Rogue's Pawn (9 page)

“Healer,” Pinkie asked, “how long would Lady Gwynn have lived before your work?”

“Seven years,” Healer answered.
Seven years?
I must have looked shocked, because she added, “There were several conditions progressing that would have led to her death in that time.”

Wow—I guess I really did owe her.

“Lady Gwynn?” Puck prompted me.

“Okay, I propose that the term be seven years.” That didn’t sound like so much now, compared to the rest of my life.
And then I go home
. Maybe I’d luck out and time would move differently here.

“Given the brevity of service,” Falcon said, “I ask for intensive training.”

“Yes.” Scourge hissed the word, snake-eyes gleaming. “Marquise and I would be most willing. For the usual side-benefits, naturally.”

Without thinking I dug my nails into Rogue’s forearm. “What does that mean?”

“Is that necessary?” Rogue demanded.

Falcon smirked. “You’ll get yours later. Presumably. I’m within rights, here.”

“Agreed,” Pinkie ruled. “The stipulation is within the parameters of Lady Gwynn’s proposal. Continue, lady. How do you propose to satisfy Lord Rogue?”

About ten smart remarks flew through my mind. I restrained myself. “Maybe I could give him something of value and then I go home?”

“Not acceptable.” Rogue pinned me with his stare. “Lady Lillibeth, I put before you that only a firstborn child will satisfy my multiple claims, given that all claimants labored under my aegis.”

Falcon sat up straighter, eyes firing.

“It’s not ideal,” Scourge growled, “but I accept the condition.”

“Agreed,” said Pinkie.

“Wait a minute!” I would have jumped out of my chair if I could. “
That
is not acceptable.”

“Lord Rogue can set his terms,” Puck said and they all nodded.

Well, shit.

“I don’t have a child and don’t plan to.” I drew the line at that.

“It will be arranged.” Rogue smiled at me and placed his hand over mine, thumb rubbing my palm so that the heat flared in me. I yanked my hand away. Unperturbed, he raised his long fingers up to the nape of my neck, lightly tugging the shorn lock that had escaped Blackbird’s braids.

“Oh no,” I gasped. I was
not
signing up to be impregnated like some brood cow. Though I didn’t like the plummy wine, I grabbed my goblet still sitting mostly full and drank some down.

“You refuse the terms?” Falcon demanded, with an edge of excitement.

“What happens if I do?”

Lady Lillibeth shrugged. “Execution.”

Their answer to everything.

Rogue quietly watched me, as if I were deciding which kind of ice cream to buy.

“You said never to accept a first offer,” I whispered to him.

His eyes were sober indigo. “Sometimes, one has no other choice. I’ve done all I could.”

He had me neatly trapped. But I would find a loophole. Seven years to do it. If I was a freaking sorceress and would be trained, then I could find a way out of this deal and a way back home.

“Fine.” I raised my voice. “To cancel all debts I might owe you, after I finish my service to Lord Puck, in seven years, I will give you my firstborn child, at such time as I may have one.” Since I didn’t plan to have any kids, that should be easy to deal with.

“
My
child,” he stipulated.

I stared at him. Completely aghast.
Oh, I don’t think so.
“How
exactly
would that occur?”

Rogue stroked long fingers down my cheek and over my throat. “Oh, my lovely Gwynn, I would be delighted to demonstrate.”

“What if I have someone else’s child before then?” I tried to shake off his effect on me.

Something blazed hot in his eyes. “To do so would void the agreement.”

“Let me guess—defaulting to death?”

Rogue nodded, lips thinned.

“How do you even know we can interbreed? I don’t know if any of you have noticed, but we’re not exactly the same species here.” I was forgetting to pretend. I put a hand to my temple, my thoughts muzzy.

This observation prompted great hilarity from the group. They laughed, repeating my words to each other. Lady Blackbird went to fetch a pitcher and circled the group, refilling goblets, including mine.

“I may not even be fertile—the women in my family tend not to be.”

“Oh, you are now,” Healer assured me, smiling sweetly at Rogue. Of course.

“Trust me to handle the rest.” Rogue took the goblet from me and set it on the table, keeping hold of my hand. I tried to yank it from him again, but he held it firmly, eyes sparkling dark as star sapphires. He never broke his gaze, even as he kissed the back of my hand. The barely banked heat in me flared.

