An Heir to Thorns and Steel

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  Disturbingly sensual. I thought to move away—

  Hands seized my arm and held it down and teeth shoved into the meat near my elbow, piercing, bright streaks of pain, the revulsion of skin being violated and then: wet streamers running down my arm, fever-hot. Blood always seemed hotter than polite, than possible.

  I was bleeding.

  I was being drunk.

  I bolted from the sheets, jerking my arm away, tumbling onto the floor in a tangle of cotton and fur and surprised yelps. Almond had fallen beneath me... it was Kelu who was crouched on top of the bed, tail twice its width, claws flexing on the edge of the mattress and lower jaw dripping scarlet. That she never blinked was magnified by my lack of glasses; all I saw were those blots of molten orange.

  “Almond!” I said, staring up at Kelu.

  She squiggled out from beneath me, panting. “Master!”

  I clutched the wound on my arm, fingers skidding across blood-slick skin. “What’s wrong with her!”

  “Master, she needs blood to stay calm,” Almond said. “Please, Master, let her drink. You’re the only elf here….”

  “You must be mad!” I exclaimed, pushing away from the bed as Kelu poured off it and prowled toward me, a blur of gray and black. “She bit me, Almond!”

  “It will pass, please, Master,” Almond said, slipping behind me and wrapping her arms around my waist. “Please, please. She will go insane, Master, she needs you. Feed her, she’s broken without you.”

  “Almond!”

  “Please,” Almond said, petting my untouched arm and licking the back of my shoulder. “I’ll distract you, Master, it won’t hurt—”

  Kelu was almost on me then. This close I could see her pupils were fixed no matter where she turned her gaze, and the blindness of that stare disturbed me even more than her predatory slink.

  “I’m not an elf, Almond!” I whispered, and then it was too late. Kelu’s mouth was on me, licking the veil of heat and life off my skin, and with Almond pressing against my back I felt caged. I watched, mesmerized, as she lapped my skin clean and then tensed as she approached the ragged holes near my elbow.

  “Sssh,” Almond whispered, nuzzling the nape of my neck beneath my hair, then behind my ear. I shuddered. “Sssh, Master.”

  Kelu began whimpering. I felt her drawing the blood from my arm and trembled. Tender kisses, soft words, and the gnawing dizzy suction, violent and revolting... between the two of them I could no longer think or act, only hang in shock, waiting to faint or die.

  Waiting...

  Wait—

  —ing—

  When I woke next I was contorted on the ground, limbs still trammeled by blankets and covered in purring genets. They were petting me, smooth palms against skin, little tongues on my collarbone, near my neck. I thought to struggle, to sit up, but when I tilted my head the room kept moving long after I stopped.

  I felt like weeping and knew not why.

  “Thank you, Master,” Almond was whispering. “So kind, you are so kind, thank you, so good, so kind...”

  My wounded arm throbbed almost to the shoulder, my fingers stiff and unwilling. That the rest of my body was fluid-hot and painless made the contrast all the more heinous. I lifted my head and found the greatest weight on me was Kelu, draped on my chest and abdomen like a gray blanket. The white fur on her chin had a pink stain, but other than that and her expression of great contentment one would never have known she had transformed into a furry vampire.

  “Kelu,” I said.

  Kelu cuddled closer.

  “Kelu,” I said, louder.

  She shifted her head on my chest so she could look at me, eyes slit in bliss, almost glowing.

  “Fetch me my glasses, please,” I said.

  Without complaint she slid off me and up to the bedstand, bringing my spectacles back with her. I set them on my nose and stared at the ceiling a moment, struggling for composure. Half-naked, bloody and covered in happy animals. I could not overcome the surrealism.

  “So,” I said. “Having exsanguinated me, you are sane now, is that right?”

  “Yes,” Kelu said, and though she didn’t call me ‘master’ as Almond did her voice was less grudging than usual. “Thank you.”

  “Tell me, how often do you need this feeding?” I asked. Surely I was not this calm.

