She glanced at me with an impish grin. “Philosophy or poesy?”
I laughed. “Observation.”
“A pretty sentiment all the same,” she said, smiling. She lifted her eyes. “Do you think it will rain?”
“Maybe,” I said, just before a distant rumble replied. We both laughed.
“And here I was hoping to spend my free period picking flowers,” she said. She looked at the ones in her hand. “Morgan... have you ever wondered... what next?”
“What do mean?”
“After we’re done with all this,” she said. “What will you do?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t. My sickness had narrowed the focus of my life to day-to-day survival, and the surcease of learning, the escape of knowledge and books. Some part of me hadn’t been certain I’d live to finish the work. But because she deserved an answer, I said, “I suppose I’d follow my father’s footsteps. Or try, anyway. I don’t know that I’m suited to the career. I fear I want the patience necessary to serve as an ambassador anywhere.”
She laughed as she stroked the petals of the flowers, making them tremble, as I trembled to watch. “I think you’d make a very respectable ambassador. You have the gift of making others see reason.”
I grinned. “Given that my father tells me that what’s needful in the career is rather an ability to listen to the pomposity of fools…”
She flashed me a grin. “Perhaps you wouldn’t do very well in that, then.”
I tried to imagine it, found the idea risible, smiled… not without some pain. I wanted very much for my father to be proud of me. “Local politics, perhaps. Or even the university. It might be pleasing, to teach.”
“Reasonable,” she said. “Even respectable.” She sighed. “Better than anything open to me.”
“Some would argue that to be a wife and mother is to have more time for contemplation,” I said, not looking at her but oh so aware of her warmth at my side.
“Those someones have never raised children, then,” she said with a huff. She pursed her lips, then rolled the lower one beneath her teeth. I hadn’t thought she could be any more endearing until then. “It’s not that I don’t love children, or want family. It’s just that... I feel... well, there must be something more than this. Do you ever have that feeling?”
“All the time,” I said. Her own world of health and life was that something beyond my reach. I couldn’t imagine what she imagined beyond hers, but gray melancholy brushed me at the thought that there was apparently never any respite from desire, even when one was so blessed.
“I’ll be sad when it’s over,” she said.
“I’ll still call on you,” I said.
She smiled at me, and there was something regretful in her eyes, and fond. “I hope so.”
Greatly daring, I reached for her hand. Her fingers laced in mine and squeezed.
She leaned toward me just as the first ripples of nausea washed down from my head to soak my body in sweat.
Not here. God, not in this moment.
Thunder.
The first scintillant wave of pain.
Her voice, muffled by the sudden noise in my head. Was that my name? Was I still holding her hand? Were those my fingers jerking in hers, uncontrolled? Were those her screams or the sound of the rain?
The pain overtook the nausea and threw me to the earth. I tasted bitter soil and bile and grass. It mixed with the convulsions and the nausea and the pain, and the hallucinations wiped the sky from my eyes and everything condensed into a knot of suffering and ending, a grand killing culmination...
...and I survived. I survived and sat up to find myself slicked in cold mud in a groove made by my flailing limbs, alone in the rain beneath an oppressive gray sky. A spray of wildflowers had wilted, just out of reach, forgotten on the ground. They were out-of-focus, smears of steel-gray and purple. I righted my glasses, but the lenses were streaked, distorting everything.
Ivy. God, God, Ivy.
I stumbled to my feet and fell again, the mud sucking at my clammy hands and aching knees. There were limits to the flesh and I seemed to have found them. My second attempt to rise, like the first, dumped me onto my elbows and knees. The pendant detached from my wet skin and dropped past my collar, falling with a squelch onto the mud. It glinted there, sullen and accusatory, the rain spilling into the gullies between the raised symbols and shimmering there.
Thunder again, heavy over my curved back. I twisted my head painfully to one side and curled my lip at the sky. Bad enough for my world to separate at the seams... was the mud really necessary? How pedestrian. How trite. Before I could stop myself, I yelled at the clouds, “CAN’T YOU DO ANY BETTER?”
