“I can prepare myself.”
Azrael rolled a dismissive eye over her. “All evidence to the contrary.”
Lan brushed crumbs self-consciously from her shirt-front and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand.
“In any case, you are here on a diplomatic endeavor and as such, you are obliged to accept my hospitality. Batuuli despises me,” Azrael added, “so she may not even receive you, but I think she will. No doubt it will amuse her to meet you and so measure the declining quality of my concubines.”
“No doubt,” Lan said caustically, getting up and pretending not to see the way the pikemen immediately closed in around her. “I’ll see you tonight then.”
“I look forward to it.” He dismissed her with a wave and returned to his throne.
One of Lan’s escorts gave her a nudge, but she lingered, watching Azrael beckon a servant over to top off his wine and another to offer him a selection of pasties. “I thought you said you had stuff to do.”
He gazed at her while his servants cleared Lan’s dishes and took her uneaten food away. “Enjoy my daughter’s company, if you can,” he said at last, then shifted his eyes to his guards. Hands closed unyieldingly on her arms and they started walking, leaving Azrael to finish his meal alone.
CHAPTER FOUR
Lady Batuuli did receive her. In fact, she seemed more annoyed by the knock on her door than by the command Lan’s escorts delivered, dismissing them with an impatient nod and a snap of her fingers to summon Lan to her, although as soon as those fine doors were shut, she let out a sudden (and still beautiful) scream: “Is there no end to his pettiness?” Seizing some elegant sculpture unfortunate enough to be within reach, she smashed it against the wall and kicked the larger of its scattered pieces at what remained of one of the guards who had first brought Lan into the dining hall. Flayed, burned and still breathing, he hung impaled on a spear set in a marble pedestal and watched Batuuli exhaust her rage. “Must I now perfume his whores to prove my filial obedience?”
“I can leave if you want.”
“You can be silent!” Batuuli spat, rounding on her with her hands in beautiful claws. “Save your tongue for my father!”
“Did I hear someone mention whores?”
Lady Batuuli straightened at once, raising one eyebrow but not bothering to turn around as the door to an adjoining room opened and her brother came through it. He paid the devastation to Batuuli’s odds and ends an inquisitive glance before his gaze lit on Lan.
“Ah,” he said, and in that one word was whole volumes of smirking, pornographic prose.
Lan did not back away as he came for her. It was a mistake. Not content merely to loom over her, he unexpectedly seized her in his arms and swung her around, loudly and melodiously humming. There was nothing to catch herself on, nothing to anchor herself to but the dead man who had swept her into this unwanted dance. Stumbling and whirling, she struggled to free herself as he twirled with her too fast and too wild, until he came to a sudden, disorienting stop and pulled her right up close to his mouth.
She thought he was going to kiss her, so she slapped out at him with an angry caw. He caught her hand without looking at it. His eyes never left hers. They were also smiling.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked her.
“Lord Solveig.”
“Lord Solveig,” he agreed and twirled her through another short set of spins, this time dipping her backwards over his arm almost to the floor. “I heard there was a delivery for me yesterday,” he said in a conspiratorial whisper. “One I don’t recall ordering.” His head tipped, showing her the sly, sidelong smile of a man who knew the answer but was inviting the lie anyway. “Was that you?”
His eyes actually sparkled. Sparkled! They were blue, she realized, and it unnerved her because the only boy whose eyes she’d ever noticed before was Eithon’s. His were also blue, but these were bluer.
Flustered, Lan shook her head.
“Oo, you’re a liar, too!” he said admiringly and spun her back up onto her feet, letting go of her right at the perfect moment to send her crashing into a flayed pikeman. He and Lan screamed together, but Solveig merely strolled over to a bowl of grapes and plucked one. “You won’t last long with that attitude. Father hates liars.”