“You know, I really don’t think ‘trust’ is a good word choice right now.”

Rogue looked grim. “Trust in that fact, if not in me,” he said, stroking my hand. “Trust that the response of your body will make it pleasurable for you. And that this protects you from far worse things.”

“I really do not want to have a baby.”

“You don’t want to die, either.”

“What I want is to go home.”

“You can’t.”

“Can’t because it’s not physically possible or can’t because you won’t allow it?”

A shadow crossed his face, darkening the lines even more. What would it be like to see that mask above me in bed? Shadows upon shadows. A shiver ran through me, composed of as much chill as heat. Rogue felt it.

“You are not the only one out of choices, my Lady Gwynn. You have seven years to get used to the idea.” He released my hand and seized his own goblet. “The terms are set and agreed upon.”

The others were watching us with avid interest, Healer standing behind Falcon, caressing his neck. I just loved being the floor show. A headache throbbed behind my eyes. So much for all that expensive healing.

Darling chirruped and Rogue nodded in my direction. “Lady Lillibeth, we’d best complete the proceedings.”

“Only your service to Lord Darling remains, Lady,” the pink woman—Lady Lillibeth, apparently—reminded me.

I was exhausted. What else did I have to give? “Okay, what bargain does he offer?”

“Ask him,” Rogue said, not looking at me, but rather up to the shadowed depths of the vaulted ceiling.

“What? How?”

Falcon slammed his hand on the table. “Enough with playing dumb, foreign sorceress. Let’s get this done with.”

Darling sat on the table in front of me. He blinked at me sweetly, swelling a purr. I saw him in a classroom with me, riding on the back of a horse during battle, then standing at my heel.

“He wants to be my Familiar?”

“Agreed,” Lillibeth said.

The cat rubbed his cheek against my chin and padded back down the table. I wanted to ask exactly what I had agreed to, but my thoughts slipped away. Falcon and Healer wandered out of the hall, arm in arm, heads bent together as they laughed merrily over some private joke. Scourge rose to leave.

“Remember what I’m owed, Scourge.” Rogue lounged back in his chair, the indolent lord of the feast. “I expect my merchandise returned in appropriate condition.”

Scourge stilled. Then gave Rogue a curt nod and left.

“Lord Puck, you will miss the festivities, but you’d best convey your charge to her new home,” Lillibeth said breezily.

The bowed-head lads pulled my heavy chair away from the table. Even looking up at them, I couldn’t quite get a glimpse of their faces. Was I supposed to stand now? Rogue and Puck pulled me to my feet, so I supposed so. Puck pulled my wrists behind my back, fastening them together by my silver bracelets, then did the same with my feet. I couldn’t seem to resist. Why couldn’t I think? I teetered there while Rogue steadied me.

“The wine?” I finally got out and Rogue touched my face in that way of his that seemed to be tender.

“Magic can’t touch you while you wear silver, but it can touch something you then touch. You could never have protected yourself against it.”

“It’s better for the journey,” Puck added. He clipped a leash to my collar.

For the first time, I really processed that I was going somewhere else, in someone’s custody. Damned if I would cry again though, despite the aching emptiness in me that was the loss of everything I’d ever known.

“A moment, please, Lord Puck,” Rogue said.

He held me by the shoulders, looking down at me, gaze inscrutable on the placid unmarked right side, intense, almost harsh on the left.

“A deposit on my debt,” he said, then pulled me hard against him, one arm sliding around my waist, the other hand cradling my head. His lips touched mine, a soft brush at first. Then moving deeper, parting my mouth with a burning heat, soft and hard at once. Cinnamon, sandalwood and something more. With my hands chained behind my back, inclined against him, nearly off my toes as he held me up by the waist and skull, I had no power to pull back from him.

I couldn’t return the kiss. Tried not to.

Tried and failed.

The edges of me blurred and I became the kiss.

I became a goblet held in his arms that he drank from, while the longing in me throbbed, pounding in my breasts and between my legs, melding with the horrible keening loss that also grew.

I knew then, profoundly, that nothing was under my control. Maybe never had been.

Rogue released my lips, eyes fulminous, like the blue flame of a Bunsen burner. He seemed about to say something. Then didn’t. Through my haze, I caught roiling regret. He set me down, giving me a little push so that Puck caught me.

