Rogue's Pawn (14 page)

“He seemed real enough to me, lady,” I said.

“I imagine it would, to someone like yourself.”

Someone like myself?

“Lady Strawberry,” Falcon said from the head of the table, though he wasn’t looking up from his plate, “don’t torment the help. My pet foreign sorceress may yet come in handy. In the meanwhile, since you are all bored enough with my feast to dredge up foolish stories to tantalize one another with, let us discuss our war strategy.”

Despite Falcon’s glowering demeanor, I welcomed this serious attitude. At last we would talk about the actual war and what the hell I was supposed to do. Enough of the frivolity. Falcon might be decked out in what appeared to be a medieval knight’s armor of mercury-bright silver—thank goodness for the soft candlelight or we’d have been blinded—but at least he seemed to take his generalship seriously.

“Now,” Falcon began, “we shall start off with several land battles—ones with lots of infantry.”

“And cavalry,” a man close to Falcon urged. He seemed to have a horse’s tail, interspersed with glittery strands, coming from his helm. “I’d like the cavalry to come to the rescue at the last moment, at least twice—maybe three times.”

Several people agreed to that, generating a small discussion of whose helm decoration would look best streaming through the air as they galloped ferociously at the enemy. Falcon agreed to add in several more cavalry charges at various points in each battle. Lady Strawberry expressed a desire to bring in her stable of monsters to be ridden as well. The table, after much gory storytelling, decided the monsters should be brought into the thickest part of any hand-to-hand ground fight, so as to maximize goring, trampling and the sight of bodies being tossed into the air.

“Lord Falcon,” said Navy Man. “You know I’ve been building my fleet of silver ships—when will we have the naval battles?”

Falcon frowned in thought.

“Now see the great military strategist in action,” Navy Man whispered to me.

“To have naval battles,” Falcon pronounced, “we will have to move some of the war to the sea.”

“Or a large lake would do in a pinch,” Navy Man offered helpfully. Falcon nodded gravely.

“So we will have to arrange to be pushed back to the sea—” he held up a hand when Navy Man took a breath, “—or a large lake. Perhaps after the cavalry charge comes in gloriously too late to turn the tide of battle?” This was greeted with great enthusiasm.

“I’m at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party,” I muttered to myself.

“We have not forgotten your role, Lady Sorceress,” Blush & Puce assured me.

“Lord Puck, of course,” Falcon continued, “will be in charge of all magic.” To which Puck nodded enthusiastically, beaming at me. “All magics will be as spectacular as possible and should only occur when the battle is nearly lost. Won’t that be glorious? But wait! Lady Gwynn has no uniform at all. Puck! Why isn’t she in uniform?”

“We’ve only arrived today, Lord Falcon,” Puck said. “I’ll design her and Lord Darling uniforms tomorrow.”

I could just see what Puck would come up with for me. No, no, no.

“Actually,” I inserted quickly, “in my land, the sorceress never wears a uniform, but rather a magic gown.” Falcon and Puck frowned uncertainly. “To set her gloriously apart from the fighters,” I added, which smoothed the group’s expressions into happy agreement, with several offering me suggestions for appropriate magical garb.

Then the raucous hilarity fell into abrupt stillness. In one of those uncanny sea changes, the crashing waves of their merriment ceased. They turned their faces all in one direction, apparently staring at the tent wall.

I listened, skimming the thoughts around me for a clue, then heard shouting from outside. Their grave watchfulness ignited into delighted interest. With shouts of merriment, everyone piled out of the tent, knocking over chairs and spilling wineglasses, to see that, just down the hill, one of the enchanting tents was blazing afire.

Chapter
Fifteen

In Which I Discover Some Truths

The tent silk whooshed and billowed with the flames. A number of brightly dressed people gathered around it like college students at a homecoming bonfire, toasting the conflagration with sparkling glasses and shouting advice to one another. With much pointing and excited exclamations, they sent a small servant dashing in through the blazing arch made by the tied-back flaps.

