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?”
If he heard the heartbreak in my voice, he didn’t say so, but his brown eyes softened as he looked over at me, the campfire crackling between us like tension.
“The kingdom is broke.”
I scrunched up my nose. “How can a kingdom be broke?”
Midas smiled over at me, swiping grease-stained fingers down his pants as he tossed the last of the bones from our meal that he’d caught. “Kingdoms can go broke quite easily, actually. But in this instance, Highbell has struggled for years. They’re little more than a frozen wasteland at the tip of the world. No farming to speak of, no mining lucrative enough to sustain them. They’re crumbling without the proper allied ties and trade. It’s a wonder the other monarchs haven’t struck already.”
I curled my toes inside my fur-lined boots, trying to leap from his words to his intentions. He had the advantage of age over me, being seven years older, but I wasn’t naive.
“What about me?” I asked him. I wasn’t sure how I was able to talk with the lump in my throat.
Midas came in front of me, snow reaching the laces of his boots. “You stay with me. I made a promise, didn’t I?” he asked, and my relief was instant and warm, almost enough to ward away the chill of the night.
“With you by my side, we’ll save Sixth Kingdom from ruin.”
I smiled up at him, appreciating his smooth face that he insisted on shaving every morning, despite the fact that we were weary travelers, oftentimes with no one to look upon but each other. He was meticulous about himself just as he was about everything else.