The Shattered Sylph (3 page)

“You want something?” Wat asked.

They went through the servants passage in which Leon had waited, the girl whining fearfully the entire way. Leon was careful not to let go of her, or to let Ril fall too far behind. He wasn’t entirely sure if human weapons could kill a battler, and he had no desire to find out. Wat stayed close to the girl, nearly tripping over her, and Leon had to bite down the urge to tell him to back off. This did not look to be an easy trip home. At least the battler didn’t seem threatened by any of them. Leon suspected he was too stupid for that—which was actually a lucky break for them, at least for now.

As a group, they ran down the corridor into the building’s kitchens, Ril locking the door behind them. The subsequent corridor led past pantries and cold-storage rooms filled with ice, now seemingly deserted. Leon was pretty sure there were still a few servants in hiding,
but so long as they stayed that way, he didn’t care. He kept his sword ready though, just in case. He couldn’t be positive there wouldn’t be more guards, either. There had been very little time to plan this mission. Their biggest advantage was that no one was expecting it. Leon already had ideas for changing the Valley’s summoning ceremonies as a result. They only had a handful of priests themselves, and none of them were ever guarded.

For now, he focused on escape. He wasn’t an expert on the layout of the building, but he did know the corridor they were in would bring them outside and behind. But while the door had been left open during the ceremony, now he sucked in a breath as he saw that someone had locked it behind them when they fled. Leon cursed. The girl only stared dumbly, while Wat started rubbing himself up against her. Distressingly, she didn’t seem to mind much.

Ril stepped forward. “Move,” he growled, pushing his master back.

“Don’t,” Leon started, but Ril aimed a palm at the door. Leon felt the blast wave, and the heavy door blew off its hinges, crashing noisily to the ground. He barely caught Ril before the battler hit the floor. Swearing, Leon handed his sword to the girl.

“Hold that,” he told her. “And for the sake of all the gods, don’t have sex now!”

She blushed prettily and stepped away from Wat, who looked deeply disappointed. Leon didn’t really care. Shifting Ril around, he heaved and managed to get his sylph up across his shoulders. Unconscious, the battler wasn’t light.

Praying there weren’t any guards outside, or else he and Ril were probably dead—Wat would protect the girl, if no one else—Leon headed outside. There was no one in sight. Giving a quick glance, he led the way across an empty, garbage-strewn lot. From there, Leon plunged down one of
the alleys he’d mapped out during the previous day, while Ril was busy pretending to be a prince. Their belongings were only a few blocks over, hidden under a pile of old lumber behind a shop. In the hope of everything going right, Leon had stashed extra clothes for all of them, as well as travel gear. Their horses were in a stable a few blocks farther. Again, just in case, Leon had procured four.

Ril came awake with a bit of water splashed in his face, and Leon left him to slowly dress in travel clothes as he got both the girl and Wat ready.

“What’s your name?” he asked the blonde, and held up Ril’s cloak for privacy while she dressed. Behind them, Wat struggled with his pants.

“Gabralina,” she told him. “Can I go home now?”

“I’m afraid not. Not with him, and he won’t ever leave you. We do have a place for you, though. You’ll be safe there.”

She regarded him with eyes that were wholly innocent, sweet, and empty-headed. “Is it beautiful?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” he promised. That at least was no lie. “It’s a long journey, however—nearly a month by horseback.

“We have no choice. You’ll be hunted down here,” he added, when she looked stunned. He shot a look at Wat, who had both feet in the same leg of his pants and was falling over. Ril simply watched, eyebrows raised. “This is very important, Gabralina. You need to listen to me.” She nodded. “Do you know what Wat is?”

“No.”

“He’s a battle sylph—a
good
one,” he added, at her frightened look. “He loves you and he wants very much to make love to you.” His gaze hardened. “You mustn’t let him. If you do, horrible things will happen.”

“What sort of things?” the blonde whispered.

“Really terrible things,” he replied, trying to think.
Every instinct Wat had would be telling him to mate with her. If he did so before he was taken to the queen and subsumed into her hive, it really would be a terrible thing. The greatest secret of the Valley was that any battler without a queen who mated with a female master would make her a queen herself, able to sense and control every sylph close enough to be drawn into their broadcast energy pattern. That was how Solie had become queen, and she was a good ruler. But given these two, it would be a nightmare.

