I woke to Almond licking my cheek and the line of my jaw. I ached... oh, how I ached. Every inch of my skin, every hair, every pore. I hurt so much I wept as I regained consciousness, and the genet lapped the tears as they fell, purring in what I could only assume was some misguided attempt at palliation.
“Not feeling any better, I’m guessing,” Kelu said, subdued. She was tucked against my solar plexus, her body wrapped against my lower abdomen, my hips, my legs. I could not see her: we lay on something soft that gave me no relief, in a darkness that barely soothed my over-sensitive eyes, in a pool of quiet that only magnified the sighing of air that passed through their long noses.
“God,” I whispered through the roaring in my head, my voice cracked. “God, give me the drug. I can’t stand it.”
“No more of it,” Almond said, hugging me tightly from behind. “You can’t, you’ve had too much already getting through the Door.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We brought you home,” Kelu said. “You collapsed in the factor’s office... we thought you were going to hurt yourself.” She paused; I felt her throat move as she swallowed. “We drugged you and took you across the Door to the Lady’s manor on Aravalís. That’s where you are now.”
I remembered then, the bonfire brightness of the elf’s very existence. “Oh God, God... tell me they’re not all like that.”
I felt their hesitation. Then Kelu said, “No. Most of them are... more than that.”
I closed my eyes and gave up to despair.
The door opened on two of them then and their presence so overwhelmed me that the sense of my body, of the genets against me receded. I clung to consciousness in terror because the alternative petrified me, but I couldn’t make it back into my own mind. My thoughts scattered as if blown by an insistent wind.
“What exactly is this you’ve brought me?” a woman said. Her angry voice held so many layers of sound it felt like cotton wadding, but made of glass and barbed wire. Had I thought the first elf I’d seen a monument? Beside her the memory of him dissolved. “I asked for a prince and you bring me a human... and a broken one at that.”
“Fine-featured for a human,” said another voice. “Very nice.”
“Don’t!” the woman said. “Don’t touch him. He’s mine.” Her voice turned toward me. “So?”
“Mistress,” Almond whispered, her voice trembling, “this is the prince. His blood is right.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, pet,” she said. “This is a human.”
“The ladders in his blood—”
“Seems to indicate that I’m right, yes?” the woman said. The knives in her voice sharpened. “I thought you would know better, Almond. And you, Kelu! You’ve been on this journey how many times now?” She sighed, like a sirocco. “You will have to be punished.”
They both shook against me, and that brought me close enough to consciousness to open my eyes, to find that I had an arm around Kelu’s shoulder.
“So he wakes.”
I lifted my gaze and found her even in the lightless room. She gave off the faintest luminescence, just enough to prick her from the skin of the dark like a bead of blood. Her presence was a crushing weight in the room, as if she took up more space than her body occupied. I couldn’t see her face, but I could feel her.
But behind her... behind her there was someone so deep and so vast she was defined by the void left in that great wake. Instincts older than my intellect drenched my skin in cold sweat.
“Can you speak, fragile thing?”
“Yes,” I said in the Angel’s Gift.
“Ah, an educated creature,” she said. “My pets seem to have mistaken you for someone else. Did you abet them?”
I lost some of the words, but caught the meaning anyhow. “I have never claimed to be anyone but who I am.”
“Mistress,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“You call me mistress,” she said. “I am the Lady Amoret and you’re wearing my blood-flag mark. You belong to me.” She sounded irritated. “If I even want to keep someone so weak.”
“You can give him to me,” said the great void behind her.
“No,” she said. “You can’t have him.”
“You don’t want him.” Caress of blood and smoke. I shuddered.
There was a grin in her voice. “Well, I didn’t until I knew you wanted him. Now I’ll keep him, so you can’t have him.”
“As you will then.” Boredom. No, not boredom... an absence of caring. Of any feeling at all. “I’ll leave you to your play.”
