Lips Like Ice

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Lydia doesn't know how long she's been asleep. She wakes to silence and the tight, wrung out feel of a headache brought on by too much crying.

Christ.

There's a lot of her life back on Earth that Lydia can't remember clearly, but she's pretty sure she's never cried so much and so often as she has in the last few months. Of course, she's also never been abducted, threatened, hurt, brainwashed, and nearly frozen to death before either. 

At least, not that she can recall.

God, she hopes not.

Lydia rubs at her swollen eyes and chuckles at her own inanity. Right, so this is the hysterical breakdown part of things, is it? she thinks. Good to know. Now get a goddamned grip, woman.

She's still in the basket, so she uses her other senses to test the world, first. The comforting crackle of the bedroom hearth fire is absent, the air still and too cold. The world smells of cold, greasy ash and her own dirty hair. She strains her ears, but wherever Lydia is, it's empty.

No light penetrates the gaps in the basket weave.

The chill is familiar, the resting ambiance of an ice elf room left unheated for an extended period because nobody is in residence. Apparently, the stupid porters didn't think to lay a fire to keep the Prince's pet warm. Perhaps they had even been told not to. The pillows in the basket are not large enough for her to rip one of the cases up and fashion it into a poncho. But Lydia can use the shard to get herself out and into the room proper, try to find a bathing chamber and get into a hot bath to stay warm until the Prince comes, or if a fire is prepared in the hearth, to find the weird alien firelighter they usually keep on the mantle and light a fire herself.

Her hands shake at the thought of purposefully starting a fire, and her imagination supplies, without warning, an image of her pitching face first into the kindling, catching aflame, burning, burning. Lydia swallows the scream that is boiling in her guts and takes out the shard.

It's easy to saw through the leather of the buckle that is holding the lid of the basket down. She flips it back quietly, clambers out, and replaces the lid, turning the whole basket slightly so that the sawed-apart strap won't be visible from the door upon first glance.

Paranoid, she scolds herself. Then rebuts it with And rightly so. Neither side of the argument chooses to say anything about the fact that Lydia has now gone from talking to herself to holding debates. Surely this is what the opening stages of going mad must feel like.

Then she cases the place. It's not much different from the Prince's other rooms. The bed is bigger, the wall filled with more windows—rectangular ones, this time. No pointed arches. They are heavily reinforced around the frame with some sort of dark lead, and are high enough off the ground that while they're large, there's no easy way to get up to them. There are no sills, either, nothing to sit on or climb up. These windows don't seem to be tinted any color at all, and so while they'll let in lots of light when the sun rises, they provide no route for escape.

A pretty prison is still a prison.

Or maybe it's only Lydia who thinks of this room as a prison. She had thought that of the last one, too, at first. Before the Prince had turned it into a home.

And this is the Prince's home now. For all that he is furious, that he doesn't want to be here, that he resents his father and is aware of what fate awaits him with his new wife, he also seems to be the kind of man who honors promises, even if they were given in his name and against his will. A self-sacrificing man with a strong streak of honor and responsibility. That Lydia is even alive still is proof of that. Elder Brother would have let her die. But the Prince both keeps his promises and honors his unspoken commitments, and that is dangerous in a place where people will take advantage of it.