Chapter 2 Daesra
DAESRA
I DON’T know why Sadaré insisted I accompany her to the market, especially since it becomes quickly and abundantly clear that I don’t belong here.
Unlike the wine we’re hauling with us, I’m not made for mortal consumption.
I never was and I never will be, no matter the growth and ferment I inspire in grapes.
All I seem to inspire in humans is unease.
Which is perhaps a type of ferment, but one too sour to be palatable.
The townsfolk eye me warily, even though I’ve hidden the horns on my head and my black claws from their sight, and changed my blue-smoked skin to a light brown—as close as I can remember to my mortal mother’s—and my wine-red irises to sable in order to pass among them as human.
They regard us with shadowed-darkened gazes and pinched lips, their tunics worn and stained from their labors.
A suspicious and unkempt lot, they are. True, they haven’t yet seen us outside of the old vineyard nearby that mysteriously became fruitful enough to already have produced a new vintage this fall.
Uncanny, yes, but hardly a sign of danger.
We come bearing wine—who doesn’t love wine, and a lovely one at that?
—and yet they look at us with their hands tightening around their tools of trade as they would around sword hilts, huddling closer together and muttering in front of their wooden stalls as if we’re toting a cart of plague-ridden corpses behind our pair of donkeys instead of freshly wax-topped amphorae filled with their next libations.
I nearly expect them to start casting stones and calling me a daemon.
The fact that I’m not a daemon anymore doesn’t seem to sway public opinion in our favor. Once stained, always visible, perhaps, even under the sheen of divinity. Not that I’ve let my divinity show, either, such that it is.
“I really shouldn’t have come,” I murmur at Sadaré out of the corner of my mouth.
“I need you,” she murmurs back, a pleasant smile fixed firmly on her lips, her eyes resolutely ahead. “And you need this.”
While I doubt the latter, she indeed requires assistance to unload the heavy clay jars from the wagon with her arm missing below the elbow and without displaying her unnatural powers as a witch.
Since that part of her body is absent courtesy of me, perhaps I should have been helping her without complaint and with copious apologies.
I’ve already apologized countless times, but in this instance, she had no need to deliver wine herself to the market.
We could have paid the harvesters to do it, whom she was hesitant to hire in the first place and even less inclined to trust, pragmatist that she is, or we could have not bothered to sell it at all.
“I’m still human,” Sadaré insisted after I’d argued with her plan back at home.
Which was ever the problem, ever the core of the argument between us. “You don’t have to be, and I’m certainly not.”
“And yet you need to live, Daesra, like I do.”
I couldn’t help hearing the rest of what I’d once promised her. To live, and live differently.
So I sigh now as I sighed earlier this morning.
“You said this would be beneficial. Let them see you, you said. And yet, I’m struggling to see the benefit.
” My eyes skip around, counting the crowd’s numbers and measuring their positions.
I’m estimating how quickly I could cut them down if they charge us before I realize it.
My sword, too, is hidden, though it could be ready in my hand in a blink.
“You live among mortals. So that’s what we’re doing.”
Not imagining how best to kill them, she probably means.
“Mortals and I don’t have a pleasant history.
” A vision of a blood-smeared temple and the corpse-lined path leading to it comes to mind, flies swarming alongside the butterflies.
It wasn’t entirely my doing. Those mortals hunted me first. And yet I still have to suppress a shudder at the memory—one that never bothered me as a daemon and yet haunts me now as a god.
She must know exactly what I’m thinking because she says, “This is your chance to change that.”
As we halt our cart near the fountain at the center of the square, the donkeys shift nervously, but Sadaré stands tall by my side, fearless, meeting the distrustful stares like a proud goddess instead of the mortal she is.
That she somehow is still mortal, if a powerful witch, even though she possesses the means to become a god, is the deepest of holes we’ve dug for ourselves as far as disagreements go—since the labyrinth, at least—but this matter of the market is more immediate and, I hope, much easier to extract ourselves from.
“Let’s just turn around and go,” I mutter.
“No,” Sadaré says quietly, and then calls, “Anyone care to try some wine? First cup is free.”
No one moves, and something like anger, shame, and guilt—all mild but enough to itch—tingles under my skin.
She shouldn’t have to go through this on my behalf.
