Chapter 4 He of the Bloodline of the Monarch of the Void
He of the Bloodline of the Monarch of the Void
Calix and I went home. It was early afternoon. When we arrived, Josie was just leaving my hut. She had used a precious portion of her own family’s water to wash my mother’s hair.
I didn’t trust myself to ask her when she was moving.
But she saw it on my face. Her shoulders slumped.
Calix pulled her away before she could apologize, or maybe it was before I had a chance to lose my shit.
I stood in the dusty doorway, my mother coughing behind me, and watched as the two of them headed off to the village square, backdropped by Josie’s giant house.
My muscles felt like needles. I bit my tongue hard enough to draw blood.
The rest of the day and night were the same as ever.
My mother coughing up her insides. Me, shivering on the floor.
The only difference was that now I got to imagine Josie trundling off to Corcagia.
Living her dreams. Hanging out with Calix.
Enrolling at the nursing college, which was right next door to the engineering college, where I would never, ever get to go.
Probably she and Calix would fall in love and get married and forget to invite me.
Meanwhile, the only way I would ever leave this place was if my mother died. And I couldn’t hope for that.
I had been so little when Dad had died. He’d broken his arm, which was a typical injury for farmhands like him.
But instead of healing quickly, the bone had become infected.
Over the course of the next few weeks, red threads of sickness had crawled up his skin.
I had been sent away to stay with Calix’s family so I would not have to watch my father convulsing and foaming at the mouth.
I had not been allowed to say goodbye until he was already in the casket.
And at that point, when my mother nudged me to say my final words to him, I stayed silent.
I knew in my six-year-old heart that it didn’t matter what I said. He couldn’t hear.
After that, it was just me and Mom. Mom took Dad’s job in the fields — a job typically reserved for men — and worked twice as hard as any other farmhand.
It wasn’t long until she earned their respect.
Some of them had had sons and grandsons who’d gone to school, and they gifted her their sons’ old books, books full of mathematical equations and fairy tales.
Mom brought those books home and gave them to me.
Dad had taught me to read, and now Mom encouraged me to learn the old stories, to teach myself languages, to solve calculus problems in my head while scrubbing toilets at the Stammerers’ house.
She grew too old to work in the fields. But she waved off my concerns when I begged her to quit.
She wanted to earn enough money to send me to college.
She kept working even as her body weakened.
As the drought set in. As the crops withered.
As the farmhands drove themselves ever harder and sucked ugly dry dust into their lungs.
Those farmhands, men who’d known my father and my mother both, began to drop like flies.
And then my mother began to cough. And then she could not work anymore.
And then she could not even stand up. And then she began to forget me.
But I had not forgotten her. I would break my own body, steal every breath from my own lungs, if it meant I could take care of her the way she’d taken care of me.
Calix didn’t understand. Josie didn’t either.
I rose and walked again to the border to gather my own fucking edenica herbs.
As I walked, I seethed. How dare they all leave me?
How dare they all get what they wanted while my mother and I suffered?
! How dare Calix stroll back in here, two months early with his handsome face, and refuse to even help!
How dare he make me feel like an idiot for so much as having an idea!
By the time I got to the fields over the underworld, I was mad as all hell.
I ripped the little red flowers out of the earth in a blind fury, hurling them into my basket until they wouldn’t even fit anymore.
I knew I was wasting them, but I couldn’t stop.
Even though every herb I picked now was an herb I couldn’t pick later, was a waste of a six-hour walk, was another inch of pain I couldn’t save my mother from, another link in the chain that bound me to this godsforsaken place —
I flung my head back and screamed.
A deafening crack sounded behind me. My heart stopped. I whipped around, the earth shifting under my feet, my body catching itself on blind instinct just before I fell, my fists up —
The earth had opened up. Before me yawned a pit four feet across. If I had been standing just two feet back, I would have been sucked into it.
It looked like a mouth waiting to swallow me… or an open gate.
