Vayu woke in the evening, to the setting sun casting long rays of light through the windows. Cheran was still asleep, and she was still alive. She had fallen asleep a few minutes after Cheran, and someone among the servants had lit the fire in the hearth. It was too warm, and she opened the window next to her bed.

  The sky was red like a bruise, and she breathed in the cold winter air. She leaned against the window frame and started untangling her hair with her fingers. They both said they liked each other, because love was a difficult word. It was a promise that she wasn’t sure she wanted to make yet, even though she knew she loved him.

  Since they met, he had seen the ugliest parts of her. He had seen her helplessness, her weakness, her illness, and loved her still. She wondered if there was something he was hiding from her. For months she had only seen someone perfect, except in the moments where he lost all composure worried for her.

  Obal walked into the room.

  “Your highness, we’ve found something.”

  He paused, looking at Cheran’s sleeping figure.

  “Please don’t wake him,” Vayu said. “Is it urgent?”

  Obal paused. “It is regarding your poisoning. We have someone in custody.”

  “Unless it is urgent, let him rest for a few more hours.”

  Obal started to leave before turning back around. “Could you come see her, then? The woman we have in custody?”

  She knew the soldier had grown to accept and grudgingly respect her, and so she followed him out of the room.

  “She does not appear to be from Fessia,” Obal told her on their walk to the main castle’s dungeons. “She is refusing to tell us anything, despite our… strict interrogation.”

  “Hmm,” Vayu said. “I’m sure you will persuade her, soon enough. How is your shoulder?”

  Obal shook out his shoulder, as if remembering the injury. “I’m doing well enough. And you?”

  Vayu pointed down at herself. “Wonderfully.”

  It was odd that she felt so healthy. She knew it was odd, an unexplainable. Instead of poison, it was like she had been exposed to some elixir of healing. The initial pain had been like fire flowing through her veins, but after it subsided she felt almost invincible. They made their way to the stables behind the castle.

  “She’s not in the dungeons?” Vayu asked.

  “Not yet,” Obal answered. “We have a small guardhouse here. It’s further from the castle, exposed to the elements. Sometimes the rats get in. In some ways, it’s worse than being in the dungeon.”

  She could imagine the stone walls of the dungeon offered some protection from the winter, which the wooden guardhouse did not.

  “If she dies?” she asked.

  “There are guards posted outside to make sure she does not,” Obal answered.

  They made their way to the guardhouse, which was only a row of modified stables, with walls on three sides and metal bars in the front. Four guards stood in front of the guardhouse, while another sat at a desk near the edge of the structure. Obal motioned for the one sitting to unlock the sole occupied cell, and they made their way in.

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  Vayu had gotten used to the refined smells of a royal life, of scented candles and soap, of handkerchiefs washed in lye that smelled like cleanliness. She had forgotten how terrible humanity could smell, and it was all concentrated within the cell.

  “When did you find her?” she asked.

  “Yesterday afternoon, while we were at the estate. At first, she was only arrested due to her trying to come into the castle grounds through one of the servants’ entrances. After I saw her this morning, I recognized her from the tea shop.”

  She smelled vomit and piss, an unwashed body and something festering. Either Obal was lying, or the woman had been in a terrible state even before she was captured. She was nearly unrecognizable from the pretty girl who served them tea. One of the guards brought her a small chair from the outside, and Vayu sat, careful to pull her skirts closer around her so they did not touch the floor.

  “You are not dead,” the woman said, looking at Vayu. Her hands and legs were bound with shackles, but she lunged forward. “You are to be dead!”

  “I did not die,” Vayu said. “Did you want me dead so badly?”

  “I only want,” the woman rasped. “I only want what the lady wants. The lady wants you dead.”

  Obal straightened.

  “What lady?”

  It could be one of the ladies at court, one of the wealthy ladies Cheran had rejected in favor of her.

  “The lady sang to me,” the woman said. “She sang me lullabies. The world will be all song when you are dead.”

  The woman did not say ‘if’. She said ‘when’, as if Vayu dying was something unavoidable. Her feeling of invincibility faded. She had come close to death.

  “Does she sing well, this lady of yours? Perhaps I could go and hear her too,” Vayu suggested. “Perhaps if she wants me dead so badly, she can do it herself instead of making others do her dirty work.”

  “Songs are not for sinners,” she hissed. “You, with your dirtied blood could never hear the song. You could never understand, and so you must die!”

  The woman strained against her bindings, and Obal walked forward, delivering a solid kick to the center of the woman’s chest. Vayu looked away as the woman coughed and gasped for breath, as she vomited a little bit more before falling to the ground.

  “So it is a woman who hired her,” Vayu said. She could take no more of it. She wanted punishments to be quick and merciful, not this. She knew it was a necessary evil. Whoever had tried to kill her, it seemed, would keep trying until they succeeded.

  “Do you have any idea who she could be talking about?” she asked. Obal shook his head.

  He looked at the woman, now a heap of flesh on the ground. “She wasn’t speaking much until now. Sometimes, during the night, she started singing. When she talked, it was always about some song. It reminded me of those fanatics who attend the church near the river. They go to daily prayers, donate their entire earnings, promise their firstborn to the church. She sounded mad.”

  “She does sound mad,” Vayu agreed, her voice light. She stepped closer to the woman. “Could you hold her back?”

  She knew of madness. When people lost their sanity, they were either sent to the madhouse, or they were sent to the monastery. The lucky ones were sent to the monastery. For some, the madness was temporary. They covered like peopel did from any other illness, and they went back to their homes. Others, they lived with monsters only they could see, and no medicine could cure their mind.

  Vayu looked into the woman’s eyes. She saw the pinpricks of the woman’s pupils, the way her jaw was clamped shut. The woman was not herself, and had not been for some time.

  “I don’t think she will be able to tell us anything coherent,” Vayu said. “Have the physician see to her. He might have medicines for her. I don’t think she did this of her own volition or will, Obal. Her mind appears to be broken. I could be wrong, of course, but have her examined.”

  Vayu had thought she could be cruel. After all, rulers were not always kind and merciful. She thought she had the stomach to look at torture and tell them to continue. But now, she only felt bad for the woman wishing her death. She wanted to tell Obal to take her to a warm room, to feed her a hot meal.

  “The physician is already on his way,” Obal said. “She has an infection as well. She’s been walking barefoot for a while now.”

  Vayu held herself back from looking at the woman’s feet. The woman did not seem like the other people Vayu had seen who had lost their grip on sanity. She was further gone, perhaps so far there was no way back. Others she had seen did have violent urges, did harm other people, but their targets changed. Their delusions were fleeting, their thoughts scattered. The woman in front her was focused on one thing at the expense of all other things. She wanted Vayu’s death even if it meant her own.

  Whoever had driven her to such self-destruction did not care that they destroyed a life. They had let a woman go mad and then let her loose like an animal put out to pasture. Whichever lady was responsible for the young woman’s fate, they would not hesitate to do the same thing to another person. It was only a matter of time, and their enemy already had a few weeks of a head start.