Shadows of neglect

"I'm so tired," she thought, though the words came to her not in any kind of voice, not even her own, but as a thin presence in her skull, barely coherent, sanded down to its last grain by exhaustion. She was so tired she could feel her thoughts dissolving, joining the rest of her—she was sure of it, if she waited long enough, the distinction between mind and body would simply go away, and maybe that was what dying felt like. She was so tired.

She lay on her side, knees drawn to her stomach, cheek pressed into the stone. The stone was colder than anything, colder than her own skin, and the cold was a kind of company. The chill had seeped through her thin shift and nested into her joints, where it became a persistent ache. Sometimes she shivered, but mostly she just trembled, a perpetual tremor as the body’s last protest.

Her cell was not really a cell, not as she had imagined from stories: it was not a cage with iron bars, or a pit in the ground, or a chamber with a straw pallet and a window to a courtyard. It was a long rectangle carved under the kitchens, barely wide enough for her to stretch out her legs. There was no window. The only door was a slab of rough wood set with a rusting lock, which meant it could only be opened from the outside. There were no chains, though the guards had offered to fit her with them, as a joke, and the echo of their laughter still rattled around the stone at odd hours.

She could hear the kitchens above her. It was a distant sound, most of the time, but every now and then, at odd hours, she’d catch the scrape of iron on iron, the flaring hiss of a skillet, or the muffled talk of women whose lives never intersected with hers except by the food they sent down—or didn’t send. Sometimes the food would arrive in a pail, slopped through the hatch in the bottom of the door, and sometimes it didn’t arrive at all. In the beginning, she had marked the days by the food, but that was a mistake: days here were not measured by the rhythms of the court, or by lessons, or even by daylight. Time here had nothing to do with sunlight.

Her lips were cracked and bleeding, the taste of iron in her mouth. She’d stopped picking at them, which was something—her nails had always been a mess, always bitten to the quick, and now they were worse, shredded and raw from scraping at the stone. Her hair was matted behind her ear, slick with grease, and it stuck to her face when she turned her head. The only thing that felt like her own was the dull amber of her eyes—though even that was fading. She had caught her reflection once, in the lid of the soup pot the guards sometimes left for her to clean, and the color was wrong, filmy, like piss instead of sunlight. She’d looked away fast, not wanting to know what the rest of her face had become.

She ran her tongue along her lips, hunting for a patch that wasn’t open or bleeding, but found only scabs and dry, papery skin. Her mouth was sticky, the tongue itself swollen, and the only moisture left in her body was the tears she stubbornly refused to shed. Water was never given to her in any measure that could help; the first week, she had learned to catch the condensation from the wall, licking at the slick places in the mortar, collecting the droplets in her cupped hands. Sometimes, at night, the air would be so cold her breath would fog against the stone, and she’d lap that up, too. But mostly, she was left to wait for the maids to bring her the pail, or to sneak a sip from the cleaning bucket when no one was looking.

The hunger was different than the thirst, but not by much. At first, the hunger had been sharp, a kind of gnawing that kept her awake and made her want to scream. Now it was just an ache, a weight inside her chest, like a stone someone had left there and forgotten about. She remembered reading once, as a child, that a person could survive for weeks without food, but only days without water. It seemed cruel to learn that lesson firsthand, and even crueler that she had not yet died.

Her body felt smaller than it used to be.

She had not grown in months—and what little softness she’d once had was gone, replaced by skin stretched tight over her bones. Her wrists were thin enough that she could almost circle them with her thumb and finger; her legs, which used to be strong from running in the palace gardens, were now sticks that ached even when she lay still. She imagined herself as a creature made only of bones, a collection of knuckles and joints and eye sockets, moving slowly to conserve the last bits of energy. She knew if she looked down she’d see her own ribs, jutting out like the cages of sick birds.

