“We’re naked,” Kelu said. “You’ll be wearing pants.”
“Yes!” I said, struggling with the words. What I wanted to say was ‘I most certainly will!’
Kelu shook her head, still bent over my wrist and concentrating on painting on the glyph. I felt the drag of the nib against the tender skin there like a talon. “Well, if you faint we’re not dragging you after us.”
“I will not faint,” I said. “I like the heat.”
“We’ll see,” she said, and turned my hand so she could continue marking me. I watched the ink glisten on my skin and then lose its luster as my skin absorbed the pigment, sullen and bitter and black.
When I woke the following morning I found the ship already at dock.
“Home!” Almond said, almost glowing as she helped me with my ablutions. “At last.”
“Huzzah,” Kelu said without enthusiasm and left the cabin. I followed her into a sharp-edged day; the sky was a patchwork of brooding blue clouds, and the holes in their coverage were lined with sunlight hard as steel and brittle as glass. The hot, salt-brightened wind did not caress me as it had at Far Horizon... it groped. I blinked and ducked my head against it.
“Ugly weather coming,” Gant said.
“I see,” I said, taking his offered hand. “Thank you for the passage, sir.”
“Be safe down there,” he said. “And come straight back if you have to.”
“I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” I said, the words slow but coming without pause. “But thank you for the warning.”
He nodded and we parted ways. This time I didn’t fall into the water; with Almond behind me and Kelu before I descended to the pier and halted there to take in this elven port—
—And found it full of humans. In fact, it looked very much like Far Horizon. The buildings, the dock with its line of piers, all of them similar. What trees I could spot were different; I recognized them as palms only from illustrations in stories.
“Looking for something?” Kelu asked.
I found it then. “The humans—” in the Angel’s Gift, the word for “people” was self-referential, and thus always indicated elves, “—they look... tired.”
“They’re servants,” Kelu said with a shrug and led me toward the town.
I followed her, unsettled. The humans around me were dressed as promised in very little, men in pants of some rough fabric, so voluminously cut they resembled skirts, and the women in shifts of the same material, sleeveless and ending halfway down the calf. The sun had darkened their skin to an appealing smooth brown, and they looked well-fed and strong... and yet something about them disturbed me. Their gait. The slump of their shoulders. Their restless eyes, never focused on one place for long.
“Servants in Evertrue don’t look like this,” I said in Lit.
For once Kelu didn’t tell me to speak the right language. “Servants in Evertrue aren’t food. Square your shoulders and walk like a person, or someone will come claim you.”
My spine straightened.
“Better,” Kelu said, and stalked on.
We left the port and entered the town proper, walking beneath the rustling fans of the palms. Their fronds almost clattered when they moved, so different from the gentle susurrus of leaves in Evertrue.
“Come on,” Kelu said. “Let’s move, or we’ll get the rain.”
So we moved, and my body did not object. Perhaps it was their nearness; perhaps my distraction with the strangeness of the climate, of the hot salt scent of it, the sharpness of the warning in the wind. Or perhaps the poppy. They swept me up in their urgency and my impression forever after of the town of Mene is of a blur of buildings, shadowed by the storms.
But I will never forget my first sight of an elf.
I don’t know what I’d expected. The paintings had conveyed a sense of length and grace, an elegant repose, but listening to the genets and their warring accounts had convinced me that the elves were like humans: good and bad, with the habit of portraying themselves in the best possible light. I had assumed then that the paintings were fictions... and they were. But they did not err on the side of idealizations. Kelu opened the door on an airy office, into a receiving room I lost for the light of the creature that rose from behind the desk. That he wore almost nothing registered only because it bared more of his skin, and his skin... his skin was luminous. Literally: it scintillated at the edges, as if the sun had crawled through the window just to lap at his edges. There were subtleties of hue in his skin that defied description: aching peaches so profound I could almost taste them, honeyed golds so sweet I could almost see them glisten. And that was before my eyes tangled in his hair. Brown was too flat a word. It shimmered as the strands shifted across one another, as if someone had ground jasper and tiger’s eye and scattered the dust across the crown of his head.
He looked real. More real than the world around him, and we were all dead, flat things, muted. It choked the words in my throat, stole their meaning and left me naked. At last I understood the elven fascination with light and color. Unbidden my mind whispered the word: fasrial, glow, a light cast from within.
“So, you’ve returned,” the elf said, and his voice caressed the back of my neck. “Did you bring us your quarry?”
“Yes, sir,” Kelu said, head bowed. “May we arrange to return to the lady?”
The elf nodded, mesmerizing me as his hair creased against his shoulders. “I’ll send a runner to the Door to tell them you’re coming. How many are you bringing?”
“Three,” Kelu said, “sir.”
His laughter made my teeth ache, as if it stroked the inside of my skin so lightly it tickled. “Waiting outside, is he? So what’s this you’ve brought with you? Present for your mistress?”
I dragged my eyes up to his and in them saw all the depth and complexity of a pond’s murk when the shiver-shimmer of afternoon sunlight glances across its surface. Something in the back of my head begin to howl. As I stared, transfixed, he approached me, and the closer he came the more my body shook. The poppy melted beneath the pressure of his regard, leaving my skin naked and raw, and he, oh, he was a fire burning me—
I moaned and the world tilted, and he grabbed me, and the touch of those hands! Fire and light and heat!