Burning pillows came flying out of the tent, flaming marshmallows flung from the end of a roasting stick. They made bright comets against the night, and the spectators dodged the missiles with whoops and mock-terrified screaming. Once the flaming missiles plopped onto the ground, someone would jump upon it, to the wild encouragement of their fellows, sending sparks flying and puffs of acrid smoke to cloud the night. Falcon’s party all galloped down the hill, crying out incoherently.

My heart pounding a greasy sweat out of my pores, I followed more slowly, my soft silken slippers no match for the stones and broken vegetation that poked the soles of my feet. The fire blazed hot on my face as, with a sickening whoosh, a neighboring tent flared with a roman candle of flame. More cries, like the singsong baying of dogs, greeted the spreading fire. I realized then that none of the words made sense to me because there was no meaning behind them. Blazing pillows continued to sail out of the tent, while the game of dodge and stomp intensified. No fire brigade appeared. No one seemed to take any useful action.

My head spun. The surreality of it all hit the back of my brain and rattled around. I wanted to shield my eyes, to crawl under a blanket, to scream out loud.

An especially large pillow rolled out of the first tent.

Oh, gods.

It was the page they’d sent in, burning as brightly and ferociously as the tents and cushions, probably decked in the same billowing silks as the rest. A thin piteous wail came from it, keening with a pain that turned my stomach.

Unable to stand a moment more, through the tears I hadn’t known were running down my face, I made a fervent, heartfelt wish.

Abruptly, fire turned to night. Eye-searing light turned to dripping dark. With all light gone from the camp area, stars burst into life above, raining their needles of halogen light upon us. Wet ash and smoke filled the air. Along with the smell of grilled meat. Water dripped like the runoff from gutters after a torrential rainstorm ceases.

Someone seized my arm, the grip a bruising claw.

“What did you do?” he shrieked in my ear. I ripped away, stumbling a few feet. Water soaked through my slippers.

“Well, Lady Sorceress?” Falcon’s familiar voice snarled from off to my right. “Your work, I presume?”

Someone tried to light a torch, but it wouldn’t take. The starlight showed that the tents that had been merrily burning now sagged with moisture, like dying circus elephants. Charred pillow remains scattered in dissolving pools of charcoal lumps. Moving between tents was a black-on-black sinuous shadow. I caught my breath.

“Lady Gwynn?” Falcon repeated.

I nodded. “I turned the fire into water, to stop the burning.”

“Did you have to turn
every
bit of fire in the whole valley to water, you filthy whore?” Lady Strawberry inserted with a bright laugh, a socialite giggling at a party gaffe.

One of the charcoal piles at Falcon’s feet choked a cry through watery lumps, pain radiating in an exploding star from its thoughts. I gagged on mucous and tears and horror.

“Help him!” I ordered through my teeth. “Fetch a healer!”

Falcon stared curiously at the dying child. “We have no healer—this is a war zone. It’s not the most glorious of deaths, but…”

“Wasn’t that just spectacular?” Puck bounced up, nearly stepping on the page. “Did you see what she did? The whole valley, every campfire, torch and candle a puddle of water! Didn’t I tell you? I told you, didn’t I? This will be amazing!”

“She
still
lacks all control,” Falcon snapped. “We’re lucky she didn’t drown us all.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t fucking burn to death!” I yelled at him. “You’re all like children playing a game. In a real war, you have healers to minimize casualties—and you don’t send someone into an inferno to rescue pillows!”

They all stared at me in mute astonishment, so I knelt down in the charred mud next to the page. In the torchlight I could see blood oozing out of the page’s crackling flesh. I tried to put together a coherent wish for him, but wasn’t sure how to reconstruct his body. I didn’t really know how to do more than wish for healing. And the anger was clouding my thinking. Stupid, stupid, stupid to let myself get so mad. I shuddered, thinking that Falcon might try to send me back to that place.
Think about this dying kid.
If I wished the pain to stop, would the magic answer by ending his life? It was funny that way.

Falcon seized my arms and hauled me to my feet. I choked on my breath, anger transforming to fear.

“Let me help him,” I gasped.

