Battles of Salt and Sighs (Rise of the Death Fae Book 1)

by Val Saintcrowe

  Was she supposed to react to that? What could she possibly say?

  “Well, I don’t agree,” he said. “On the other hand, I can see arguments that can be made. After all, generally speaking I think killing is wrong, but in the case of this war, it must be done, because the atrocities visited upon my people must end, and this is the most efficient way of making sure that happens. One could argue that visiting atrocities on human women shows them rather efficiently that they have no power over us, that it strips away their ideas of superiority to the fae rather handily. What do you think, domina? Do you feel superior to me?”

  “Our superiority lies in our morality,” she said. “The death fae are evil—”

  “Come now.” He raised his eyebrows.

  She looked away. He was right, of course. Morally speaking, the humans were no different than the fae, and perhaps worse. “But the death magic, Larent,” she murmured. “You don’t have magic, but the magic is—”

  “Natural,” he said. “There is nothing evil about death and decay, about frost and cold, or about the extinguishment of flame. These things are all natural, normal things.”

  She had not thought of it that way.

  “The magic itself is not evil. It’s the application of it,” said Larent.

  “Does it matter what I think?” she said.

  He sat down on the couch next to her. “I can’t get out of it. Do you understand that? Even if I could stop Akiel from wishing to watch me have you, it would still… nearly every fae man in the cohort indulges, and none of them want to hear me say that what they are doing is rape or a crime. They won’t listen, and they will turn on me. So, I have no choice.”

  “Well,” she said, “I don’t have a choice either. You have already indicated to me that you will take me no matter what I say, so I don’t know why we’re having this conversation. Even if I agree, I’m under duress. I’m a captive here, and I can’t leave, and you’ve already violated me, so I have no ability to consent, not in this position.”

  “I understand that,” he said.

  “But it doesn’t matter?”

  “It’ll be easier for us both if you are physically cooperative.”

  “It’ll be easier for you, because you won’t have to fight me.” Her voice rose.

  “It will be easier for you as well, because otherwise, I will be forced to hurt you, and then there will be physical pain and lingering damages that need to heal. I can spare you that.”

  “I’m not going to agree to this. I’m never going to agree to it.”

  “You don’t have to agree. You can internally curse me. You can curse me out loud when we’re alone, for all I care. But if you can pretend to enjoy yourself and to be willing, even eager, that would be best.”

  “No.”

  “There must be something you want that I can provide for you.”

  “Always with bargaining.”

  He shrugged. “I find people respond better that way than to threats. So… what about your Cassus?”

  “I’m not whoring myself out for you to leave Cassus in the dungeons.”

  “I’ll free him.”

  Her lips parted. She was stunned.

  “Well?”

  “You can do that?”

  “I could find a way, yes,” he said. “It wouldn’t be easy for me.”

  Her mind began to churn. Cassus was young and stupid and inept. He wanted to help Magdalia, but could he? He had connections with his brother, but certainly he’d never be able to employ those against the Croith. He wasn’t skilled with fighting or anything like that. He wasn’t cunning. He…

  “Not enough?” said Larent quietly. “I realize it’s not nothing, what I’m asking of you. For it to be convincing, we’ll need to prepare, so that will be another invasion of your body.”

  “What do you mean by ‘prepare’?” What preparation could they need?

  “Practice, I suppose.”

  “No, I’m not submitting to you—”

  “I don’t mean fucking, I just mean… women’s bodies are not all the same, and I am not familiar with the topography of yours, that is all. I need to, er, explore a little.”

  “You put your hands all over me at dinner.”

  “Not your breasts or cunny,” he said. “I have never touched you there.”

  “You have, when you put your cock in my…” She couldn’t say the word he’d used, though she’d heard it before. It was vulgar. “In me.”

  “All right, I touched it, but barely, and not your clit, and I didn’t… I barely remember—”

  “Well, it doesn’t seem necessary, then. You seemed to achieve it fine then, so what is different now?”

  “It’s necessary.”

  She set her jaw. “But—”

  “It is.”

  “Fine,” she muttered. “In that case, Cassus is definitely not enough.”

  “All right, so then what can I offer you?”

  She licked her lips, and then it tumbled out of her mouth. “Free me.”

  “Is that really what you want? How will that be different than what we spoke of before?” he said. “If I somehow pretend to have lost track of you, then you’ll be out in the punishing wilderness alone. It’s better for you if you let me deliver you to your sister as we already planned.”

  “I want to go now, with Cassus.”

  “No. Impossible. I need you through the winter.”

  “Are you going to be fucking me at every opportunity, then?” She couldn’t believe she’d said the word out loud.

  “No, not unless we have an audience,” he said.

  She shuddered in spite of herself.

  “Ask for something else,” he said.

  “That’s what I want,” she said.

  “No, there must be something else.”

  “There isn’t. What I truly want, I can never have. I want to be home again, safe in my villa, my sister down the hall in her bedchamber, my family alive—”

  “Yes, well, I want to have grown up in a world in which I wasn’t owned,” he said, glaring at her.

