She stiffened – then relaxed and nodded. “Yes. Yita.”
“Yita who loves you.”
She smiled and laughed beneath raindrop tears. “Yita who loves me.” She pressed her lips together tightly. Her grip tightened around the glass in her hand. “He cannot touch me now. He has not since, because I asked him not to. He remains close, always, but sometimes if he comes too close…it is as though he is Orin come again, and I cannot look at him. It is horrible, horrible, Yita has done nothing, he is not Orin by any stretch of the imagination, but…” Her mouth opened and her eyes changed, and then she was sobbing, as expressive as any human I’d ever known. She leaned into me and I hugged her.
“Let it out,” I said. “All of it. Let all of it out. Don’t stop it, let it go until it’s over.”
She nodded, burying her face in my blouse. “Orin is always there,” she said. “Always, always, he won’t go away, I just want him to go away…” She lost herself to her tears.
“It’s okay. I know it feels like he’s here, but even though it feels like he’s here, you’re safe. You are surrounded by people who would go to war for you. Darin will take no shit from anyone. He will burn them into nothing and dance on their ashes. Hey, can you look at me? Just for a minute. You don’t have to. Stay here until it’s over.”
She sniffled, looking up. Her face was paler now.
“You don’t have to feel safe to be safe,” I said. “We will do everything we can to make you feel safe, but you are safe here.”
She hugged me. Wrapped her arms around me and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed.
“I am sorry,” she said.
“You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“But I do.” She sat up and dried her eyes with the heel of her hand, sniffling. “I have treated you poorly. We all have. You…” Her face contorted. “…saved me from him, and you have been nothing but kind. This is…strange…for me, but strangeness is no reason for callousness.” She shook her head and looked up, blinking. “I should rather be silly for speaking to an animal than a monster for denying you your rightful humanity.”
The word she used was sarchasha, not humanity, but it meant what it should have and slightly more. I smiled at her.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We all need to change at some point or other.”
She nodded and took a deep, echoing breath. “Thank you.”
“Anytime.” I looked at the empty glass in her hand and grinned. “You want a drink?”
She laughed and nodded. “Yes.”
I took her hands and we stood, making for the little bar. “What do you want?”
“Everything. All of them,” she said. “Every last one.” She smiled. “And then we will play dress-up.”
Her laugh was airy and mine was rough, but they meant the same thing.
***
Yita found us half an hour later, deeply drunk and laughing hysterically at a joke neither of us could remember telling.
We were sitting at the bar in the living area, the one filled with scratched up white couches and metal tables. Whatever we were drinking came out of a dark red bottle and tasted a hell of a lot better than communion wine. I swirled it around in my mouth and swallowed, finishing with an exaggerated pah.
Yita smiled his confusion when he came upon us. “What’s going on in here?”
“Giiiirl partaaaay!” I said. I think I was trying to shout, and it came out exactly as slurred as you’d expect. My mouth made the shape for “woooh!” but I forgot to actually make the noise, so it came out as a breathy whistle.
I coughed and smiled at Yita, and he laughed.
“Girl party,” he said. “I suppose that means I’m banished?”
“You can be a girl too!” I said. “Right, Len?”
Lenada nodded vehemently. “You can be whatever you wanna be. You can be a sandwich. Or a bird. Tweet tweet!” She looked around and scratched her head. When she rediscovered Yita, she smiled. “You wanna drink?”
Yita sat on the stool next to her and took the bottle she offered him. “I’d never turn down a drink from a beautiful woman.” He peered around at me. “And her very pretty friend.”
On Earth, that kind of comment might have made a woman in Lenada’s place bristle, but she smiled broadly at me. For everything they lacked in emotion, they made up for it tenfold in distribution of compliments. I raised my glass to him and tipped it back. The wine-equivalent was sweeter than sweet and somehow dry as all hell.
“What are we drinking to?” Yita said as he poured himself a glass.
