My just-for-fun ship was powered by sails and some mysterious engine in either pylon. I had no clue how they worked, only that they emitted clouds. It was magitech, so I could do whatever.
“It gets hazy after the second bottle.”
“Oh boy. That’s a lot of booze.”
“I’m competitive. This is known of me.”
“Did you win?” I asked.
“The alcohol part, thoroughly. I’m four times her size. It was what happened after…”
I stopped drawing. “Holy hell, seriously? Her?”
Dak shrugged.
“She took your virginity?”
He spread his hands, as if to say, “It is what it is.”
This was big news. Okay, half-big—by my reckoning Dak had lost his virginity to Melanie St. John at a campout years ago, but Dak measured virginity in the way of Baptist-reared kids who had faith in the “oral/hand job” loophole. It permitted good Christians to get frisky and keep a side pot of purity for down the line. Not that I found fault in this—I had no strong opinion one way or the other, having not had enough sexual experience to worry about it. I nonetheless had to correct for Dak’s idea of virginity when we talked about this stuff.
I frowned. “Wait a sec. She loaded you up on liquor and took you below deck for boning?”
He sighed. “Yet another chaste soul plied with drink and taken advantage of. I feel like such a cliché.”
I snorted. I’d let him get away with “virgin,” but certainly not “chaste.”
Dak read my mind. “Melanie and I were in a strict hands-and-mouth-only relationship. Quinny was… full contact.” He absently rubbed the side of his head. “Almost bit my ear off.”
Now I scowled. “How drunk did she get you?”
“We both felt it in the morning, but no blackouts or anything.”
“But you… y’know. Consented, right?”
“Damn near consented her through a wall.”
“Still. Remember her ‘surf the great green sea’ comment? Sounds a little different now.”
“Part of why it bothers me. Pretty sure I’m her big, green fetish.”
Oof. I felt for him. We both had friends who could treat sex like just a fun biological function, but in spite of our occasional religious heresies, neither of us strayed too far from the sacralized view. For him—and probably me too—sex wasn’t “just boning.” I wasn’t saving myself for marriage, but I’d always hoped to connect with someone at more than a genital level. Quinny was from that other world, similar to what we brushed against in popular culture, where people had casual sex buddies. It sounded like Dak’s world had collided with hers, which is the tax pluralism takes. It’s the price of having different kinds of people, and since Dak and I were already so weird, we’d gotten used to paying it.
“Ugly views on orcs and lesbians aside, Quinny’s not all bad,” I said. “She helped me through some trauma after my first battle. The woman has sex like it’s a handshake. Maybe she figured you do too. Jumping you might have been her way of welcoming you aboard.”
He snorted. “Fine for her, but that’s not me. Or at least, not me at my best. Guess I was overly dick-first.”
“You worried you gave her orclings?”
“Nah, Northern Spine orcs can’t impregnate humans. Half-orcs are lame angst factories.”
“The situation’s not a total screw-up, then.”
“I don’t know.” Eliandra swayed into view, her smoothly careless locomotion setting me immediately on edge. “You both screw up a lot.” Her voice lilted and she hung boredly off a crate, the lines of her body stretched taut. I caught a whiff of the rum on her breath even from a distance.
“Seems Quinny and I didn’t finish all the booze,” Dak muttered.
“Screw off, peasant.” The rosy-cheeked Queen pushed off the crate and alighted onto another beside my sketchpad. Even drunk, her every motion was gracefully executed.
I didn’t like the reckless energy pouring off her. “Unwinding from your kidnapping with a few drinks?”
“You can’t have any, because it’s all in here.” She patted her belly with two hands, then snapped up my sketchpad before I could stop her. She was somehow even faster while inebriated. Or maybe she was always that quick, but forgot to act human in this state. I fretted as she flipped through my art. “What exactly are you doing tonight, oh great dreamer and god of our realm? Hopefully not making more messes. Moved any continents lately? Displaced a few families? Make any interesting new friends?”
