On Wings of Bone and Glass

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  “With me to kill everyone who tries to harm so much as a single one of his eyelashes,” I said. And sighed. “You seem more reasonable a man than your peers... or if you are not you hide your bitterness better. Given that, I need your help.”

  “You! Need my help!” He laughed. “Yes, you do, given that you are my prisoners!”

  The genet at Amhric’s side growled.

  I lifted a hand to still them both. To Ikaros, I said, “The era to which you—we—belonged previously has ended. The elves are no longer immortal. They are also no longer exiled. I intend to take most of them with me through the Door to the continent, where we will, I hope, once again integrate with the human nations there. Those nations are numerous and powerful and will soon be producing mage companies to bolster their existing and long-experienced armies, so you need not fear for their safeties. If indeed you care?” I cocked a brow at him in challenge, for he’d been looking mutinous. When he honored me with a jerky nod, I continued. “It is my heartfelt wish that the Archipelago should also move to a more just system of governance, and that we might establish a relationship of mutual advantage. Since technically the islands still belong to the elves, and since by your own confession you have not succeeded in exterminating them all, it would perhaps behoove you to consider a more radical solution to your problems.”

  “That being?” he said, wry. “Let me guess. Cooperation.”

  “The woman sitting next to me is my betrothed,” I said. “And I am the prince of elves. Do you really wish to make war on a nation with a human queen?” As he considered Ivy in narrowed-eyed silence, I said, “You note she doesn’t understand the Gift because she wasn’t born here. She wasn’t raised in chains. There are other possible futures for humankind, Ikaros. Wouldn’t you rather one that didn’t involve watching your own back until some elven slave knifes you in it? Or is that your goal? To re-create Serala, but with human masters and elven food?”

  No one interrupted this silence as Ikaros considered me, one finger passing over the cleft in his chin. At last, he said, “You ask a great deal, Master Locke.”

  “I ask that you help me to build something sustainable,” I replied. “A people cannot flourish in a state of perpetual paranoia.”

  His sigh now made him look tired. “Be that as it may—and I concede the point—there are sacrifices that will have to be made in order for our more militant members to agree to even the concept of peace.”

  “For instance?”

  He met my eyes. “You came with Tchanu. You cannot know what that means.”

  I didn’t, no, and I suspected I wasn’t going to like what I heard. “Will you let me talk to her?”

  “Diantha would say that letting you do so would be to let you conspire against us.”

  I glanced at Amhric... and at the genet who’d been most vocal in his defense. “Then let her serve as chaperone.”

  The golden genet lifted her head, ears sagging. “Me?”

  “I trust your discretion,” I said. “And I have no doubt Master Ikaros trusts your allegiance. Does he not?”

  Ikaros opened his mouth to opine and then stopped when the genet looked toward him. He said, carefully, “You’re very forgiving, Marzipan.”

  “I still can’t believe you gave them pet names,” Kelu interrupted, her teeth bared. “And you call yourself guardians of freedom!”

  Abashed, Ikaros looked away.

  “Go on,” Kelu said. “Tell us you don’t trust a genet. I’d like to hear it.”

  So of course, he said, “I’ll allow it. But Marzipan... I hope you will report anything to us that would endanger us.”

  “Of course,” the genet said.

  Tchanu e Nudain was being held in a cell like the one I’d woken in, but alone in her block. The guards left us with her and retreated to the end of the hall to provide us with a semblance of privacy. Marzipan the genet, who’d said no word to me on the journey, settled in the corner as far from us as possible; from the flare of her nostrils this was less out of respect and more because the elf stank of blood and less pleasant things. She was in terrible condition, so disfigured I found it difficult to meet her gaze.

  “On purpose,” she said. The words were slurred, but distinguishable. “They do it. To use up my magic. They tear me up. I heal myself. I have nothing left to attack them with.”

  Remembering Carrington and her sheaf of swords, I said, “I know the approach.”