Puck tossed me over his shoulder. Upside-down and through the blur of drugged wine, I saw Rogue striding off toward the dancing.

Part II

Higher Education

Chapter
Ten

In Which I Discover There Is Something Even Worse Than Grad School

I didn’t remember any of the journey. Dimly I recalled arriving at yet another castle, this one silent as stone. Puck carried me down winding stairs and set me with odd gentleness on a hard bench of a bed and clipped my leash to the wall. I blinked at him, bleary, wanting to beg him not to leave me there, though I didn’t know what would be inflicted on me.

My blood ran cold with dread.

Puck patted me on the cheek, his green eye slightly luminescent, the brown vanishing in shadow, and whispered in my ear. “‘If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended, that you have but slumber’d here, while these visions did appear.’”

I may have dreamed that part, my drugged mind giving him Shakespeare’s lines.

They left me alone for the first few days. Completely isolated. I paced my little cell as far as my leash would allow. Though shadowed and windowless, the stones themselves gleamed with an icy gray light, keeping me in an eternal twilight. They’d taken my awful clothes and left me naked, with no blanket to use, but I was neither hot nor cold.

I loathed that cell. I counted the stones that made the walls and flung the most vile wishes against it that I could think up. The silver stopped me of course, but I mentally dismantled that room time and again. Exploding it away.

And that was just the first few hours.

Those hours strung out into formless time. I had a bucket of water to drink from and an empty one to void into. No one brought me food. I slept restlessly, wishing for darkness, and woke disoriented, craving true light. Boredom and despair ground into me.

Over and over I replayed the negotiations at the feast, reviewing the bargain points. They wouldn’t just leave me here. I was to be trained. Rogue wanted me back intact. They wouldn’t let me starve.

Though I knew in my head that this was likely just the first lesson, as time wore on, the fear that I would be forgotten wormed into my heart. I’d maybe been already forgotten back home. A hundred years could have passed and everyone who knew me was dead. I could starve and waste away in this little cell and no one would ever miss me.

I thought about how they were doing it. If you subjected a person to complete darkness, the retinas became so sensitive they could detect a single photon of light. With the unbroken silence, the featureless stones, the unvarying light, my senses were becoming more and more frantic for input. I craved any kind of contact. Anything at all.

By the time the door opened, I keenly felt my own desperation. Starved in both body and mind, I welcomed the sight of Scourge’s cruel ebony face.

“Kneel,” he said, in his quiet hiss of a voice. I hesitated and he turned to go, pulling the door behind him.

“Wait!” I cried out. It would do no good to fight this. Clearly no one would rescue me. I knew the terms full well. I would be trained and only then could I return to a semblance of life. I didn’t want to die here in this unchanging, claustrophobic room. Scourge watched with cold satisfaction as I knelt.

“You will not stand upright,” he explained. “You will not speak. Should either of those things occur again, you will be punished. It will be painful. Understood?”

Taking away my humanity. Check. I nodded, unable to tear my gaze from his matte black eyes.

“Marquise? Come meet your new toy.”

With a coo, she came sweeping around him. Marquise was Scourge’s alabaster twin. Floor-length white hair blended into the silky sheath she wore around her slender body. “Ooh,” she exclaimed, dropping before me in a cloud of mint and fresh air, cupping my cheeks, “she’s so cute! You’ll be a good widdle girl for Marquise, won’t you? Never disappoint me, yes?”

I stared into her exceptionally lovely eyes, layers of white on white, only subtle shadings showing the difference between cornea, pupil and iris, feeling another layer of myself crumble in the face of her attention. The unreality of it all took me just another step farther away. Kneeling there naked, while she petted me, I couldn’t quite recall who I was. I only hoped she wouldn’t let Scourge hurt me. And that they wouldn’t leave me alone again.

“I have something for you.” She smiled, white lips curving with joy. She held out a little plate with something resting on it. Something gray and flat. My stomach lurched, desperate for even that unappetizing food. I reached for it.

Scourge’s whip cracked on my back. Agony seared through me. I cried out and the whip landed again. I choked back my scream.

“No sounds. No hands,” Scourge said, calm and reasonable.

“There, there.” Marquise kissed away my tears, her lips cold on my skin. “I’ll set it here for you. See?”