  “You speak as if that’s my fault, when you participated in the slaughter of my family, and I never owned you.”

  “You owned others like me.”

  “I was a good dominissa,” she said. “I was never needlessly harsh or cruel. I was—”

  “Stop,” he said, his voice hard. “Stop, before I forget this entire thing and decide you deserve it rough.”

  She cringed, backing away from him.

  He got up from the couch, and he began to pace.

  This was becoming familiar between them, her sitting here, him pacing, the cracks in her widening and deepening. Soon she’d shatter and she’d be nothing but little pieces of herself.

  He stopped and turned to look at her. “I could teach you some things, basic self-defense, things you can do even without a weapon. That way, after you leave me, if you don’t wish the attentions of someone else, you can perhaps hurt him and run away.”

  She had never thought of such a thing before.

  “The truth is, domina, you are never going to be as strong as a man. There may be some weaklings you could overpower, but even a half-grown adolescent will be able to beat you. Men and women are simply built differently, and you are not…” He looked her over. “You have never used your body at all, built any strength. Even so, there are some techniques that I know of, things that can be used against a man, ways to use his strength against him. I used to teach girls at my villa. Our dominus would be stumbling about drunk and usually didn’t remember the next morning where he’d been or what he’d been about. Even if he did, it was sometimes worth it to them to get free of him.”

  She swallowed. “And you wished to protect them, because of your mother.”

  He sighed. “My mother… the worst of it with my mother was that she was beaten in here.” He touched his temple. “Generations of helplessness mean it’s easy to think that you must simply go along with it all, make the best of it
. The other slaves hated her for her seeming submission, and they hated me too. I wanted to show them that I wanted to fight, that I wasn’t willing to roll over and accept—” He threw up his hands. “Why am I telling you this?” He bowed his head, dragging his fingers over his face. “Never mind. Never mind it all.” He started to walk towards his bedchamber.

  She got up from the couch. “Wait. You’re just leaving? That’s the end of the negotiations?”

  “Why am I negotiating with you?” He strode through into his bedchamber. “It makes you think you have power in this situation, and you don’t. I’m giving it to you, and why? You belong to me. Every part of you does. I can do whatever I like with you, and I will, and I don’t need your permission.” But she could hear that he was trying to convince himself of this, and that was why he was saying it out loud.

  She went to the door of his bedchamber and hovered there. “I suppose it doesn’t really matter. You have already taken my virtue. I don’t know what I’m protecting.”

  He raised his gaze to hers and touched his temple. “Protecting yourself here. In your mind. You know that’s the only thing that truly matters.”

  Perhaps he was right.

  “Maybe it would be easier for you if I just broke you, however.”

  She let out a noise, and she didn’t know what it was, but it was something anguished.

  “Quicker,” he said. “All the suffering at once.” He was talking to himself. “Then it would be over and done with for you.”

  “No,” she said.

  He didn’t respond.

  “Look at me,” she said.

  He didn’t.

  “I’m not going to break.” Her voice was strong and defiant, even though she’d just been thinking that she was about to shatter. “No matter what you do, I won’t, and if you’re brutal with me, it will only make us into enemies, and I know your weaknesses.”

  He did look at her now, and there was a glint of respect in his gaze. “Aren’t we already enemies, domina?”

  “I’ll tell,” she said. “I’ll tell that you aren’t fucking me. I’ll tell the women, and they’ll tell their men, and soon everyone—”

  He crossed the room to her and cut her off, one thick, large hand wrapped around her neck.

  She gasped.

  “I wouldn’t make threats like that, domina,” he said. “I have no qualms with eliminating you if I need to.”

  That made no sense. He was hesitant to sexually assault her but killing was nothing? Perhaps the killing was simply quicker and easier.

  “If you’re dead,” he said, “there will be no one to help your sister.”

  Curse him for knowing her weaknesses. She gritted her teeth. “Look, I’ll take your stupid offer. You free Cassus and you teach me to defend myself and I’ll let you…” Her voice died. “I’ll let you fuck me in front of Akiel,” she whispered.

  He let go of her neck. “You’d say anything to save your life, I suppose. I should kill you now, anyway. I can’t trust—”

  “You can trust that I care about my sister,” she said, and she was horrified, because she’d lost every bit of leverage that she’d had before. Now, her life was a gift. He was giving it back to her. She hated him. She wanted to scream.

  “You realize that I don’t have to free your human boy, and that I don’t have to teach you anything?”

  She nodded.

  “But I will say that if I kill you, I’ll have to find another girl, and the ancestors only know what she’d be like, or if she’d be as easy to work with as you. Furthermore, I’ve already fucked you once, so maybe it’s less…”

  It wasn’t, but she wasn’t going to contradict him at this point.

  He looked down at his feet. “I’m sorry about all of it, do you know that?”

  “Doesn’t matter how sorry you are if you won’t stop doing it,” she said.

  He inclined his head. “Out of my bedchamber.”

  “We’re not going to shake hands this time?”

  “Would you like that?”

