I wanted to say that I didn’t feel beautiful and perfect, but my teeth were chattering too much for me to get a single word out. Then all three men came crowding into my cell, and I discovered that even with a warning, I couldn’t fight at all.
8
Afterwards Lord Hei seemed shaken. Not as shaken as I was, unfortunately.
“Are you sure you didn’t hurt her?” he asked.
“If she’s really a dragon, she’ll survive,” the man who had slit my wrists and bled out a carefully measured cup of blood told him.
“If she doesn’t survive, she wasn’t a dragon,” said the man who had forced more of the red liquid down my mouth.
“Should we keep watch over her?” asked Lord Hei.
The two men shrugged together. “Not much anyone can do for her, one way or the other,” they told him. “And she might cry and scream a lot. No point in listening to that.”
They left, Lord Hei giving me backward glances as he walked away, but walking away nonetheless. I thought about killing them. I thought about capturing them and pinning them down and slitting their wrists and stealing their blood as they had stolen mine, and forcing them to swallow strange liquids. I thought of all the poisons I knew, all the places in the human body I knew where a single cut or blow or twist would be fatal. But none of that had done me any good. They had still come in and done what they had wanted to me, and all my rage had meant nothing and would probably mean nothing when they came in and did it all again, as they had promised they would.
“Don’t struggle,” Lord Hei had told me, stroking my hair as tenderly as a man like him knew how, as the others held me down and hurt me at his orders. “Don’t struggle, and it will be over soon and you will be glad of it. You’re going to be a dragon, Laela, a dragon! My very own dragon. With beautiful black hair, like a curtain of midnight.”
The tenderness in his words and his hand on my hair was the worst part, worse than the pain and the fear and the dreadful feeling of helplessness, because I knew then, knew down to my very marrow in a way I had never known before, why women stayed with bad men who did bad things to them, and I knew I could be one of those women, and very likely would be if I didn’t find a way to fight it, to escape, and soon. Because I would forgive any cruelty from someone who needed to me. The need in his voice and his touch was a stronger draw than any drink, any tincture of poppy, and I knew then I could succumb to it just as so many women had done before me. Everything could turn out exactly as he hoped, because he hoped it and I could not bear to dash his hopes the way he would dash mine.
But then they were gone, taking with them whatever shred of tenderness he had shown to me, and the desire to kill them overcame every other desire. I shivered and shook, and thought the walls were closing in on me and crushing me, and that I was floating in the air and chained to the floor at the same time, and that evil beings were in the cell with me and trying to smother me as they pushed me backwards into an unfathomably deep drop into Hell, and through all of it I plotted how next time I was going to fight back, next time I would break free of my captors and escape and run, run, run all the way back home and never leave ever again.
But when they came the next time, none of that happened. I wasn’t even able to try to fight back. One twist in their grasp made the floor lurch under my feet like a canoe on a stormy lake, and I ended up sagging limply in their grip, unable to offer up even a token resistance as they drained more of my own blood out of my arms and forced more of the foreign blood down my throat. Lord Hei stroked my hair and asked, his voice full of worry, if I was supposed to be so shivery and sweaty and pale.
“It means the change is taking place,” the dirtier of the two men said, and then, wrapping his hands in his sleeves, pried open my lips and poured more of the blood into my mouth.
“You hear that, Laela?” said Lord Hei, stroking my forehead. “The change is taking place. Soon this will all be over, and you will be a dragon. The most beautiful dragon that ever was! Think of all the things you will be able to do when that happens!”
I did. I thought of shredding them all with my claws, and melting the flesh from their bones with my fiery breath, and bursting free from this prison and flying up, up, and away to some remote peak where no human would ever touch me again, or even sully my gaze with their presence. I thought those thoughts over and over as I lay on the cold stone floor, unable even to push myself up to standing, and as they came in and hurt me again, and again, and again.
9
It was morning. How did I know? I was underground. But I knew. Lying there on the dirty stone floor, my wrists hurting more than I thought it was possible to hurt from where they had cut me over and over again, twitching uncontrollably and feeling like I was falling even though I was already lying on the ground, I knew it was morning.
I sat up. I still felt like
