Lexa
I’m woken up by Lis in the late hours of morning. She barely says a word to me–tiptoes around me, in fact, keeping a wide distance between us as she shows me the bathroom located on the second floor, just down the hall from my room, and leaves a set of clothes and a small plate with bread, fresh butter, and a glass of milk on the table beneath the window in my room.
My body feels leaden when I run a shower. There’s not much to be had in terms of hot water, but honestly, the cool spray feels nice given this place has little in the way of air conditioning, either. My mind is locked in a haze I have a hard time breaking free of, but after my shower, I change into the clothing Lis laid out for me. Men’s clothing, at least the pants. I tighten them with a belt. The shirt, however, is probably one of hers, given that it barely covers my belly button. After I eat, I tame my hair into a tight bun and start to move downstairs in search of anyone who can tell me where to find my friends, but I look up at the stairwell that snakes four stories, and I feel a sudden desire to snoop.
I’ve never been one to just allow the world to keep turning regardless of the situation. I’m a planner. A leader. A defender. An eldest daughter and older sister. I want everything to be in order, and I hate–I hate–being out of control.
Not knowing where I am makes my skin crawl. Not knowing where Chessie is… gods, it’s wrecking me. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep last night had Lis not offered me tonics to help put me under, which I accepted, but I know from now on I need to be at the top of my physical abilities.
I climb the stairs to the quiet, empty third floor. The house is larger than it looks–like it was built for multiple families or perhaps multiple generations. There’s a second kitchen on this floor, seldom used or so it appears, and four good-sized bedrooms–all of which are empty, save for a few dusty tables, some random boxes of fabric, and… weapons.
I smooth my hand over a short blade I doubt anyone has touched in many years before sliding it into the pocket of the male trousers I’ve been given.
I move on, my feet sending a dusty echo as I climb the stairs to the fourth floor, but then Lis speaks somewhere behind me. “You can’t go up there. Those are Kaleb’s rooms.”
I pause, my hand gripping the railing. Everything in this place is well built but very old, like this particular building was constructed centuries ago, but it’s well maintained, even though it’s built of scraps of metal and wood–whatever could be found.
“I was–I needed to look around.”
“You need to know that you’re safe?” Lis blinks up at me, and her voice wavers, cracking. That single split syllable is a silent question, I realize. She wants to know if she’s safe, too, with me in her home. She’s the lady of this house, I think. There are no other children around, so this baby will be her first. She’s young, possibly my age or younger, and beautiful, but thin. Her wrists look incredibly delicate as she stands below me, gripping a woven basket full of laundry I imagine she just picked off the line in the courtyard.
“I’m not going to hurt you.” I walk back down the stairs. “I have no reason to.”
“I won’t hurt you either.”
I stare at her for a moment, at the hard as nails expression that flashes behind her eyes. She’s not as frail as she looks, is she?
“I was coming up to tell you that Chastan will be here any minute now to escort you to the sparring ring. You’ll be training there every day until the Trials begin next week, I believe. I don’t know much about the details of the games.”
“How do I get out of the walls around this place?”
The silence that settles between us is deafening. She considers my question, scanning my face for inconsistencies, ulterior motives. “You can’t. It’s heavily guarded. We are not allowed to leave. I’ve never been outside the walls.”
“What?”
“I was born in the Glade and will die in the Glade.”
“I don’t–there are no trees here.” I’m not sure why that’s the sentence that leaves my lips first.
She gives me a simple one-shoulder shrug. “I’m not sure where you’re from or what you expected, but we are not free people here. We work for the fae. We live for the fae, and we die for the fae.”
I narrow my eyes. “Why?”
She shifts her basket to her other hip, taking a deep breath. The angelic, doll-like features fade in an instant, revealing the look of a woman who takes no shit and demands obedience.
I fight the smile tugging at the corners of my mouth.
Lis and I will get along just fine.
As long as I follow her rules.
“We don’t have a choice. The men–four hundred men, to be exact–from our pack who died yesterday didn’t have a choice. You don’t have a choice to compete in the games. This is your reality, Lexa.” I reach the foot of the stairs, and she steps toward me. I tower over her, casting her in my shadow, but her expression only tightens with conviction as she tilts her chin and grinds out, “You will obey Kaleb’s word. That’s the main rule of this house. Kaleb is our Alpha. He’s the Alpha King of the Glade, and for some reason, he chose you to be our victor, our competitor in the games.”
“I haven’t met your Alpha King.”
“He was forced to watch the Cullings. He was there.” Her voice quivers, and I feel like she wants to say more, but the image of that random man standing a few feet away from the king when I’d raised my arrow comes hurtling back to the forefront of my mind, and I pause.
“You will do your own laundry and mending. I expect you’ll keep your room clean, and I also expect quiet. If you’re going to fight or be aggressive, take it to the sparring ring. I serve supper every night, but if you want a spot at my table, you will contribute to the house chores, to the mending that needs to be done and the repairs–”
“I’m willing to do that,” I cut in.
She purses her lips, sniffling indignantly. She scans my profile, then my body, noticing the calloses on my hands and fingers. I take the moment to look at her as she shifts the weight of the basket again, switching hands, her child-sized, delicate fingers catching the hazy sunlight drifting through the window at our backs.
But it’s the tattoo on her ring finger that jolts me back into my body with a start. I step toward her before I can stop myself, my eyes narrowed and honed on the symbol–a circle with two lines just off center.
