The Claimed: A Clash of Copper and Gold

Chapter 4: Palace Tour

As we passed through the doorway, Niako flipped out a hand and said in a bored voice, "This is the family room. Well, one of them."

I blinked as I looked around myself, struggling to connect what I saw with the words "family room." In our castle's family room back in the Kingdom, flower vases lined bay windows, the flickering fire cast a warm glow on cozy couches, and a portrait above the mantle depicted me as a baby nestled to my mother's chest with my father's arm over her shoulder and Aunt Mitzy and Grandpa Joop at their sides. This room was perhaps twice as large, but the feeling was all wrong. Dark curtains blotted out the light from the few high windows. Ten stiff armchairs spaced about six feet from each other circled a rug pieced together from exotic animal furs. The walls were bare apart from dimly flickering gold lamps, and the firepit in the corner looked unused. This was no more a family room than the Serving Ceremony was a family dinner.

"Why did you put a bread roll in your pocket?"

I whirled to face Niako. His gaze on me was sharp, but his emotion was impossible to decipher.

"Oh, that." I forced a laugh. "I am saving it for later."

"You are very strange." He turned and started down the hallway.

For the next ten minutes, he led me on a dizzyingly fast tour. The palace seemed even larger inside than it had appeared from the outside, but the space felt hollow, and the decor ranged from impersonal to disconcerting.

"What's down there?" I said as we passed a dark narrow corridor with doors lining both sides. Five of the doors had animal heads mounted on them.

"My father's bedroom is on the end. Behind each animal head is the cell for the Claimed with that name."

I squinted through the dark corridor and saw a bear, a panther, a lion, a moose, and... "Is that a horse's head?"

"It had to be a horse's head for Horse's cell."

I shuddered and tore my eyes away. "Your mother doesn't stay in this corridor?"

"No." 

I followed him through a parlor room and a private dining area. He paused in front of an even longer and darker corridor. Bizarre abstract paintings of contorted bodies lined the walls.

"This is my mother's corridor."

"There are so many doors," I said.

He nodded. "They had to add more rooms to fit all of her Claimed."

"The Claimed can't share cells?"

He rolled his eyes at me. "If they shared cells, they could talk to each other."

Niako led me through a second family room just as chilling as the first, and then into the smallest room I had seen yet. The walls and ceiling were painted gray, and cold gray tiles covered the floor. A bookshelf and cabinet both stood empty, collecting dust. In the corner of the room sat a spiky gold-plated cage.

"What is this room?"

"Nursery."

I swept another glance around the room and realized the cage was actually a crib. What I had initially seen as spikes at the top of the four posts were statues of the Goddess Rashika with sharply-pointed cones for her breasts and helmet.

"Did you... stay here?"

"Before I moved to my own corridor, I did." He tugged at the collar of his shirt, eyes on the gray tiles between us. "That was a long time ago."

I remembered my mother telling me that she felt lucky to have the childhood she had even though her parents had been poor and, in her later years, sickly. I saw how many rich families were much less happy than mine, she told me.