When she closed her eyes, the world turned red and black behind her eyelids, a patchwork of darkness and whatever light leaked through the cracks in the door. Sometimes she dreamed—of water, or of sunlight, or of the sound of laughter that wasn’t meant to hurt. But mostly she just drifted, the edge between waking and sleeping so thin she could not tell when she crossed it.

There was nothing to do here, except wait. Sometimes she tried to count the hours, but it was useless; the rhythm of the kitchen had nothing to do with her, and there were days when no one came at all. In the long silences, she listened to her own heartbeat. It was a slow, animal thing, persistent and unreasonably steady, the only thing left in her that felt alive.

She was used to the pain, or at least the flavor of it. The first few times the guards had come down, she’d cried out—she remembered that, though not the sound itself, only the taste of blood after. Now she didn’t even bother. The beatings were not regular, not every day, but they came often enough that she’d stopped hoping they’d end. Sometimes they were methodical, ordered by his majesty for some new perceived slight; sometimes they were lazy, just a way to pass the time for the men who drew the short straw to the night shift. The maids, too, were not innocent—they took a different pleasure in it, the kind that was worse because it was accompanied by sweet, false words, as if they believed their own stories about why she deserved this.

She had stopped trying to remember the last time she had been clean, or the last time someone had spoken to her in a voice that was not a sneer or a threat. Her mother’s face was gone, erased from her memory by the constant repetition of stone and darkness, but she remembered the feeling of her mother’s arms, the way they had wrapped around her, the way they had made her feel as if she was safe and wanted. That feeling had been stripped from her, piece by piece, until she was left with nothing but herself, and even that felt like a punishment.

Sometimes, in the deepest part of night, she thought about what it would be like to die. She did not fear it, not really, but she was not ready for it, either. It felt wrong, to end like this, to have come so far only to vanish into the damp. She was not brave enough to welcome death, but she was too stubborn to invite it, so she lingered in the space between, holding on by the edge of her teeth.

Her name had been stripped from her, too. She was not Princess, not Daughter, not even Girl. The guards called her Rat, or less. She clung to the old names in her mind, repeating them to herself in the dark: Daughter, Sister, Princess. Sometimes, she would mouth the words, silent, just to feel the shape of them on her cracked lips.

She was so tired. The tiredness was not just in her muscles, but in her bones, in her teeth, in the soft places behind her eyes. Even thinking took effort, and the thoughts were always the same: I want to live. I just want to live. The words were pathetic, childish, and she hated herself for thinking them, but they would not go away. She wanted to live.

There was a sound from the kitchens, a clatter of something dropped, the voice of a woman raised in anger. It echoed down the chute and into her cell, a brief reminder that there was a world above her, a world where people yelled and argued and threw things, a world that did not notice her absence. She listened, for a moment, and then it faded.

She opened her eyes, and the ceiling was there, just as it always was, just as it would be until the end of things. Her amber eyes stared back at the ceiling, waiting for something—anything—to change.

It was always the maids who brought the food, never the guards. The guards were content to lurk in the stairwell, sharing a smoke or passing a flask back and forth, but the maids were required to deliver the food themselves. This was explained to her early on, when her captivity was still something new enough to require explanations. The words used were always the same: not fit for a soldier’s hands, better the women deal with it. They never said what “it” was. She had come to understand that she herself was the “it.”

There was a sound at the hatch—a scratch, then a bang. The slot at the bottom of the door snapped open and a battered metal tray clattered onto the stone. The tray was followed by a second, lighter thud, the sound of something damp and soft striking the floor. Then, footsteps, and the trailing laughter of two women. She recognized the voices. She always did.

The smell came before anything else. Even before she crawled to the door, before she was on her hands and knees scrabbling for the tray, the odor had reached her: a sharp, yeasty stench like wet wood left in the sun, layered with something sour and off. She waited, the way she always did, just long enough to be sure the footsteps were retreating, the laughter fading up the stairs. Then she pulled the tray toward her.

