Page 11

Punishment

SALLIE ROSE

No, Stone Fae do not blink.

But the glow in the Stone Fae King's eyes flickers—like someone coming out of a trance.

“Yes… we shall proceed.”

He produces a time glass out of nowhere. Of course, the sand in it is blood red, not pale brown like every other time glass I’ve ever seen.

Where does one even get blood-red sand? It’s got to be a dye job, right?

Anyway, he flips it and sets it down on the seat of that scary red throne—the same one I woke up to this morning.

“Your punishment will last as long as it takes for the sand to drain from the top.”

Then, to my great surprise, he picks me up. In his arms. Like a baby. Cradling me to his chest, his bicep flexing against my back.

Okay, not going to lie—I do not hate being lifted by a preternaturally strong male.

I grin up at him. “Maybe I should go out of my way to get punished again.”

“Perhaps,” he replies, voice far less irritated than it was over… dinner? Breakfast? Whatever this apparently nocturnal race calls that meal.

He gazes down at me with those glowing red eyes. “You will stay in the bath until the time is up.”

“Okay, no problem. I’ll stay in this terrible bath as long as you want me t?—”

He drops me.

Into a tub of freezing-cold water.

Oh. My. Weedy. Garden!!!

The tub is so deep, I slip under the surface before I can even register what’s happening. I come up sputtering, gasping for air?—

But I don’t get far. The moment I try to climb out, two large… I don’t even know what to call them. Shadow hands? Darkness molded into fingers? Either way, they press down on my shoulders, easily keeping me in place.

The water comes all the way up to my chin.

From behind me, the king speaks—his voice floating over from the direction of the throne. “As it turns out, my father was not wrong about how much you princesses dislike a perfectly normal bath.”

His smoke-and-glass tone is hard to read. But I swear, there’s amusement in it.

“Perfectly normal?” I screech. “It’s—it’s freezing ! F-f-freezing!”

In Aralysse, we have three punishments: fines, exile, or a prescribed stay in the castle dungeon.

I used to think the dungeon would be the worst—oppressively hot in the hottest months, bone-cold during the coolest.

But I didn’t know what cold really was until now.

And this isn’t like a lake plunge. Those, you can swim around in . Generate body heat. Pretend it’s invigorating.

This tub is a different beast. It’s the exact depth to keep me submerged, but too tight to move in.

It’s like sitting in an ice bath the Aralysse king sometimes requested during one of his mortality kicks—but without a physician timing the session to a count of 120, or anyone caring whether your toes survive.

I think of the blood sand hourglass. Sixty minutes. A full hour.

Three thousand six hundred seconds.

The shadow hands don't budge.

“I wonder if the stories are true,” he muses. “That your toes turn gray as our stone skin and have to be amputated.”

I fight the shadow hands. I fight them with everything I’ve got—though it’s not much, with no suns’ light or plant life to power my magic.

But there’s a reason no bard sings of actually triumphing over your shadow demons, just being plagued by them.

Eventually, I tire. The hands loosen. But it doesn’t matter. I can’t move. All I can do is sit in this frozen hell.

And I have never been this uncomfortable in my life.

And that includes yesterday, when I got strong-armed into pretending to be someone marked for ritualistic murder while wearing a too-tight wedding dress.

My teeth are chattering so hard, it feels as if they might crack.

And though I’ve only read about how to treat hypothermia, in the many medical herb books I borrowed from the castle library to decide what to plant for my father, I’m fairly certain the numb feeling in my toes and hands can’t be good.

The Stone Fae King has won. This, by far, is the worst punishment I could ever imagine.

Even my thoughts feel slow, like they’re freezing solid one by one. Freezing me into an ice sculpture of misery.

“By Eryx!”

Yet another of his strange moon invectives. It’s followed by a heavy clunk , then another—what turns out to be the sound of his clothes hitting the stone floor.

He climbs into the bath behind me, displacing the water with two massive splashes.

It’s like sitting in an icy pool that suddenly turns into a hot spring.

His furnace of a body begins to heat the water, but not quite fast enough. On pure instinct, I turn into his warmth and burrow.

I wrap my arms around his broad gray shoulders and my legs around his heavily muscled waist. I press my chest and stomach to the length of his torso, trying to get every cold piece of me touching every weirdly warm piece of him.

Next thing I know, I’m clinging around him like the comically persistent branch bears my father was always spraying out of his rare fruit trees.