And then my voice broke and I gagged on my first sob. Another, just as bitter. They burned coming up, like vomit, wrenched me so hard my ribs ached. Everything had gone cold except my throat and eyes. Cold clothes. Cold skin. Cold wet slime beneath my clenched fingers. Cold world.
I had to escape.
How long it took me to totter to my feet and into a carriage home I couldn’t say, not with my body knotted and my memory raddled with holes. How many times I fell I couldn’t count. The mud was bad enough. Collapsing up the stairs to my flat... white shock up my knees, sparks from my wrists. Trying to catch myself. Failing. Smacking my head at least once against the edge of a step and losing my vision, conscious only of the relentlessness of the rain.
I clawed the door open and fell inside.
A ray of sunlight spilled warmth over my body. Gentle hands, small and delicately clawed, peeled my clothing from my skin. Worried whispers, a furred cheek rubbing against mine, comforting. The lumps of ice in my joints began to melt. The nausea subsided. My vision cleared. I was in Almond’s arms on the floor by the fire, Kelu sitting at my head and untangling my hair.
My first attempt at speech came out as a croak. Almond looked up at me, and I managed intelligible words on the second. “H-how long?”
“Three hours,” Kelu said behind me. “Since you staggered in. What possessed you to go out in the rain?”
“It wasn’t raining when I left,” I said huskily.
“You were gone so long.” Almond rubbed her nose against my chest. “Master, we were worried. You’re not well.”
Not well. What a... what a marvelous understatement. I could barely encompass the magnitude of it. Not well. “How long is this voyage to your home?” I asked.
They both looked at me then. At each other and then back at me. Kelu said, “It’s a month or so. We’d have to get to the port, though, that’s another week.”
I drew in a long breath, pressed my arm to my brow. My entire body felt raw, abused. I thought of wildflowers wilting in the mud. “I should pack.”
“M-master?” Almond whispered, ears slowly rising. “You’ll come home?”
“We’ll leave tomorrow,” I said. “I’d say we should leave tonight, but...”
“Tomorrow is fine, Master,” Almond said, lapping at my collarbone. They hadn’t dressed me, I realized, only thrown a blanket over my hips and legs.
“I’ll start packing for you,” Kelu said, rising.
“I should—” I began and then trailed off. As if I had the energy to follow her. Had I only a few days past been priding myself on my lack of self-deception?
“Sssh, Master,” Almond said, licking my neck. “Rest. We will take care of everything.”
Will you, Almond? I wanted to say. Will you give me my life back? My health? A future with a wife and children and family and friends who didn’t pity me?
But I didn’t say those things. I let her tongue tranquilize me, let the heat of the fire and the heat the genets seemed to spread beneath my skin lull me, and I slept there before the fire, clasped in furry arms.
“—ster, Master... shall I open the door?”
I heard the knock then and sat up on my elbows, groggy. How long had I been out this time?
“Master,” Almond said, round eyes on mine. “Shall I? It’s
the fourth time someone’s come by since you’ve been asleep.”
“God!” I said. “Who—” And then I realized. “It’s probably Chester.” I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. The grip of my ambivalence was so intense I knew it was concealing tumult, and I didn’t want to be drawn out. Rude to leave him at the door, though. I sat up, wrapping the blanket around my waist, and strode to the door, and I took it for granted that I could move without pain. Even after the afternoon I’d had, I still expected it after being cared for by the genets.
I opened the door for Chester, surprising him yet again mid-knock. His eyes raked me from bare toes to bare chest, lingering only a moment on the blanket and the pendant. Then he said, “I came at a good time, I hope.”
I sighed and stepped back. “Come in.”
He entered cautiously, as if expecting to find the entire occupancy of a zenana in various states of dishabille strewn around my sitting room. He saw only Almond, holding her knees by the fire.
