A/N: So, this is sort of a sudden, spur-of-the-moment WIP. It's fantasy crossed over with horror and you can blame all that on Game of Thrones and From Elfland to Poughkeepsie for giving me ideas, the latter especially. Talk of fantasy being insanity and a heightening of reality made me think along the lines of A Clockwork Orange and my own twisted version of horror.
Basically, it's graphic and has trigger warnings out the wazoo, but I'm liking it so far. It has a female anti-hero, which is basically like the main character being a neon tiger or unicorn.
Enjoy?
Warnings: blood/gore, death penalty/other punishment, classism, servitude/slavery, violence, is-in-first-draft-mode, and probably more.
CHAPTER ONE
Chas stared at the red-rust dribbling down the hill, slipping between raised flagstones and soaking into cracks, feeding the small green plants that sprouted there, yet to be smashed by a wagon’s wheel or smothered in horse’s dung.
Something about it was interesting; maybe the fact blood similar to that flooded her veins, blue under her milk-like, half-translucent skin. She tilted her head, only for the wooden pins in her ashy hair to pull tight against her scalp, digging in with tiny claws like bugs wanting to stay. She straightened herself then got her relief. She tilted her chin up and avoided looking at the faces of Thomas and John beside her; at eight and nine, both were equally horrified. Not that they didn’t have a reason to be.
Chas hid a yawn behind her dusk-pink, billowing velvet sleeve, bored with the affair. Today was normal, even if Thomas and John were new to the show as some of the youngest of her great father’s spawn. She dutifully let her eyes go back to the main attraction, even if she still saw through corners. She watched her step-mother’s face, vacant as ever, and her father’s, old and fat and wrinkly, looking vaguely amused. She watched as her black-haired sister Croi’s stone masquerade slip for a split instant, green high-lighting her cheekbones as she swallowed hard, listened to Rupert sigh, fear pulsing her veins at the hint of wetness in the noise, and watched as Devyos’s face twitched, sickness clear about him even though he was one of the oldest.
She wasn’t sure which one of them was the oldest, really. Most of them came from different mothers, most of them bastards, and all of them constantly scrapping for squatting rights over a plot of land with no worth, if only because they were raised on it, near living the life of peasants. Calling her father a lord was calling a pig a wolf, but to each was own and their king had his own ideas. This grisly and tasteless party was one of his ideas of fun, after all.
She tilted her head again, unable to help it. She was pretty sure she knew what that rope-like thing was now, it a snake-ish thing twisted over itself, stained faintly pink. She squinted. Yes. She was right. Not that there was much error for wrongest. The elf wouldn’t have had rope sticking out of it. Innards, then.
She let out a faint hiss when one of the guards stepped into her view and started to carve. Something fell off with a wet plop, then the guard moved away.
She tightened her fingers in the fabric of her skirt as Croi choked on vomit.
The girl had never learned to stomach blood.
It truly was a pity. Everyone had to learn sometime.
Chas looked away from the string-ups, looking towards Croi. Croi’s dark hair frizzed, a reverse halo around her skull, and her chapped lips were parted in disgust. None of them faired well in the odd steamy temperatures of Boar Town, or, as known to anyone with a soul, Pigs’ Landing.
She looked from Croi to watch as one of the knights’ sons, perhaps Thomas’s age, shook a young elf along like a string puppet.
Her lip curled in disgust at that. Dead things were one thing; those that played with them another.
She sighed softly to herself and then looked to Macelina, her handmaiden and removed-cousin. She showed no sign of anguish at all. Chas moved closer to her.
“You remember your father hanging here,” Chas said.
Macelina looked up at her, eyes duller than leaf-brown church glass, “Yes. Barely.”
Chas hummed. “I can remember my mother burning here.”
Macelina flinched, dark face contorting. “Why?”
“Every memory forgotten is a small death,” Chas said.
“I doubt they’d agree.” Macelina nodded towards the elves, the elves with their bent necks and half-slaughtered bodies.