But there’s nothing comical about the piece of granite that suddenly presses against the very center of me.

I don’t think that’s his stomach.

And I no longer believe the sculptor exaggerated what he saw.

Silence falls over us.

When the king finally speaks, his voice sounds less like smoke and more like steam… choking out of a machine that’s running low on water.

“You will return to your original position.”

As intimidating as the hard thing between us is, I say, “No. I’ll stay right here where it’s warm, thank you.”

More silence. Thick with tension. The hard length is pulsing now.

“I am required to give you a nightly bath until the time of the ceremony. I cannot…”

He swallows, and I feel the movement against my cheek, which I’ve pressed into his throat.

It takes him several seconds to finish: “…clean you in this position.”

“Clean me,” I repeat. “You mean like a pet?”

“What is a pet?”

“An animal you keep for companionship. The princess—I mean, I have a cymurra named Velvet that I like to pamper and spoil. I have my handmaiden feed it a meal worthy of a human before she’s allowed to eat herself.”

“So, this animal serves no other purpose than to keep you in silent company?”

“Yes. And it calms my spirits when I pet it.”

I feel him frown. “Is it at least slaughtered and ground into meat or adhesive once its companionship duties are done?”

“No!” I jerk my head back in horror. “Our beloved pets die of old age or disease! Never by our hand, unless it’s meant as a mercy.

And then they’re placed in the special part of the royal mausoleum where we keep all of our pets.

My first cymurra died when I was twelve, and I go to visit it at least once a week to leave flowers on its grave. ”

“Flowers like the ones you grew on that bush?”

“Somewhat. We have a designated flower called whitespire that we grow especially to commemorate deaths.”

He tilts his head. “How many of these bushes do you have at your palace?”

“A near acre of them.” I settle back into his chest, laying my head on his shoulder.

“So not only you, but many of your servants have the same magic that you have?”

“No, only one other. Our gardener is a very sweet man named Oak. He’s descended from an Earth Fae who was exiled from his kingdom after marrying a mortal from the newly crashed ship.”

I smiled fondly against the Stone Fae King’s shoulder, thinking of my father’s unusual backstory. “Anyway, Oak was very eager to pass on his magic, so that it wouldn’t end with him.”

The water swishes, and then there’s a round bar of soap on my back, rubbing with just enough pressure to feel like a massage. “So this Oak was childless, and thus he taught you how to work this magic.”

“Yes. I suppose you could say he’s childless now.” The not-quite-a-lie fills my chest with sadness. “He had a daughter once, but not anymore. He taught me the same as he would have taught her.”

I feel a slight pause in the rhythm of his soaping my back.

“And you welcomed these lessons? I have never heard of a royal accepting such teachings from a commoner.”

“Well, princesses are different. Commoners taught me to read and write. They cook my meals and grow the food that makes them. They mend my clothes and render the fabric to construct them. Everything I have I owe to commoners.”

“Also, my Stone Fae Kingdom. We allow you to thrive on our lands.”

“Well, that’s more of a racket than anything,” I point out with a shrug, not caring an iota about how he feels about my disdain for his people. “The commoners do all the work, while the Fae use their superior strength to take most of what we produce. None of it is very fair.”

The water swishes again, and a cloth replaces the soap on my back. “For someone who has grown up knowing you would be sacrificed to my kingdom, you seem very concerned with fairness.”

I twist slightly, angling my face toward his voice. “The only people who aren’t concerned with fairness are those with the superior advantage.”

A beat of silence. “So, you do not believe in our right of rule?”

“No. This whole system is a load of toilet fertilizer, if you ask me.”

That lands hard. His body stiffens, and the towel massage stops. “I have never been spoken to so frankly. I am not sure how to respond.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I’ve never spoken so frankly, either,” I admit. “Knowing exactly how I want to respond and saying what’s on my mind? That’s new to me. Usually, I keep my thoughts to myself.”

Another quiet moment. Steam curls off the water between us.

Then he murmurs, “I should turn you around. Your back has been thoroughly cleaned.”

I hum noncommittally but stay where I am, our strange hug stretching into long silence. I’m no longer even a little bit cold.

“Why did my commander call you Sallie Rose ?”

I go still.

“Sallie Rose is a nickname that Oak gave me,” I answer after a beat. “If anyone calls me anything, I would prefer it be that.”

“Fine. I will call you that. And if you wish, you may call me Veyrion—in private, exclusively. When others are about, you must call me Sovereign or King.”