Needled, I tried to respond, but nothing came to mind so my mouth just said, “No.”
“Why, look at this! Our beloved Tammagan is in her battle dress. I suppose that means we have you to thank for the idiotic armor that’s gotten so many women killed on my behalf. Good to know.”
“It’s not like that,” I said.
“A young man draws pretty women in skimpy attire. I think I know what it’s like.” She tossed the pad onto the crate and her lightning palm snagged my computer stone.
“Hey!”
I gave chase, along with Dak, but she wheeled, thumping her back into the rail. She’d already figured out how to flick through all my illustrations of Rune, and one by one the holographic images flashed in front of us. The first one featured a battle, skies thick with dragons and lightning blasts. “Good of you to give us a few wars. We certainly need those to keep us on our toes, don’t we?”
“What the hell is your problem?” Dak reached for the computer stone.
Eliandra glared with such fire that it stalled his advance and he actually took a step back. “He gave us this bastard of a world. The Cataclysm, wars, oppression. He’s no better than Dracon.”
A growl rippled from Dak’s throat, more tiger than human. “So without Isaac, there’d be no war?”
Her glare intensified, but she said nothing.
“Thought so,” he said, unflinching.
“Have you any clue what Dracon’s done?” she asked.
“He enslaved your people.” I thought back to Dracon’s paintings: women in chains, lorded over by grim warriors in desolate landscapes. “I saw the chains and collars, and I’m sorry.”
“It was worse than chains and collars.” She slipped into a seated position on the rail, back flush to a crystal panel. “Humans try not to remember the Fugue. But my people can’t forget.”
I frowned. “What was the Fugue?”
Eliandra rolled her head back, staring drunkenly through glass at the heavens above. “A spell that bent the physically weak to the will of the strong. Say a man saved a woman from wild predators. The Fugue bound her to him, so that she’d worship him from her knees. So, too, if he bested her in combat. This filthy obsession for their masters was implanted into the hearts of the defeated; it was what our world once thought of as love.” Bitterness infused her voice. “It wasn’t, of course. It was infernal magic. A spell. The Fugue changed the slave’s mind; shattered her will.
“He built a world where conscience and compassion could be torn away at the point of a sword, where ferocity of spirit could be choked to death with a brutish fist.”
I gaped. I sensed Dak’s rigid stance beside me.
“So, no. You don’t ‘get’ it,” Eliandra spat. “You didn’t live it, so you only know it here.” She tapped her temple. Then she set the same fingertips to her heart. “I feel those facts here, because it tore apart my family. Dracon made this world his harem. Put himself at its top, with my people—in all their wisdom, beauty, and magic—under his feet. Humans live blessedly short lives, you see, so none still suffer the Fugue. It was destroyed in the Cataclysm. But for those long-lived beings who came before, it still holds power.”
“That’s why he wants all the elves.” My voice sounded hollow. “They’re the only ones left he can… control.”
“And my mother,” Eliandra choked, holding back tears, “has been at his mercy for nearly three-quarters of a century.” She steadied her breathing, stared me down, and sp
oke evenly. “So tell me. In seventy-five years, how many times do you think he’s raped her?”
Everything in me went concave and my eyes burned. I blinked, and tried to say I was sorry. To say anything at all. I couldn’t get a single word past the knot in my throat.
“We’re going to end him,” Dak said, his voice low and furious.
What I felt, I didn’t immediately recognize. I had no word for it. It was like a shudder—not of fear or pleasure, but blinding outrage. A white-hot spark of wrath sang through my every fiber and I wanted to break a hundred thousand necks. I blamed Dracon for that alien urge, and knew it was his neck I had to break a hundred thousand times over.
But Eliandra’s stare never wavered from me. “You? You’re just like him.” The words came softly, but between the ribs and into my heart, where I felt them as surely as cold steel. Holding my computer stone, she showed me the next image. “This?” She waved my image of a maiden in the coils of a dragon. “How does this save my mother?”
