“I am delighted to be the best of two uninspiring choices.”
She lifted her head and bared her teeth at me. “You want me to be excited? Fine, you go and free the genet nation. Then what? We all die within the next decade, and that’s it. And within that decade, how many of us will be able to break free from our conditioning? Don’t kid yourself, Prince. We were born slaves and we’re going to die slaves.”
“Almond,” I said, “brought forth an angel.”
“Almond was worthy of an angel.” Kelu’s ears were flat to her skull. “That’s all that means.”
“Are you sure?”
“What good did her sacrifice do? She saved the elves—wonderful! For the elves. That’s all we’ve ever done, is do things for elves. In what way was her death any different from her life?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But Marne gave up his life, and now, strangely, humanity has become heir to the magics that elves have had since their birth as a race. That is suggestive that there is some divine plan at work, isn’t it?”
“Humanity could afford to wait,” Kelu said. “We can’t. And don’t—don’t tell me to trust God. What God have I ever had, except apparently Sedetnet, and then Suleris? My god was a whip and a boot and a collar. No angel ever came to me or any other genet who dared hope for better. If Almond got her visitation, it’s because Almond was already a saint. She’s not like the rest of us. She was always…” Kelu gritted her teeth and forced herself to finish, belligerent, “she was always better than any of the rest of us.”
“You miss her.”
The look Kelu gave me then could have generously been called hostile.
“It’s not a weakness,” I said. “To have cared about her, and to miss her.” I sighed and extended my arm. “Here.”
She transferred her gaze to it.
“Go on,” I said. “Rend me. I’m used to it.”
Despite her best intentions, she snorted a laugh, and her ears relaxed. I thought that more than I could have hoped for, so I was surprised when she said, tentatively, “We traveled together. For a long time. As genets count time, anyway. Several trips here, to look for you. She was… she was always so optimistic. Of course we’d find you. You’d be wonderful. You’d be the best master ever. Never anything about you doing anything for us. She didn’t care about that. If you’d beaten her, she would still have loved you. That part… that part infuriates me. I’ll never understand forgiving someone who could abuse you. But she would have forgiven anyone anything, and seen the best in them.”
“The way she saw the best in you?” I guessed.
“You’d like me to agree with that, wouldn’t you.”
“I don’t need you to,” I said. “She saw the best in everyone, and none of us were worthy.”
Kelu hugged her knees and didn’t answer.
“Will you come?” I said.
She sighed through a closed mouth, her back lifting and falling once. “Might as well. I don’t have anything else to do.” She pushed off the drake’s arm. “When you fill that, give it back to me. And don’t do it all at once. You can kill yourself now, remember.”
“I do,” I said. “But thank you for the reminder.”
She eyed me as if examining me for any hint of sarcasm, but I maintained a bland expression, and she huffed softly and padded off.
“She’ll come,” I said to the drake. “She’s grieving in her own way, is all.”
The drake put its head down and rolled an enormous eye back to consider me. I leaned against its neck and kept my own grief to myself.
20
The Evertrue party departed in the morning. Eyre promised that nothing would befall Chester for his actions against Roland and Powlett; Chester promised that he wouldn’t need protection, and by his speaking look gave me to know that I was not to do anything that required protection myself. Kemses, as always, indefatigable, and Rose, eager to be gone… and the drake, last of all, nudging me with its nose before stepping away from us and springing into the air. I gave thanks that someone had improvised a harness for its passengers and wished them well.
“That’s that, then,” Ivy said, leaning against my side. “When do we leave?”
“As soon as possible.”
We passed through the Door into summer.
Before us spilled a field of short bronzed grasses, reflecting the sun in eye-watering flashes when the wind stroked it: that same breeze caressed us, sultry with the perfume of the sea, stinging our nostrils with salt and heat. Near the horizon a few palm trees bent and swayed, too far for the rustle of their hard leaves to overcome the sound of the surf. I had not loved the Archipelago when I’d first arrived, associating it only with fear and peril… but when Ivy exclaimed, “Oh, but tell me we might have a summer house here!” I saw it with fresh eyes.
Tchanu guided her horse up alongside Ivy’s. To me, she said, “She likes it?” And when I translated, she laughed, quiet. “Tell her she will like Nudain, perhaps. We built into the cliffs… the ocean, it comes in.”
On hearing the elf’s words, Ivy said, “That sounds beautiful!”
It did, and as we had agreed to travel to Nudain first, to enlist the aid of Tchanu’s household, I said, “Lead the way.”
We were a small group: behind Tchanu, Ivy, Amhric and I rode abreast. Kelu was once again behind me in the saddle, and Emily rode with Ivy, as had become her custom on our journey to Vigil. A group of ten guards had been selected from the various blood-flags, and so we traveled encircled in its protection; but I had brought my staff, and the glass shard, because there were defenses I refused to delegate. I welcomed the warmth and the presence of the sea; the landsense whispered things to me now that I had been hard-pressed to apprehend previously, of the pressure of the water against the rocky bones of each island, of the shivering interplay of currents between each of the isles, of the wind that had touched so many distant places before flooding my lungs with faint memories.
