by E. A. James
“But that means Tanak is a hybrid, too.”
“That’s right. As you can see, there is no difference between the hybrid offspring from any other Raveniss. Your children will be fully Raveniss, as if you never came from the village at all.”
Margila shook her head. “I wonder why I worried about coming here at all. I shouldn’t have taken so long to make up my mind.”
“Nonsense, my dear. Leaving behind everything you know and love to mate with a Raveniss takes real courage. You have our deepest respect, and we will make every effort to make you comfortable here. As you can see, you will find other maidens from your own village here, in every walk of life. Some of them you may already know from previous lotteries.”
Tanak interrupted. “There’s another reason we took so long getting back. The humans have brought in a fleet to wage war against us. They have vessels patrolling the mountains, and they attacked us more than once. I would have been killed if Margila hadn’t saved me.”
“And I would have been killed if Tanak hadn’t saved me.”
The Archduke frowned. “In that case, you had better come and give me a full report. We must send out fliers to patrol our southern boundary, and the other families will have to be informed so we can call up a council of war.”
Tanak turned to Margila. “Mother will take you down and show you to our chambers. I will meet you there in a little while.”
He and his father went back through the door into the spire, along with a crowd of other men. Katya hooked her arm through Margila’s elbow. “Come with me, my dear. You must be starving.”
Margila laughed. “Pretty close to it.”
Katya snapped her fingers, and a bunch of women crowded around. Others hurried away into the citadel. “I’ll show you to your quarters, and you’ll find a hot meal waiting for you there, along with some more suitable clothing. Leaving the village as a sacrifice is hard for a young girl. No one knows that better than me.” She motioned to an elegant lady on Margila’s other side. “This is Praila. She is married to my older son. She came from your village several years ago. Maybe you remember her.”
“Only distantly. I think, back then, I was too young to understand the lotteries.”
“I remember you, Margila,” Praila replied. “I remember what a lovely little girl you were. I’m glad we’re here together, married to two brothers.”
“What about your other sons? Tanak said he had three brothers. Are the others married to a Raveniss woman?”
The smile evaporated from Katya’s face. “I’m afraid no one is married to any Raveniss woman. We have so few people that all the men must take their wives from the village. We have a lottery of our own, and each man must wait his turn before he goes to collect the sacrifice. My younger sons have not yet had their turns.”
“That must take a very long time.”
“Not only that, but each man takes his life in his hands going anywhere near the village. Sometimes a girl already has a sweetheart who wants to fight the dragon to save her.”
“That happened to me. Tanak had to knock my sweetheart out to get away.”
“Some men aren’t so lucky. In earlier years, whole cadres of village men would lay in wait on the mountaintop and attack the dragon as a group. Several of our men lost their lives that way, and our numbers are already low enough.”
Katya led Margila down into the spire. A winding stone staircase spiraled into the citadel’s heart and opened out in a large stone passage lined with vaulted chambers. Light poured into the rooms from windows in the walls. Tapestries covered the walls and made the place bright and inviting.
Katya kept talking the whole way down the passage, but Margila couldn’t stop staring at everything around her. She didn’t understand half of what Katya said.
At last, Katya opened a heavy wooden door and led the way into a chamber unlike any Margila had seen so far. An enormous bed stood in the center, and high windows overlooking the mountains gave a commanding view of the villages and farms far below. A washstand stood beside the bed, and a stuffed couch and chair sat before the windows.
Margila went to the window and drank in the sights with her whole self. “It looks like home.”
“It’s much nicer,” Katya told her. “None of those people suffer from hardship or want. The produce from the farms goes to a central distribution hub so everyone has enough during the winter. When the snows come and the winds howl, all the people and animals come into the central keep to stay warm. They sit around the fires and tell stories, and the children play games together in between wrestling in the snowy courtyards. No one goes without here. We all look after each other.”
“Who tends the farms? Do you have a subclass of farmers that provides all the food to everyone?”
“There is no subclass. There is only Raveniss. Many of the men from the ruling families make their lives on the farms. Everyone gives their work according to his or her skills and desires. If someone wants to tend the flocks, he does so. If he feels called to observe the stars, he spends his time doing that. No one tells anyone what to do, but everything gets done in its own time.
“That sounds very civilized.”
“It is. Now stop talking and sit down to eat. The food won’t get any hotter.”
Margila became aware of the most delectable smell, and Katya showed her to a table set next to the window. Roasted meat, steamed vegetables, and warm bread with butter lay on a plate, all ready to satisfy Margila’s appetite. She ate and drank until she could hold no more.
“Now for your clothes. Come and get dressed.”