She sniffed, and the larger presence withdrew, sucking most of the darkness from the room. In that absence I could catch glimpses of my hostess’s face: sharply pointed, severe, milk-and-rose petal perfect. Drops of golden light rolled down the edges of her hair as she shifted, drew closer.
“What I don’t understand is what got into your head,” she said. “I know you’re not stupid, Almond. A little simple perhaps, but not hopeless. But this? This is... “ She sighed. “Such a disappointment.”
Almond squirmed against my back. I could taste her despair like tears. “Mistress, please, please, he really is the one! I know it, I know it.”
Before I could object thin fingers curled around my chin and moved my face. So cold, her fingers, like being bitten by ice. I jerked against her grasp, but she hardened her hand against me.
I hated her eyes. Such an incredible blue, so dark, so complex, so unspeakably beautiful... and so rotten. Edged with cruelty and indifference and empty, empty as a broken vase.
“This,” she said, “is a human, Almond. Human. Look at him. He doesn’t shine. He has no magic.” She tapped my glasses with a fingertip, and I flinched back as if she’d assaulted me. “He’s so weak he can’t even see right.”
“He fed me,” Kelu said, ears flattened against her head.
“You bit him?” she asked.
“I drank,” Kelu said. “He kept me alive.”
She shrugged. “We know very well what kept you sane on your journey, pet. That taste would have lasted you much longer than the weeks you were away.” She chafed her thumb along my jawbone and I twitched. Her dissonant voice, the edges in her eyes, the cold she exuded... my entire body tried to shrink from her. It didn’t matter how unearthly her beauty. I wanted nothing to do with her. “You might have had your drink of this mortal, but it was all for the pleasure of biting him.”
The word “mortal” struck me like a blow. I felt it suddenly, the truth of their immortality. I couldn’t imagine her dying, or that elf at the dock. Nothing that shone so could possibly dwindle enough to die.
But I—I was not so durable.
“Weak,” she said. “Barely even useful for sustenance.” She sighed. “Ah well. I’ll have him sent to the kennel. The two of you are with me. I’ll deliver you personally to your trainers for correction.”
“Mistress,” Almond whispered, shaking against my back, “One of us should stay. He’s not well.”
The elf stared at her. “Did you just speak out of turn, pet? I expect that from Kelu, but you?”
“He’s sick,” Almond whispers. “And we soothe him.”
“He’s no more concern of yours,” the elf said. “And his sickness or wellness is of no moment. He’ll live out his usefulness one way or the other... whether he suffers or not doesn’t matter.”
“Mistress—”
“Don’t make me strike you,” the elf said.
They seeped from my side like reluctant shadows, taking their anesthetizing warmth with them. I shuddered in the dark as the demon-pain crawled up my limbs. I could hear their laughter in my ears, and it tangled with the elf’s words as she said, “Much better. And as for you, sickly thing... be good and follow the instructions your keeper will give you, ah? It will make your life much easier.”
And then the door shut on them, leaving me with the demons.
“This is it,” I whispered to them. “Just kill me now and have done with it.”
But they only laughed, laughed and said, Oh no. This is a fate even worse than we could possibly devise. We will leave you to it... for now.
I did not have time to object, for no sooner had I managed to lift my head and struggle upright then the door opened to admit two more elves. These were dim embers compared to Amoret and her companion, but without the genets their brilliance cut me. I shied as they reached for me, but they did not seem to notice. They were talking but not, I realized, to me: continuing a conversation they’d been having when they walked in, not even considering me a person worth acknowledging. I hated their hands on me. I hated that I could feel every separate finger through my coat, my blouse, all the way to my skin. I hated their casual dismissal. And I hated how they manhandled me down the hall. I tried fighting them, but pain left me weak and breathless and in that moment I hated myself also, for not having the strength to win my freedom, or at least bruise them trying.
