THREE #3
"I realize that," I agreed, nodding. "But there are areas of the human realm.
Places where not a tree can be found, let alone the veil to The Green.
Places where the humans crush so tightly together that there isn't a whisper of air between them in the streets, where someone could disappear if they needed to. "
"Around all that metal," Drake mused, brows drawing low. "It doesn't bother you?"
"I've never lived in one of the human cities.
My parents kept an estate for me on a large piece of land.
It had human servants - changelings cast aside mostly - to tend to me.
There wasn't much exposure to it. I had been in a town only once, cars and trains around," I went on, wondering if those words were lost on him as well, if he had ever seen the giant metal beasts hurtling through the world at unnatural speeds, carrying countless humans to the buildings where they worked.
"It made me achy," I admitted, remembering the way I had gone to bed bone tired afterward, soreness like growing pangs in my limbs.
"But I could learn to live with it. I'd have to.
Jasper and Jade did alright," I added in an attempt to bolster my own certainty that I could do it.
"The body can almost get used to a certain amount of pain," Drake commented, voice guarded.
When I turned, I saw a veil over his eyes as well.
He would know.
Pain.
He would know it better than most.
His entire life since my father came upon him had been torment.
Slave labor meant to break his resolve, his spirit.
Then there had been the beatings.
For fun.
For entertainment.
To try to bring about the Change.
I'd never seen it.
Him Changed.
I doubted my father's guards had ever managed to make him break enough to bring it about. Or else I doubt he would have been living in a barn doing manual labor anymore.
My father would have been selling tickets, creating fights to put his Draca up against someone else's poor, enslaved creature.
They got it the worst, it appeared, the fae who Changed, who became other things.
Treated like lower beasts, taken as slaves, killed for fun like hunters in the human realm with the large-eyed deer who did nothing to deserve death.
A Draca would bring in the biggest betters, the worst of the worst, wanting to see a creature of myth in all its glory, fire billowing from its mouth, setting all the other animals ablaze.
I'd seen him losing his control before, had seen the plates erupting from his skin, bloodied and fierce.
But try as they might, they could never fully break his spirit, never make him become a plaything for the rich, the powerful.
My stomach sank each time I would hear a guard call out to him.
Draca.
Like a slur, like an insult.
The beatings always followed.
Daily.
More often even, I imagined.
I tried, here and there, to interrupt it, to get the guards to go do something else, to save him what little bit of pain I could.
But I wasn't naive.
I knew he went to bed bloodied and bruised more nights than he didn't.
I knew he knew more about pain than I ever would.
My heart ached for his reality.
"I'm sorry for what they did to you. For what my father did to you," I told him, voice getting a little thick.
To that, his eyes - along with his body - softened, the guards fell. "You're not responsible for the crimes of your father."
Crimes.
I had never heard it called such.
Even if that was what it was.
A crime.
To beat, to enslave, to torture.
It wasn't generally seen as such in our realm.
Maybe the word, the idea, came from his clan. Maybe they were not violent as one would think creatures made of scales with the breath of fire within them would be.
Maybe they were kind and peaceful.
"I wish I could have stopped them."
"You certainly tried," he surprised me by saying.
My brows had drawn low, and a slow smile tugged at his lips.
"Come now, Amy. In what world did you have an emergent need for them to come and move your armoire around in your room?
" he asked, reminding me of one of my less inventive attempts at distracting them.
"I'll never forget that," he added, shaking his head.
"You were all of a babe, half leaning out your bedroom window, voice cold as your mother's - which I knew not to be your own - informing them that they had forgotten their agreement to come up and move it, and that you were going to go tell your father if they did not do so immediately. "
"I never did ask them to do it in the first place," I informed him, shrugging. "But they couldn't be accused of being the brightest bunch. They all figured they'd forgotten. I ended up living with the armoire half-blocking my closet for that year."
His smile pulled up higher at that. "You always tried, Amy.
I saw that. But you were young. Your father was dead inside.
There was nothing you could do to save me from it all.
Well, until now that is," he added. "I barely remembered what it felt like not to have chains eating away at your flesh, burning the skin away day after day, night after night.
I feel lighter," he added, shaking his head at himself as though he were being silly.
"I couldn't even lift them. I don't know how you managed to carry that weight for... I don't even know how long you were there."