  She managed a smile. “Why are you here? I can’t imagine it’s to free me.”

  “Why wouldn’t you imagine that?” I asked, crouching across from her.

  “Because I am who I am. And they are who they are.”

  “Nothing is so simple, e Nudain. Or did you not fight alongside humans less than a week ago?”

  “Foreigners,” she muttered.

  “Humans, all the same.”

  She sighed, and the flex of her skin made the wet blood on it glitter.

  “They tell me,” I said, “that you were chief among their torturers.”

  She eyed me then, an expression betrayed by a gleam across sclera set in a face that was otherwise barely recognizable. “You ask if I used them for food? The answer to that is yes. What else? You say things are not so simple. You are right. Say I give up using humans for fuel. Then the elves who have no such compunctions come, destroy me and my family and all those who look to me for protection. This is better? If the choice is between us dying and other people dying, what choice is that?”

  “Kemses did not abuse his humans,” I said.

  “Kemses e Sadar held a single city in the entirety of the Archipelago. Why do you think that is?”

  I grimaced.

  “You will have to tell them, Prince. Yes, we used them. Yes, we used them to death. But some of us did it from necessity. Would they have chosen differently had it been them?”

  For the first time, the genet spoke. “But you used the humans cruelly, Mistress.”

  “You call me Mistress?” Tchanu snorted, a wet sound. “And yet you do not defend me?”

  “She’s being polite,” I said.

  “She is being insolent.”

  “Is she right?”

  Tchanu hesitated.

  I leaned toward her. “Are you now to tell me that you were one of the elves who enjoyed the violation of humans?”

  “No!” she exclaimed. “I did not violate them. I enjoyed them, yes. But I did not enjoy cruelty, or misery, or pain. I did not torture them.”

  “But did you give them a choice?” I asked.

  “Of course!”

  I searched her gaze for something I could bring back with me, something to justify what she’d done. I found nothing. For such as Tchanu, the pretense of consent was sufficient. She had no context for understanding that someone who feared retaliation, whose entire life depending on a mistress’s goodwill, would say ‘yes’ even when they wanted to say ‘no.’ But she really hadn’t had that context. How could I blame Tchanu for developing a conscience in a society where what she had done was the least of the evils committed by her own peers? By their standards, she was all that was kindness—had probably in fact been considered eccentric for the small liberties she’d thought she’d been bestowing on her slaves.

  Those slaves saw it differently. Her kindness had been menace wrapped in her own self-justification. And now they wanted to kill her for it.

  And I... I had just saved Troth and the entirety of the continent in part because Tchanu had helped. Not just by pledging to me and to Amhric in the courtyard, but by accompanying my party to the demon and safeguarding me while I danced with Sedetnet in an otherworld of his making. She had most certainly taken our part because she’d seen no choice. But since doing so, she’d been loyal.

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said, and did not add my title because we both knew she didn’t believe I’d succeed.

  Marzipan followed me up the stairs. The guards didn’t trail us, perhaps judging t
hat she was sufficient, which was well, because what I needed, more than anything, was a corner where I could stop thinking for a while, and stop presenting a perfect façade of confidence to the world. “Do you suppose,” I said as we emerged into the courtyard, “I might sit for a while, in the sun?”

  “Up there?” She glanced toward the fields.

  “Yes.”

  She flipped her ears sideways, considering, then nodded. “You won’t run. You love your betrothed and your brother and your genets too much to leave them.”

  “How is it that you know this and Ikaros and Diantha do not?”

  “I don’t think they believe in love anymore,” Marzipan replied. “So I don’t think they’re willing to trust it in others.”

  Startled by the perspicacity of this observation, I stopped to regard her. She met my eyes, looking up at me with all the earnest attention of her kind, and unbidden I found myself saying, “You remind me of someone I knew.”

  “You knew?”

  I nodded. “I think she would have liked you.”

