Learning to Cope
Unfortunately the prince didn't cut off my hand the next day. He walked into the room proud and smug, and announced he wasn't going to try and test my re-growth again yet, instead, he mixed up a powder into a glass of wine and made me drink it. I told him I hadn't had my womanhood ceremony yet, so I couldn't drink alcohol, but he pinched my nose and poured it down my throat anyway. The taste was sharp and bitter and it burned as it went down, I gagged and coughed, and dark blood speckled my dress in front of my when I did.
Almost instantly after drinking it, my stomach began to churn and twist, I moaned and tried to curl up, but the straps held me down. He pulled up my dress and looked at my stomach, and I could see the black streaks of my worms thrashing under the surface. I tried to focus on them, tell them to get the wine out of me, but my head was fuzzy and a bit muddled by then, and they just kept going in circles, trying to fix the holes in my insides as they formed. Eventually, they figured out what was going on, and I felt the wine and powder pool up in my stomach, and then without warning, I vomited it up, the bloody, tainted wine shooting out of my mouth and across the room. The prince's eyes lit up and he wrote on and on in his notebook, looking very pleased as my worms were finally able to stitch my stomach back together.
"Wonderful... Poisons are ejected from the mouth, that's wonderful, just wonderful, I won't have to use tasters anymore, I can eat my own food, just wonderful. Next up is... Oh, this will be interesting, I see, I'll need to prepare for that. Sweetheart, you could use a rest anyway, I presume? It looks like your stomach is still churning, I'll let you be done for the day, I got what I wanted, but you're not getting scraps tonight, not after wasting wine like that! Ahaha, just a bit of a joke there... But you will be getting dungeon rations tonight, either way, I need to start seeing how nutrition changes your abilities, and we need you to have the same diet while we get our baseline measurements. Then we can start weening you off, of course. Well, anyway, is there anything I can get you in the meantime?"
I opened my mouth to speak, but only a spray of blood and a raspy wheeze came out. It would seem my throat was still torn up from the tainted wine. The prince chuckled at that, and spoke in an overacted and dramatic way.
"Ohh, nothing at all? Nothing? Well, I'm sure Sister Mill would want something, as a favor, I'll give you something for her, out of the goodness of my heart, what would she like? A pony? A new dress? To not have to hang from the ceiling like a puppet?"
I frown at him and swallow a mouthful of blood. I had considered spitting it at him, but I knew that would end badly. Still, I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of trying to speak again. This seemed to encourage him though and he carried on.
"Oh, how selfish! If you don't want anything, she can't have it either? How horrible of you, what a bad friend! She must hate you, you could end her suffering with a word, and yet... nothing. Tsk tsk, a shame on you, this must be why you were homeless, no one would ever take in such a selfish child as you!"
I knew his words were only empty teasing, things said to hurt me, but the pain still welled up. I fought back the tears and shut down my face, trying to feel and show as little as possible. He laughed again, and once more drug me back to the wall where he chained me up. He gave Mill a strange hug on the way out that made her choke and go stiff until he left, but I couldn't see why.
Like he promised, the dinner that night was just bread and water. My throat and stomach were taking longer to heal than the finger did, and I was still having trouble talking. I guessed that internal damage took a bit more time to heal, but I could still tell it was healing. I think the prince knew I wasn't fully healed internally however, as both the bread and water were salted, and my stomach screamed in pain as I swallowed.
~
The test the next day was worse than the wine. The prince coated the top of my leg with a type of yellow jelly, and while it was a bit cold, I didn't understand what the test was until the prince lit a bit of string with one of the gas lamps on the wall and held it to the jelly. My leg lit up like a candle. It was the worst pain I had ever felt, and while it didn't spread much past where he had spread the jelly, it burned down, into my leg meat, searing and flaking muscle and skin. Of course, as was getting to be routine, I screamed until my throat hurt.
An aspect of the burning I didn't expect was the change from sharp pain to a dull throb after a few minutes. My leg was still burning, and I could see the bone, but the majority of the worst pain seemed to fade. I wasn't sure why it happened, but as I started to calm down and my screams turned to moans, the prince seemed to lose interest in the test, and he snuffed out the flames roughly with a heavy wet cloth.