My breath caught in my throat. I backed away from the hole, slowly, feeling like a hunted animal. Feeling like I had just a day ago, when my boots had moved across the border.
Someone — or something — had to be here. Waiting for me.
I knew it the way I knew gravity, the way a hunted animal knows a hawk.
I couldn’t see him, but I sensed him. It was crazy, but I thought I could even smell him, the scent of rough soil and something deep and rich like camphor.
Or maybe I was only smelling myself. My own fear.
Sweat drenched my underarms and stomach.
And still I did not see him.
The darkness was total. How could it be so terribly dark? Just a moment ago I had screamed at the stars —
The stars.
Something was blocking my view of the stars.
I saw its outline just before it caught me. Tall. Broad. Human-shaped. Masculine. I caught that whiff of earth and camphor.
I screamed. I tried to stumble backward, my fists still up, but the thing had hold of my hips. He plunged with me into the pit.
I screamed again. I could do nothing else. We were already so deep that even the stars had vanished. And I was still holding my basket! I hadn’t even dropped my fucking basket!
“Wait!” I cried. “My mother! At least let me give this stuff to my mother!”
And, unbelievably, my captor slowed his footsteps.
My heart soared with hope. I grabbed at the arms that held me.
This monster’s skin was smooth and supple, not furred or plated at all.
If I could hurt him, if I could get him to drop me…
. My hands scaled his muscles, probing for a place I could scratch or jab.
But my breath caught. He was obviously far too strong for me to escape.
His biceps were as hot and hard and rippling as those of any human male I’d ever met.
Then his grip tightened. He quickened his pace again. My heart dropped. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t take you back.”
“You have to —”
“I’m the Prince of the Underworld,” my captor snapped. “I don’t have to do shit.”
I caught my breath. Oh, no. A prince?
I tried again. “You’ve got the wrong person!”
He laughed.
“Take me back or I’ll scream!” Even as I said it, I cursed myself. Was that the best I could do? He probably liked hearing his victims scream.
Sure enough: “Then scream,” he said, with satisfaction.
Well, he’d asked for it.
I screamed my throat raw. I felt him flinch.
Ha! I screamed harder. For good measure I pounded relentlessly on his muscled back with my free hand.
My hand and arm grew sore but I didn’t stop, even though he wasn’t slowing down.
Actually, it felt good to punch the shit out of something.
This was what I’d wanted to do to Calix.
I paused long enough to take a deep breath — the Prince dared to relax, more fool him — and then I screamed louder than ever.
The Prince jumped. “Monarch’s balls! You don’t quit, do you?”
“Let me go!”
“No. And I’d reconsider that screaming if I were you. Anyone you attract down here is going to be worse than me.”
That shut me up.
“Aha,” he said, with satisfaction. “You do quit.”
It occurred to me that my mouth was right next to his neck. I bet I could rip his jugular out if I tried hard enough.
I sank my teeth in. Fuck, his neck was corded under my tongue.
The Prince jerked away and cursed. He almost dropped me — success!
— but then he hurled me over his shoulder, where I couldn’t bite anything except the small of his back.
I tried and failed. “Stop that!” he snapped.
“You can’t escape anyway. There are millions of tunnels.
Even if I dropped you, you’d never find your way up. ”
“I know which way up is,” I snarled.
“Oh, yeah? Can you climb a vertical slope a hundred feet or more?”
Gods almighty. As if it weren’t bad enough that I’d been kidnapped by an underworld monster; he also had to be a prince and a jackass. This time, instead of biting him, I scratched. He hissed. I snapped at him, “You might have abducted me but that doesn’t mean I have to listen to your shit.”
“Monarch’s balls,” he said again.
We were surging through tunnels I couldn’t see. I squinted over my shoulder through the blackness, trying to get a look at his hideous form, but even with my vision starting to adjust, I could hardly see a damn thing.
And then… I could.
