7
Not long after dinner, Terry’s pale face mirrors my fallen one.
We stand waist-deep in the clearwater lake, black fish spearing around our unmoving legs. Normally, I like to chase them. I feel no such joy this Quiet.
I told her all that happened in the marketplace and the carriage and more of what’s bloomed between the prince and me—all those sweeter moments, the games we play in bed, the laughs we draw from each other.
I revealed all to her, and now all she can do is stare at me with a pallor the shade of a moonstone.
After a long while, she eventually loosens her breath and says, “That’s not normal, April.”
I scoff and run my fingertips over the water. “No kidding.”
“No, you don’t understand,” she says, taking a step closer to me in the water. Her voice drops to a whisper, “Jealousy with the dokkalves ... it’s not normal for them to feel that over slaves, or lovers—even lovers who are their own kind. They will react to the disrespect, but not the jealousy.”
I shrug, dipping my hand into the water to graze my fingertips over the scaly skin of a passing fish. “Maybe that’s what he meant. I was disrespecting him.”
“It’s more than that,” she says, defeat slackening her face. She cuts a sharp look to the gardens, as if to make sure no one can hear us. “He makes you eat dinner with him. He lets you pick out your fabrics. He has you in his chamber every Quiet that he’s here. None of that is normal, April. None of it.”
A frown is my answer and I look up at her with squinting eyes.
She explains, “I haven’t been here for his past lovers, but I know enough in my time spent in these lands. I know the rules.”
I arch a brow, my face clinging to the crestfallen feel of my sunken heart. “Which are?”
“Lovers eat in their own rooms. They only come when called for, not expected to be waiting in the bedchamber. Dresses—the few of them that they are allowed—are chosen by the seamstress or the prince, not you. It’s strange, don’t you see that? That a prince will feed you apples in his bed, and ask about your life in the village and what you enjoy, then take you to the markets to feed your hobby of sewing. Don’t you see how ... odd that all is?”
I shake my head, damp tendrils sticking to my bruised cheek. “I don’t know. I just do what he tells me.” I shrug lamely. “Maybe he’s just trying to cram it all in before I leave.”
“If you leave,” she grumbles.
My frown digs deeper. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She lets out a heavy sigh, one that deflates her perky breasts. “He seems ... obsessed with you. Maybe he won’t let you leave when the time comes. Maybe he’ll ...”
“Kill me first?” I finish her sentence for her.
Her mouth is set into a grim line as she meets my gaze. “Maybe.”
“The bargain protects me,” I say. “At least for the rest of the time I have here. And he has to take me home, too. So I know I’m safe ... sort of.”
“Bargains can be broken,” she says, confirming the worst of my fears, the fears that I’ve carried with me since he attacked me in the carriage.
“I don’t want to hear that right now. The bargains are all that are keeping me safe.”
“Even in bargains,” she tells me, “the dokkalves trade their slaves—even their lovers. We’re auctioned off in the markets, sold to the courts, set free in the Wastelands for the Ferals to have us. We’re not ... entirely protected. Even with our bargains.”
I decide I want no explanation of what a Feral is.
This world shouldn’t get any darker for me.
And yet, fate has other plans when a guard appears on the pathway ahead. “The prince is arriving,” he shouts down at me.
I freeze for a moment, an unmovable statue in the lake waters.
Then urgency jolts through me like lightning and I’m scrambling out of the water.
“Where are you going?” Terry hisses, trudging through the waters behind me.