Once the fire was out, my worms, who had retreated to my foot and abdomen at the lighting of the fire began to try and re-enter the burned husk of my leg. They couldn't seem to burst through the cooked part at first, and the price grew increasingly more annoyed as he poked and scraped at the meat, looking for signs of regrowth. Eventually, I realized I could direct the worms to eat the hardened flesh, and as they did I could feel them poke through and begin to emit their pink paste, rebuilding my ruined leg. The ones in my foot ate away at the flesh too, but didn't seem to be able to produce the paste for some reason, and it took until the worms from the top reached them for them to help with reconstruction.
Once the worms started working, as usual, the prince started writing in his notebook, noting times and how the process worked. He never addressed me once. In fact, he never even made eye contact, he just wrote, and watched my leg heal. I began to learn that this was his usual self, quiet, not thinking of others as "there", and just focused on his work. It would get to the point later that even if I spoke to him he wouldn't seem to hear me.
Once my leg was mostly healed and covered with dark grey and pink squiggles, he pulled a metal stick off of the tool wall. It had a round circle on the end, and the letter "N" backwards in fancy script in the center of that circle. He shoved the circle end into the furnace and let it get red hot. Of course I knew what was coming next, I had helped do it to Farmer Anayis' animals once or twice. I started to cry, my eyes burning and my heart pounding, but he ignored me and firmly held the brand against my face, holding it there for much longer that Anayis had instructed me and Mill to hold it to the cattle. I felt the heat rip through my cheek and into my mouth, I opened my lips and gasped for air, trying to cool the inside of my mouth. I feel one of my teeth crack in half and a pain stronger than the burn shot up into my brain.
He pulled the brand away, the skin peeling off with it and I shake in the straps, trying to comprehend the overwhelming sensations; my leg still throbbing, my face feeling like it was still on fire, my tooth shattered and the taste of blood and a screaming pain going into my head. I tried to scream again, but my mind wouldn't even work that much, and I ended up just gurgling, drooling thick, bloody spit onto my neck. The prince perked up at this, and forced my mouth open, poking at my tooth with his quill. I spasmed at his touch, and everything went white
When I came to again, I was chained to the wall by one hand. There was a half eaten plate of dry bread on the floor in front of me and Mill was asleep across from me, hanging limply, her habit torn more and her face bruised again. My cheek still burned, and my tooth still ached. I poked at the cracked tooth with my tongue again, and to my horror, the bits came right away out of the socket. I gagged and spit them out, the tiny bits of bone clattering on the stone. Mill sighed in her sleep and swung in her chains and I sat still for a moment, making sure I hadn't woken her. Cautiously, I poked the hole where the tooth had come from. It was deep, and unsurprisingly there were worms sliding around inside. I made one slide out into my mouth, and held it on my tongue for a long while, feeling it twitch, and feeling the heat and wet from my mouth from the worm's perspective. It was a strange sensation, being aware of something and being that something too; almost like a numbness, but without a loss of feeling.
After that long while, I directed it back into the tooth hole, and bent over to pick up the half chunk of bread. Taking a bite, I tasted different blood, not the sweet, tangy taste of my blood, but a metallic taste, and I pulled back and looked at the bread. It was too dim to see anything much, but looking at Mill's face, I could only assume it was hers. I shuddered and took another bite, taking care not to chew on the side with the empty, throbbing hole. I washed it down with the rest of the water, still slightly salted for some reason, and stood up. I stretched as best as I could, with one arm free I could actually move around a bit much more than I could in days. I popped my back, and sighed in relief as the feeling in my legs slowly came back.
I looked down to see my whole leg had grown back, the pink and black swirl pattern covering it from knee to ankle, it still hurt, in fact even my fingers still hurt, but it was there, and whole again. I flexed it, and felt the worms acting as tendons, pulling and twisting in my leg to give it support and structure. I felt them out, and 'saw' that they had a sort of rigidity to them, I couldn't pull them away from their spot anymore, like they were a part of me forever like the ones that helped to make up my skin.
I sat back down and leaned against the wall, watching Mill's chest shake as she raggedly breathed. It had been days since we actually touched each other. We usually slept with each other in our arms, and this amount of time with a full lack of touch was painful, it made a sore spot in my chest. I scooted forward, and reached out with my free hand as far as I could, and I just barely could brush her hair. At my touch, she cringed, still sleeping, and mumbled softly, swinging on her arms. I slumped, and lay down as best I could to rest, feeling the tiny sharp prick poking out of the once empty tooth hole.
