Ch15: What's His

Vibe: Art Deco — Lana Del Rey | My Body Is a Cage — Peter Gabriel

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The road went on for a long time.

She counted. Not time — it meant nothing without the sun. She counted sounds.

First the forest — wind in the canopy, the far-off howl of something they had left behind. Then the ground beneath the wheels changed: soft to hard, dull to ringing. Cobblestones. Then voices — scattered at first, then thicker, until they blurred into one continuous hum. The smell shifted in layers: smoke, food, animals, something chemical and sharp, food again.

She saw nothing through the slats — only fragments of darkness and yellow light. But she counted. As long as she counted, her mind kept working. As long as her mind worked, she was still herself.

A city. But entirely alien to the one etched into her memory.

They stopped. Voices outside — the two of them handing something off to someone else. She caught fragments: 'into pieces,' 'still time before the auction,' 'this one, separate.' The monsters — she had heard them through the dark the whole way: heavy breathing, now and then a stray touch against her shoulder or her leg. The beasts were handed over first.

Her — after.

Itvia festered like an open wound on the capital's side, a district dying from within yet pulsing with its own feral, predatory logic. A narrow street, cobblestones uneven, laundry lines strung between the buildings, lanterns burning a dull yellow. Something wet underfoot — better not to think what. Somewhere off to the side, shouting — not from pain, but wagers. Laughter. Smoke from a brazier where something fried and would have smelled good, if not for everything else in the air around it.

A woman stood in the doorway and looked at her without any expression at all. Eyes that had seen everything and had long since stopped caring.

She was brought inside. Cooler in here, darker. A corridor, narrow, low-ceilinged, doors along both sides. Some shut. Behind some, silence. Behind one, the even breathing of several people at once.

The keeper came out through a side door.

Not old — forty, maybe less, though his face had worn past the point where age could be guessed. Dressed neatly: a dark coat buttoned to the throat, clean hands, hair combed back. One of those men who built his authority out of tidiness, as if everything clean and orderly made whatever he did justified too.

The two hunters exchanged a few words with him. In low voices. She tried to read their lips and caught some of it: 'found in the forest,' 'not from here.' The keeper nodded. He came up to her.

He looked her over in silence — head to foot, slow, over an object, not a person. He paused at her hair. A moment longer than anywhere else.

Moon-silver hair. She knew it drew the eye. Even Erebus had said hair like this was rare across the whole empire.

The keeper said nothing about her hair aloud.

"Pretty," he said at last, to the hunters, not to her. "Carriage like an aristocrat's. Pity she's dressed like a servant."

Erebus had trained her to stand exactly this way — straight, shoulders back, chin lifted slightly. She could not undo it. It ran deeper than habit. It had settled into her body.

And now, what he had built into her was betraying her.

They agreed on a price. Without her. As if she were not standing right there.

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The cellar turned out cleaner than she expected.

A windowless room, but with a lamp — oil, dim. The floor was wood, not earth. Benches lined the walls, and women sat on them. Different ages, different looks, some still in their own clothes, some no longer. All of them silent. Not asleep — simply still. The kind of silence that settles once every thought has already run its course and only the waiting is left.

Elara sat in the corner. Her back against the wall. Knees drawn to her chest.

No one spoke to her. She spoke to no one.

/"A person opens when they are at ease. There is no one here I need."/

For the first time in a long while, she sat among people and did not read them. She only watched the floor.

After a while, they came again.

A different man — not the keeper. Older, heavier, with a face that had grown used to getting what it wanted without asking. Two men followed him — an escort only, but they had already understood their role before the first word was spoken.

He walked the length of the benches. Stopped. Looked.

He lingered longer in front of her.

"This one," he said, short, to the escort.

They took her by the arms — both sides, without roughness, but in a way that made resistance pointless before it began. She rose on her own, so at least they would not have to drag her.

"Too pretty for the common floor," he told someone walking behind him. "She'll fetch more."

Laughter filled the room. The two men from the escort.

She did not look. Her breath stayed even. She counted her steps.

A room on the second floor — not a cellar, but no better. A table, two chairs, the window curtained shut. Nothing on the table. But the room itself was steeped in a heavy expectancy, only the sense that along these walls things had happened for years, and finally settled.

They sat her at the table, the chair shoved roughly into the back of her knees. The escort left. But there were no footsteps.

They were standing outside the door. She knew it.

"Your hand."

She hesitated a second. Then her right hand settled onto the table. On its own. Because resistance here carried a price she was not ready to pay yet.

A third man entered. Neither the buyer nor the guard, this one was slight, unremarkable man with the detached manner of a scholar. He carried no instruments, no candles. He sat across from her and hovered his palm over the back of her hand, not touching it, only holding it suspended in the air.

Under his low, monotone murmuring, symbols began to coil in the air above her pulse point.

She watched, unblinking.

She had seen a mage before. Long ago, when she was small — they were brought to the palace for the holidays, conjuring fire from their palms, weaving webs out of light. She had watched then with wonder, and a little fear. But those had been tricks. Pretty, weightless, made only for smiles.

This was not that.

