stretched, cracking my spine.

I didn’t have long to wait, but while I did, I pored over what I had learned. The Laundress, a shit stirrer. Need to keep an eye on that one. Violet, old timer and the best informed of the lot. Keep both eyes on that one. Green Man, sweet—maybe a bit too sweet. The emerald-skinned one hadn’t told me what her name was, cautious. The rest of them milled about and went to and from the main hallway where the ramp up out of the warrens were.

When they came for me, I was expecting to be taken in the kin’tha, but all it did was follow me closely, a mere six inches from my back heel.

The guards who walked me out of the warrens were tall, near twins of each other, with a head full of dark red braids that reminded me of the atrocity I now shambled around in. I had almost forgotten for a few blissful moments that the body reflected in the mirrors we passed was mine. I longed for the simple sight of something familiar in those reflective panes and turned my head away when I could no longer stand the strange set of turquoise eyes flashing in them.