Page 11 of Psycho Gods

I didn’t respond.

On the outside, icy drops pelted skin.

Inside my mind’s eye, I reconstructed the fae library stacks spine by spine, and I rebuilt the towering mental shelves I’d once lived within.

It was painstaking work.

The first lesson a fae tutor had ever taught me was how to create a memory palace. Knowledge was useless if it had nowhere to go.

Step one: meditate.

As a child, I’d spent days, months, and years mentally building a library that mirrored the one on the top floor of the palace.

Step two: memorize.

Every day, my tutors would ask me about the contents of random pages in books I’d read. If I couldn’t remember, I’d read the book again and mentally reshelve it.

The one time I still couldn’t remember, my tutor had hit me. Hard.

I hadn’t cowered like a princess was supposed to; instead, I’d hit him back harder.

He’d beaten me bloody and dragged me to Mother, who’d gladly lit me on fire for hours.

I’d never forgotten a book since.

When I’d turned ten, recalling was no longer sufficient for my tutors, and they’d demanded I start applying what I’d read to hypothetical situations.

There was a reason I could expertly give a detailed examination of the elements of a problem.

It wasn’t nature.

It was nurture.

Brutal. Fucking. Nurture.

With me being tortured at night by cold flames, pushed to mental limits during the day by emotionless tutors, my childhood had been horrific.

But the lessons were effective.

Now, as an adult, inch by painstaking inch, I meditated and rebuilt my old memory palace under the spray of a cramped shower.

Time warped.

I blinked back into the present.

Luka cut up fruit and gave it to his twin as the kings glared at me in the dining hall. We were having another meal.

John hand-fed me fruit.

I tried to smile at him in thanks, but I was too deep in my mental library.

For some reason, the section I’d read at fourteen years old was blurry, the spines and words much fuzzier than the rest of the mind palace.

“Something is wrong with her,” Malum snarled. “We need to bring her to the medical room.”

Luka shifted in front of me protectively but didn’t respond.

John said, “She said she’s fine and that she just needs to think. Just let her do what she needs to do.”

---