Holy golden donkey balls. France? There had not been a prison community there in the time of the dragon king, which meant she was not fey … she was human. “What year were you born?” I asked.
She pushed back strands of her shiny hair. “Uh, I don’t exactly recall.” She took a few moments, seeming to be calculating in her head. “I’ve been in the castle for more than a thousand years.”
“How are you still alive?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve lived here since I was acquired. I never age or change and it’s okay. I do my duties, and the … the king leaves me alone.”
I’ll bet. She must have loved it when he was gone for most of her thousand years. No wonder she looked fey, she’d been living in Faerie, surrounded by magic. It had slowly been infusing itself into her, shifting her humanness. Now she was no more human than I was.
“What happened in this castle while Larkspur was in the land between?” I asked, hoping like hell she might have any insider information. The dragon king had chosen well when he sent her to me. I would not attack one of his victims, not even to save myself.
Dammit.
“The castle does not need him to continue its journey around the fey lands. We – the other captives and staff – just lived day to day.”
She had to have been bored out of her freaking brains. I’d only been here for five minutes and I already wanted to carve out my own eyeballs and throw them against the wall just for something to do.
“What’s your name?” I tried to put on my nice and gentle voice. She seemed easily spooked and I needed her help.
“They call me ‘maid,’ or ‘wife.’ I don’t recall what my name was before that.”
Maid or wife … what the holy fuck? That’s it, I’m killing every single one of the assholes in this castle.
“Okay, well, you need a name, because I’m not calling you either of those things. Let’s go with…” I examined the timid female, trying to think of something which would suit her. “You look like a flower, all delicate and pretty so … Rose. That’s what your name can be. Rose.” Hopefully she had some hidden thorns too.
She did that blushing thing again, and I found myself shaking my head at the innocence of her. I’d thought my twin was naïve, and she had more than proven she was by trusting the bitch twins, but Rose was almost child-like. She had only been sixteen when she was taken, which was very young in the supernatural world. Not so much in the human world, especially back in her time of birth. They’d had very short lives then.
I put my general blunt nature into play. I didn’t have time for bullshit.
“Would you like to escape from here, Rose?” She stepped closer to me and I realized there was a basket at her feet. She must have dropped it when she first walked in.
“I can’t leave. If I betray the king, he will hunt me down and inflict the worst torture you can imagine. I’m the first of the dragon marked. We’re all tied to the king of course, but I’m more so than any other. He can end my life with nothing more than a thought.”
“So there were dragon marked before he was killed and sent to the realm between the worlds?”
She nodded. “There was me. He disappeared in Faerie for some time, and when he returned, he cast this spell. I was his experiment to see if he could create a bond between himself and other creatures. The spell allows him to infuse small pieces of himself into each marked, and then their life essence bonds to him. While there is even one marked alive, he cannot be killed.”
I’d guessed as much, but it was still painful to hear that.
I straightened, blinking rapidly, trying to process her information. “Why are you telling me this?” I asked. “Surely, he doesn’t want us to know anything which might help to defeat him.”
She shook her head, before reaching down to yank up the basket. “I’m forbidden from giving you any information which might help you escape. He has not forbidden me from talking about the marked.”
Her large eyes were flashing at me, and I knew she was trying to tell me something more. That the key to defeating king of the dickheads had to do with the marked.
“Come, I must dress you. He’s expecting you for dinner.”
“No,” I snarled. “I will not dine with him. I’ll tear apart any clothes he puts me in.”
Rose did not argue with me, she just waved her hand and suddenly I was frozen in place. Great, so the rose did have some thorns – but she wasn’t supposed to use them on me.
“I don’t want to force you,” she said. “If you give in to him a little, you have more chance at him granting you the freedoms you’ll need to escape. In my time we had a saying: the snake in the grass will catch more with silence than with fear.”
Strange she brought up that analogy, when my personal feelings toward Larky was that he was a snake. But okay, she had a point with the try-and-be-nice thing. It was just so much fun to smash his belongings and rip the shit out of him, but … it definitely wasn’t getting me anywhere. I was disadvantaged here. Everyone in this damn place seemed to have more magic than me. Even the human.
Rose released her hold on me, and this time I didn’t fight as she shuffled me across to the bathroom. I cleaned up quickly, trying my best not to think about how out of control I felt. I would just have to be smarter at this game. Fighting, no matter how right it felt, was not going to work. I had to manipulate him to get the information I needed – lull him into a false sense of security. That way, when I figured out how to kill him, he would never see it coming.