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1
SIERRA
With my back turned, I pour a silvery liquid into a metal canteen, struggling to stabilize my hand against the swaying carriage.
Outside, a heavy rain pelts the ground and the wooden carriage, as trees dance in the wind. Together, all the noises form a simultaneously calming and unsettling combination of sounds. The effect is unnerving, like the ripping of parchment.
“You shouldn’t be so humble,” the foul dark elf soldier says over the sound of the rocking, roaring wagon. “Your beauty and compassion are known all over Kantor.”
He’s kind to me but not without purpose. I know what he wants from me. It’s the same thing most elves want from me.
“It was nothing you wouldn’t have done for me,” I say matter-of-factly, struggling to lie through my teeth.
He looks pathetic in the dim, magical light of the moving room, lying helplessly atop a makeshift cabin bed built right into the carriage.
Internally, I feel like crying. I don’t want to do this, but I don’t have a choice.
You’re too far along now, I think. Turning back now could mean your death!
I struggle to stand up and find my balance.
I hand him his canteen as he takes another bite of the bread loaf, grateful that even now he fails to notice the rodan poison spread among the seeds. If he looked through my luggage, he’d find a variety of texts on poisons and dark elf history, all stolen from the club where I lived and worked.
“Actually, I don’t know that I would have done the same,” he says, with a refreshing bit of honesty. “Does that make me bad?”
I watch as black specks enter his mouth, and the canteen he drinks slowly weakens him.
“Not at all,” I lie.
It has required a good deal of study and diligence, finding the right concoction to bend him to my will while not outright killing him. If I killed him even a moment before now, it would have meant my own head.
After all, he might be a second-class citizen, but I’m far lower than he is in the social hierarchy. Human women have been killed for much less.
My eyes shift to the bag and the books contained within it that are slowly slipping out. I know that my brow must be shiny with sweat, and I fight the urge to wipe it away, looking from his eyes back to the bag. Every jostle brings those books closer to thudding onto the wooden floor.
And then he would know everything.
“That’s a relief,” he says. “I’m glad to hear you say that.”
Thankfully, he is a simple elf. He doesn’t question much, and this whole operation has gone off without a hitch.
I try to calm myself down, reminding myself that I can’t look suspicious. I’ve completed several steps of my plan already. I must keep moving forward.
I can still see the faint outline of Club Riel behind us as I peer out the back window. A heavy fog punctuates the distance, making that torment seem farther and farther away. Though I know that there is no relief.
The farther away this carriage gets from Club Riel, the closer I am to a much worse fate.
“You still haven’t told me much about yourself,” the soldier says. “What’s your story?”
I remember his name – Januzari. It’s a name I’d rather not dignify. I don’t want to humanize him.
I smirk.
“There’s not much to tell.”
Images flash through my mind like a stage play. At that moment, I’m both sitting in front of the soldier and living through a vivid series of memories.
“Oh, come now,” he says. “You must have come to me somehow.”
