It’s nice of him to warn me, but he’s a little too late on that front. Staying away from faerie food? That ship has long since sailed.
It was a mistake. I didn’t know any better, and the pink apple I found hanging off an enchanted tree was impossible to resist. I was hungry. Confused. I ate it. And now? If I don’t have some food grown in Faerie every day, I get sick.
I don’t tell him that. No reason to. Even if I hadn’t already eaten the apple, I’ve been inside the prison for three days now.
I peek across the aisle, watching him eat. He makes quick work of his meal, though it’s almost… dainty? Graceful? I don’t know, except it makes me feel like an uncoordinated idiot as I finish polishing off the grapes on my plate.
Now that we’ve broken the silence of the wing, I guess Rys has decided that he might as well be a little more neighborly or something.
After he nudges the food on the floor out of his cell before toeing the plate out into the hall, he stands in front of his cell, peering over at me.
“I’ve heard them address you as Elle.”
I shrug. When it comes to that subject, it’s better to stay quiet.
“But it’s not your name. It can’t be.”
“Is your name Rys?” I ask.
He looks surprised that I retorted. His eyes widen, pulling on his scar, before he closes off his expression. He mimics my shrug. “It’s what I answer to.”
“Same.”
“Very well.” And then he tells me, “I think I’ll call you Leannán.”
My heart just about stops. In his hypnotic voice with his strange accent, it almost sounded like he said Helen. I know he didn’t—the whole first part is nothing like my normal, human name—but forgive me for being on guard.
“You can’t just give me a name,” I sputter. Not in this place where names have meaning and I’m already struggling to get used to being called Elle. For reasons even I don’t understand, I’d give anything to hear his lilting, lyrical voice call me Helen, but since that’s never going to happen, I’ll accept Elle.
Except he doesn’t want to call me that.
“Why not? If the name you have isn’t yours to begin with, what does it matter what I call you?”
I’m not going to win this. There’s a spark in his golden eyes that warn me against even trying.
Fine.
“What does it mean?” I ask, turning the conversation back on him again. “That name?”
His lips quirk just enough that maybe I could call it a smile. Maybe. It doesn’t last, though, and from the way he gestures his hand in a careless wave, I probably imagined it anyway.
“Forget the meaning. It’s… more a reminder.”
“A reminder?” I echo. “For what?”
“For me,” he says. Then, before I ask again what that means, he tells me, “Dusk has his eye on you. He calls me a human lover, but he’s warned the other guards away from you. He’ll take you if he can.”
Why is he telling me this? “How do you know that? You haven’t been here. Where were you anyway?”
He doesn’t answer that.
“He’ll use you,” Rys says instead, a conversational note creeping into his tone. Like it’s a foregone conclusion that I’m going to let Dusk touch me, and that he’s just offering some advice because he’s bored and I’m a captive audience. “He’ll use you, but you won’t mean more to him than a rush of power, a warm body for his pleasure, and a receptacle for his Cursed seed.”
Wow. Wow. He’s just going to put it out there like that, isn’t he?
“I have to give him permission.” I cling to that certainty. “He can’t force me.”
“Not without your true name, Leannán.”