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T he next day their party grew larger—at least Hellebore heard more horses and another set of wheels, but she was only let out of the carriage for basic necessities. Afterwards, her hands were rebound and she was roughly shoved back in.

She didn't see the captain again. Her collection of bruises changed day by day. Had what she'd done even worked or had she failed to save the elf from her unintended homicide? If it hadn’t, she'd sacrificed her chance to escape for nothing because now they had her on murder and practicing alchemy on an elf. Plus, stealing a magical plant and using the blood of an elf for transmutation. Her status as a princess might go a long way protecting her from physical harm, but those offenses stacked together and not even her status would save her from execution.

Finally, when she was brought out of the carriage after two weeks of traveling, it wasn't to a forest surrounding them. Well, mostly. There were still lush trees and sunlight streaming in over the leaves, but there was also a wall. She looked over her shoulder as her guards put her on her feet to see a massive castle stretching up into the sky, framed by the mountains around them. They were in the capital, Auror.

She was being pushed forward, unable to really look around as elves rushed about. A female elf came striding out of the castle, a baby elfling on her hip. Given the circlet on her head, Hellebore imagined this had to be some relation of the king. The pattern on her dress was familiar, but when Hellebore looked around, she didn't spy it on any of the elves she'd traveled with. Where had she seen it then?

Then she was being shoved through the doors and hauled through hallways, no one bothering to say a word to her about where she was being taken. Was she going to meet the king and would he reveal what he was going to do with her? Or why he had been apparently targeting her in the first place?

But instead of being taken down, they went up. She wasn't being held in the dungeons, at least. She tried out her Iubian again. “Where are we going?”

The two elves looked at each other, and the one on the right shook his head. The one on her left said, “Your room.”

“And the king?”

That earned her harsh glares from both of them. “The king will see you when he desires, alchemist.”

Then they were in front of a door, and once more she was being pushed inside somewhere. They didn't remove the rope binding her wrists, which was driving her insane with the way it had rubbed her skin raw and broken it so it bled. They just shut the door and locked it.

They'd had the foresight not to give her her belt back. Not that there was much she could do now. If she'd failed to escape the little patrol that had caught her in the forest, she knew she wasn't going to make it out of the castle and the city without being caught. With the mountains around them and the terrain outside the city she’d observed, there was probably only one main road out, if she even made it that far.

Hellebore still took stock of the room just to see if there was anything useful in it.

Huh. The room was nice, far nicer than she anticipated even as a royal hostage. It was the height of luxury, or... if this wasn't the height of luxury for Sun Elves, she couldn't imagine what that did look like. There was a four poster, gilded, canopy bed covered in plush pink and orange blankets. On the other side of the room was a tall dresser made of the same soft white wood as the bed and a vanity with a gold framed mirror, and next to it, a deep wardrobe that matched, with gold trim in swirling sun and iris patterns. Toward the front of the room was a sitting area with a low table, a sofa, and a few plush chairs, all trimmed in the same bright, sunny colors—orange, gold, pink. On the table was a vase of flowers in the same colors, though unfortunately no Sunrise Irises. Just normal, but pretty, flowers.

Why were there fresh flowers? Did they put fresh flowers in every room? Or...

Hellebore turned on her heels, looking up at the ceiling, a stunning painting of a sunrise splashing the surface in gold, orange, and pink.

Had they been expecting her?

She made her way over to the window and peered out into the courtyard, using her sore, bruised shoulder to nudge the shimmering gold curtain out of the way.

The activity had slowed. The royal—whether she'd been the queen or a princess, Hellebore wasn't sure—was gone. As far as she knew, King Taiyo wasn't married, but knowledge of minutiae like that wasn't her area. Their neighbors and the politics of foreign affairs were all Callahan’s arena.

She desperately wished Callahan was with her, and not for politics. If he were there, she would be able to trust nothing bad could happen to her. Callahan wouldn’t let it.

But he wasn’t. So, missing the way her brother always crushed her to him every time she’d returned home from the academy didn’t do her any good.

The last of the patrol was being cleared away. Hellebore moved farther down the room to the next window—her room was obscenely large—and did the same, catching sight of the next courtyard over, connected to the first but separate enough. She spotted bushes of orange, gold, and pink flowers, the ones that made up the bouquet on her table. But what was most interesting were the servants scurrying about it, seemingly deep in some kind of preparation. Some court event maybe taking place there?

A banquet for the king who had returned shortly before they received their human hostage?