It was bread, as always, but the bread was gray and hard as stone. The top was mottled green and blue, the mold in full bloom, and it left a trail of powder on the metal where she scraped at it with her thumb. Beside the bread was a wedge of cheese, slick and shiny with oil, its rind split and leaking. She remembered the taste from the first time she’d tried it, weeks ago: it was so bitter it had made her gag, and for a full day afterwards she’d retched up bile until her throat burned. The only other item on the tray was a tin cup of water—or what was supposed to be water, but even before she lifted it to her lips, she could see the faint film floating on top, and the bottom was clouded with grit.

The bread was the worst. She had learned not to bite it directly—it would snap her teeth, the crust so tough she’d nearly bloodied her gums on the first attempt. Instead she used her fingers, pinching away the wettest, least-moldy parts and shoving them between her teeth, swallowing without chewing. The taste was earthy and sour, a flavor that filled her mouth and seemed to creep up the back of her throat, as if the mold had grown inside her.

She forced herself to finish it, every crumb, even the ones she had to scrape from the tray with her fingernail. She licked the metal clean, and then, after a moment’s hesitation, ran her tongue along the inside of the tin cup, gathering the moisture there, the way a dog would. The water was cold, but so bitter she nearly spit it out—she recognized the taste, now, as the runoff from the kitchen mops. They must have filled the cup from the cleaning bucket, not even bothering to rinse it.

She drank it anyway.

The maids sometimes stayed at the hatch to watch her eat, and when they did, she pretended not to notice. They would talk among themselves, loud enough for her to hear. “Look at her,” one would say, “eating like a rat.” Or, “That one’s got no shame, after all.” Once, after she had licked the tray clean, one of the maids had leaned close to the hatch and whispered, “Your mother used to say that a lady never licked her plate.” There had been laughter, high and mean.

She used to think she could hate them, but even hate was a luxury here. Instead, she simply watched. She learned the names of the worst ones—there was the tall, freckled maid who always spat into her water, the little one with crooked teeth who wore perfume to mask the stench of the cell. She learned the rhythms of their shifts, the patterns of their footsteps, the cadence of their cruelty. Sometimes she imagined she was one of them, moving freely through the palace, making jokes at someone else’s expense. But it was impossible to hold on to the fantasy for long.

The bread caught in her throat, and for a moment she thought she would choke. She coughed, coughed again, and finally forced it down. Her eyes watered, but she refused to let herself cry. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and the skin there was so dry that it rasped against her lips, leaving a thin line of blood where the flesh split.

She thought of her father, the king. The word tasted sour in her mind, though not as bad as the bread. He had not spoken to her in months, not since the night they had dragged her from her bed and down to the kitchens, the night her status as princess was formally revoked. There was a ceremony for it, of course, as there was a ceremony for everything: a declaration before the council, a reading of the charges, a public statement to the effect that she, and all her claims, were null and void. She remembered standing there in her nightgown, hair tangled and face red from crying, while her father looked past her, his eyes fixed on the wall behind her head. He had not said her name, not once, during the whole affair.

The guards and maids all knew the story, or thought they did. They repeated it among themselves, adding details, twisting it into something that could be laughed at over a meal or gossiped about during a slow shift. She had heard every version: that she was a thief, a liar, a witch, a bastard, a spy. That she was dangerous, or insane, or both. She did not bother to correct them. The truth would have made no difference, and anyway, there was no one here to listen.

She was nothing, now, and even that was a joke to the women above. Sometimes she listened to them as they prepared meals for the rest of the palace, their voices rising and falling in a rhythm that sounded, to her, like music. They would talk about the children, their own or someone else’s, about the men they liked or hated, about the weather, the holidays, the coming of spring. Once, a new girl had asked about the cell, not knowing what was behind the hatch, and the others had laughed at her. “There’s nothing down there,” they said, “nothing worth worrying about.” The new girl had seemed to believe them.

