Princess of Chains

The first thing you learn in the kennel is that the floor is always cold.

Not the air. The air in the princess's menagerie is warm and wet and smells of cedar chips and the faint copper tang of the feeding trough. But the floor, the stone floor of your cage, holds the night's chill until well past noon, and by the time it finally warms, the sun is already sliding down behind the western wall and the cold comes creeping back. I've been here long enough to know the exact hour it turns. I could tell time by it if I had any use for time.

My name was Matteo. I say was because names are the first thing they take. Not officially. Nobody sits you down and says, you are no longer Matteo. It happens the way most things happen here. Slowly, then all at once. The guards stop using it. The other kennel slaves forget it or decide it's not worth the risk of remembering. And then one morning you wake up and you can't recall the sound of your own mother saying it, and that's when you know it's gone.

Now I'm Forty-Two. That's the number burned into the plate that hangs from the chain around my neck. The plate is tin, cheap, stamped with the princess's crest on the back, and it clinks against my collarbone when I move. You learn to sleep on your side so it doesn't rattle. You learn a lot of things.

The kennel holds sixty of us. Thirty cages on each side of a central corridor, stacked two high, and I'm in the bottom row on the left, third from the end. From my cage I can see the corridor, the feeding trough, the door to the guards' room, and, if I press my face against the bars and angle my head just right, a sliver of the garden through the high window above the far wall. Green things grow out there. I've forgotten the names of most of them.

I woke this morning because someone was screaming.

It was coming from the far end of the corridor, near the door. A woman's voice, high and ragged, breaking apart into sobs and then rising again. I didn't move. Neither did anyone else in the cages around me. We lay still in the dark, listening, the way you listen to rain. It's not that we don't care. It's that caring costs something, and we've all learned to count our coins.

The screaming stopped. A door opened and closed. Boots on stone. Then quiet again, except for the breathing of sixty people in sixty cages, which is a sound you stop hearing after the first week.

I sat up. My back ached from the cold and from the work yesterday, hauling stone for the new fountain in the east garden. The princess is building fountains. She has seven already, but she wants eight, because eight is a lucky number in her family's tradition, and she is very serious about luck. I know this because the guards talk in front of us like we're furniture, and after a while you start to piece together the world from their scraps.

Breakfast came at the usual time. A guard named Bruno walked the corridor with a bucket and a ladle, slopping gray porridge into the bowls that sit in brackets outside each cage. Bruno is a thick-necked man with a birthmark on his jaw and a way of looking at us that suggests he's counting livestock. He doesn't hate us. That's the thing. He doesn't feel anything at all, and somehow that's worse than hatred.

He stopped at my cage. Ladled the porridge. Didn't look at me.

"Bruno," I said.

He didn't answer.

"There was screaming this morning. From the end of the row."

"Eat your food, Forty-Two."

"Who was it?"

He moved on to the next cage. I watched him go, then looked down at the bowl. The porridge was lumpy and warm, and I ate it with my fingers because they don't give us spoons. Spoons can be sharpened. So can belts, and shoes, and the tin plates around our necks, if you work at them long enough. Everything is a weapon if you're patient. The princess's advisors know this. They've written it down somewhere, I'm sure, in a book about managing human livestock.

I ate. I licked my fingers. I waited.

The morning routine is always the same. After breakfast, the guards open the cages one by one and march us to the washroom, where we stand in a line under cold water and scrub ourselves with rough soap that smells like lye. Then we dress in the gray tunics we all wear, and then we're assigned to work crews. Garden. Kitchen. Stone. Laundry. The princess's household runs on our backs, and she has a lot of household.

Today I was assigned to the garden. I was glad. The garden is the only place where I can see the sky without bars in front of it, and on good days the head gardener, an old woman named Sera who isn't a slave but might as well be, lets us work in silence without shouting.

We walked out through the side door, twelve of us in a line, chains linking our ankles but loose enough to walk if you kept pace. The garden opened up around us, green and gold in the morning light. Roses. Jasmine. A hedge maze that the princess's guests get lost in at parties, laughing, spilling wine. I've watched them from behind a hedge, these guests, these beautiful people in their silk and their jewels, and I've thought about how easy it would be to reach out and take one of them by the throat.