He lowered his face close to mine, hawkish nose sharp against the torchlight, eyes alien black hollows, the left made sharper by the brown feathery patterns dancing across the skin, flickering like flapping wings with the torchlight. I quailed, helpless in his grip.

“Do nothing else,” he hissed.

“But…”

“No!” he thundered in my face, as if his mouth might open into a massive maw that could consume me whole. His teeth were pointed in a jack-o’-lantern smile. “Why is she not trained?” He yelled this from inches away, spittle hitting my face with shrapnel force.

“Scourge and Marquise certified her,” Puck said obsequiously, his long fingers tugging at Falcon’s sleeve. I flinched at the sound of their names. “They’re most exacting. Really, she helped not harmed. It was just a little, well, much, you know?”

“Did your trainers win your obedience, little magician-slave?” Falcon crooned to me.

“Technically, she’s a free…”

“Silence!” Falcon’s voice crackled like lightning. Puck subsided. Falcon drew me closer so he spoke against my cheek. As if he might take a bite out of me. “She knows she’s all mine for seven years, don’t you? Trained to be my pet? That’s what I paid for. Answer me, Sorceress. Tell me of your obedience. I know something of what the trainers do. Shall I summon them to come hold your leash and give me a demonstration?”

I shook my head, trembling wildly. He laughed, a cruel sharp cackle.

“Not so full of yourself now, are you?” Falcon pulled back slightly, then gently kissed me on the forehead. “Do as you are told, Sorceress, or I will make good my threat.” He stared into my eyes. “Or maybe it’s not a threat? Maybe you liked what they did to you? Some do grow addicted, you know, can never know pleasure again without the pain and humiliation. Perhaps I’ll show you some of the games I like to play. I don’t mind that your magic is sexual.” Bending me back, he surveyed my bosom.

He sank his sharp teeth through the ruby velvet into my left breast.

I screamed. But held myself from fighting back. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs, I had indeed been carefully conditioned. I might have my thoughts back, but it was as if the circuit in my brain that would allow me to resist had been snapped.
Or rewired,
part of me whispered.

“No magic tricks, lady?” Falcon crooned, watching me closely.

“No,” I gasped.

He dropped me in the bloody mud. “Do as you are told. Nothing more. Ever.”

Raising his voice, he instructed the others to see that the servants cleaned up the mess, which included carrying off the charred corpse of the page I’d let die instead of finding it in myself to resist Falcon.

I sat in the mud cradling my injured breast, moisture seeping through my dress to settle stickily against my legs. Stars blazed in an icy rainbow above.

“As for you.” Falcon nudged me with his toe. “Return to your tent and make yourself useful. Tomorrow, set yourself to creating lights for us that won’t burn.”

“In different colors!” Puck clapped his hands. “And bright enough so we can still light up the tents from within, like silk lanterns at Festival.”

“Yes, most definitely,” Falcon agreed. “Off with you, Lady Sorceress. I want nothing more from you tonight.”

I strained up, weighed down by my sodden gown, and staggered slowly away, holding my wounded breast tight. It took me a while, wandering through the dark and soggy camp, to find my own tent. Especially since I stayed close to the tent walls, rather than down the open alleyways between. Keeping to the corners and shadows. Gone was the wild party Puck and I had walked through.

I stumbled over a puddle of a campfire and nearly pitched facedown. I stopped and took a moment to breathe. Looking at the stars, I wished the pain in my breast to diminish—I should be able to fix it when I could see it, and until then I didn’t want to wish the pain totally away, lest it blunt important information about the state of the wound—then sharpened my night vision.

It was a small defiance, this spell-casting, but I knew I had to continue to go against the programming if I was to have any hope of changing the false wiring they’d created in me, before my own habits solidified it forever. Falcon might have scared the living shit out of me, might have pushed those particular buttons that short-circuited my free will temporarily, but I would not allow them to govern my every thought. Not ever again. I repeated it. My new mantra.

Some things were worse than death. I would take death over being lost to myself. If Falcon tried to leash me as he threatened, then they could just try to kill me and we’d see who won out this time.