“Literally anything,” I said. I was tempted to say “Orin’s fucking corpse” or something equally vulgar, but enough of me was sober to stop that thought before it left the station.
“The moons, then?” said Yita. “The drink itself?” He turned to Lenada and smiled with all the heart in the universe. “The brightest star in either of our skies?”
Lenada grinned and slid sideways into him, drink sloshing around in her hand. I smiled drunkenly at Yita over her tangled white hair.
We drank and drank and drank, and the sun stayed down and the rain kept coming.
***
Hours passed. Several of them, I think, or maybe just the one, but at some point I looked up and the light was different. It was darker, and the rain was heavier. There was thunder now, and lightning, enough to turn the whole world white when it struck. Yita looked at Lenada over his shoulder. She was asleep on the couch, one arm up over her head.
“You know, I never thanked you properly for what you did for Lenada,” he said. He swirled the wine – what might as well have been wine – at the bottom of his glass, staring at it with a peculiar intensity.
“What else would I have done?” I asked, but I knew.
He sighed wearily and looked at me with what I can only describe as sympathetic regret. “We kept you in a cage,” he said slowly. “We treated you like an animal, and not a very smart one either. You could have just…” He waved his hand. “…let it happen. And honestly, I wouldn’t have blamed you.”
“Christ, I would never,” I said. Drunk me was even more appalled by the idea than sober me, and sober me was horrified.
He shrugged. “But you could have. And if I were in your place, I might have, just out of sheer spite.” His expression softened. “You didn’t, though. You saved her.”
“Hey, all I did was throw a tantrum. Darin’s the one who threw him out the window.”
“That tantrum got Darin’s ass in the room before something even more unsavory could happen.” He covered my hand with his, giving it a pat. “Thank you.”
I smiled. “You’re welcome, Yita.”
He grinned and lifted his glass. “To Tany of Earth! May your life be long, and your luck be strong.”
I laughed and clinked my drink against his, hard enough to make some of my wine spill over onto my fingers. My luck went to shit a long time ago, I thought, but I drank, and I was smiling when the glass hit the bar.
Part Four: Prove It
The dress was red as sunset, slashed open and striped through with heavy black silk. The sleeves hung loose around my arms and tight at my wrists. A black silk sash, thicker than my hand, was bound around my waist, the blouse of the dress sagging over it, the skirt billowing outwards like an open flower in the cold before a storm. My face was powdered white and painted. Formal Sarchan makeup was, oddly enough, very similar to the earthly Western fashion – dark red lips, dark red eyeshadow and thick black lines on the eyelids – with the exception of a single, equally red line drawn from my lower lip all the way down to the hollow my throat. My hair, black and soft with some plant extract Lenada had spent an hour combing through it, hung over my shoulder in one long, intricate braid woven through with thin strands of red cloth. A black choker of lacing metal sat at my throat, bowing with the weight of an abyss-black gemstone with a name even Lenada couldn’t quite pronounce.
“Nasilia,” said Lenada, clapping her hands together. Beautiful.
“Yeah
,” I said, turning slightly in the mirror. The girl in the glass was a stunning creature, poised and perfect as a porcelain doll. She didn’t feel like me, but she wasn’t quite a stranger either. It was like I was looking at a version of myself from a completely different universe. She was proud and strong, a woman not to be trifled with. There was fire in her smile, molten rock and melting diamonds hewn into the pits of her eyes, daring everyone in the room to do anything but bow.
“You,” I said to Lenada, “are a miracle worker.”
She beamed at me, clasping her hands at her chest, close to giggling. She was a bright person once you pushed passed all the professional bluster and personal trauma, but I guess everybody’s something under their skin.
“You like it?” she said.
“I’m obsessed,” I said, and gave a little twirl.
We heard a thump from upstairs as storage room doors were pushed and propped open. Something dropped and broke and Yita fell into a fit of cursing somewhere down the hall. Lenada and I looked at each other and laughed.
“He sounds like he’s having fun,” I said.
