My peculiar wardrobe surprised me once more on the third day. The Scarlet Revenge was hanging there again, surrounded by about half a dozen new gowns. One was a lush lemon-yellow, with opulent frills and buttons; one emerald, with brooches made of gold and heavy rubies; three black-and-white ones, with unbelievably intricate silver embroideries over the hems; and one blue as nightly sea. Behind them, I discovered more frocks. But it intrigued me that their sizes varied a bit, like they hadn’t belonged to a single lady but to many. And that some of them had rather extravagant, bold designs… with slits, dips, and spreads.

  I narrowed my eyes, growing pensive. These were not only noble dresses. They were not servant’s dresses either. Some of them seemed a little inappropriate, eccentric.

  It occurred to me that my answer could lie in those overturned paintings. It made sense that I would likely glimpse the painted likeness of at least one relative of the Prince or any of the previous proprietors of this fortress, in any age of its existence. Unfortunately, today my knight-escort was just as vigilant and grim as before, and I didn’t dare risk premature and painful death. Darsan did carry a sword, after all. Not that I’d mind dying by the hands of such a gorgeous specimen. But it clashed with the overall plan.

  This time, I wore my wanderer’s clothes: the large linen shirt, and the wide breeches with the suspenders to keep them from falling. It happened once; people thought I was trying to get a laugh out of them or that I was a whore, while in fact my breeches were just too wide for my waist.

  Wearing this was comfortable, yes. I also wasn’t keen on showing up with any of those artful gowns in case the Prince turned uncontrollably livid again. There could be no proper conversation with him when he got livid. And I already had my answer. If he had seen the scarlet one, he’d seen them all. And he’d seen whoever wore them.

  He didn’t even greet me when I entered the dining hall this time, already busy with his food and looking stormier than ever in the shadowy corner of the table. Just like last night, the hall was dimly lit. No sign of his knights tonight, either. Feeling dauntless, I sat two chairs from him—much closer than the seat opposite his—and ate in contented silence. The Prince revealed no interest in conversing with me, so it became clear it would be up to me whether we exchanged words or not.

  The nigh-shattered window was still standing when I glanced at it surreptitiously.

  “Are your knights also your wardens?” I asked eventually, in a bright and cheery voice.

  The Prince paused, looking up at me. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Are you hostage in this castle, my lord? This morning, it occurred to me that no villager has ever glimpsed your face. Must be many years since you left the fortress,” I munched on some lettuce, “or invited someone in.” Those that he invited never went back, too.

  To my deepest surprise, he did not comment on this. Did I hit the nail on the head… or was he simply exhausted with my blabbering?

  “Dear Darsan mentioned you used to be friends, brothers even. And that something happened here during the blight.”

  The Prince clanked his fork back on the table sharply, and I blinked at him. That was quite a short time to get so heated. “Darsan will receive a severe punishment for engaging in such conversations with you,” he announced sternly. “And you will be gone very soon.”

  “Yes, about that… When you mentioned three nights, were you referring to tonight or tomorrow night?”

  “Tonight,” he snapped at me. “Do you ever stop asking questions, zany?”

  “Perish the thought! If I stop, I’ll turn into you,” I said, grimacing a little. All sad, lonely, and hoary. Sinking in silence. Swamped in misery. The snark reply elicited no reaction from my table companion. My tremendously boring table companion.

  Suppressing the urge to sigh, I refocused on my meal. None of my questions have led me somewhere so far. Only Darsan had given me glimpses of the truth. And so did the castle itself—or at least that wardrobe with the peculiar dresses.

  Yesterday, when the knights led me through the corridors back to my room, I managed to get a quick peek through a crack in one of the arched, broken windows. Something warm shimmered in the thick gray nearby. Thanks to my damned short sight and the thick puffs of smoky mist, I couldn’t tell what it was. The shimmer I glimpsed briefly yesterday stayed in my mind all night, making me wonder about its source.

  Tonight, I had discerned a single lit-up pole with a lantern, just before the black-green thicket of the forest began spreading. Something lay between it and the castle too, but with the vapor clouds gathered, I couldn’t make out if it was a garden or a meadow. It was likely greenery, but certainly not lush greenery. No life thrived within this kingdom.

  Quick and quiet, I marched on again, before Darsan could sense my delay and turn around.

  If I escaped being sacrificed, I had to look for clues. Any clues. Clearly, I would find some. If they weren’t afraid of me discovering something, they wouldn’t constantly escort and confine me.

  “Are you capable of anything commendable or is acting like an insolent child all you can do?”

  This unnatural venture of a conversation made me snort into a laugh. The Prince sounded like the silence that settled between us had angered him significantly more than listening to me talk, thus he had chosen the lesser evil in the end. Perhaps he wished to show himself as courtly, granting me a final indulgence. Unlikely.