“While you’re travelling with us, I want you and Wat to be like a brother and sister. Don’t let him touch you, got it?” he said.

Gabralina frowned and stepped out from behind the cloak, clad in a simple riding dress of cotton with brown shoes. Her hair shone like gold over the top of it, and her curves were obvious even through the loose material. The woman was gorgeous, making Leon wonder why she’d ever been picked as a sacrifice. She looked more like she should be some nobleman’s mistress.

She didn’t seem to notice Leon’s appraisal, instead looking down at Wat, who was on his back, trying to pull his pants on by way of his head. Ril looked as if he wanted to kill the other sylph. “How about Wat and I just have sex then?” she suggested instead.

Para Dubh was a kingdom with a land mass ten times the size of Sylph Valley, comprising dozens of little hamlets and villages scattered through the mountains that made up most of its geographical territory. The center of its power and its greatest architectural achievement, however, was a massive city of the same name, built on the sloping shores of a wide ocean bay.

Though she had memories of living in another city when she was a child, Lizzy Petrule had never before had the freedom to simply explore—and the city of Para Dubh was much larger than Eferem’s capital ever hoped to be. Lizzy was sure she would have been impressed with Eferem anyway, if she’d been allowed to wander, but her mother had always been around, or one of her three sisters with whom—as the eldest—Lizzy had always been expected to help, even though the family had servants. She hadn’t minded most of the time, but she’d always wanted the freedom to do as she pleased just once.

Now, though it took her weeks of begging her mother, there were no parents in sight and she was almost on her own. Giggling, she and her friend Loren hurried down the sidewalk that led to the docks, Loren’s water sylph, Shore, hurrying at her side and holding her mistress’s hand. Shore was getting good at mimicking human shape, and she looked like a pretty realistic little girl, if a bit wetter than normal. Three blocks behind, the rest of the group that
had come to the city with the two girls were still unloading wagons.

“They’re going to be so mad at us,” Loren sniggered. “Did you see Daton’s face when we ran off?”

“He was furious!” Lizzy agreed. She was a little nervous of what their ostensible chaperon would say when they returned, and she truly didn’t want her mother to find out, after all of her promises to behave, but mostly she was too giddy to care. She was eighteen and legally an equal to any man in Sylph Valley, if not here. And even if Daton reported this to her parents, her mother would only yell at her for so long. Her father had left months ago with Ril. Lizzy was still angry at that. She’d begged to go along, but Leon and his sylph weren’t as easy to wear down as her mother, and they’d refused. She’d argued until she was almost blue in the face, but neither her father nor Ril would budge. So, she’d had to stay behind. She hadn’t forgiven either one of them yet.

Well, she was having an adventure now. With Loren at her side, Lizzy ran through the strange city, marveling at the sights and the sloping roads. Para Dubh had been built on a hill by
human
hands, unlike how things were built by sylphs in the Valley, and the roads zigzagged down to the ocean.

Neither had seen the ocean before, and after Shore’s reaction, both girls immediately chose the docks as their first destination. The little water sylph had been struck dumb by the sight of all that salt water, and it was their duty to take her to see everything up close, they decided. The others could unload the wagon. It was just a single load of iron ore, sent as a gift to the ruling family of Para Dubh as part of a trade agreement—and to test the people bringing it. Except for Daton, everyone who’d come was under the age of twenty.

Loren had the only sylph. Usually, responsible adults were the only ones allowed to have sylphs, but Loren had been chosen after her water sylph’s first master died. Loren had been fourteen at the time and was almost twenty now, making her close to two years older than Lizzy, but the girl was so immature that Lizzy doubted she would ever have been selected for a sylph if the decision hadn’t been left up to Shore.

Ahead of them the road zigged, the side that faced the ocean fronted by a waist-high wall of cobbled stone. For a moment the two girls leaned on it and looked out over the beautiful old city, the rooftops covered in gardens and the spaces in between filled with walls, statues, and strips of park. Neither had ever seen anything like it, and they stopped to regain their wind, confident that they were far enough away from Daton that he couldn’t just call them back.

“I love it here,” Loren breathed, turning her face into the salty breeze that blew over them even this high up. It brought the scent of flowers, as well as salt and fish. Beside her, Shore turned in the same direction, smiling. She didn’t say anything—not so that Lizzy could hear—but Loren smiled down at her.

