Page 10 of The Fae Queen's Captive
And if I’m awake, then I should leave.
Or I should stay and learn where the fuck I am.
There are good reasons to do any one of those things, but unfortunately, it’s not a good reason that drives me forward to the wardrobe after Morven leaves. It’s the memory of the queen’s fingers on my mouth. It’s wondering if her eyes are as dark as I remember.
I’ll go down to the feast,and thenI’ll figure out what to do. That seems like a good enough plan for now.
And as much as it irritates me, Morven was telling the truth about the clothes. Everything in the wardrobe is much nicer than what I’m wearing now, even though it’s all fantastical as hell—velvets and watered silks and brocades embroidered with gold and silver thread. They feel soft and silky to the touch as I run my fingers through them.
I have my doubts as I finally settle on a dress and start shucking off my dig clothes…my body is generous with its curves, and I have a hard enough time finding clothes that accommodate my tits and ass when I have an entire Internet to shop from. I’m not holding out hope that a random wardrobe in a random castle that shouldn’t exist is well stocked with plus-sized court gowns.
Except, impossibly, the dressdoesfit. It fits perfectly, as if it were tailored for me.
A dream dress, Janneth. Obviously it fits.
I find a tall mirror next to the wardrobe and admire myself in the bronze light of the fire. The dress is made of layers and layers of blush-colored tulle, the outermost layer stitched with small gold and silver stars. They glimmer while I look, as if I’m wearing fabric scissored out of the night sky and stitched onto the first breath of dawn. The bodice is boned and laced with corset laces, which after stumping around Edinburgh as a living history tour guide during my undergrad years, I’m able to lace and tighten on my own without a problem. The sleeves are sheer and detached, leaving my shoulders bare, and there’s a slit high in the skirt that exposes my leg when I move. You can see the tattoo on my thigh, the reds and golds of Frank Cadogan Cowper’sLa Belle Dame sans Merci, a woman sitting above a cursed knight, pinning her long red hair up as she looks down at his armored, cobwebbed form.
A tattoo from a different time, for a different Janneth. A version of myself that I’d long ago said goodbye to.
At the bottom of the wardrobe, I find a pair of silver slippers that pair well with the dress, and on the dressing table, I see a slender diadem made of golden stars. I brush my hair until it hangs in gleaming blonde waves and then set the diadem onto my head. It winks along with my nose ring.
Dressed, I open the door to the hallway and see a dusting of leaves on the stone floor. Bright orange and ruby leaves that weren’t there when we were outside the room just half an hour ago. When I step, the leaves drift in a lazy swirl forward, beckoning me onward like a variegated GPS.
Follow the leaves.
It’s cool outside the tower, and I decide to grab my coat. The boxy, polyester thing is hardly court appropriate, but since I havea lot of doubtsabout how much that matters, I take it anyway. But I feel stupid carrying it, and I’ve only made it a few doors down the hallway angling off from my tower when I stop and try to think rationally about all this. Rational thinking is something insatiable girls have to learn at some point, and I’d had to learn it after I bought myself a one-way ticket from Kansas to come study abroad in Scotland and then spent months living on coffee, cereal, and leftover pastries from faculty meetings.
I’d especially had to learn it after the first semester of archaeology classes, when professors started tearing apart my fantasies of what archaeology would be, dusting off my imaginings, and showing the broken shards of my ideas for what they were: cracked, dime-a-dozen detritus.
Rational thinking or not, it takes me physically holding my coat to realize something I’ve forgotten, which ismy phone, and I dig into my coat pocket to pull it out. It lights up right away, but as I’m opening my text messages, I realize I have no signal. Not even the gleam in a cell tower’s eye of a signal. Not unusual for this part of the Highlands, but sometimes if you’re on the right hill and the wind is southerly and the clouds are parted, you can catch a stray whiff of it long enough to check your email.
But not in the hot lady’s mushroom castle apparently.
I’ve stopped in front of a tall, mullioned window, one of its sides open to the night air. The leaves shiver fretfully around my feet, as if anxious about my pause in forward motion, but I ignore the magic leaves and turn my phone off and then back on again.
It doesn’t matter. Still no bars. And my battery is low, which probably also isn’t ideal.
I put my phone back in my pocket, and I have a moment when I think about how easy it would be to step on the ledge and then jump down to the moat below. It’s not an easy fall—maybe not even a safe fall—but I might be willing to sprain an ankle in the name of getting out of here. And if all thisisa strange kind of dream, well, then falls are supposed to wake you up from dreams. I saw that in a movie once.
“It is a long way down to the water,” someone says from behind me, and it takes me a moment to process what they’ve said, not because it isn’t true—it’s patently true—but because they haven’t spoken in English.
Longum iter est usque ad aquam.
Latin.
Most legal and ecclesiastical documents from medieval Scotland were written in Latin, which means knowledge of Latin is something of a necessity in my area of research. But I haven’t heard itspokenvery much since my undergrad studies—I read the stuff, but I don’t converse in it at the pub or anything.
I turn and face the person who spoke. He doesn’t have a ruff of moths or impossible eyes. He’s a pale, middle-aged man with grave features and a dark beard. Like the others I’ve seen, he’s wearing a cloak, but unlike the others, he’s in a doublet and trunk hose, all black and silver, looking like he’s stepped out of a portrait from Holbein’s emo phase.
“It is a long way down,” I say, my own Latin coming out halting and imperfectly conjugated. Then I have a thought—well, the seed of a thought, anyway. “Is there any way you can help me?”
“It would be my honor,” he says. “I expect you need help making it to the queen’s hall?”
“No,” I say quickly. “Can you help me leave? Can you help me get out of the castle?”
He gives me a pitying look. “There’s no leaving unless the queen allows it.”
I take in his strange clothes again, think about his Latin. “Not even for you?”