Hellebore sighed, trying to roll out the stiffness and the ache in her shoulders, but not being able to do much with her hands still bound. After a few hours of trying to rest while shifting from spot to spot to find something comfortable, she gave up. Instead, she did another lap around the room, looking at everything around her and coming up with a dozen ways she could use her alchemy on them to fashion tools for escape or weapons to protect herself, but knowing it was all fantasy.

With some awkward, slow positioning and work, she opened the drawers of the dresser to see it was full of clothes in the Sun Elf style, lots of shiny, spotless silks that were completely impractical in her mind. As she stared at the dresses in the wardrobe, all she could think of was how the hems were so long they'd trail behind her and the nice fabrics would be ruined in a lab. The harsh cleaning treatment the alchemists used when purifying themselves while around toxic substances would render the delicate fabrics to shreds.

Whose room was this? They couldn't have been expecting her for long, and all of these clothes clearly indicated this room was lived in.

Her stomach sank. Unless the king had been planning on kidnapping her before he’d ever even left for Chymes. Hellebore wasn’t a fan of those implications, so she pushed the ludicrous idea away. Why would the king go through the elaborate ruse of visiting her father in the name of peace just to steal her away? He could have taken a page out of the alchemists’ book and just raided the academy to steal her. But that didn’t even explain what he would want with her.

No. While possible, it certainly wasn’t plausible. Her fear was simply getting the better of her, and if she had a knife and the right formula, she would have cut it out of her. Since she could not, she just pushed it away. Logic dictated the most reasonable explanation was that she was in someone else’s room, and that female elf had simply been displaced for the time being.

Hellebore then made her way over to the wall closest to the bed and tried the second door there, but it was locked. And the sun was setting.

And clearly, she wasn't going to be fed, so at least that was consistent with her hostage expectations even if inconvenient.

The next morning, she woke up when her door flew open and she startled, knocking one of the pillows to the ground as two female elves came into the room while two hovered at the door. The two guards who entered were dressed in matching uniforms, likely servants, while the other two at the door were clearly guards. At the sight of her, completely disheveled and dirtying the pristine bed, one of the servants gasped.

The other tutted under her breath and said, “The king will not be happy about this.”

Well, if the king cared that much, he could have come and seen her for himself and at least given her the use of her hands back. Although he was smart not to. She was deadly when all she needed was her hands and something to write with in order to bend the world to her will.

“Come, Your Highness, we must clean you up,” the first one said, hurrying to her side.

Hellebore snapped, “Your king doesn't want his hostage to look like one?”

At their blank stares, she realized she’d spoken in Chymesian and repeated herself in Iubian, her words losing some of their bite as she had to walk slowly through the words. But even when using their tongue, they didn’t respond.

She didn't know if they couldn't understand her beneath her accent or if they simply chose to ignore her comment. Likely the second.

Instead, the servants helped her to her feet and undid her hands. The first maid gasped at Hellebore’s bleeding wrists before shooting a glare at the guard. One of the guards shrugged. “She's an alchemist.”

The next second, a tub was being carried into the room by another set of female servants, who began filling it with water and using their magic to heat it. Hellebore watched them intently, taking a little pleasure in how the longer her gaze stayed on them, the more their hands shook. The original two servants exchanged glances as they pulled fresh clothes from the wardrobe. One of the guards at the door took a few steps toward Hellebore, moving to stand between her and the elves using magic.

Before Hellebore could speak, one of the original elves grabbed the guard by the arm and hissed, “Stop that. You know His Majesty’s orders. She’s not doing any harm.”

Hellebore turned her head slightly, catching the guard’s eyes and grinning.

The guard ripped her arm out of the servant’s grip. “Maybe not yet, she’s not, but you see that look in her eyes. She’s—them all with her eyes, and if she had a knife, she’d be doing even worse.”

She’d missed one word, but overall she wasn’t doing too poorly.

Hellebore turned her head to face the guard fully and lied through her smile. “Actually, I’m focusing on translating your language in my mind. Forgive me, my Iubian is rough.”

The guard returned to her post, hand on the hilt of her sword, eyes tracking Hellebore’s every move. The second servant cleared her throat and cut in, pulling Hellebore to her feet.

Then the original two elves were trying to help Hellebore out of her dirty clothes, but the construction was clearly foreign to them, and Hellebore shoved them off. “I am capable of getting out of my clothes myself. I am a princess, but I have lived most of my life without—” The word for attendants escaped her, so she fumbled for another one. “—without maids.”

When she was a student at the academy, she lived like all the other students, no servants or special treatment.

At least, that’s the way it was supposed to be. She hadn’t had the servants, but she was never sure about the special treatment.