  “It depends on the potency of the blood,” Kelu said. “You... “ She licked her teeth. “I am sorry. Do you... I don’t want to upset you.”

  Showing signs of caring about my feelings? Something was very wrong with her. “Continue, please.”

  Kelu flipped her ears sideways and looked away. I couldn’t tell if this was contemplation, puzzlement, or sheepishness. “The magic in you is very strong, but it’s... twisted.”

  Magic was ridiculous enough. Twisted magic... “For God’s sake,” I said, letting my head fall back. The ceiling was reassuringly normal. “Twisted.”

  “Yes,” Kelu said, subdued. “Like it’s gone rotten or sick. There’s a lot of it, but it... you have to take a lot to get what you need out of it.”

  Ridiculous. “When will you need it again?”

  A pause. I could almost sense them looking at one another. Then, Kelu: “Maybe two days?”

  “Two days!” I exclaimed. “How did you get here if you need elf blood every two days?”

  “I said it depends,” Kelu said, ears flattening now.

  “Before she left she had a draught from a very potent sorcerer,” Almond said. “It lasted her a very long time.”

  “It’s always lasted the entire time we’ve been away,” Kelu added, ears still sagging. “I don’t know why it hasn’t this time. Unless it’s the smell of you.”

  “You are to have me believe that I am so tantalizing that my mere presence is enough to stimulate your hunger.”

  Kelu at least had the grace not to answer, and even Almond looked stricken.

  “So, then. Granting that I have re-awakened your appetite. If you don’t have this taste of me periodically—”

  “—every few days.” Kelu was looking down.

  “—every few days,” I said, “what exactly will happen to you?”

  “Master...” Almond began, but Kelu shook her head at the smaller genet.

  “Without it,” Kelu said, “I’ll become rabid, lose my intelligence, and finally die in convulsions.” At my stunned silence, she said, “I saw it happen in one of the experiments, the ones they made while they were trying to fix what failed in me.”

  I had thought her to be exaggerating her need for blood to justify the enjoyment she’d evidently had in taking it from me. But their countenances were both too dire, and the report too extreme, for me to disbelieve. As outlandish as it sounded, I couldn’t imagine such shame and bitterness had they not truly feared the lack.

  “And this doesn’t happen to you,” I said to Almond, puzzling at the problem.

  “No,” she said. “Our makers wanted to create us, Master, and did the best they could. Kelu was their first design, but when they were unable to make her work, they consulted a sorcerer of great power. The enchantment he designed allowed the creation of all the genets, and that enchantment had no flaws. We are not as smart as Kelu, but we are less aggressive and require no magical maintenance.”

  “They subsist,” Kelu muttered.

  “And you?” I asked.

  “I suffer,” Kelu said. “I was created to suffer, because the elves think suffering is beautiful in everyone but themselves.”

  Another one of those chills ran down my body. Not solely foreboding, either, but the flesh’s reminder that it had been compromised and would not mind remedy. I sat up, and again the room whirled around me, smearing.

  “Master!” Almond exclaimed, steadying me. “You need care!”

  What I needed was a doctor, but how would I explain this to Stirley? Oh, yes, I was out in the woods when I was attacked by a beast, who ripped through my coat and blouse and chewed the body of muscle just above my elbow while s
ucking half the blood from my arm. Oh, I know I am no outdoorsman and not at all given to hunting, it was a whim, I just happened to have startling bad luck.

  Yes, Stirley would believe that. “Yes, Almond. I need care.”

  And as I expected, she said, “Lie down, Master. We will take care of you.”

  I told her where to find water and soap and linen and let her go. Perhaps having servants had its advantages.

  It was while lying thus, with Almond gone and my mind barely tethered, that Kelu said, “You know what this means.”

  “Pray do tell.”

  “No matter what you look like,” she said, “you’re an elf on the inside. If you can feed me, you have the blood ladder magic, the birthright of all elves.”

  “For all I know you also attack and suck blood out of humans,” I said, still staring at the ceiling.

