An Heir to Thorns and Steel

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  “Ah, no,” I said. “That is hardly an answer.” I looked down at Kelu, who was spread over my crotch like a shameless furry loincloth. “You answer me. You will tell me the ugly parts.”

  “All elves are hateful,” Kelu said, ears lopsided. “That’s all you need to know. And it’s m-much less important than me figuring how I’m going to get b-back through that win... mmm, window. Before we get caught...”

  “I will help,” Almond said, sliding her arms beneath Kelu’s.

  “Oh, stay,” I murmured, because the warmth of them was delight and to add them to the poppy-fugue... oh, irresistible.

  “Can’t,” Kelu muttered. “Just came to get my s-sanity for another few days.”

  “You feel good,” I said.

  “Pervert,” Kelu said.

  Almond whispered, aghast, “Kelu!”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” I said, still amused, still drifting.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Kelu said. “Eventually you will.”

  “You don’t even have a breast to grope,” I said.

  “No, but the elves gave us en-enough holes to spend yourself in,” Kelu said, teeth bared.

  Almond shuddered. “Kelu...!”

  “You’re so tiny,” I said without thinking. “You’d break.”

  Kelu’s ears flattened, but what I heard in her voice was despair. “That’s the aim.”

  Almond tugged her bodily off of me then. She gave me a quick lick, as if she could distract me from the cold horror of the words, and whispered, “We are following you, Master. Soon we will reach the port. Sleep well, sleep well.”

  I wanted them to stay but... I couldn’t. I couldn’t ask. Not now. So I let them crawl back through the window and into the dark and I turned back toward the wall in my blanket and I began to shiver.

  And I did not stop.

  The following morning I turned the vial in my fingertips, and my thoughts had sobered. That I needed the syrup to reach the ship was beyond question, but I had not liked the slur in Kelu’s speech, the glazed stare, the lassitude that had pervaded her limbs. I did not want to become the wasted addict of Guy’s nightmare.

  I feared there was no middle ground.

  I tried to be careful with the dose, and that earned me a perilous state; I didn’t lose my connection to the world, but neither did the ache in my limbs abate. I could move but not well. It was an acceptable compromise.

  What I did not expect was how quickly it faded.

  By midday, when the caravan stopped to water the horses and refresh the drivers, my body was wracked again, so much that I couldn’t straighten. Pain could be as much a cage as any drug. I wept against the carriage frame, hissing through my teeth in an effort to remain silent. God and angels knew what the driver thought... Chester’s mad friend, given to vapors and tantrums and queer posture, stooped like an old man. Syphilis, maybe. Some other disease of the aristocratic. As if I had designs on being more than what I was, a struggling student, a would-be folklorist. A professor one day, perhaps, if I could be so lucky as to live that long. Anything... anything but this. This wasted wretch of a man lingering before death’s door but without the courage to pass through it.

  We live forever, the demon’s memory whispered, and so will you.

  Anything but this. I felt for the vial. I did not measure it.

  That day blurred into night and then the morning that followed, and the afternoon and evening... all a smear of cloudy skies and the splash of hooves in puddles and the roll-and-bump of the wheels beneath me. Bitter, bitter poppy and I, and a sword in my lap and a pendant in my hand, all my senses blunted and attenuated into a numb pall... we made the trip all together, a circus of mismatched freaks.

  That fourth evening I found myself assigned to the floor again, and so great was my drug-addled haze that it mattered not a whit to me, and I set myself on the bare floorboards as if on a king’s bed. With, I thought dreamily, the same amount of privacy, remembering the historical accounts of King Odward the Humble’s bedchamber through which the peasants could process, there to witness the king’s diligent attempts to create an heir, and offer their many and varied suggestions for ensuring a healthy boy. King Odward had been unable to keep a wife; several had divorced him despite that marrying him made them queens. I had to imagine having spectators crowded around their beds every night had something to do with it.