Her lips part to shout at me to back away, I’m sure, just as Chastan calls from downstairs.
I meet her eyes. “Is that your wedding tattoo?” I ask, and she narrows her eyes at me.
“Where did you say you were from?”
“I didn’t,” I reply and tear myself from her side, hurrying down the stairs while my mind works overtime.
All married couples in Endova and Teshka get those tattoos. My parents have them, matching sets, and every couple gets a different symbol decided upon by our priestesses.
The tattoos, the Dead Tongue being spoken… am I somehow still in the Deadlands? I find that hard to believe as I wordlessly join Chastan in the foyer, following him through the city in the unforgiving sunlight and heat that sticks to my skin. Here, it’s far hotter than any summer I’ve experienced back home. I keep my head down as people come out of their homes to look at me. Children pause in the dirt, their eyes scanning mine–my face, my body. Silence coats the city as I, their victor, am led to the sparring ring.
I pass a group of women hanging laundry and notice the intricately woven patterns of their clothing–work that can only be done on a loom. Patterns I recognize. Sacred patterns we learned as children. Patterns that echo the stories often told around warming fires and the Harvest Festival.
My head feels suddenly heavy, the headache from yesterday coming back at an alarming rate, but Chastan halts in front of a set of metal doors and pulls them open. It’s another walled off area–a pit. A pit full of bored looking men who lean along the cracked stone walls with their arms crossed, their skin tanned from the unrelenting sun.
“Let’s get going. We’re already hours late,” Chastan barks, his voice heavy with frustration, but I’m looking at the weapon belts slung around their waists.
Chastan points to a tall man with short black hair and blue eyes–ice blue, like a glacier. “This is Colin, and that one is Avery. They’re twins, if you haven’t noticed. Uh, that’s one’s Rufus–” He points to a man with short brown hair currently sharpening the end of a spear on the far side of the pit, crouched under the shade of a makeshift metal roof covering half of the ring. “Then Colt, Gage, Samson–”
His voice trails off as he makes hasty introductions. I don’t smile. I don’t offer any type of greeting other than a cold look, but my mind is still reeling with unanswered questions.
“...hand-to-hand first. He just needs to know where her weaknesses are…”
I snap my attention back to Chastan.
“All right, then. Colin, you’re up first.”
I look at Colin as he kicks off the wall, cracking his knuckles. Okay, so this is what we’re doing. A little roughhousing. Nothing special. Nothing that’s going to help me get out of this place and find Meg and Chessie, which is my only desire.
Colin is tall, built, with large hands and lean, long legs, which I can work with. His center of balance is situated in his hips, which is normal for someone his size. He smirks at his twin brother, who remains along the wall, shifting his weight with a brow raised.
Colin doesn’t even have a moment to raise a fist. I whirl, twisting my body in a sharp circle, and kick, my heel colliding with the underside of his jaw. His teeth clack together so violently the sound echoes through the ring, and he falls backward with a sharp exhale, his eyes rolling back in his head.
Every man in the ring straightens to attention in what I can only describe as utter shock, and while this is a training session, I suppose, they don’t know me. They don’t know my history. They don’t know I train men like them. Warriors. Warriors who are only as strong and as capable as they are because I made them that way.
It’s chaos for a few minutes, but that’s all it takes for me to bring every single man to the ground without so much as breaking a nail. The loose sandals Lis gave me this morning are now resting on the far side of the ring, flung off in the carnage. Avery rolls away holding his face, his nose bleeding profusely. Rufus, the largest of the bunch, crawls on his hands and knees, spitting blood. Colin is knocked out. Who else was there? Oh, the man cradling his balls on the verge of tears is… well, his name doesn’t matter.
I rise from a crouch and turn my attention to Chastan, the last man standing, who looks bewildered as he takes several steps away from me with his hands raised.
“Are you fucking joking?” I snarl, rising to my full height. “Is this what you consider training? I was in that arena with fae.” I point to his friends–all clearly shifters–and the mess I made so easily. “I got lucky I didn’t die during the Culling. I got lucky that whatever binding powers the fae king possessed made it impossible for a fae male to use his wings, or whatever magical gifts they have. Even if I had my wolf, it wouldn’t have been a fair fight.”
Chastan gapes at me.
“This is child’s play,” I grind out, pointing to Colin in particular, who I think might have been their best fighter in the bunch had he had a chance to prove it. “Bring me a fae male, or stop wasting my time. I have shit to do–”
“And what would that be?” booms a new voice.
Shivers curl up my spine like wisps of cold smoke as I slowly turn to face the gargantuan man who just walked through the doorway into the sparring ring.
“Fuck,” Chastan hisses under his breath before scrubbing a hand down his face, but I lock eyes with the stranger–the man from the balcony. His dark brown hair, just a shade or two darker than mine, is pulled back away from his face in a messy bun at the nap of his neck. His broad, heavily muscled arms bulge through his shirt as he drops several dummy weapons–swords of wood–on the ground at his feet.
He’s handsome. Gorgeous. The kind of man that would make my blood heat in an instant in any other situation than this.
His golden-hazel eyes scan the men still crawling away from me, but his expression is flat. Then, he turns his gaze to me.
“You want a fae to play with, wolf? Are you sure?”
I notice his pointed ears the very moment he draws back his fist.