Chapter Six: Faces Worth Remembering
561 Words
The feast happened without her, the way feasts always seemed to. Except this time she wasn't the one being toasted at the head of the table, she was the shame being hidden three rooms away, close enough to hear the music drifting down the corridor, far enough to be conveniently forgotten by everyone who mattered.
Except Ilsa decided forgetting wasn't enough entertainment for one night.
She found Elyra first, dragging her by the wrist out of the kennel corridor and into the servants' passage just outside the great hall, where a handful of visiting nobles happened to be filing past on their way to the wine table. "Look," Ilsa announced, pitching her voice loud enough to carry, bright with a cruelty she clearly hadn't had to practice, "this is the one Father keeps hidden. Isn't she charming?"
The nobles laughed not cruel exactly, worse than cruel, careless, the kind of laughter that didn't even bother hating her, just found her funny the way a broken toy might be funny, something to be pointed at and forgotten a moment later. One of them, a portly lord dripping with rings, actually leaned down for a closer look at her scars, the way a man might inspect livestock at market for flaws worth negotiating over.
"Gods, Cassian bred an ugly one, didn't he," he said, not lowering his voice at all, as though the girl standing directly in front of him had no ears worth sparing.
Sable stood a little apart, arms crossed, quieter than her sister but no warmer, watching with the specific satisfaction of someone enjoying a show she hadn't had to plan herself, content to let Ilsa do the work while she collected the entertainment for free.
Elyra said nothing. She kept her scarred face perfectly still, eyes lowered in the posture this body already knew by instinct, the posture of someone who had learned a long time ago that reacting only ever made things worse.
But behind that stillness, something far colder than fury was working. She catalogued the ringed lord's face, the cut of his coat, the pack sigil stitched into his collar filed away. She catalogued Sable's crossed arms, the particular curl of contempt at the corner of her mouth, filed away. She catalogued the tight, delighted grip of Ilsa's fingers still bruising her wrist, filed away deepest of all.
A Queen didn't forget the faces of people who laughed while she was weak. She'd learned that lesson once already, in a throne room, at the hands of someone who'd sworn to love her forever and meant it right up until the moment it became inconvenient.
She let Ilsa drag her back toward the kennel corridor once the joke got boring, once the nobles moved on toward the wine and better gossip. She lay down again in the straw beside the old gray hound, dry eyed, perfectly calm on the surface, something entirely different working underneath.
Every face, she promised the dark, the way she'd promised it the night before, and would go on promising it every night after. Every single one. I don't forget. I collect.
Somewhere beneath her ribs, behind the locked door of a caged wolf still learning to trust that someone was finally trying to free it, something stirred for the first time since she'd woken in this body.
Not fear this time.
Interest.
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