“A trifle irregular,” he said at last.
“I’m leaving.”
He stopped to stare at me, then set his folio on my table and gripped the back of the chair. “Locke?”
“I’m going with them,” I said. “To wherever it is that their elves live.”
“Bit sudden,” Chester said. “Shall I make tea?”
I hesitated. “Tea would be pleasant.”
He nodded and went to the kitchen. While there, he said, “So, what precipitated this, if I may?”
I didn’t want him to ask because I didn’t want to examine my own reasons too closely. But he had and it seemed useless to lie. My life was coming apart. What use trying to hold it together anymore? “They were right about my being adopted.”
He put the teapot to boil and leaned back against the counter. “I’m sure your parents told you that mattered not a whit.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s not it.”
“What is it, then?”
“No one in my family’s died of a wasting disease,” I said.
He tilted his head. Then his brows lifted. “Ah.”
Just like that, he understood. My relief sickened me: I would not have to explain. All my life I’d assumed that because no one in my family had been afflicted by a disease like mine, that it would resolve... that there was some chance of a normal life. Now...
I said, “Mind if I dress?”
“Actually I mind more if you stay like that.” Chester grinned.
I laughed and went to my bedroom. Kelu had fallen asleep beside two filled packs—had that constituted her idea of luggage? I couldn’t imagine traveling without a trunk. I’d have to check them later. I shook my head and pulled on trousers and a shirt and went back out to find a cup of tea on the table.
“So when are you leaving?” Chester asked.
“Tomorrow.”
“That soon?” Chester asked, startled. “Have you told anyone else?”
I measured a few spoons of honey into the tea, watching the fluid drip. “No.”
“Your parents will worry.”
“They know I’m likely to be busy for the next few weeks while on retreat.”
“After that, though...”
“I’ll leave them a note.”
“Damned cowardly of you.”
I couldn’t bear the thought of speaking with them again so soon. “I suppose so.”
Chester sighed. “Have you made any plans, then?”
“I need to get to Far Horizon,” I said. “There’ll be a ship there, I’m presuming.”
“Presuming!” Chester exclaimed.
I glanced over at Almond. “Won’t there?”
She said, “We have access to a vessel, yes, Master. Engaged by our mistress on behalf of her mission to find you.”
“You should take someone with you,” Chester said.
“You volunteering?” I said with a snort.
“I would, yes.”
I glanced at him, surprised. He was sipping from his cup; at my gaze, he looked up, met my eyes, and in them I saw something that shamed me. I had assumed my friends would love only a healthy man. That they would stand by me in my extremis hurt too much, came too close to shattering what was left of my carefully constructed world. If they could still love me like this, how could I leave? How could I not be brave enough to face my end with them?
How grateful I was that Almond interrupted us. “Forgive me,” Almond whispered. Her ears dipped. “That would not be wise, Master. He’s human.”
I began to say, ‘As am I’ but couldn’t find the words in me. I was obviously human, and yet my blood had soothed Kelu and the presence of the genets affected me. What did that make me? Perhaps some half-breed. Elven parent, human parent. Was that even possible? It was not the story on the pendant they’d given me, of course, but....
“And that means what?” Chester said. “If he’s this prince of yours, won’t he have some say over my treatment?”
She flushed and looked away.
I slipped my crooked finger beneath her chin and lifted her face. “What are you not telling me?” I asked her, my voice gentle.
She took a shivery breath and said, “It has not gone well for the humans of late, Master. They were once valued servants. Now they are chattel... some whisper that in Valisna they are hunted for sport.”
“Say that again?” Chester said, horrified.
“Things are not well in the Archipelago, Master,” Almond whispered. I found myself brushing my thumb to and fro on the underside of her jaw. “Some say it is because our masters are without a king, and were never meant to be ruled by a council of elders.” She swallowed, a movement I felt against my fingers. “You are needed, Master.”
“I thought your king was dead,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “And you are his brother.”
