Chapter 14 Raw Meat
Raw Meat
Iwoke up to the smell of raw meat.
The scent jerked me to a sitting position before I even realized I was awake.
I hadn’t eaten meat since the last holiday season.
Even when I’d purchased food for my mother in the village, most of what I’d been able to afford was vegetables and dried beans.
Maybe eggs or hard yellow cheese if I was careful, and if Mr. Stammerer had given me a tip.
A dead rabbit was bleeding on the pillow inches from where my head had been.
I screamed. I scrambled out of bed and almost tripped over Hades. “Hades!”
“Keep it down,” he hissed. I couldn’t believe it. He was just lying like a fucking lump on the carpet. “Do you want everyone to hear you?”
“Do I want everyone to know what a depraved weirdo you are? Uh, yeah! What the fuck is this!”
He sat up, looking insulted. “What’s wrong with it?”
“What’s wrong with it? What’s right with it? It’s a dead animal.”
“So what? You humans love eating dead animals. Look, I’m sorry it’s so scrawny, but it’s not exactly easy pickings up there. Once again, you could say thank you.”
But my brain had snagged on the word eating. “This is… for me to eat?”
“Unless you’d rather have the pomegranate,” he snapped. Pomegranate. That had to be the name of the fat red fruit.
But my chest, despite myself, was warming. My cheeks, too. “No, I don’t want your fucking pomegranate. Hades…”
“Your Lordship,” he corrected me.
Ugh. “Your Lordship. Are you saying you sent someone aboveground to hunt me a rabbit?”
“Absolutely not. Monarch forbid anyone find out about this. I went aboveground to hunt you a rabbit.”
“Wh… why?”
For a moment he didn’t say anything.
Then he flopped back to the carpet. “You can’t work if you’re hungry. I need you to work. So.”
There had to be a catch. As he’d said, prey was impossibly rare, and I seriously doubted his royal ass knew how to lay a snare.
It had to have taken him hours to hunt this rabbit.
Then I realized: He’d said it was from aboveground, but not from across the border.
“I get it. You’re tricking me. The rabbit isn’t from the Lümerlund side, is it?
It’s from the underworld side. It’s underworld food. You’re trapping me here.”
“It is from the Lümerlund! Monarch’s balls, woman. I keep telling you, I’m not lying to you.”
I didn’t believe him. I scrambled out of bed and went over and prodded him with my toe. “How do I know I can trust you? Look at me. Hades. Hades. Hades.”
He sat up furiously. “I’m never doing anything nice for you again.”
But I had already gasped. There was a four-inch gash across his forehead, covered in crusted blood.
He realized I’d seen it. He winced and tried to cover it with his hand.
Too late. The sight the angry wound made something bubble in me.
It was only selfishness, I told myself. Fear for my own life.
Hades and his desperation for his reservoir were the only things standing between me and the Lake. If anything happened to him…
In a black voice, I said, “What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” he said. “It’s fine.”
“What stupid thing did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything! It was your friend.”
My friend. My heart fluttered. “Calix?”
Hades scowled. He tried to hide his face in the carpet again. I pressed my bare foot against his cheek. He stilled.
“Tell me,” I ordered him.
For a heartbeat he was still. His flesh was hot against the bare muscle of my foot.
I pressed him a millimeter harder into the carpet.
“It was nothing,” he said, sounding a little choked. “I’m serious. I was trying to take the herbs in the basket to your house. You said you wanted your mom to have them.”
My heart flip-flopped.
“But as soon as I got to your village, someone saw me and ran off and fetched your little blond friend.”
“Who? Who saw you?”
“I don’t know. Some guy in a uniform.”
Uniform? We didn’t have uniforms in Limer. Hades had to be mistaken.
“By the time I found your mom’s house, your blond friend had converged on it with a bunch of men. You humans are the stupidest thing I ever saw. Imagine, a whole pack of grown adult men listening to a dumb kid.”
As if Hades wasn’t the twenty-six-year-old prince of a kingdom of centuries-old godlings. But all I said was, “Calix is good at getting people to do what he wants.”
“He sounds like a fun guy. Anyway, they chased me off. Your friend shot at me, but he only grazed me. I’m fine.”
“Calix shot you?” My elation drained out of me.
Because whatever blond mob-leader had chased Hades away from my mother’s house, it wasn’t Calix.
Calix was a diplomat, not a soldier. He didn’t know how to fight.
Not once, in our almost two decades of friendship, had I ever seen him so much as scuffle. And he definitely didn’t own a gun.
“Sure did. He makes a puny warrior, you know,” Hades said. “A real warrior would have used his bare hands. Or at least a sword. Something sporting.”
I didn’t bother to tell Hades he had his attacker wrong. Why would I? Why had I even thought he’d be able to recognize Calix? He’d only seen him once, from far away, when I was telling Calix about my idea for the reservoir.
Although… something was nagging at me. Two things.