  “But I don’t,” Kelu said. “Look at me.”

  I did. With my glasses on I could see the signs of repletion in her, the lassitude, the dilated pupils. I couldn’t imagine drinking blood without gagging, much less deriving such bliss from it. And as much as I tried to bar the thought, it came anyway: that perhaps it was not the blood, but what traveled on it, that she craved. Blood ladders, she called it, as if one could climb them to heaven. Perhaps there was magic in me. Twisted magic, she said. To match my twisted body.

  Surely not.

  “Ask your parents,” Kelu said. “Go today. Ask them if you’re adopted.”

  “Preposterous,” I whispered.

  She said nothing... but the idea took root and festered.

  I walked to my parents’ house... by myself, without aid, without pausing to rest, without calling a carriage. I walked. The butler took my coat and I proceeded to the sitting room and there I settled on one of the chairs and accepted tea and waved off a plate of scones and then waved it back when I realized I was hungry. Me, hungry.

  When I set the plate aside I found my eyes wandering to the portrait hung above the mantle. I remembered how long we’d posed for it, or how long it had seemed to me then as a child of nine: interminable confronted by the stink of linseed, the stiffness of my dress clothing and the hard discomfort of the chair. But it had produced a lovely painting, the three of us, Father so stern and proud, Mother serene and pleased. The painter had even managed to make my wan complexion a thing of purposed contrast with the sleek darkness of my hair, more artistic than I imagined it had been in person.

  But for the first time I truly looked at my parents. My mother with her golden curls and light brown eyes, with pink on her cheeks... my father with his brown thatch, bronze skin, and earth-brown eyes, and a stocky and powerful body, short where I was tall. They had been rendered in smoky ochers, sienna browns, and bright cadmium yellows, touched with pink and caramel. Against that overwhelming warmth, I was a small blot of alabaster and lamp black, my gray eyes with their black rims seeming too large and solemn, exposed without my spectacles.

  I looked nothing like them.

  My mother entered then. She had not changed much since the portrait; a few more lines in her face, perhaps, a little more silver in her hair, her edges softer. But she retained a grace born of modesty, and the simple powder blue day-gown she’d chosen flattered her. I rose to greet her, gathered her smooth, dry hands in mine and leaned down to kiss both of her cheeks.

  “What a pleasant surprise,” she said. “I thought you would be in school, love.”

  “I’m in retreat, working on my dissertation. I thought I’d stop by as I am likely to be too busy to for the next few weeks,” I said, letting her draw me back down to a seat, this time on the couch. “Have you had any word from Father?”

  “The usual weekly letter,” she said with a smile. “He finds this time of year trying, as always. Spring makes him long to be home with us.”

  I thought of my youth as she poured me a new cup of tea. “Spring was always when it seemed interminable, the waiting for him to come home on leave.”

  She laughed, soft. “It still is. For me, anyway, now that I find myself with too much leisure.” She studied me a moment. “You look well, love.”

  The bandaged arm was hidden beneath my blouse, though I was surprised she hadn’t noticed it anyway. “Thank you,” I said. “I feel well today.”

  “Then... has there been... any news?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Stirley is just as confused as always. But I do have good days.” I nodded toward the portrait. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it.”

  She twisted to look at it and smiled, and all the joyful memories of our family were in that gaze. “Long enough. I’m glad I had that done, though. It’s good now that you’ve left the house. A comfort.”

  How does one ask one’s parents if you are really their son? I stared at the portrait, the warmth of the tea caressing my fingers through the thin porcelain wall of the cup. The eyes of my child-self met mine, so grave, already too well-acquainted with the durance of suffering. “Mother,” I asked. “Was I adopted?”

  Her cup paused on its journey back to the table; she set it down carefully before lifting her gaze to mine. In a motion as old as my memory, she touched my hair, brushed it back from my face. “Does it matter?”

  I closed my eyes. That was answer enough.

  “Morgan,” she said. When I remained silent, she framed my chin in her fingers and gently angled my face downward to meet her gaze. “How did you come to the question?”