  I set my head on my joined hands and stared at the distant hearth, waiting for its flames to knit together into the shape of a dragon or a demon or a king, but I could not concentrate long enough to hold any forms together. I drifted, losing the passing moments, so that when the master of the house stopped before me I did not know how much time had passed.

  “There’s a girl outside to see you, sir.”

  “A girl?” I asked. What girl? My mother? Ivy? “What’s that you say?”

  “A child,” the man said. “Perhaps eleven or twelve.”

  “I don’t know any children that age,” I said.

  “You are Morgan Locke, yes?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “She asked for you by name.”

  Perplexed but unable to worry, I followed him outside and toward the edge of the building. There was a little cloaked figure standing there by the corner, head lowered with the hood drawn so deep I couldn’t see her face. She wore an innocent gown of white eyelet lace, the visible folds shining against the soaked gray dark of the rain-spattered alley, and matching white stockings with tiny blue pinstripes. Her shoes seemed a little big for her feet.

  I approached her, curious, stopped a polite distance away. “You asked for me?”

  The hood nodded, and then the girl turned and walked into the alley. I wondered if this was some new hallucination, but no... looking over my shoulder I could see the puzzled look on the face of the master of the house. With a shrug I followed her.

  No sooner had we gained the dubious safety of the wet shadow of the building than she pinned me against the wall, pressing me into the brick. “I thought you’d never come out,” Kelu hissed.

  Even poppy-drowned I could be shocked. “What are you doing here?”

  “I need you,” she said, grabbing my wrist and beginning to unbutton the cuff. “And you were on the floor surrounded by people, I couldn’t get in there. I had to get you to come out.”

  “But how... where did you find this dress? And how did you... your face is not a child’s!”

  “I stole the outfit,” she said. “No one locks their windows around here. As for the house-master...” She snorted, shoving my sleeve up past my elbow. “Didn’t I tell you before? People see what they want to see. Proper children never look up at strange men, yes? I kept my head bowed like a modest little girl and asked for you.”

  “Kelu,” I began, but she was sinking her teeth into my arm, grinding me back against the wall in her desperation. My head dropped forward against hers; the trails of blood flying over my skin were the hottest thing in me, the only real part of me, escaping, fleeing, leaving me adrift....

  “GET YOUR HANDS OFF HER!”

  Kelu ripped her teeth from me, taking two shallow channels of flesh with them, and fled deeper into the alley. Her hood fell off, hair gleaming behind her as she fled, white lace, pale tresses. I was left with my back to the wall, staring after her until a hand turned my face forcibly back and I found myself staring into the eyes of a much taller man.

  “Take off your glasses.”

  “P-pardon?” I asked.

  He did it for me then, an intimacy I could barely protest, and handed them to one of the men standing behind him.

  And then he cocked his arm and smashed his fist into my cheek.

  I fell in the mud and skidded and then they were all on me. I didn’t even know why until one of them said something about molesting children.

  Molesting children!

  “Not a child,” I managed then, words slurred.

  “That’s what they all say,” one of the silhouettes said, and gave m
e a fist in my stomach for my trouble.

  I let them hurt me; I couldn’t stop them. And I was so far into the opium’s embrace that it was a dream, a phantasmagoria of shadowed faces, wrestling body parts, of unexpected agony, of nausea and confusion and the iron tang of blood mixed with mud.

  They came to a halt at last. My glasses were set with incongruous care on my nose. Several of the men were drifting away... I watched them because the movement attracted my wandering eye. It was only when their leader jogged my bruised jaw that I looked up at him and wondered how I had not recognized him before. But then, perhaps he had not been the one who’d taken my glasses off. I had lost the track.

  “Because you were given into my care as a friend of the family by Mister St. Clary,” the head driver said, “I will do you this one favor... even though you are nothing but a drug-addicted, dissolute, baby-raping worm.” He smiled and shoved me back against the ground. “I’ll give you an hour. If I find you anywhere near here after that...”

  I looked up at him. “A joke.”

