“Please tell me,” he said, “that you weren’t hoping to wear this.” He indicated the pink dress with exaggerated disgust.
“Not on your life,” I said, and let it go. “…They’re here, then?”
“Most of them,” he said. “Some make a habit to arrive fashionably late, but if I’m gone much longer, they’ll start to wonder what’s become of me.”
“So you haven’t gone in yet,” I said.
“I have not.” He held out his arm for me to take. “Shall we?”
I swallowed. His entrance alone would make the room go still. Him with me might give somebody a stroke. The thought, oddly enough, made me laugh. I took his arm. “We shall.”
We left the room in a soft whirling of silk and satin. I felt faint when I heard the door close behind us: but I remembered what I looked like, and the feeling faded a bit. I could do this, wear this painted face like a mask, a Halloween costume. I’m not Brittany Lu tonight. I’m someone much braver, with significantly less regard for her own personal safety.
“You,” Darin whispered, “look spectacular.”
“You too,” I said, voice small. Spectacular was not a word I wanted to associate with myself tonight.
But again: that was probably the point.
***
The gala hall took up the entirety of the top three floors – by which I mean the top floor, who’s glass walls and tapering ceiling towered at least three stories above us, hung with glinting white lights that might have been chandeliers or fairy lights. The sky rose black and starless around us, everything but the moons drowned out by scalding white light. The floor, polished dark wood, was ringed with white tables draped in white cloth and set with flowers of every color, something with folding petals like a rose. Plates full of small white pastries and meats were set at every place before chairs mostly still pushed in and empty. A few people were sitting and talking, older men and women and a few rambunctious children someone had the bright idea to bring along, but mostly, people stood, milling, talking. Waiting.
They froze when we entered. No one announced us. No one had to. The awareness of us spread over the crowd as a wave, a breath of wind that stole the words and whispers from every mouth as it passed over them. Grey faces framed by burning white hair turned to face us, metal jewelry rattling at ears and throats and wrists. Sarchan faces were impossible to read, but it was safe to say they were surprised.
Darin grinned at the procession. “Evening, all,” he said. And he turned to me, took my face in his hands, and kissed me.
I expected a gasp, or the sound of breaking glass as someone fainted and dropped their drink, but there was nothing, just cold, uncomprehending silence.
He lingered on my lips for a long moment before pulling back, smiling, and taking my arm again.
“That was,” I started. I didn’t have an end to the sentence, but the sentiment got across just fine.
“Abrupt,” Darin said softly, smiling at people as we carved our way through the crowd to the far end of the room, where a slightly higher table with slightly nicer chairs sat against the glass, framed by black and white silk and red flower petals. “Shocking, tantalizing.”
“Tantalizing?”
“Maybe just for me,” he said, grinning. He walked and spoke with the smugness of a gay couple walking past a hate rally: totally and completely out of fucks to give, and freer for it. Everything is funny when your enemy’s mad.
“It was deliberate,” he said. “It will force them to ask the questions we require of them without giving them the chance to think you’re a glorified pet.”
“…Okay,” I said. “What should I do?”
“Talk,” he said. “As much and as loudly as you can.”
We made it to the table on its platform and sat ourselves in the two center chairs, black metal and red cushions webbed with braided red string. Everyone was staring at us.
“What’s gotten into you?” he said to them merrily, and raised his arms. “Eat! Dance! Celebrate another year of brotherly skullduggery.”
The whole hall blinked at once, and, slowly, people turned back to their circles. No doubt to gossip, and whisper things in the vein of “holy shit, did you see that?”
“Brotherly skullduggery?” I said.
“And sisterly.”
“…Right.”
A chair scraped away from the table to my left, and Sol-dam sat down beside us in what I assumed were medical dress-whites – long white robes with thick bands of silk flowing down behind his back like a ragged cape. He nodded at me as he sat and turned to Darin with one eyebrow arched high.
“That was…interesting,” he said.
Darin smirked. “What was?”
