The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(7)
It was a relief to work. The urge to move, to do, rode high. Someone—a guard?—gave her a double basket. She eagerly began to fill it, prying crumbly yellow blocks of sulfur from the ground. She saw tunnels that led below a volcano. The prisoners who went there carried pickaxes. Kestrel was made to work out in the open. She gathered—the realization was plucked like a stone from the rushing river of the drug—that she was too new to be trusted with an ax.
All the guards carried looped whips attached to their belts, but Kestrel didn’t see them being used. The guards—they could not be Valoria’s best and brightest, if commissioned to serve in the worst corner of the empire—were content to keep a lazy eye on the prisoners, who obeyed directions easily. The guards talked among themselves, complaining about the smell.
The boiled egg odor was very strong here. She noticed this without being bothered by it or by the sweat that stained her dress even as she shivered hard (was it very cold, or was this just the nature of the drug?). She loaded each of the two baskets attached by a flexible pole that she heaved up onto her shoulders. The weight felt good; it was so good to dig and lift and carry and dump and do it all over again.
At some point she staggered under the baskets. She was given water. Her marvelous strength returned.
By twilight, she was hollowed out. Her good sense returned. She refused the food served when the prisoners had filed through the black iron gate and into the yard.
“This food is different,” said the silver-braided guard from yesterday, whom Kestrel understood to be in charge of the female prisoners. “Last night I gave you a taste of how nice it’d be to work, but from now on you’ll get a dose of something different at night.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Princess, no one cares what you want.”
“I can work without it.”
“No,” the woman said gently, “you can’t.”
Kestrel backed away from the long table with its bowls of soup.
“Eat, or I’ll force it down you.”
The guard had told the truth. The food contained a different drug, one with a metallic scent like silver. It made everything slow and dark as Kestrel was led into her prison block and to her cell.
“Why doesn’t the empire drug all its slaves?” Kestrel mumbled before she was locked up.
The woman laughed, the sound murky, underwater. “You’d be surprised how many tasks require a mind.”
Kestrel felt foggy.
“New prisoners are my favorites. We haven’t had one like you in a long time. New ones are always entertaining, at least while they last.”
Kestrel thought she heard the key turn. She dropped into sleep.
She tried to eat and drink as little as she could get away with. She remembered the guard’s words . . . until, in fact, she no longer remembered them and avoided full meals simply out of the awareness that the drugged food changed her and she didn’t like it. She’d tip her bowl of soup out onto the muddy prison yard when no one was looking. She crumbled bread and let it fall from her hands.
Still, she was hungry. She was thirsty. Sometimes, she ignored her nagging worry and filled her belly.
I would do anything for you. The words echoed in her mind. Often, she couldn’t quite sort out who’d said them. She thought she might have said them to her father.
Then she’d feel suddenly ill, nauseated with an emotion she would have recognized as shame if she’d had a clearer head. No, she hadn’t said that to her father. She had betrayed him. Or had he betrayed her?
It was confusing. She was certain only of the sense of betrayal, thick and hot in her chest.
Kestrel had moments of clarity before the morning drug shot her up, or before the twilight drug dragged her down. In those moments, when she could smell the sulfur on her and feel its dust in her eyelashes, saw the yellow stuff beneath her fingernails and powdering her skin like pollen, she’d envision those words, written in ink on paper. I would do anything for you. She knew exactly who had written them and why. She became aware that she had been pretending to herself when she’d believed her words had been untrue, or that any of the limits she’d set between her and Arin mattered, because in the end she was here and he was free. She had done every thing she could. And he didn’t even know.
The guards still didn’t trust Kestrel with a pickax. She was starting to worry that they never would. A small ax was a real weapon. With it, she might be able to escape. In her clearer hours, on the days when she ate and drank less, Kestrel was desperate to lay her hands on one of those axes. Her nerves screamed for it. At the same time, she was afraid that by the time a guard gave her one and sent her down into the tunnels, it would be too late. She’d be like all the other prisoners: wordless, eyes wide, minds gone. If Kestrel was sent into the mines underground, she couldn’t be sure that she wouldn’t lose her sense of self along the way.
One night, she managed to avoid consuming anything before being locked in her cell. She regretted it. She shook with hunger and fatigue, yet nothing could make her sleep. She felt the dirt floor beneath the holes in her shoes. The air was chilly and damp. She missed the velvet warmth of her nighttime drug. It always swaddled her thickly. It smothered her to sleep. She’d grown to like that.
Kestrel knew that she was forgetting things. It was horribly unsettling, like walking down a staircase in the dark, hand on the rail, and then the rail vanished and she held nothing but air. Try as she might, Kestrel couldn’t remember the name of her horse in Herran. She knew that she had loved Enai, her Herrani nurse, and that Enai had died, but Kestrel couldn’t remember how she’d died. When Kestrel had first come to the camp, she’d had the idea of searching the prisoners for the face of someone she knew (a disgraced senator, wrongfully convicted of selling black powder to the east, had been sent here last autumn), but she found that she didn’t recognize anyone and wasn’t sure if that was because she knew no one here, or if she did and had simply forgotten his features.