Gild (The Plated Prisoner #1) - Raven Kennedy Page 0,6
against her small form, her throat clogged into silence.
“Don’t look at me like that, Coin,” I tell her. She stares unblinkingly back at me.
“I know,” I say with a sigh. “I know it’s important to Midas that I’m kept safe inside my cage, just like you,” I say with a tilt of my head before I glance at all the luxuries I have within reach.
The food, the pillows, the expensive clothing. Some people would kill for these things, and I don’t just mean that as a figure of speech. They would actually kill for it. Poverty is a vicious motivator. I know that all too well.
“It’s not like he hasn’t tried to make me more comfortable. I shouldn’t be so greedy or thankless. Things could be a lot worse, right?”
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