“I can’t tell if you’re clever or just stupid enough to be brilliant.” Sol-dam shook his head, laughing. He clasped his hands together on the table in front of him and examined the floral patterns on his plate. “Brittany,” he said, looking up, “eat something.”
“Is it time?”
“Yes,” said Darin, and he reached for a platter of some steaming meat that smelled very much like sweet and sour chicken.
“Show them you can use utensils,” said Sol-dam, then held up a hand to stop me from speaking. “I know, it’s ridiculous and awful and insulting, but it will prove something to them. Darin”—he gave Darin a hard, reproving look—“has forced their minds open by kissing you. Keep the dialogue going, widen their confusion. Force them to assume what you are.”
“A trained pet?” I said blandly.
“No. A person. A poor Sarchan girl with a genetic disorder.”
“Thanks?” I said.
“You’re welcome,” Sol-dam said, smiling. “Make them think you must be like them.” He held up a three-pronged fork. “Please?”
I scowled at him. “Fine.” I picked up my fork and stabbed at a piece of meat on Darin’s plate, lifted it to my mouth, chewed and swallowed. Sweet and sour.
The hall had gone quiet again. Everyone was staring.
“What?” I whispered.
Darin was smiling like a mad god. “You seem to be a step ahead of me. Take some meat from there to your plate,” he said, pointing to the platter. I did, and he took a piece from my plate and ate it.
Someone gasped.
“Does that mean something?” I said, turning to Sol-dam.
“Sharing food is something only very close people do,” he said. “Couples, usually, sometimes siblings. Keep doing it, it’s freaking them out.”
“Better idea,” said Darin. He forked another piece and said, “Open wide.”
I did and pulled the meat from his fork with my teeth. We stared at each other with smug, childish eyes, conscious of the mortified mutterings of everyone else in the room.
Behind me, Sol-dam was laughing under his breath.
“Niris,” Darin bellowed, still looking at me. To the far right came a sharp metallic screech. “Music, if you would.”
A moment of uncertainty passed, and a chorus of deep stringed instruments rose up over the stone-still crowd.
People turned to their tables and took their seats with all the urgency of flowing molasses. Silverware clinked against plates and a conversation emerged from the silence, rising steadily until the room was humming with music and voices and laughter, and the occasional curse from the lightweights who were already drunk out of their skulls. Servants – very large ones in simple black attire – walked between tables with desserts and champagnes and wines and a pale-yellow liquid Lenada had called “hard sugar”. Only a few people were drinking that, and they all had this dreamy, vacant look on their faces.
“How we doing?” I said, leaning closer to Sol-dam.
“Well, I think.” He scanned the crowd, maybe looking for dissenting faces. Every now and then someone would steal a glance my way, but the second they saw me looking back, they dropped their eyes.
We ate and talked and I tried to smile and nod my deference in the Sarchan fashion at anyone who looked at me long
enough to try. Lurasi scowled and glared at me, while a cluster of misra – ministers, not so different from senators – regarded me with open, unmarred curiosity. I sipped at a thick, bitter red drink that was two inches to left of being wine and raised the glass to them. A misra in blue raised his glass in turn.
Then Darin stood. “Come.”
I took his hand and stood with him. “Where?” It was a bit early to be leaving.
“With me.”
We stepped off the platform and into the empty space between the tables. Conversation died, and everyone turned to look at us.
“Niris,” he called. “Something quick.”
And we danced.
Dancing is a universal concept, but dances on Earth were frightfully variant, ranging from traditional stomp dances and breakdancing to ballroom dancing – none of which I had ever been very good at. He took my hand and grabbed me by the waist, and we started to spin. Slowly at first, then faster, and faster and faster until the room beyond us was a blur of color lost in a wash of sound. I felt us move forward and back to the beat of a drum I could barely hear. With each passing step, Larus drew closer, and closer and closer until we were pressed together, both of us looking down.