She used to believe in something, too. She used to believe that someone would come for her—that her father would change his mind, that her siblings would rally, that the palace would not allow its own to rot in the dark. Now, she could not remember the last time she’d thought that way. The world above and the world below were two different places, and she knew which one she belonged to.

She pushed the tray aside, folding her arms across her chest, and let her head rest against the cold stone. The hunger had not been sated, but it was dulled for now. She listened to the distant noises, the shuffle of feet in the hallway, the clink of dishes from the kitchen. She listened, and waited, and tried not to think.

Even so, the words came, the way they always did, echoing in the space where her thoughts used to be: My existence means nothing. I am nothing.

The words did not hurt as much as they used to.

She did not allow herself to cry, but sometimes the tears leaked out anyway, trickling from the corners of her eyes and pooling along the edge of her nose. In those moments, when she could not stop herself, she whispered the words like a prayer: “I don’t want to die.” The words were barely audible, the breath of them so thin it might not have existed at all, but she repeated them, again and again, as if they might be enough to keep her alive. “I don’t want to die.”

The stone beneath her cheek was slick with old tears, the skin chafed raw from rubbing against it. She pressed her face harder into the cold, letting the pain of it drive away the memory that always came, like a shadow, whenever she closed her eyes. But the memory was stubborn. It hovered in the darkness, waiting to pounce.

If only. If only she had not left her room that night. If only she had not been so thirsty, so desperate for water, that she’d risked the wrath of the guards to slip down the hall toward the kitchens. If only she had not paused outside the council room, drawn by the light spilling from the crack beneath the door. If only she had not listened.

But she had listened. She had crouched there in the shadows, her back pressed to the wall, her heart pounding so loud she thought it would give her away. She could hear her father’s voice, low and steady, speaking in the formal tones he used only with his most trusted advisors. She recognized the other voice, too—the aid, the one who was always at his side.

They spoke as if she did not exist, as if she was already gone. The words were cold, businesslike, as they discussed her future in the past tense. She remembered the exact phrase: “It would be best for all involved if she simply vanished. Quietly. Without incident.”

She had covered her mouth with both hands, stifling a gasp. She remembered the taste of her own skin, the roughness of her palms, the trembling that started in her fingers and spread up her arms, her whole body shaking so hard she thought her bones might rattle apart.

She had tried to back away, slow and silent, but she was not careful enough. Her heel struck something hard. The vase. She had not seen it in the darkness, and when it tipped, she reached for it, but her hands were wet with sweat, and it slipped through her fingers, crashed to the floor, exploded into a thousand shards.

The silence that followed was absolute. The voices in the room stopped.

For a moment—just a moment—she thought she could run, that she could make it back to her room and bury herself under the covers and pretend nothing had happened. But even then she knew it was hopeless. The silence from the council room had a quality to it, an alertness, as if every ear inside was now pointed directly at her.

She remembered turning, remembered the slow-motion feeling of her body as she pushed herself upright, desperate to flee. The door to the council room opened, spilling yellow light into the corridor, and in that light she saw the face of her father’s aid. He was smiling. The smile was not friendly.

"Well, well, well,” the aid said, stepping into the light. His smile was wide and sharp, all teeth and no warmth. “Look what we have here. A little rat that shouldn’t be out at this hour.”

She tried to back away, but her feet refused to move. The man advanced, his boots slapping against the tile, his gaze fixed on her with the same cold amusement he reserved for breaking in new horses. She knew, in that moment, that she was trapped.

He grabbed her by the hair, the fist tight against her scalp, and yanked her forward. The pain was blinding, but she did not scream—not yet. He dragged her into the council room, her toes barely grazing the ground, and when she finally managed to let out a sound it was a thin, strangled yelp.

The room was full of men—her father at the head of the table, the other councilors ranged on either side, none of them meeting her eyes. She recognized their faces, even though the world was spinning around her. Some she had known since childhood; some were strangers, brought in to replace the ones who had died or left or fallen from grace. They all looked the same now: blank, bored, waiting for the scene to play out.