A searing line scored her skin. Not sliced from outside. Written from within, laid beneath the skin like a dark, unnatural vein. Elara did not understand its shape until the line closed into a perfect, cinching circle.

She could not look away.

Magic. Not a trick. Not a parlor entertainment for the capital's holidays. Real, invasive magic that settled onto a body and demanded no consent.

A sharp lump gathered in her throat.

"What is that?"

The words tore loose on their own, and she was afraid the instant she heard them — afraid that she had asked, that she had not been able to stop herself. Erebus did not allow questions. But she was looking at the dark circle on her wrist and could not stay silent.

"Something to control you," the mage said, without lifting his eyes. Indifferent, like a physician explaining a medicine's effect to a patient he was seeing for the first time.

He rose and walked out. Simply that — turned and left, as if he had finished everything he had come to do.

The one who had brought her here stepped closer.

"Why not test it now, while we're at it."

She felt him before he touched her — the smell of alcohol, the heavy step, the heat of a body too close. He gripped her chin and tipped her head up.

"Look at me when you're spoken to."

She looked. Safer than resisting.

"Really is pretty," he said to no one in particular. His fingers pressed harder into her chin. "Very pretty. Your kind costs. So why were you running around in the forest, instead of where the likes of you belong?"

She did not answer.

"Quiet one," he said, and smiled — sweetly, and that was worse than any word. "No matter. That can be corrected."

He let go of her chin. His hand slid higher, his fingers catching a strand of her hair, lifted it to turn it in the dim lamplight. Slow, as examined cloth in a market stall, testing the quality.

"Silver. A rarity."

/"Erebus used to run his fingers through my hair too. But differently. Gentler."/

Maybe because the motion was the same — the same certainty, the same sense that she was not a person but a thing being appraised. But there, at least, some attention had come with it. Here — only a coarse inspection of livestock.

He let the strand fall. He drew the back of his hand along her cheek, from temple to the corner of her mouth, unhurried.

Her skin rose in gooseflesh. Not from pleasure. From revulsion.

Elara stared at the wall in front of her.

His hand traveled lower — down her neck, stopped at her collarbone. His fingers pressed, not hard, but with certainty. Tested the density of the skin. Checked whether anything beneath it was worth the attention.

He leaned to her ear.

"You'll make someone with money a pretty toy."

She felt his hot breath on her skin and fixed on one thing only — give nothing away. No tension in her shoulders, no quickened breath. As Erebus had taught her.

/"Weakness is a tool."/

He drew back. Pressed his thumb into her wrist, onto the circle. Searching for a reaction.

Nothing.

She felt absolutely nothing.

He pressed again, harder. Anger began to surface through his indifference.

Nothing.

/"He got it wrong. Or the wrong spot. Or something is broken."/

She did not know which. But she felt nothing at all — only the pressure of his thumb on her skin, and her own breath, which she had learned to keep hidden.

He released her wrist.

"Broken, is it? Or the mage botched it."

He looked at her differently now — no longer with the satisfaction of appraising goods. With irritation.

"No matter. We don't need the brand for this."

He stepped back. Then, without a word, he seized her by the shoulders and hauled her up from the chair — no effort, no question. The way one moves an object that owes no explanation of direction.

She stood. Her body did it on its own.

He caught her by the arm and wrenched her toward him.

She flinched back on reflex. He did not let go. He caught her tighter, twisted her arm behind her back, and pinned her against the table — sharp, without warning, hard enough that the wooden edge bit into the small of her back.

"Stop squirming."

He drove his thigh between her legs — heavy, certain, unhurried. He stood so close she felt every shift of his body. His other hand clamped her waist and dragged her nearer.

She did not move.

/"Do not give him the pleasure of seeing fear."/

His fingers crept up her shirt — not straight for the buttons. Slow. Pausing at her ribs, at her breasts. He was in no hurry, and he made sure she understood it: that she was going nowhere, that he could allow himself anything he wanted, for as long as he wanted it.

She stared at the wall in front of her. Fixed on one thing only — breathing evenly.

His thick fingers found the first button of her shirt.

It gave.

Then the second.

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A shout rose from the floor below.

Sharp, raw, a man's roar that stopped everyone in the room cold.

Then came a heavy crash, and after it the ring of steel, and boots running in a panic.

Elara stood pinned against the table, her heart beating in a strange, unnatural rhythm. But that is what happens when everything becomes too much. Past a certain line, the body simply stops reacting and starts to wait.

/"If she tells the truth, I will ask. If she lies, she will live."/

No. Not that.

/"You survive as long as you are useful."/

She closed her eyes. Briefly. Only long enough to gather herself.

She hated this in herself. That even here, in this room, with this circle on her arm, the first thing that surfaced was his voice. Not a prayer. Not anger. Not a plan.

Him.

/"Erebus will do whatever it takes to get me back."/

It was not hope. It was a cold, deliberate certainty, built on the nature of the one person she understood completely. He would not leave her here. Not because he loved her. Because she was 'his'. And what belonged to him, he gave to no one.

She exhaled. And opened her eyes.

The shouting past the door grew louder.