It has only become more and more apparent that mortals are repelled by me on a fundamental level.
It’s my fault that they’re acting like this, never mind that I’m trying to be good—the tame little human with his tame little donkeys and his civilized little cart.
How can you fear me when you don’t know what I am? When I don’t even know what I am?
With the thought, a hunger within me grows, expanding outward until I can feel it in the air.
An invitation.
“Come, we won’t bite,” I say, a bit too bitingly. Sadaré nudges me subtly with her elbow.
For a long moment, they only stare at us. The pressure of the crowd is like a collectively held breath, until one man steps forward. He doesn’t ease the tension, only heightens it.
“What else are you selling?” he asks, a leer in his tone I don’t care for.
Sadaré blinks. “Only wine.”
He eyes her up and down. “I’d pay for you.”
I sidle between her and the man, but before I can shove him away—perhaps keeping his severed balls in my grip while I do—a woman dashes up behind him, snatching him by the arm, and drags him away, yelling obscenities at him and lashing him about the head and shoulders with a wooden spoon.
He only flinches and snarls at her like a beaten dog.
It’s all so violent and sudden, Sadaré and I stare at each other in shock.
But we don’t have long to ponder before another man takes his place. This time, his feverish gaze lingers on me.
“How about you, then?” he asks, his voice a hoarse, desperate whisper.
But then someone else is clamoring behind him, and another behind her, shouting at us and each other, wanting us or denying their neighbor, until there’s a crowd heaving around us like an angry sea, both struggling toward us and yet held back by their own tide.
Someone topples into the fountain with a splash.
Fights break out openly, and I spot a spray of blood streak the air.
“Now can we go?” I ask Sadaré through gritted teeth, my eyebrow raised. My voice is calm, but the back of my neck is prickling in warning, and my fingers twitch in an effort to withhold my claws, let alone my sword.
“Yes,” she pants, backing away and guiding the donkeys with her.
At that moment, a woman lunges past me, grasping for Sadaré’s hair.
The urge to kill the woman where she stands rises instinctively within me, but she only catches a few strands of those red-bronze locks in her fingers before she’s thrown back with invisible force into the crowd and swallowed by thrashing limbs.
Sadaré lets out a breath that she wasn’t holding in fear, but against the painful tightness of the ropes tied around her chest, having increased her own discomfort intentionally.
Either one of us could have shoved the woman, but we didn’t—at least not openly. Sadaré used her witch’s trick, exchanging pain for potency to exert elsewhere, while I did nothing.
Except… maybe not nothing. Rather, I’ve done enough already, and anything else would be too obvious, too dramatic. Or even deadly.
I can still barely hold myself back from defending Sadaré, but I force myself to follow her, especially after she gives me an urgent, insistent jerk of her head.
The rest of the townsfolk hardly seem to notice our quiet but hurried retreat.
They’re all shouts and swinging fists and tussling bodies on the ground.
Fortunately I didn’t let Pogli come on this ill-fated venture.
His horns, stubby wings, and pig’s tail are easy enough for me to disguise on his small if stout figure, but with this ruckus, the little chimera would have barked up a storm or perhaps grown to the size of a lion and torn through the crowd. That would have been less easy to hide.
The town and its cries fall away behind us as the road takes us around a hill and a line of cypress trees.
Only when we have relative silence around us—no one following that I can tell, other than the donkeys with our still-laden cart—do we both hold each other’s gazes uneasily and let our voices out.
“Well, that didn’t go well,” she says with a tense huff of laughter.
“Was it something in the wine?” I suggest, trying to make light of the crushing weight on my shoulders. They’re torn between hunching in shame and drawing my sword from thin air to go charging back there to eviscerate them all. I take a deep breath in an attempt to calm myself. It doesn’t help.
“They didn’t even have any.”
“I know.” Just as I know it’s something in me, not the wine, that caused them to act like beasts.
She knows, too. “You did that, didn’t you?” At least she doesn’t sound furious. I was braced for it, and now something in me sags.
“I didn’t intend to,” I say, defensiveness creeping into my tone. She gives me a glance that’s half rueful and half doubtful, and guilt twists in my stomach. “I wouldn’t put you in danger just to prove a point. At least not anymore.”