The aid released her and gave her a shove, and she stumbled forward, hitting the floor with her knees. The impact rattled her teeth, sent a jolt of pain up her spine, but she refused to cry. She would not give them that.

She looked up, forcing herself to meet her father’s gaze. His face was a mask, unmoving, the lines around his mouth deeper than she remembered. His eyes, when they found hers, were empty of everything—of love, of pity, of even the barest recognition. It was as if he was looking through her at something far away.

“Poor little Rat didn’t know when to keep hidden,” the aid said, his voice dripping with mockery. “Oh well. Now she knows.”

She did not answer. She kept her eyes on her father, waiting for him to speak, to do anything, to give some sign that she was not invisible. But he did nothing. He did not even flinch when the aid stepped behind her and shoved her again, harder this time, so that she sprawled on the floor in front of the entire room.

Her palms scraped against the rough rug, and she bit down on the inside of her cheek, tasting blood. The men around the table were silent, staring. One of them shifted in his chair, but no one moved to help her.

The aid leaned down, his breath hot against her ear. “You hear things you shouldn’t, you end up where you don’t belong. Isn’t that right, Your Majesty?”

Her father did not answer. He only nodded, slow and deliberate, as if he was agreeing to some point made earlier in the evening.

The aid stood upright, his hands on his hips. “What do you want done with her?” he asked.

“Take her away,” her father said, his voice flat. “She is no longer welcome here.”

And just like that, she was nothing. The councilors went back to their papers, the aid hauled her to her feet, and her father turned away, as if the whole thing bored him. The look in his eyes, the moment before he looked away, was not hatred, or anger, or even disappointment. It was something colder, emptier—a wish that she had never existed at all.

She remembered being dragged from the room, the laughter of the aid echoing down the corridor, the hands of the guards rough as they led her down the stairs to the cell. She remembered the last thing her father said, just before the door slammed shut: “Make sure she doesn’t come back.”

In the present, on the cold stone, she blinked away a tear. There was no reason to think of any of it now, no reason to remember. But the memory was always waiting, ready to pounce, whenever she closed her eyes. The rest of it came in flashes: the rough hands grabbing her by the hair, the sudden yank that brought her to her knees, the way the men inside the room laughed as she was dragged forward, skidding across the rug on hands and knees. She remembered her father standing at the head of the table, his hands clasped behind his back, his face unreadable. She remembered begging—she was not proud of it, but she had begged, pleaded, cried, the way a child does when she still believes someone will save her.

No one had saved her.

She pressed her face into her arms and let the darkness have her.

It was as simple as that. One moment she was a princess—unwanted, unloved, but still a princess—and the next she was a problem to be disposed of. She remembered the scraping of the guards’ boots on the stone as they dragged her away, the snickering of the maids as they watched her pass, the way the doors to the upper halls shut behind her with a sound like the end of a story.

If only, she thought. If only she had stayed in bed, hidden under the blankets, thirsty and afraid but still safe. If only she had not been so curious, so foolish, so desperate. If only she had not heard.

But there was no undoing it.

The memory replayed itself in her mind every night, over and over, a punishment more exquisite than any beating. She would see the vase, the shattering, the sudden turn of faces in the council room, and feel the cold grip of fear close around her throat. She would remember the smile of the aid, the blankness of her father’s eyes, the way the guards had manhandled her without hesitation, as if they’d been waiting for this moment all along.

She whispered the words again, “I don’t want to die,” but she knew that, sooner or later, she would.

The cell was silent. The only sound was the soft, rhythmic breath of her own body, the occasional drip of water from the ceiling, the scurrying of something small and unseen in the corner. She closed her eyes and tried, for the thousandth time, to imagine what might have been.

But there was nothing left to imagine.

She squeezed her eyes shut and let the darkness press in, thick and absolute. She was so tired. Her bones ached, her skin burned, and every muscle in her body was tight with pain. But it was the memory that hurt the most. It clung to her, a weight she could not shake. She tried to breathe, but the air was thin and heavy, and each breath was an effort.