  We climbed to the fields and there I sat, hands on my knees and face lifted toward the sky. Cloudless, just like Troth’s had been before the battle... but hot rather than chill. The blue had a different cast thus: more sultry, more vibrant. I listened to the sea’s rolling boom, and the hiss of the wind through the nearby palms, and I wondered how in God’s name we were going to heal the wounds of the Archipelago.

  “You are distressed,” Marzipan said at last, hesitant.

  “Unavoidably.” I smiled a little. “What will you tell Ikaros of my meeting with Tchanu?”

  The genet wrinkled her nose, pondering. Then, hesitant, “That it was complicated.”

  “Complicated! Yes. I suppose.” I glanced at her. “Was e Nudain your mistress?”

  “No, Master. Tchanu e Nudain did not keep genets; she favored human pets. But some of her family members liked genets, and I belonged to one of them. He was....”

  “Cruel?” I guessed.

  “Complicated,” she said, smiling at me. “He had a hunting cat he raised from kittenhood and when it died he could not bear to raise another. But he missed having pets. So he bought a genet. He liked me to do the things his cat would do: sleep on the rug by his feet, or lick his cheek, or eat from his hand. And he treated me as I thought he must have treated his cat. Kindly, but not like a thinking creature. He preferred me not to speak.”

  “What a bizarre existence,” I said. “I would have gone mad.”

  “It was not bad,” Marzipan said. “We had an understanding. And many genets have worse masters.” She shifted, curling her tail around herself. “I was a recent purchase, so I know little of this blood-flag, and of Tchanu almost nothing but hearsay; she left not long after I arrived. The other genets tell me that she liked her pets to enjoy themselves, but that she was blind to their more subtle signs of unhappiness. Only when they dared make much of their repugnance would she leave off. I don’t know that she was a bad elf. But she was insensitive, and nothing in her role made it necessary for her to learn otherwise. All the elves beneath her took their lead from her: many were more heavy-handed, but they all offered what they thought was license but what the humans felt they could deny only at great cost to themselves. The resentment is... very bad, Master. In part because some of the humans and elves might have found each other pleasing otherwise.”

  I put my face in my hands.

  “It is very bad, isn’t it,” she said.

  “The only reason I say it is not impossible is that I lately spent several days killing the walking dead, a thing I would have disbelieved up until the point where they slit my throat.” I let my hands drag down off my face and glanced at her. She was darker in hue than Almond had been and had eyes bright as aquamarines, but there was something similar in her bearing, more so than in Emily’s or Kelu’s. “What would you do in my place?”

  “I would have to first know your aims,” she said slowly.

  “I—” Fumbling to a halt, I frowned. What were my aims? ‘Come to the Archipelago and free humanity and the remaining genets,’ certainly, but beyond that I had thought that Serala would remain elven territory, and that the humans and genets would return with us. Why had I made that assumption? What greater right did the elves have to this land than the humans who’d helped them survive on it? What if they didn’t want to leave their homes? Why should they be the ones to uproot themselves? In favor of those who enslaved them!

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I thought I did, but I’m afraid a good part of my intent involved making decisions on the behalf of others without consulting them first as to their desires.”

  She cocked her head, ears canted toward me. “That matters to you?”

  “Of course it does.”

  “It wouldn’t matter to every elf,” she offered as, I thought, apology.

  “I know,” I said. “But I was raised human.”

  Marzipan nodded. “Maybe that’s what everyone needs. To be born and raised as something else. Then they’d understand one another.”

  “Would that they might,” I said. “Alas, we will have to muddle on without such easy solutions.” I pushed myself upright, reluctant. “I won’t keep you from reporting to your master any longer. Thank you for the liberty, Marzipan.”

  “I don’t think of you as a prisoner,” she said. “No matter what the humans say. You are our sire’s brother, which makes you family too.” She stood up, brushing her fur off. “May I ask you who I reminded you of?”