My confused senses reported both opulence and a peculiar architecture, something that allowed cross-breezes to torture my hyper-sensitive skin. I heard the rustle of palms in the dark, smelled the velvety perfume of unfamiliar flowers. It was so hard to feel anything past the intensity of the elves and the searing complaints of my body, but the balmy evening, wet from storms, fell over my shoulders, and I thought that they’d taken me outside. Then I lost the sense of the evening, lost the breezes, felt a cramped weight all around me. Wherever they took me now, the halls were too close.
“Here,” the first of the two said as rough hands stripped my coat from me. I could not protest—the drag of fingers and the way they passed my body from one to the other left me numb. “Put him up, will you?”
“Do I look like I have that much energy?”
“Well I certainly don’t. Tie him.”
A sigh blew across the back of my hair and the second elf drew my arms over my head, folding my fingers onto a hook. I wondered that they took for granted that not only would I consent to being stretched on my toes but that my body would support it when every limb screamed for me to collapse.
...and then my fingers locked on the hook.
I jerked away and nothing happened. I tried to spread my fingers, but they remained fixed. They were no longer my hands, but someone else’s, holding me in place. I stared up at them, choking on bile. My body had betrayed me before, but it had never felt alien to me until this moment.
“I want to feed first,” the second elf said.
“This isn’t feeding,” the first said. “We need to test him for her, see if he’s worth keeping.”
“We can test him while we eat,” the second said. “Let me go first.”
“Just don’t drain him,” the first said finally.
The second laughed and cast a cold shadow against my back as he approached me from behind. His hands settled on the undersides of my stretched and aching arms, thumbs caressing the trembling muscle. His palms glided down to my chest and even through the vest I sensed the burn of his presence. I flinched, but there was no escaping the stroking. I had never been touched so intimately and with so little regard for my own desires. Up to my elbows, down again over my chest, my ribs. Up. Down. I ground my teeth and fought the nausea. It would end. It had to. And yet he continued, on and on, until the urge to vomit almost overwhelmed me.
“Stop playing with it and eat,” the first said, bored.
The second laughed... and on the next pass his hands ripped me open and spilled something vital and he gathered it and gathered it and it was like being flayed of a skin I didn’t even know I had and I screamed, oh how I screamed—
“How is it?”
“Not much, but it refills quickly. Mmm. Very quickly.”
“Blood from a stone.”
Laughter, like the harsh cries of carrion birds. And still the violation went on, stripping me until I wept.
I was not surprised when the demons came.
How do you like our gift, O Prince? Do the elves not use it well? Is this not better than being eaten alive? one of them asked, licking my ear. I could not twitch away, so consumed was I by the madness of what they did to me, for now they were both at my body, stroking, cutting, hurting.
“Make it stop,” I whispered. “Oh God. Kill them. Kill me. Something. Anything.”
We obey the commands of the Prince, the demon said with a mocking grin... and then he dragged his claws up my spine and I convulsed. And then again. The pain woke and found invaders in its demesne and it roared defiance, devouring me to forbid me from them. Mine, it hissed in the voices of demons. MINE, MINE FOREVER.
Yes, I thought—screamed—no, yes ANYTHING STOP—
“Did we overdo it?”
“Not sure. What a mess. You clean up.”
“You were the one who pushed it too far.”
“He still producing?”
“Yes, still.”
“Stupid. Get a human in here to clean it up.”
“Fine, fine.” A pause. “He alive?”
“Breathing...” A hand brushed my face, traced my cheekbone. “Mmm, still full even after all that. You have to take it slowly, but it never seems to end.”
I discovered then that I had never hated anyone in my life... because in that moment, I hated the elves, hated them and wanted nothing more than to feel them die beneath my hands.
“She’ll be pleased. We can replace the one we just used up.”
I tried to rise so I could get my hands around their throats, but I couldn’t find my arms. I couldn’t find my body even, until one of them nudged my ribs with the tip of a sandal. “Let’s go tell her, then.”
“Right.”
