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Whatever they are, he acts as if he’s better than them.
But my skin burns from his handling, and even as I step out of the bathtub, finally clean and shivering as my chattering fights to overcome my tears, I can’t find it in myself to see him as any different than the rest of them. I may be in a beautiful home, but it’s a prison.
My room is dark, too, and the air is frigid. I dress quickly, finding my clothes on the floor near the threshold. Surprisingly, they’re dry, and I have to assume that his bursts of magic were warm enough to zap the water from them. Once I’m dressed, I turn to look in the mirror I’ve been avoiding, I burst into tears all over again.
I grip the washbasin as the sobs wrack my frame, but I can’t be bothered to calm myself. I don’t recognize the person in the mirror. She looks thin, broken, forgotten. My heart breaks for her, and I wonder–not for the first time–how I’m going to get through this.
Taking a breath through gritted teeth, I toss my head back and glare up at the mirror with defiance. My eyes are red and my cheeks are blotchy. I hate how weak and pathetic I look. I wasn’t always like this. I used to be someone.
Toklys once told me I was the light of his world. What have I become?
And even more, what is to become of me?
67
KHA’ZETH
So, she can talk.
And she’s not a complete idiot, after all.
It’s easy enough to let my fury overtake me and storm out of the washroom, but when the bedroom door shuts behind me, I give pause. Kha’zeth, I reprimand myself silently, you’re acting a beast. The girl is frightened out of her wits. Who wouldn’t be?
The fact that she survived the trolvor should be commended in and of itself. They are brutes of the highest order, only fit to serve beneath the King. We don’t even allow them to breed with matrons, not that one would ever accept them into their bedchambers. By the unwritten rules of our society, they are anomalies. Most are neutered at birth, only suited to guard with their brute strength and small brains.
My magic, unbound, finally settles as I listen for her gentle sobs.
But she is silent.
I’m beginning to realize that it must be a survival instinct, learned from her brief stay in the royal dungeons. Or, maybe even further, from her life on Protheka as a slave to the dark elves. I have heard tales of the horrific conditions they kept the humans in, and had imagined our presence to be a welcome relief, but maybe I am mistaken. Those damned trolvor, I curse internally, they would eat their own spawn if they could produce them. And now they have ruined my ‘gift’ from King Asmodeus.
She does not trust us. She does not trust me, in particular, and I have given her little reason to do so. Fine rooms be damned.
I let out a long sigh and lean against the doorframe, using the chaos magic imbued in all things to hear better into her room. The soft pad of bare feet becomes audible to me. The schiff of cloth and a slight sniffle.
I was in such a rush to see her cleaned up, I didn’t have a chance to appreciate her rich flesh and dark hair once she was. And now that I know she is sentient, it pains me to realize I treated her like an animal. Still, she is weak.
How can the King presume to breed an army from such beings?
I can’t even be sure we’re compatible, she and I.
My jaw works furiously as I consider what to do next. I can’t leave things the way they are between us. Resentment grows far faster than trust, and I have fumbled both.
“Damn it,” I say aloud, wracking my mind for an easy resolution, of which there is none. I simply have to apologize, and hope that I receive the more generous end of her forgiveness.
Then a thought strikes me like a blow to my gut.
She has not eaten since she arrived and was likely neglected by her jailors before that. It is my duty to keep her fed long enough to breed with, and though the latter sends a shiver of disgust through me, the former is manageable.
More than manageable, it is a precedent.
But I must wait until she is presentable, or she may take my sudden reappearance as another intrusion. I listen again, harder this time, so that I can almost see her movements behind my eyes. The sweep of cloth against flesh tells me that she is dressed again. And on an even stroke, she brushes her matted hair until the tangles are worked out.
It is another beat of my heart before I knock, stilling her movements.
“Human,” I say a little too harshly, resolved to soften my tone on a steadying breath. “May I come in?”
There is only silence.