“They just forgot everything, didn’t they?”
Macelina halfheartedly nodded.
“You’re not concerned that the king has decided to kill the minorities again,” Chas said.
Macelina laughed. “Minorities? I thought he went after anyone who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, wield a sword, my lady,” she said, same amount of malice to her voice as usual.
“You’re not concerned as the daughter of a traitor?” Chas let her eyes glance over Macelina, notice her soft curves and soft face, the lack of expression and lack of anything to distinguish her from the dark-skinned people of the crowd. The rags she wore weren’t suited for a lord’s daughter, even if she were a failed lord’s daughter. It was easy to see why the woman languished in misery.
Macelina’s eyes tightened. “Should I be, mistress?”
“No. Not now,” Chas said. She glanced at Macelina’s flowing robe and saw the older youth’s battered iron sword stretching straight down from the hip. “You can wield a sword, after all.”
Macelina said nothing in response so Chas stepped away.
Her father’s latest bride, who somehow reminded her of a misplaced duck, now stood vapidly at her father’s side, a fur stole around her shoulders as she stood seemingly not afflicted by the heat. Her red-painted lips drooped and her forehead was creased in concern. She turned to Chas’s father then and issued a pretty unforgivable plea, “May we go now?”
Chas winced and Devyos followed suit, their expressions quickly twisting into twin looks of pain. Their eyes went to their father’s face and then took him in from a distance. This was the man that had taught Chas to fear great men. Great men who could pull the tusks off a boar, anyway. Aimery taught her many lessons, mostly about pain and fear and how to handle both, and he did it with honor and righteousness.
Questioning Aimery wasn’t something a smart individual did often.
Yet, Aimery’s slightly-scarred face did little more than momentarily twitch into an unhappy grimace, before he said, “Yes.”
Rupert spoke up then, “They’ll probably be on display at the feast, anyway. You might as well learn to stomach them.”
Chas flinched into Macelina’s side when Aimery let loose a bear-paw hand, snapping Rupert’s head to the side, the boy’s hair falling down almost over his eyes like feathers. He looked like the broken statue of an angel when he shifted away, scuttling like he knew was best and letting loose murmured apologies.
No one went against father. Not for long, anyway.
***
The feast was as magnificent as she expected it to be. They had it in the old conversation chamber, it a place for debate, the throwing of objects, and where men decided when and where to send boys to their deaths. She wasn’t sure what the true name for the room was, but she took it in. She kept herself looking bored as she did, though--no need to start a brag.
There were two dark-polished softwood tables, one raised on a stone dais and the other at floor level; one for the king, queen, their offspring, and very high nobles and one for the lower nobles or families of higher nobles, if the families were large. Her family sat at the long table while her father sat at the circular one. She didn’t mind, really--the floor was colder here, sure, but in the heat that was a small blessing. However, she was surrounded by small children, youthful, hopeful princes who didn’t realize she wasn’t as up for barter as a cart horse or goat, and spiteful nobles deemed even lower than the keepers of Rahma. A fire blazed in a bowl in the middle of the circular table and another was kept in a stone square in the wall, tended by a bent-backed servant. A map of the known world, smoke-blackened and one copied from the map room, which was honestly more impressive to anyone even the least bit scholarly, was on the wall behind her. Animals stuffed to look wild and alive by some tame necromancer lined the walls; at least one bear, a few beautifully feathered birds hung from the ceiling like they were in flight, two pheasants marked one of the room’s entries, and a stag and doe were by the room’s tiny southern window. To her front were too obnoxious princes and, behind them, the reason for their better-than attitudes. A mural, probably a copy, as well, ran along the wall in vivid colors. It showed the defeat of The Eastern Nation. The Eastern Nation’s ancient colors were splattered with blood wherever you saw them, even while the colors of Surah and Lott were shining brighter colored. It could almost be beautiful if the blood-red weren’t so distracting.