My outrage supernova collapsed into a black hole. The gravity of the guilt crushed me. I couldn’t breathe. I was up in the sky, in a spacious room with air on all sides, but there wasn’t enough of it and I gasped.
Dak stepped between us. “The Fugue is gone. Isaac destroyed it.”
“Hardly helps my mother, does it?”
“You were born after the Cataclysm?”
“What of it?”
“Then he sure as hell helped you. You’re free.”
“And so my mother’s fate is on me?” she snarled. “Is that it?”
“Of course not,” Dak said, voice softer. “It’s on Dracon and always has been. Not Isaac, not you, not her. Dracon.”
“Oh? And if I keep going through these images, what will I see?” she challenged. “Dracon gave us the Fugue. What do you suppose Grawflefox has given us?” She tapped through two more.
Panic jolted through me. “Eliandra—give me the computer.” I knew how many more taps until she saw the truth, and I wasn’t ready.
“Why?” She tapped to the next image. One tap away. “Is there something I shouldn’t see?”
The look she gave me? The sickening insight hit me. She already knows.
“Well? What aren’t you telling me?”
My shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry.”
She hit the arrow on the screen and there it was: Eliandra’s portrait atop the Palace of Ten Thousand Chambers while the wind fingered through her long hair, staring off into a sunset with keen eyes. On the other side of that holographic image, I saw the frozen horror in those same eyes. Her head shook almost imperceptibly. No matter what she’d anticipated, the evidence of her own creation at my easel undid her.
The ache rocked through me. “I’m so sorry.”
She dropped the computer stone and its stand. It thumped to the deck and winked out. The Queen’s eyes were glassed over. “You made me?” Her voice hardly carried over creaking wood and distant propellers.
I couldn’t look into her eyes; the accusation in them was too strong, washing over me, my hands hanging limp to my sides.
Dak sat down.
“You made me.” Tears lanced down one cheek, then the other. “Did you put me on the streets? Did you leave my belly empty every night?”
“No,” I whispered.
“Did you give my mother to Dracon?”
“No! Never.”
“But you made me Queen. I blamed myself for those choices, except they weren’t really mine. Were they? You taught me to lie, you put that damned crown on my brow, and you set me in the midst of traitors with only words and decorum to protect me.”
“I didn’t mean for that to—”
“Didn’t mean it?”
“I drew you to be a queen. I didn’t know about traitors, about what the crown would be like.”
“You broke me,” she whispered. “You built me broken.” She turned and gripped the rails. Fumbling for a window release, she pushed it open on its hinge and lurched partway out to throw up before sinking to her knees. “You’re the reason I don’t even… I don’t…”
I swallowed and Dak looked at me, worried.
“I don’t know who I am.” She said it quietly to herself, then focused back on me. “You made me hollow.”
“All right,” Dak said, taking a knee. One of his hands rested on her comparatively tiny shoulder. “You’re not hollow. You’re a pain in the ass, but nothing about you is empty.” He grinned. “And you’re full of rum, remember?”
She sobbed, wiping rapidly at her face. “Of course. Not very royal of me, is it? Crying.” She glanced at me. “Please, Isaac.” It was the first time she’d used my real name. “Tell me who I am.”
“I… You’re the Queen.”
“That’s not a person. It’s a role. I know my roles, I know what I have to do—I have to save my mother. I have goals and skills, I have faces to wear that get me from here to there. But who am I? You made me, so just tell me. I have too many faces. Which is me?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I can’t—”
“Just decide!” Desperately, she scrambled to her feet. “I don’t care which. Just decide.”
Dak shot me a look, as if to ask whether he should carry her to her quarters to sleep it off.
I shook my head at him and looked at Eliandra. “I can’t.”
“You have to.”
“I can’t. I don’t know. The only one who can know is you. I’m sorry.”
Dak went to steady her, but she shrugged away from us. “I can walk.”
“You sure?” he asked.
“Yes.” She shut her eyes, inhaling. She held it. Then, on the exhale, her whole body straightened and she once again wore Regal Eliandra’s face. “Elves are not clumsy drunks.” She turned and made for her cabin, disappearing within.