And there they left me, like an unfinished meal they’d lost interest in, spilled on the floor in all my helplessness and hatred. I thought of Kelu’s curled lip and flattened ears and understood at last. A collar around the throat or a mark stained on the skin, it didn’t matter. These creatures treated us all the same. I struggled to rise and found I couldn’t; they had... done something to me, something indescribable. Just making the attempt brought tears to my eyes and I wept them past my gritted teeth and clenched jaw. I hated crying. I hated crying for pain even more. And I hated my body for not only betraying me, but for apparently having some new and special way of being violated that I’d never even imagined.
Before I could gather myself, the door opened again for a human, another man. He did not meet my eyes, nor move with any confidence or energy. He looked much as I’d felt... or as I would if the elves did what they’d done to me over and over, past cowed and well into exanimate. He shifted me to one side and applied himself to mopping the floor; had I vomited? I didn’t remember. I hadn’t eaten in so long it hadn’t mattered much. I watched in dismay as the man finished cleaning... and approached me. He looped my arm over his shoulder and heaved me up without so much as a by-your-leave and dragged me out the door.
“I should very much like to escape,” I told him conversationally. He did not reply.
“Or to kill my captors,” I offered.
Nothing.
“Do you even speak?” I asked. I switched to Lit, though by now my native language felt ungainly. “Or do you prefer a civilized tongue?”
That made him flick his eyes toward mine, but there was nothing in them. No approval, no curiosity, no censure. Nothing.
He brought me to a room off a narrow, poorly lit hallway; no, calling it a room dignified it too much. It was a closet, just large enough for the thin bunk. The man dropped me there, ungently.
“You can’t possibly be leaving me here,” I said.
He shut the door on me. Closing it revealed two bowls. One was empty; one had water.
“No,” I murmured, stunned.
The door remained shut. The bowls did not vanish. The room remained tiny and crude, with its too-thin bunk and scratchy sheets.
“No,” I said. I was not trapped. I was not a prisoner. I was not doomed to become a drudge who bowed his head to the will of his masters, the masters who abused and stole his essence whenever they pleased.
I was not going to become a human Kelu.
I was NOT!
I threw myself against the door and struck it with my fists and my entire world was a NO screamed through my aching body and raw throat and bleeding soul. But I had the fortitude only for that one sad attempt. I was nothing but pain, a ruin of limbs and broken grace crumpled at the threshold of a lifetime of slavery. The demons crawled over my skin and licked at my invisible wounds and their mocking laughter blocked my hearing. I closed my eyes and managed to curl into an awkward ball, hiding my face against my knees.
I breathed. Breathed through suffering and agony, through the sense of helplessness. Breathed through terror. And when I came out the other side, I found the door opening, the sliver of light falling across my cheek sharp as a cut.
“Morgan,” Kelu hissed.
I squinted past the tear-stiffened skin around my eyes.
“Are you awake?” she asked in Lit.
“Yesss,” I managed, hoarse.
“Can you walk?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” I said. The effort of talking woke stabbing pains in my throat.
“I’m getting you out of here,” she whispered.
I looked at her. “Why?”
“Because,” she hissed, “I hate them, and doing anything that hurts them pleases me.”
I knew the source of her vitriol now, felt it seething in me. But something nagged me about her motivations anyway. Why me? Why didn’t she choose some other way to hurt them? “I’m sure there’s an easier way.”
She shrugged. “You’re the one that occurred to me. Besides, we dragged you into this, we should get you out.”
“I’m having trouble imagining you professing to altruism on the behalf of an elf in human’s skin.”
Kelu sighed. “I don’t have time to argue with you. The truth is that Almond thinks you’re the prince, and she believes it so much she never once recanted even while they were punishing her. So... yes. I am breaking you out of your cell and smuggling you out of here. Maybe you are the prince. Maybe if I free you, you’ll turn the whole Archipelago upside-down. But even if you don’t, it’ll upset Amoret and that makes me happy. So are you coming or not?”
“What about Almond?” I asked.
“She’s elsewhere,” Kelu said.
The image of Almond bearing some hideous torture because of me was more than I could stand. “We have to take her with us.”
