My tiredness is forgotten with Midas standing in front of me.
All of my focus is on him, my every nerve aware of his attention. As Midas continues to watch me, I take the opportunity to look over the handsome planes of his smooth face, the determined edge of his eyes.
The longer I look at him, the more I forgive him for bringing me up here tonight. For making me be a bystander of the pleasure I took no part in as he spread the thighs of his saddles.
Midas raises a hand and slips his finger past my bars. “You’re so precious to me, Auren,” he murmurs, voice low, tone tender.
I freeze, my breath contorting in my chest like a stiff, sharp bevel that scrapes my nerves into awareness. He carefully draws closer until a finger trails down my cheek. My skin tingles at the contact, but I continue to hold perfectly still, too nervous to even flutter my eyelids closed in case that tiny movement would make him stop touching me.
Please don’t stop touching me.
I desperately want to lean forward and nuzzle against him, to reach through the bars and touch him back, but I know I shouldn’t. So I stay still, though I can’t keep the eager glint from shining in my gold eyes.
“Did you enjoy watching tonight?” he asks, his fingers carefully trailing down to skim the edge of my plush bottom lip. My mouth parts, breath demanding as it wraps around the pad of his thumb, heat drawing in heat.
“I would enjoy participating more,” I reply, extremely mindful of how his fingers move with my mouth as I speak.
Midas brings his hand back up so that he can touch a piece of my hair. He rubs the strands together, watching the way they glimmer in the candlelight. “You know you’re too precious to pile you in with the other saddles.”
I give him a tight smile. “Yes, my king.”
Midas drops my hair and taps me on the nose before pulling his hand out of the cage. It takes a lot of self-control to stay still, to not arc my body toward him like a branch bending to the call of the wind. He breezes past me, and I want to bend.
“You’re not like one of the common saddles to be ridden daily, Auren. You’re worth far more than them. Besides, I like you always there, watching me. It makes me hard,” he says with a heated gaze.
It’s funny how he can make me feel both immense desire and crushing disappointment at the same time.
Even though I shouldn’t, I push back. I blame the coiling forlorn want in my stomach. “But the other saddles resent me, and the servants talk. Don’t you think it would be better if you let me participate one night, even if all I do is touch you?” I ask. I know I sound a bit pathetic, but I yearn for him.
His brown eyes narrow on me, and just like that, I know I’ve overstepped. My stomach tightens for an entirely new reason now. I’ve lost him. I’ve torn the playfulness off like a ragged strip of parchment.
Handsome features harden, charm cooling like snow over coals. “You are my royal saddle. My favored. My precious,” he lectures, making my eyes drop down to the edges of my toes. “I don’t give a forged fuck what the servants and saddles say. You are mine to do with as I wish, and if I wish to keep you in your caged quarters where only I can get to you, then that is my right.”
I shake my head at myself. Stupid, stupid. “You’re right. I just thought—”
“You are not here to have thoughts,” Midas snaps, cutting me off in a rare harsh discipline that makes my breath catch. He was in such a good mood, and I ruined it. “Do I not treat you well?” he demands, flinging his arms up as his voice cracks through the vast room. “Do I not bestow every comfort to you?”
“You do—”
“There are whores in the city right now, living in squalor, pissing in buckets and humping in the streets to make a coin with their cunt. And yet, you complain?”
My lips clamp shut. He’s right. My situation could be so much worse. It was worse. And he saved me from it.
Bright side: The fact that I’m the king’s favored gives me lots of advantages and protections that others don’t have. Who knows what would’ve happened if the king hadn’t rescued me? I could be owned by horrible people right now. I could be living where disease and cruelty runs rampant. I could be fearing for my life.
After all, that was my existence before. A victim of child trafficking, I lived for far too long at the hands of bad people. Saw too many vile things.
I ran away once, lived with the only kind people I’d ever met since my parents. I thought I’d escaped the brutality of life. Until raiders came and ruined that too. My life was going to be pushed right back into misery, but Midas swooped in and saved me.
He became my shelter from the harsh, biting violence always raining down on my beaten soul, and then he made me into his famed figurine.
I have no right to complain or demand. When I think of how I could still be living…well, the list pretty much just goes on and on with lots of other really unpleasant things, and I don’t like to think about that. I get indigestion when I think of my past, so I prefer not to. After all, indigestion doesn’t mix with the amount of wine I drink every night. That’s why I’m a bright side kind of girl.
The second King Midas sees the contrition on my face, he looks pleased with himself that he was able to redirect my line of thinking. His eyes soften again, and his knuckles come up to brush against my arm. If I was a cat, I’d purr.