“It does not belong to us,” Amhric said. “But it knows you.”
Opening my eyes again, startled, I glanced at him. He smiled, and I found myself smiling back.
“We could be friends,” I said. “Serala and I.”
“You could be,” he agreed. “And you will.”
“Have you ever had a mango?” Emily was asking Ivy.
“Goodness, I haven’t. What is it?”
“A sort of fruit. Round and yellow. Shaped like a bean.”
“Is it tasty?”
“I don’t know!” the genet exclaimed. “No one ever let me have one. I am going to have one this time!”
“Well, Morgan? Are mangos worth waiting for?” Ivy asked me.
“He wouldn’t know,” Kelu said. “Slaves aren’t given good food, and humans here are slaves too. Just a better class of slave.”
“Then the king will know,” Emily said. “Sire? Are mangos good?”
The expression on Amhric’s face made him less of an icon to gather awe and more a person like the rest of us. He was not young as humans counted time, but in that moment I could see that as elves did, he was not far out of his young adulthood. Even Ivy laughed to see it. “You like mangos!”
“A king who likes mangos,” Emily murmured, ears sagging in bemusement.
“Why not?” Kelu said. “They have to eat too.”
“I do like them,” Amhric confessed. “So perhaps when we reach Nudain….”
Hearing the name of her domain brought Tchanu into the conversation, which I explained.
“We have mango trees,” Tchanu said, and I translated. “And you shall have as many as will content your hearts. And stomachs.”
Nudain owned half of Aravalís, the largest of the Archipelago’s islands; this dominion it split nearly perfectly with Suleris, whom I had not wanted to approach without support from Tchanu’s blood-flag. By her reckoning, the seat of Nudain was some week and a half from the Door’s locale, and while there was no road to ease our passage the ride was an easy one. Serala’s
tropical heat and bright, clear skies felt like a benison after the weeks of Troth’s cold rain, and we rode as if on holiday. While I missed the drake and found my thoughts straying often to the fate of the Evertrue mission, even I began to relax beneath the influence of the climate. Tchanu remained reserved but now and then one glimpsed hints of her appreciation for the absurd… and of course, as companions for any journey I would have always wanted Ivy and Amhric. Emily was fine company as well, and Kelu by her very presence brought the memory of Almond with her, and if that was a bittersweet addition both of us, genet and prince, would not have had it any other way.
I knew that our arrival at Nudain would presage the revolution on the Archipelago, and that it would be tiresome and require us to gather all the blood-flags of the islands and demonstrate, repeatedly, our dominion over them. During the silences that fell between our conversations, I began polishing a speech to deliver to Nudain’s elves about how there would be no more slavery—that their humans and genets were no longer property, but free agents—and how this was not negotiable. I hoped they would be willing to discuss their objections to this proposition in a reasonable fashion, but I also began to plan what I would do in response to intransigence, particularly if it became physical or even, God preserve us, violent.
This speech had become so real an event for me that the actual events that befell us caught me completely by surprise… and I was not the only one. We’d been enjoying the sixth day of our idyll when an ambush sprang at us, and that they’d accomplished this from so little cover as to require invisibility was even worse, for it led us to believe our attackers to be elves.
But they were not.
Forty armed humans spooked the horses, dragged Tchanu’s guards down, and crashed into the center of our party, and I had barely the wherewithal to land well before five of them had me thrust into the ground. The hooves of my rearing mount flung clods of earth at me as they scythed into the ground far, far too close to my face, and hands snatched my wrists, crossing them together for what I knew would be rope.
Over the tumult, I barely heard Ivy’s indignant protests. But it was Kelu whose snarl shook me from my torpor. “Morgan, you’re the damned prince and they’re using magic!”
“Right,” I said, dry. I closed my eyes and gathered all their spirits in my hand, and then dug my fingers into them.
Humans in Troth had known nothing of the potential within them, living as they did in a magical poverty difficult for the humans of Serala to imagine. From birth, the humans of the Archipelago recognized the wells of their power… because elves were forever ripping that power from them.
Their reaction to my play was, unsurprisingly, to become frenzied with rage. I had enough time to consider my complete lack of foresight before one of the humans holding me down slammed my head into the ground hard enough to separate me from consciousness.
21
So I woke, unsurprisingly, in a cell. Alone, also unsurprisingly. From the stone comprising the walls, I guessed we’d been dragged the rest of the way to Nudain; that humans had apparently done so forced me to re-evaluate my cavalier assumptions about an elven revolution. Humanity, confronted at last with merely mortal captors, must have found the rage necessary to accomplish their own liberation. How ridiculous to have come here on a mission of mercy to people who needed a savior not at all! As ridiculous as the possibility that we might die here at the hands of those people we’d intended to succor.
I put my aching head in my hands and reflected on the series of ironies that had composed my life up until now. Surely I was not in mortal peril—I had centuries yet before me for God to fill with many more such ironies, and if my life to this point was any indication, He had too much a fondness for them to let me perish now. Too, did I do anything in as poor taste as die here, Chester would be sorely vexed, and I had no desire to catch a minatory lecture from him on the subject. He had access now to an entire library of arcana; surely there would be some volume on the summoning of ghosts if I had the poor taste to expire before he could reach me to deliver it.