  “A mercy,” he said. “And I won’t tell you twice.”

  “My things—”

  “I’ll let you keep your life and everything you’ve got on you. Consider it a bargain.”

  I stumbled to my feet and wobbled there. The ground didn’t make sense. I couldn’t find the edges of my body. But somehow, I managed a mocking bow.

  “Don’t push me,” the driver growled.

  I smiled a lopsided smile and limped into the dark after Kelu.

  I didn’t find them; they found me, collapsed outside town beneath a knot of trees, unable to order my limbs or my thoughts and my bruised body turning a patchwork black as dark as my hair.

  “Master!” Almond exclaimed.

  That abruptly I was exhausted, tired of them, tired of their voices, their angelic smell and warmth, their demands on me. “Just go away.”

  “Don’t tell her that,” Kelu said. “She’ll do it, weeping all the while.”

  “You abandoned me,” I said after a moment’s contemplation.

  “I had to,” she said. “If I’d stayed, we’d both be locked up somewhere, me as a curiosity and you because you know something about it.” Her voice lowered. “I didn’t want this to happen to you.”

  “Don’t lie to me,” I said, not knowing where the words came from. “You hate the elves. You were glad to see me beaten to within a breath of my life.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “But somehow it’s less satisfying when you don’t look like one of them. If you could just thin out and get prettier, then... yes, I would have watched and enjoyed every fist in your face.”

  “Your candor is much appreciated.” I closed my eyes. “And now, you will have to drag me someplace safer, because I’m not sure whether they intend to make good on their implied pursuit.”

  “Are you always this coherent when you look this bad?” Kelu asked.

  “I am when I’m drugged core-to-skin with opium,” I said. “Now help me up.”

  They did so, as best they could; fortunately for them my disease had wasted me. They would have had too difficult a time propping up a healthy man of my size. Together the three of us hobbled deeper into the countryside, where I discovered that the tired gray of a world scrolling past your carriage window is a very different thing when you must trudge through it supported awkwardly by two much shorter creatures. The mud sucks at your boots. Your pants become sodden and clammy and heavy. The colors smear together so that it’s hard to note landmarks; one rain-dulled shrub looks very much like another. And the air stinks of mold.

  “Here, Master,” Almond said, long after I’d given up trying to decide where we were or how far we’d come. “Sit, please.”

  I did not so much sit as fall, and where I fell I remained. This was becoming habitual, my inability to come to a halt with any grace. I thought briefly of hiring a baggage handler to arrange me wherever I happened to stop moving, but that thought lasted about as long as it took for my limbs to hit the unforgiving earth.

  And then the opium deserted me.

  “Master!” Almond cried, but she was very far away, as far away as my own pathetic whimpers. I was alone with the mud and the splintered glass in every joint, the fire in every organ.

  Delicious, one of the demons whispered then. He suffers.

  Another laughed and caressed my cheek. This is the alternative to dying, Prince.

  “I know,” I said, hoarse. “I’ve always known.”

  He doesn’t understand, one of them said, tracing the crease where my thigh met my hip. Should we enlighten him?

  This is the alternative to dying, Red Prince, Blood Prince, the voice near my ear whispered, stroking my face. In my delirium I could not see him. This is immortality. When you should have died, instead you feel pain. This delicious, consuming pain.

  Your body’s rebellion, the one at my hip hissed.

  Against nature, said the third. You are unnatural. And so we are here. Because you brought us here.

  Show him, the one at my face said. Show him what he has allowed into the world. I felt the inexorability of his attention like the approach of the sun, burning, too hot, too close. Show him the feast!

  They dug their teeth and talons into my body and began to tear me limb from limb, and I felt the tissue in my legs and arms rip, unravel, come apart and I screamed, I screamed until my throat bubbled blood and I choked on it—

  “Master, Master, Master, Master!”

