Page 69 of Royal Captive
All activity in the yard ended. Two fae who were throwing a ball stopped their game, the one not even flinching as the ball hit him hard in the chest as he stared at me. Another group froze mid-laugh at something Strumo had said, eyes widening at our approach. Approximately a hundred prisoners paused in what they were doing to stare before hurriedly looking away and pretending they hadn’t done so in the first place.
One group kept staring as if in challenge.
“Oh no,” I whispered as the group made a beeline toward us. The fae leading them had skin with a green tinge, completely bald with a golden hoop earring in his left ear and tattoos covering his large, muscled chest and arms.
Ellis stepped in front of me and put a hand up, but immediately hissed in pain and went to his knees, clutching at the cuff on his wrist in agony.
The large fae and the other two flanking him stopped to point and laugh. And to my dismay, everyone else in the yard joined in.
Ellis got to his feet slowly as I helped him up.
“Magick cuffs,” I whispered in his ear.
“You think?” he growled back.
I resisted the urge to gut punch him. If there was ever a time we needed to show unity and strength, it was right-fucking-now. I’d thought the eyes in the sky during the Royal Hunt had been bad, had made me feel watched, scrutinized, judged, but this was worse. Every single gaze leveled on us and not a single one was friendly.
“This must be the princess or queen or whoever that we heard so much about,” the green man rumbled, cracking his knuckles ominously as his cronies surrounded us.
Don’t show fear. Don’t be afraid.
I didn’t want to stereotype people (or fae, whatever), but greenie looked like every baddie from every scary story I’d ever heard about fae growing up.
“Which makes you what?” Greenie snorted at Ellis, giving his smaller height and slight frame a derisive sniff.
“Her bitch boy,” Ellis replied lightly with a grin, but his eyes darkened with violence. The tips of his fae fangs glinted in the sun, and magick sparked around us in the air, charged with electricity.
Greenie took a half-step back, perturbed by such a nonsensical, crazed answer. His eyes narrowed, and he gave a shake of his head to his cronies. “You’re lucky I’m busy. Later.”
He shuffled away with his crew, and I breathed again, my breath fogging out in front of me in the cold morning air. At least I had my thicker morning dress on when the guards took us, the one lined with fur at the neck and wrists. It would be easier to strip down when hot than have nothing to cover up with when the temperature plummeted.
“Come on. Let’s get out of the middle. Too many stares.”
Ellis tugged me away and I went even though it was on the tip of my tongue to argue that the stares would follow us wherever we went since we were the new, shiny entertainment. He was dead-focused on his target, but I couldn’t help but look around.
Spiky thorn bushes grew thickly around the yard’s white-washed walls made it apparent that no one tried to scale them. Guard towers loomed over each of the four corners, with guards present with those staffs I had learned about from Ellis.
The prisoners were mostly separated into small groups. Greenie and his cronies held court with a rough crowd that was the largest and congregated in the middle of the space under the only tree in the yard. A second group of a dozen fae loitered around benches in a corner. Shaking and fidgeting humans stood nearby, clearly at the beck and call of the fae. Acid welled in my gut as a blue-skinned fae crooked one finger at a human, forcing him to get on his hands and knees so the fae could prop his feet up on his back.
Another group of twenty humans went through a rough set of drills and exercises. A few fae prisoners supervised them, kicking them behind the knees or smacking them in the face when they stumbled or did something wrong.
Scattered individuals and pairs also littered the area, eyes turning to us as the fresh, new entertainment.
“Here. Sit.”
Ellis led me to the edge west corner of the wall, and we sat on a raised ledge that ran the perimeter. It looked like it had been a flowerbed or vegetable garden at one point, but it was nothing but parched dirt that crumbled to dust in my fingertips. A dark statue stood still a few feet away, but I paid it no mind. It wasn’t important.
“Nice entrance.”
I squawked as the statue moved and twitched, revealing itself to be a fae. He shook off the shadows and darkness like it was a cloak, and it was a cloak that disintegrated around him just like that dusty dirt that had just fallen through my hand.
“I thought no one could use magick here,” I asked warily, standing up and taking a step back. Ellis bristled beside me, just as surprised.
The fae had peach toned skin and shaggy brown hair, and a thick black beard that put Shyllon’s to shame. His frame was lanky but muscled, like a fast predator. His golden eyes shone at us in amusement.
“Darling, when you’re as old as I am, you learn so many tricks that it’s child’s play.”
Old? I would guess he was around the same age as King Fennis. Which was … well, I had no idea how old he was.
