Chapter 3
Three
Timur
“What are you?” the Joy Vessel had asked.
A simple question, but even if I wanted to answer it, I had no answer to give her.
What was I?
Not yet a beast, but no longer a fae.
Not yet dead, but hardly still alive.
I’d lived in this world for a hundred and thirty years, not a long time, but over the course of those years, I’d been many things. And today, I bought a Joy Vessel, which made me…
“A pleasure trader,” I said. “I’m a pleasure trader, Sweet One.”
She looked terrified, but I had no comfort to offer her.
Pleasure traders were a brand-new class of shadow fae, and all of us were criminals, because owning a Joy Vessel outside of a royal court was a crime. It was possible only in Ashgate, the city of crime.
There was no official ruler of Ashgate. The city belonged to no one.
It claimed to be free and answer to nobody, but crime ruled here, and Ray and Mazra were the two most powerful criminals.
Both had turned to trading joy and pleasure, like me.
Unlike me, however, they had the money to buy Joy Vessels and the power to fight for them if needed.
It was a true miracle that I’d managed to get my hands on one after all.
My Joy Vessel crouched on the grass rug on the floor.
The rug was the only furnishing in here aside from the wooden chest by the wall where I stored the few weapons I had kept even though I could no longer use any of them effectively.
Throwing a spear or wielding a sword didn’t work as well when sitting in a chair.
Even shooting arrows from a bow was no longer the same for me.
The only weapons I had on me now were a set of three throwing knives in the triple sheath strapped to my left thigh under my skirt.
With her back to the wall, the Joy Vessel hugged her scruffy gray sweater around herself. The day's heat beaded with perspiration on her forehead, plastering the brown strands of her hair to her bizarrely light-colored skin, yet she wouldn’t let go of that sweater.
“What do you want with me?” she asked, licking her lips.
I noticed that her lips were cracked and peeling, dried out by the merciless desert that she’d crossed to get here.
“Are you thirsty?” I asked in turn, not answering her question. “I have some water—”
I offered her my water bag. Fast like lightning, she snatched it from my hand and uncorked it.
“Leave some for tonight,” I warned her. “That’s all we have, and I won’t be able to get more until probably tomorrow morning.”
She stopped drinking and glanced at me with alarm.
“Why not?”
“Water costs money,” I explained.
“Don’t you have money?” Her voice trailed off as she glanced around this pathetic place. Its bare, weathered walls explained my situation better than any words ever could. “But…I don’t understand. You just paid a bucketful of gold for me.”
“And that bucketful was all I had.”
I dropped every single coin I’d managed to save onto that scale, even the queen’s ring that I’d kept through the entire last decade of suffering and hardship.
I’d planned it all carefully, but the risk of my coming out of that auction empty-handed had still been extremely high.
It was easy to predict that any humans arriving at Ashgate would be quickly claimed.
I knew that competing with someone like Ray or Mazra for Joy Vessels would be difficult if not outright impossible.
I’d decided my best chance to get my hands on a Joy Vessel was to bid on the first one. I figured as they got sold one by one, the bidding would intensify, the prices would rise, and the tempers would heat.
Unwittingly, the Joy Vessel had helped me.
Her disrespectful attitude toward Ray had calmed his appetite for her.
Otherwise, I doubted he would’ve allowed me to overbid him.
Offering everything I owned for her had been a gamble, but I saw my chance, and I went for it, stunning everyone for just long enough for me to claim her.
“You spent everything you had?” She looked shocked.
A huge satchel full of gold might look like a recklessly high amount, but I was certain I got a bargain.
“There are just over thirty Joy Vessels left in the entire kingdom,” I explained.
“Most are in the queen’s sarai, heavily guarded and inaccessible even to someone like Ray or Mazra, despite all their power and wealth.
There are only six of you in Ashgate. Less than a handful more may still come.
But that’s it. There will be no more after that.
You, my dear, are priceless, and your weight in gold was a small price to pay compared to what you’re truly worth. ”
She swallowed hard, looking tense.
“Okay. So…now what?” She sounded guarded, her shoulders raised, her gaze glued to my face, though she couldn’t possibly see much of me in the shadows of my hood.
She didn’t look repulsed. Was she scared? Definitely. She seemed to be scared every moment of the short time that I’d known her. So much so that I couldn’t even envision her in a relaxed state, as though fear had become one of her attributes and she simply didn’t exist without it.
Her fingers trembled as she raised her hands to her chest. She adjusted her sweater, wrapping it tighter around herself. Her hands missed the ends of the sweater once, twice, until she finally got hold of it and released a shaky breath.
It wasn’t just fear, I realized. The Joy Vessel must be exhausted too. Her journey to Ashgate had been long. And the auction had been trying. Ray had enraged and terrified her. Her fear had spiked into a genuine panic when he’d approached her with that flower, the purpose of which I didn’t know.