She looked away from the graphic example of a snippet of the horrible battles that had led their two countries, if they could be called that, the unified tribe-nations they were, to be pushed together, controlled by the high king of Surah, their host of the night.
She was snapped from her thoughts and then turned off her drink when a shrill wail filled the air. Her cat’s eyes snapped to the table’s entertainment and she curled her lip, pink mayberry wine going sour in her mouth.
She wasn’t certain what the thing was. She could guess it was some sort of pixie or brownie, but the thing was too twisted and filthy to make sense of. It’s giant ears were ducked tight against its skull and its giant, black-and-honey-brown eyes were huge with terror and wet from unshed tears. Its clothing was stained in dried blood, old food, and perhaps other humans’ bodily fluids and gristle clung to its arms and legs; many drunk men of court seemed fond of throwing their leftovers at the creatures. It had bloody cuts covering it, some sewed up with black thread, and the beast was suddenly letting out sound of distress for no real reason. Chas looked from it to Robert and put down her drink cup.
Robert was one of the high king’s sons and now wore a thin gold crown. In a past life, the boy had been a friend of Rupert’s. Chas figured that was only because that it used to be if you called one, you got both, which would make some sort of bond eventually. Otherwise, they were the same age and neither knew his limits.
Today, Robert wore his golden crown and held the base of a white candle, its yellow flame flickering on a black wick. He stabbed at the pixie again and she sucked in her lips.
Bastard.
She stared daggers at the youth, but said nothing. No one defended the honor of a brownie; It was one of those things that society deemed useless. After all, they were animals. No one defended a horse when its master decided it was time for its throat to be slit.
Instead, she wondered how plump little bookish Robert had grown into this cruel and immature young man, with biting yellow eyes and the face of a starved wolf.
She brushed back some of her coarse hair off her shoulder then and looked down at her plate. The food was bizarre as ever. She was sure her mother would have called it novel, but there was nothing novel about a cow’s tongue on your plate. She chose the proper fork and then went to poking it, ignoring the smell that clung to the brownie and the smell of death that hung to the men that had been allowed closer viewing of the latest elf slaughter.
Speaking of which, Rupert had been correct; the elves had joined them for dinner. She attempted to ignore them. They looked like a pair of songbirds with strings tied around their necks hanging from the chandelier over yonder, anyway; it was too gruesome for dinner’s sight.
“So, have you--” It was Alicia, a Baroness from Knife Point, that had started to ask the question. She knew how it would be finished, and quickly dropped her fork.
“Oh dear,” Chas said, all in mocking display. A few actually looked sympathetic. “I hate moving about with this corset.”
She bent over at the waist neatly, body used to acts of contortion ever since her father’s third wife had insisted she dressed as was suitable for her new body, and picked up the silver fork. She looked at a distorted shape in the shiny surface and raised an eyebrow. Was that really--
She sat up slowly, pretending to be collected, and then glanced over her shoulder slowly, chin brushing against looping curls.
The bastard of North Point (North Point was lucky and had only one) was trussed up like a boar at the main entrance of the room, two porches and two shallow bowl lights putting his dirty face in sharp relief. He had a mane of pale blond and red-dark blond bent and broken feathers and the wild eyes of a hunted animal, eyes marked by pretty lashes and sharp triangles of various colors. He looked like his mother but the rest might’ve belonged to the stonemason she’d supposedly slept with, not that he looked much like a man; more so a starved, overgrown boy with his gangly arms and legs and joints that stood out like they were broken.
Chas looked from him, to the pleased face of the high king. His grin was malicious and his eyes squinted in hungry pleasure.
Great. As if this place needed more excitement.
“Hello, Dominic,” John of Reeves said, staring down at his subject. Chas fought back a shiver. The high king’s voice made her blood slow and cold.
“Hello, Master,” Fulke said quietly, voice monotone. I wasn’t sure why John of Reeves called him Dominic. Sure, his mother was certifiably insane and marked his name different on the two papers needed to declare him a citizen, but he was clearly Fulke. If it wasn’t, perhaps he’d have survived a bit better when it came to the insults flung at him by the young to-be knights in North Point.
