My ribbons rise up alongside my resolve, and I get to work.
It takes a few minutes of wrapping and tucking and tying, but after some adjusting, I finally feel satisfied with the outcome. My golden ribbons are now wrapped around the bodice in elaborate braided designs, swooping over my breasts before cinching at my waist, the rest of the strips hanging down around the entire circumference of my skirt.
I’m still way more exposed than I’d like, but it’s much, much better, holding everything in and covering my most intimate parts. I’ll still have to be careful when I walk, because even with some of my ribbons wrapped around my waist, my sides are still somewhat exposed from the gaping fabric, but at least I don’t feel naked anymore.
My hair is already braided with a few pieces hanging down my back, so I leave my scalp alone. I hear voices carry in from my bedroom, and I know that more guards have arrived to escort me downstairs.
I should be starving by now since I haven’t eaten all day, but I wouldn’t be able to tolerate food right now even if I wanted to. When I hear Digby call my name, I slip my feet into satiny slippers and then straighten my spine.
Don’t be a mouse, Auren.
I walk into my bedroom, facing the group of guards standing on the other side of the bars who have come to escort me downstairs. I haven’t been let out of my rooms for months. It’s not often that Midas allows me to leave my cage, his possession over me so intense. When he does on those rare occasions, it’s usually just to have dinner with him because he misses my company or stand behind him in the throne room, showing off to visiting dignitaries.
A skeleton key is passed to Digby as I approach. Solid iron, as black as coal, is fitted into the lock. Ironic that the key is the one thing that isn’t made of gold.
The metal creak of the key turning is so loud that it infests my eardrums and hatches into a hundred fluttering fireflies zapping against my skull.
Digby pulls open the door and the other guards step aside, careful to keep their distance under my faithful guard’s watchful eye. They know that one overstep on their part will have Digby telling the king, and that’s not something any of them want.
I walk through, the cage door swung open wide, like a rigid rib cage peeled back on a hinge, allowing its heart to spill out.
My ribbons don’t trail behind me as usual, but I take comfort in the feel of them bound around my torso like an extra set of strengthening bones as I begin to make my way out of the bedroom, sandwiched by the guards on both sides.
My footsteps feel alone, despite the fact that four pairs of feet accompany me as I walk. The sound of dread is in the soft swipes of my slippers over the polished floors, in the suck of air that pulls my lip in between teeth.
You trust me, don’t you?
Shouldn’t I always?
Of course.
That answer is all that I have. I just have to trust him.
But I’m not going to be a mouse.
Chapter Ten
I remember the first time I walked through this castle ten years ago. Walking into a palace, after the places I’d been... Surreal. It had been surreal.
I was fifteen years old, but a girl in only one sense of the word. My innocence was lost—that’s how some people would put it. But not me.
I never misplaced my innocence. It wasn’t my own doing from a forgetful lack of care. It was taken from me, one cruel exploit at a time. I remember each piece of it as it broke away from me, until I was raw and bare, exposed to the harsh elements of the world with a chip gouged deep in my shoulder and a bitter taste always at the back of my tongue.
No, I wasn’t innocent anymore when I walked into Highbell with Midas for the first time, but he brought back something I thought I’d never have again.
Trust.
He wasn’t a king yet then, and the castle wasn’t made of gold. It’s difficult, even in my own head, to reconcile what it looks like now with what it looked like then. The walls were the mottled gray stone cut from the frozen mountains that the palace is perched on. It was gloomy even as it was luxuriant, this ashen gray fortress buried in the snow.
And despite the opulence of my surroundings, when I first came here, I was gloomy too, because I knew that our short few months alone together were coming to an end.
“I’m going to offer my hand in marriage to the princess of Sixth Kingdom.”
He’d startled me with his words. There was no mention of any of this before. He had plans and ideas, I knew he did, but I wasn’t interested in hearing them. I was too enraptured with soaking in the peaceful reprieve, the safety, the friendship. But I always knew the other shoe was going to drop.
I looked up at Midas, my handsome nomad with snowflakes in his blond hair. We were camped beside a frozen fissure, icicles formed around its mouth like a geode, diamonds for teeth that glittered beneath a waning moon.
“Why?”