“We’ll start moving again in a minute. It’s not going anywhere.”

“I wish I could hear her,” Lizzy said.

“You have to be her master,” Loren replied smugly, which was an attitude Lizzy always hated. Loren thought she was better than other girls because she had a sylph. It made Lizzy want to point out the fact that her father’s battler Ril had told her he loved her and that she was his queen. He’d said it many times.

But that wouldn’t help any. “Solie’s the queen,” Loren would taunt, and though battlers were crudely known for
their single-minded ability to both fight and fuck, Ril was not. The joke around the Valley—told only where her father could never hear—was that Ril had been turned into a eunuch by his injury. He certainly hadn’t looked at her since he was hurt, Lizzy thought bitterly. Except once.

“We should get going,” Lizzy told her friend instead. “It looks like it’s a ways off.”

Loren made a face, but both of them were used to a lot of walking: to school and back, to the fields and back…Sylph Valley had more sylphs than any other kingdom in the world, but they weren’t slaves. Humans had to carry their own weight, and both girls had picked more corn and fruit and planted more seeds than they ever would have liked. This on top of tending the family garden, chickens, and horses. Lizzy’s father told her it was good for her. Not that he ever joined in, though she’d sometimes seen him help with the heavier work.

Of course, this year he and Ril had missed the entire planting. Lizzy herself got to miss half, thanks to this trip.

The two girls ran down the steep road, Shore keeping up easily and all of them laughing as they darted around street musicians and performers, groups of old women dressed in black and men carrying heavy baskets on their shoulders. There was nothing like this back home, and they reveled at the sights, smells, and sounds. If either of the pair had had any money, they would have spent it tasting everything.

But they didn’t. Instead, they just stuck to the road, following it down along switchbacks that passed homes hidden behind tall stone walls with wrought-iron gates, and then past shops filled with myriad objects neither girl had ever imagined. And the buildings only grew more common, spaced closer together on the level ground before the water, homes and other shops replaced by markets
specializing in fish. The girls clasped hands, hoping not to lose each other in the suddenly thick crowd, and Lizzy looked behind her for a landmark along the road they’d taken down. They could just follow it back up to where they’d left the others.

She found a marker easily enough: a statue of a man on a rearing horse, beneath a streetlight with a glass bowl over an oil lamp. Trotting under it, however, already seeing her and waving madly, was a tall, lanky boy barely older than herself, his jaggedly cut hair hanging in his eyes.

“Justin?” Lizzy gasped.

Loren turned. “What is
he
doing here?”

Looking for her, no doubt, Lizzy realized with a little flutter she couldn’t decide was excitement or irritation. Justin was the son of Cal Porter, one of the Valley’s original drovers and—as he liked to keep reminding everyone—the one who’d first brought Solie and Heyou to the Community. Cal was also very vocal about the idea that his nineteen-year-old son would make the perfect husband for Lizzy Petrule, ever since Lizzy was caught giving him a kiss at the harvest dance when she was sixteen. It was the only time he’d kissed her, however, and it had probably only happened thanks to lots of hard apple cider and her own frustrations—and it wasn’t the only kiss she’d received that long night.

He’d been wooing her ever since, in his awkward, shy way. For her part, Lizzy wasn’t sure what to think. She liked Justin. He was honest and friendly, completely incompetent at lying to anyone, and he never gave up on her, even when she snubbed him or joked about him to her friends, or when she skipped out on dates their mothers arranged, laughing at him when he looked crestfallen. He just kept trying, and in the last year she’d stopped laughing at him and skipping out on their dates. She was even
wondering when he might have the nerve to try and kiss her again…and if she’d let him.

Part of the reason she’d come on this trip, though, was to get away from most everyone she knew. She’d thought it would help her decide what she wanted to do with her life. Her dreams from when she was twelve and thirteen hadn’t come true, and she wanted to go somewhere she could reflect on life and maybe learn to look at Justin with fresh eyes. Only he’d come along, and now here he was again. Part of her was glad to see him, but the other part was terribly angry.

“What are you doing?” she shouted when he got close.

Justin, who had been grinning, skidded to a nervous halt, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “I followed you. Daton said no one was supposed to be alone here.”

“Do I look like I’m alone?” she groused, facing away from him with her hands on her hips.

