by D. N. Hoxa
When I walked inside, I breathed a thousand times easier. I waited for Hiss to slither his way by my feet, and with one last look at the women, I pushed the door closed with my hip.
Laughter bubbled out of me, then faded away in an instant.
“Why haven’t I done that before?” I wondered out loud, shocked at the realization. “What stopped me?” Most of the prince's soldiers weren’t there. The women had never looked particularly dangerous. So why had I kept myself without food and without light the night before?
“You did,” Hiss told me, slithering his way toward the bed of the prince. “You should stop stopping yourself more often, Pain Seeker.”
He was right. I’d gotten in my own way and had endured weakness and cold when I didn’t need to. I looked at the spot on the floor, under the windows, then at Hiss, who’d made himself comfortable on the prince’s bed.
“Well? Aren’t you going to share?”
I smiled. Putting the gas lamp on the desk, I grabbed my last strawberry and joined him on the bed. It was soft and warm, and more importantly, it smelled of the prince. I hadn’t even realized he’d had a smell before, but now that I felt it, it comforted me. It was smokey, mixed with sour apples, and man.
When I put a piece of bread in my mouth, my eyes closed. There was plenty of water in the bathroom, and I’d drank from the faucet on the wall all day, but the food was something else entirely.
Something I hadn’t needed to go without until now.
No more. From that moment on, I decided that I was going to take what I needed from the fae. What did it really matter if I was stopped or not? Death awaited me at the end of this road I was on, and whether I reached it sooner or later made no difference. But I’d be damned if I let myself get weak again.
“Paint,” Hiss demanded.
“I have no colors. You can’t paint without colors, can you?” I reminded him for the second time. The brush was in my hand still, my stomach full of bread, half a strawberry, and three full walnuts that Hiss had broken by simply squeezing them between his tail.
“You ask the wrong questions,” he said, his voice stern, as if he were reproaching me.
“And what are the right questions?”
“Who has colors?” Hiss asked me. We were at the window again. There wasn’t much to see in the room, anyway, but the outside was always beautiful, no matter that the darkness took most of it for itself.
“Nature.” Spinach, carrots, strawberries, blueberries, beets—they all gave beautiful colors. I used to mix them in the kitchen of our home myself when I was a girl, back when my father treated my painting as a waste of time instead of something my soul lived for. He hadn’t given me colors, so I’d made them myself.
“And who’s connected to nature?”
The right question.
“The Shade.” The exactly right answer.
My stomach twisted into knots instantly. Of course. I wasn’t used to asking the building I lived in for things, but this was a Shade. It had given me warmth whenever I needed it. What if it could give me colors, too?
“Correct,” said Hiss with a smile, and I moved back to the middle of the room. There was nothing in there that could serve as a canvas—except the stone walls. The flattest surface I could find was in the bathroom, on the other side of the tub that I’d put back in its place when the prince left. I wasn’t going to use it, anyway, and I didn’t want to constantly have to look at it.
I went by the wall and touched it with my fingertips. It would be just enough. Then, I sat on the floor, the feelings rushing in my veins almost completely foreign to me, like my body had forgotten what it was like to feel excitement. So much change in so little time.
This time, when I put my hand against the floor and gave away my magic to the Shade, I didn’t ask it just for warmth. I asked it for color. Any color. One or two or three—it didn’t matter.
“It’s not working,” I said, desperately trying to hold onto the excitement. It made me feel so alive, so suddenly.
“Patience, Pain Seeker,” Hiss whispered, and even before he finished speaking, I noticed that the floor under me shook, only a tiny bit.
First came the warmth. It heated my skin within seconds.
Then, the cracks on the stone of the floor expanded. They filled, then spilled—color. Black, white, red, yellow, blue.
My heart almost leaped out of my chest. I tasted happiness for the first time in years. I laughed and Hiss laughed with me, but he didn’t ask me what I was going to paint again. He just sat there, by my side, and watched.
“Thank you,” I whispered to the Shade.
I dipped my brush into the blue color that had spread around and met with the red halfway, but more of it was coming. I was going to use all of it, death be damned.
My brush pressed against the stone wall, instantly giving it life.
And just like that, I was a little less broken.
Chapter 16
When I woke up in the morning, and realized I’d slept on the bed, panic filled my mind.
I’d slept on the prince’s bed. When he came back, he was going to notice, and…
And what?
No, I whispered to myself. Remember. I’d already decided that I was going to take what I needed. Death was no longer relevant. I would not take it into account.
But when I saw Hiss by my feet, slowly stretching on the blanket like he’d just woken up himself, I smiled.
“You didn’t leave.” He usually only visited for a couple hours. Last night, he’d stayed with me while I’d painted till almost dawn. It seemed he’d slept with me, too.
“I will now,” he said, lazily raising his head. “As soon as I have a walnut.”
He’d really liked the walnuts.
I forced myself to smile. Hiss’s company was great. It made me feel like a completely different person. Curiously, I touched my own chest for a second. Was it me, or was my heartbeat a little bit louder?
