by Nunn, PL
She lowered her own eyes, to not look at his so apparent soul, knowing it was impolite.
“Father, I beg for leave to share shelter this night,” Aloe declared with the tones of a ritual speech.
“I grant you leave, Aloe blood kin of Ashara. But what of this one with you?”
“She is my companion, Father. I ask leave for her also.”
“Let her ask for herself.”
Victoria peeked up from her lashes. He was very fine to look at, glowing soul light at all. She tried to block out the glimmer of soul.
“Father, “ she whispered. “I beg leave to share shelter this night.” And as an afterthought. “For my kitten, too.”
He looked at her a long time. The pale, thin lips turned up in a slight smile.
“You have my leave.”
Aloe grinned.
“It has been a long while, youngling,” the Father said, taking a sip from a silver chalice.
“I’ve been here and there.”
“So busy,” he mocked. He motioned and the chairs to either side of him cleared. Aloe relaxed into one and Victoria, after a moments uncertainty took the other. Someone placed a chalice before her and plate heaped high with an assortment of fruits. She found she was rather hungry.
“I don’t suppose,” she looked up shyly at the lesser sidhe, juice trailing down her chin, “that having partaken of your food and drink I’m trapped here for the rest of my life.”
He laughed, seeming genuinely amused. “Vicious rumor. And a very telling one of you. It has been a long time since I’ve seen a human and longer still since I’ve sat foot in your realm.”
“You’ve been to earth?”
“When I was younger and earth as you call it was wilder and more receptive to my kind. Several families of Dockalfar were responsible for the little practice you mentioned. It was an excellent way to acquire slaves.”
Victoria stared at him, owl eyed. “They were true? The myths were true.”
The last was stated more as fact than question. She gazed about the room in an enlightened daze. How many cultures’ superstitions and legends were based on fact that had leaked across the borders of this realm? How many superstitions were not superstitions at all, but plain warnings of things that human folk could hardly understand?
“Not all.” The Father sipped at his drink. It was wine and strong at that. “But here and there. Who knows? Your folk have always been easy to frighten.”
“And quick to take up the sword,” Aloe added from his other side. “I’ve heard Neira’sha’s tales of the Other Realm. Not a place I’d like to visit, let me tell you.”
“Not now,” the Father stated, frowning. After a moment it vanished from his face and he was looking at Victoria again. “What brings you here, full-blooded human that you are?”
“Some high sidhe’s whim,” Aloe supplied. “Some bored high lord who wanted new toys, no doubt.”
The Father did not take his gaze from Victoria, slowly, his frown returned. “A powerful high lord, to open the portal. For such small gain.”
He reached out one narrow, fine boned hand and almost touched fingertips to Victoria’s cheek. “Beautiful, I think,” he murmured. Victoria found herself blushing, that this breathtaking creature, surrounded by breathtaking creatures should find her appealing.
He smiled, almost as if he sensed her thoughts. “One learns to find the beauty in every race. For a human, I think you must be exceptional. Even for a sidhe,” he added, “there is little to fault.”
“Thank you,” she whispered. He touched her face. Just a brief caress of his fingers. They both shivered. He pulled back, eyes hooded all of a sudden.
“How long have you been in Elkhavah?”
“I don’t know. A week, maybe less.”
“She was dancing in a fairy circle,”
Aloe said. “Who knows how long she was there.”
“Ah. You have some power, I think,” he said slowly. “Did you know that?”
“Power?” she repeated blankly. “Me?”
“Very odd,” He spoke quietly and would say no more, even when Aloe pressed him.
“He’s old,” Aloe confided to Victoria later, when the lesser sidhe were flocking to the dance floor and frolicking atop it with wild abandon. “The old ones get strange notions.”
Victoria watched the dance. It was not the dance of the forest fairies. It was controlled and contrived almost in comparison. The music was lovely and the dancers inhumanly graceful. But she was not drawn into it like water to a sponge. It did not sap at her soul. Aloe watched beside her for a moment, humming along, then could stand it no longer and bounded up to claim a partner who had been making eyes at her from the floor. Her laughter echoed back.
Sidhe occasionally brushed past her, some even inviting her to join them. She declined, content to sit on the sidelines and watch. Something fluttered across her then that was not exactly touch. It was an irritation behind her eyes, under her skin.
It was deliberate and foreign. She flinched, looking about. No one was near.
No eyes were on her. Like a horse twitching its skin to rid itself of a fly, she reflexively coiled her will and knocked the irritation away. It went, but she could almost sense it hovering over her.
Watching her with nothing so mundane as eyes. She looked for Aloe, afraid and lost.
The sidhe girl was wrapped up in her dance, arms around the neck of her handsome partner. The Father was talking with another sidhe male.
It tried her again, this time harder, and she thought that it was more than one.
That was it. That was why it twitched in so many places. It was curiosity that plagued her. The curiosity of magical beings. They wanted to invade her to see what she was. She squeezed her eyes shut tight, balled her fists against the irritation.
Willing them out, out, out!
They swam around her commands like fish around a heavy anchor. She was so clumsy and weak, and they were bright shining fireflies. Why didn’t Aloe or the Father stop them? They were raping her.