But that's a fantasy. Fantasies are free. Fantasies are the only thing in the kennel that doesn't cost you anything.

Sera put me on weeding duty, which meant kneeling in the dirt between the rose beds and pulling up anything that didn't belong. I worked slowly. Not because I'm lazy. Because I wanted to listen.

Two of the princess's ladies-in-waiting were walking the path above the rose garden, their skirts brushing the hedges, their voices carrying in that careless way of people who've never had to worry about being overheard.

"She's in a mood," one of them said. "Did you hear about the kennel this morning?"

"I heard something."

"One of them attacked a guard. Bit him on the hand. Can you imagine? They're putting her down tonight. The princess ordered it herself."

"Which one?"

"The one they call Twenty-Nine. The quiet one."

I kept my head down. I kept pulling weeds. But my hands had gone cold, and it wasn't from the morning air.

Twenty-Nine. I knew her. Everyone knew her. She'd been in the kennel longer than almost anyone, maybe fifteen years, and in all that time she'd never spoken a word that anyone could remember. Not to the guards. Not to the rest of us. She just worked and ate and slept and stared at the wall, and sometimes, late at night, you could hear her humming something, a tune with no words, so soft you weren't sure if you were imagining it.

She bit a guard. Twenty-Nine, who never fought, who never resisted, who seemed to have made peace with the cage in a way the rest of us couldn't.

I pulled a weed and the roots came up clean, and I thought about that. I thought about what it would take to make a woman like that bite.

And then I thought about what it would take to make a woman like that stop.

The ladies-in-waiting moved on. Their voices faded. I stayed on my knees in the dirt, and the sun climbed higher, and somewhere in the kennel, in a cage at the end of the row, a woman who had not spoken in fifteen years was waiting to die.

That night, I didn't sleep.

I lay on my side, the plate cold against my collarbone, and I listened to the kennel breathing around me. Sixty people. Sixty cages. And at the far end, a silence where Twenty-Nine used to be.

They'd taken her in the afternoon. I hadn't seen it. I'd been in the garden, and by the time we came back, her cage was empty and the straw had been swept out and replaced. Bruno was already assigning the cage to someone new, a man from the kitchen crew who'd been sleeping in the overflow pen near the stables. The kennel doesn't mourn. The kennel fills vacancies.

But I couldn't stop thinking about the humming.

I'd heard it maybe a dozen times over the years. Always at night. Always the same tune. I'd never asked her what it was. I'd never asked her anything. None of us had. She was the quiet one, and we'd all decided, without ever saying it out loud, that her silence was her business, and that respecting it was a kind of dignity we could still afford.

Now she was gone, and I realized I didn't know a single thing about her. Not her real name. Not where she'd come from. Not why she'd stopped speaking, or what she'd been humming all those nights, or what had finally broken inside her when she sank her teeth into a guard's hand.

And I realized something else.

I was next.

Not literally. Not tomorrow. But I was thirty-four years old when they brought me here, and I've been here six years, and I've watched the ones who last and the ones who don't. The ones who last learn to disappear. They learn to be furniture. They learn to make themselves so small and so quiet that the guards forget they exist, and forgetting is the only mercy this place offers.

Twenty-Nine had disappeared better than anyone. And then one day she hadn't.

So what was the point? What was the point of disappearing if you were going to bite a guard's hand in the end anyway?

I turned onto my back. The plate clinked. I didn't care.

Above me, through the high window, I could see a single star, faint and white against the dark. I stared at it for a long time. And then, for the first time in six years, I did something I hadn't done since the day they brought me here.

I made a decision.

I was going to find out what Twenty-Nine had been humming. I was going to find out who she was. And I was going to do it before the same thing happened to me.

I didn't know how. I didn't know what it would cost. But the decision settled into my chest like a stone, and I held onto it, and I didn't let go.

The kennel breathed around me, cold and patient, and somewhere beyond the walls, the princess's fountains ran all night, eight of them now, lucky, endless, pouring water into the dark.