“You can have them all,” I said, pointing at the half a loaf of bread and three walnuts on the desk across from the bed. That’s what was left from last night’s dinner.
“I’ll only take one,” he said, and his black wings spread when he jumped out of the bed, only to disappear again as soon as he landed on the ground.
I went to the bathroom to use the toilet and saw the painting on the wall in daylight. The sun fell right on it, giving it a different life from the night before. It took my breath away all over again—the idea that I’d been able to paint and the painting itself.
It was the scenery from the fae prince’s first battle. Everything he’d told me, every detail, every line, just as it looked inside my head.
“Did you mean for that woman to look like that?” Hiss said as he slowly approached me, standing in front of the painting. The sun was at our back and our shadows fell over half of it, but it didn’t take away any of its beauty.
The woman he was talking about was the only female there—a Winter fae, whom the prince had seen watching the battle from the edge of a cliff near the field. To him, she’d looked sad. In the painting, she looked merely curious.
“It doesn’t really matter.” She was as she should be.
“I thought you said she looked sad in your story,” Hiss reminded me. I’d told him what I was painting while I painted it but not whose story it was. To do so would have felt like I was betraying the prince. Hiss devoured every word that had left my lips. I hadn’t been listened to like that since my father was alive.
“She did but not in this painting. Art becomes whatever it wants to be, no matter what you meant for it—and paintings are no different. They’re just more colorful.”
Hiss smiled. “Then I shall remember it.” All his eyes moved over the painting for a few more seconds. “What about this soldier? It is almost as if he’s fading out of existence, like when the last snow leaves the ground in springtime. Why is the ground blue behind him?”
He was talking about the elf soldier who had his
head and his sword lowered, and his hand was holding onto a horse’s neck, just so he wouldn’t fall to the ground.
“Because blue makes him both stand to attention and fade out of it. He is the soldier who was wounded in the story and later seen at the edge of the field, barely standing. It is not clear whether the soldier lived or died that day,” I said, reaching out my fingers to touch the colors. I didn’t know what the Shade had used to make them, but they had dried beautifully, just like they should. “You must always choose colors that don’t overpower the shapes when you’re painting but rather complement them. That is why nature is the most skilled artist of all.” I waved behind us at the sun and the sky and the forest underneath it. “It knows the balance between shape and color better than any living creature.”
His round pupils dilated as he took in the majestic sun, as if he were seeing it for the first time.
Then he smiled and slithered back. The time had come for him to leave.
“Are you coming back?”
“Yes,” he said, stretching the s.
“When?” I asked because I hated to think that this was the last time I would see him. He had already given me so much. I felt indebted to him for life.
“As soon as I can, Pain Seeker,” he said, then nodded his head at me. “Remember yourself.”
And with that, he slithered his way toward the window, up the wall, then flew off the stool with his wings spread wide.
This time, when I looked outside, I could see him. His wings didn’t move—they just stretched all the way to his sides, and he fell gracefully, gliding in the air like it served him only, before the side of the castle took him from my view.
I turned to the painting again, and with my hand on the stool, I let out my magic. “Erase it,” I asked the Shade. “Erase the painting.” Because if the prince saw it, he would know how well I’d listened to him telling me his stories, and I didn’t want him to know.
But the painting didn’t fade away like I expected it to. It didn’t move at all. Fear gripped at my throat. If the prince saw…
My eyes closed and Hiss’s words whispered in my ear. Remember yourself. It didn’t matter if the prince saw. I did what I needed to do, and I would continue to do it.
I made my way to the desk and ate the bread and the two remaining walnuts by myself, staring out the window, wondering. When I was full, I drank from the bathroom faucet. The water was ice cold. It seemed to freeze my lungs for a second.
And while I waited for the freezing to pass, my eyes caught the small mirror at the other corner of the room, right over the bucket. I had seen it before. I’d never gone close to it, though. I don’t know why I did now, but when I saw my reflection, a cry left my lips.
I was nothing like the woman I used to be, though I looked exactly the same. My hair was still white with a hint of silver to it, though some of it was still brown with dirt. I hadn’t had the heart to clean myself, other than below my hips, and there was more dirt on my skin than I’d realized. My dress was no better, but my skin was as fair as it had always been, so fair I could see all my blue veins underneath it if I looked close enough. My lips were the same shape as they had always been, a very pronounced V for a bow, and the upper lip fuller than the bottom one. My eyes looked the same, too—silver, wide, surrounded by white lashes, just like every other elf’s. But the expression in them had changed. When I stared at myself, I did so in a…sharper way. Colder, less kind, almost mean. And I hated it.
Before I could get angry at myself for looking different—something perfectly out of my control—I moved away from the mirror and focused on the sun. I had barely rested my elbows on the stool when I felt the pain.
I’d been in peace without it. There was no pain in any of the people surrounding me since the prince left. Maybe that’s why I was so sure that it was him.
I spun around, holding onto the wall, and watched the door. Even so, it made me jump when it opened.
