3. N
Triana fell, tumbling down a dark tunnel lined with whipping cables and branches that tore at her.
The tiny part of her mind that remained awake knew she remained trapped in a nightmare, but though she struggled, she could not wake herself.
Behind her, very close, came the gray-scaled lizard thing that had taken her, and followed her even into her dreams.
She landed heavily, back on the cave floor, where the battle still raged.
Part of her knew this could not be, that this had to be reworked memory, yet it seemed real and felt very real.
Standing, she saw the swirling lights of the metal monster, casting about itself in a great clashing of gears and mage-lights, and she struggled, step by step, as though wading through mud, to escape.
She must try and reach the Gate … which in turn receded further away.
The Thing … hulking, lizard-scaled, and implacable …
grabbed at her. She fled, running into spinning corridors that opened beneath her feet, with it close behind.
She stepped badly and fell again, this time down the grand stairs of her father’s house …
her house now … but decorated as it had been when she was a child.
She landed in her mother’s room instead of the hard marbled floor.
She stood up, nursing a sore elbow … and found herself only six now, but memory was uncertain …
her mother, her eyes already unfocused and the air redolent with smoke from the pipe, her ‘medicine’ to help her through the day.
“See, mother, I made this to help you feel better … ”
“That’s nice, dear.” Her mother’s voice, distant and dreamy, speaking to herself. “Where’s the nanny? What was her name? Shauna … oh ….” She drifted away. “That’s right. Discharged her … the New One. Whatshername. Where is she?”
“I don’t like her, mother,” Triana replied, in a mix of adult-voice and child-voice, one layered on top of the other, “she smells like fish and peppermint. I want Shauna back.”
Her mother’s voice, fading and unfocused. “That’s nice, dear. Run along now.”
Triana winced away from the memory, but in the dream, it came sharper, and cut like glass …
with details she never noticed … the thin tracery of scars on her mother’s wrists, the hovering presence of the physician mage with his styptics and drugs, and the unmistakable bulge of her mother’s pregnancy, so soon after the last, an heir and a spare.
Too soon. But father’s will drove. There must be an heir and a spare.
The floor tipped under her and she fell again, with Triana stretching out twice, thrice her normal length, falling this time along the corridors where her brothers mocked her, taunting her with their privileges …
the swords and horses, trips to visit other lords’ estates, going to the gladiatorial games …
all things she wanted, desperately. She knew she could be better at all these things than those two brats, and it was all withheld from her because she was “just a girl” and worthless.
She landed in the stables, like those of the estate and not …
these went on like mirrors reflected in mirrors, as far as the eye could see, instead of the two-dozen stalls that actually existed.
Even in her dream state she recoiled, trapped.
Her brothers, younger, and one already her size, who had been at their father’s wine during one of the revels, catching her as she returned from her ride, not on her own mule, but on a forbidden warhorse …
secret jumps in the deep woods. Different from her memory …
her brothers’ eyes the dead-black pits of the gray-scaled thing. The eyes of the Thing that caught her.
Holding her down, and taunting her with the vilest epithet they knew …
girl. Just. A. Girl. Their strength already exceeded hers, and she had no leverage in the straw.
They held her down, laughing at her. She was too valuable as marriage property, so they didn’t dare actually harm her in any way.
But they pushed her into the straw and sat on her, and made her ask them in a polite, breathy, high-pitched little-girl voice to pretty-please, let her up.
She did so, the hot shame and humiliation as sharp as when it had happened for real, and not in dream.
She would be expected at the feast, expected to amuse the old men she’d be seated with, make them laugh with her quick wits and clever observations.
Of course she knew why she was expected to amuse them … .
With a flip of the wrist, her brother tossed her out of the stable straw into her seat at the table, somehow immaculately gowned and groomed in a filmy thing weighed down with beading and gems, and surrounded by those old, old men, her father’s peers,
all of whom had buried two or more wives and were looking for the next.
But a glance at the head of the table told her that her father was watching her, and she desperately wanted to please, so she made sly observations about the age and defects of Lords that were not at this feast, and who did not currently need new wives,
and contrasted them unfavorably with her neighbors at the table.
It was a game, but one danced on a knife-edge, because an enemy might turn ally, and what she said now could later be used against her own House, and Father never let her forget that.