Kelu scowled at me. “I was going to go back for her once I get you out of the way.”
“And if she’s taken while you’re busy with me?” I forced my recalcitrant body to its knees.
“No, no,” she said, irritated. “Stop that! You’ll make things worse! If you want her to come now, I’ll go get her alone. They’ll notice you limping after me. And you’ll slow me down. Which is why I wanted to get rid of you first!”
“It’s both of us or neither,” I said. “I’m not leaving without her.”
She sighed and shut the door on me.
I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against the cold stone floor. I had to rise. I had to escape this place. And I had to get Almond away from them. And yes, even broken Kelu. Perhaps I could take them home with me, keep them safe from the depredations of elves forever. Gant was waiting somewhere; Gant was under the protection of a different elf, one who didn’t apparently use every human as food. Surely escape could be accomplished.
I tried to stand and fell. Sprawled on the ground, I remembered that part of my plan had been to find someone to heal me. I couldn’t imagine any elf ever consenting to do something beneficent, but I also found myself forced to admit that I was becoming an invalid faster than I’d planned, faster than I’d dreamed in my cruelest nightmares.
God, I couldn’t afford to be this weak. Not here.
By the time Kelu returned I had used the wall to drag myself upright and was leaning heavily against it. Seeing her made me glad... but seeing Almond...
“What did they do to you?” I hissed.
She bowed her head, embarrassed. “It is nothing, Master.”
“What did they do to you!”
“Later,” Kelu said, dragging my attention away from the macabre embrace of the bandages wrapping the smaller genet’s torso. “We have to go now.”
“Very well,” I said, and took my first step. My heel landed, the shock traveled up to my ankle and my leg tried to continue through the stirrup of bone and muscle. Kelu snatched for my arm. She snarled. “Almond! Get his other side.”
The smaller genet set her shoulder under my armpit and the two of them together managed to bolster me. But I was weeping again, with frustration and the sheer brilliance of the pain, so blinding.
“What happened to you, Master?” Almond asked, her voice twisted with worry. “You smell so wrong.”
“I don’t know,” I said, panting and trying to help them but it was hard, so hard to coordinate my limbs. “They touched me, they ripped me open, and now it’s bad, it’s very bad.”
“You smell like agony,” Almond said softly. “Like screaming.”
“Screaming... why, yes, I do seem to recall screaming,” I said. Mordant humor was all I had left.
“Sssh,” Kelu said. “Just concentrate. We have to get you to the stables.”
I wondered what poor souls they kept in stables, if they kept humans in kennels. I feared to ask, and it needed too much of my effort to remain conscious. Whatever they’d done, whatever they’d taken from me, it made my body worse. I felt as if I was grinding my bones to powder and my muscles were tearing apart. My sweat dampened their arms where they propped me up. The hall we traversed stretched on toward infinity... like a nightmare, as difficult to apprehend.
“Not far now, Master,” Almond whispered, and perhaps she licked my cheek.
A cool breeze... we were outside? It smelled like storms. Blindly I sought the sea. I could feel it pounding against my skin as if I had become the strand.
“This way,” Kelu said, tugging me, and I realized I’d been straining toward it.
I strangled my protest and let her guide me until we passed a threshold and I found the light warm and dim. I squinted into the real and found a long row of stalls, lit by lanterns and dense with sepia shadows. The musty warmth of the place felt good, felt right. Dry and full of living things.
“There are... horses here?” I asked.
“What did you expect?” Kelu said.
I managed a twisted smile. “Some sentient race forced into eternal servitude on hands and knees.”
She flashed her teeth at me. “You’re learning.”
Almond flattened her ears.
I remembered an important point then. “I can’t ride horses.”
“Then it’s good we’re not stealing a horse,” Kelu said, disappearing into the maw of the shadows, the black ones at the end of the corridor. I waited, leaning heavily on Almond.
Eyes first out of that dark. Giant eyes, bright as embers. Visceral memory: alchemical fires burning, talons, the hiss of a phantom, ancient anger. I backed away, stumbling.