“Honey, I’m home,” the fae prince mumbled slowly as he pushed the door closed behind him.
The pain in him wasn’t as intense as it had been before. It wasn’t as deep, and there wasn’t too much of it, but there was enough. It radiated off his left shoulder and leg, beneath the plates of his silver armor that he still had on.
His face was clean, but his hair wasn’t. He moved toward the bed, never taking his eyes off me. My heart didn’t dare pick up the beating, even though it was excited.
What for? That the prince was back?
What nonsense.
“You’re still here,” he said, his voice as carefree as it had been when he told me his stories that night.
Finally, I gathered myself and turned around when he began to take off his armor. I’d already watched him strip once, on my first night in this place I looked out at the sky, but I no longer saw the sun. All I saw was the image of his face in my mind, his eyes staring at the back of my head.
“Have you eaten?” he said and slowly stepped closer to me. I held my breath—I don’t know what for. When he stopped next to me, he put something on the stool next to my hands—a box made of very light, almost orange wood. He pulled the lid open, and inside it were strawberries. Six of them. “From the Autumn Court. They’re a lot tastier than what we can grow here. Try them.” And he went back to the bed.
The smell that left the box filled my nose, dipping my mind in memories. Even if I had thought it okay to speak to the fae prince, now I wouldn’t have been able to. I was too stunned. I reached for one of the strawberries and brought it close, analyzed it as if it were a foreign object, one I had never seen before.
I put it in my mouth and bit into it. My mind was blown away. He was right—they were a lot tastier than what he gave me before. The taste was a million colors on my tongue.
And when I heard the water flowing, hitting the bucket with a thud, I remembered my colors. The painting. My breath caught all over again as I leaned to see the back of the naked prince in front of the bucket. The painting was right next to the tub. He’d passed it on his way to the faucet.
Why hadn’t he said anything?
When the water stopped pouring, he grabbed the bucket and stood up with a hiss. His pain intensified, mostly on his leg. I turned to the sky again, eyes closed, waiting…
He emptied the bucket in the tub. No word.
He stepped into the tub and sat down. I could never understand how he could stand to be in such cold water, but he seemed to have no trouble with it.
I leaned back again, slowly, to see him inside the tub, back turned to me. The painting on the wall was right to his side, yet he didn’t comment. I looked at it, too. Could it be that the Shade had hidden it but not from me?
I waited for a whole minute, soundless, until the prince began to wash himself. No, he couldn’t see it. There was no way he wouldn’t have recognized the story if he did. No way he wouldn’t comment.
I turned back to the strawberries and put another in my mouth. This one was even juicier, sweeter, what heaven would taste like if it were food.
And the prince kept on washing himself, hissing, growling, the pain intensifying with every movement. It wasn’t much and it would heal. By nightfall, he would no longer even feel the pain.
But I could take it away right now.
I looked at the box in front of me. He’d brought me strawberries. He’d told me stories. He hadn’t killed me yet, at least. It was only fair that I repaid the favor by relieving him of his pain.
So what if he found out that I had magic? Maybe that would make up his mind to end me faster.
It was probably my magic whispering words in my ear. When it felt pain, it wanted it, and now that I’d taken the prince’s pain twice before, it knew that particular brand, and it wanted more of it. It wanted all of it.
There were a thousand reasons why this was a terrible idea, yet I still walked to the tub. Chin up, taran, my father whispered in my ear. Even if it all went wrong, I knew it was the right thing to do, and that was all
that mattered.
The prince raised his head and looked up at me when I approached him, the bar of soap in his hand as he lathered his arm. The wound on his other one was still open, and dark blood poured out of it, turning the water a beautiful shade of pink. He watched me, completely confused, as I kneeled by the tub, right behind his back. Then I put my hand over his naked, wet chest.
I must have lost my mind, but even so, my eyes closed. My magic eagerly slipped out of my hand and into his skin. He let go of his breath when he felt it, but he didn’t stop me. I didn’t look. I didn’t think. I just did what I’d done since I remembered myself—I sought pain, took it for myself, and healed in its place.
When it was over, I breathed easy. My magic was content, folding in on itself inside my chest, calm and peaceful. My body was more relaxed. The wound on the prince’s arm was already closing. I watched his flesh knit together, and he did, too, his mouth wide open.
It was done now. He wouldn’t feel anything else. His body would heal within minutes. My debt was paid. Now I could go back to the strawberries and eat them all.
But when I stood up and tried to take my hand back, he grabbed it in his. He brought it up and pressed his lips in the center of my wet palm, igniting every cell in my body, wiping my mind clean.
A kiss from a fae.
Had the world gone mad?
The prince looked up at me again, my hand still in both of his. He held it like he knew me, like I wasn’t who his eyes said I was.
“Thank you,” he whispered and finally let me go.
I didn’t see the way back to the window. I no longer was yearning for the taste of strawberries. I closed the lid of the box, took it between my arms. With it, I lay down on the warm stone floor and closed my eyes.
Chapter 17
