Your Narrator Gets Caught Out
A/N: Dun dun dun! Ahhhh I'm so excited for you to meet the rest of this cast!!! Thanks for reading! If you're enjoying it, please consider rating or awarding a power stone
Finally all burrito-ed up in my layers of scratchy knapsack and hay, I try my hardest to fall asleep.
Unfortunately, sleep does do not the polite thing and reward my effort.
The hay doesn’t smell like, human waste or anything—thankfully—but it does smell stale, and is so prickly against my skin it feels like I’m being bitten by a hundred little ants. And as it turns out, a couple inches of hay is no match for a cold, roughly cut stone floor.
I’d never thought of myself as particularly spoiled kid. But in the world of Chess Games of Blood, I might as well have been the princess in that Princess and the Pea story.
I wriggle in my ‘blankets’, then flop over to face the far wall of the cell.
Has the fighting upstairs started? Surely, with this much advance warning, Silverwood Keep would stand? The folks I met would be fine?
Surely the Silverwoods would be able to defend their territory. They’re a whole line of warriors. I mean, defending the royal line is why they’d been given their titles and lands in the first place. And I know they still take the training of their forces and commanders seriously—Prime!Alex had mentioned in the books he’d learned how to fight almost before he could run. And of course, I’d seen how my Luke and Alex had acted just shortly before with my own eyes.
If only I can hear something from here. Anything. Living in ignorance, it turns out, is not bliss. Without anything else to occupy it, my mind fills in the gaps easily with the previous medieval-ish fight scenes I’d played through or read through. The clang of metal against metal. A sharp arrow cutting through the air. A gurgling gasp, a spray of blood gushing—
I squeeze my eyes tightly close. I definitely won’t sleep if I keep entertaining this nonsense in my head.
Like my preschool teacher had instructed, I try to clear my mind of all thoughts except one.
“One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi,” I mutter under my breath.
And just like that, before I’d even reached the thousands, I’m asleep—cast off into the world’s most uncomfortable night of sleep.
“-Lia! Wake up,” my mom says too loudly into my ear. I feel a hand jostling me left and right.
I bat her hand away.
“Five more minutes,” I mumble.
The shaking gets more insistent.
Ugh. Every. Time. She drives me to school a whole hour before homeroom starts anyway. What does five minutes matter? I’m—
—Jolting right up like a bucket of water’s just been thrown at me, my heart tight and painful in my chest.
I’m dead, I finish inside my head.
Funny what your mind thinks are important in bad circumstances. School and mom, I guess.
“You’re still with the living, I see,” A too-familiar voice says from somewhere to my left.
I freeze.
Slowly, very slowly, so slow my hands have time to move down to the hay and clutch handfuls of it for dear life, I turn towards the voice.
Alex Silverwood kneels in front of me, half in the cell, half out of it. Perfectly illuminated by the suddenly-abundant candlelight, it’s easy for me to see how different he looks from the guy I’d met yesterday—and I’m not talking about the hay that's clinging to him here and there [4]. His once fine clothes are rumpled and dirty, and marked here and there with brown splotches whose origins I refuse to think about. His face is dirty too. On his right cheek is a nasty-looking gash. It's close enough to his eye that I’d bet that he’d be blind as a bat if he hadn’t moved out of the way in time.
His eyes too, are different. Still as pale and clear as the frozen surface of a pond in winter. But also cold. Hard. The warmth that had appeared when he'd first seen Aurelia yesterday has entirely evaporated.
“Get up,” he says. He ducks out from the cell and waits for me to pull myself upright.
I do just that—while staring at my wide-open cell door and feeling irrationally betrayed.
He catches where I’m looking, and snorts. “Please,” he says. He holds up his own jangling ring of keys, then tucks it back away into somewhere around his waist. “Did you think our family wouldn’t have a spare set of keys to the dungeons?”
Okay. Well. When he puts it like that, my plan last night maybe had a few flaws.
Miffed, I take as long as possible to pick myself off the floor and dust off the worst of the hay.
Annoyingly, he just stands there waiting, the picture of patience and unruffled nobility. Damn good breeding.
The moment I’m done fastening the last of my clothes, he steps back from the cell to clear the space in front of the metal opening. He jerks his head in the direction of the doorway, which is somehow still open and virtually unchanged from last night.
“You’re coming with me, Aurelia,” he says. “My parents want to see you.”
There’s a weird emphasis on the Aurelia in his sentence.
I swallow.
“Lead the way,” I say, smiling weakly.
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1. It was real itchy, but in retrospect probably not a bad thing. Helpful to the whole disguised as a lump of hay plan.
2. The items were heavy and clanged like cold iron. Given that this is the dungeons… yeah, really don't need to see them or any suspicious stains still clinging to them.
3. Can you imagine if I’d been my clumsy self and dropped it? We’d totally be back to the whole “becoming a corpse instead pretending to be one” thing. Obviously I moved very, very carefully.
4. Presumably, it came from the whole waking-me-up-and-reminding-me-I'm-maybe-dead-but-definitely-stuck-in-a-terrible-fantasy-novel thing he just did. So evil.