  Their touch chased fire up my skin and I jerked away, screaming. But they didn’t let go and as they stroked me the demons fought them for my body: caresses sweet as sunlight and bitter teeth rending my flesh. Their voices competing with the voices of demons. Their fur, plush as velvet, against the scaled and fiery skin.

  And slowly, so slowly I lost sanity and time, they won. They won and I found myself in a trench in the muddy earth, their bodies pressed flush to mine; Kelu at my back, Almond at my chest. Their tiny tongues lapped at the exposed skin above the collar of my blouse, pinprick teeth so near my throat and the nape of my neck.

  Almond was weeping, stroking my chest with her little hand. “Master,” she whispered. “Oh, Master, come back, come home.”

  My first attempt at speech failed; the muscles of my jaw refused to release. My teeth ached from clenching them so hard. I worked my mouth until the muscles loosened and then croaked, “‘m hu... here.”

  “Master!” Almond said, squeezing me and sniffling.

  “Here,” I said again, and alas it was true. This last bout had not killed me; had not killed me and had not set me free from the grinding pain. I’d no doubt sweated the poppy out of my body, and the soothing aura of the genets was only enough to keep me from becoming too crippled to move. “For all what good it does me.”

  “I’m so sorry, Master,” Almond said.

  I smiled without humor. “And you, Kelu? Are you also sorry?”

  A surprising silence then, not the vicious response I’d been expecting. But then I hadn’t expected to find her helping Almond gentle my body either.

  “Maybe the king is dead,” Kelu said at last.

  Almond stiffened. I found it more perplexing than horrifying. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “The king has the wounds of the world,” Kelu said, her voice reluctant. “I’ve never seen anyone as miserable as you are. Maybe that’s why. The king is dead and now you’re the one who has to carry them.”

  I laughed breathily. My ribs wouldn’t expand for anything greater, though in my heart I was laughing fit to cry. “You believe those old stories.”

  “They’re true,” she said.

  “Even if they were,” I said, “even all the pain I’m in wouldn’t pay for the evils of the world. I’d be dead. There’s not a body that could support that much suffering.”

  “Elves don’t die,” Kelu said with a shrug I could feel against the skin of my shoulders.

  I would have scoffed except... “They live
that long, do they?”

  “They don’t die,” she said again. “Unless you chop them into bits and burn the pieces.”

  “I know you hate them,” I said. “But that doesn’t make them into the monsters of your imagination.”

  Almond touched my throat then and whispered, “Master, she is right.”

  Surprised, I rolled my eye down toward her. “You jest.”

  “No,” she said. “The elves do not die. They are truly immortal... if you hurt them, they... knit together again.”

  Unnatural, the demons hissed in my mind. I shuddered. “That can’t be possible.”

  “I had to see it, Master, to believe it,” Almond said, ears drooping. “It’s... hard to imagine otherwise.”

  “So if I am an elf,” I said dryly, “then I should be up and walking after that incident in town.”

  Their silence was suddenly tense. I looked down at Almond. “What?”

  She hunched her shoulders and ducked her head. With one trembling hand, she peeled the lapel of my coat back and with it my torn blouse.

  The first thing my eyes caught was that the interior pocket with its precious drug was soaked, that when Almond shifted it aside the scritch-scratch of broken glass sounded. My poppy gone...

  Then I saw my skin.

  Despite my aching muscles I scraped the rest of my shirt apart, the blood-caked buttons reluctant to release the holes. I stared down at my unblemished skin in utter disbelief.

  “Not possible,” I whispered, touching my ribs. “I felt it. I felt the skin break. I felt the bruises.”

  “It was just like with the true elves,” Kelu said, her voice low against my nape. “Except worse. They hurt too, when their bodies come back together.”

  With all the time humanity spent running from death, I would have thought discovering that I could not be killed (if they were right, my mind whispered, refusing to believe completely) would have filled me with joy. Instead I thought of an eternity of suffering, emotional and physical anguish, of being crippled and unable to escape my body, and I wanted to scream. Wanted to scream—