Chapter 21 #3
But she looked all too human. Her ears weren’t even all that pointed, not in any definably different sense; she was petite, her limbs proportional to her body, her face as human as mine.
If they were twisting animals and humans into strange hybrids, she was probably one of the unfortunate recipients of their occult experimentation.
Maybe. It was impossible to know. But the fact remained that she still hadn’t woken up.
“Wroth…” The panic of my first dead body—the first person I’d ever killed, whether I meant to or not—had saturated my brain. “What do I do?”
The woman laid there like a dead thing. Perhaps I was wrong, and she had merely been preserved in that icy liquid, like the severed heads. Maybe the Fae, in their rush to get wherever they’d disappeared to, simply hadn’t cared to encase her body in crystal first.
Wroth made a grumbling noise, even as he pressed an ear to her chest, eyes narrowing as he listened to her lungs. His nostrils twitched and flared; he gave her a sharp look, displeased about something, but all he said was, “Her heart beats.”
He clasped his hands and pressed them down beneath her breasts, shoving down in sharp, short motions, and just as I was sure he was working on a corpse, the woman’s entire body jerked, arms and legs spasming, and she jackknifed upright with a cough, choking up a vast quantity of the blue liquid and spewing it all over the floor and my boots.
She coughed once more, flopped back on the floor, and went still.
Slowly, oh so slowly, her eyes cracked open. The irises were as black as her hair was white, confused and unfocused.
“Jesamin, move back,” he said, his voice sharp, but I stood my ground as the woman twitched at the sound of his voice. He remained crouched over her, tail lashing with unspoken wariness.
“You’re alive,” Wroth said to her, his gaze assessing, then he glanced at me helplessly. What do you say to someone who has been floating unconscious for countless centuries? “Do you…understand me?”
As he spoke, her eyes focused on the ceiling above, flaring through unreadable emotions. She remained supine, her limbs limp, lips trembling as they pressed together. Only once did her gaze flick to Wroth, and another shiver wracked her body.
I sighed, putting a hand on Wroth’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, Wroth, but I think she’s terrified out of her mind. Fiends may not have existed the last time she was awake.”
He backed away, and I took his place, holding my hands out like she was a wild animal.
“I am Jesamin,” I said, putting a hand on my chest when I said my name. “You’re safe now…well, as safe as you can be. We won’t hurt you.”
The woman’s gaze flicked between us, still groggy but clearly suspicious.
“Jesamin.” I pointed to myself again, then gestured to my fiend lover. “Wroth.”
She slowly sat up, now starting to shiver in earnest, her teeth clattering loudly, and examined my face. Then she opened her mouth and spoke in a hoarse voice.
I didn’t understand a word of it. It was a liquid language, rising and falling, with seemingly three vowels for every consonant. Something about it made the fine hairs on the back of my neck rise, and I wondered if she was speaking in the original language of the Fae.
Wroth was still grumbling behind me, rummaging in his pack, and the woman cast him another dubious glance before mimicking my gesture, indicating herself with two fingers to her collarbone. “Líadan,” she said, slowly and clearly.
I repeated it, and she nodded gravely. She stared at my naked throat, tapping her collar, then she asked me a question, her voice rising at the end, and looked around expectantly.
She went terribly still at the sight of the darkened, dry tubes, the shattered glass, the mummified lumps. Her breath came faster, almost panicked, and she slithered backwards on her rump until she hit the base of her cylinder.
“Give this to her,” Wroth said, holding out one of his blankets. I gave it a furtive sniff, but it smelled clean enough.
“You’re freezing,” I said, using my gentle-the-wild-animal voice. “Put this on. You’ll feel better with a few more layers.”
Líadan’s mouth had dropped open as she took in the destruction of the cylinders, and when she looked back at me, her eyes were shiny with tears.
She asked me another incomprehensible question, her voice cracking, and I took it upon myself to lean forward, button her shirt, and wrap the blanket around her shoulders.
Wroth even found a pair of socks in my pack, and I pulled them over her feet.
She allowed me to do so, almost like a human-sized doll, limp with distress. I offered a hand, maneuvering her to her feet and wondering if her legs would even hold her after all that time spent weightless.
“I’m unsure of this,” Wroth said darkly, but he was careful not to cast an assessing eye at the traumatized woman, who wobbled as she hung on my arm.
“She was a slave.” I nodded towards her, willing him to see the ring of chthonium around her neck. “Can you get a pair of breeches from my pack?”
She was several inches shorter than me, a little wider in the hips, but she gamely pulled the breeches on as we conspicuously looked away, making it clear we were willing to give her some privacy.
Wroth shifted from foot to foot, clearly disturbed and wanting to move on, and I spoke quietly to Líadan as we guided her down the corridor, knowing she wouldn’t understand, but hoping another human voice might be a comfort to her.
“We will find Marrion soon, and she can look you over,” I said, grimacing as we passed a human man in a cylinder. No bubbles rose from his nose; he floated motionless, perfectly preserved, yet so clearly dead I was amazed I had questioned the life in Líadan at all.
She stared at the man, though, her eyes going blank with yet another terrible shock. “Riagán?” she asked, her voice cracking into a rough whisper as she pressed her palms to the glass.
There was a collar around his throat as well, and though his limbs were only slightly too long for his body, just disproportionate enough to make the primitive side of my brain recoil, he appeared as human as Líadan.
She leaned her head on the glass, whispered under her breath, and turned her back on him, eyes downcast.
It was only towards the end of the hall that even the former Fae-slave skittered away from the cylinders.
There was a warg in one. Having heard stories all my life, yet never having actually seen one, I stopped dead in fascination.
He was alive, bubbles moving upwards. Several eyes clustered over each cheek were closed; his body sprouted thick hair in patches, limbs long and thin, his snout pasted shut with the pale jelly around the tube to hide his fangs.
Unlike Líadan, who had seemed to float within a large, empty space, the warg was so large it seemed his sheer mass and coiled limbs filled the cylinder entirely.
“Gods, this is what you fought in the war?” I whispered to Wroth.
“Worse,” he said, coolly eyeing the warg. “The ones we fought were alive and moving.”
I remembered thinking the stakes and wolfsbane around Lonmire were antiquated affectations. Now I thought they weren’t nearly enough if you had to fear something like this prowling around your village.
“Don’t even think of asking me to free this one,” Wroth said with a snort.
“No.” I peeled my eyes from the warg. “No, I would not like to see him alive and moving.”
Líadan crept past the warg on silent feet, clinging to my shoulder again once we moved along.
“You didn’t much like him, did you?” I asked, not expecting an answer, and not receiving one.
“I wonder what you saw. I hope…I hope I haven’t ruined you, rather than letting you die a natural death in your sleep. ”
Wroth, only a few steps ahead of me, turned and touched my shoulder. “You made the right choice,” he said quietly. “You did what you thought was right. The gods know the world might be a better place if everyone had the courage of their convictions as you do.”
I tried to smile, but I watched the silent woman sidelong, her black eyes like holes burned into her skull, and wondered.