“Master?” Almond asked.
I wasn’t even sure if the trip was possible without their help. I might not be alive when I got to the ship... or worse, I’d survive but be so crippled they’d have to carry me on board.
It did not escape me that in my anxiety my body was attempting to knot in every muscled corner, but that the presence of the genets was preventing it.
“Will you be safe?” I asked instead.
Kelu said, “We made it here. We’ll make it back. Or not. Doesn’t much matter to me.”
“Kelu!” Almond exclaimed again.
“How did you get into Evertrue?” I asked.
“People see what they want to see,” Kelu said. “If we crawl around on all fours in the shadows, they see stray animals. If we dress in clothes and keep our heads down, they see children.” She shrugged. “No one believes us to see us. I’m shocked you accepted us so quickly.”
“It is because he is one of them.” Almond closed her eyes and rested her furry cheek on my chest. “He knew, seeing us, that we were his work.”
“No,” I said, the word leaving me before I even knew it was in my mouth. “No, I would never do to you what the elves have done to you.”
“You would not have made us?” Almond asked, looking up at me.
And then I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t look into those lilac-petal eyes, so earnest and so innocent, and say, “I would make it so you would never have been.”
Kelu snorted. “Just like an elf.”
“I beg your pardon,” I said, a little harsher than I intended—the implied insult stung. “It’s a somewhat complicated matter.”
“Right,” Kelu said. “To create a race of slaves or not. Hmm. Let me debate that one.”
Almond’s ears flattened in distress. I looked at her again and sighed, wrapped an arm around her and pulled her closer. She squeaked and then conformed to me, flattening against my body, pressing herself flush to my skin. The rush of warmth and pleasure suffused my cheeks and I gasped despite myself.
Watching, Kelu said in a voice so twisted it hurt to hear, “Using us is its own reward, isn’t it.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Almond whispered to me. “I live to please you, Master. It makes me so happy.”
God, I didn’t want to let go. I didn’t want to make that trip without them. And because the idea terrified me, I rolled awkwardly to a seat and pushed myself from the bed to get dressed.
“Master?” Almond asked, hesitant.
“The sooner we’re on our way,” I said, jaw hard, “the sooner we’ll arrive.”
Chester was as good as his word. Not only was there a seat waiting for me on the carriage to Far Horizon, but he was there to see me off.
“Five-day trip,” he said, tossing my bags into the floor well and pulling the wooden flat over it. “A bit long, but we’re not the Church to clear the way before us with heralds. The driver stops at night and there are hostels, but they’re not going to be anything posh.”
“I wouldn’t imagine so,” I said. “I couldn’t afford them anyway.”
“Save your money,” Chester said. “I’ve arranged it for you. Once you get to Far Horizon the first stop they make is at our warehouses on the pier; you’ll be able to find your ship from there.” He glanced at the horses and the porters loading the trunks. “The roads are fairly good, so it shouldn’t be an arduous trip for all its length. This is the family coach, so don’t hesitate to act like you have the privilege. As long as you don’t get in the way of the business.”
Stunned, I said, “No, of course not.”
“Those creatures... not with you, right?”
“No,” I said. “They’ll make their own way there.”
“And probably faster on foot than you will in this caravan,” Chester said with a nod. “Good, I didn’t know how I’d fob off a couple of talking animals. I thought of sticking them in a trunk, but....”
“That would have been an inconvenience.”
“Ah, yes. “ Chester stepped away from the carriage door and cocked a brow at me. “You have your... medicine?”
The poppy was in my inner coat pocket, warming against my breast. I hated to bring it, but I knew I would never make it to Far Horizon without it to calm my body. “Enough to get me as far as the ship.”
“Right. Good.” Chester nodded. “That’s all, then.” He looked at me. “Locke... Morgan. Good luck.”
