The Beast Prince

by Marian Perera

  “Oh, right.” Marus pushed his own thoughts back to that topic.

  Kat rearranged the mugs she’d knocked out of place. “The girl told us a Prince’s power is carried in his blood and his seed. So slashing your throat open would work, but sex is safer.” Her mouth twisted. “Disgusting, but safer.”

  Marus almost asked what was so repulsive about something Kat had done herself, before he remembered they were talking about a child. Not to mention any daughter of Ractane’s was, technically at least, related to him, as if his family hadn’t been disturbing enough already. And yes, drawing a Prince’s blood could be deadly, since the instinctive response of any Prince to injury was reversion to earth form.

  “But I’ve been with lovers before, and nothing has happened,” he said.

  “Because you’ve never had a void before.”

  “A what?”

  “The girl said Ractane was curious why the Princes couldn’t father children like themselves. We know what happened the one time a human went to the Queen, so why couldn’t her sons have powerful descendants too? That’s why Ractane started his harem—to see if he could spawn a line of Princes under his command.”

  It was what she had once suggested to him, that a Prince wanting an advantage over one of his brothers should ally with two or three others. Marus hadn’t been too worried about that because any such coalition would fall apart fast as each Prince’s ambition and ruthlessness came to the forefront, but Ractane’s plan took that into account.

  It was also the most disgusting perversion Marus could imagine. The women might or might not have been willing to participate in the scheme, but the children…even if they had power over earth, they wouldn’t have been Princes by any definition of the word. More like pawns. Marus thought it said something about him and his brothers that, within moments of their birth, they hadn’t needed to consult with each other before they fled the Queen’s valley. No matter their differences, they valued their freedom and autonomy. Which Ractane planned to deny his own children.

  “He couldn’t,” he said, willing it to be true.

  “No, he couldn’t,” Kat said, much to his relief. “The children were fully human. The women you had in Copper Lake might have conceived too—without preventatives, anyway. But unless they were virgins when they came to you and chaste afterwards—”

  Marus shook his head. He preferred women who knew what to do and who were confident about what they wanted; shy innocents made him feel he had to step carefully in case they burst into tears.

  “—it would be difficult to tell who the father was. And since those children were human, they would have been accepted into their community.”

  He had never been close enough to that community to be told if that had happened. He wondered if he’d had any such children, unknown and lost now in the devastation of the town.

  Kat breathed out softly, in a sigh. “Ractane puzzled over how the Queen had passed her power down to her offspring when he couldn’t do the same. Then he saw what the Queen had done that he’d failed to do.”

  Marus saw it too. “She killed the man who sired her brood. He did the same with the women in his harem?”

  She nodded, a small jerk of her head. “Waited until they were about to give birth, or actually in labor. Death is the catalyst. Violent death, I’m guessing. That preserves the power handed down from parent to child—except the vicious bastard was cheated again, which almost makes me think there might be some justice in the world. His children had no power over earth, just voids where their abilities should have been. But he figured out a way to put those to use.”

  Marus finished that. “Because the voids drain power into themselves.” He barely recognized his own voice. “And he only ever had daughters, just as our mother only gave rise to sons.”

  He would never have believed such a thing could happen, but then again, he would never have expected to lose his Queen-given ability either. His hands rested on the table, and he looked at them as if they belonged to a stranger, or a human.

  “The day it happened,” he heard himself say, quietly as if he spoke to the patterns in the scrubbed surface of the table, “a woman came to my house, early in the morning. I had a go-between who arranged that. He found women who’d share a Prince’s bed, and I drained marshes or broke up fields for sowing. Sometimes he sent women I hadn’t asked for, like an unexpected gift, so I thought she was one of those.”

  “What did she look like?”

  Marus said nothing for a moment, because he remembered he’d seen her in the fever dreams. Except he couldn’t recall details—she must have been attractive and good in bed, but nothing else had made any impression. She’d blended into the nameless, indistinguishable mass that humans had always been to him, until he’d lost his power. Until he’d met Kat.

  “She wasn’t thirteen, if that’s what you’re wondering,” was all he could say. “Closer to twenty, I’m guessing.”

  “If Ractane’s thirty years old, how could he have a daughter who’s twenty?”

  “We’re all thirty, and don’t forget, we were never infants.” A baby would have been better off dumped in a pit of scorpions than born of the Queen.

  Her brows went up. “You seem younger.”

  Was that a compliment? Marus decided to take it as one, and returned to the topic of the woman who’d come to him. “The odd thing was that when we were done, she left without a word. Then again, some women were just curious what it was like to be with a Prince.”

  He drew in a breath, feeling a yokelike weight settle across his shoulders, leaving him no choice but to bear it. “If you’re right, there’s nothing I could do about it, short of finding her—and then what? I wouldn’t want to touch her again.”

  “There’s more,” Kat said. “That isn’t the end of what the girl told us.”

  “Oh, life is too generous. Go on.”

  Her voice was even and empty. “Ractane is on his way. She said he can sense where his daughters are, just as they’re always aware of him. He’ll reach us before dawn tomorrow.”

