The Empire of Dreams (Fire and Thorns #4) - Rae Carson Page 0,1
would get better, praying Horte?o the blacksmith would leave her alone. The prayers never seemed to work, but the girl didn’t know what else to do.
A hinge squealed as the monster found the iron ring and gave it a yank.
No, please, no.
Light poured down the ladder, and the girl had been in the dark for so long that it hurt her eyes.
“Ah, there you are,” said the monster.
A tiny whimper bled from her lips.
“Why don’t you come up?” he asked reasonably.
She shook her head fiercely.
An arm reached for her, draped in the finest, palest linen she’d ever seen. Fingers curled, beckoning her. They were long and slender like spider legs, with skin as white as a cloud.
He said, “I won’t hurt you.” His accent marked him as Invierno as surely as his pale skin, with words that sounded half swallowed before being reluctantly shoved from his mouth.
“I have to pee,” she whispered. The pressure in her belly was awful, and she wriggled her bottom to keep everything inside.
“Let’s take care of that, shall we? Climb up, and you can go to the outhouse.”
The girl was not stupid. But she couldn’t stay in this dark hole forever. If she refused, the monster would come down after her anyway.
“All right,” she whispered, and she rose to her feet. She wiped her dirty hands on her shirt and smoothed back her hair. Her arms quivered as she reached for the ladder rungs and began to pull herself up.
She was slow about it, thinking, thinking, thinking what to do. No one in the village would come to help, not even if she screamed. It was winter, so if she managed to escape, she’d have to find a warm place to hide. Maybe the monster truly meant her no harm, but she remembered the wet thunk and its ensuing silence, and she knew that possibility for a fancy.
Too soon, she reached the top rung. Her head peeked above the floor, and sure enough, the cottage was in shambles. Near the hearth, sticking out from beneath a pile of splintered wood, was a dark, slender arm ending in calloused fingertips. A smear of blood coated the back of Mamá’s limp hand.
Something changed inside her. It was like a twist at the base of her skull, a little snake of sadness and hate and rage—all combined with a desperate determination that should have died with her mamá but instead would be with her always.
So the girl’s decision about what to do was easy: She would die fighting as hard as she could.
She clambered onto the floor, gained her feet, and faced the monster.
He was tall, maybe the tallest person she’d ever seen, with eyes like deepwater ice and near-white hair that fell loosely to his waist. An amulet hung from his neck, a small iron cage housing a shiny blue gemstone.
She barely kept her gasp in check. The monster wasn’t just an Invierno; he was an animagus, one of their rare sorcerers who could use his sparkling stone to burn her to the ground, or even hold her in place so she couldn’t move at all. She’d seen a few Inviernos in their village before, but never an animagus.
“Well,” he said, looking her up and down with his cold, cold eyes. “Aren’t you a disgusting little creature.”
And somehow she knew he wasn’t talking about the dirt under her nails or the hole in the left knee of her trousers or the tiny pee stain at her crotch, but rather her very own self.
A busted table leg with a jagged end lay beside Mamá’s hand. Maybe she could reach it before he burned her. Looking the monster straight in the eyes, she said, “May I use the outhouse now?”
“If you answer a few questions first, then yes, of course.”
She blinked. She’d expected him to say no. “All right.”
“Let’s start with . . . who is your father?”
The girl pressed her knees together. It was easier to hold it standing up, but she couldn’t last much longer. “Don’t know.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“Are you my papá?” she asked, peering closer. Mamá had described him as tall and pale, with hair like falling water. And that’s all she’d ever said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said the monster, and the girl felt a relief so huge it almost loosed her bladder.
Then his frozen eyes narrowed. “But it was someone like me, yes?”
The girl said nothing.
“How old are you?”
This part is fuzzy in the girl’s memory. Did she hold up six fingers? Seven?