Drawing himself together instantly, like a cat, like an animal, Lis jumped up. At one jump, away from the bed, pulling the canopy to the side, and at the same time turning around.
Her dark hair was still braided in two tight braids, long to the floor.
Lying on his bed, Shela looked at Lis with strange whitish eyes without pupils.
A match struck, and the darkness of the room was a little diffused by a blinking light. Lis turned to the light, and Nikto saw it. Nikto lit a candle.
“W-what the hell is going on here?” Whispered the Lis.
Nikto shook his head oddly, and laid aside the open book lying on the table. It was a book of Lis. It was very convenient for making various drugs.
“A useful book,” said Nikto, “and a complicated one. However, I never doubted you,” he added, trying to smile. And in the dim light of the candle, his grin turned out to be truly creepy.
Lis staggered back and looked at Shela:
– She…
“She was cold there, in the basement where the servants threw her. At the very bottom. See what the rats did to her?”
Lis with undisguised disgust looked at Shela, at her chewed stumps instead of her hands. Hands that once so gently and skillfully caressed him. Her legs were chopped down to the knees. Exactly chopped off. Lis knew that. Rats could gnaw them, but they would leave bones. And too evenly they were bitten off. Apparently others feasted on her feet. Other, eternally hungry creatures living in this castle, and having maybe even less rights than rats. Slaves of Prince Arel.
Interestingly, do rats eat their own specie? Do they bite off their paws?
She was the same disenfranchised gray shadow, a rat, only in human form. And now she was lying on his bed, dirtying it with black stained blood from vile stumps.
“It's you!” Yelled Lis frantically. “You killed her! Now take her away! Let her bask in your bed! But she has nothing to do with me!”
“Really?” Nikto grunted. “I wonder, and what does she think about it? Maybe we’ll ask her? Let her tell how Arel mocked her. Or how she
went crazy with fear, but there was no one to protect her. Although, one person said that he loved her, that she was very dear to him…”
“Shut up! Shut your crooked mouth! She is just a slave, my fleeting whim, and if she didn’t understand it from the very beginning, this is her problem!”