Dragonfly met me with squeals and intricate jig-steps that made her wings and curls bounce fetchingly. She showed me all her little candles filled with thimbles of water like it was the best thing ever. I asked Dragonfly if she knew the dead page and she did. She hoped the war would also bring her such distinction.

I couldn’t bear to hear it. I sent her off once she helped me out of the mess of soaked red velvet. She could get rid of it, whatever, I didn’t care. And go hang with her servant friends, talk of glory, just leave me alone with some soap and water for a sponge bath. I’d see her in the morning. She happily pranced off with her trophy.

In the cool dark of the tent, still faintly tinged with the lily’s perfume, I wiped myself down of smoke and mud, reaching under my thin shift, much as a conservative Mormon girl would, obediently dressed even when bathing. It probably wasn’t very effective, but I couldn’t bear to look yet. Bad sign, that.

I remembered a photo that had circulated on the internet, accompanied by a story of how a woman had gotten a tropical bug bite on her breast that she bandaged and ignored. Then she was put off by doctors. When they finally examined her, finally looked under the bandage, the terrible pain she had been experiencing turned out to be due to the honeycombed parasitic nest her breast had become. The clever picture with it was made by superimposed images, as so many internet urban myths were. This one, however, had managed to choke me with horror before I took refuge in Snopes.com’s rational and reassuring breakdown of the hoax.

No one here to tell me it was all urban legend.

Even as my left breast throbbed, I knew most of the pain was fear. I was afraid to look. Afraid to see how deeply those fangs had dug into the tender tissue. Afraid that I might see something horrific as that hollowed-out breast swarming with larvae.

For that reason alone I had to deal. I couldn’t risk what my fears might subconsciously create. And I couldn’t let a wound go uncleaned. It didn’t bear thinking about to see what might grow from the flora of Falcon’s nasty maw.

Not giving myself another moment to think about it, I grabbed several of Dragonfly’s little votives and dumped the water into a wash basin. I set them on the little vanity table and, slowly and precisely, wished them to light. They flickered into life. The left bosom of the white cloth was soaked in blood, both rusty and bright crimson.

Looking away, I washed my face more thoroughly, then popped the makeup spell. Back to my less-fuckable self, more than a little wan. Though my hair flowed like sparkling black water, just as I first pictured it.

Darling brushed through the tent flaps, just as I had nearly screwed up the courage to yank off the shift. With a stab of guilt I realized I hadn’t given him a thought. Where had he been during the fire? In happy reply, he sent me pictures of dancing with a group of people wearing some kind of ribbons. He hadn’t seen the fire but had gotten quite wet. He pictured himself, soaking and bedraggled, hissing at me.

“Sorry,” I said. “If it helps, you’re not the only one pissed and, frankly, your damp fur is the least of my worries at this point.”

Darling leaped up on the vanity, carefully avoiding the candles, and arched against my belly. Immediately the throbbing and the fear abated. Forgot how handy he was that way. I popped the pain-diminishment wish, too, but left the night vision in place. I scratched Darling’s ears and he purred forgiveness, along with a sly image of him with a horsehair plume like Puck’s.

“We’ll see.” I chuckled, amusement at his foibles thawing the horror of the night. “Tomorrow we’ll see if I can create light without fire. Then we’ll make your battle armor—whatever you want.”

The cat was better than Percocet. Feeling dreamy and fine, I pulled off the white shift.

Yes, there were the teeth marks, but it wasn’t so bad. They formed an oozing ring around the pink nipple, a harshly red and inflamed insult to the white globe of my breast. I washed the wound with the soap and water—old-fashioned approaches never hurt—and picked out some white and red fibers clinging here and there. I wished the wound clean of both fibers and infection, as I did with water and food. I wished for it to heal quickly. I hesitated to try to heal it completely myself. I had a pretty good idea of the glandular tissues involved and the epidermal layers that covered them, but nothing precise enough to guarantee a perfect reconstruction. If I simply healed the skin, I ran the risk of sealing infection inside to fester. It looked better now, anyway.