Chapter Eighteen - Teresa

The Faerie left.

He didn’t just vanish. There was no missing time, no blink followed by a sudden absence. After all he’d done, he just stood up. Turned. Then walked through the door.

It felt surreal.

It was so jarring that I spent almost a minute just staring at the slab of wood that barely stood out from the rest of the wall before it finally sank in that I was alone. Nothing was chasing me. Nobody was going to come and run me off. He wasn’t behind me just waiting to shatter my dreams – I looked back and checked three times to be sure. There was an actual floor to lay on, one that wasn’t covered with powder and rocks and crumbly bits of charcoal that made getting comfortable impossible. The air didn’t carry that faint scent of smoke that I hadn’t started to notice until I’d already been deep in that nearly endless corpse of a forest.

It was even cool, as if the room was air conditioned and had some actual humidity instead of the parched stagnation outside. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, savoring the clarity and faint tang of wood as the full body shaking slowly started to fade away.

I didn’t realize that I’d fallen backwards until the tears started trickling into my ears. It wasn’t until I blinked that I realized blankly staring up at the ceiling had burned the light crystals and their cages into my vision. After that, the first conscious move I made was to flip over onto my stomach. Then to wipe the thick paste of ash that was left on the parts of my face that he hadn’t touched away.

I looked around after that. Actually around, not just ahead of me.

The table and door were still there, so were the pegs and the mirror. Thinking ahead enough to turn my head I managed to take in the rest of the room. Three things that caught my eye in the part that used to be behind me. Thinking about them instead of everything else made staying calm easier.

The first one I focused on was a basin in the corner of the room, directly across from the mirror. Height was hard to judge from the ground, but it was probably around waist-level. There were taps in the wall next to it, two of them. Wooden cylinders with curved openings and removable tabs threaded through above them. A few feet away from that – which was obviously a bathtub – a wooden seat was growing out of the wall.

That was – I hoped it was a toilet. Even if it was closer to an outhouse, it would be better than peeing in the woods. At least it wasn’t just a hole in the floor. It being out in the open was not a pleasant thought, though, so I looked away fast.

The second thing was the bed, right behind where I’d started and centered directly across from the door. It wasn’t anything grand or impressive – nothing in here was, except for maybe the mirror – but it looked functional. The mattress was just a thick sack of straw plopped on the ground inside of a frame grown out of the wall. A ragged-looking blanket like what you’d cover a horse with was spread across the top.

The last thing was a chest at the base of it. My backpack was sitting on top, the spear looped through its straps. The gems at and around its point were sparkling even through the blue blood congealed on them.

Well, technically, the grey one at the point was glowing, the black ones fused with it seemed to be sucking in the light, and the brown ones on the wings were reflecting everything. I didn’t think they’d been doing that before, but I hadn’t exactly had time or space to stare at it. There was something new next to it.

It was – or at least had been – one of the boar’s tusks. It was still the same length, with that subtle curve that was probably meant to help rip up undergrowth or rocks. The bottom had leather strips wrapped around it, lashing a dull, silvery metal to it as a handle. It looked like a distorted jawbone.

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Were that boar’s bones…

Nope. Thinking about that was confusing and started to make me nauseous. Of course, the Fae’s idea of a ‘reward’ was cutting off part of a living thing that I’d been forced to kill and making it into, well, whatever that was. I wasn’t up to dealing with that, especially since thinking about it was only a little bit less painful than what had just happened.

I went over to the tub instead. Getting to my feet took a few tries, the first handful ending with me collapsing onto either my knees or my hands. The pain of each impact helped to distract me and meant that some of the shaking had a physical cause. I was still a bit unsteady once I finally managed to stay upright, but I made the walk over without any more falls.

The tub was empty, but the two taps were obvious. Take out the tabs and they’d flow, leave them in and it wouldn’t. The drain at the bottom was just a wooden plug, no chain or anything, thicker on one end than the other. It was obviously meant to plug a hole that was about half the size of my fist. Not a big enough gap to catch my foot on unless I shoved my toes down it.

I pulled the left tab out first and the water started gushing out, crystal clear and cold.

I wasn’t sure if it was drinkable, but I didn’t really care. It was probably better than the stagnant, ash-laced stuff I’d been living off the last few days. I let it flow and drain, checking if it was going to warm up while I rinsed my hands. The blood sluiced off first; it hadn’t even had the chance to fully dry. The ash took some scrubbing, though – it was caked on deeply enough that the water couldn’t do it alone.

After about thirty seconds it hadn’t started to warm yet, so I cupped my hands and started using it to rinse out my mouth. The first few times I spat it came out cloudy and grey. The sooty taste faded a bit after that, but not completely. I wasn’t sure if what I actually swallowed had it or if it was just what was left in my mouth. I drank until my stomach started to hurt, then managed to stop myself.

I left the first spot running as I pulled the next tab out. The water from this one was, right off the bat, hot and steaming. It wasn’t boiling, but touching it was still painful. I drew my hand back after a few seconds to see painfully red skin.

It looked like it would only take a couple minutes with both taps running for it to fill high enough for me to sink into. I’d just put in the plug when I realized that I’d have to take my clothes off for it. In a room where I couldn’t lock the door.

In front of a mirror.

After what had just happened.

I could almost feel the fingers again as my skin started to crawl. The water rising up over my hand, warm enough to hurt, was what knocked me out of that feedback loop of thinking. Feeling it was also enough to drive home that getting clean was more important than the chance I’d get seen naked if someone like him or the servant he mentioned came in. All the ash, the blood, the sweat – everything that was stuck to my body after so long running in the woods. The thought of sinking into hot water and getting it all off – that was more than enough to convince me.

I didn’t know when I’d next get a chance to relax like this. And it wasn’t like there was anything else I could do; I was sure that however long I had left before someone came in wouldn’t be enough time to make a plan or learn some earth-shattering secret magic that would let me fight my way free. I was stuck here and taking care of myself when I had a chance was probably the best thing to do, even if it made my skin itch to think that it was what the Fae wanted me to do.

I kept my back to the mirror, and more importantly the door, as I blocked the waterspouts. The water was high enough and I wanted to spend as little time exposed as possible before I was in it. Shirt first; it sent up a puff of powder as it hit the ground and I wrinkled my nose at the sudden smell of BO. Turns out that ash and sweat mixed together after days of running for your life wasn’t a good deodorant; who would’ve thought? I’d never gotten my bra back after the ritual, so my pants were next. The zipper that apparently the Fae didn’t know how to work stuck for a second before I got it down and then shimmied out of them as quickly as I could.

Underwear joined the pile last and then I jumped in.

Somehow, I didn’t splash any of it out. I did groan, though, the sound escaping as I felt my lower back relax for the first time in days. It was just so warm – nothing like the unclean and tepid heat I’d gotten used to from almost everything in the burnt-out forest. It was closer to sitting in front of a fireplace, or under a nice blanket, or even to cuddling up against something big and warm and soft. Like…

My thoughts started to drift as I let myself loosen up. The thing – the friend, since they’d been ready to help – inside me noticed too and started to pulse with waves of calm and pseudo-contentment that joined me as I sunk even deeper into the water. My nose was just barely above it as I let my legs stretch out.

It couldn’t hurt to just stop thinking and let myself soak, right?