“If there really is a god,” she whispered, barely a breath, “please don’t let me die.”

She said it again, and again, the words tumbling in her head, half prayer, half plea. She did not know who she was speaking to, or what she expected, but she repeated the words until her lips stopped moving and her mouth was too dry for sound. Her vision blurred, the stone and shadow blending together. She felt herself drifting, floating, as if her body had finally given up on her.

The pain faded, replaced by a numbness that was almost peaceful. She could not feel her hands or feet. She could not feel anything at all, except the heat of her own tears on her face.

It would be so easy to let go. To surrender. To slip away and never wake up.

The darkness deepened. Her thoughts slowed. The edges of the world curled in, growing smaller and smaller, until all that was left was a single, fading point of light.

Then, suddenly, there was a noise—a loud crash, so close it made her flinch. The sound echoed through the cell, shocking her back to awareness. There were footsteps, fast and urgent, and the door to her cell slammed open.

A figure burst through, wrapped in a dark cloak, moving so quickly it seemed more shadow than human. She tried to open her eyes, but they would not focus. She could only see the blur of the cloak, the sweep of fabric as it knelt beside her.

Arms, warm and strong, slid under her back and knees, lifting her gently from the stone. She wanted to cry out, to ask what was happening, but her throat was too raw for sound. The stranger wrapped her in something soft—a blanket, thick and warm, the first warmth she’d felt in months. She was cradled like a child, held close against the woman’s chest, the smell of soap and earth and wind filling her nose.

“My young lady, please hang on,” the woman said. The voice was low and urgent, kind in a way she had not heard in so long. “Everything will be—”

The words dissolved before they finished, swept away by the tide of unconsciousness. She felt herself drifting, slipping under, as if she’d been dropped into a deep pool of black water. The world narrowed to points of sensation: the warmth of the blanket, the press of unfamiliar arms, the rocking motion as she was carried up and away from the cell.

She could not tell if she was awake, or dreaming, or already dead.

Images flickered in her mind. The ceiling of the cell, gray and endless. Her father’s face, cold and hard. The aid’s crooked smile. The moldy bread, the sour cheese, the grit in the water. The memories spun together, tangled and bright and raw, filling her with a pain that was almost worse than anything her body had endured.

She heard the woman’s voice again, distant and muffled, as if underwater: “It’s all right. I’ve got you. You’re safe.”

Safe. The word made no sense. It was not a word that belonged to her life, not anymore. Safe was something that happened to other children, other daughters, other girls whose families wanted them. Not to the unwanted ones. Not to the rats.

As she floated, she tried to remember when it had started to go wrong. Was it the night she left her room, thirsty and afraid? Was it the day her mother died, and no one in the palace bothered to comfort her? Was it the moment her father looked through her, as if she was already a ghost?

Her siblings—7 of them, all older—had hated her from the beginning. She was the accident, the afterthought, the mistake that should have been hidden away. She was never clever enough to them, never pretty enough, never brave or cruel or cunning enough to earn their love. When her father turned his back, they followed, as if hatred was a game and she was the ball passed from hand to hand.

Even now, as she was carried through halls she could no longer name, she could feel their contempt clinging to her skin. She wondered if they would miss her, if they would celebrate when she was gone. She wondered if the palace would even notice.

The darkness threatened to swallow her again, but just before it closed, she thought she felt the woman’s hand on her face, brushing the hair from her forehead with a touch so gentle it made her ache.

She wanted to ask, “Why?” Why had it all gone so wrong? Why had none of them ever loved her? Why had she even been born? But her mouth would not form the words, and the woman’s voice faded, replaced by the hum of the world turning without her.

She gave in to the darkness at last, letting it pull her down. Maybe, this time, it would be kind.

Maybe, this time, she would be able to sleep without waking up.