She was tall, but Justin still towered over her. “But you’re both girls,” he protested, and winced as he realized what he’d said. Lizzy and Loren both glared at him. Even Shore frowned, her eyebrows drawn together. She was dripping on the ground, Lizzy noticed absently.

“Don’t call me a girl,” Loren snapped, and made a face at Lizzy. “I’m not staying with him.” Turning, she headed for the closest dock, which stretched out over the water, small ships and longboats pulled up to either side. Men were frantically busy loading and unloading gear and fish and shouting at each other. Loren made her way through this, leading Shore.

Lizzy eyed Justin. He seemed miserable. He hadn’t meant to offend anyone, she knew, but sometimes he just blurted out the worst things possible. Usually it was only when someone else was nearby. When he was alone with her, he was much more confident.

“You’re lucky a battler didn’t hear you say that,” she complained, still a bit angry at him for following. He sagged even more. Most of the world still considered women second-class citizens, but the battlers in the Valley got very cranky at such treatment. No one had died yet for anything they’d said, but everyone had learned to keep sexist opinions to themselves.

Still, Lizzy couldn’t hold on to her anger for long. Justin meant well, and she and Loren running off hadn’t been terribly smart, even if Loren was supposed to be old enough to be responsible. Of course, if Loren were, Lizzy thought, she wouldn’t still be hanging out with girls in their teens.

“I’m sorry,” Justin said.

She sighed, turning and slowly heading down the dock after Loren and Shore. “It’s okay, but I told you that I wanted some time to myself.”

“I know. It’s not really safe here, though,” he replied. “Daton told me to come after you.”

She should have known. There was always someone around to make sure she was being a good girl. If it wasn’t her father, it was Daton, or Justin in Daton’s place. Lizzy had to bite down on her anger before she started yelling again. It wasn’t really Justin’s fault. She supposed she should be glad they trusted her alone with him—though really, that was just one more thing to be annoyed about: they weren’t afraid of her being alone with Justin at all.

In her mother’s mind, Lizzy suspected, the marriage was already fixed. It would have been, she was sure, if Queen Solie hadn’t banned arranged marriages entirely. At least no one could
make
her marry someone she didn’t want, though they’d hint endlessly. She shot a sideways look at Justin where he flanked her, looking around with the same wonder she herself had been feeling until now.
She just wasn’t sure if she wanted to be married to anyone. Not yet.

Marriage. Loren would tell her to haul Justin out behind the barn and get any itches scratched and then not worry about it, but Loren was the sort to haul nearly anyone out behind the barn. She’d even told Lizzy that she’d seduced battlers. Lizzy wasn’t so sure of that. Loren had never actually named any battler she’d been with, and for all their reputation, they were supposedly loyal to their masters. And from what Lizzy had heard about their appetites, they might be more than even Loren could handle. Of course, Lizzy didn’t expect to ever know what they were
truly
like.

“Have you seen the ocean before?” she asked Justin, by way of apology.

Justin shook his head emphatically. “It’s unbelievable. And it smells!”

Her anger gone, Lizzy laughed at that, and she daringly reached out to take his hand. Justin squeezed hers and beamed. Perhaps his following them wouldn’t turn out to be so bad after all.

They walked down the long dock, their boots making a clomping sound on the wood. It was wide, but still they had to step around stacks of goods or men trying to unload the boats. There was shouting and curses, and Lizzy stared about her, seeing skins of a dozen different colors and clothes she never would have imagined, even as she had to nearly dance out of the workers’ paths. She saw tall men, short men, dark-skinned men, and pale men. She saw men with tattoos over all or parts of their bodies, and some with more jewelry than the vainest woman. Others were completely hairless. She giggled and clutched Justin’s hand tighter, dragging him along as she hurried to catch Loren and Shore.

The older girl stood at the very end of the dock, Shore crouched nearby, as though she was contemplating a leap into the water, while her master flirted with a man in loose, flowing clothes. He was bare chested and had tattoos curling around his torso and up his arms to encircle his neck. He grinned down at Loren in a way that made the hair on Lizzy’s neck rise, and she stopped a few feet away, not sure what to do.

“Maybe I did come here to find someone like you,” Loren was telling him, tapping his chest flirtatiously with a finger. Behind her, Shore got ready to jump, but her master grabbed her shoulder without even looking. “We certainly don’t have anyone quite like you back home.”