“I’m not letting her go,” Elsie whispered. “But I swear on the gods of my world and yours, if she leaves me because of you, I’ll be back to do more than slap you.”
She left me alone to my thoughts for a full five minutes. I was too tightly bound to escape, too tired to care.
Eliandra slid down a ladder from the weather deck’s hatch and sealed it behind her. Seeing her woke me in all the worst ways. We were alone now, and I no longer had to lie. “You killed my best friend.” The words made me tremble. Ronin and Cassandra hadn’t made me a warrior, but holy shit, I knew in that moment I could be a killer. Not just orcs and dragons and illusory doppelgangers; I could kill this elf if I were free. I could do it with my hands and sleep like a baby.
“He didn’t stand down.”
“You ordered your own mother to kill him.”
She snorted. “She’s not my mother.” At my unconvinced silence, she went to the imaging stone. “Nell, scry the area around the Broken Valley for Dracon’s sky keep. Once you find it, hail them and establish contact the moment we’re near enough.”
“So you haven’t got anything else to say for yourself?” I growled.
“What is there?” Eliandra asked. “You made me Queen. You think your friend was the first man I ordered to his death? Do you know what a Queen does? I decide trials, battles, how much money to spend on the sick and poor. Life and death at the stroke of a pen! I’ve never savored it. But when your task is to decide, sometimes people die. They just do, no matter what you choose.”
“You didn’t have to kill Dak.”
“It was my mother’s life or his.” She shrugged. “You made a similar judgment in the Mirror Room—deciding between Ronin and Dak, you chose your friend. I didn’t blame you.”
“You want to be blameless for this?” I was floored. “It’s not happening. This isn’t like repealing a tax or choosing who to save. You straight-up ordered his death and now you’re delivering me to Dracon, and not because it’s good for a country. You’re capitulating! And you’re making excuses for yourself.”
“I suppose you’re the only one who gets to make them, then.” She came close and looked down at me. “A fire has burned in me for three-quarters a century, and it will burn not one day longer. As for the price I pay for this? Exile, and death when Ronin finds me. These aren’t mere risks, they’re assured costs. And I pay them gladly. You’ve no idea what it’s like to live in a state of terror and sorrow for longer than a mortal lifespan—everything I am was to save her. I would rather die a traitor having done so than live a thousand years having failed. Two weeks of satisfaction outweighs a millennium of torment.”
“It’s not just about your pain!” My eyes stung again. “Can’t you see we’re all in pain? Everyone is! It should have brought us together. We could have found a way to beat him. Instead, you let your pain tear us apart.”
“There are no worlds in which we all live happily ever after.” Her voice was chill and jagged. “There are hard truths and measured calculations of risk. This universe doesn’t reward sloppy decisions—play your hand greedy, and it will strip you of everything.”
My head hung. Her words were the hollow defenses of a villain. “You murdered my best friend.”
She sank to her knees, lifted my chin with two fingers, and caught me with a pleading look. “I am sorry. Truly.”
The imaging stone clicked and a clockwork typewriter embedded in the table punched out a report with machinegun strokes. Eliandra plucked the paper free and read it quickly. She lowered a seat near me—though not too close. “Nell, put him on screen.”
The pod’s crystal lights dimmed and beams of amber emanated from the rune stone, projecting an image of Dracon. He sat on a throne, and I got a look at the breadth in his shoulders, the imperial strength in his stance framed by expensive robes and a wildly feathered hairstyle. I looked beyond all that, though, into his eyes—and was startled. His regalia distracted from it, but Dracon’s face was mundane and flawed: the first time I’d seen him, I’d thought his eyes probing, perhaps because of distortions from looking into a face projected in green flames.
But no, his eyes actually bugged a little, and were spaced too wide. His mouth was also too close to his eyes, working together with his small nose to make him look like a pug dog dressed as royalty. Except I liked pugs—they were adorably grotesque, with their watery, concerned-looking faces. This man? I wanted to punch him square in his ugly nose.
He held up an oath stone, pressing his thumb to it. “Are you prepared?” That voice—much as I hated its effect, the rich baritone almost made me forget the flaws in his mug. He would have made an excellent storyteller.