  The yoke grew to a mountain. “If he knows where she is, why is he only coming to us now?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he can only sense her while she’s conscious.”

  The worst part, Marus thought in a detached way, wasn’t the weight pressing down on him. It was the sense that there was no longer anything in him which could bear it. All he felt was a cold dread that didn’t even have the galvanizing aspect of terror.

  “What are your people going to do?” he asked.

  “Dig in and brace for impact—not much else we can do. Mayor Stuyvesant says we won’t hand the girl over if she wants to stay with us.”

  Marus hoped she wasn’t waiting for something brilliant or profound from him. He couldn’t fight another Prince. No wonder so many human settlements were in ruins. And even if he fled—not that he could get far before dawn—Ractane would destroy the town to get his daughter back.

  Since Marus couldn’t think his way out of the next twelve or so hours, he shifted focus. “If we live through this,” he said, “and if I’m able to take earth form again somehow, what would you want from me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I traded favors with Copper Lake. I haven’t done that with your people because I’ve had nothing to give—yet. So if I did, what would you ask for?”

  “Isn’t this wishful thinking?” She sounded tired. “We don’t have a clue how to fight a Prince.”

  Marus already knew why her people had built their town where it was, on a spit of land extending into the sea. Ractane could only approach from one side, and chances were they’d laid traps there, perhaps even with explosives; they’d had years to do so.

  Whether their defenses would work was another matter entirely, and all they could really do was make it difficult for Ractane to reach them. As long as he r
emained in earth form, he was invulnerable.

  If he continued to think of Ractane, he’d sink into a pit and not come back out, so he changed the subject. “Kat?” At the change in his tone, she looked up. “Maybe I asked the wrong question.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He stretched until the joints popped in his shoulders, rolling them to work the stiffness of tension out. “If you could choose whether or not I regain my power, what would your decision be?”

  He wondered if she would say there wasn’t time to waste on hypotheticals that would never happen. Instead she rested her elbows on the table and studied him over her clasped hands, with as much careful assessment as she would have looked over a new weapon, evaluating its weight and range and firepower.

  “If none of this had happened, I would never have seen the best side of you,” she said after a moment.

  “My best side is a powerless human? I don’t want to hear what my worst side is.”

  He’d meant that as a joke, but she didn’t smile. “You know, you’re right,” she said more quietly. “Without your power, you’re—decent enough, but that’s all you are. With it, you’re the closest thing to a god, and given how hellish the world is at times, that’s not the compliment you’re taking it as.”

  He was decent enough. Well, that was possibly the nicest thing a human not under duress would say about him, and he wasn’t sure why he’d hoped for anything more. She’d laid it out very clearly; there was no lesser of two evils here.

  “So what’s your answer?” he asked.

  “If you retake your power somehow, it’ll separate you from us and—” She hesitated. “And you might let it go to your head. But I want you to have it back.”

  That was unexpected. “Because I’ll be your patron then?”

  She shook her head slowly, her gaze direct and filled with sadness. “Because without it, you’ll die. Even if you escape being killed by one of your brothers—or one of us, for that matter—you’ll grow old. Another thirty years will be the most you can hope for, if you hope at all. You’ll die, and I’ve already lost enough people whom I—who mattered to me. It’s selfish of me, but I’d rather have you as an arrogant, overbearing master than not have you at all.”

  That twisted in his chest like nothing he had ever felt before. He’d heard any amount of praise and flattery in the past, but her quiet honesty and the shadow of tenderness in her voice—those went deeper, all the way. For the first time he knew what it was like to be cared for, cherished.

  And not for his power either, just for himself. If the damn table hadn’t been between them, he didn’t know what he would have done. Taken her in his arms, gone to his knees before her. Anything.

  But so much else lay between them—her people and his brother, for a start—and he swallowed the words he might have said. If she lived through Ractane’s onslaught somehow, she’d be better off without ties to any Prince. Other human survivors wouldn’t discriminate between him and his brother.

  The legs of a bench scraped across the floor, breaking into his thoughts, and she rose to her feet. “Do you want to go to the town? I gave Julissa—that’s the girl who came with the message—the ponies to take back, but we can get there on foot, if we don’t wait too long. The gates will be barred and reinforced after midnight.”

  “No, there’ll be enough bad feeling towards a Prince already without people hearing one of them used humans for breeding purposes.” His eyes might go unnoticed in the dark, but it was still a risk—and more to the point, he wouldn’t hide behind humans. “But you should leave. You’d be safer there.”

  Her chin went up. “You asked what I’d want from you if we come through this and everything goes back to—what passes for normal. I’d ask you to stay. To protect us. So I’m not leaving either.”

  He wanted so much to kiss her, one last time. “Well, then,” he said lightly, because he had no intention of the slightest trace of longing or despair showing on the surface, “let’s get ready to go down fighting.”

  They spent the next two hours at it. He closed and barred the gate. Kat tucked an extra box of cartridges into a pocket, cleaned her rifle and sharpened her knife, steady strokes with pauses every now and then to check the razor edge.