“God,” Chester said.
“You didn’t realize?” said a sleepy alto from the passage to my bedroom. “I thought we said it clearly. We were sent to fetch you to marry your brother’s intended. She wants your baby. And probably to set you up as king. Amoret likes power.”
Chester said, “Locke, think a moment about all this, please. Do you seriously want to go to some foreign nation where they hunt humans for sport, marry some girl you’ve never seen, and become a despot?”
“Now, now,” I said. “I might be a wise and benevolent ruler.”
“Be reasonable,” Chester said. “Even if you were a wise and benevolent ruler, tell me what history teaches us about kings.”
“They’re lucky bastards?”
“They’re eventually deposed,” Chester said dryly. “And their heads come off.”
I shook my head. “I can’t believe in it, Chester. To be honest with you, I think they’re mistaken.” Almond gasped but I continued, “But let me explain this to you. My parents are not truly my flesh and blood. I suspect I have driven Ivy away. And I’m dying.” I sipped from my cup. “As I’m going to expire, I may as well do it someplace where I won’t be an embarrassment to the people who’ve known me all my life.”
He wasn’t looking at me now. “Is that what this is about? Or are you hoping they’ll be able to cure you?”
“And if they can, I’ll come back,” I said. “But it bears repeating. I can’t live like this, not much longer.” Mud in my mouth, mingling with bile. “Even if it doesn’t kill me, what will my life hold? Trapped in my own house, unable to go anywhere without knowing whether I’ll have one seizure or many, spells of vomiting or hallucinations. Unable to marry—what woman would have me? My world would dwindle to the inside of this flat, futureless and devoid of meaning. Tell me, Chester, what am I supposed to do with that?”
Chester finished his tea and poured himself a fresh cup, stirring the milk and honey into it. Then, “I can get you transport to Far Horizon.”
“I beg your pardon?” I said, startled.
“You forget,” he said. “My family manages the majority of o
verland trade and transport. The reason I’m marrying Minda, remember? To put a lock on the sea lanes as well?” He set his spoon down and framed the cup in both hands. “We have regular runs down to Far Horizon. I can get you a seat on one in the morning.”
“I...” I stopped. “You don’t have to do that.”
“No,” Chester said. “But I’m your friend. You’ll recollect that we look out for one another.” He grinned. “If you decide to stay and become the benevolent king of the nation, though, pass a decree about the human-hunting so that I can come examine the ruins for languages, eh?”
I laughed. “You know I’ll never be a king,” I said. “Monarchies are too exploitable, kings too subject to corruption, or why would we have bothered with the Revolution? But I’ll see if I can’t find someone to fix me up and then I’ll come back.”
Chester nodded. “In the mean, we’ve work to do.”
I glanced at the folio and chuckled. “I suppose we do.”
I woke the following morning into an expansive sense of well-being, warm and shimmering and touched with the promise of white sunlight. Almond was draped on my chest, Kelu with her spine against my side.
There was no question: these creatures kept my disease at bay. What a prescription.
My sigh woke Almond, who raised her eyes to mine with a drowsy look and a quizzical tilt of her ears.
“Nothing,” I said, smiling at her though my heart felt wounded. My life had fallen to pieces around me but I didn’t want to give it up for the uncertainty of some fantasy in the company of servile and unlikely magical constructs.
“Don’t believe him,” Kelu said, voice sleep-slurred. “He’s upset.”
“I know,” Almond said, looking up at me. “Master?”
I shook my head. “It’s just so unusual to feel good.”
“And feeling good depresses you,” Kelu said. I couldn’t tell if she was mocking me or not.
“Kelu,” Almond hissed.
Kelu shook her head and twisted so she could look up at me. “We’re going to have to leave you for the trip to the ship. You know that, yes?”
I hadn’t thought of it, actually. The concept of spending a week traveling without them to ease my body petrified me.
An Heir to Thorns and Steel Page 10