I offered him my hand; he took it and tugged me into a rough embrace. So strange to feel the living heat of his body, the lift of his chest as he breathed, the width of his hand on my back. I was saying goodbye to everything I knew, and for a moment I was tempted to cling to him and let the carriage start off without me. And yet, strangely, I felt as if I had always been holding him, and always would be, and for a breath the world seemed on the verge of making sense.
Then he let go and I gripped the handle above the door, hauling myself up the step. What made me pause there I didn’t know, but I turned and looked over my shoulder and said, “I’ll be back.”
“On a royal holiday,” Chester said with a grin, and then paused. “Ah, Locke?”
I glanced at him quizzically.
“No sword?” Chester asked.
“Even if I had one,” I said, “I’m not planning on dueling.”
Chester shook his head. He unfastened the belt beneath his coat and doffed it, handing it all to me—the belt, the sword, the knife. I stared at it, wide-eyed, and he said, “Take it.”
“Chester—”
“Take it, damn it,” he said. “If they decide you’re not who those creatures say you are, you should at least put up a fight before they drag you into chains.”
I held his eyes, stunned, then wrapped numb fingers around the sword. It was a significant gift; I never saw Chester without it. The prestige of knowing how to use the weapons of the honor field remained, even with dueling outlawed and the nobility an obsolete establishment.
Chester grinned, hand beneath mine on the scabbard. “Bring it back, will you, Locke? God go with you.” And then he let go and shut the door on me.
I looked at the dark interior of the cabin, feeling at a loss. What was I doing here? This was insanity.
And then the carriage lurched into motion and it was too late to change my mind. Not and retain any dignity anyway. Enveloped in the remains of the genet-induced comfort, I stared out the window as Chester’s warehouses receded from view. One of my hands crawled to my throat to tangle in the cold chain there; the other rested on the confusion of leather, brass and steel on my lap. The heavy buckles bit into my legs.
I rested my head against the wall of the carriage and closed my eyes. It was well-sprung but there was still a rocking to it, one that whispered lullabies. Better that than to contemplate for long what I did, what I held, what it all meant.
When I woke it was to a clinging humidity and a gray cast to the cabin interior, to the heavy hum of rain. My body had stiffened, the snarl of angry aches already in my hips and shoulders. More of that to come, I knew. With closed eyes I reached up to press my palm against the vial, to trap it between my coat and my breast. Poison. It didn’t take long to make a poppy addict. I could wait.
There was nothing to see outside the carriage’s glass window. As distraction I set myself to sorting the tangle in my lap. Chester’s belt was meant for broader hips than mine; my fingers lingered on the supple leather and the buckle holes, tracing them, chafing against them. As the first rash of gooseflesh traveled my arms I bowed my head to the inevitable, and when the sensitivity bloomed I was at least unsurprised. The velvet touch of the rain, hot and enclosed. The beads of it clinging, almost imperceptibly heavy, in my hair. The musk perfume of the oil I could feel, slick and thin, against the edge of the crossguard. I pulled the sword free of a few inches of its sheath and lost myself in the maze of gray and silver reflections on that rectangle of steel. I could not help but reach for my own face, the blur of a gray eye—
—bright God A
lmighty, the fire of flesh parting—
My thumb flew to my lips and I suckled on the cut, so narrow I could barely feel it against my tongue. The sour iron of my blood, so thin, so hot....
I shuddered, and for the briefest of flashes I could understand Kelu... and knew with passionate intensity that I never, ever wanted to be seriously hurt with my skin throbbing just at the wetness in the air, just at the touch of the living air. It hurt so much, but I felt it so intensely... was this pain or rapture? My eyes closed against the confusion of scent and sight and pain. It would get worse. It would get worse and I would turn to the vial.
But not yet. I turned bleary eyes back to the silver-and-gray smear beyond the window and sank into bleak contemplation.
By the time the carriage had come to rest for the evening, I had to accept help to step down to the muddy courtyard of the hostel. I stood in the dark, gathering myself and trying to straighten my screaming body in the shifting black rain, the buildings surrounding us reduced to hulking sullen silhouettes, slick and drooping. Gray mud, lead-colored puddles, the gleam of the harnesses turned muddy silver... the only warm things the steam off the backs of the horses and the blush hidden beneath the stringy wet falls of my hair. They had to help me to the door because I couldn’t get there on my own.