She put the plate on the floor and tapped it with an ivory-tipped finger. I stared at it, trying to master the sobs racking me.

“She’s not mentally defective, is she?” I heard her ask Scourge with concern.

“I don’t think so. She’s only a human, of course. Perhaps you should speak more slowly.”

“Loook, sweet baby darling,” she drew out, “see the yummy food?”

“Eat.” Scourge trailed the whip over my tender skin. I obeyed, bending over the plate and lapping up the tasteless patty while Marquise stroked my hair and trilled her delight.

They left me then. Alone with my humiliation and a licked-clean metal plate.

The food was drugged, of course. At least it made the time go faster, the stones around me pulsing in a light fog until I blacked out, waking to a glassy half-existence. By the effects, I thought it must be a hypnotic. Soon I was unable to think at all.

All the better to take suggestion.

Their two next visits went just the same, with me quickly learning what they wanted. Of course, they only wanted easy tricks. Crawl. Sit up. Lie down. Roll over. Just to make me obey. Scourge only struck me with the whip once, when I tried to tuck my hair behind my ear while eating. Otherwise I gratefully gobbled the food they gave me, chagrined to be pleased by Marquise’s effusive praise.

On the fourth visit, the door opened when I didn’t expect. I’d been pacing at the end of my leash, trying to focus my mind. I dropped to my knees, but not before Scourge saw me.

“You will not stand upright,” he said, as if speaking to the mental defective Marquise thought me to be. The whip cracked against my thigh and I clamped my lips on the scream. The whip cracked again. Burying my face in my hands to muffle all my cries, I writhed at his feet while he whipped me, the pain obliterating all else.

It ended when his hard fist wound into my hair and he yanked me to my feet.

“Do you stand?” he asked.

I shook my head frantically, as best I could trying not to reach up to relieve my screaming scalp. I sobbed incoherently. Slowly he lowered me to my knees, still holding me upright by my hair.

“Perhaps you need a reminder. My knife, Marquise.”

She glided into view, handing him a golden knife that gleamed sickly in the gray light. She wrapped her arms around Scourge from behind, watching around his shoulder with glowing white eyes that reminded me of Christmas ornaments. A stray thought I couldn’t quite grab on to. I tried to remember what a Christmas ornament was and couldn’t. I couldn’t think of anything as the blade sawed through my hair, roughly ripping it away.

“Kneel straight. Don’t move,” he said.

I trembled so, I could barely stay still, but I managed as Scourge shaved my head. The blade scraped over my scalp, catching me here and there, but I made sure not to flinch. Tears seeped from under my lashes, but they were like the blood flowing from the wounds on my head—I could not stop either thing. Locks of my hair drifted down, brushing my skin.

Finally, he finished.

“Now, thank me.” His eerie flat voice whispered over me. Confused, I sat paralyzed.

“Kiss his feet, darling girl,” Marquise said. She lay draped over the bed now, languid and lovely as new-fallen snow. Alien and horrifying in her beauty.

Scourge waited, impassive. Though I’d seen the gleam of pleasure when he whipped me. He liked it when I resisted. They both drank up every moment of my pain and humiliation, bright-eyed and sated with it.

At that moment, I took the last bit of myself and locked it away, down deep where they could never reach it. I turned the key and gave up everything else to being what they wanted.

Otherwise I couldn’t survive this.

I bent over and kissed Scourge’s boot, pressing my lips to it, numb, blank as a clean slate. Marquise squealed and clapped her hands.

After they left, I ran my hands over my bald head, as if it weren’t part of me. When my knees ached from kneeling so long, I crawled over to my bed, which smelled of Marquise.

I slept and the Dog chased me through ragged dreams of shattered delirium. Its eyes were deep sapphire like Rogue’s. It seemed both wild and loyal. But I fled, terror driving me into the shadows where Marquise waited for me with her poisonous affection.

Time dragged on, the boundaries of it disappearing entirely. I waited for my trainers with a kind of eagerness. They had me practice more tricks, Marquise leading me around the little room on a leash while Scourge gave me various commands and I performed like a circus pony. I learned to obey without thought.

I forgot anything but pleasing her and avoiding his whip.

I don’t know what made them decide I’d had enough. I had no thoughts at that point. One time—it turned out to be evening—Marquise came to my cell alone and handed me a gray swath of silk and kissed me on the cheek.

