Songbird (C6)

Prompt: C6. The villain wins. You're were never meant to be a hero, you were only meant to be their prize.

It took him three years to find her.

She should be grateful for that. She has memories of a life outside the castle, of a world beyond the Little Lord’s domain. She has memories of real friends to keep her company. The ballroom is empty tonight, and only the moonlight coming in through the windows illuminates the carpets and the stone floors.

The tables had all been full tonight. He was celebrating his conquest over another lord, adding territory and power to his rule. She’ll never know if it was a coincidence, that he found her there or if he took the other’s land because she had hidden from him there.

It doesn’t really matter, does it? The other lords are dead. She is in a cage. The Little Lord is safely sleeping in his bed.

Her hands wrap around the golden bars of her cage. So much gold, so much time went into its construction, but the Little Lord was making a statement that went far beyond her. She looks down to where a chain holds her feet to the ground so that not even her wings could carry her away from him.

She’d been young when he took her from her home. He was young too. The young lord had heard her music in the town and demanded that she join him back home. Her parents encouraged her, but what choice must they have had? They had an apple tree in their yard, and she used to wonder if she’d ever make her way back there, but now she knew.

He’d deceived her with pretty gifts and prettier words, and she fell for it. She sang him praises and wrote him songs that carried his heroic deeds throughout the lands. She did that for years and years. People in the castle used to joke that she was in love with him, but she was manipulated to praise him, to sing for him. It is what he bought her for. When she found out the truth of what he was, when she realized the extend of what he’d done to her, she’d ran.

He’d put out a hefty price for her. She’d spent the first two years looking over her shoulder for bounty hunters and wondering what her price would be. If her new friends would be eager to hand her over for the gold it would bring them. They weren’t.

She’d never loved the young lord, for all the songs and the lore about him. She knows that for sure because she felt it during her years away. She used to wonder what her friends at court would say, if they saw her there with the dirt in her boots and a smile on her face. Would they have been happy or jealous?

She knows now that it would have been pity.

I’ve come to take you home Songbird, and I came all this way. You can’t enjoy living in this poor man’s tavern.

He tried to be kind at first. Subtle in his manipulation. He acted as if she had been lost or kidnapped, and he was so happy to rescue her. She might’ve believed it, if she hadn’t already known who he was. His regal appearance and soft face fooled those around him, but not her. Not anymore.

Is it a joke? My little songbird calling herself Cat? I don’t really find it funny.

The annoyance came later. After she ran from him back to her tavern. That was the mistake. She should have fled the city with nothing but the wings on her back. She had memories. She had a pet. She had friends to say goodbye to. He had just enough time to find her there and block the exit with a frown marring his face. She had wings, however, and she flung herself out the window to avoid capture.

I will take you back and lock you in a cage with golden shackles. That was my mistake, keeping a bird without one.

When he found her next, there was a fight, but not a long one. She was no match, never was. He shackled her right there in front of all his men. Enough of this. He said, like she was a stray dog he’d caught and not a person. It’s time to go home.

“I see my songbird is awake.”

She looks up, and watches him walk up to her cage. She releases the bars and steps back, lest he think that she was trying to escape.

“I’m having trouble sleeping, why don’t you play me a song.”

“Yes, Master,” she says. She bows her head and picks up her flute. There were worse fates than this. She could rot in the dungeons or be hung outside the castle walls. He could deliver the lashes he promised her, one for each day she was gone, and leave her to bleed out on the stone. She could be his enemy instead of his pet.

She plays.