The headache did not pass, and briefly I mourned the loss of elven immortality. Once I was sure I could move without vomiting, I tried crawling to the furthermost wall, which was partially lined with bars rather than more stone. There I found a most salutary sight.
“You live!” I exclaim.
“You would have known had I been dead,” Amhric said.
My brother was in the cell across from mine, sitting cross-legged before his own set of bars. The view, I realized, would have permitted him to keep watch on me. I grimaced and rested a hand on one of the bars. “I am sorry. It must not have been a pleasing vigil.”
“I would have known had you been dying also, brother mine,” he replied. “You will ask me next after the others, and I will say that I know nothing of the remainder of our guard. Nor of Tchanu—they don’t seem to be housed here.”
The metal beneath my palm drew my attention, for it reminded me of the staff. I lifted my fingers, curled them again around the slim cylinder. “We could leave.”
“We could.”
Heady thought. Metal could be subjected to the will of the magics under my command. There was nothing keeping us here, save that concentration was proving difficult; one of my eyes was still narrowed, and opening it caused pain to spike to the back of my head. “You haven’t freed yourself because of me, I take it.”
“I won’t leave you,” he said. And added, “We are in no danger yet.”
Now I squinted at him. “I love you, Amhric, but surely you jest.”
“They have not killed us,” he said. “And Ivy was not imprisoned here that we know of. Nor have I seen the genets. They are likely responsible for our being alive.”
“Which means they are somewhere in Nudain arguing for us?” I grimaced and sat with my back to the wall, stretching one leg gingerly before me and using the other lifted knee to rest my hands. “It seems a credible hypothesis. I will have to hope you’re right, as I doubt I could do anything more strenuous than stumble in your wake if we were to make an attempt at escape.”
“Is it bad?” he asked, soft. “I didn’t see the injury, but you have been unconscious for several hours.”
“I feel as if someone has split my head with a pike.” I paused. “Did someone?”
His soft laugh, barely audible, still lifted my spirits. “We would no longer survive a wound that dire, so it is safe to say you have been spared it.”
“Pity,” I said. “I’m forced to face the fact that a mere blow can cause this much pain.” The stone wall was cold; I tried resting the back of my head against it, and the contrast between it and my fevered scalp was welcome. “Is it what it looks like? The kept humans of Nudain have overthrown their slavers.”
“It seems so, yes.”
“What a mess.”
“Better, perhaps, than the alternative.”
I winced and touched my fingertips to my throbbing temple. “I don’t know that either alternative is preferable.”
“Perhaps not. But there was never not going to be consequences for what happened here, Morgan.” Surprised by the sadness in his voice, I looked toward him. “What we have done in ridding the world of the demon, in freeing the magics long chained from humanity on the continent and in liberating the elves long imprisoned by their curse… all of that was the quick and easy part. What lies before us now—the rapprochement of the races—will be our real life’s work.”
“I… had not thought that far ahead, I admit.”
I hadn’t thought Amhric capable of anything as indelicate as a snort until this moment. “Tell me a new tale, brother mine.”
“All right,” I said. “Perhaps I had a feel for the scope of the work before us. But it was a nebulous feel, I pledge you.”
He chuckled. “As none of us are given to see the future, I will grant you that.”
I grinned at him despite the way it made the skin of my face ache and subsided into a comfortable silence,
and this he kept with me.
The men who came for us were not gentle. The first yanked me to my feet and when I staggered shoved me upright and said, “Stand up straight or we’ll make you.”
“I’ll be sure to vomit on your shoes, then,” I said past the blinding pain. “Or if you prefer, I’ll aim higher.”
This earned me a punch to the gut that flattened me against the bars, and for a moment I lost the world entirely. The sounds of a struggle penetrated my haze and I said, conversationally, “If you are treating my brother as badly as you are me, right now, at this moment, I will destroy you all and care nothing as to the cost.”
“As if you could,” the first guard sneered.
“Would you like to try me?”
“Morgan—” Amhric sounded worried, and that infuriated me. What had they done to him? I pushed myself to my feet.
“Just come along quietly,” said another of the guards.
“No, no. Come at us, please,” said the first again. “I would very much like to ‘try’ you, the way so many elves have ‘tried’ me. Do you have any idea how that works?”
“Yes,” I said. “They tie your hands to a hook on the ceiling and then seal them there with magics you can’t break. And then they stroke you through your clothes in a violation more hideous than anything you can imagine, as if your skin is lacerated and they are digging claws through your spirit and sucking up the blood. And you weep and they laugh and say in a language they think you can’t understand that you are sweet to the taste and they could use you for hours and hours without you running dry.”
I chanced opening my eyes when I heard no movement, felt no new abuse, and found all six of our captors staring at me.
“You can’t know that,” a new one said, uneasy. “Not from the inside like that. You’re an elf.”
“I am now,” I said. “But I was enchanted to seem human. It turns out that elves can also be harvested for magic. Or could, when elves still had claws to do so.”
On Wings of Bone and Glass Page 22