  One thing was certain: he looked glum. More so than ever before. If he had rejoiced in taking sacrifices among the villagers, I didn’t think he rejoiced in taking me. In the last three days, his mood had gradually dipped lower and lower. As if he dreaded whatever he was supposed to do.

  “Commendable? Let me think,” I leaned back in my chair comfortably. “I have never been imprisoned before,” I put up a finger. “Despite that some elements of my repertoire have been very unladylike.”

  The Prince only sighed with exasperation. It was a struggle to share every commendable thing I’ve done when I had no idea what the word meant for him. Even not giving up on living life each day was commendable in my books.

  “Oh! I am an excellent juggler. Rare skill. If Your Majesty or any of his courtiers could provide some balls, I could demonstrate,” I said, taking a gulp from the wine. “Small will do.”

  “What about severed heads? Can you juggle those?” the Prince replied, abruptly.

  I nearly choked on the wine. Dark. What was that, an attempt at being funny? Or was he just butchering mine?

  “Depends on the heads,” I blurted, as if pulling at the lewder side of the joke would save it from his morbid poison. As if. But there was a strange tension in his face when I peeked, like he was holding his breath. Like he counted on my wit to pull through.

  “And what heads does my lady prefer?”

  “It’s all the same to me. I already said small will do.”

  “We don’t have small,” he said.

  I put down the cup with the slowest motion. What was happening? “I’ll take whatever you have, then. Performance over size is my maxim.”

  “No juggler of mine was able to handle whatever we have.”

  I grinned, “Rest assured, my lord, that’s only because you’ve never crossed paths with a skilled one.”

  He measured me carefully, something strange and light shimmering vaguely around him.

  Before I could react, he turned several notches paler. And then his chest convulsed, and he began coughing. My lips opened, to suggest a sip of wine, but it worsened rapidly. I could only watch as he covered his mouth with the back of his hand, and then grabbed a napkin and coughed some more, the noise horribly wet and gurgling, like drowning. His body slid off his place, and he stood with difficulty, hand gripping at the ornate ear of the chair as he stumbled and coughed and coughed. Slowly, he made his way outside. I rose to my feet with slight unease, brows furrowed.

  What was that about? And more importantly, did I trigger it?

  “Your Majesty, don’t leave me here alone with all this food,” I protested out loud, “you’ll find there’s nothing left next time you enter!”

  The Prince choked again, this time I think purely, wondrously, with amusement. He waved at me dismissively as he left the dining hall at an urgent pace, hunching into more coughs.

  Was there something in the food? After a fleeting look through the plates in front of me, I considered the idea. Perhaps not my food. Did they attempt to harm him? Cautiously, I pushed back my chair and walked up to his.

  I froze up. Traces of something black and viscous smeared the ivory-white napkin, a half-outline of where he had pushed himself up to his feet. It looked like nothing I could recognize. It wasn’t blood either. Or was it?

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  Hearing the door click open again made me jump a little. Darsan swept in with his usual graceful air.

  “Is His Majesty alright?” I asked before he could aim questions or instructions at me. Don’t tell me I killed the bastard after a single crude joke.

  “Perfectly well,” came the brief answer. His voice was inexorably cold. The Prince must have mentioned to him the phrase severe punishment somewhere in between orders. Oops. That was my fault.

  “He’ll come for you,” the knight said, “and in the meantime, I will be your keeper.” With this, he moved beside me and relaxed his hand on the pommel of his sword.

  Shaking my head, I plopped down on my chair and continued my dinner in peace. Well, almost. It was not quite comfortable to eat while an angel of death was standing over your shoulder, watching your every move, his defined features holding equal measures of hate and disgust.

  The hardness I glimpsed there was unmistakably the product of his last conversation with the Prince. And I could sense he blamed me, which was ridiculous. I only asked him a couple of vague questions that morning, and he answered, vaguely. His poor self-control was his own fault, not mine.

  Darsan had told me almost nothing. What was the point of this punishment? Why keep secrets from me if they were going to sacrifice me at any moment?

  “Are you not hungry?” I eventually inquired, troubled by this heavy silence.

  When I cast another curious glance over my shoulder, Darsan was squeezing the sword hilt and steadily glaring at a point on the table. Better not stir his anger further, then. As I munched on some bread, my eyes flicked to the blackened edge of the Prince’s napkin. I had thought he was sick with a disease. But after our incredulous last exchange, I wasn’t so sure.

  Did he… attempt to reciprocate my humor? After I rewound every word, it became very much possible. Even though it was a feeble, very crippled attempt. Why now? The questions just piled up in my head the more I pondered on this affair.