“No, no, Master,” Almond said, grabbing my arm. “It’s just a drake, it won’t harm you.”
The shadows drained off the rest of the animal as it stepped toward me, a creature as tall as a draft horse but sleek and hard as a greyhound and scaled like a serpent. It extended its narrow, pointed head toward me, those cabochon eyes focused on mine.
“Give it your hand,” Almond whispered.
I extended my aching arm, palm up. It lowered its head, nostrils flared; its breath when it blew on my skin was hot, hot and dry, like the draft off a fire. I didn’t realize until a long tress tumbled over its head to tickle my wrist that it had a black mane to complement its two swept-back horns.
“At least it likes you,” Kelu said, throwing a saddle over its back. She had to stand on her toes to reach over it.
“A... a drake?” I said, looking at Almond. “Like a dragon?”
“It’s not a dragon,” she said. “This is a rare riding beast, Master. Fit only for kings and princes.”
“Should we be stealing something so rarified?” I asked. “Won’t they notice?”
“We don’t have a choice,” Kelu said, tugging the girth taut. “We have to make the best time possible. This is the fastest thing in the stable, and it’s also the only thing that’s not going to balk at the smell of me or Almond.”
“Still—” I began, and then... it stretched its long neck out and pressed its smooth cheek against mine.
A sense of well-being flooded me, so intense I froze. It chafed its face against my cheek, against my neck, took a step forward until it could press its chest against mine. Shocked, I put both my arms around its muscled neck, my fingers tangling in that soft, long mane as it snuffed at my back.
Both genets were staring at me. I wanted to protest that I hadn’t planned any of this, but... God, it was such a warm animal, and it felt good, good to touch it. So I gave up and buried my face in its hair.
“It knows him,” Kelu said, sounding shaken.
“Of course,” Almond said. “He’s the prince.”
Kelu said, “Ah... rrr. Yes. Come on, Morgan, get on.”
She wanted me to pull myself onto an animal this tall when I could barely walk. I laughed, weakly, bitterly.
“Try, Master,” Almond said, petting my shoulder. “We’ll help.”
“Just hurry,” Kelu growled.
I drew in a deep breath of the drake’s scent: musty and musky and spiced, the sweat of snakes and predators touched with sparks. I steadied myself on the creature’s body, moving to its side, and there confronted the saddle. I reached for the pommel and managed to lock my fingers around it and then closed my eyes and heaved myself upward.
And I almost made it.
I fell, the genets lunged for me, and the drake... swerved under me. I found the saddle beneath my chest and blinked at the tooling on its leather edge. Very elegant. How had I gotten here?
Without warning, Kelu shoved her shoulder into my backside, pushing me up into the saddle. Almond steadied me and the taller genet pulled my leg over the back of the drake, which had folded itself beneath me, tucked neatly on the ground like a cat.
“At least it’s cooperating,” Kelu said. “There.”
“Do we need a bridle?” Almond asked, hesitant.
“Yes,” Kelu said. “I’ll get that. You get up behind him. We have to hurry. Someone might want to take a midnight ride.”
I held onto the saddle. So many things going on around me and I felt like the master of none of it. It was humiliating. But... the drake beneath me was warm and very alive. I almost wished the saddle away, so I could feel its smooth skin against my legs.
“All right,” Kelu said, throwing the reins over the creature’s long neck and pulling herself into the saddle in front of me. “Let’s go!”
The moment I’d been dreading... the moment we actually moved. At home in Evertrue I’d often longed to take part in the equestrian sports my peers did, but every time I’d ridden a horse had involved an agony of jarred muscles and white pain shot straight up the column of my spine. I closed my eyes and braced myself with a reminder that there would be no liberty without pain, that I could live through it, must.
Muscles glided beneath my legs, growing hot enough to feel through the thin leather of the saddle. Startled, I opened my eyes to find the drake standing, and as I gaped it took its first few steps.
“Does it even have bones?” I asked.
