Chapter 4 #3
“Dinner,” he corrected. “It’s dinner time for humans, isn’t it? Though by the time we get there, it’d be closer to a midday meal already, since you’re clearly not in the mood to hurry.”
“Is that all I’ll have to do? Just eat?” I clarified, afraid to trust him.
He nodded. “Drink too. In fact, I’d ask you to drink as much water as you can since it’ll take me some time to get more. Fresh water is scarce around here and extremely expensive. There is a source of it in the caves of the Wall, I’ve heard, but it’s controlled by Ray.”
“Wait…” I still struggled to wrap my mind around it. “I’ll drink and eat. And…that’s it?”
“What else would you expect?” he sounded confused.
After witnessing the effects of the golden hyacinth on humans, I expected the worst. But I wasn’t going to tell him about that of course. If he didn’t have that scenario in his head, I sure wasn’t going to put it there.
“Never mind.” I took a step closer to him before I even realized what I was doing. “So, we’re going to this place where they will feed me and give me water, then we’ll come back here, right? Nothing else will happen?”
“The highborn fae who pays for your joy tonight will understandably want to experience it too,” he replied.
That meant I’d be eating with someone’s tendrils connected to me, which wasn’t unusual for me.
Back in Teneris, I would often take meals with Dawn, Prince Rha, and members of his court.
While the prince had developed a strong preference for Dawn early on, other nobles sometimes shared our joy of food with us.
I’d have a general’s or a minister’s tendrils attached to my leilathas before.
It wasn’t new to me and didn’t feel particularly invasive or wrong.
“Alright,” I said tentatively. “Just promise me it’s only the joy of food we’re talking about here.”
“That’s what we’re being paid for,” he confirmed with a tired sigh.
I noticed his use of “we” instead of “me.” As if he wasn’t the one pimping my joy out and collecting money for it. As if these decisions and actions were not just his, but mine too.
“Fine. Let’s go then. I’m starving.” I took my place beside him as he moved toward the path on the side of the cliff again.
It was a long path, longer than the height of the cliff because it ran at an incline.
“It’d be easier for you to ascend the path when using my chair with me,” Timur suggested.
“Probably, but that’d mean I’d have to sit on your lap again.” I winced.
“What’s wrong with sitting on my lap?” The way he asked it made me pause.
It didn’t sound like an innocent question coming from someone who had no dick and no idea how to use one. His voice had dropped, making it sound almost…suggestive? Like a man who was very much aware of the consequences when inviting to host a woman’s ass on his lap.
But he couldn’t be, could he?
Shadow fae didn’t have any sexual organs until they went into their mating fever, a state of madness that demanded fucking and breeding.
Timur clearly wasn’t suffering from it because if he had been, he wouldn’t be able to speak as calmly as he did.
He would hardly be able to speak at all from what I’d heard about the mating fever.
But then, Timur wasn’t exactly a shadow fae, was he? He certainly didn’t look like one. A shiver rippled down my spine when I thought about his red eye and the spine tail.
“I’ll walk,” I said resolutely.
“Suit yourself,” he agreed, much to my relief. “But you’ll have to walk ahead of me so I can see you.”
“Why?”
“You are my most precious possession, Joy Vessel. And there are plenty of those who’d snatch you from me if given a chance.”
“Precious? Right,” I huffed under my breath. “I literally cost my weight in gold, don’t I?”
Stomping ahead, I tripped and nearly lost my balance. The spine whip swept out from under Timur’s cloak and caught me around my waist. I stopped with my arms up to avoid touching the creepy thing.
“And of course,” Timur added, dryly. “The last thing we need is for you to fall off the path and break your neck.”
The path was wide but steep and uneven. And it was long, endlessly long. I tried to keep my steps steady while feeling Timur’s mismatched eyes on me.
What was he?
I thought about his perfect fae features merging with the grotesque white skeleton in a form that seemed to be an amalgamation stopped midway. A transformation that froze before fully leaving one form and becoming the other.
If that was true, then which form did he start with? Was he a fae turning into a monster? Or a monster turning into a fae?
Or was it something else entirely?
I tripped and immediately raised my arms.
“I’m fine! I’m up. Just keep your tail away from me.” I scrambled to my feet quickly.
From the corner of my eye, I saw the white spinal column with spikes move back and away from me. That part of him was especially hard to accept. An involuntary shudder crossed my shoulders as I narrowly avoided being touched by it again.
At least with the sun down, the heat had receded too.
A fresh breeze blew from the ocean, cooling my strained muscles.
But I hadn’t eaten anything since before the auction.
I’d been surviving on a few sips of water.
My legs shook from exhaustion. My lungs burned.
My head felt fuzzy already, and we’d barely come a quarter of the way.
After a few more shaky steps, I pressed my hands on my knees, bending down to catch my breath.
“My offer for a ride still stands,” Timur announced calmly behind me.
The prospect of close proximity to him made my skin crawl, but not exactly from repulsion. I found his appearance disturbing rather than disgusting. But trepidation didn’t make crawling onto his lap any more appealing.
“I’m fine,” I repeated, pushing myself up the path again.
I blew a lock of my hair away from my face and wiped sweat from my forehead with my forearm. Sweat trickled down my back too. I took my sweater off and tied it around my waist.
“I can make it,” I said in an upbeat voice.
Propping my hands on my hips, I glanced up the path ahead of us.
There was not a single fae on it this evening.
Some of the Ashgate dwellers were still asleep at this hour.
Others used the hanging bridges or their shadow magic to travel between the caves.
This path was mostly for the camels and other magic-less beings like me.
“I’ve never had to work this hard for dinner before,” I muttered.
