My stomach twisted in a tight knot. Heat flooded my face, and my hands turned cold.
“Ha! Well, we can all hope,” the higher voice said.
The voices were moving closer. Should I run?
I was halfway down the spiral when I heard a door open and shut, and the voices recede. They’d taken a different landing onto another floor.
They hadn’t discovered me.
I hurried up the steps before I encountered any more servants.
When I reached the hall that led to Kassian’s suite, I paused and leaned against the wall to let my heart rate settle into a normal pace. The words I’d overheard were still ringing in my mind, and I felt ill.
A grinding sound of metal came from the far end of the wall, and I lifted my eyes to the lift that had carried Kassian and me last night. Someone was coming up the lift at that very moment.
They were about to discover me sagged against the wall in the corridor outside Kassian’s room, looking like a child who’d tried to run away and lost the nerve.
I fumbled for the door and slipped inside the vast, empty room. I heard footsteps in the hall.
Kassian?
I hurried to sit on the bed in some amalgamation of casualness and calm. My heart pounded at the thought of seeing him, and my face flushed red. I cleared my rusty throat.
A knock came at the door.
Ollan’s voice called, “My lady?”
“Come in,” I replied, swallowing a confusing lump of relief and disappointment and arranging my face into a neutral expression.
Ollan opened the door and stepped inside. “The tailor is here,” he announced. “And after that, the mark-maker.” He gestured at his arm. “To draw the outlines for your tattoo, the one you’ll receive at the marking ceremony.”
Another mark on my skin proclaiming that I belonged to the Sworn. I nodded stiffly as a sensation like ice water flooded my body.
Ollan ducked out again to speak to the tailor, and I rearranged my features into something close to serenity. The tailor entered with Ollan, and I tried to smile at them.
The tailor bowed low, her chin tucked against her collarbone, her eyes downcast in careful respect. “My lady.”
She was young, human, with dark hair and skin, dressed in a gray dress that was simple, but draped around her body in the most flattering way. Cunning little embroidered roses lined the sleeves and hem. She didn’t meet my eyes, but not in a frightened way. I had the sense that she was a person who left most unnecessary interactions out of her life.
What must it be like for her, a human living in this city?
“If you could stand there, my lady,” she instructed, “I’ll take your measurements.”
I stood so the tailor could measure me. She made brisk notes on a pad of paper she kept tucked in her waistband. She didn’t attempt to make conversation, and I was grateful for that. My thoughts were too scrambled.
When the tailor had finished, she asked, “What sort of fabrics were you thinking, my lady?”
Ollan stepped in and gave her an order that went almost entirely over my head. Something about receiving gowns, and breakfast gowns, and ceremony gowns, and on and on. I didn’t know half of the things he was talking about. Was I supposed to? Had Mother Shade covered the types of gowns a Sworn wife wore while I was hiking through the woods in search of my mother?
I thought again of what I’d heard while I was sneaking up the servants’ staircase.
No wonder he’s left already.
Where was Kassian now?
I felt as though I were lost in a dark wood. The whispers of gossip were like ghosts, and the dangers circling me like wolves.
I can’t see her remaining for long.
The Alpha can make her disappear if need be.
I gulped a breath to steady myself and squeezed my fingers into fists.
When she’d finished, the tailor bowed again and left. Ollan stayed behind, studying my face.
“You look pale,” he observed.
“I must be hungry,” I said, and realized it was true. My head was faint, my stomach cramping. I hadn’t even felt it until that moment.
“I’ll bring lunch here,” Ollan said. “After you eat, the tattoo maker will come and sketch some designs on your arm.”
He left, and I sat on the bed, and shut my eyes.
My skin crawled in horror at the thought of more marks being forced upon my skin to brand me forever as something owned by the Sworn. A memory rose in my mind—Neil, staring at me with revulsion, and his friends—my friends—echoing his sentiments before they threw me out. A sharp pain pricked at my side where Neil had stabbed me later.
He’d rather I was dead than a Chosen girl.
What would my village think of me now? A mate to the most feared Sworn of all?
What would my grandmother think if she heard? I could imagine the expression on her face if I returned home with such a mark on my arm, black as poison and coiled around me like barbed wire. She’d pressed her lips together and say nothing at first. She’d step aside to let me in, but there would be no hug. No joyful reunion. She’d ask me if I wanted to sit, if I wanted to eat, and I’d feel like a stranger in my own home. After I’d eaten, she’d tell me that I couldn’t stay, and she’d stand at the door and watch as I left, and I’d feel her stare between my shoulder blades as I walked away from my home, away from the village where I could expect nothing better than another knife through my ribs, back to the forest that waited with grasping, venomous arms to devour me.
I’d be an outcast.
My hands shook, and my chest grew tight. I buried my face in my lap and tried to find air in my lungs.
I heard the door open and close. Footsteps. A hand touched my shoulder.
I trembled.
“My lady,” Ollan said. “You look pale. Are you all right? Is it hunger? I’ve brought your lunch.”
My stomach rebelled at the thought of food.
“I think I’ll be sick if I eat it,” I whispered.
Ollan crouched beside the bed. “My lady,” he said, his voice kind. “Please, tell me what is wrong. How can I help?”
My eyes flooded with tears at his gentle way with me, and I told him the truth. I told him about Neil, and the day I’d been marked—how the Sworn held me down, how I’d tried to take an ax to my arm afterward. I poured out my thoughts about my grandmother, and my village, and the forest, not realizing until after I’d spoken that I’d revealed that I didn’t see myself as staying in the capital forever.
Ollan listened, and then, when I’d finished, he smiled at me reassuringly.
“Don’t worry, my lady. All will be well. I’ll stay with you the entire time.”
When the mark-maker arrived, I lay down on the bed, my legs as weak as noodles, and counted tiles on the ceiling while the woman made quick, efficient marks across my shoulder and upper arm with a pen. The ink was cold on my skin, and I shivered. The mark-maker consulted a paper with instructions—perhaps from Kassian?—and she didn’t speak to me at all.
Ollan held my hand and told the mark-maker that I was nervous. He hummed tonelessly under his breath in an effort to distract me, and he told me to think of a happy memory.
“Make it as real in your mind as you can,” he said.
So, I imagined myself in the forest by my home, and that Kassian and I were playing pretend games, and the cold slick feeling on my arm was only mud being finger painted into marks that would declare me a member of the resistance. I imagined Kassian, his eyes brimming with joy at the game, drawing on my arm with one finger. The river behind us, bright with sunlight on its surface, and the sounds of the forest echoing around us. Bird calls. The whisper of the leaves against the brush of the wind. The scent of moss and moist earth and growing things. My sweat dripping in my eyes, stinging.