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The next stop won’t be nearly as easy.
I take a deep breath as I approach the staircase that leads to the West Wing. The guards, who I am used to seeing in masks, stand there far less imposing now than they were before.
Now, instead of fearing the men who tower over me, I pity them. Their faces are misshapen. One has scales and bony plates covering his skin, his mouth and teeth jutting out at an elongated angle, the skin around his lips reddening with the effort. The other is covered in a thick pelt of coal-colored skin with sparse, matching hair, and his eyes are small round orbs that match, while his nose turns up into a snout with two large tusks on either side.
Under the guise of their masks, they are intimidating, terrifying even. But without the covering, it is easier to see their isolation. Their pain and their fear.
I take a tentative step past them, and they do not stop me. Instead, they shrug their shoulders and nod.
When I reach the top of the stairs, I’m not quite sure what to do with myself. I follow the halls to the left, and several doors are shut to me, while a few are cracked open, revealing more pain and unnatural changes happening to the people inside.
A richly dressed woman with fawn-colored fur, freckled with white spots stares at me from the end of the hall. Round eyes that are too large for her head blink slowly; her pointed ears flit forward and to the side. I gesture for her attention.
“Excuse me,” I speak in a hushed tone, not willing to intrude on their obvious grief unnecessarily.
“Yes?” She takes a couple of small, hesitant steps toward me.
I recognize her light voice as the veiled noblewoman who spoke kindly to me at the dinner table, and I curse Madame all over again for inflicting her twisted brand of vengeance on these innocent people.
“Do you know where I can find Sigrid and the king?” I ask her.
“Yes, Lady. I lead you there.” She gestures for me to follow her down the bleak hallway.
One door reveals a man with wilted wings like a butterfly’s and a woman with a round, furry face and small slits for her nose. They cry at the foot of a bed while its occupant takes stilted, wheezing breaths.
I squeeze my eyes shut against the desperate words and the soft cries, imagining myself back in the dungeons of Villa Paradís all over again.
We reach the end of the hall, and she points me to a smaller set of stairs leading upward again. I’m barely on the first step when I hear Einar’s deep voice resonating and filling the floor above.
I follow the sound up to the servants’ quarters, nearly slipping on the last stair. A girl slowly moves ahead of me, her tall, filmy antennae wobbling from side to side with each step she takes. I don’t miss the way that her feet drag slowly along, leaving a trail of green slime on the floor in her wake.
I take in each of her movements, and the sound of her labored breaths. Then it clicks for me -- that day with Einar on the tour. Him telling the servant to keep her mask on. What I thought was rudeness on his part was kindness instead. He didn’t want to add to her pain with my reaction.
I watch the snail-like girl head toward her room before I continue to follow the sound of Einar’s voice down the hall.
The servants’ quarters are far grander than the ones Madame has given hers in either of her houses. The rooms are fairly spacious, from what I can see, and along the far wall is a small lift that looks newly installed. A scale-covered servant is cranking a lever that lowers it downward.
I’m certain that the contraption has a practical use, but I know the castle’s owner too well now to imagine that it wasn’t a sentimental reason that motivated him to install it.
Einar’s voice floats from further down the hall, and I follow it, passing more of what I had seen on the other level. Pain. Mutations. Suffering.
When I arrive at the room I’ve been looking for, the door is open, revealing Sigrid sitting up on her large four-poster bed.
Her feathered fingers are cupping Einar’s cheek, and he leans into her touch. The gesture is so matronly and so foreign to me. I debate whether or not to interrupt their moment when she catches sight of me and waves a weakened hand. The king turns and smiles when he sees me, and it is all I can do to not to break down and tell him everything.
“Come, dúllan mín.” Her voice is scratchy, but she’s smiling. Or trying her best to.
Einar chuckles and, in Jokithan, asks her why she calls me this.
“Because, inside, she is a sweet little girl, still. Underneath her defenses, she is good,” she answers back, and the words she thinks I cannot understand cut deeply.
If only she knew there was no part of me that was good or sweet left. There isn’t room for those things in the world I grew up in.
I force a smile and walk toward them, keeping my darker thoughts to myself.
Einar nods and continues to speak in their language, but his eyes never leave mine.
“Yes. I believe she is,” he says in the common tongue, offering me a smile that I do my best to return.