I had thought on the long ride that the poppy would be worse than the pain. It was. But I wasn’t sure about the poppy versus humiliation. The pitying look the driver shot me before shutting the door on me was almost more than I could bear.
That was before I turned and looked at the inside of the hostel.
“There’s room in the corner still,” the master of the house drawled.
I stared aghast at the bodies carpeting the floor. “No private rooms?”
“Saints, no, sir,” the master said. “Afraid not. Rain’s driven in all the carters who’d normally sleep with their beasts and the cargo.”
I would have to sleep on the floor. On the floor. I thought about turning around and marching straight back out to the carriage, but there was no room in it for me to stretch the length of my body.
“I see,” I said... and allowed myself to be pointed to one of the last remaining spots in the room. It was near the door; I could not have chosen a spot farther from the fire if I’d tried. Grinding my teeth I stepped carefully to the bare boards and stared down at them. My joints growled warnings. I ignored them and heavily went to my knees, then down to my side. With my back to the wall and the blanket I’d packed tightly curled around my shivering body, I closed my eyes and prayed, prayed that come the dawn I would be able to walk.
When my eyes flew open the following morning, I knew that no one had been listening.
“Master Locke?”
“Stop touching me,” I snarled, because the fire under my skin stripped all mortal courtesies from me.
The driver yanked his hand back. “Apologies, Master. We need to leave if we are to make our schedule.”
I closed my eyes, shaking, almost fevered with how much I hurt. “Yes, yes, I’ll be along in a moment.”
The mud-spattered boots crouched next to my head didn’t move. I heard the door open on the wind-scoured morning, close, open again... wondered when the driver would go so I could drink the damned poppy and be done with this whole charade of strength and normalcy.
“Does the master require help?” the driver asked.
Damn it all. “I’ll be along,” I said through my teeth.
I could almost hear the shrug. The leather creaked as the driver rose; I could hear individual folds straightening. Everything too bright, too intimate, and my body—God... how could I still be alive?
As soon as the door closed I turned to face the wall and groped inside my pocket for the vial. My fingers skidded on the glass, so smooth, so vicious. I worked the cork free—ah, the scent, so bitter! And took a quarter of the contents in a gulp, fighting back the taste, trying not to gag on the misery of my future.
By the time I’d forced myself to sit up the world had begun to fall away from my touch.
By the time the hostel-master brought me a cold roll and dried apple I could smile at him, almost like a civilized creature.
By the time the driver reappeared at the door I could walk myself to the carriage and step into it, not feeling the tapping of Chester’s sword against my knee and hip.
By the time we found the road again I could look outside at the gray and blustery day without understanding or even caring, and it was good, so very good. And I knew, feeling that euphoria, that casual apathy, that I should be very, very afraid, and I couldn’t manage that either. Wrapped in my blanket with my head resting against the wall of the carriage, I drifted through the gray of the day, observing the crisp edges of a world shone to high polish by the rain that fell, now and again, like an afterthought from a careless sky. And I smiled without pleasure or humor, for that I had no attachment to it, none at all. I had come adrift...
That night I walked myself to the hostel’s door, wrapped in the blanket as in a royal mantle, and if my gait reflected my disease it no longer reigned unmolested; the usurper poppy battled for me and won. I smiled down at the master of the hostel with my pupil-drowned eyes and this time they had a room and I repaired to it with all the slow dignity of a prince.
I think there was food, but I don’t remember eating. I only remember the bitterness of the second dose, acrid and welcome, and the flood of bliss that followed close on its wake. I curled up on the rough bed and was lulled to my drug-softened sleep, and the blanket it drew around my senses was no less muffling and warm than the one around my shoulders.
...until I felt the licking. Insistent, raspy, hot, tickling me despite my dulled sense of touch there just below the angle of my jaw.