When Hellebore had returned to the castle for holidays and breaks, it had always been a strange adjustment for her to get used to being attended by servants, specifically disrobing and bathing in front of strangers. However, she figured this was on the lower end of uncomfortable things about being a hostage, and there were far worse, so she'd accept this strange situation. At least the guards were female.

Of course she caught the whispers of the girls, but she couldn't blame them too much. She was a foreign species to them, and she was rather bruised from the rough handling, not to mention the scars she'd accumulated from experiments gone wrong.

She ignored them and safely sank into the tub, hissing when her raw, cracked wrists hit the warm water. The stinging sensation went right up into her jaw, but the heat did help relax her sore back and ease the ache in her shoulders.

“Your Highness, your wrists, let us—”

She held up her vivid red wrist and snapped, “Unless it's an order from your king, don't. If he wants a cleaned-up hostage, I will oblige, but do not push me further.”

She remembered the word for oblige; that was a victory.

The servant fell silent and simply returned to waiting off to the side with a towel. Hellebore gritted her teeth and ignored the stinging in her wrists with every motion as she cleaned herself from head to toe. While she did so, some of the maidens stripped the dirty bedding and replaced it with a matching fresh set. Hellebore ran her fingers through her warm, brown hair.

She stepped out of the tub only for the servants to attempt once more to take over, and this time she let them as they dried her off and got her into a shift that was a foreign style, but it was at least some covering. That was when three more female elves came in with an assortment of tools and fabrics and the measuring tapes around their shoulders that left Hellebore assuming they were seamstresses. The two guards rolled their eyes; one crossed her arms and muttered something that Hellebore thought translated to something involving “commotion” and the “lifespan of a fly.” One of the servants stifled a laugh at whatever the guard said, both receiving glares from the original pair of maids.

The three seamstresses moved in a whirlwind, having Hellebore lift her arms and positioning her to their liking as they took a flurry of measurements and held up fabrics to her face, all talking so fast Hellebore caught very little of it. What she did catch was about fabrics and necklines and a comment about wide hips Hellebore should probably be offended by. Her cheeks flushed, but she managed to stay still and hold her tongue.

Now she knew what her experiments must have felt like being measured, poked and prodded all the time.

It was humbling if nothing else.

Were her hips really that wide?

If they were going to eye her hips and legs with such disdain, they could give her back her Chymesian clothes and just let her be the filthy savage they all thought she was. But before she could pitch the idea, the seamstresses were done and gone.

Then the maids threw a dress from the wardrobe over her head. Hellebore let them since the style was different than her usual skirts and blouses and she wouldn't know where to begin to secure it.

Once she was dressed, she looked around to see the other servants were gone, and she was left with just the guards and the original pair of maids. They sat her in front of the vanity and handled her hair.

The two bickered about a style for a minute before Hellebore said, “Does it really matter? Just—” As her mind blanked on the Iubian word for braid, she made the motion with her fingers. “—then pin it.”

“Do you mean braid?” the taller of the two asked.

Hellebore snapped her fingers and pointed at her. “Yes. That. Braid it.”

The girls obeyed, quickly doing two braids and wrapping them around her head in a crown, pinning it into place.

Finally, they seemed to be done, and when she rose from her seat to be escorted to the king who apparently was fussier about her appearance than she was, the shorter maiden shook her head and said, “No, His Majesty will come see you later.”

Hellebore huffed and moved to sit on the sofa where a breakfast tray sat as they left. The guards stayed, perfectly silent. Smart. The guards were staying inside the room to make sure now that Hellebore had her hands, she didn't try anything.

The sun kept climbing into the sky, and when it reached its apex, the door finally opened. She'd been staring at her injured wrists, ignoring the guards, and looked up to see the captain from before in her doorway.

So he wasn't dead. That was a relief. She didn't need to see the king with murder as one of the charges against her.

If she was a hostage, she needed to be a sympathetic one.

He looked much better than the last time she'd seen him. She rose from her seat, and his quick stride halted when she did. He looked up from the door and froze at the sight of her.

She raised an eyebrow as his eyes skimmed over her, looking like a Sun Elf and far less like a mad alchemist. His eyes darted back up to her face, and his expression steeled as he finished stepping into the room. He gave the female guards a nod, and they departed, shutting the door behind them.

Wait...

She spoke in Iubian. “What is going on?”

He paused in front of the door. “What?”

“The maids—they said the king was going to come see me.”

He stared at her. As the moment stretched down, a sinking feeling settled over her, especially as she looked him over, studying the pattern he was wearing. It was the same as the royal she'd seen the day before.

Oh no.

She’d thought the hole she’d dug for herself couldn’t get deeper. She had been very wrong.