“Milsagra!” Yita shouted – goddammit, basically, with an extra helping of blasphemy.
“I’m sure he is,” Lenada said.
“Will you two be at the dance?” I asked.
Lenada snorted. It was the most unladylike sound I’d ever heard her make. “Hardly. We won’t even be among the help.”
“Why not? Wait, right, stupid question,” I said, and waved it off.
This gala was, apparently, a recurring thing at the Arsilia household. Darin was the biggest of all the law-damning fish, I knew that. What I didn’t know was how that put him at the top of an established social hierarchy, not so different from a king or a president – except the station wasn’t elected, or passed down. It was taken from whoever had it before, usually with an undo amount of force. Darin held the most prestigious (and biggest) digiporous farms in the northern hemisphere, as well as the bulk of the underground army commonly referred to in popular literature as grunts, and, as such, anybody who wanted anything to do with the digiporous market (which was, apparently, fucking huge) had to go through him first. Most of the lower Lurasi maintained their loyalty through shows of faith (like bailing out arrested merchants and smugglers) or by keeping their distance, interacting with Darin only when they absolutely had to. Darin didn’t have a formal title, but he was known as the Grey Sea Dragon, which was a bit on the nose, but it got the point across. The imaginary kingship would change hands when someone managed to kill Darin or otherwise usurp him through single-player means – another one of those condictia rules everybody was so hell-bent on obeying. Which meant you couldn’t just amass an army, storm the monolith, and murder everybody in sight on the principal that you’ve got to catch the head honcho eventually – it had to be you. It’s all weirdly civil, as far as regicides go.
And, uh, shockingly, nobody wanted to go toe-to-toe with the hulking draconic madman that was Luras Darin Arsilia. He’d been in power for a long time, and probably would be until his natural death.
Point being: Darin didn’t like to keep his own help around the party. It was, as he’d mentioned when Sol-dam said I should go, full of people with an overfondness for guns, who might take this opportunity to kill him and take the mantle for themselves. He had plenty of bulkier, better trained servants to cart wine through the crowds without risking Lenada or Yita or anybody else of lesser physical prowess.
Besides, they had a date.
“So where will you guys be?” I said.
Lenada came up behind me and adjusted the thin black ties holding my sash in place. “In the white room at the bar. Drinking till we drop or some such. Oh, what did you call it earlier…” She snapped her fingers and frowned.
“Netflix and chill?”
“Yes, that.”
“So you’re gonna watch a movie?”
“Yes.”
I chuckled. “Hey, uh. Lenada?”
“Yes?”
I turned to her and took her hands in mine, squeezing them gently. “Are you doing okay?”
She looked down and smiled. “Yes. I am.”
“And you think you’re totally good to be having sex?”
“Tany!” she pulled her hands away and put her hand over her heart.
“You don’t have to answer me, but you should be honest with yourself. I know it’s been a while, and if you’re good now then that’s fantastic, but don’t ever feel obligated to—”
“Who said we were having sex?”
“Um.” I blinked at her. “You…you said you were gonna Netflix and chill.”
“We are.”
“…What do you think that means, exactly?”
“Cold drinks and a movie,” she said. “And an evening generally spent doing nothing productive. Chilling.”
“I don’t…” Never mind. If she missed the explanation the first time, she wouldn’t catch it a second. I smiled. “That’s great. Drink everything for me.”
“I will.” She pulled at my sleeves and moved my braid a centimeter to the left on my shoulder. “You look so lovely, Tany.”
“That’s all you, Len,” I said.
“An artist cannot paint on empty air.” She smiled, almost sadly, brows pushing together. “I hope you will have fun. I know this is not just a party for you, but try not to let anyone get to you, okay? Some of the lurasi are, um…” She bobbed her head left and right, searching for the word. “…socially lacking, let’s say.”
“Like…” Like Orin. I bit back the name before I could say it out loud. “Like home.”
“Good to know men are like this everywhere.”