Timur waited in his chair silently. Powered by foreign magic, the chair’s thick wheels glowed softly, promising a smooth, cushy ride. I felt more at ease with the unfamiliar green magic than with his touch. Yet in his case, both came as a packaged deal.
“I’ll never make it up there on my own, will I?” I blew out a breath in defeat.
“No. It doesn’t look like you will,” he replied honestly.
“And there’s no other way for us to get food?”
“No,” he confirmed what I already knew. We had no money to buy even a pack of plain rice.
“Okay…” I untied my sweater and put it on again as an extra layer of protection from the contact with him. “Let’s try it then. Just…” I approached his chair tentatively. “Please keep that spine away from me.”
“What spine?” He adjusted his cloak, getting his lap ready for me. With a flash of white, the bone whip shifted from his knee.
“That one.” I pointed at it.
He slipped it under his cloak, tucking it to his side.
“Alright. The spine is put away.”
“Thank you.” I gingerly brought my butt down to his thighs, mindful not to kick his legs or feet in the process.
“I’ll have to use both my hands to help you,” he warned.
I remembered his right hand—the one with claws. I didn’t want any of the skeletal parts of him to touch me. But the alternative was to keep crawling up this path until I dropped dead from exhaustion.
“Okay.” I nodded.
He gripped my left side with his left hand. The right one, he kept under the cloak, holding me through the material with it.
Maybe his right hand just got caught in the cloak by accident and he didn’t free it.
But I had a feeling he did it for my sake.
He’d caught on to my apprehension about his looks and took care to hide them from me the best he could.
Guilt scraped inside my chest at that thought, like I was caught doing something I wasn’t proud of.
Timur adjusted me on his lap sideways, guiding both of my legs over his right armrest.
“That’s better,” he grunted approvingly. “We may even make it there on time now.”
The chair moved up the path again. The incline of the path made the chair tilt backward, forcing me to lean with my shoulder against Timur’s chest. I strained my neck muscles, trying to keep my head from dropping to his shoulder.
That didn’t last long, however. My neck cramped, and I had no choice but to rest my head on his left shoulder, snuggling against him like some fucking bride.
“Now that we’re both on the chair,” I said, snappy in annoyance at the situation. “Can we just fly straight up? Why do we need to follow the path?”
“The chair doesn’t fly. It hovers over the ground when it’s rough,” he explained. “It can also roll on its wheels on a smooth surface.”
“So much for magic,” I scoffed. “It’s not all-powerful at all.”
“No, it isn’t. Every magic has its limitations. But Gorgonian magic can do what ours can’t in this case. People of Lorsan are excellent at crafting devices like this.”
“How did you get it? Did you travel all the way to the Above for it?”
“No. The fae of Sky Kingdom blocked our shadow tunnels with their light, making it impossible for any fae to travel between our worlds. However, their light doesn’t stop inanimate objects from passing through. So a trade can still happen, if one knows the right people,” he added casually.
“What did you trade for it?”
“I called in a favor,” he replied vaguely. “But it was a multi-tier trade. Someone from Sky Kingdom, I don’t know who and to what purpose, needed a weapon laced with a potion from Alveari, and someone from Lorsan was willing to trade a moving chair for spider silk from Sky Kingdom.”
I whistled. “You have quite the connections.”
“Had,” he corrected. “Most are lost now.”
Timur wasn’t generally forthcoming with information, but he’d been replying to some of my questions and even elaborating on some. I wondered if I could learn more about him if I kept pushing, but I wasn’t sure how much more I really wanted to know.
He’d never even asked my name, addressing me simply as “Joy Vessel.” He treated me as his property, a precious one maybe, but still only a thing not a person. If it helped him keep his distance from me, then I should probably do the same.
The chair kept moving at a swift pace, and I hardly even noticed as we reached the end of the path. The view up here caught my breath once again. It truly felt like standing at the end of the world, gazing out into the dark ocean below.
“What an eerie place,” I said softly.
“Most avoid it,” Timur replied. “Only the rejects end up here, with no other place to go.”
“Why?”
“Shadow fae detest the ocean. It’s too chaotic, unpredictable, and often dangerous. Day storms are not as frequent as they are in the desert, but when they come, they often bring thunder and even rain.”
“Why is rain bad?”
“Because it’s wet,” he said matter-of-factly, making me laugh.
I stopped laughing abruptly, realizing this was the first time I’d found something funny in a very long time.
“Rain is free water, good for drinking, which is great,” Timur continued.
“But not all rain water can be collected. It gets everywhere, leaking through the roofs and flooding the caves. They also say that every now and then, the ocean comes ashore in a Big Wave in Ashgate. When it happened last time, about fifty years ago, all the lower caves flooded, and the briny water didn’t recede for days or even weeks.
As hostile as desert can be, shadow fae by far prefer dry land to the ocean shore. ”
He kept saying “shadow fae” not “we,” as if he didn’t count himself as part of his people. Or maybe they weren’t really his people? When it came to Timur, I still felt very confused.
Meanwhile, there I was, sitting on his lap, snuggling into his chest with my head on his shoulder and his arm around my waist. And I had to admit, it didn’t feel so bad.
Warm and comfortable, my muscles relaxed.
I didn’t even mind him resting his chin on top of my head earlier while we were ascending the path.
With the chair tilted back, it must’ve been easier for him to tip his head forward and prop his chin on my head.
Even as his chair came back into its usual position, I still kept my head on his shoulder.
I might not have climbed all the way up this cliff, but the journey had exhausted me nevertheless.
Hunger and dehydration had weakened me, and I felt content letting Timur and his chair transport me across the sand dunes now.
Drowsy, I almost dozed off, forgetting all about our final destination until Timur said softly.
“Here we are.”