Gild (The Plated Prisoner 1)

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.