“He used to cut out their tongues or make them swallow coals,” Batuuli remarked, watching Lan try to right herself without touching the pikeman or the pedestal where he was fixed, “but these days, he just impales them. There used to be more…I don’t know…poetic symmetry to his punishments. Now, it’s like he’s just going through the motions.”
“Poor man. He needs cheering up. Although,” he mused, running a critical eye over Lan, “I’m not at all certain this is how to go about it. I enjoy slumming in the gutter as much as the next man, but she looks like a pig-farmer.”
“Peaches,” Batuuli corrected as Lan bristled.
“Ah yes, I recall now.” He plucked at a hank of her hair, winding it around his finger and shaking his head. “I’ve known softer hair on a horse’s tail. And the smell…” He leaned close for a whiff and straightened again, wincing. “How can he stand to touch you?”
“I don’t think he has yet,” Batuuli said, adding with an arched eyebrow, “He expects me to prepare her for him.”
“Does he? That’s new.” Solveig walked a circle around Lan, inspecting the curves of her body. “Well, one never knows. Diamond in the rough and all that. If you’re very opposed to the task, dear sister, I’ll be happy to take charge of her.”
“I’m tempted to let you. That would teach him.”
“I could make a day of it,” Solveig mused, now behind Lan where she could not see his leer, but making certain she could hear it. “It’s been years since I last stole one of Father’s pretty ponies from his stable. The little French girl, you know the one.”
“Mmm.”
“I seduced her,” Solveig confided, coming round again to smile at Lan. “I was a month seducing her, in fact. Little glances, little smiles. Love notes, you know the sort…your eyes, your lips, your creamy bosom in the crude grip of a monster. She flitted about the palace, meeting me in shadowed rooms, stealing cold kisses before going to his bed.”
“Father was so confused,” Batuuli said. “He simply could not understand how she could seem to seek his company so eagerly, yet endure his embrace so reluctantly.”
“But of course, it was my company she was after,” Solveig said with a modest bow. “And I made sure to seldom be found save in my father’s presence, so the more I won her to my side, the more Father would think he was winning her to his. And she had to let him think so, for fear he’d put her aside.”
“And you,” Batuuli said with smiling rebuke. “You let her think you so conflicted!”
“How could I betray my loving father with his own courtesan?” Solveig demanded, then tipped a wink at Lan. “Half the fun of seducing her was making her think she was seducing me.”
Batuuli tsked. “And you let her.”
“Of course I let her! I waylaid her on her unhappy walk to my father’s chambers and, overcome with furious passion, whisked her away to my own. She trusted me,” he said, laughing. “Ah, blind, stupid love! She had no fear. The apparatuses we of the masculine gender are forced to use to mock the procreative act can be so intimidating—”
“And deadly,” Batuuli interrupted.
“And deadly,” he agreed. “Especially those of my collection, but she had no fear. Like you,” he told Lan, reaching up to tickle her chin. “But I broke her, piece by piece. By the end, she wasn’t even crying. She just lay there, letting me pose her however I pleased, and waited for it to be over. I left her, bound and splayed, and let Father know where he could find her.”
“What happened to her?” Lan asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. Father cleaned her up and got rid of her, I suppose. And if you’re wondering, no, he never said anything about it to me.” He tried for a dramatic scowl, but there was too much real f
rustration in it to pull off the cavalier attitude he affected. “There is no punishment quite so effective as his enduring forgiveness. Ah, well. Dear sister! Another delightful visit, as ever.” He went over to clasp her hands and kiss her in a distinctly unbrotherly fashion.
That they were playing up to make Lan uncomfortable was obvious, but it was also successful. She found herself staring at the wallpaper and shutting her ears to the wet sounds they were making, reminding herself that they probably weren’t really related. And anyway, they were dead. The dead had their own idea of morality.
“And you.” Solveig returned to pat Lan’s hip and gave her ass a friendly squeeze. “Adieu for now, but you came here as my property, dear thing, and I will be exercising my rights of ownership just as soon as I decide when and how I want him to find you.”