I managed not to fall over myself, and when Darin stopped spinning me, people were clapping. Darin bowed and I curtsied, and then people were standing and taking partners of their own. They flowed around us like a school of fish, everyone almost but not quite bumping into each other. Darin took my hand and led me over to the musicians, who were scratching out a bouncing tune on instruments that might have been violins or lutes or anything. The one closest to us, a slight man with short white hair and a soft smile, nodded to Darin as we passed.
“You were brilliant,” he whispered to me.
“Thanks,” I said – and we were stopped by a man.
“Ah,” he said, “Bir-ee-tany, is it? Sol-dam told me your name.”
Something in his smile made me want to knock his teeth in. I returned it as coldly as I could and curtsied, bowing with one hand forward the way I’d seen the other ladies do.
“It is.” I straightened and clasped my hands together at my waist, squeezing my fingers until they stung. “And who might you be?”
“Bir-i-tany,” said Darin, and I noticed he wasn’t calling me Tany. He didn’t like this guy any more than I did. “May I introduce Misra Kallen Arkai.”
I’d rather you didn’t.
He was thin, even for a Sarchan, and of a height with Darin. Everything about him reminded me of a mummified corpse: his skin stretched tight over his bones, his eyes bulged from his head, his lips were thin and wrinkled and barely moved when he smiled. He seemed more fish than Sarchan, honestly, and he was staring at me with unmitigated interest, not so different from the way Orin had looked at me before Larus had thrown him out the window.
“It’s a pleasure,” I said, and added, “Go fuck yourself” in English, just because I could.
Kallen looked to Darin for a translation. Darin kept an admirably straight face as he said, “It is an Earthly greeting, sir. She wishes you good fortune.”
I smirked. Kallen made a face I couldn’t identify and visibly shook himself of some discomfort. “So she can, indeed, speak?”
“Unless you’ve lost some hearing, sir, I believe the pair of you just had an exchange,” Darin replied, each word colder than the last. His smile did little to level the tension.
Kallen responded only with a contemplative murmuring. He smiled mirthlessly to me, and to Darin, and excused himself to track down the man with the hard sugar. I stared after him, my stomach in knots.
“What is the matter?” Darin said.
“…I don’t know,” I said, watching Kallen. He smiled and bowed and kissed the hands of every lady he was introduced to, perfectly polite. “I’ve just…got a really bad feeling.”
Darin frowned down at me worriedly. “Are you ill?”
“No, not that kind of bad feeling,” I said. “An I-really-don’t-like-him kind of feeling.”
“Ah.” Darin scowled after Kallen and shook his head. “No one I know likes him.”
“What’s he done?”
“He’s a smuggler,” said Darin. “Works with the Dasyl family, and sometimes with me, but so does everyone at some point. I am what Sol-dam refers to as ‘the biggest of the fish.’” He winked at me. “Everyone hates the Arkais. Common knowledge.”
“Ah,” I said. “Fun.”
“Fun for everyone but him,” he said. “He was one of the people Sol-dam thought might help us, but he’s become involved with, ah, creature trading. So he’s out of the question. No one here much cares for him, but he has some contacts in the leading body.” He smiled. “How about we meet some less awful people?”
“Sure.”
We skirted the edge of the dance floor, talking with the people who watched from their tables. An old woman named Tasidia was nice enough, but she tried to pet me as I walked away. Her tall, angry sons, Nilm and Milir, looked from Darin to me in confusion, and when I spoke they just about shat their pants. I had a nice long conversation with a scientist, someone who distilled the flower everyone was so obsessed with into the stuff they used for seizure medications. He treated me as just another person straight off, and seemed confused when another man butted in and asked Darin where he’d “acquired” me. The scientist hit the man over the head with his walking stick and told him to be more respectful, and when I laughed, he smiled.
People muttered as I moved and talked, and with every conversation I had, the muttering grew louder, and the people I talked with became…nicer.