Be witty, but look guileless. Flirt, but make it appear to be the product of a child’s innocence.
Weigh every word carefully before it was spoken.
In her dream she saw them sizing her up through her now jaded eyes, and felt their disdain …
little girl playing at a grown-up’s wit.
Old enough to wed, bed, and breed another heir for an aging elven lord, and if she didn’t die in the birthing, then that heir and a spare, and after that a pretty ornament for a pretty box to wilt away in, as her mother had wilted away.
Then the dead husk would be discarded and a new pretty toy found.
She tried to look away, but the crystalline edges of this dream held her fast, pitiless.
The oldest elven lord, a wheezing wisp with rheumy eyes, looking at her as though served a piece of bad fish … his papery voice … a clever kitten, but too stout to be fashionable. Perhaps a good spell surgeon might improve her prospects?
She was both outside and inside herself at the same time, observing and experiencing.
Small wonder almost nothing ever passed her lips at these things, despite the tempting array of delicacies.
She wouldn’t actually eat until she was safely in her room with no eyes watching her except the bevy of nannies, as alike as a swarm of bees, and as maddeningly busy.
The nausea and anxiety she kept hidden could be given its brief due, then a small supper …
but not too much because a girl must always be “slim and lithe.”
She felt the eyes of the nannies and maids and slaves weighing every morsel she ate, judging, careful not to incur father’s wrath and dismissal.
Coal black eyes. The gray creature had caught her again.
Another table. More coal black eyes. Dressed in a gauzy thing that left her nearly nude and fully on display for her suitors.
The eyes of the dozen elven lords, awaiting the next pleasantry, the next bit of droll humor, served with just enough sauce to be amusing, but not enough to be off-putting to a future husband.
The dead-black eyes of all staring at her, toting up her value, measuring her worth.
She looked to her father, who was then dead and decaying, his head twisted as he had been taken up from the riding arena, still muttering polite comments to his guests.
His eyes fixed on hers. Dead and black, and without pupils.
Flip. Flip. Flip. Memory after memory, dredged up to tear at her.
Brothers’ funerals … One dead from drunkenness and duel, the other from stupidity.
By then, she didn’t have the wherewithal to pretend to care.
Her mother’s passing … from a failed child.
Four, when most were lucky to bear two and live, and Triana wept for days.
She felt herself curling into a ball to try and escape the onslaught, and fell again, this time landing hard on her wrist and back, and striking her head hard upon a stone floor.
She wept, and tried to focus on two points of light.
The Thing’s eyes boring into hers … then the slow clearing as the black eyes formed tiny white dots that grew into pupils, and continued to expand as more light rushed in.
Too white, too bright. She awakened, her eyes already opened and staring.
She gave a great heaving sob, still curled on a hard, cold stone floor.
She blinked, her eyes open, and the world resolved itself into a table, with wheels, made of some kind of painted metal.
A harsh, bright light shone down from an unseen source.
She had fallen for real the last time, not in her dream, and landed hard, her wrist hurting from where it had taken her weight.
She blinked again, trying to focus around the tears.
She felt confused, and overwhelmed by having her worst memories hurled at her like catapult stones, the disorientation of being …
wherever this was … and an emerging sheer terror.
She felt sick then, and squeezed her eyes shut.
A woman’s voice came from behind her, unintelligible at first.
She froze, still curled on the floor, and focused on the individual words.
Strange accent, or rather, words accented in a way that made them unfamiliar.
The cadence sounded elvish, but with too many ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ salted in.
Nobody spoke like that outside of ancient books.
A shadow covered the light and she blinked as she turned her head to look up.
A woman knelt beside her, offering her some kind of a clay cup. She dipped the corner of a small hand-towel into it, and used it to dab at Triana’s forehead. Triana felt the sting of it as the towel touched the abrasion where she had fallen in the cave, trying to escape the metal monster.
The woman said something else to her, softly. She struggled to parse the words, the archaic phrasing. Help her sit up? … seemed to be the question.
She nodded and the woman helped her sit, holding her arm until the wave of dizziness passed. Triana looked up at her, and nodded. The woman withdrew her arm, and Triana leaned back, settling herself against the bars.