Princess Dionna took to looking a little ill. I took in the girl. Her blonde hair was lank around her face as always, too thin to hold up on its own, and it was lighter than mine, anyway. Her narrow brown eyes danced around with impish terror, though, while mine lay fixated on her where she sat across the table. I noted her bare, bony shoulders, them automatically making me picture Fulke, which prompted me to ask the questions I was now dying to ask.
I couldn’t ask her, though, as much as I could ask Robert, so I turned to Macelina, who had polished off all the sickening food on her plate and now licked at her fingers, completely ignoring the scandalized table guests in her near vicinity.
“What’s going on?” Chas asked, bowing her head down to whisper in Macelina’s ear.
Macelina turned ever the slightest to give Chas a cold look, even though all her eyes managed to convey was the coldness of a frozen mud puddle.
“Didn’t you hear when Prince Fiorenze said they’d be having a little more than the usual entertainment tonight?” she asked, mumbling.
“Yeah. We have a brownie on the table and two strung up elves. All we need are some chained gypsies playing flute instruments and a wolf’s head and we’ll be set,” Chas said.
Macelina nodded to Fulke. “Well, there’s your wolf’s head.”
Chas’s food clawed its way back up her throat for the first time that day; the first time since she drank bad milk sometime near her eleventh birthday, if she recalled right. “What?”
No. That couldn’t be right. Fulke, who was nothing but a selection of bones masquerading as a weakling of a human, couldn’t be that.
That’s not how things worked.
Wolf’s heads were rough-looking ugly men in their early thirties with issues ranging from theft to butchery of a child, but they were normally just people society didn’t want anymore--or something to that effect. At seven, that’s how her older cousin Willelmus had explained it, anyway.
And, unless Fulke had gotten himself a ruined mind in the few years since she’d seen him when the queen of North Point, his mother, had dropped him off at Rahma for a winter, he wasn’t the sort. He was quiet, gentile, and very polite, as far as he could recall; a downtrodden but tough small youth with an affinity for animals of all sorts.
It didn’t match.
Macelina finally responded then, a sly grin to her face, as if proud to have won this round, “He’s a traitor, he stole a relic from Joan’s Abbey, and he impregnated one of the queen’s younger sisters--or at least that’s what I was told.”
Chas knew that was a lie and gave Macelina a look that informed her she could see through the pig’s dump she was trying to sell her. If he’d done that, he’d have been skewered on a sword on the spot.
Being a wolf’s head meant you’d lived long enough to give a try at running.
She had to know how insane the rumors were, though, so she asked, “What sort of relic?”
“A saint’s skull.”
Hogwash.
“What will they do to him, then?” Chas asked, fear still creeping slowly through her. She was pretty sure the wolf’s head part wasn’t a lie; Macelina’s right eye hadn’t squinted like it did when she told lies, like the ones she’d just spewed as brilliantly as Sir Martin of Hisa managed to dance and/or flirt while drunk.
Instead of what she expected, though, Macelina had a flash of something like unease take over her face, before her expression turned dark. “See for yourself.”
Chas pulled an annoyed expression out of her bag of tricks, then turned to look, expecting anything but what she saw. Fulke’s eyes were terrified, whites taking up twice the space of irises and he had bit his lip hard enough to bleed. One of the guards held his arms behind his back.
Then Chas saw the pliers, the knife, and her mind quickly connected dots. Traitor.
She stood up, shoving the ornate chair she’d been seated on hard enough for it to rock loudly in the suddenly silent court.
Her dress billowed out and swirled around her legs like taffeta water and her dinner knife was clenched in her hand. She grabbed Prince Robert by the scruff of the neck and lifted him across the table. She put the point of her meat knife to his Adam’s apple, then looked up the table to the high king.
“I wish to have Fulke Waters as my servant please.”