“Literally everywhere, Len.”
Something heavy, a chest or a table, went thunk in the hall, and Yita cursed loud enough for the whole planet to hear.
“Should you go help him or something?” I said, shooting a concerned look at the open door.
“He’s…probably fine,” she said.
“Milsagra dolam tir musetha!” Yita was practically shrieking now. A servant I didn’t recognize ran past our room in a panic. Yita followed a second later, hot on his tail and cursing like a sailor.
Lenada and I slowly turned to look at each other.
“You sure?” I said.
She sighed. “I’ll go make sure he doesn’t kill anyone.” She gave me an apologetic smile. “Darin will be up after everyone has arrived and milled around for a bit.”
Grand entrance, I thought. This spelled disaster in every language I’d ever heard. “Great.”
“Malisagra!”
“I should,” said Lenada, pointing at the door.
“Go get him.”
She nodded and rushed out, leaving me alone with my peculiar reflection.
The room was small, compared to the rooms in the rest of the house, one of many reserved for guests Darin rarely ever had. It was more a courtesy of design than anything remotely useful, so it had turned into a kind of storage closet for Lenada and everyone else who worked and lived on the lower floors. White shelves were full of boxes made from something that looked and felt a lot like cardboard, and a host of mirrors leaned against the wall by the door. There was a bed, piled high with dresses Lenada had pulled from her own wardrobe and a host of gifted garments Darin had received from his family and closer friends, dresses given in the hopes he’d find a nice wife to give them to in turn. People who wanted him to pass his imagined kingship down the family line wanted him to have a legitimate child, mostly in the hopes that another draconian Sarchan overlord would be more than enough to quell the unrest passing it down would cause.
I abandoned the mirrors and walked over to the bed, painted dull purple and yellow by the twilight spilling through the massive windows. My fingers trailed along fabrics softer than silk, darker than night, brighter than neon. Some were the same brilliant red as everything else in the monolith, some were white and yellow, some were black with purple stripes, some blue with black sl
eeves. One was pink and lacey, bulbous and frilly and ridiculous.
A door opened somewhere and my heart stopped. A moment later I heard Yita screaming at someone and I sighed. I’d been fine an hour ago, but now the prospect of going to a party had finally worked its way into my nerves. The stupid thing was, it wasn’t the prospect of being surrounded by politely homicidal criminals that disturbed me: it was the idea of being surrounded by people. I thought of a hundred eyes in sunken grey faces, painting me over with their unreadable expressions, waiting for me to slip or squeak or spill something and prove to them I wasn’t a person after all. It was the same feeling that haunted me before every academic meet, every birthday party, every school assembly, regardless of whether or not I was supposed to be the center of attention. The idea of guns and sentience and proving myself to an arrogant, ignorant world had somehow made me forget that, made it seem more far away, less like they were people and more like they were robots, machines looking for mathematical proofs in a sea of discarded numbers.
But they were people. For all their pride, they were people, and people judged. People sniffed out weaknesses and cracks in the social façade like bloodhounds and sharks. I guess that was the whole point: to prove I didn’t have any. Weaknesses, cracks, or anything else that might make me lesser.
I looked across the room and caught my own eyes in the mirror. Brown, but black as night from such a distance, backlit by the dying sky. She stood tall and proud and impossible, red as fire and blood and liquid wrath. She was alive, she was intelligent, and she could give a damn what these people thought was true. She was beautiful, and she knew no bounds.
They had no reason to believe she wasn’t me.
***
I was still standing by the dresses, staring at myself in the glass, when Darin entered the room.
He opened the door and looked around at the shelves full of boxes and the many forgotten mirrors, and eventually he found me at the bed. He smiled warmly, softly, like he’d come here for nothing more important than a hug or another walk on the beach.
He came to me and reached for my hand. The sleeve of the pink dress was balled up inside it, being kneaded back and forth by nails and knuckles as I thought. I looked up when he touched me.
A Pet For Lord Darin Page 13