Page 12 of A Dance of Lies

He wants to see my progress. He is tired of asking Brigitte.

I blink at him. “Without music?”

“Yes.”

Even if I wanted to, the last of my strength has dissolved. “I . . . can’t.”

He steps forward, pushes my chin up with his chalice. “You will if I say you will.”

His request isn’t made by a king; it’s a command from a puppeteer.

I still have five weeks. I shouldn’t have to perform yet. Brigitte opens her mouth, but he whips up a hand in warning. She purses her lips at him before giving me a pitying glance.

My fingernails drive into the flesh of my palms. This man holds my life in his hands, but rage courses through me. He put me in that cell in the first place. And after two years of aching loneliness and pain, he drags me back out, expecting me to recover on his timeline. Hatred seeps through me, hot as lava. “Your Majesty,” I say before I can think better of it. “I merely wish the time you promised me, so that I might prepare a performance befitting yourhonorablecrown.”

He catches the insult buried in the flattery. I tell him now, with my gaze, that I haven’t forgotten. He knows I am innocent.

He says nothing, just watches me, silent for one breath, then two. He has never needed hands to touch me; his eyes prod my flesh as if it were clay. But then I realize the risk I’ve taken in angering him and curse myself inwardly.Foolish.

But when he doesn’t chastise me or revoke our deal, I know for sure: whatever his plans, he must truly need me, and only me. He must not trust anyone else—perhaps because I’m the only dancer he has bound through unseen chains, tethered to him by desperation. Was that the reason he threw me in prison to begin with?

Or is it something more?

“Your Majesty,” Brigitte says, attempting to smooth the tension, “she will be ready by the time we leave.”

“Yes, she will be,” he responds. “She will prove to me just how thankful she is for a second chance.” He leans in, his wine-soaked breath clogging my ears. “Oh, yes, Vasalie,” he whispers. “I see your little test. That streak of defiance never ceased to amuse me before, but know this: You are only here if you are valuable to me. A broken toy has no worth.”

Broken toy.

No worth.

His words are blows, harsher than the guard’s assaults. They burrow into my mind, sowing doubt and fear. I can’t escape them, or the truth behind them: He broke me, and I am too fragmented to piece myself together again.

The certainty of it follows me, mocks me, as the days slip by.

Brigitte tends to me each day, pushing me through therapy, meals, treatments, practices. I retreat into the crevices of my mind. I float through the motions, drift through the hours.

At night, I leave the window open to the stars—to the rain, even—if only to remind me where I am, and where I am not. Even so, my sleep is fitful, nightmare-ridden, full of festering darkness, biting manacles. Shrieks and screams that echo throughout my dreams, so like the terrors that haunted my mind in that cell. I wake only to feel like I’m sleepwalking through the next day.

It is a brittle, absent existence.

“Vasalie,” Brigitte scolds, tugging my arm from the window onemorning. She’s found me here more than once, in a trance, staring at the snow-crowned mountains in the distance. It’s a reminder of the place I once called home—a place far away, separated by miles of sea. A place where the mountains are wholly covered in ice, so bright during winter you have to squint to see them. The place I ran from.

I wish I could run from here.

“You should be preparing,” Brigitte says, scooting me toward the door. Normally, I’d have been in my training room hours ago. “You’re to dance for King Illian tomorrow.”

That’s all I’ve done lately: train, practice, stretch, train. My muscles remember every dance I choreographed, every step I learned, but my body doesn’t always obey. Even as I build my strength, the breadth of my movements . . .

My progress is not nearly enough.

Worse, my anxiety stacks into a fortress I can’t navigate. I push myself and fail. I mourn what I lost. And when that timid thing inside me breaks—the last traces of determination and pride I desperately cling to—I crumble. I lie on the floor, heart rabbiting, lungs struggling for breath, needles of pain grating my skin like the jagged teeth of prison rats.A broken toy has no worth.

I have nothing to show but how destroyed I am. It reopens even more wounds from a time before Illian.You’ll never be more than a man’s plaything.My father’s voice is so clear, I almost wonder if he’s near. My father, who’d made a deal, who’d seen me as a token to trade with. Who offered me as a match for a man Emilia despised. It hadn’t mattered that I was thirteen, that I hadn’t even begun to bleed.How could you deign to believe you’d be anything more?

Plaything.

Broken toy.