I sit outside at a small table that is covered with a thin sheen of dirt and coffee stains. The girl who waits on me takes no notice of the filth, but merely writes my request for tea on a pad and disappears. She has several tattoos, none of them mine. They are crude designs, stamped into her skin with no sense of how the furrows of ink should nestle against the body’s curves. She will age and they will age, sagging without grace until her skin resembles the mottled hide of a toad. I turn away, bored and irritated. Not much longer, I remind myself. Not much longer.
I stare at the humans passing me on the street. They are young, but already their flesh sings of weariness. Better to free them from their anxieties, their uselessness. I do not feel remorse or shame for the bargain I have struck with the Dark Lord’s loathsome servant. But I swallow a mouthful of the scalding tea the girl has brought in an effort to wash away the rancid taste of our encounter, for Red Cap poisons the air with his graveyard breath.
Red Cap. I whisper the name without fear, for I know him better now. He tried to impress me with signs of his power; the stink of carnage that flies from his mouth, the claws that scratched and fondled his prick, and the eternal well of pain in his stone eyes. He boasted that his hound was on the trail of the child in a far-off city, that I had nothing to offer him. But I did not purchase his tale for he wears the leather collar of his Dark Lord, and though it is decked with onyx, bloodstones, and rubies, it serves a function other than fashion. He has come to me because he has been ordered by his Lord not to fail or his head will rest on a pike. His own servants will feast on his carcass and another will be enjoined to wear the cap o’ blood.
I have no such allegiances to the Queen, nor do I fear her reprisals for she will not venture from the court. And there is no one among the Highborn who would come forth as her champion. She has walled herself away from the bitterness of the clans who have watched their numbers and their world dwindle. They remain at court, mute but filled with anger, clinging to a fading past.
The tea, despite the taste of human pollution, cleanses my palate. I dip my finger into the black brew and begin to trace a wet, circular line on the table. A sending designed to call its brother etched into the neck of the girl who resisted me. I can see her face, a lean oval, the cheekbones rising beneath moss-colored eyes, the kissable truculent mouth, and a small white scar at the corner of her upper lip bearing witness to an old beating. I hesitate, wondering if she might actually be the Queen’s lost whelp, for there is in her features and in the defiant blood traces of the fey. I shrug. It doesn’t matter whether she is or isn’t. I only need Red Cap to believe it and his own hunger makes him an easy dupe.
The pattern forms beneath my finger, and I dip my finger again into the cooling tea to draw more lines across the table’s scummy surface. I do not need the girl to come to me to snare her like a hare in a hunter’s noose. The knot of trouble on her neck will do as I ask. I do not need to collect her blood, only truss her slowly in the spider’s silk of my tattoos: the adder and scorpion to bind her will to mine. When she is weakest, I will claim her, a valuable hostage, in a game of power between the Queen and the Dark Lord.