Slowly, I realized that the walls were shining. The walls themselves were rough and black like onyx, infinitely faceted like cut jewels, but deep in the crevices between those facets, something glittered with an otherworldly, blue-white light.
“Bioluminescent fungi,” the Prince said. “Shiny mushrooms.”
I realized that I was staring at the walls, open-mouthed. I clamped my mouth shut and then opened it again immediately to say, “I know what bioluminescence and fungi are. I’m not stupid.”
“Sure. Just annoying.”
I craned my neck, trying to get a look at him, but I could see no part of his face except the square cut of his jaw. Just you wait, I told myself grimly. He probably had eight eyeballs.
He kept moving. He was carrying me like a sack of flour, and he wasn’t even out of breath. Now that I could see, I realized that the tunnels were empty. Weren’t these tunnels supposed to be teeming with hideous godling-monsters? “Where is everybody?”
“We’re still too near the surface. No one wants to live so close to your world, human.” A pause. “Don’t worry. We shouldn’t see too many people until we’ve reached our destination.”
“Don’t worry?” I sneered. “Worry about what? That someone else might steal me and eat me before you’ve had your turn?”
He barked out a laugh. “Don’t joke.”
Something in his voice made my blood run cold.
The dim, glittering light was brightening.
We’d reached a new part of the underworld, where the tunnels were wider.
And now, I could see, there were some creatures.
But they weren’t slithering around or leering at me like I would have expected.
Instead, they were curled in unmoving lumps on the ground.
I couldn’t even really see what they looked like.
Were they plate-skinned and many-eyed, like the escaped girl of two hundred years ago had said?
Or human-looking, like the Prince? But maybe the Prince, too, was hideous under all his muscles.
Perhaps he’d peel his human flesh off later, like a coat.
The increased light and population could mean only one thing. We had to be getting closer to the center of the underworld.
The Prince darted into a series of side caverns.
We didn’t travel long before we reached an area where the light was even brighter here, the tunnels taller and wider and smoother and almost totally unpopulated, more like corridors than anything else.
Then the Prince swung sideways, through a thick beaded curtain, taking such a sharp turn he made me yelp.
Behind the curtain was a heavy metal door.
Behind that door was a bedroom.
My whole body jumped. For the first time, I dropped my basket. I balled my fists. Everyone had always suspected something like this; the godlings, after all, only kidnapped girls. But to have it confirmed…
My breath had gone shallow. My heart was pounding in my throat. I knew I would only have one chance — maybe a millisecond — to defend myself. In my heart of hearts, I knew I couldn’t stop this enormous motherfucker from hurting me.
But the least I could do was hurt him first.
The Prince dumped me on the bed.
I rolled instantly onto my back. I lunged upward. My muscles were coiled, my fists clenched, my whole mind and body refusing to go down without a fight —
The Prince turned on his heel and walked away.
I blinked. I sat indignantly on the mattress, glowering at his retreating back. “Hey! Where do you think you’re going?”
The metal door slammed shut behind him. I heard the k-chunk as he deadbolted it.
“What?” I shouted. I couldn’t believe it. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
The silence demonstrated that he was not, apparently, kidding me.
I was alone.
I looked around. The eerie, beautiful blue bioluminescence was absent from this room. Instead, an enormous fireplace was built directly into the glittering onyx wall. It was so large I could have slept in it. Warm orange flames roared, exactly like the fire in my hut at home.
Where my mother was currently shivering and coughing.
My mother. I hadn’t thought of her while I was being spirited through the tunnels. Now that my body was calming down, I could think again. I cursed myself for having forgotten her even for an instant.
It was still the middle of the night, possibly edging toward morning. When was Josie leaving for Corcagia?
If it was today… would she think to visit my mother first? If she did, she would take care of her, and she would notice my absence. She might even tell Calix that I was gone. And Calix might guess what had happened to me.
But if Josie didn’t visit my mother…
No. I couldn’t think about that. The best way to help my mother was to help myself.
And that meant getting the hell out of here.