Chapter 3: The prison

The room had a fire, and that was the first thing I noticed when the guard shoved me through the doorway and closed the door behind me with a click that echoed in my ears like the sound of a cage locking shut.

It was a real fire, with logs burning and flames dancing and heat pouring off it in waves that made my frozen skin ache because I had not been warm in weeks, not since the guards had taken me from my father's house and put me in chains and dragged me north across the frozen border.

I heard the lock click and I heard the guard's footsteps retreat down the hallway, and then I was alone in a room that looked nothing like the dungeon I had been expecting.

There was a bed, a real bed with blankets and pillows and a wooden frame, and a table with food, bread and cheese and a pitcher of water and a cup, and a wardrobe against the wall that I did not open because I did not trust it, and a window set high in the wall, too high to reach and too small to climb through.

But the fire was the most confusing thing of all, because why would they give me a fire when I was a sacrifice, when I was supposed to be in a dungeon with chains on the walls and rats in the corners and water dripping from the ceiling?

That was what I had prepared for, what I had braced myself for during the long cold journey north, the dark and the cold and the pain that I knew was coming. But this room had warmth and food and a bed, and I did not understand any of it, because monsters were not supposed to be kind, and kindness from a monster was always a trap.

I stood in the center of the room and waited for the torture to begin, because I knew it would, because it always did, because every time someone had been kind to me in my life, it was only so they could hurt me worse later.

I waited for the door to open and the guards to come back and drag me somewhere dark to do whatever they did to sacrifices, but nothing happened, the fire crackled and the snow fell outside the window and the room was so quiet that I could hear my own heartbeat pounding in my ears.

I pressed my back against the headboard of the bed and pulled my knees to my chest, but I did not sit on the bed, I sat against it with my back to the wall, because that was how I had slept at home, back to the wall and eyes on the door, never fully asleep and never fully safe.

I did not trust the warmth, I did not trust the food and I did not trust the bed, because I had been beaten too many times to believe in kindness, because every time someone had been kind to me, it had been a lie.

My stepmother smiled before she hit me, and my father said kind things before he locked me in the cellar, and the guards were gentle before they put me in chains, and I had learned that kindness was a weapon that people used to make the hurting worse. I would not fall for it again, not here, not in this castle full of monsters who saw me as nothing more than a human whore to be used and broken and thrown away.

Voices came from outside my door, nobles laughing, and I held my breath so they would not hear me, so they would not know that I was listening.

"The king's human whore," one of them said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. "Did you see him, kneeling in the snow like a dog?"

"I heard the king looked at him, really looked at him, like he mattered," another voice said, and this one sounded curious, almost interested.

"He does not matter," the first voice replied, and the words cut into me like knives. "He is a sacrifice, and he will be dead within a month."

"Sooner, if Ramiro has anything to say about it," someone else added, and then they laughed, and their footsteps faded down the hallway, and I was alone again.

The king's human whore, that was what they called me, not a person but a thing, a toy, something to be used and broken and thrown away like all the sacrifices who had come before me.

I had heard worse in my life, had been called worse by my stepmother and my father and the people who had beaten me, but coming from them, in this place, surrounded by stone and snow and monsters, it felt different, it felt like a promise of the pain that was still to come.

I looked at the food on the table, the bread and cheese and water, and my stomach growled because I had not eaten in two days, because the journey north had been long and the guards had given me nothing but scraps of moldy bread and water that tasted like rust.

I wanted to eat, I wanted to drink, and I wanted to fill my empty stomach with something warm and good, but I did not trust it, because what if it was poisoned, what if it was drugged, and what if they wanted me weak and compliant and easy to break?

I turned away from the table and pressed my back harder against the headboard, and I told myself that I would not eat and I would not drink and I would not sleep, because that was how I survived, by giving them nothing, by taking up as little space as possible, by being so small and so quiet that they forgot I existed.

The fire burned low as the hours passed, and the room grew dark, and the door did not open, and no one came, no guards and no nobles and no king, just me alone in the darkness, waiting for something I could not name.

I did not know if this was mercy or cruelty, because mercy was a word I had learned to distrust, and cruelty was the only thing I had ever known.

But I was still alive, and somehow, against all the odds and all the years of pain and all the people who had tried to break me, that felt like the beginning of something, though I did not know what, though I could not have named it if I tried.

I only knew that I was going to find out.