“That’s my precious girl,” he says, and the worry knotted up in my gut loosens a bit, because I am precious to him, and I always will be. He and I, we have a bond no one else understands. No one else can. I knew him before he wore the crown. I knew him before people bowed to him in reverence. Before this castle gleamed with gold. Ten years I’ve been with him, and that decade knotted the string between us.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him.
“It’s alright,” he soothes, one more stroke over the bones in my wrist. “You look tired. Go on back to your chambers. I’ll call for you in the morning.”
I frown as he pulls away. “In the morning?” I fish. He doesn’t normally call for me until after the sun has set.
He nods as he starts to turn and walk away. “Yes, King Fulke is leaving tomorrow to return to Ranhold Castle.”
It takes a lot for me not to visibly sigh in relief. I can’t stand King Fulke of Fifth Kingdom. He’s a sleazy, crass old man with the power of duplication. When he uses his power, he can duplicate whatever he touches exactly once. It doesn’t work on people, thank Divine, or I bet he would’ve tried to duplicate me ages ago.
If I never see Fulke again, it would be too soon, but he and my king have been allies for several years now. Since our kingdoms border each other, he comes here a few times each year, usually with wagons full of things for Midas to turn to gold. Once he gets back to his own castle, I’m sure Fulke duplicates it all. He’s gotten very rich off of Midas’s alliance.
I’m not sure what my king gets in return, but I highly doubt he’s making Fulke rich out of the kindness of his heart. Midas isn’t exactly known for being selfless, but hey, when you’re a king, you have to take care of yourself and your kingdom. I don’t fault him for it.
“Oh,” I reply, knowing what this implies. King Fulke will want to see me before he leaves. He has a near obsession with me that he doesn’t try to hide anymore.
Bright side? His enthrallment makes Midas pay more attention to me. It’s like when children are fighting over a single toy. When Fulke is around, Midas hoards me, making sure Fulke doesn’t get a chance to play.
If Midas notices my discomfort, he doesn’t say anything about it. “You’ll come to the breakfast room in the morning while we dine,” he says, and I nod. “Now go to your room and get some rest so you can be fresh. I’ll send for you when it’s time.”
I bow my head. “Yes, my king.”
With another smile, Midas walks out of the atrium with a flap of his robe, and I’m left alone, the atrium suddenly feeling cavernous.
I sigh and look at the expanse of gold bars that curve out into the room, silently hating them. If only I was strong enough to pull the bars apart and slip out. It’s not even that I’d run away, because I wouldn’t. I do know how good I have it here. But to just be allowed to roam on my own within the castle, to follow Midas to his bedroom…that’s all the freedom I long for.
Just for fun, I grip two of the bars and pull with all of my might. “Come on, you little gilded prick sticks,” I mutter as my arms strain.
Admittedly, I don’t have much to boast about in the muscles department. I probably should use some of my free time to exercise. It’s not as if I’m too busy. I could do sprints from one end of the floor to the other, or I could climb up the rungs of the cage and do pull-ups, or I could…
A snort of laughter escapes me, and my hands drop back to my sides. I’m bored, but I’m not that bored. That male saddle with the abs is obviously much more motivated than me.
I look past my bars to the birdcage that’s hanging from a pedestal a few feet away. Inside, there’s a solid gold bird sitting frozen on her perch. She used to be a snow finch, I think. A belly marked to match the white snow she would’ve flown over, wings outstretched to glide through icy swept wind. Now, her soft feather down is all hard metallic lines, her wings forever tucked against her small form, her throat clogged into silence.
“Don’t look at me like that, Coin,” I tell her. She stares unblinkingly back at me.
“I know,” I say with a sigh. “I know it’s important to Midas that I’m kept safe inside my cage, just like you,” I say with a tilt of my head before I glance at all the luxuries I have within reach.
The food, the pillows, the expensive clothing. Some people would kill for these things, and I don’t just mean that as a figure of speech. They would actually kill for it. Poverty is a vicious motivator. I know that all too well.
“It’s not like he hasn’t tried to make me more comfortable. I shouldn’t be so greedy or thankless. Things could be a lot worse, right?”
The bird just continues to stare at me, and I tell myself to stop talking to the thing. It took its last breath a long time ago. I don’t even remember the sound of its song anymore. I imagine it was beautiful, though, before it solidified into a gleaming, silent specter.
Is that going to be me?
Fifty years from now, will my body go completely solid like the bird? Will my organs fuse, my voice silence, tongue weighted? Will the whites of my eyes bleed out, lids stuck forever open, unseeing? Maybe it’ll be me on my perch in here, stuck immobile forever, while people look in, talking to me through the bars when I can’t talk back.