~
The next few weeks were hell. Well, more hell than it had been at least. The daily "tests" continued, with every day bringing a new torture to me. One day I would have acid thrown on my chest, another I would have insects put on or in me, I had fingers removed and damaged or poisoned and then reattached. There were other, lesser tortures to be had too, stabbings, more burnings, different poisons, and extracting teeth, which always grew back sharp and pointed, making my speech more slurred as more and more teeth were shattered, pulled, drilled out, and burned.
Mill didn't fair very well either. Whenever I would pass out during a test, I would find her sobbing or knocked out, always a bit bloody, and her habit was almost always torn more than it had been before. The prince commented on this once, in his standard confusing way, Calling her injuries "love taps" and telling me if I didn't go out so fast, she wouldn't get them. Mill, for her part, refused to tell me what the prince was doing to her.
"It's my burden, ye've got yer torture, let me deal wi' this, it's not fir ye to think abou' yet."
More than anything I wanted to be able to help her, to find out what he was doing and stop it, but I wasn't about to argue with Mill. Despite the torture that seemed to go on without end and seemed to be endlessly creative, the prince still never removed an arm or hand like we wanted. All of my fingers had been re-grown at this point, and one of my feet, but nothing that could be used to get the keys and get us free. My body was an aching, throbbing mess all the time now, half my face and most of my body was the pink and black pattern.
One day, after a session of cutting my arms with sharp knives and seeing if horizontal or vertical healed faster, the prince made the mistake of leaving one of his knives on my chest while he wrote. I stared at it, my mind racing, and glanced at the prince. He was in one of his moods where he didn't consider me to be alive, so he was fully ignoring me to fill in his notes. I took a slow breath and rocked ever so slowly away from him, lifting up enough to let the blade slide down my chest and to the side where my arm was strapped
The knife slid to the table with a dull sound, muffled by the ragged remains of my dress and I froze, looking at the prince. He was muttering to himself, still not looking at me as he wrote quickly. I pulled my hand back as far as it would go, and was able to just barely grasp the tip of the knife, pulling it down into my palm. I flipped it over, and tilted it back, and slid it through the leather strap, cutting it like paper. I shivered slightly, thinking of cutting skin the same way, and then looked a the prince again, gaging the distance. Behind him, Mill watched in wide eyed rapture, and I knew I had to try. If I moved too much, he'd notice, even he wasn't that oblivious, so I had to make the movement count.
With all the force I could muster, I lunged forward and plunged the knife into his left eye, the juice spraying out as the eyeball split, and I felt the knife hit bone. I held on tight as he screamed and jerked back, leaving the knife in my hand. I quickly sliced the remaining bonds, and jumped off the table onto him as he writhed on the floor. I stabbed him in the chest, and cut his belt off, pulling the keys free. My heart racing, I limped to the cell door and opened it, and rushed over to free Mill.
"Ye did it! We kin git out! We're free!" she crowed as she tugged me towards the stairs, stepping over the still floor bound prince.
We dashed up the stairs as fast as we could, which wasn't too fast, as I was still woozy from blood loss and Mill had been standing in one spot for weeks by now, but we still burst through the wooden door and into the castle itself. Out of breath and panting, we both ran for the front hall, feeling the sunlight on our skin as we ran past the open windows, our footsteps muffled by the heavy carpet. I let myself smile, and I squeezed Mill's hand, she laughed a small, rough laugh like she used to, and we turned the corner into the entryway.
Standing in the hall, looking bored was the guard that brought us our food. I froze at seeing her, but Mill bolted faster, yanking my limp body behind her. The guard yelled loudly, calling for help, and reached for her spear. We were almost to the door when I felt the thud of something hitting my back, dead center. My legs kicked out, and I went numb from the chest down. I looked down and saw the tip of a spear jabbing through my front, and I slumped over, unable to move. Mill screamed, and tugged at me.
"Gi' up, we're almos' out! Gi' up gi' up gi' up!"
She pulled at my arms and I groaned as my chest tightened and flexed, the worms already trying to figure out how to heal this, but no matter how fast they had gotten, it wasn't fast enough. Mill looked at me, and I looked back up at her. Her eyes watered, but she didn't say anything else. She sat down beside me and hugged me as tight as she could. It hurt terribly, and I could only feel her in my arms and shoulders, but it felt so, so good to feel her grip again, to be in her arms. As I blacked out once again, I saw the guard slam her gauntleted fist into Mill's head, and I felt her arms go limp around me.