Margila would have fallen asleep if Katya and Praila hadn’t taken her to the other side of the room. A magnificent gown of brightly-colored brocade lay on the bed. Lace trimmed the bodice and the hem, and gold thread decorated the puffed sleeves. “Oh, I couldn’t possibly wear that. It’s far too rich for me.”
Katya guffawed with laughter. “Too rich for you! Take a look at my dress, my dear, and Praila’s. All the women in the citadel wear this, and you can’t go around in that flimsy little shift. Come now. Would you like to take a hot bath before you get dressed? I can send one of the other women in to wash and comb your hair.”
Before Margila could answer, the door opened without a knock, and half a dozen women entered. Each one carried a large jar with steam swirling from the top. They set up a wooden tub in front of the windows and filled it with hot water. Then they all filed out as quickly as they came.
Katya patted Margila’s hand. “Take your bath, my dear, and enjoy yourself about it. You deserve it, after what you’ve been through. Praila and the other women will come back in a little while and help you get dressed. These gowns take some getting used to.”
She followed the others outside and shut the door. Margila found herself utterly alone for the first time since long before the lottery. Blessed silence filled the chamber, and the sunlight streaming through the windows made her eyelids drift closed.
This place was far nicer and far more comforting than she ever would have dreamed. Tanak didn’t do it justice when he told her how rich and wonderful it was. She could stand at those windows and gaze out for the rest of her life and never get tired of it.
The steaming bath water sent out tendrils to tempt her, and she meandered over to the tub. She slipped off her shift and let it fall to the ground. That was the last vestige of her old life. She would ask for a fire later to burn it.
She stepped into the hot water and let it swallow her up to the neck. She lay back in the tub, and the gorgeous view still lay before her eyes. The green of the grass and the blue of the sky married perfectly with the golden sunshine. Her eyes drifted closed, and she fell asleep.
CHAPTER NINE
Margila didn’t wake up until the water got cold. She got out of the tub and dried herself off with the towel Katya left for her. She’d just wrapped it around her naked body when Katya and Praila returned. “Goodness! You must have been exhausted. We thought you would never wake up.
”
“Did you see me asleep?”
“We checked on you more than once, but we didn’t want to disturb you. Come over here and we’ll get you dressed. Someone is waiting for you.”
“Who is it?”
“Get dressed, and you’ll find out.”
Somehow, they put that magnificent gown on her. She couldn’t figure out how they did it. Katya was right. Learning how to put it on and take it off would take some doing.
They combed her hair and twisted it up on top of her head like their own. Margila smoothed down the brocade skirts. She didn’t recognize herself.
The women pushed her toward the door, and she found Tanak waiting for her out in the passage. He wore the same fancy clothes, with brocade trousers and doublet, and his hair hung wet and freshly combed around his shoulders. “There you are. Are you feeling better?”
“Yes, thank you. Are you?”
He took her hand. “You don’t know how relieved I am to get you back here alive. I was really worried.”
“How did the meeting go with your father?”
“Everyone is on high alert. We expect the Axis to attack at any moment.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
He inclined his head toward the far end of the passage. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”
He led her all the way back to the spiral staircase and all the way back up to the courtyard between the spires. They crossed the courtyard to another spire, where Tanak started up another spiral staircase winding into the sky.
Margila caught sight of the countryside outside the windows. The spires she thought were so high fell away, and she looked down on them from above.
At the top of the spire, Tanak opened a door into a gigantic chamber. The roof split in two and the clear sky showed between the two halves. A massive black shape stuck its pointed nose up through the gap. It looked like one of those guns the soldiers pointed at her, only ten times the size.
Tanak guided her up another block of steps to the base of this thing. He pointed to a small tube. “Take a look inside there.”
She bent her eye to the hole and peered inside. What she beheld took her breath away, but she had no idea what she was looking at. Small lights hovered on a black background. They moved together in a slow, mysterious dance. “What does it mean?”
“The large light you see is the sun shining in the sky. The smaller light is the moon, and that big shadow you see across the bottom of the screen is the planet Phomentina.”
Margila yanked her eye away from the hole. “That’s impossible.”
“This is one of the machines I told you about. It’s used to look far out into space, above the sky, to see what the sun and the moon and the stars are doing.”
“What good does that do? Knowing what the sun and moon and stars are doing won’t keep you warm in the winter.”
“I brought you here to show you this. You couldn’t understand what I’m about to tell you if you didn’t see it for yourself. If you watch carefully, you’ll see the planet moving around the sun. That’s what makes the sun rise in the east and set in the west.”
