Page 3 of Prince of Masks
That gives me reprieve until after New Year—when the final semester of the school year begins, and I will be forced to return to that hell.
But not yet.
I sag in the armchair, suddenly lighter. Tension that was kneaded into me, my bones, my muscles, it’s gone in a wispy moment, and now I’mreallyworried I’ll pass out.
I look over Father’s shoulder.
At the rotary phone, the one that connects to the servant’s hall in the Yellow Wing, Mr Younge bows his head. His voice is a constant hum, barely louder than the crackling of the fireplace.
I don’t doubt that he’s ordering help to my room, a meal, perhaps someone to wash off my body before my pores soak up every speck of filth coating me.
What I wouldn’t do for a spa day, a mud bath, a full body scrub and chemical peel, a thousand facials and a mani-pedi.
I suspect Mother is thinking the same.
Her pinched mouth is too wrinkled, even with the slight touch of filler that plumps them. She runs me over with a gaze creased with disgust; her nose crinkles as she eyes the smears of manure on my cheeks.
She doesn’t ask how this happened, what happened, how I managed to get myself soaked in manure. She just sighs something curt, then turns her inky gaze on Witchdoctor Dolios.
“And that?” She gestures a slender hand to me. “Will she fall ill?”
My brows hike.
I hadn’t considered that, getting sick from the fertiliser—from bacteria in the shit, soaking into my pores…
A tired scoff jerks my shoulders.
Wouldn’t that be bitterly hilarious, if I died from the fertiliser? Got E.coli and suffered to my deathbed, sent there by Dray, killed by Dray, but in the most indirect of ways?
Dolios reaches for the next armchair, where he deposited his medical bag. He digs his hands into it, the brown leather cracked.
“It is possible,” he says. “Salmonellosis, Shigella, E.coli,” he lists, and draws out a jar of brown balm. “Skin irritation is the most likely result, but I will prescribe cleansers to be certain.”
Mother leans her weight back onto her right foot, the slightest retreat from me—from contamination.
Father pushes from the desk and, extending his hand for the jar, throws a glance over his shoulder at Mr Younge. “Is Abagail here today? She will need to apply the balm.”
Mr Younge nods once, then his indecipherable murmur returns, orders hummed into the receiver of the rotary phone.
Father passes the balm to me once he’s inspected it, and the moment it is in my fist, the hit of menthol strikes my nostrils, burns them.
My mouth turns down at the corners.
I don’t look forward to being covered in that smell, though it is better than the smell of shit, so… get over it, Olivia.
Dolios hands over three narrow phials to Father, who takes another beat to eye them over before offering them to me.
The witchdoctor gives instructions, “Drink one phial each morning, one hour before breakfast, not with, not after.”
I nod, glass jars and phials clanking in my cupped palms.
With that, Father juts his chin, a dismissal. A frosty one—and so, this melancholy of mine, this state I am in, doesn’t thaw him.
He’s still very much pissed off with me.
My smile is a grimace, the corners of my mouth tucked into my bulging cheeks, as I scoot off the armchair.
Mother makes a face at the leather I was slumped in for so long. Her hand finds her nose, pinches, and she slides a step back.