  She turned on her heel and stalked out.

  He shut the door behind her firmly.

  WHEN THERE WAS a knock at Magdalia’s door, she assumed it was Duranth and called out, “I thought you were busy all day running everything!”

  The knock came again, more insistent. “Please, dominissa, let me in,” said a low voice.

  She hurried to the door, drawn by the honorific more than anything else. No one called her that now. No one spoke to her except Duranth. Even though she knew it was pointless, she seized the door knob and tried to turn it. “I can’t let anyone in. I’m locked in here.”

  “Ah,” said the voice. “Of course. Well, perhaps that’s better. We can speak through the door.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I am here with a message from your sister, that’s all you need to know. She asks if you remember the year that the harvest festival was delayed due to the roast turkeys all being burned?”

  “Of course,” said Magdalia, thinking this was a very strange thing to send in a message to her.

  “What did you say about that? What did you call them?”

  Oh, it was a test, for her to prove her identity, and the preceding story had proved that the message came directly from Onivia. Wasn’t her sister clever? Magdalia would never be so clever. “I called them burnty birdies,” she said. She had been rather young at the time.

  “Yes,” said the messenger. “It is you, then. Her message is as follows. ‘Do not give in to despair, little Magda. I love you.’”

  Magdalia waited, but the voice didn’t say anything else. “That’s all?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She is in the encampment of a fae cohort led by a princep named Akiel,” said the voice. “Do you have a message in return?”

  So, Onivia was being held captive, but she’d somehow contrived to send this message. It was vague because she could not come out say what she meant, but Magdalia thought her sister was trying to tell her that she was coming for her.

  Of course Onivia would try. She would never leave her alone here.

  Magdalia was hit with a wall of shame. Here she was, prisoner, true, but enjoying Duranth’s favor and housed in a lavish bedchamber, fed the choicest of meals. She could be using her influence on the Croith to free her sister.

  Why hadn’t she done so?

  But then she thought of asking for anything from Duranth—admitting that he was in charge and that she needed him—and her stomach curdled. “Tell her that I love her too, and that I bid her to think first of herself, that I am unharmed here.”

  “Very good,” said the voice. “I bid you farewell then, dominissa.”

  Then there was nothing, not even the sound of footsteps.

  The messenger had gone.

  ONIVIA HAD BEEN fifteen when she arrived at the capital with Magdalia in tow. She was feeling grown up, because she and Magdalia had traveled alone on the last leg of the journey. Her father had dispatched one of their elder half brothers with them on the ship across to the mainland, but their brother had not boarded the train with them to the capital.

  Instead, he’d carted them aboard and left them to fend for themselves with no other companions than their maids, fae slaves who were as awed by this foray into the outside world as the girls themselves.

  The train was exciting. Though they had all seen the train that criss-crossed Quinta Island, taking supplies from various villae to the coast to be taken to the mainland, none of them had ever boarded one.

  As the youngest, Magdalia deferred to Onivia, and Onivia also had become rather adept at schooling her sister’s moods. Magdalia was one for complaining about everything.

  Why, she’d wanted to bring that fae brat of a companion she had at home, the one who used to sit in on their lessons and raise his hand and ask questions of their magister, questions that would excite the magister and draw him down tangents that bored Onivia, even as they excited
that slave.

  Why there was a slave in their classroom, she didn’t know.

  She was happy enough to leave him behind, even if Magdalia had thrown a crying, screaming tantrum that had lasted for hours.

  Magdalia would do that if Onivia didn’t frame things in a certain way. She would say things like, “Some people might turn up their nose at food in the dining car on the train, but not us, because we are adventurous and because we welcome new experiences.”

  By anticipating the things that Magdalia would dislike and framing the endurance of them as something laudable, she easily schooled her sister’s temper, and she was quite proud of herself for this feat, for Magdalia was not easily tamed.

  So, when Onivia disembarked from the train and was met by her aunt, she thought rather highly of herself. She did not notice that her clothes looked quite different from everyone else’s in the train station, or that her accent marked her as backward and country-bred. She was disdainful and haughty, and it was she who nearly threw a tantrum when her aunt laughed at her.

  Her aunt was her father’s sister, Aunt Toria, who had gone to live at the capital for her schooling and then never left. She was a widow, and she had inherited her husband’s stake in a newspaper in the city. Her husband hadn’t had anything to do with the editorial duties of the paper—that had been the purview of her husband’s father, but the son had shown neither inclination nor talent that way.

  So, Aunt Toria was similarly uninvolved in the newspaper itself, but she was given a share of the profits, as her marriage had ended without any heirs, and she was all that was left to inherit her husband’s estate.

  Aunt Toria wore a slim skirt, unlike Onivia’s and Magdalia’s, which were packed full of crinkly, expansive petticoats to make them wide and full.

  The first thing Aunt Toria did was to go through their trunks and insist that every single one of their dresses be altered.

  “But we had this wardrobe especially made before leaving home,” said Onivia importantly. “The slaves toiled to sew such creations, and they are all brand new.”