“Yes,” Kelu said, and though I couldn’t see her face I could almost hear her rolling her eyes. “Hold on to me, will you? I don’t need you falling off.”
I slipped my arms around her thin waist; behind me, Almond did the same. The drake glided forward, like shadows spilling across the ground. I was so lost in the wonder of it that I didn’t notice that we’d stopped at the door to the courtyard until Almond gasped behind me.
A bewildered human servant stood at the door. A night watchman? A stablehand? I waited for the inevitable cry of discovery, but the man didn’t move, didn’t speak, did nothing. I wondered if he had been so hollowed out by the elves’ appetites that he had no intelligence left until I realized he was staring at the drake’s face, like a thing mesmerized.
No... like prey.
The drake prowled toward him, one liquid step at a time, and the human did nothing but gaze unblinking and begin at last to shake. When we were so close the drake could nudge him, he slid to his knees in a swoon and the drake brushed past.
“My God,” I whispered.
Kelu leaned forward and patted the drake on its chest. “Nicely done... but that won’t last long. When he recovers his wits he’ll tell someone we’re gone. So... hang on.”
I renewed my grasp on her as she slapped the reins against the drake’s neck. It accelerated from a walk into a full run so smoothly I didn’t feel the transition, and then we were pouring into the most incredible leaps, as if the ground could not keep us. And it moved almost without sound, great clawed feet scraping against the earth before leaving it. I bent close against Kelu’s shoulder and laughed, laughed because I had never felt anything like it, like the heat that radiated from its body as its skin glided smooth and loose over its wet muscles; never felt anything like the ease and grace with which it moved and brought us with it. Never felt anything like the speed at which we traveled, whipping my face with my hair and I didn’t mind the sting, not at all, nor the cold.
We fled out the courtyard and through gardens that registered only as a confusion of topiaries and spicy perfumes. My impression of Amoret’s estate was one of extraordinary wealth, open spaces and the knife-edged silhouettes of palms.
“This place,” I said into Kelu’s ear. “It must have gates.”
“It does.”
“With guards.”
“Just don’t fall off,” she said, ducking low against the drake’s neck.
I shrugged and bent toward her, the creature’s mane slapping my shoulder.
Soon we were flowing past the largest part of the estate, so large that we seemed to run forever before it receded. And then the gates hove into view, and Kelu sent the drake veering off the path. I lifted my eyes just enough to know there was no earthly way a horse could have leapt those gates and then the drake was airborne.
We touched down on the other side as lightly as the wind brushing grass. The high sky above us, the hot skin of the drake against the insides of my legs, and the twin genets before and behind me... my world had no beginning, nor end, and I had never felt such elation. I hid my face in Kelu’s hair and wept for glory. I thought there could be no improving this feeling...
...and then I heard the splash of water and a cold spray wet my calves, and we were loping along a moon-silvered beach, black waves frothed with silky gray. The ocean’s susurrus calmed the storm in my head, gentled the ache in my over-sensitive skin, filled me until I could hear nothing else.
“Master?” Almond whispered from a far, far distance. “Are you well?”
I drew in a long breath and said, “Yes.” For the first time, it was the truth.
“It’s going to be a long ride,” Kelu said. “All night and into the day. Tell me if you need to stop.”
“What about the drake?” I asked. “Doesn’t he need rest?”
“The drake’ll run forever, as far as I know,” Kelu said. “It doesn’t seem to tire the way horses do.”
I felt the fluid glide of the muscles beneath us and the slow, rhythmic rise and fall of its barrel as it breathed, and I could almost believe her. But something in me insisted, “We’ll have to stop at some point for him as well.”
She shrugged. “Just as long as we’re far, far away from Amoret by that time.”
“At this pace, I can’t imagine that taking long,” I said as the great claws bit into the sand and sent it flying in lacy fans. “It was so easy,” I added in wonder. “Escaping.”
“We’re not safe yet,” Kelu said.