With that, he left, which Lan knew mostly by the sound of the door opening and closing. When she looked back, Batuuli had draped herself—or had been draped—across a settee and was gazing up at the ceiling. The top of her flowing gown had been pulled astray, exposing her left breast. The nipple was small and pointed and still wet from Solveig’s mouth. She looked like a painting of herself, the kind that ought to have a peacock in the window behind her or maybe a panther lying at her feet.
Minutes passed, uninterrupted by anything but the occasional low moan from a pikeman.
“What do you want me to do?” Lan asked finally.
Batuuli lay a hand over her eyes and delicately massaged.
Lan’s temper slipped a notch. “You know, this may shock you, but I don’t want to be here either.”
“Then go. I shan’t chase after you. Go to my father just as you are. Do you think he will have you anyway? Honestly now, do you think he should?” Batuuli waited, then sat up suddenly and said, “Do you?” in a voice like steel. “Do you think, because he is what he is, that he deserves no better than a filthy bag of rags like you?”
“No.”
“But that is just what you say when you offer up your unwashed body to him, who is lord over all the living and the dead. You say he is not deserving of even the smallest effort or consideration. You say it is you who condescends to rut with him, to grace his bed with your presence, and he should be grateful. Isn’t that so?”
“No.”
“No? No, did you say? But you don’t want to be here! And certainly, you don’t have to be here, so get out, warmblood! Get out and go to him!”
Batuuli stared her down from the settee. Lan dropped her eyes.
“Ask me to allow you to stay.”
“Please let me—”
“Ask me to prepare you for Father’s bed.”
“Please prepare—”
“Tell me you want to be my father’s whore.”
Lan’s jaw clenched.
Batuuli waited, then wordlessly got up and opened the door to the hall.
“I want to be his whore.”
“Louder.”
Lan could see a servant busily cleaning the windows and two pikemen on patrol. Batuuli could see them too, and as Lan hesitated, she calmly said, “I said, louder. When he has you, he’ll have you whenever and wherever the urge takes him. It will not serve you to be shy. He’ll have you in the dining hall before the whole of his court, if he wishes, and he will want to hear you moan and feel you suck at him with the same enthusiasm as if you were couched in private shadows.”
“I want to be his whore!”
The servant looked around, looked right at her.
“And he sent you to me because?” Batuuli prompted.
“I…need to wash.”
“Which makes you?”
Heat fanned up Lan’s cheeks. “A dirty whore.”
“Louder.”
“I’m a dirty whore!”
Batuuli shut the door and leaned against it. “So much for human defiance. Tell me again that you don’t want to be here and please believe, I will see you gone. ‘This may shock you,’” she mimicked, exaggerating Lan’s northland accent and giving her words an oafish lilt. “Shock me? Nothing shocks me anymore. You all come tossing your manes and stamping your hooves and you all leave well-saddled. I have seen your kind in droves.”
Crooking a finger for Lan to follow, she went to the other door and opened it. The room beyond was even bigger and brighter than the first, with her handmaidens and her courtiers frozen in their arrangements as they waited on her return.
“Take this and have it cleaned,” Batuuli ordered, waving in Lan’s direction.
“Yes, my lady.” Soft, cool hands gripped Lan’s arms, as impersonal and immovable as any guard’s. “Shall I have the clothes laundered?”
“Are those clothes?” one of the courtiers inquired, wafting a perfumed handkerchief beneath his nose.
“In the interests of public sanitation, they ought to be burnt,” another drawled.
“Insult my father’s playthings at your peril,” Lady Batuuli said coolly. “Do not imagine your words will be kept in confidence just for speaking them here. I have no loyal servants. They are all his.”
Lan’s footsteps as she was led away were uncomfortably loud in the silence that followed, but before she was even out of the room, Lady Batuuli broke it again.
“Get out, all of you. Simpering fools. Magpies. Get out! No, not you!” she snapped as the handmaidens holding Lan released her and began to bow away. “You get about your work.”