The first was that I couldn’t figure out who Hades had seen. There weren’t that many young, yellow-haired men in the village. Josie had a cousin of about Calix’s build, but he was a redhead. But maybe that was who Hades had seen, and he had just looked blond in the dark.
And the second thing…
“What about the herbs? What did you do with them, if you couldn’t leave them with my mother?”
“I put them at the border. In your basket.”
I exhaled.
That was that, then. Hades had gone aboveground. He’d tried to give my mother the herbs, but someone — not Calix — had chased him away. But he’d still left the herbs at the border for Calix to find.
The question only remained whether Calix would find them… and what he would do if he did.
In the meantime, I was still on my own.
But Hades had killed me this rabbit.
I took my foot off Hades’s face and looked at the rabbit. It was so… raw. Its body had been torn at the leg joint, and I could see the thin white sliver of fat against the red meat. My mouth watered. I hated myself for even asking, but… “You promise it’s from the Lümerlund side?”
“I’m not answering that again. Don’t eat it if you don’t want it.”
Of course I wanted it. Now that we’d determined that Hades hadn’t run into Calix after all, I couldn’t think of anything else. “Do you have a knife?”
“Not for you.”
“Not to stab you with. I can’t eat the rabbit raw. Humans don’t just tear into raw animals with their teeth. I have to skin it and take the organs out. And to do that, I need a knife.”
“Euch. You what? And you humans say the chaosgotten are cruel. What did that rabbit ever do to you?”
“It insulted my family,” I said dryly. “Just get me a knife and a stick, okay?”
Hades stood up and dusted himself off, looking doubtfully between me and the rabbit.
Then he admitted, “I suppose you don’t have the proper teeth for rending meat,” as if it were an insult, and he went off and came back a little while later with Elke, while I sat there and smelled the animal’s blood and tried not to think about how hungry I was.
Elke carried a beaten metal knife and a sharp, pointed glass stick. She handed them to me. Hades hovered suspiciously like I was going to try to slice someone’s throat, but Elke didn’t seem fazed at all. She seemed… excited.
I rolled back the carpet and laid the rabbit on the stone floor.
I wished I had also asked for disinfectant.
My father had taught me how to skin and dress an animal, but I hadn’t done it since I was very young, and I was clumsy and nervous as I peeled the skin from the muscle, trying not to nick the intestines or bladder.
When I was done, I spitted the rabbit in the giant fireplace.
They both watched curiously as I worked. I rotated the rabbit over the fire. The smell of charred, roasting meat filled the room at once. It was all I could do to keep cooking. The fat crackled and dripped. I actually whimpered out loud.
No one made fun of me.
I couldn’t help it. Far too soon, I ripped the rabbit off the skewer and started cramming fistfuls of almost-raw meat into my mouth. Blood dripped down my chin. I could have sobbed.
“I thought you couldn’t eat it raw,” Hades said rudely, but he was prodding at the rabbit.
Elke asked tentatively, “Is it… good?”
Probably it wasn’t good. It wasn’t seasoned at all, and I had barely cooked it. But I nodded furiously anyway.
“Can I… have some?”
I blinked at Elke. Both my hands were busy shoving food into my mouth, but I nudged the carcass toward her with my toe and shrugged.
With a dexterity I would not have believed possible from a creature that didn’t have hands, she peeled off two thin slivers of meat and gave one to Hades. Hades put his in his mouth, chewed once, made a face, and spat it out.
“Hand it here if you’re not going to eat it,” I said. Hades’s expression of disgust deepened, but he placed his chewed-up bit of meat delicately into my palm. I put it in my mouth. It was damp. I could feel the dents of Hades’s teeth-marks with my tongue. I swallowed.
I looked up. Hades’s expression of disgust had shifted to one of fascination.
“Shut up,” I said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
I looked to Elke for backup. But Elke was ignoring both of us. She was chewing the meat almost studiously, a queer look on her face. After far too long, she swallowed it.
And then the rabbit was gone.
I stood up. My hands and face were covered in animal fat. All at once I was paralyzed by humiliation. How could I have eaten like that, like a wild beast, in front of the Prince and Elke? I was disgusting. No wonder no one back home (like Calix…) had wanted me.
But Hades just said, casually, “Give the lady a napkin, Elke. We wouldn’t want to ruin that nice outfit of hers.”
I was still wearing the white negligée.
I stuck my tongue out at him. Elke, discreetly, offered me a square of fabric. Hades watched me as I wiped my face.
It occurred to me that I really should thank him. But I couldn’t, somehow. His gaze was too intense, too hot, for me to be able to form the sentence.
“What are you looking at?” I snapped at him instead.
“You,” Hades said.
Elke coughed. I reddened. “Well, cut it out, and get out of here so I can get dressed.”
“Okay, goddess.”
“This is the third day!” I screeched.
Oh, gods, it was the third day.
One day left to get water in that reservoir. One day until I was rent by the Monarch’s teeth the way my own teeth had torn that rabbit.
Now that I was no longer starving, the fear of hunger in my body was replaced by a different fear.
“This is the third day,” I repeated. “We have to get to work.”