Scorn and Devotion

Chapter 25

Warnings - mentions of alcohol, depression, unbreakable vows, selling body, gore

We'd been escorted out of the Courtroom. We'd stopped along the way because Timothée also needed to empty the contents of his stomach. What we had seen had been beyond disgusting. It was one thing to hear those things said to me, another to see them myself. Timothée looked pale and ill, and I was sure I looked no better.

We were not returned to our dimly lit, warm room, but to a freezing cold cell. We were practically thrown to the ground. Gadina had left some food and medicine for us, but then left.

The room was small, and everything was hard and cold. There was nothing in the whole damn place. No beds, blankets, or anything resembling a place to sleep. I wondered where we were supposed to go to the bathroom.

"It just doesn't make any sense to me," I said after eating some of the hard cheese from the platter. I wasn't sure I wanted to touch the violet-colored medicine in the glass vial.

"What?" Timothée asked solemnly. He had opted for the bread.

"Five trials, it doesn't make sense. We are completely within his power. He could make us face horrible things and not give us the chance to win."

"It's because he knows we won't," Timothée grumbled.

"Hey!" I said reproachfully. "Stop taking my job, I'm supposed to be the gloomy pessimistic one."

It had been an attempt to make him smile. It didn't work. He just gave me a withering glance.

"As you so often remind me. I was a slobbering drunk who did nothing but party and waste my princely assets. I think I've got enough pessimism and self-depreciation to be getting on with."

His words were dry and sarcastic like they had been when I'd first come back to the castle. I'd been so willing to believe that the hard man laced in arrogance and irritation had been who Timothée had become. I had heard story after story of his rapscallion ways and I didn't take a moment to assess him. I had needed him to fit that mold I'd created, because if he was his old self, the one I'd known so well - goofy, and kind, and loyal, and nervous - it would break me apart to know that I'd been away from him for so long.

That armor he'd put on had not been pride in his own apathetic, negligent, ways. I had been too blind to see the despair he was in, and now I was realizing this was what he did when there was too little hope in his life. My coping mechanism was anger, his seemed to be a lackadaisical approach to life and dry wit.

I tried to form the words I knew would offer some false sense of comfort. I could not quite manage it. He and I would both know it was a lie, because I too, knew we would die under this ground if a miracle didn't occur.

"Our only hope," Timothée said, staring blankly at the wall. "Is that my father somehow, someway, realizes what has happened. I think our knights would be enough to scare Abraxas into giving us up."

"He can't," I said, not looking at Timothée. "If a human stumbles onto Fae lands they become the property of the Fae. Fae cannot be punished for a human's hubris."

"We had no hubris stumbling upon this place."

"Nevertheless, it's a law. Your father could barter for us surely, but Royals are not lawfully allowed to make deals with the Fae."

"I know that," He grumbled. "Didn't stop us."

That was true. It had not stopped Timothée, but that had been a secret for years. His father might not be so willing to blatantly go against the old laws, especially so publicly. If I knew his father, he wouldn't, he was afraid of anything that might tarnish his name and image.