Lan was taken to a great white room, whiter than anything she’d ever seen before, whiter even than fresh snow, but it was a cold whiteness rather than a clean one. Opulent, of course, all crystals and vases and glittering edges, but strange and untouchable. Her eye could not seem to find a lighting place until she turned and unexpectedly met with a mirror hung in three panels on the wall. Real mirrors and not just shiny metal, with white and gold etching all around their edges to form a single picture in three parts of a river with trees and deer. In them, Lan saw herself so vividly that, even knowing it was a mirror, she initially thought she was looking at another person.
She saw a woman, one so much older than she was, a woman with only the most surface resemblance to herself. Dirty brown hair that would wash out to a deep honey color if it was ever washed; sunken eyes that could be green or blue depending on where she was (in this white room lit with electric lights, they were grey); a pale, fine-boned face with smudges of dirt to add unneeded depth to her high cheekbones and wind-chapped patches to give her color. It might have been a pretty face in another time and place. Here in Haven, it was the very definition of drab and Lan found her reflection’s stare too direct, too knowing, to meet for long.
She could not guess the purpose of the room, except maybe just to look pretty, which, given that this was Azrael’s palace, was not out of the question, but she must have been brought here for a better reason than just to see it. There was a deep depression in one corner, the most recognizable of the room’s features, and it was there that Lan was aimed, but it was not until one of the handmaidens started water flowing that she truly understood. She was to be bathed. Not just scrubbed off or given a basin to wash in, but bathed, and if that were not frivolous enough, this entire room had been built solely to house the bath.
“One would think I had just shown you my father’s killing garden, the way you look.” Lady Batuuli moved past her to sit on a padded bench by the wall. “Is it not exquisite? Resplendent? Inspiring? Come now, give me a superlative I’ve not heard and you shall have a biscuit.”
“It’s a waste.”
“It is indeed. Such a pragmatic mind you have to appreciate that.” Lady Batuuli put out her hand. A fluted glass of wine was placed in it. She sipped once, then opened her hand and let the glass fall, shatter, and stain the whiteness of this room with a spreading pool of blood-red wine. “I’ve come to think of it as my father’s vanity given physical dimensions,” she said as her handmaidens divided—some to continue preparing Lan and the rest to clean away the wine and broken glass. “He’s made us all his mi
rrors in Haven. And his masks. But it is rather a rude observation, so you shall not have a biscuit after all.”
Lan turned away to watch the bath fill.
“I suppose the more civilized flourishes are rather overwhelming to one of your upbringing, but you might at least pretend indifference, for my sake. You can’t imagine how galling it is to see you simple folk stand in surroundings such as these and gape at a hot water faucet. That’s enough,” Batuuli said with a wave. “Undress her.”
One handmaiden halted the flow of water as magically as it had started and two others stepped up immediately.
Lan backed away fast, clutching at her shirt-front with both hands. “I don’t need help!”
Batuuli sighed and said, “If she won’t remove them, cut them off.”
“You can’t cut off my clothes!”
“Your clothes?” Batuuli tipped her head in what could only be an acid imitation of her father. “I was talking about your hands.”
Lan was reasonably sure she didn’t mean that…but she let go of her shirt and let the others undress her.
Batuuli deliberately lowered her gaze and studied Lan’s naked body as it was exposed. Her lips pursed. “Truly, my father’s standards are not what they once were…and they were never all that high to begin with. What do you suppose he sees in you?”
“Sex,” Lan said through clenched jaws.
“No, no. There are far more attractive options…shall we say, open?…to him. He may not be very discriminating, but he doesn’t want for a whore when the mood falls over him. There must be dozens of them waiting on his whim here in Haven, hundreds who come begging at the wall every year. He has his pick of holes to plumb, so there must be something about yours that appeals to him. You can get rid of those,” she told the handmaiden holding Lan’s clothes.
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