“You’re doing great,” said Darin. He shook hands with a man a full head shorter than everyone else and they exchanged pleasantries. I waited patiently for them to pause so I could introduce myself.
Someone inhaled at my shoulder. I heard a dull metal scratching sound, steel on leather.
“Nothing personal,” they whispered, and they reached around me. Something flashed in their hand.
I threw back my elbow as hard as I could and felt it connect with something I couldn’t see. The whispering voice made an “oof!” sound, and something came into view: a body, a hand, a head, revealing itself in a ripple and disappearing again just as quickly. Camouflage.
“Darin!” I said, but he was already on them.
The crowd collapsed backwards, and suddenly Darin, the assailant, and I were in an open space. A man from the crowd, a tall handsome misra in dark blue, to one who’d been watching me at the table, reached out, grabbed me by the shoulders, and pulled me away just as the knife came down, cutting through empty air with a thin whistle.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Course,” the misra said absently, watching.
The invisible shadow wasn’t so invisible anymore. I’d shorted something in his suit, and he clicked into view every third second, pixelating, solidifying, and disappearing again. Darin tripped him with his tail and drove his fists into the ground where he thought the man was, but when he appeared again, he was behind Darin, knife in the air.
“Look out!” I screamed.
Darin turned, but not fast enough. The man drove his blade into Darin’s back and dragged it down, hard enough to crack the scales. Darin gave a shout and dropped to a knee.
The man pulled out the knife and dragged it through Darin’s wing. It tore open, blue blood spilling onto the hard floors. Someone screamed. Darin dropped to his knees, crying out. The man moved forward.
And I jumped on his back.
He tumbled forward and the knife flew from his hand, clattering to the ground and skidding away beneath the skirts of the crowd. He was taller than me by a solid foot, but he was thin, lanky – and he wasn’t righteously angry.
I wrapped my arm around his neck, a basic chokehold any idiot on Earth would know how to do, and squeezed. He rolled onto his back and back onto all fours fast enough to throw me off. I went rolling, and he was on me in another second, a fresh knife in his han
d, face split by a killer’s mad grin.
I threw up my fist to meet his face and a bone in his cheek went crack. He stumbled back, cursing, and then I was on my feet and on top of him, one leg to either side, slamming my fists into his face, over and over and over again.
It occurred to me a moment later, when I saw Darin heaving himself off the ground and walking over to me, that he probably would have been fine on his own, but it was a little late now. The man wasn’t moving anymore, and his suit had completely malfunctioned, leaving his body plain for all to see – blood, busted teeth, and all.
Darin pulled me off him without a word, and I let him. Blood dripped from my knuckles, some of it red, some of it the unsettling blue-black of the Sarchans. I stared at the flickering face of the prone figure, moaning and clutching his broken nose, spasming with every breath. I’d broken something, or fractured something else, and it was poking into his lungs.
“It’s alright,” said Darin. He took me by the shoulders and leaned down, his eyes coming level with mine. “It is alright. They are undone.”
I nodded, shock settling over me like a lead blanket.
“Um,” I said. “Sorry.”
He nodded once, solemn as a ghost. “Sol-dam,” he said, “take her. Please.”
Sol-dam appeared from the folds of the crowd and took me gently by the shoulder, steering me away, towards the door. The crowd parted for us, funeral-quiet.
“…Wait,” I said.
I stopped and turned to the man – eyes open, moaning, slowly trying to sit up. I waited for him to see me.
“Moltu,” I said. Adversary.
I raised my hands to him, soaked in his blood and mine. I turned my palms towards my face, closed my eyes, and lowered my head: a Sarchan salute, one used by the victor at the end of the duel, a “no hard feelings” gesture. The people around us went still.
I dropped my hands and opened my eyes. “Nothing personal.”
We walked out. Behind us, the blue misra was laughing.
***
“So,” I said as Sol-dam wrapped white bandages around my split knuckles. “Kallen’s not our guy, then.”
A Pet For Lord Darin Page 14