  Time flew by when I was at a table as abundant as this. At some point, I caught myself looking at the gigantic pile of fruits in one bowl, and the ripe carmine-red apple on top of it. It got me wondering about Jun. What was he doing without me? Three days and I already missed him, though I knew Eina took good care of him. It eased my mind that Arst was safe for at least another year because of me. I still didn’t know what I had gotten myself into.

  The door burst open some time later, and the Prince stood in the adumbral frame with the harrowed expression of an executioner that I imagined he would have. Darsan grabbed a hold of my elbow and pulled me to my feet.

  I watched him bring out a black piece of fabric from his inner pocket and, to my surprise, wrapped it around my eyes. Oh, alright. Mysterious, I liked it. Quite sensual. Darsan’s grip on my arm was all but gallant as he led me across the hall, and then let go abruptly. A quick movement of fabric suggested a respectful bow, followed by the fading sound of footsteps.

  That was new. The Prince had not been my escort before. His hold on my upper arm was a tad less furious than his knight’s as we walked down a long hallway in silence. Two times he offhandedly warned me of stairs, but that was about all the guidance he gave. When we walked through a hall, we heard odd noises: a large piece of furniture collapsing and a mirror shattering, as if they both hit the floor on the other side. The suddenness made me flinch. Even after three days, I never got used to that.

  Eventually, we halted in front of a room, and I heard the clink of keys in the Prince’s hands.

  “Look, I’m not exactly in the springtime of my life,” I said. “I might taste a bit stale.”

  “Quiet,” he ordered.

  “You know saying this word repeatedly won’t make it work on me, right?”

  “Then maybe I should sew your lips together,” he suggested.

  I tensed up.

  “Which lips?” I asked, abruptly. There was a momentary pause—and then he heaved a heavy sigh.

  He was still wallowing in that morbidity… which was obscurely, borderline humorous. It was like the shadow of humor. Grotesque humor. Was it? Maybe I was imagining things. The world always seemed funny through my lens, while he sounded dead serious.

  After the rightful key finally found the room’s keyhole, we trot inside. Unexpectedly, a variety of pungent, musty smells invaded my nostrils, and I paused to think about their origins. There was the slightly nutty odor of linseed, the unpleasant stench of kermes, the faint scent of egg tempera, and the sharp pine-like aroma of turpentine resin and oils.

  The Prince sat me down on what I guessed was a couch and tied down my wrists to the armrests most insolently before he removed my eyeband at last. As I suspected, it was his chambers. Quite smaller in size than I had expected. Perhaps my impression of the room’s proportions came from the unusual amounts of objects piled up and left haphazardly around us.

  At a quick scour, I saw an ornately carved chest with two smaller trunks by its side; several stands for armor, ceremonial clothes, and even one with displayed regal, embossed armor, tucked aside to make place for a large desk. The desk I barely recognized beneath the piles of books and scattered texts. High-ceiling velvet-red curtains hung loose, and the bedsheets on the canopy bed lay disheveled. Unlike the dining hall, here countless candles illuminated the room warmly, leaving no corner in shadows. Their ash and wax mixed in with the rest of the scents oddly well.

  In front of me was a tall easel with a wide linen canvas spread on a wooden-framed stretcher, and beside it sat a helping table littered with objects all useful to a craftsman of art. There was a stone mortar and pestle surrounded by pigments, a flat wooden palette with brushes of various sizes and forms (though seemingly long unused judging by their cleanness and neat filaments), and a pair of palette knives with relieved wooden handles.

  One object differed from the others, set aside. A square wood box, long and narrow, in a deep red color, and a golden clasp with a lock. The clasp was up, and I assumed the box was unlocked.

  “I will be honest,” I said. “You are the very first man to let me enjoy three full nights of feasting before taking me. I am thoroughly impressed. But then again, none of them were royalty.”

  This only made him look over at me fleetingly, visible exhaustion on his face. Then he resumed examining his pigments and binders, and arranging them together by preference with the calmest motions. What was he going to do with me, paint me until I died of boredom?

  Opposite to my wiry anticipation, there was an ease in the motions of his hands as he ground minerals and colored dust. And ease in the expression of his face when he mixed the colors and lined his brushes. Almost like affection. The very sight of the brushes and the pigments unbound the clutch of darkness around him and lifted off the heaviness from his shoulders.

  While he had busied himself with his tools and instruments, I tugged at the thin rope around my wrist several times, to no avail. One time—after a particularly violent yank which shifted the whole couch forward—he even paused everything to look at me directly, and we initiated a staring competition.