I nodded and leaned into the drake’s next stride, and we paced the ocean. The sand gave way to pebbles and then rocky slopes that the drake bounded up with the agility of a pouncing cat. Even when the rocks beneath its feet trembled and slid it never slipped, only dug those claws deep past the scree and launched us up again. If this was a mount for royalty, then it was only because it was itself a king among mounts.
We surmounted a cliff and ran its length, the drake’s mane streaming in the starlight as far below the distant ocean boomed and rolled. On my other side the grassy field stretched on into the purple dark. The warm wind coursing over us tasted like the sea, and like exotic flowers I had no names for, like the sweat of the drake and the lilac-and-musk fur of the genets. It was so beautiful it pierced my heart.
“Let’s stop,” Almond said. “He needs to stretch.”
Did I? Kelu was pulling the drake to a halt. We’d been moving so long that the cessation of the wind was a shock. I got my leg around the back of the saddle and slid onto my feet in the grass; though I wobbled, I did not fall. The drake twisted around to nuzzle me and I hugged its long head, setting my brow against its smooth cheek.
It made a sound I couldn’t describe. Not a purr... but a low rumble in its chest.
Almond wrapped her small arms around me from behind. “Thank you, Master,” she said.
I looked over my shoulder at her. “What for?”
“For sending for me,” she said.
“I can’t believe she came,” Kelu added, standing apart from us with her arms folded over her chest. “Talk about disobedience. Running away from your masters?”
“The royal blood-flag is my master,” Almond said. “And yours too, Kelu.”
Kelu snorted.
“So,” I said, stroking the drake’s forelock and then releasing its head, “where exactly are we? And where are we going?”
“We’re on the island of Aravalís, the largest one in Serala,” Kelu said. “And we’re heading away from Amoret’s estate.”
“That’s your plan?” I asked. “Just ‘away’?”
“Yes,” she said, ears flattening.
“Kelu,” I said, “the island is full of elves. Elves who probably want to kill me or do whatever it was they were doing to me that was going to kill me... and re-capture the two of you. And who knows how much the drake is worth. And your plan is... to avoid the search parties forever?”
Kelu looked away from me.
I sighed and rubbed my forehead. Such a beautiful night to be so lost and in so much peril.
“Master,” Almond whispered, “You’re standing.”
I looked down at her hands clasped at my waist, then at the horizon. Then at my feet. I was indeed standing. Not pain-free—never that—but I could stand on my own. “Small miracles,” I muttered.
Nearby the drake had splayed its forelegs and stretched its back with all the sinuous elegance of a cat. The saddle shifted forward as it exhaled. Kelu sighed and went to tighten the belly-band while I watched and mused.
“The mark on Captain Gant,” I said. “He was traveling under some elf’s blood-flag. He seemed to think highly of him.”
“Kemses e Sadar, Master,” Almond said. “The Sadar blood-flag is powerful, though not popular.”
“I would have thought the elves would worship power,” I said. “Why is he not popular?”
“There are rumors,” Kelu said from the drake’s side.
“What kind of rumors?”
Kelu’s tail swished once in agitation. “That he consorts with humans.”
“Sounds like my kind of elf,” I said.
“Carnally,” Kelu said, eyeing me.
I snorted. “Well, I’m not the right shape for that. Is he on this island?”
“Yes,” Kelu said. “At the opposite end, at the mouth of the river Susulís in the southwest. He owns Erevar.”
“Well, let’s go,” I said, carefully approaching the drake.
“That’s... a very long way,” Kelu said.
“And you have a better plan?” I asked as the drake knelt in front of me.
Kelu’s ears flicked outward.
“Then to Erevar we go,” I said, clambering into the saddle. Almond hopped up behind me, and Kelu came last, reluctant. This time the drake waited for my knees to press against its barrel before it began walking.
“You should still give me the reins,” Kelu said. “You have no idea where you’re going.”
“True,” I said, and passed them to her. She rubbed her thumbs against the leather, then turned the drake’s head and we resumed our flight.