“Master!”
I’m dying, I wanted to whisper. I’m dying. And yet my traitor mind whispered back: This. This is what your body was meant to embrace. This is what your senses were honed to perceive. This is where you have always belonged.
How sad, how sad that you can no longer stand it.
“Master...!”
Her voice was very far away. I struck the floor, mildly surprised at the pain, and drowned.
I woke to Almond licking my cheek and the line of my jaw. I ached... oh, how I ached. Every inch of my skin, every hair, every pore. I hurt so much I wept as I regained consciousness, and the genet lapped the tears as they fell, purring in what I could only assume was some misguided attempt at palliation.
“Not feeling any better, I’m guessing,” Kelu said, subdued. She was tucked against my solar plexus, her body wrapped against my lower abdomen, my hips, my legs. I could not see her: we lay on something soft that gave me no relief, in a darkness that barely soothed my over-sensitive eyes, in a pool of quiet that only magnified the sighing of air that passed through their long noses.
“God,” I whispered through the roaring in my head, my voice cracked. “God, give me the drug. I can’t stand it.”
“No more of it,” Almond said, hugging me tightly from behind. “You can’t, you’ve had too much already getting through the Door.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We brought you home,” Kelu said. “You collapsed in the factor’s office... we thought you were going to hurt yourself.” She paused; I felt her throat move as she swallowed. “We drugged you and took you across the Door to the Lady’s manor on Aravalís. That’s where you are now.”
I remembered then, the bonfire brightness of the el
f’s very existence. “Oh God, God... tell me they’re not all like that.”
I felt their hesitation. Then Kelu said, “No. Most of them are... more than that.”
I closed my eyes and gave up to despair.
The door opened on two of them then and their presence so overwhelmed me that the sense of my body, of the genets against me receded. I clung to consciousness in terror because the alternative petrified me, but I couldn’t make it back into my own mind. My thoughts scattered as if blown by an insistent wind.
“What exactly is this you’ve brought me?” a woman said. Her angry voice held so many layers of sound it felt like cotton wadding, but made of glass and barbed wire. Had I thought the first elf I’d seen a monument? Beside her the memory of him dissolved. “I asked for a prince and you bring me a human... and a broken one at that.”
“Fine-featured for a human,” said another voice. “Very nice.”
“Don’t!” the woman said. “Don’t touch him. He’s mine.” Her voice turned toward me. “So?”
“Mistress,” Almond whispered, her voice trembling, “this is the prince. His blood is right.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, pet,” she said. “This is a human.”
“The ladders in his blood—”
“Seems to indicate that I’m right, yes?” the woman said. The knives in her voice sharpened. “I thought you would know better, Almond. And you, Kelu! You’ve been on this journey how many times now?” She sighed, like a sirocco. “You will have to be punished.”
They both shook against me, and that brought me close enough to consciousness to open my eyes, to find that I had an arm around Kelu’s shoulder.
“So he wakes.”
I lifted my gaze and found her even in the lightless room. She gave off the faintest luminescence, just enough to prick her from the skin of the dark like a bead of blood. Her presence was a crushing weight in the room, as if she took up more space than her body occupied. I couldn’t see her face, but I could feel her.
But behind her... behind her there was someone so deep and so vast she was defined by the void left in that great wake. Instincts older than my intellect drenched my skin in cold sweat.
“Can you speak, fragile thing?”
“Yes,” I said in the Angel’s Gift.
“Ah, an educated creature,” she said. “My pets seem to have mistaken you for someone else. Did you abet them?”
I lost some of the words, but caught the meaning anyhow. “I have never claimed to be anyone but who I am.”
“Mistress,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“You call me mistress,” she said. “I am the Lady Amoret and you’re wearing my blood-flag mark. You belong to me.” She sounded irritated. “If I even want to keep someone so weak.”
“You can give him to me,” said the great void behind her.
“No,” she said. “You can’t have him.”
“You don’t want him.” Caress of blood and smoke. I shuddered.
There was a grin in her voice. “Well, I didn’t until I knew you wanted him. Now I’ll keep him, so you can’t have him.”
“As you will then.” Boredom. No, not boredom... an absence of caring. Of any feeling at all. “I’ll leave you to your play.”
She sniffed, and the larger presence withdrew, sucking most of the darkness from the room. In that absence I could catch glimpses of my hostess’s face: sharply pointed, severe, milk-and-rose petal perfect. Drops of golden light rolled down the edges of her hair as she shifted, drew closer.
“What I don’t understand is what got into your head,” she said. “I know you’re not stupid, Almond. A little simple perhaps, but not hopeless. But this? This is... “ She sighed. “Such a disappointment.”
Almond squirmed against my back. I could taste her despair like tears. “Mistress, please, please, he really is the one! I know it, I know it.”
Before I could object thin fingers curled around my chin and moved my face. So cold, her fingers, like being bitten by ice. I jerked against her grasp, but she hardened her hand against me.