  The rope looped three times around my wrists and knotted twice. It was a tie so impossibly skillful and so skin-incisingly tight that blood was barely flowing into my hands. Frankly, this entire room smelled like debauchery. I didn’t know why the fine ropework he had performed on me surprised me this much.

  First, he spread a glue-like solution over the canvas and then added thin layers of another, white and less viscous. And then he stepped away from the easel and unclasped his cloak, setting it aside. My smile widened as he proceeded to unravel the cuff buttons of his sleeves, with calm and measured motions, and diligently roll them up, surely to save the exquisite fabric from staining. He gave a long look at the empty sheet, his eyes darting to different places of it, marking pathways, with perfect intent.

  His recent interrogation flashed through my mind, and it struck me. Those questions about appearances, shapes, and colors he asked… The amusement seized and obsessed me in full, and I barely held back. Part of me wondered what he would do if I shattered those ideas and stained those colors.

  I watched him take the charcoal and begin sketching with broad strokes, and knew I wouldn’t be able to stop myself.

  “You know none of the stories I told you about my life were true, right?” I asked. The bubble in my chest burst, and I laughed so loud that I was sure they heard me in every corner of the castle.

  The Prince’s hand dropped to his side. He watched me laugh for a while, and his unperturbed silence hit me and cut off my laughter. Something ruthless and unkind sharpened his eyes. I held my breath.

  He took the red paint box and extracted a brush from inside. Then he neared me. When he reached me, he pushed my fingers down to open my palm and painted a thin but deep line over the skin.

  My breath hitched in my throat with the sudden sharp pain, and I jerked back. With astonishment, I found blood now trickled down from the edges of the line… as if the tip had cut through. Evanescently, I glimpsed the brush was entirely made of glass. Swirls of vivid color flowed through it like they were living things trapped inside the grip.

  The pain cleared my mind a bit. I scoffed out an incredulous laugh.

  So that was where his magic came from. A painting brush!

  “I could go on,” he warned. The armrest creaked under the pressure as he leaned against it and loomed over me. “Now, I will carry on with the painting, and you will tell me the truth. Understand?”

  I nodded, lips pursed. Truth? There was no game in truth. No thrill. Telling him the truth was out of the question. I forced myself into a visage of sorrow and sighed. It wasn’t that hard to put on a pained face: that cut was stinging like hell. He walked back to his easel and looked at me with raw expectation.

  “Alright, I’ll be truthful this time,” I said. “My mother died in childbirth, and my father drank himself to death. And I had no siblings.” A pause, to add more dramatism. “Even though I have always wanted some. Being all alone is terribly lonely when you’re… younger.” After my quick presentation, I met his eyes with my face downcast and the right amount of hurt, I hoped, resonating from it. “Is my lord satisfied now?”

  The Prince regarded me with a blank stare. The pain on my face must have added verity to my words; he didn’t question them. Even better, he renewed his attempt to draw, summoning the same composure from before.

  “Liar,” I relaxed into the softness of the couch, internally rejoicing in my triumph. “You said it doesn’t hurt, two nights ago.”

  “It doesn’t,” he retorted, “if you sit still and don’t provoke my anger.”

  Tender raindrops drummed against the windows and just listening to their soothing music made me drowsy. The heavy scents in the room intoxicated me and I blinked slowly, my head becoming heavier.

  Just now, I heard a hushed ticking sound, from a pendulum in a case. The clock must be here somewhere, I pondered, in this room. I wouldn’t have heard it if I hadn’t stopped talking for a good moment. Its lulling rhythm emerged in the rainy silence.

  “You love it,” I breathed out, and the Prince shot me a look from behind the easel. “Painting.” Those overturned paintings across the castle were his. Why did mentioning them stung at him as if I had reopened an old wound? Rapture gripped his face as he painted, and his body was tense with the sensual delight of it. It was easier to notice when I observed him for a longer time and didn’t distract him.

  “Close your eyes,” he said, his voice coming to me through a strange, muffled distance, “and relax your head. Like you’re in the depths of sweet slumber.”

  I didn’t understand. Those eleven before me, what happened to them? Surely, he had painted them too. But what else? Out of curiosity, I obeyed and reclined my head as negligently as possible, letting the black coils of my hair spill over the side of the armrest. And then I closed my eyes, as requested. The pendulum tact became gradually clearer.

  “I’m sure you’re tired, you poor soul,” the Prince’s voice wafted over me, “from all that endless wandering. You deserve some rest.”

  There was a clever quip at the tip of my tongue, but I forgot it. It came and went, like wind, and I let it pass by and kept breathing… and breathing. Deeper and calmer. I couldn’t believe I forgot a quip. It wasn’t like me. And while I struggled to go back and find it, a wave swept me away.