“I am.” Eliandra lifted her own oath stone. “I have acquired the dreamer. Should your offer please me, I swear to deliver him, intact and unharmed. In exchange for my mother, I’ll flee the civilized world, never to oppose you again.”
“Very well.” Dracon waved his free hand dismissively. “I vow safe passage to your Akarri, and to free your mother from captivity. You will receive her alive and unblemished. I will never pursue you—or her—ever again.”
“So I swear,” the Queen said.
Dracon nodded. “So I swear.”
The stones in both their hands flashed in sync with one another. A shudder wormed through Eliandra’s spine, and a similar one in Dracon, though he struggled to conceal it.
He sneered at us. “I expect you by tomorrow afternoon. I’ll have your mother dressed for travel. The past fifty years as your adversary have been less than a pleasure, Your Highness—but at least they’ve come to a satisfactory conclusion.” The warlord turned his attention on me, voice taking on a resonance that captured my attention and made the delivery feel creepily private. “You, I expect, will entertain me from start to finish.”
Eliandra cut his image off with a wave of her hand over the amber stone. She looked at me awhile. “I’ll have food brought to you tonight. We’re on course to arrive on time tomorrow afternoon. I would steel myself for what’s to come.”
I swallowed, for the first time feeling something besides loss or rage. I was afraid of what an immortal and amoral wizard intended to do with the man who’d ruined his whole world.
Chapter Ten: The Sky Keep
The Sky Keep loomed closer, a floating mountain pulled out by its roots and set gently rotating among the clouds. It was egg-shaped, most of its surface craggy stone. Waterfalls descended from on high and crashed over lower terraces. In places, the rock had been carved into classical architecture, featuring immense Roman columns, statues, balconies, and verdant gardens grown along paths sculpted into the mountainside.
Dark spines dripped from the underside of the mountain, bringing to mind Cloud City from Star Wars. We approached those spines, the central stalactite bristling with wooden docks.
A dozen or so dragons escorted the Nell, beating their leather wings alongside, sometimes peering through the crystal roof. Akarri skirted about with a spring in their step, no doubt feeling like goldfish staring out the bowl at hungry cats. I wondered if the flying lizards knew the Akarri had hunted dragons before—if they were intelligent enough to hold vendettas.
We docked at a wooden pier that jutted off the enormous stalactite. Our hatch slid open and two warty orcs dropped a gangplank from the pier’s end onto our egress ramp. A half-dozen more held crossbows and iron weapons ready.
“I’ll take the wizard alone,” Eliandra announced.
“I absolutely disallow it,” Tammagan said.
“I nonetheless will,” the Queen said. “Wait here for my return.”
Rage bunched Tammagan’s shoulders together and I could tell, orders be damned, this was going to be an argument. I took the opportunity to glance around and spotted Elsie coming from below deck to operate a turret. Briefly, our eyes met.
I shot her a look that was supposed to mean, Are we okay? Can we please be okay?
She hesitated the briefest moment. She cast a nervous glance at
Tammagan—one that suggested the dreaded breakup visit had never occurred. Her features softened ever so slightly. Then her eyes went back to me and she nodded her assent, disappearing into the turret before I could express my gratitude.
No matter what else happened today, knowing Elsie didn’t entirely despise me helped.
Tammagan and Eliandra were still debating the merits of the Queen going it alone when I interrupted: “The thing you have for Elsie? I didn’t create it. Whatever else you believe, know that. It doesn’t come from anyplace but you.”
Midsentence, Tammagan blinked at me. “You think that’s what I think?” Leaning in close, the Captain tapped my chest twice to accentuate her point. “I love that scheming bitch because she made me want her, not you.”
I wanted to laugh. It was the first good feeling I’d had in a day. Gods and wizards are no match for Elsie’s big, dumb, greedy heart.
At last, Eliandra pulled Tammagan back into the debate and dressed down the Captain so thoroughly I felt certain Tammagan would stab the elf all on her own. Instead she relented, and Eliandra prodded me down the gangplank with her staff of office.