“That’s ridiculous. Everyone knows the sun goes around the planet. We can see it moving with our own eyes.”
He shook his head. “We can see other planets moving around the sun, too. Phomentina moves in a circle around the sun. We call that circle an orbit. All the planets have them, but Phomentina’s orbit is decaying, falling apart. Every year, Phomentina moves closer to the sun. One of these years, the sun will suck the planet into itself, and the planet will cease to exist.”
Margila stared at him. “Do all the Raveniss know this?”
“This is the main reason we take maidens from the villages. We want to build up our population before we leave for another world.”
“Do the villagers know? Do they know they’re all going to die soon?”
He put his head on one side. “You tell me. Do the villagers know?”
Margila cast her mind back to her days before the sacrifice. Her father’s conversation with Major Bloodkist came rushing back. “They know—at least, some of them do.”
“What did you hear or see that makes you think they know?”
“The day before the lottery, I overheard my father talking to the Axis Joint Commander. The Major said something about finding the perfect destination. He wanted my father to postpone the lottery until the Axis Joint Command could bring in the fleet to fight the Raveniss. Councilor Dunroy was there, but I don’t think anyone else in the village knows.”
Tanak nodded. “There you have it.”
“My father said he couldn’t understand why the Axis didn’t evacuate the village and leave you to die. He thinks Major Bloodkist won’t be satisfied with anything short of full-scale slaughter. He thinks the Axis and Major Bloodkist are out to annihilate the Raveniss for the fun of it, to show off their firepower.”
“So that’s the kind of man leading this campaign?”
Margila looked down at the floor. “I’m afraid so.”
“That’s nothing we didn’t already suspect. Anyway, now you know. We’ll take a few more maidens from the village over the next couple of years. Then we’ll leave this planet.”
“How will you leave?”
“We have special ships ready to take everyone. We have everything we need except a few more females.”
“How do you know the village will continue the sacrifice? Now that they have the Axis fleet to back them up, they don’t have to do it. They know you won’t retaliate by attacking the village.”
“They won’t stop the sacrifice. They’ve been doing it for generations. They won’t stop now.” He took her hand. “Come on. We’ll go back down.”
Margila said nothing on the way down. A thousand things crowded her thoughts. He led her all the way back to the bedchamber before she realized where she was.
Someone had taken the bathtub away, and her shift had disappeared. She sat down on the stuffed chair by the window in relief. She didn’t have to deal with the shift or even look at it again. It vanished out of her life.
She noticed Tanak rummaging around on the other side of the room. She got up and went over to him. “What are you doing?”
He showed her a small device that fit into the palm of his hand. “I’m priming my weapon. All the Raveniss are preparing for the Axis assault.”
“What makes you think there will be an assault?”
“My father sent fliers down to the village. They just got back a little while ago. More and more Axis vessels and soldiers have set up on the Common. They’re getting ready for something. Since your Major Bloodkist wants to wipe us out to the last man before evacuating the village, we can only assume they’re planning to attack us.”
“Can you give me a weapon? I want to do something. I don’t know if the women among your people are allowed to fight, but.....”
“Everyone will fight. Anyone who wants a weapon will get one. You’ll have to learn how to use it, though.”
“Can you show me how to use it? I can learn if you just show me.”
“I’ll show you tomorrow. For now, you better just relax and get used to being here. You look very nice in that gown, by the way.”
“It’s a lot nicer than that shift. That thing belongs in the manure pile.”
He pulled her closer. “You looked just as beautiful in that shift as you do in this gown. You’ll always be beautiful to me.”
She blushed. “Thank you. You look very dashing in that suit, too.”
He circled her with his arms and kissed her. “The best thing about that shift was that I could smell you straight through it.”
Her eyes shot to his face, and the color mounted to her cheeks.
He murmured into her ear. “I could smell the honey oozing out of you. I could hear your heart pounding when your legs rubbed against each other. I could taste your sweet nectar on my tongue.”
Her nipples stood to attention under her stif
f bodice, and her skin tingled with unrequited passion. Even now, his words brought a gush from between her legs. The fury of their first love-making flooded over her. She wanted him all over again.
He hitched his hands under her armpits and lifted her up to meet his kiss. She put her arms around his neck and followed his head down her neck. He mouthed her collarbone, and his kisses left a trail of glowing embers plunging down into her cleavage.
Margila threw back her head and gasped in delight. If only she could free her breasts from their restraint and fling them into his mouth, she would die of happiness. She didn’t have to struggle, though, before his hands moved along her ribs and found the heaving mound of her breast. He stroked her nipples through the rigid stays of the bodice until she couldn’t stand it anymore.
