The Queen's Assassin (Queen's Secret #1) - Melissa de la Cruz Page 0,29

few necessities, or what he considered necessities at the time, laughable to him now, the perishable food and inadequate footwear. But he’d made it pretty far, farther than he’d ever gone away before. Then the headaches began.

He shook it off at first, faulted hunger and the long days of walking, but they grew more intense with every mile he traveled from Renovia. He stole fresh meat off a butcher’s slab and cooked it up in the woods, drank fresh water from a crystal stream, spent an entire day resting his feet, and still, the piercing throb in his head would not cease. Next came the nightmares. Those were vague enough when they started, visions that vanished from his mind as soon as he startled awake, but soon became worse—something chasing him, and he’d run and run, but no matter how much he ran it was always right on his heels, ready to grab him. He’d wake up drenched in a cold sweat. After the worst dreams he’d find himself far from camp, disoriented from sleepwalking. When he didn’t heed these warnings, the shapeless threat on his heels turned into an actual monster, and then one night he was visited by an angry vision of Queen Lilianna herself. When he woke, he found himself perched on a cliff—ready to dive into the inky depths below.

He returned that very morning. The blinding pain, the visions—it all subsided as he drew closer to Renovia. Cal had learned his lesson. He never attempted to abandon the vow again.

Cal’s silent days at Deersia are punctuated by three meals shoved quickly through the doorway. He has no human interaction aside from the gruff words—“Breakfast!” “Dinner!” “Supper!”—yelled through a narrow slot in the door.

The food at Deersia is terrible—typically some kind of gruel, or if he’s lucky, a porridge of peas with a hard square biscuit made of crudely milled, cheap flour and a bit of salt—and on more than one occasion, a few grubs—but he eats most of it anyway, to keep up his strength. He’s eaten worse to survive. The trick is not to look at it or think about it much. Consider it a sort of medicine, awful but necessary.

He draws a simple map of the prison interior on the floor so he can push hay on top to hide it. He’s not sure he’ll need to use it, but it gives him something else to focus on. Makes him feel like he has some control.

He does his best not to think of the momentous task that lies beyond his release.

And if I confirm the king’s involvement?

You are the Queen’s Assassin, are you not?

Regicide. The thought chills him more than his current imprisonment, though his circumstances are already enough to drive a man mad. How long must he wait? The queen promised that she would send for him, but if she does not, he will take matters into his own hands.

Cal spends hours at the barred window, observing the mountains and tracking travelers as they pass through roads in the distance, making note of any who have a routine. He scratches a crude calendar of sorts low on the wall where he sleeps and uses symbols to mark patterns, a D for the local draper who delivers flour and ale and other kitchen necessities at the beginning of every week, G1 and G2 to mark the various guards and their shifts, and so on. Far off in the distance Cal can see townspeople on their way back and forth from the marketplace and to worship.

From each meal he saves half the biscuit, when he gets one; if the porridge is fresh and filling enough, he’ll save the entire thing. He stores them in a pouch he fashioned from the blindfold scarf. He’ll need hardtack on the road should he have the chance to flee. A bit of water is all it takes to make them palatable, and palatable is all it takes to ward off starvation when decent meals or fresh meat are difficult to find.

Each day he tears a bit of the wool blanket, rolls squares of the rough fabric into tubes. He stuffs handfuls of hay inside. Since he has no needle or thread, he ties them closed with thin strips of the fabric. These can