“Master,” Almond whispered. “Master, Kelu needs you.”
And that was all the warning I had before the piercing, the sharp bone grating on bone at my wrist. I cried out, but the sound was weak and lost in the musk-and-lilac smell of Almond’s fur. I could not resist them. The pain of it somehow melted into the smooth river of the drug, all heat and darkness and submission. They were an inevitability as suffering was an inevitability, and I traveled not toward any hope of redemption but toward death.
And then the demons came. As Kelu suckled at the edge of my wrist and Almond cradled my head, black hands scaled as hot and smooth as a dragon’s ran over my groin, beneath my belt and up onto my chest, spreading over my heart.
The Red Prince returns, one of them whispered in my ear. I remembered their fixation with ears and knew I should flinch away, but the poppy prisoned my limbs and my will... ah, my will was not so strong. It had foundered in fur and scales and heat and sorrow. And when he arrives, we will add him to our... collection. He too shall serve us.
“The Prince is dead,” I murmured, eyes tightly closed.
A caress over my heart, tracing a circle there. The Prince lives, and he is here beneath us now. We long to consume you, O Prince. And you draw nigh, just to give us the chance.
“Master?” Almond whispered. “Are you well? Master...?”
In my drowsiness fear was too distant. The petting of demons, the touch of elven slaves, it was all the same to me. “If I am the Red Prince,” I said. “You have not yet destroyed the King.”
“The King,” Almond and the demon breathed as one, a harmony of devotion and avarice that sent a leisurely ripple up my spine.
“The King,” I said, and in my delusion I conflated him with the folk tales of the bleeding king, the heart of the land who paid over and over for the cruelty of his nobles, his court and his kingdom with the scars that parted his skin like seams, exposing the rotten core of the monarchy. Always dying, never slain. Always paying, never in full. Hostage to the outrage of the oppressed; ransom for the injustices of history. “You will never have him.”
You will lead us to him, the demon whispered, kissing the line of my cheekbone. And then we will take you both.
“Never,” I said,
fevered and dreaming, turning my face away and closing my eyes. “Never.”
“Master,” Almond whispered, licking my nose, wetting the line of my eyebrow. “Master, come back, come back.”
“... he’s d-d-drugged,” Kelu said. “And now s-so am I...”
“Master,” Almond whispered again.
It is only a matter of time, the demon promised. We live forever, and so do you. We will have all the time of the world, until the end of days. And we will win.
“I am dying already,” I said, serene beneath the weight of those arms, the words, the bodies. “I will be gone before you can do me any harm.”
“Master!”
You cannot die, Red Prince, the demon said, laughing. Try it and see.
I turned back toward it, perplexed, but it had fled, collapsed into the shadows of my blankets, into the tenebrous creases of the genets piled on stomach and legs.
“W-wake up!” Kelu said, prodding my belly with a claw-tip. “What... what did you d-do to me?”
I focused on her with difficulty. Her eyes had gone black, their orange flare only barely visible to me as a smudge. “Glasses,” I muttered, and groped for them. Almond put them in my hand and I perched them on my nose, squinting at Kelu.
Ah, she was limp. Limp and dazed. I wondered if my stare gave me away as obviously as hers did... but then, how slight these little elven constructs were, barely flesh and bone, child-thin and virgin to such degeneracy. Surely I did not look so... wasted. “It’s opium,” I said at last, recalling she had asked a question.
“Opium!” Kelu exclaimed. “What? Why!”
“Because,” I said, contemplative, “I couldn’t move without it.”
“He is an elf,” Almond said, petting Kelu’s shoulder.
“What does that mean?” I asked. “Is drug-addled dissolution a characteristic of elves? Am I destined for decadence, sloth, and sensual dissipation?” Somehow, the idea amused me, recalled our discussion at chocolate about fairy lords and their harems.
“You must do what pleases you best, Master,” Almond said.
An Heir to Thorns and Steel Page 11