Her mind. Her soul.
She could not remember later when it happened. But something ruptured at the indignity. Something inside her broke and surged free. It filled her and fed her sense of impropriety and with deft, powerful hands she wrenched the probing fingers of magic out of her mind. She cared little for what happened to them after that. But several of the dancers staggered and leaned against their partners in shock.
What was in her, what boiled inside of her soul wanted very much to pursue the perpetrators. She would have gladly done so, but knew not how to go about it. All she could do was sit and stare blindly at the dance floor, while her mind, her very being, suddenly soared on wings it had never known before.
It was different than the magic of the sidhe, she thought, rank amateur that she was. It was familiar in a way. Like an old pair of shoes or a well worn nightgown. It did not astound her as it should have. And it welcomed her with a joy that was boundless. Or did she welcome it? She felt very much like a foundling who after long last had found her way home. She felt, for the first time in her life, rather adept and powerful. Secure. How nice to feel that way.
A hand touched her shoulder. A physical hand. Something stroked her scattered wits. Something that did not venture deeper and reeked of calm and concern. She looked up at the Father.
“It’s all right child.” He smiled down at her. “You’ll drive us all out of our home, if you keep up. No one will harass you further.”
She blinked at him, bewildered. He was nothing but kindness and care. She subsided. She thought that she was suddenly very tired. Drained of physical energy. Sleep would be quite nice. Some place warm and soft.
She closed her eyes and let it come.
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Part Seven
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Alex slept through a good part of the journey. It was a forced condition. His attempts at escape were numerous and ill fated. The ogre was slow, but the spri
ggan was most definitely not. And though the spriggan could not quite overpower him, he was very good at slowing him down long enough for the ogre to catch up. The ogre was most alarmingly adept at obliterating thoughts of escape. Or thoughts of anything else. With no Victoria to use as threat, Zakknr was left solely to rely on physical punishment. He doled it out rather well. It was easier for all concerned, the ogre had apparently concluded, if Alex traveled unawares.
Reluctantly, in his moments of painful consciousness, Alex had to agree. It was hellish torment waiting for the Dark Assassin to appear out of the woods with Victoria in tow. Torment to ponder what might have happened to her. Alone. Alone in a hostile wilderness and him helpless to help her. Helpless to save himself, when it came right down to it. All he had to hope for was the efficiency of, God help him, an assassin of dubious morality, who had seemed earnest enough on owing him a debt. But so many days had passed with no sign. Maybe more days that he knew, with his bouts of forced unconsciousness.
It was stupid, of course, his struggle, but he could not stop himself. The frantic worry over Victoria gnawed at him. It made him wild. Even when the sensible part of him insisted that on the chance that he were free there was nothing he could do in the vastness of this alien forest. No way of tracking a girl days missing.
Hopeless.
He was awake again, head still fuzzy and aching from the last time the ogre’s fist had connected with it. He lay passively against the rancid, broad chest of his captor, contemplating falling back into oblivion. The vista was nothing different than it had been on previous days. Lush greenery, age old trees. Dusk was beginning to fall. Soon, the ogre would call a halt and they would set up camp. Alex stretched his fingers. They had little feeling in them, having been bound in front of him for days now. A length of leather tethered his imprisoned wrists to the saddle. Captivity drained at the soul.
Helplessness amplified his nightmares.
The ogre or the spriggan had shaken him awake on several occasions, when his nightmare cries became too much for them. He could not remember what he dreamed. He assumed it was the same old lurking horror that preyed on his sleep since he had returned from war. He had always been able to remember before, though.
The spriggan came up to ride beside the ogre and they conferred. Alex paid little heed to what they said, his mind drifting elsewhere, dreaming of red hair and creamy skin. No wonder God ignored his pleas when his deity was a woman. It soon became apparent, when full dark obscured the path, that tonight was to be different from the others. They were not stopping to make camp. In fact, they picked up the pace with more earnestness than they had before evidenced. Alex took more stock in the quality of their surroundings. They had been traveling in low mountainous country for days now.
The forest thinned not at all due to the massive slopes. But suddenly it was a bit thinner, almost newer in the shape of tree and undergrowth. It felt younger than the other. But the earth itself, that still felt ancient and what rose from it, in sporadic, ruined fingers that had nothing to do with nature told of ages long past. Ruins.
Columns and patchwork scraps of walls and stairs that were long overgrown with jungle, glowed dully in the moon light. A broken statue lay on its side, covered with moss, a depression in the forest floor hinted at a cellar. An arch that was all that was left of a building stood proud and crumbling among creeping ivy. It was surreal, and beautiful, and ever falling under the power of the forest.
It spoke of civilization past, when he’d had little indication of civilization at all in this land. He wondered if this pitiful remnant was as close as he might get.
Then, above the treetops, the dark shape of a mountain taller than most in this gentle range hinted at an answer to his mental pondering. With the moon behind it and half obscured by clouds as it was, the mountain was little more than a dark shape. He might have looked away, but for some niggling intuition that drew his attention back to it. Its shape was odd, its crags too regular and too pointed, its precipices too slender and jutting too high, and so many of them. Light flickered in the darkness as they moved. Flickered and danced as if from flame, and caught reflections of smooth stone, or polished metal. It towered over the forest-covered ruins like some monolithic guardian. Dark and sinister and not quite definable.