“Stand up, sweet baby,” she coaxed me.

I started shivering, afraid of the trick.

“Stand up and put this on.” She sounded more stern this time, so I found myself obeying. She unclipped my leash from the wall and led me out the door. We walked through a silent corridor, punctuated by a door every so often. We climbed stairs and walked down still hallways. Marquise opened a door to a new chamber.

“Your new room! Isn’t it pretty?”

It was. It was grand and large and decorated entirely in shades of gray. My eyes didn’t know where to rest. It overwhelmed me and I found myself clinging to Marquise.

“There, there.” She held me close, chill fingers brushing over my naked scalp. “Don’t be afraid. You’re growing up now. Bathe. Eat. Sleep. Tomorrow I’ll fetch you for class and you’ll be a good pupil, won’t you? You’ll make me so proud.”

She unclipped my leash from the collar and hung it by the door, blew me a kiss and left me in that grand and terrible room.

If she hadn’t instructed me to bathe and eat, I likely would have crawled into a corner and stayed there. Instead, I did as she bade me, washing in the warm water left for me, my scalp stinging from the soap and water. A distant part of me observed that not much time must have passed since the shaving.

Time enough.

The food was bland but lacked the tang of the drug. After I ate, I hung up my new dress and slid under the covers, watching the sunset light fade to true night, thinking about nothing at all.

In the morning, I sat nervously on the side of the bed and waited for Marquise, wearing my new dress. She swept in with smiles and a bouquet of flowers for my breakfast table. She watched me eat, praising me all the while, then, when she said it was time to go, attached the leash to my collar and clucked at me to hurry.

She led me to a chamber that looked much like my old cell, except this one gleamed with a metallic sheen. Scourge stood, a black sentinel next to a silver chair positioned in front of a simple table of the same metal. He held the long whip coiled in his dark fist. I couldn’t meet his eyes, terrified to be standing up and walking. Marquise went to stand on the other side of the chair.

“Lady Gwynn, welcome.” Scourge’s gravelly voice rolled across my nerves and I cringed. The silky dress irritated my healing wounds slightly, the whiplashes still raw on my skin. I nodded at him to show my mute obedience and he gave me an approving smile, black teeth gleaming. “We begin with baby steps. We will remove the silver and you will think of nothing. Understood?”

I nodded again.

“Then sit.”

They crouched and removed the cuffs from my ankles, then my wrists, the skin blackened and ulcerated beneath them. Marquise smoothed an affectionate hand over my bristly scalp and kissed me while she unlocked the collar. She and he both wore ornate silver jewelry that stood out against their monochromatic selves.

“Nothing,” she reminded me.

I did this easily.

After all, I had no thoughts to think. I sank into the space I usually occupied, that place without hope or fear. Simply existing until directed otherwise. It came naturally to me now.

“I want something from you, Lady Gwynn.” Scourge’s voice didn’t startle me. I waited for him to tell me what it was. Anything he wanted. He set a white crystal on the table in front of me. “I want this to be black. Make it black for me.”

I looked at it without curiosity, uncertain what they wanted.

“Do you want to please me?” Marquise stroked my scalp, ivory nails light on the tender skin, and I nodded. I did. Oh, I wanted to please them both.

“Take that wanting. Visualize the crystal as black. Connect the two.”

I did. And the crystal turned black.

She sighed approval, petting me. He set the whip aside. I squirmed with joy, then disappointment when they clicked the silver restraints back on me. But Marquise soothed me. This was enough for today. Back in my grand chambers, silent servants brought me food and more flowers, lavish rewards for my small success.

From there the lessons progressed into longer sessions. For days I only turned the crystal from white to black and back to white. Once, I grew a little bored with the exercise and turned the crystal pink instead. Before my horrified eyes even took in what I’d done, Scourge had bodily lifted me and draped me over his lap while he took my place in the silver chair.

Blood rushed to my head and an iron hand held me down. He yanked up my dress and spanked my bare bottom. I wept helplessly, the pain nothing like the whip and yet all the worse for being a child’s punishment. And worse because my body roused to the touch, quickening with a rush of shameful desire. When he finally let me up, I stood before him, hands clasped together, desperately wishing for a voice to apologize.