The golden hyacinth was used by hags and mages who dared break the law forbidding the handling of the flower.
What effect did it have on humans? I had no idea.
But I couldn’t think of a better way to stop Ray from punching her than by going ahead with my final bid.
It’d been a risk, but it worked. The Joy Vessel was mine, and my new worry had become to keep her.
“Now, you need to rest,” I replied to her question.
I needed some rest too. I’d spend days traveling and searching for ways to borrow gold.
I didn’t need much sleep to survive, but I’d been functioning on no sleep at all.
The exhaustion had been catching up with me.
Yet so much still had to be done. In fact, the real work had just begun.
But I allowed myself to slow down today, just for an hour or two, to celebrate my new fantastic acquisition.
She slumped against the wall. Her shoulders dropped. Her eyelids seemed heavy too. She visibly struggled to keep her eyes open.
“I take it there's no bedroom here?” she asked with a sigh. “No bed either?”
“Do you need a bed to sleep?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
I didn’t remember the last time I slept in a bed, definitely not since I’d gotten this chair. But she wasn’t me. If she needed a bed, however, I didn’t have one to give her.
“There is no bed,” I said. “And there won’t be one for a while. You’ll have to make do with what’s in here.”
“This rug?” She grimaced, but there was no fire in her question. She looked simply too tired to sound angry or demanding.
“The rug,” I echoed, stretching my shoulders.
Caves were expensive in Ashgate. In comparison, the shacks on the beach cost almost nothing to rent.
But they provided no protection from the daily heat and only very basic reprieve from sunlight.
The heat inside the dwelling rose as midday approached.
The Joy Vessel had finally loosened her sweater around her neck.
My skin itched under the coarse fabric of my cloak.
If I were alone, I would’ve taken it off long ago.
I cast a furtive glance at the Joy Vessel. It was best to wait until she fell asleep before taking off my cloak. But maybe I could at least pull my hood off? My hair bunched around my neck under my hood, making the heat increasingly more unbearable.
She didn’t appear particularly happy with my buying her. Would she hate me even more if she saw my face?
But then again, what did it matter if she did?
I had no reason to care what she thought about me. Raising my good hand to my hood, I slid it down, watching her closely as I revealed my face.
Her eyes were on me. She couldn’t have missed my gesture. But her expression hardly changed. She squinted momentarily, then her features relaxed with exhaustion.
“Are you not afraid of me?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said carefully. “Should I be?”
It was a bizarre reply in these circumstances. She seemed to be afraid of everything before, and now…now she just looked tired.
I rarely revealed the physical effects of my affliction to anyone.
Mostly because it felt like exposing my weakness, which I loathed.
But the Joy Vessel was to share my living space with me now, and I wasn’t inclined to endure the heat inside my cloak simply to spare her the displeasure of looking at me.
Oddly, she didn’t seem displeased by my appearance either, just as she wasn’t scared.
“Do my looks not repulse you?” I pressed, confused.
Apparently, I did care about what she thought of me. I really needed to hear her answer.
“Your looks? Why?” she sounded puzzled by my question at first, then a puff of breath escaped her. “Oh… I can’t see you.”
Her words made no sense. She was staring straight at me.
I’d heard that human eyesight wasn’t as good as the shadow fae’s, especially in the dark, but the darkness wasn’t absolute in this place.
The wooden door had plenty of gaps and cracks for sunlight to get in and illuminate the space in pale muddy yellow.
“It’s not that dark here,” I pointed out.
“I know but… I lost my glasses.” She rubbed her eyes.
“What do glasses have to do with anything?”
“My eyeglasses,” she corrected. “I have weak eyesight and need eyeglasses to have the perfect vision. It’s like…
” She waved a hand in front of her face.
“Custom-made lenses to correct…” She dropped her hand wearily.
“It doesn’t matter. I lost them, okay? I can’t see anything clearly now.
Just blurry shapes of color, shadows, and light, that kind of thing.
Anyway, it's not like you would understand an impairment of any kind. You fae are perfect in every way, aren’t you? ”
“Perfect? Right, we are,” I scoffed bitterly. “Until we’re not.”
Her semi-blindness had its advantages. I could finally get out of this stuffy cloak without the uncomfortable sensation of anyone’s prodding eyes on me.
I unclipped the pin holding the cloak at my throat.
The heavy fabric slid off my left shoulder but got caught on the bumps and spikes of my right one.
I left it like that. With hardly any skin left on my right side, it didn’t matter.
The suffocating heat escaped from around my body.
The warm air inside the dwelling still felt cooler than my flushed skin, allowing me to breathe a little more freely.
I scooped my long, black-and-white hair up, fanning the back of my neck with it. Then I exhaled, leaning back in my chair with relief.
“Go to sleep, Sweet One,” I murmured, finally allowing the exhaustion to claim me too.