Chapter 23 Little Gnat #2
The complicated knot of their lives snatches tight around her. Is this the birth of an insult that will turn into a tender nickname? Or has Sascia altered the events of the future enough to erase all potential tenderness from those two words?
A strange kind of confidence pumps through her veins. She leans forward, mimicking his casual stance, and says, “I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think I am nothing to you.”
“Oh?” he breathes, as quick to rise to her challenge as she was to set it.
“You made the Heart Claim for me. You told your friends to arm me with protection. You wanted me to live. All of that for an inconsequential gnat?”
Nugau’s eyes never leave her face, his features don’t shift, not an inch of his body moves, but Sascia knows.
He is keeping himself still. In this sparring of insults, she has struck the winning blow.
A smile steals into the corners of her lips.
Abruptly, Nugau unfolds and turns away, a deep mauve dotting his cheeks.
It looks almost like Sascia…embarrassed him.
“The Queen has made me responsible for your well-being,” Nugau says. “You will stay in this room today to heal and rest, but tomorrow, you will start earning your keep like the rest of us, until the Queen returns to set your Trial. Is that understood?”
His discomfiture is a contagion; her own cheeks heat and her chest feels crammed with the beating of a too-wild heart. She gives Nugau a hurried nod, eyes averted.
“Show her how to use the medicine,” Nugau tells his friends. In a few strides, he is at the door, but before he steps out, Sascia catches a glimpse of his neck, just above his high collar. A necklace of bruises marks his skin, deep blue against the smooth porcelain.
Around her, the two aesin spring into action.
A tray of pots and vials is placed on the ground before her.
Orran instructs Sascia to slather a thick layer of paste on her sprained ankle.
He is speaking, but Sascia’s mind has glitched: Nugau on his hands and knees, Nugau gripped by a claw of black, Nugau in pain.
“Your queen,” Sascia cuts in. “She hurt him. For helping me?”
Orran nods. “The prince and the Queen—”
“Orran,” Thalla interrupts. “Don’t. Nugau won’t like it.”
“If she’s to survive here,” Orran replies quietly, “she has to understand.”
“And are we so sure we want her to survive?” Thalla says brazenly.
“We are.” With their chin, Orran points to Mooch, now hanging off a strand of Sascia’s hair.
Whatever power the itka holds, it certainly shuts Thalla right up.
“The prince was right,” Orran tells Sascia.
“Your kind has wrought unspeakable damage on our world. The Queen wishes for the destruction to stop, for our lost to be avenged and humans punished. She brought the Jagged Blade, her army, here with that goal in mind. But in your world, the Dark does not obey us as it does in ours. We cannot find a way into your city. We have been stuck here, in these tunnels, for months.”
Stuck in an underground station that humans have sealed off and the Maw presses down on—no wonder they can’t find their way out. All this time, there has been an entire army less than a mile beneath New York. War was far closer than Sascia had thought.
“But yesterday, you found a way out,” Sascia says to Thalla. “Does the Queen know?”
The lady’s gaze narrows. “She does. Ktren, the horned aesin, is one of her spies, a part of her trusted council. She assigned them to our scouting party to keep an eye on Nugau. It is the first time we have managed to find an opening to your world. But you stopped us—the Queen knows that, too, human.”
“That’s where she has gone now, with most of her battalion,” Orran says. “To try to find the way out again.”
Sudden dread knocks the breath out of Sascia. She’s trapped here while a whole battalion pokes at the fabric of the world, trying to fight a path into her city, her family, her friends. “Why would the Queen spy on Nugau?”
Orran opens their mouth, but Thalla cuts them off. “That part is definitely not your story to tell, Orran.”
They agree with a grunt and say instead, “The prince has been trying to change the Queen’s mind. He argues for a retreat of the army. He wants to seal off the entrances to your world and separate our kind from yours forever. No war, no bloodshed. No more death.”
But if Nugau doesn’t want war either, why refuse to help Sascia? She thinks of her accusation: All of that for an inconsequential gnat? She thinks of his blushing cheeks, his avoidant eyes. Is his objection not to peace, but to Sascia herself?
“The prince does not hate you,” Orran says, as though he senses the pathways of her thoughts.
“But he is not pleased. He plays a dangerous game: he cannot outright challenge the Queen, but only discuss and debate as respectfully as befits her only living child. Making the Claim on your behalf forced him to show his hand. That he wants neither aesin nor humans to die. And your own Claim has only made things worse. The council now believes he plots against his mother, using you as a pawn to convince the aesin to trust humans and abandon the war. The Queen believes he aims to make himself king.”
In a flash of movement, Thalla jumps from the sofa and lunges at Sascia, bringing her face inches away from Sascia’s own—terrified, Sascia flattens herself into the sofa. The coppery smell of fresh blood emanates from the elf’s concealed mouth.
“And that’s why she punished him yesterday,” Thalla says. “That’s why she humiliates him now by making you his ward.”
“Thalla,” Orran is saying, reaching for the other aesin’s arm. “You’re scaring her—”
“She should be scared.” The hiss comes low and guttural, grazing against Sascia’s ear.
“You only won Nugau’s Claim because of the itka.
But your kind has destroyed our homes and killed our loved ones for generations.
To win your own Claim, to become our ambassador, you will need the favor of the aesin—and unlike our prince, they do hate you, human. ”