The gaggle of orcs wasted no more time, snagging my arms and forcing me to a doorway at dock’s end, in the side of the stalactite. Eliandra followed in their wake, unharried and imperial in her bearing.
Within, massive open gears and clinking chains pulled our wooden platform up a dark shaft. The shaft stank of infection and orc sweat. Their bodies were matted in sparse hair, filth, and scabby sores. After our plodding ascent, we made our way along a great hall large enough to fit a herd of elephants. It was lit by torch flame that hissed on oily wicks, producing an occasional wet pop.
The once-great corridor had seen better days. Cobwebs festooned the arched ceiling and deep cracks pitted the masonry. Patches of floor and wall were broken off—suspiciously, most often at roughly orc-swinging-his-axe height. Graffiti was everywhere, consisting mostly of stick figures, crude images of breasts, and depictions of cartoonish violence. It was all very junior high.
The walk would have bored me had I not been quaking in fear, knees wobbling and threatening to buckle as I approached my doom. Would it be quick? Certainly not. I refused to imagine what awaited me, even though girding my psyche might have been wiser.
The hall emptied directly into a throne room. The orcs grunted in fear at the threshold, seeming to tiptoe once they were on sacred ground. The chamber was unlike the corridors, in that it was both pristine and cluttered. While objectively immense, it was made to feel tiny by the sheer volume of stuff. We marched past statues and glass cases full of crowns, jeweled weapons, and memorabilia. Tapestries on every wall depicted battles and feasts and orgies. A scale-model battlefield contained three or four thousand two-inch-tall, separately carved and painted miniatures in stylized armor, each holding a unique weapon, all seemingly made by the same hand.
There was no organization or theme, and we wove a complex circuit to a long worktable where I saw Dracon in person for the first time. I had the opportunity to size him up in the flesh.
He bent over a model creature with Rancor-like qualities, concentrating intensely on a scalpel he used to shave slivers of wood from around each vertebra. Between the hunching and the oversized cape, he seemed too small to be a lord of dragons. True, the cape swooped off a shoulder and bared one arm, revealing he had the bulk of a professional wrestler; but it was that incongruous, strong-yet-old look of a fifty-year-old bodybuilder past his prime.
The strength in his body clashed with his opulent robes and kind-of-nerdy face. He was just some dork trying to be a stoic barbarian, but also wrapping himself in the trappings of wealth.
Then the hair. He had insanely feathered, ’80s-style Twisted Sister hair that was, I guess, cool. Once.
The orcs hissed and prodded each other for a volunteer, shoving the smallest one forward. It straightened, gulped audibly, and looked at Dracon. “Sire. We bring you wizard, like you ask.”
Dracon winced, his scalpel hovering a moment over the model monster. He leveled his icy glare from across the table. “What have I said about interrupting me?” he asked in glacial tones so well delivered he might have taken a side gig reading Leaves of Grass over the radio.
His glare cowed the orc into submission. Then he fixed on me, studying me. I sensed reptilian intelligence in his bugging eyes, my skin crawling. Goofy and out-of-touch as his attire might be, I recalled his casual references to torture and my stomach turned.
“But I’m being rude,” he sang, playfully rolling the “r.” Standing briskly, he opened his hands in welcome. “Forgive me. It’s been so long since I’ve had a real guest.”
So this was our game—pretending at normal? Sure, why not. “Nice place. Should I have taken my shoes off at the door?”
“Oh, banter! I like you. Nothing like Cassandra. I found her quite shrill.”
Since I was Cassandra’s creation and said to be much like her, I found that odd, until I realized a lot of females probably sounded “shrill” to Dracon. And, hell! This wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill misogynist. I was staring down the barrel of a killer, a warlord, and a rapist. Swallowing my crack-wise instincts, I vowed not to joke with the bastard. All I wanted was this collar off so I could shoot him in the face with my rainbow gun.
I was scared. But it was a reckless kind of scared.
“I brought your dreamer,” Eliandra said. “Now it’s your turn.”