  I should have anticipated that she would ask, but somehow I hadn’t. I didn’t know what to say. My eyes lifted to the portrait again, and she followed them and sighed a little, releasing my face.

  “Ah,” she said. “Sometimes it is the small clues.” She folded her hands in her lap. “Your father and I had... problems. But we dearly wanted a family. We brought you home from Saints’ Graces as a baby and we have never regretted it. We love you, Morgan. We could not love you more if you had come from our own flesh.”

  “I see,” I said.

  She gathered my hand in hers and squeezed it. “It’s immaterial, love. Let’s say nothing more about it.”

  I smiled at her, let her draw me into conversation, the aimless pleasantries that belong to the visitor’s hour. It would have been a pleasure any other day; perhaps it was a pleasure on this one also, save that I did not remember feeling anything, anything at all. When it ended, I found myself outside the house with no memory of how I’d gotten there. Shading my eyes and squinting up at the sky gave me no hint as to how much time had passed, for I seemed incapable of making sense of the position of the sun. My eyes watered, tiny lash-sized droplets flicked on the inside surface of my glasses. I took them off and cleaned them on the edge of my vest, mechanical, without attention. In similar fashion I hailed a carriage.

  “Where would you, sir?” the driver asked.

  No answer. I had no answer. Where would I go? Where did I belong?

  “Sir?”

  “Ah... the university, please,” I said blindly.

  The carriage lurched into motion. I stared at the buildings as they scrolled past and did not see them. I did not count the money I paid the driver; I did not feel the sun giving way to the clouds as I walked onto the campus, my gait stiffer than it had been in the morning.

  How well I knew this place. So well I could find the loveliest park in it without paying attention to myself, my feet or my surroundings. My head rested against the trunk of a tree; my eyes on the clouds knotting together in the sky, their gray edges cut from one another with incandescent golden rims. My breathing felt tight and strange, and I could not seem to calm it.

  I didn’t question their love for me. I couldn’t. But I’d always believed...

  A tremor ran through my body. Best not to finish the thought. Best to drift in comfortable numbness. Best to stop thinking—

  “Morgan?”

  I jerked my face up and then staggered to my feet out of courtesy, out of habit, my knees protesting. I steadied myself on the oak. “Ivy... I didn�
��t expect to see you here.”

  “I could say the same of you,” she said, smiling at me, head dipped a little so that her light brown curls fell before her face. She had two books balanced against her hip and her free hand was occupied with a spray of wildflowers. “I heard you’d gone on retreat... what are you doing here?”

  “Clearing my thoughts,” I said, stunned by her. She’d always had that effect on me. That delicate, warm coloring, the peach softness of her skin, the charm of the freckles scattered over her nose. Her spirit shimmered beneath her surface, like the sun behind the clouds gathering over us.

  “May I?” she asked, pointing at the ground beside me.

  “Of course,” I said, and hastily pulled my coat off and spread it for her. She laughed and sat on it, smiling up at me.

  Ah God, God. She was so lovely. I sat gingerly beside her, forgetting the ache in my joints.

  “We’ve missed you at the chocolates,” she said. “It’s not the same with just Guy and Radburn. I am fond of them, but... you and Chester belong with us.”

  “It won’t take us long, the retreat,” I said. “The work is going well.”

  “It was sudden,” she said. “The decision. It seemed... well, precipitous. Was there any reason?”

  So hard to lie to her, and so easy. “Eyre gave me an unbelievable find from Vigil’s athenaeum. A trove. I wanted more time to study it.”

  “And Chester?” she asked. “Radburn said he’d found a new topic. Something about the evil of kings.”

  I laughed. “We thought it would be appropriate given the patriotic bent of his parents.”

  “I can’t imagine he’s enjoying it,” she said, shaking her head and twirling the flowers in her fingers. “He was so happy with the language work.”

  “I’m sure he’ll return to it,” I said, smiling. “You can’t keep someone from what they love, not for long.”