“Well.” Dak put his thumbs into his belt. “Elves and rum do not mix.”
“It’s my fault,” I said bitterly. “Her. This world. All of it.”
“You would try to take credit.”
“Just look at this mess.”
“It’s a wilderness full of free people,” Dak said. “Of course it’s a mess. There was a Rune before you and, if we both keeled over tomorrow, there’d be a Rune after you. The world was here first, dude, and even with the force of reality-altering magic behind your paintings, they’re just one more piece of a great, big everything.”
“But Dracon—”
“—is one of those guys who thinks it all belongs to him. Power and responsibility are just two words for the same thing. To take responsibility for a thing is to make it yours. Dracon invented a world where he could save a woman and make her belong to him. When he ‘saved’ the world from monsters single-handed, he decided it all belonged to him. If you want to be different from him, you have to share responsibility. Try to see it: you’re one tiny piece of this world. It’s not on you to save the poor women and the poor elves from Dracon. It’s on us all. The responsibility falls on us all, because the world belongs to us all.”
I closed my eyes and sighed. “That’s all true. But I still put the Akarri in that stupid armor. Screwed up the sky ships. Messed up Eliandra’s life by making her Queen.”
Dak shrugged. “You were making art. That’s not usually connected to the powers of literal creation. Were it, I think we’d have to burn J. K. Rowling at the stake for what she did to the poor Weasleys. What galls me about Dracon is that at some point he realized this place was real, and he kept treating it as his.”
I nodded. “He galls me too.” I wrapped my fingers around the stylus and stared at it. A sense of determination woke inside me and I picked up the computer stone and its stand, setting it up again.
“What now?” Dak asked.
I opened a new document and stared at blank space. Pressing stylus to pad, I said, “High time the Akarri get a decent change of clothes.”
Dak rubbed his hands together. “I’m getting an art boner.”
This time, fu
nctional demands and creative spark merged. I wasn’t drawing the new armor out of pure instrumentality. I’d tapped into a deep well of feeling, and the rage poured from the tip of my stylus, channeled directly into a suit of armor intended for one purpose: to give our foes nightmares.
Chapter Six: The Citadel of Light
My muse had donned combat fatigues and affixed her bayonet. My vision for the new armor burned brightly in my imagination and scorched from the tip of my stylus until I could no longer keep my eyes open. Near dawn, I had a vague sense of Ronin easing me below deck. I woke in a new bunk—she’d deposited me with Dak, who’d had the foresight to blueprint himself a plus-sized room to accommodate his height.
I got going around noon, taking lunch as my breakfast. Above deck, our ship sank below cloud cover and through a flock of bat-mantas. They held formation with our craft, silent bodies gliding in our wake.
Dak didn’t like how large they were. “Those creatures are a middle finger in Darwin’s face.”
“Yeah.” But I was grinning. Being from rural America, I didn’t mind a bit if Darwin lost one for a change. We were due.
By late afternoon, we flew over a sweep of autumnal trees that burned gold and red, breathtaking since it was late spring elsewhere. “The seasons are different here?”
Ronin approached the rail beside me. “They pass week by week. In a few days, the trees will be bare. In six, shrouded with snow.”
The hilly forest dipped into a shallow valley, trees ringing a sparkling lake in the shape of an eye, an island at its center only adding to the effect by looking like a green iris. We descended and splashed down on the lake, our propellers operating just as smoothly in water. On closer inspection, the lake was shrouded in frozen mist, patches of ice ramming into our hull as we plowed forward.
Our pilot shut down the propellers before one could eat a mini-iceberg.
“Everfrost Lake,” I said. “Name makes sense now. Where’s the Citadel?”
“There.” Ronin pointed to the island.
Nothing was on it. It was flat, populated by a copse of evergreens and jagged, ice-glazed stones standing sentinel at its beaches. “Is it… invisible?”
Only Broken Things Are Free (A Pygmalion Fail Book 3) Page 7