It’s a fear I have, though I’ve never voiced it. Who knows if this power will change? Maybe one day, I really will be a statue.
For now, all I can do is keep singing, keep ruffling my proverbial feathers. Keep breathing with a chest that still rises and falls like the sun. Coin and I aren’t the same. At least not yet.
Turning, I run my hand down the bars before letting my arm drop to my side. Bright side, Auren. You have to look on the bright side.
Like the fact that my cage isn’t small. Midas has slowly expanded it over the years to reach throughout the entire top floor of the palace. He had workers construct extra doorways at the backs of the rooms to be fitted with barred walkways that spill out into large circular cages. He did all of that for me.
On my own, I can get to the atrium, drawing room, library, and royal breakfast room, plus my personal rooms, which takes up the entire north wing. It’s more space than a lot of people have in the kingdom.
My personal rooms include my bathroom suite, dressing room, and my bedroom. Lavish rooms with giant-sized bird cages built into each one, and connecting barred walkways that allow me to walk from one room to the other so that I never have to leave my cage unless Midas comes to escort me elsewhere. But even then, he usually only takes me to the throne room.
Poor favored golden girl. I know how ungrateful I sound, and I hate it. It’s like a festering slice deep under my skin. I keep scratching at it, irritating it, even though I know I shouldn’t touch it, should let it heal over and scar.
But while every room is opulent and my every view elegant, the luxury of it all has long since faded away for me. I guess that’s bound to happen after being here for so long. Does it really matter if your cage is solid gold when you aren’t allowed to leave it? A cage is a cage, no matter how gilded.
And that’s the crux of it. I begged him to keep me and protect me. He fulfilled his promise. It’s me who’s ruining this. It’s my own mind warping me, whispering thoughts I have no right to think.
Sometimes, when I drink enough wine, I can forget I’m in a cage, I can forget the pestering scratch.
So I drink a lot of wine.
Blowing out another breath, I look up at the glass ceiling, noticing more clouds rolling in from the north, their puffy forms illuminated by a left-behind moon.
A foot of snow will probably dump over Highbell tonight. By tomorrow morning, I wouldn’t be surprised if all of the atrium windows are completely covered in white powder and thick ice, the sky hidden from me once again.
Bright side? For now, I still have that single star peeking through the night.
When I was young, I remember my mother telling me that the stars were goddesses waiting to hatch from the light. A pretty story for a little girl who would lose her family and her home in one fell swoop.
At five years old, on a clear, starry night, I was ushered out of my bed. Single file we walked, me and the other kids living nearby, while the sound of fighting erupted in the air. We crept out into a warm eventide, trying to get to safety while danger surrounded us. I cried beneath my parents’ kisses, but they told me to go. To be brave. That they would see me soon.
One order, one urge, one lie.
But someone must’ve known that we were being whisked away. Someone must’ve told. So while I and the others were snuck out, it wasn’t safety that we reached. Instead, before we could even get out of the city, thieves attacked from the shadows, like they were just waiting for us. Blood was cut out of our escorts. Hot liquid sprayed over small, stunned faces. The memory still makes my eyes burn. That was when I knew that I was awake during a nightmare.
I tried to yell for help, to call for my parents, to tell them that this was all wrong, but a leather gag that tasted of oak bark was pressed into my mouth. I cried as we were stolen. Tears trickled. Feet shuffled. Heartbeats lurched. Home faded. There were screams, and metal clangs, and crying, but there was silence, too. The silence was the worst sound.
I kept looking up at those shells of light in the black sky, begging the goddesses to be born and come to rescue us. To return me to my bed, to my parents, to safety.
They didn’t.
You’d think I might resent the stars for that, but that’s not the case. Because every time I look up, I remember my mother. Or at least, a piece of her. A piece I’ve been desperately trying to hold onto for twenty years.
But memory and time aren’t friends. They reject each other, they hurry in opposite directions, pulling the binding taut between them, threatening to snap. They fight, and we inexplicably lose. Memory and time. Always losing one as you go on with the other.
I can’t recall what my mother’s face looked like. I don’t remember the rumble of my father’s voice. I can’t dig up the feel of their arms around me when they held me for the last time.
It’s faded.
The single star above winks at me, the sight blurred from the water gathered in my eyes. In the next second, my star is smothered by roiling clouds that block it from view, making a pang of disappointment scrape the surface of my heart.
If those stars really are goddesses waiting to be born, I should warn them to stay where they are in the safety of their twinkling light. Because down here? Down here, life is dark and lonely, and it has noisy bells and not nearly enough wine.
