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My stomach loves when Prince Daein has guests over. There are always so many leftovers for us slaves on those occasions.
Tucked between Terry and Sira, I pick at my full plate and watch the argument in front of us unravel. Hilda and the cook are at odds again. This time, over the rations.
Being house slaves, Hilda insists we are fed more than the backroom slaves. Not to feed our energy, but to keep our bodies presentable and also for an added privilege.
The cook is standing her ground, though. And I can’t really blame her for it.
The backroom slaves do more hard labour than my kind. They scrub and clean and wash all day long, and that’s just the backroom slavesinthe castle. The ones that tend to the gardens and the barns have it even worse.
So it’s only with Hilda’s back to me that I scrape a chunk of my meal onto Sira’s plate. She takes it with a small smile that she hides with a tucked chin.
Terry frowns at me. I guess she’s on Hilda’s side.
I don’t worry myself over it. Terry wouldn’t blab on me, and Sira is too pleased with the rations I share with her to say anything to the cook or Hilda.
The argument only ends with the butler’s arrival. His beady eyes slide between the pair, silencing them instantly.
I tune out for his mediation. The more I ignore his existence, the better. There’s something about that guy that just rubs me the wrong way. An icky feeling in my gut.
I stick around in the kitchens for a while. Leftover cocoa and milk is shared between the lot of us—equally, as ordered by the butler. And then when Sira and most of the other slaves start to trickle off to the slave quarters for bed, Terry and I stick it out a while longer. We sit on the windowsill now, looking out at the side of the grapevines.
“If he leaves tomorrow, we can swim in the lake again,” she muses aloud.
I agree, but I know he won’t leave the castle for the next few days since he’s already been gone for too long. This is his pattern, I’m fast learning. Some days here, some days gone, over and over, as though he doesn't like to stay in one place too long.
Eventually, when the cook blows out the last of the candles, and darkness swallow us whole, Terry and I leave the kitchens.
Her room is off the first corridor in the slave quarters, so she is first to find the Quiet in her room. I carry on through the halls alone, halls illuminated by sparsely lit candles bolted to the walls by iron candleholders.
Terry told me a fun fact the other day. The litalves’ skin burns when they touch that metal. Another slight difference between the light and dark fae. When I was young, I used to think of them as much the same. They mostly look the same in their pointed ears, sharp canine teeth, foreboding height and vicious natures. But then, as I grew and learned more about them, I realised that their differences are in their natures.
The light fae are dangerous to humans, but not as much as the dark fae are. Their threats come in different ways. The litalves once trapped us humans in their lands, tricked us into bargains and forced us into lives of torture. Not just slavery, but torture. Humans would be caught in eternal dances that would make their ankles break and their feet bleed and centuries pass them by—and still, they could not stop dancing. Litalves would force-feed my kind their fruits, too much of it, and so we would spiral into frantic overdoses that would see us dead. They would release us into the wild, only to chase us in their traditional Wild Hunt.
But the dark fae?
They would simply slaughter us. Their tortures came as punishments, not just entertainment. They would react to slights and offences, behead and gut us—but in their lands, there are no Wild Hunts or enteral dances or forced overdoses for their pleasure.
Their threat to us is sharper, faster and somehow colder.
Ahead, my room door edges into sight, faint and shadowy under the sparse candlelight. I move for it, my boots moving quicker over the carpet, and I try to throw all thoughts of the wicked fae from my mind.
Never good to think about them and their cruelties before sleep, otherwise I’ll just suffer a night of terror-plagued dreams.
But before I can so much as take a step towards my room, a new threat snatches me up from the corridor.
I’m thrown into an open door of a dark, empty room.
The heels of my boots catch on my skirt as I go staggering back.
The door clicks shut and, just as I go tumbling over, large hands snatch me up from the ground and spin me around. My breath is knocked out of me, lost, as I’m slammed up against a wall.
Feeling the heat of a tall body pressing against mine, pinning me in place, I suck in a sudden, sharp breath—enough to let a terrified scream rip through me.
But no scream comes.
It’s silenced when a hand snatches up my throat, holding firm. All that escapes me is a pained whisper, my heart hammering wildly in my chest.
The warmth of a sweetened breath runs over my parted lips. Caramel, slightly salted, like the leftover dessert we had in the kitchens.
