“Roll your dice,” I said. “Please.”
He grinned with teeth and without joy... without any visible emotion at all, as if his heart was as powerless to coalesce a single feeling as his physical shell was to hold a distinct shape. “And you would beg me for that, I sense.”
“Yes,” I said, instantly. How many humiliations had I borne for lesser cause? How often had my own body brought me to my knees for no master other than my belief in the senselessness of fate? But here was a cause I could abase myself for... if only it saved us. If we could escape, if we could reach the mainland and find my cure by any other means, I knew, knew I could stand against Sedetnet. But not like this. Never like this. “Would it amuse you? How low shall I place myself? I could kiss your feet.”
“I seem to recall you doing that before,” Sedetnet said.
“A slightly different circumstance.”
Surprising me, Sedetnet said, “I liked it better than this one.”
“We could have that again,” I said. “Make a new bargain. Another night for the freedom of the king.”
He laughed. “Do you hold your prowess in such esteem, then, that a single night with your body would pay a lifetime’s ransom?”
“Fine,” I said with a grim smile. “Two nights.”
He laughed.
“Roll your dice, Sedetnet,” I said. “Or let me buy his freedom some other way. I don’t want your gift.”
“No,” he said. “Many things may be said of me and most of them calumny, but this thing will never be said: that I break my promises.” He took Amhric’s wrist. “You entered into this with me in good faith, Morgan Locke, and now you try to break with me, like the lowest of creatures. I will remember that about you, in the future.”
“Sedetnet, don’t!”
“Save your breath,” Sedetnet said. “Be glad that I’ve arranged for your future at such small cost. I have not always been so kind.” He bent before me and smiled into my eyes, and there was nothing, nothing in the void of his gaze, nothing behind them to entreat, no sympathy, no compassion. He ran his hand lightly from my throat to my groin in a caress too intimate for public view. “You know,” he said, “that without the king a new prince has little power.”
I glared up at him, fighting the invisible chains that bound me to the deck.
“No, I suppose you wouldn’t know that, would you,” he said. “You know very little of the prince’s powers... not how to lift the shield that guards the King-Engaged, nor to wield the Sword that defends the King-Reclusive.”
“I will find a way to undo you with them nonetheless,” I said.
“Perhaps,” he said. “If you sail on to history’s crypt and unearth the knowledge there.” At my start, he said, “Oh, yes, I have an inkling of your errand.” He continued stroking me, regarding me with those uncanny, empty eyes. They did not even gather the light in wet reflection, but remained inscrutable. “Vigil, yes? To learn the secret of immortality.”
“How—”
“Did I know?” Sedetnet laughed and awarded Amhric a coy glance over his narrow shoulder. “There is a king in the world again, and a prince. And where there are kings and princes there are demons. And where there are demons... there are great magics. But there is no evidence left of great magics... no knowledge left of how to fight with them.” He slid his hand beneath my coat and spread cold fingers over my skin, spreading his leaden aura. “And there you will perhaps learn how to use these princely powers you are now about to inherit.”
My breath caught. “You want us to go to the mainland.”
His brows lifted; he seemed surprised. “Why... I believe I do,” he said. “Or perhaps I am warning you: if you come against me before you have some control over your magic, intending to liberate your beloved king, I will overmaster you both and it will end for you. I have little patience for impotent royals.”
“Why would you warn me away unless you feared that I could win?” I asked.
Sedetnet sighed and turned his head toward the sky, as if sharing some exhausted understanding with the storms wedded to his bleak aura. “Please,” he said, with such boredom that I felt the weight of his centuries in every word, “destroying the easily destroyed is so dull. Such a tiresome waste of energy. I would much prefer a fight I might actually lose.”
He made a fist over my stomach then and jerked it up through my clothes and I screamed with the suddenness of it, the pain. In his hand he clutched a writhing gossamer of smoky thorns and all-too-real blood, drizzling onto my coat, soaking it. “I keep my promises,” he said, and ripped it free of me. As I writhed, consumed and burning, I heard him whisper, “Don’t bother to fight the chains. They’ll hold you to this ship until you reach the human lands. We all have our part to play, beautiful Prince. So go to Vigil, Morgan Locke; go and learn. Come back to me a worthy adversary.”
And then I remembered nothing more.
I woke, and all the aches of my body had flown into my hollowed heart to nest in the emptiness where my sense of Amhric had been growing... to live there, for they could no longer live in my limbs. I had shed my human mask for the truth of moonlit cream and glittering black, for the grace and warmth and too-real beauty of elven shape, for the dancer’s sense of the air around me and the pulse of the world against my skin, close as a lover and piercing in its poignancy.