Alex’s eyes kept seeing shapes that his mind could not attribute to nature, and yet it grew out of the mountain like so many upthrust hands of stone. And the darkness and the rolling terrain would not allow him a clear look at it.
Falling water could be heard above the whisper of wind through leaves. They were on a path that was wider than any game trail, running diagonal to the slope of the hillside. The nighthorses pricked their long ears eagerly, snickering among themselves. They pulled at their bits, wanting a faster pace. They came around a cluster of rocks and trees and the moon was no longer behind the great shape.
They had circled it and come up from the opposite side. It was no feat of nature that perched upon the forest shrouded mountain. And just as certainly no feat that man could have imagined. It was a great towering symphony of stone. Turrets and bridges, towers and spires that rose and angled out from a solid fabrication of rock and cut stone that grew directly up from the ground beneath it. The water sound came from a mind-boggling waterfall that originated from the base of the fortress proper and fell some two hundred feet to a destination hidden by trees and forest. The moonlight made the water crystal blue against the darker stone of the keep.
Alex was quite literally speechless.
He leaned forward on the saddle and stared and could think of no adequate words to form, even had he been in company inclined to discuss it with him.
They trotted up a smooth path cut through uneven land. The path zigzagged, making the ascent easier on the horses, giving one alternating views of the keep. The lights came from portals high up its façade, the only sound that threatened the solitude of the night was the crash of water.
The forest path turned into a road paved with stone, muffled hoof beats suddenly turned to clatter. The nighthorses tossed their heads in excitement, no doubt relieved to be returning home. Gates loomed in the dusk before them. Thirty feet tall, and carved from dully gleaming reddish metal. Small hunched figures scurried across the broad road, whites of their eyes flashing as they stared up at the riders. In the darkness, they reminded Alex of the goblins save for some greater length of limb and grace in movement.
They snarled and clutched at the horse’s reins. The ogre bellowed and they shrank.
“Cursed bendithy,” he yelled. “Open the gates, stupid creatures!”
“Zakknr, Zakknr,” they muttered amongst themselves, scurrying away from his wrath. They ran to the gates, and climbed, agile as monkeys, up the rock foundation siding them. Into dark pits they disappeared, while the night horses shied nervously in waiting. The gates creaked and swung inward. Orange light spilled out upon them. Zakknr urged his mount forward, Bashru followed, muttering to himself.
Two ogres not quite Zakknr’s size stood at either gate, eyeing the newcomers sullenly. A dozen of the bendithy scurried about, whispering among themselves.
Gnomes lurked in the shadows of the gate.
The outer courtyard they found themselves in was vast. Columns thicker than red woods made an open hall from the outer gates to the inner and more ornate ones that led to the keep proper. The outer courtyard seemed to run the circuit of the fortress, its walls curving around the taller ones of the inner structure. The ground was covered in smooth black stone. The distance from the inner gate to outer was some three hundred yards. The ogre urged his mount into a bone jarring trot across the distance. The sound of hooves was overpowering.
Zakknr swung down from the saddle when he had reached the inner gate. He cut the thong binding Alex to the saddle and pulled him down. Alex had no time to protest the rude treatment, for Zakknr grabbed his bound hands and pulled him behind him towards the portal. It opened for him without benefit of command or knock.
; The light in this hall was nothing so mundane as flame. It glowed from the very walls, casting a soft luminescent aura to the air itself. It was an entrance hall of some splendor, long and colonnaded, with a ceiling so tall that it hazed at its apex.
Balconies were strung like beads midway up and higher still there were walkways like spider webs. There were figures up there, hard to distinguish in the distance.
Alex was too impressed with the sheer size of the hall to pay them much heed. All he could do was stare like a child at his first carnival as Zakknr strode towards the far end of the hall, pulling him in his wake. The spriggan was no longer with them.
There were portals all along the length of the hall, some open, others closed and sealed. Small furtive figures scooted behind the columns, keeping pace with them. The bendithy. There seemed an inordinate amount of the things. Was this a place of bendithy then? It seemed too graceful an undertaking for so secretive a creature. Of course he would attribute it no less to the ogre’s clumsy hands. He could imagine Zakknr’s breed living in nothing more than crude stone caves and being satisfied with the lot.
A portal at the end of the hall melted away and figure strode out, trailed by other figures. Alex stared, caught off guard, stunned at something so bright and beautiful in a land filled with ogres and spriggan and gnomes. The man, and it was male, although man might have been too human a term, was almost as tall as the ogre. He stood half a hand taller than Alex. He was breathtakingly, astonishingly beautiful. Hair like spun sunlight fell over his shoulders in thick, silken curls. Skin like ivory stretched taught over bones finer than any icon of human perfection might hope to achieve.
Lips were full and well formed, nose narrow and straight and eyes…the eyes were just a tad large, thickly lashed and tilting at the corners. They were as deep as ever the sky was. They sparkled with inner life, with wisdom, with amusement.