  “You may,” I said. “She was… well, I knew her as Almond. I suppose she was one of the Almonds. But she was my Almond, and I loved her.”

  “What happened to her?” Marzipan said, trotting alongside me as we started back down the slope.

  “She died to save my life,” I said. “And then a most amazing thing happened.”

  Marzipan glanced at me.

  “An angel came,” I said, and saw not the ground or the courtyard or anything before my eyes, but the flash of light. “An angel came to her.”

  For the first time in our acquaintance, Marzipan sounded shaken. “Angels don’t come to genets.”

  “They do now.”

  She said nothing all the way back.

  23

  “So Tchanu was a human raper,” Kelu said. “We are all surprised.”

  “I’m surprised!” Ivy said. “She treated me well!”

  “Of course she treated you well,” Kelu replied. “You were with Morgan. Morgan’s the prince. Tchanu responds to power, that’s all.”

  “It’s not all,” I said heavily. “Because she helped us, and she is owed something for that. At very least a fair trial.”

  “How could anyone here grant her a fair trial, though?” Ivy asked. “There won’t be an impartial person on the whole Archipelago. The elves will support her—”

  “—Unless they think tearing her down will let them maneuver into her place,” Kelu interrupted.

  “—and all the humans will want to hang her,” Ivy finished, and sighed.

  We’d been assigned a single room, the better no doubt to guard us, and it was in this room we were now conferring. Ivy and I were on the settle together, with Emily at our feet. Kelu was perched on a chair, tapping her fingers impatiently on the arm. And Amhric was sitting on a pillow, hands resting on his knees. He looked tired.

  “We can’t stay here,” Emily said, trying for a firm tone and succeeding only in sounding frightened. “I like the other genets, but the humans… they’re crazy.”

  “What did you expect, given how they were treated?” Kelu said.

  “They’re crazy like they might kill us on a whim,” Emily replied, ears flattening. “And I don’t care what was done to you, that’s not right. We haven’t done anything to them!”

  “I’m not sure we can leave,” Ivy said slowly.

  “We can,” I said. “The genets will let us escape. But what profit in that? Fleeing makes us look guilty. We need to establish ourselve
s credibly here if we are to accomplish anything. Which brings us to what, precisely, we want to accomplish.” I met my brother’s eyes. “I had a goal here, and it looks most of the way done already. What remains? What would you have us do? You are the king, and these are your elves.”

  “Haven’t you just said it?” Ivy asked. “Whether they like it or not, the elves are at least our responsibility. What the humans want to do is theirs.”

  “But who owns these cities?” I asked. “Who has the right to the plantations, the harbors, the ships? A Serala with a liberated human and genet populace is only possible if the emancipated wish to uphold that society. Otherwise, they will tear it down. And then what? We bring the elves to our sides and then flee with them to Troth and never return?”

  “And are you going to bring all the elves?” Kelu asked. “Or just the ones who’ve never tortured someone? Because if you’re only bringing the good elves with you, then you’re going to be pretty lonely on the trip back to Vigil.”

  “There might not be any bad elves left to bring,” Emily muttered.

  “Amhric?” I asked.

  He was studying the fingers of one hand, a slight furrow on his brow. “Morgan, why do you suppose you were raised human?”

  “Because my mother wanted to save my life, presumably.”

  “And do you believe in God?” He looked up at me, and this look was almost shy.

  “I would have to by this point,” I said. “Or be forced to believe I hallucinated Almond’s visitation. And… I manifestly did not, for her choice unbound us.” I paused, then smiled ruefully. “Rather a scholar’s reply, isn’t it. ‘I now have evidence, naturally I believe.’ But this is not faith.”

  “No,” he allowed. “But having found your way to belief at last… can you think that there might have been a plan in your having been born of Evertrue?”

  “And coming to love humans,” Ivy murmured. She shivered at my side. “It does seem… a strong coincidence, doesn’t it?”

  “Maybe you’ll explain what the two of you have already apprehended,” I said.