I hated her eyes. Such an incredible blue, so dark, so complex, so unspeakably beautiful... and so rotten. Edged with cruelty and indifference and empty, empty as a broken vase.
“This,” she said, “is a human, Almond. Human. Look at him. He doesn’t shine. He has no magic.” She tapped my glasses with a fingertip, and I flinched back as if she’d assaulted me. “He’s so weak he can’t even see right.”
“He fed me,” Kelu said, ears flattened against her head.
“You bit him?” she asked.
“I drank,” Kelu said. “He kept me alive.”
She shrugged. “We know very well what kept you sane on your journey, pet. That taste would have lasted you much longer than the weeks you were away.” She chafed her thumb along my jawbone and I twitched. Her dissonant voice, the edges in her eyes, the cold she exuded... my entire body tried to shrink from her. It didn’t matter how unearthly her beauty. I wanted nothing to do with her. “You might have had your drink of this mortal, but it was all for the pleasure of biting him.”
The word “mortal” struck me like a blow. I felt it suddenly, the truth of their immortality. I couldn’t imagine her dying, or that elf at the dock. Nothing that shone so could possibly dwindle enough to die.
But I—I was not so durable.
“Weak,” she said. “Barely even useful for sustenance.” She sighed. “Ah well. I’ll have him sent to the kennel. The two of you are with me. I’ll deliver you personally to your trainers for correction.”
“Mistress,” Almond whispered, shaking against my back, “One of us should stay. He’s not well.”
The elf stared at her. “Did you just speak out of turn, pet? I expect that from Kelu, but you?”
“He’s sick,” Almond whispers. “And we soothe him.”
“He’s no more concern of yours,” the elf said. “And his sickness or wellness is of no moment. He’ll live out his usefulness one way or the other... whether he suffers or not doesn’t matter.”
“Mistress—”
“Don’t make me strike you,” the elf said.
They seeped from my side like reluctant shadows, taking their anesthetizing warmth with them. I shuddered in the dark as the demon-pain crawled up my limbs. I could hear their laughter in my ears, and it tangled with the elf’s words as she said, “Much better. And as for you, sickly thing... be good and follow the instructions your keeper will give you, ah? It will make your life much easier.”
And then the door shut on them, leaving me with the demons.
“This is it,” I whispered to them. “Just kill me now and have done with it.”
But they only laughed, laughed and said, Oh no. This is a fate even worse than we could possibly devise. We will leave you to it... for now.
I did not have time to object, for no sooner had I managed to lift my head and struggle upright then the door opened to admit two more elves. These were dim embers compared to Amoret and her companion, but without the genets their brilliance cut me. I shied as they reached for me, but they did not seem to notice. They were talking but not, I realized, to me: continuing a conversation they’d been having when they walked in, not even considering me a person worth acknowledging. I hated their hands on me. I hated that I could feel every separate finger through my coat, my blouse, all the way to my skin. I hated their casual dismissal. And I hated how they manhandled me down the hall. I tried fighting them, but pain left me weak and breathless and in that moment I hated myself also, for not having the strength to win my freedom, or at least bruise them trying.
My confused senses reported both opulence and a peculiar architecture, something that allowed cross-breezes to torture my hyper-sensitive skin. I heard the rustle of palms in the dark, smelled the velvety perfume of unfamiliar flowers. It was so hard to feel anything past the intensity of the elves and the searing complaints of my body, but the balmy evening, wet from storms, fell over my shoulders,
and I thought that they’d taken me outside. Then I lost the sense of the evening, lost the breezes, felt a cramped weight all around me. Wherever they took me now, the halls were too close.
“Here,” the first of the two said as rough hands stripped my coat from me. I could not protest—the drag of fingers and the way they passed my body from one to the other left me numb. “Put him up, will you?”
“Do I look like I have that much energy?”
“Well I certainly don’t. Tie him.”
A sigh blew across the back of my hair and the second elf drew my arms over my head, folding my fingers onto a hook. I wondered that they took for granted that not only would I consent to being stretched on my toes but that my body would support it when every limb screamed for me to collapse.
...and then my fingers locked on the hook.
I jerked away and nothing happened. I tried to spread my fingers, but they remained fixed. They were no longer my hands, but someone else’s, holding me in place. I stared up at them, choking on bile. My body had betrayed me before, but it had never felt alien to me until this moment.
“I want to feed first,” the second elf said.
“This isn’t feeding,” the first said. “We need to test him for her, see if he’s worth keeping.”
“We can test him while we eat,” the second said. “Let me go first.”
“Just don’t drain him,” the first said finally.
The second laughed and cast a cold shadow against my back as he approached me from behind. His hands settled on the undersides of my stretched and aching arms, thumbs caressing the trembling muscle. His palms glided down to my chest and even through the vest I sensed the burn of his presence. I flinched, but there was no escaping the stroking. I had never been touched so intimately and with so little regard for my own desires. Up to my elbows, down again over my chest, my ribs. Up. Down. I ground my teeth and fought the nausea. It would end. It had to. And yet he continued, on and on, until the urge to vomit almost overwhelmed me.
“Stop playing with it and eat,” the first said, bored.
An Heir to Thorns and Steel Page 16