“What are you doing in there?” came his voice. “I cannot wait for you forever, you know. If you are not put in the room with the other women soon, it will look bad for me.” A pause. “Of course, everything I’m doing looks bad at this point. Why I bother doing anything for you, when you do not even deserve it, is beyond me, truly, and—”
She pushed open the door. “Help me.”
He regarded her, in the bunched up corset that would not go over her breasts. “You are trying to get this on or off?”
“On,” she said.
“Why did you take it off at all?” He seized the bottom of the thing, which meant his fingers brushed parts of her breasts.
She hissed.
He yanked hard, and the corset settled properly over her body.
She jerked back from him. “I needed clean fabric against my skin.”
He flinched. He started to say something, then stopped. He rubbed a hand over his neck and studied the floor.
She backed away, back into her closet and banged the door closed on him.
“Are you all right?” he said, his voice unsteady.
She didn’t answer. She was going to start crying.
“I’m sorry,” he said in that same unsteady voice. “I did not think it all through.”
“You are not sorry,” she said tightly. “You did enjoy it. You enjoyed doing that to Celedin, humiliating him, beating him, using me to do it, and then making me watch you kill him. You enjoyed every single second of it. You have been dreaming of it for years, for your wholelife, I imagine.”
There was nothing from him, not from the other side of the door.
Her hands were shaking. She had difficulty taking a dressoff a hanger, but she managed to step into it and to get her arms through the thing. Then she opened the door to him again, turning her back to him.
He began to button her. “Celedin deserved it, yes, and I will never repent of doing it to him. But you did not. It was not punishment for what happened with Nathre. It was not even lust, Aerhril. It simply had to be done.”
“Stop speaking,” she said.
“I need you to cooperate with me, not to make things even harder, because if you are a problem, it will be difficult for me, and it is already difficult for me, and—”
“You are asking me for favors? Really?”
He sighed behind her. He buttoned the rest of her dress in silence.
Then he took her by the arm and jerked her out of her room. He escorted her all the way down to the south tower, where he threw her into a room with all the other women.
4
AERHRIL USED TOhave nightmares.
She’d had them when she lived in the Vale with her family, and she had them when she came north to Foxglove Peak. She was obliged to share a room here, with the youngest of the tutors, the female tutor. Her name was Galadril, and she was the daughter of some elf lord or other, unmarriageable due to her lack of dowry and thus obliged to come and tutor elf children to earn her keep. She was very young, but to Aerhril, she seemed old at the time. At eight years old, seventeen is ancient.
Galadril was not in the best temper when awakened in the night.
Aerhril would wake, shrieking from her nightmares. She couldn’t always remember what they were about. She mostly remembered the feeling, a feeling of being chased or caught or smothered. There would be images, dark images, shadows and smoke and teeth, but nothing very specific.
Galadril would lift her head and say, in a sleep-ravaged voice, “If you do not get quiet immediately, I shall smother you with your own pillow.”
Sometimes Aerhril would quiet then, sometimes, she would whimper a bit longer or sob loudly, and Galadril would go on.
“No one would suspect me, and no one would care that you were gone. They all think that the northern air will betoo much for your southern constitution. They will think nothing of it, of a little southern nae Oir girl cold in her bed in the morning. And I shall finally be able to get a full night’s sleep.”