“True!” Dracon clapped his hands twice. A stone slab along the wall lifted via chains and pulleys, revealing a corridor beyond. A willowy figure in white stepped from the shadows. She slid her hood back, revealing a splendorous elven face much like Eliandra’s, except a more mature thirty years old instead of the Queen’s still-gets-carded look. Her gleaming platinum hair was a shade lighter, glinting like snow. With her pale skin and white traveling cloak, she seemed bleached of all color.
The woman descended several stairs, gliding toward us. “Daughter.”
“Mother,” Eliandra whispered in such a fragile, hopeful voice that for an instant, I nearly understood everything she was doing. Then, she put her mask back on and stared at Dracon.
Dracon waved off her hard look. “What, you expected treachery? What is one concubine to me? You get Koriana, and I keep the remainder of your race to myself. I’d introduce you to the rest of your people, but I keep my harem elsewhere.” His smile wasn’t so much taunting as genuinely proud. “I’ve over six hundred women and two hundred men to do with as I please once I return to my capital. So take your reward and get thee gone from here.” He settled his serpentine gaze back on me. I felt grimy. “My guest more than makes up for the loss.”
Eliandra removed the control ring and tossed it to Dracon. Then she ran to embrace her mother.
But Koriana stiffened during the hug, looking at Dracon. “I am… released?”
“Yes.” He waved her away. “Begone.”
Eliandra stroked her mother’s cheek. “I’m taking you somewhere free.”
Koriana squirmed away, stumbling away from her daughter. “I don’t want to go!” Her eyes were wild with terror.
Eliandra reached for her mother, blinking through her own confusion. “Just let me take you into the light of day.”
“I said no. There’s light in the gardens.” She glanced at Dracon. “Please, don’t make me go.”
Dracon teased a feathered lock of his hair in amusement, as though a well-trained dog had excitedly sat when the command word was said in casual conversation. “You’re free now. I’ll never seek you again.”
Koriana flinched, as though struck. “But I love you.”
Eliandra looked ready to vomit. I had to sit, or I would too. Dragging a chair from the table, collapsing into it, I stared at my hands. I couldn’t look at Eliandra. She’d killed my best friend, I reminded myself. I should have relished the horror in her face; should have gloated.
Instead, I was close to laughing and crying at once. This was the madne
ss of the world—my friend had been murdered for this. The Queen had killed him for fool’s gold.
“If I’m free, I don’t have to go,” Koriana insisted.
“Technically, no,” Dracon purred. “You’re free to do as you like.”
“This is the Fugue!” Eliandra shouted. “She won’t be truly free until I get her away from you.”
“Ah, but I disagree,” Dracon said. “I promised to release her from captivity, and she may now do what her heart desires. It cannot be helped if she desires me. Tell me, did you really expect her to go willingly? For her to recognize her daughter, and my hold on her to simply lift like a dream? I am a god, you daft child.”
“Mother. Please look at me,” Eliandra pleaded. “Try to remember me. I’m the same girl whose hair you brushed; who you read to at night.”
“I know who you are,” Koriana snapped. “I simply don’t intend to leave with you.”
Eliandra wheeled on Dracon. “She has to go! That was our bargain.”
“Indeed, it would violate our bargain for me to keep her captive or to pursue either of you. I am under no obligation to force her aboard your ship, though. Or to prevent her from, say, taking her own life if you drag her screaming from my keep.”
Koriana’s eyes brightened at the suggestion. “That’s right. Take me from here and I’ll pitch myself from the rails.”
The Fugue wasn’t subtle, I realized. It was total. It was the obliteration of a person, so thorough it had wiped out Koriana’s sense of being a parent. I remembered discussions of genocide, of how it was so much worse than just mass murder—it was the annihilation of a whole people, not just their bodies but all their traditions and culture and memories along with. The Fugue was nothing less than the genocide of a person.
Eliandra shook her head fiercely. “I didn’t agree to this!”
“You did.” Dracon canted his head to the side. “And per our agreement, I’ll not stop you from leaving—with or without Koriana. Though since Koriana is a freed woman, nothing bars her from taking you prisoner…”
Only Broken Things Are Free (A Pygmalion Fail Book 3) Page 12