Page 33 of Rogue's Pawn (Covenant of Thorns 1)

Higher Education

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Chapter 10

In Which I Discover There Is Something Even Worse Than Grad School

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Ididn’t rememberany of the journey. Dimly I recalled arriving at yet another castle, this one silent as stone. Puck carried me down winding stairs and set me with odd gentleness on a hard bench of a bed and clipped my leash to the wall. I blinked at him, bleary, wanting to beg him not to leave me there, though I didn’t know what would be inflicted on me.

My blood ran cold with dread.

Puck patted me on the cheek, his green eye slightly luminescent, the brown vanishing in shadow, and whispered in my ear. “‘If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended, that you have but slumber’d here, while these visions did appear.’”

I may have dreamed that part, my drugged mind giving him Shakespeare’s lines.

They left me alone for the first few days. Completely isolated. I paced my little cell as far as my leash would allow. Though shadowed and windowless, the stones themselves gleamed with an icy gray light, keeping me in an eternal twilight. They’d taken my awful clothes and left me naked, with no blanket to use, but I was neither hot nor cold.

I loathed that cell. I counted the stones that made the walls and flung the most vile wishes against it that I could think up. The silver stopped me of course, but I mentally dismantled that room time and again. Exploding it away.

And that was just the first few hours.

Those hours strung out into formless time. I had a bucket of water to drink from and an empty one to void into. No one brought me food. I slept restlessly, wishing for darkness, and woke disoriented, craving true light. Boredom and despair ground into me.

Over and over I replayed the negotiations at the feast, reviewing the bargain points. They wouldn’t just leave me here. I was to be trained. Rogue wanted me back intact. They wouldn’t let me starve.

Though I knew in my head that this was likely just the first lesson, as time wore on, the fear that I would be forgotten wormed into my heart. I’d maybe been already forgotten back home. A hundred years could have passed and everyone who knew me was dead. I could starve and waste away in this little cell and no one would ever miss me.

I thought about how they were doing it. If you subjected a person to complete darkness, the retinas became so sensitive they could detect a single photon of light. With the unbroken silence, the featureless stones, the unvarying light, my senses were becoming more and more frantic for input. I craved any kind of contact. Anything at all.

By the time the door opened, I keenly felt my own desperation. Starved in both body and mind, I welcomed the sight of Scourge’s cruel ebony face.

“Kneel,” he said, in his quiet hiss of a voice. I hesitated and he turned to go, pulling the door behind him.

“Wait!” I cried out. It would do no good to fight this. Clearly no one would rescue me. I knew the terms full well. I would be trained and only then could I return to a semblance of life. I didn’t want to die here in this unchanging, claustrophobic room. Scourge watched with cold satisfaction as I knelt.

“You will not stand upright,” he explained. “You will not speak. Should either of those things occur again, you will be punished. It will be painful. Understood?”

Taking away my humanity. Check. I nodded, unable to tear my gaze from his matte black eyes.

“Marquise? Come meet your new toy.”

With a coo, she came sweeping around him. Marquise was Scourge’s alabaster twin. Floor-length white hair blended into the silky sheath she wore around her slender body. “Ooh,” she exclaimed, dropping before me in a cloud of mint and fresh air, cupping my cheeks, “she’s so cute! You’ll be a good widdle girl for Marquise, won’t you? Never disappoint me, yes?”

I stared into her exceptionally lovely eyes, layers of white on white, only subtle shadings showing the difference between cornea, pupil and iris, feeling another layer of myself crumble in the face of her attention. The unreality of it all took me just another step farther away. Kneeling there naked, while she petted me, I couldn’t quite recall who I was. I only hoped she wouldn’t let Scourge hurt me. And that they wouldn’t leave me alone again.

“I have something for you.” She smiled, white lips curving with joy. She held out a little plate with something resting on it. Something gray and flat. My stomach lurched, desperate for even that unappetizing food. I reached for it.

Scourge’s whip cracked on my back. Agony seared through me. I cried out and the whip landed again. I choked back my scream.

“No sounds. No hands,” Scourge said, calm and reasonable.

“There, there.” Marquise kissed away my tears, her lips cold on my skin. “I’ll set it here for you. See?”

She put the plate on the floor and tapped it with an ivory-tipped finger. I stared at it, trying to master the sobs racking me.

“She’s not mentally defective, is she?” I heard her ask Scourge with concern.

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