I woke and I wept, cradled by the genets and surrounded by my demoralized elven retinue, because with those new senses I could feel the cage the sorcerer had erected around the ship, the bright-fire of the bars, and I knew that he was right. I could not break them... not yet.
“Master,” Almond whispered, pressing her cheek against my side, “Oh master.”
Bent over me on one knee, the captain of the elven guard said low, “My lord... what shall we do?”
“We sail on,” I whispered. To wield the Sword that defends the King-Reclusive. “We learn. And then we make an ending.”
For the first twenty-six years of my life I had been a cripple, forever battling nausea, weakness, seizures, and constant pain, a war that consumed my every waking moment and all the moments it contrived to steal from my sleep. For twenty-six years, I had been a prisoner in my own body, facing a life of increasing disability, losing friends, a chance at love, and the meager pleasures of school and learning. For twenty-six years I had suffered and believed it to be my lot for the remainder of my miserable life.
In one day, a sorcerer had undone it all and given me a supple, beautiful, working body, and all I could think, over and over, was that it had not been worth the cost.
I heard the approaching footsteps despite the lightness of their tread, and then Kelu said, “It’s been a week. Are you done moping yet?”
The wind off the sea combed my hair back from my face, the one I still wasn’t accustomed to touching. It was not so much that the differences were vast, though even cosmetically the alterations were significant—it was that nothing hurt when I touched it anymore. That alone was enough to make me feel as if I had been anchored in a stranger’s flesh. “Kelu...”
“Your elves are restless,” Kelu said. I did not have to turn to imagine her with her slim furred arms crossed over her flat chest and her ears pinned back against her skull. I’d seen her angry often enough. “The other genets are draped in mourning all over your cabin... even the drake is depressed. You could afford to be dramatic when you were dying alone in your student flat. You don’t have that luxury anymore, Prince.”
“And what would you have me do?” I asked, unable to quantify the feelings her litany of sins had pricked forth in me.
“You’re the smart one,” she said. “You’ve read all these history books. Do whatever it is leaders do when their soldiers are drooping.”
“Water them?” I asked. “Like wilting flowers, perhaps.”
I could almost hear her scowl. “Are you mocking me?”
“No,” I said, and managed a laugh. “No. Myself, maybe.” I twisted around to look at her, turning my back on t
he sea. “But I’m not ready for any of this. I want to go back. I want to win him back.”
Kelu’s arms were indeed folded over her chest. Her expression was even stormier than I’d imagined, lips pulled back along her thin muzzle to expose her teeth. The genets were not built to intimidate: at barely four feet, they looked more like furred children with the faces of absurdly endearing foxes. But what nature—or in this case, magic—had not granted her, Kelu managed with her sneer and bared fangs. “Don’t even think it,” she said. “You’re not getting him back. He’s gone, Morgan.”
“There must be a way—”
“Going to your wreck of a human library and finding out how to be a real prince of elves, maybe,” Kelu said. “But turning this ship around and going after him? What are you going to do? Knock on the sorcerer’s door and ask him nicely?”
“The dice might favor me,” I said wryly.
“Or he might kill the king just to see what you’d do,” Kelu said. “You can’t even get the ship to turn around, he magicked it so hard. It’s ridiculous, it’s stupid. We have to move forward, not back.”
“My brother,” I whispered.
“Has lived long enough without your help, and through worse tortures,” Kelu said. “All you can do for him now is go do what you apparently do best.”
“Stumble into messes?” I asked.
She sighed, exasperated. “No. Read books, take notes and make sense of it.”
“The fate of the world rests on my ability to do scholarly research,” I said. “Fancy that.”
“Lucky for us you’re good at it,” Kelu said. “If the fate of the world had rested on your ability to use a sword, we’d be in trouble.”
Twenty-six years of bodily weakness had not acquainted me very well with what few martial arts remained relevant to a university student. It was why Kemses e Sadar, the only elven noble who had pledged himself to my brother the king, had assigned a contingent of elven guards to accompany us on our errand back home: six men and their commander, called Last.
I had not thought to ask him why the name, even. That bothered me. Kelu was right: the voyage home was all of six weeks, and I’d lost one to guilt and despair. I had five left to find my bearings in this new body... to learn my guards’ names and faces... to plan the expedition to Vigil’s athenaeum.
I had a notion on how to begin.
Return with Morgan to Evertrue in Book 2!
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Daughter of two Cuban political exiles, M.C.A. Hogarth was born a foreigner in the American melting pot and has had a fascination for the gaps in cultures and the bridges that span them ever since. She has been many things—web database architect, product manager, technical writer and massage therapist—but is currently a full-time parent, artist, writer and anthropologist to aliens, both human and otherwise. She is the author of over 50 titles in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, humor and romance.
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An Heir to Thorns and Steel Page 35