  Might come in handy if Ractane took her alive, Marus thought as he gathered up their supplies; she’d asked him to do that, so he stowed food in the pots, filled the packs and tied the furs into neat bundles. He wasn’t sure why, but when he was done, Kat took him to the barracks and pointed out a loose floorstone.

  “Saw that when I pulled the bunks away.” She levered the stone up to show a deep hole beneath. “Drop everything inside.”

  Marus did, though he doubted Ractane would take clothes or cooking pots another Prince had used, and he said so. Kat shrugged as she replaced the floorstone.

  “It’s your tribute,” she said, “and I’d rather burn everything than let him have it. Even if he razes the place, maybe he won’t find this.”

  She pushed a bunk over the floorstone for good measure and dusted her hands off. “You know we’ve buried written accounts?” Her voice was somber and seemed to come from a little distance away. “Of how we got here, our experiences, our names. Copies of the logbook from the ship, and mementoes that were passed down from our great-grandparents. We put them in iron cans and sealed those and buried them in different places. Even if we all die, those will be there, and maybe some day, someone will find them.”

  Marus had known life wasn’t easy for humans, but until then the full reality of their existences hadn’t struck him. Burying their names just as Kat had hidden his tribute, so that even if—when—they died, they wouldn’t be forgotten. That was all they could hope for.

  He spoke without thinking. “What if whoever finds those can’t read?”

  Kat looked at him with incredulous shock, as if she couldn’t believe she’d heard him right. And then she made a gasping sound that turned into a laugh, breathless and shaking, but still laughter.

  For a moment he wasn’t sure whether there was a touch of hysteria in her reaction—and that was the blackest humor he could possibly have come up with—but her head went back as she kept laughing, and he found himself doing the same. Not because it was the first time he’d heard her laugh, but because it meant even a Prince’s approach and the possibility of her people’s extinction hadn’t defeated her. She pressed her knuckles to her mouth, turning the sound to muffled gurgles.

  “We put pictures in too,” she said when she could speak normally again, a trace of the amusement lingering in her eyes. “Anyone who could draw well did sketches. Stephen says he wishes we could add a rosy stone, whatever that is, to help with translation, but this is the best we can do.”

  Marus had never heard of pink rocks being useful in understanding other languages, but there was so much he didn’t know about humans. “That’s something else I can do if we live through this. I never learned to read.”

  “I can’t either.” She looked abashed.

  “Well, we’ll do it together.” If humans could manage it, how difficult could it be? “But for now, let’s go to the tower.”

  Other than her weapons, the only things they hadn’t buried were the lanterns and candles. Marus stuffed the tapers into his pockets and gave Kat two lanterns, taking the other two himself. She went up the steps before him, and since he had a feeling she’d notice if he enjoyed the curves of her hips and backside, he looked at her shadow against the wall instead, long and sinuous in the lanternlight.

  She was a cat all right—not one of those small meowing things but a hunter on the trail. She made him think of clear water spilling down the rocks after rainfall, of the wind echoing through mountain passes, and the raptors rising towards the sun. She made him think of fire and furs and sex.

  They reached the top of the tower, the open observation deck. He set lit candles and la
nterns in a semicircle on the high ledge around them, and sat on the curving bench just below. Across from him, Kat put a knee on her side of the bench and leaned out, looking in the direction of Solstice Harbor. It was in darkness, not so much as a single light glowing in a window.

  “Kat?” he said, and she turned. “It’s not too late for you to leave. The town’s gates are probably barred by now, but you could hide somewhere else.” Anywhere else might be safer, because Ractane would wipe out the town, but wasn’t likely to search every hollow in the hillsides.

  She put her rifle beside her as she sat down. “Maybe it was too late the moment I walked in here. You’re hoping Ractane will see the tower lit up and will stop here.”

  She hadn’t wanted to talk about herself. “Might as well give him some target other than your town.” Though since it would take hardly any time for the outpost to fall, he changed the subject too. “Tell me, why did your people name this land Avalon?”

  “We had to name it something. And I’ve heard that in legends, Avalon was a magical island far away.”

  Marus couldn’t argue with that reasoning, though he suspected this Avalon was nowhere near whatever pleasant images humans had originally conjured up. But for the first time, he felt a little envious of humans. They were small and weak, and yet they had a history that went back…well, for a lot longer than thirty years, he guessed. They probably had people who passed down those stories, people whom they trusted and liked and listened to and learned from.

  It occurred to him that what he had with Kat—friendship, which was completely new in his experience—was something humans had all the time.

  “You know,” he said, keeping his tone casual, “we’ve talked about my parents, but not about yours.”

  “What about mine?”

  “Tell me about them.”

  She looked at him as though he had taken leave of his senses. “Why? They’re not anywhere near as, uh, interesting as a goddess and a madman.”

  Lucky you. “Yes, something normal and safe for a change.” It occurred to him that she might feel her family was private, not something to be trotted out for a Prince. “I was just curious. We can talk about something else.”