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I would be safe. Not long.
I wanted to call for Hywel, but I was meant to be quiet. To wait. Better to not alert whoever made the nightmare that the dragon was watching too.
Just wait. Not long.
My body was sore, my belly hollow. Were they stealing all my strength again, all thenéktarI'd fallen asleep soaked in, gorged and healthy? If the dream took too long, would I wither once more, wake empty and ravenous?
Not long. I chanted the two words over and over in my mind until they blurred together, slurring into meaningless gibberish, even in my thoughts.
It was too long already. Not minutes but hours. I was stiff and brittle. I tried to move, and a chain rattled, a cold cuff I hadn't noticed before jostling on my ankle.
It's growing, I realized. The nightmare was growing. When I sat still, not moving, just holding onto waiting, holding onto Hywel and Laszlo, waiting for rescue, there was nothing to be afraid of.
And Birshawantedme afraid.
But I'd had to breathe—hadn't I?—and now the air was stale and sour and foul. I'd moved my sore body, and the bed had pricked me, tried to stand and found myself cuffed.
I don't want to see him. Seeing him again would be the worst thing, the most terrifying, I thought suddenly. It wasn't hard to conjure the thought, because it was true. The one real blessing of the nightmares was that I hadn't had to see Birsha again. He was a phantom to me, so rarely present in the centuries I'd lived under his rule and yet there in every brick of the house, every client's stare, every bowl of rotten food and ordered word from guards.
He hadn't needed to threaten me face-to-face, to tower over me—he wasn't a very large man, anyway—to hurt me directly. Birsha and his actions, his control, had surrounded me every second of every minute of every hour of every day. There was no escaping that.
A match hissed in the dark, blue and then orange light flaring in a small pool, just barely illuminating the white gloves its fine stick was pinched between.
My fingers dug into the ragged mattress beneath me, a clammy squish and the slow blooming arrival of a figure in the room with me making me stiff with fear.
And deep down inside of me, a tiny flare of victory that was easily squashed.
"The difficulty with men and monsters who make pretty vows is how often and how quickly they are broken."
I couldn't swallow the bile rising in my throat, too strangled with terror, and the acid burned hotly on the back of my tongue.
Birsha leaned forward, the unremarkable profile of his face shifting in the flare of the match. He was unrecognizable, impossible to remember, indistinguishable from any male face. Not ugly, not handsome, not interesting. A phantom that refused to make an impression.
The match licked at a whisper of paper, larger flames growing and curling, a tendril of smoke before a true fire caught.
A hearth, modest but certainly not anything that had existed in my cell.
Birsha stood with his back to me. "I imagine they promised not to abandon you, to protect and shield you from my reach. Did you know they would prove false? You've lived too long to make fantasies of knights in shining armor. Not from monsters, certainly."
The firelight should've reached farther, but the room was opaque. All I could see was Birsha's undefinable figure standing at the edge of the hearth. The light didn't even reach my own hands and feet. I was lost in the dark, alone, with him.
He turned and proved that the shadows belonged to him too by staring directly into my eyes. His features stretched into the mask of a smile, eerie and discomfiting by how clearly it didn't reach his eyes, didn't even seem to sit properly on his plain mouth.
"They've done me a favor. I see now I was too strict with your upkeep. You were quite losing your shine, not worth what I paid for you."
He'd paid me a small stack of coins. To watch.
Birsha did not blink, did not so much as twitch. "You will make me a grand fortune once more. Perhaps I should release your leash every few decades or so. Let you run wild, and then bring you back to heel refreshed. It did not take long. A few months, and you'vefuckedyour way back to health."
I tried to tear my stare away, tried to flinch, but I was frozen.
"Rabid little creature. All appetite. No grace. You repulse me," Birsha said, voice oddly bright, delighted. "You are exactly what they want, the rutting beasts. You match them perfectly. Just cunt and cock, claws and mouth, the lot of you grinding yourself down to useless stubs in pursuit ofnothing. How easy you make it for your betters to take the reins."
"I've heard you've had a difficult time lately."
Silence echoed, burned, pounded through my ears. I could not move, but I had spoken, stared directly into the hollow nothing of Birsha's gaze and said my thought out loud.
"You had torun." A strange heat, pride and fear mingling, oozed through me.
