Chapter 7: The Window

After Leticia left, I sat in the silence for a long time, with her words echoing in my head like the ringing of a bell that would not stop. "No one cannot save anyone." I did not know if she was warning me or telling me the truth, but either way, it settled into my chest like a stone, heavy and cold and impossible to ignore.

The fire crackled and popped, throwing shadows against the walls that looked like they were dancing, or maybe reaching for me. I pulled my knees tighter against my chest and pressed my back harder against the headboard, but the shadows did not come closer, and the fire did not burn brighter, and the room stayed exactly as it was.

I needed to move.

My legs had gone numb from sitting in the same position for so long, and my back was screaming from being pressed against the hard wood of the headboard, and my neck was stiff from the angle I had been holding it. I needed to stand, to walk, to do something other than sit here waiting to die.

I pushed myself off the bed and stood on legs that wobbled beneath me.

The floor was cold against my bare feet. Even colder than the stone floor of the throne room had been, and I shivered as I took my first few steps toward the window on the far wall.

But it was not the window I found.

My hand brushed against the stone wall beside the wardrobe, and instead of the rough, solid surface I had expected, my fingers found something else, like a seam, a crack, and a line in the stone that should not have been there.

I pressed against it, and the wall moved.

I gasped and quickly pressed my hands on my mouth, so I won't attract the guards that patrolled the passage outside my room.

I had just found a hidden door, and it swung open slowly, and silently, like it had been waiting for someone to find it, and I stood there for a moment with my heart pounding in my chest, trying to decide whether to step through or close it and pretend I had never seen it.

The room beyond was small, barely larger than a closet, with walls of the same black stone and a floor of the same cold rock. But there was a window set high in the far wall, too high to reach and too small to climb through, and through that window I could see the frozen waste stretching out to the horizon, so white and endless and empty.

I stepped inside.

The cold hit me immediately, sharper and more biting than the cold in my chamber, and I wrapped my arms around myself and shivered. The window was not sealed properly, and a thin stream of freezing air slipped through the cracks, carrying the smell of snow and ice and something else, something wild and open and free.

I looked out at the frozen waste land.

The snow stretched as far as I could see, so white and pure and untouched, broken only by the occasional outcropping of dark rock or the twisted shape of a tree that had long since died.

The sky above was grey and heavy, full of clouds that promised more snow, and the wind howled across the open plain, kicking up flurries of white that danced and swirled like ghosts.

It was beautiful, and it was terrifying at the same time.

I thought about what it would be like to walk out there, to leave this castle behind and disappear into the white. I thought about the cold seeping into my bones, the snow covering my tracks, and the wind stealing my breath until there was nothing left of me but a body that would freeze and be buried and never found.

I thought about jumping.

The window was too small to climb through, but the thought was there anyway, the idea of it, and the pull of it.

I wanted to just open the window, slip through, fall into the white and let it take me. So I would be free, and there would be no more chains, no more beatings, no more Ramiro, and no more king with his golden eyes and his shaking hands.

Just no more of anything.

"You are stronger than you know." My mother's voice echoed. It was soft and warm and so clear that I almost turned around to see if she was standing behind me.

But she was not there. She had not been there for eleven years. She was gone, buried in the frozen ground of the southern territories, and all I had left of her was a leather pouch of dried herbs and a voice in my head that came when I least expected it.

"You are stronger than you know," she had said to me on the night she died. I had been crying, clinging to her hand like I could keep her alive if I just held on tight enough. She had smiled at me, that same smile she always smiled, even when the pain was bad, even when she could not keep food down, and even when her fingers had grown so thin that her rings fell off and rolled across the floor.

"You are stronger than you know," she had said. "And you will survive this. You will survive everything."

I did not believe her.

I had not believed her then, and I did not believe her now. Because I was not strong. I was a boy who had been beaten and chained and sold to monsters. I was a boy who could not even shift into a wolf to defend himself. I was a boy who had spent his whole life surviving, yes, but surviving was not the same as being strong.

Surviving was just not dying.

But I closed the window anyway.

I stepped back from the cold and the pull of nothingness, and I closed the hidden door behind me, and walked back to my bed on legs that were still shaking.

I sat against the headboard with my back to the wall and my eyes on the door, and I thought about my mother's voice. I thought about her smile, and the way she had looked at me like I was something precious, something worth protecting, and something worth loving.

I did not know why I had closed the window, or why I had stepped back. I did not know why I was still here, still breathing, and still fighting.

But I was, and for now, that was enough.