Dierá mocked him then, much as G'rkyr had done earlier, and her scorn cut him more deeply than any blade ever could. "'I free you,'" she laughed, mimicking his movements and expression. "You free me…Ha! Have you ever in your life considered your words before they came out of your mouth? Have you ever thought of anyone else beside yourself? Have you ever truly seen what is right before your eyes? Do you understand nothing?"
Her large eyes were so wild and angry that G'rkyr and the other Empyrjurin turned away from them. Yet as she spoke, Rastín could tell that Dierá knew that every word was wrong and that every word cut at his heart, but she seemed unable to stop herself. It seemed he was there and those she wished were in his place were not, so she raged and she raged.
"I was to have been your queen, your wife, your beloved. I was to be the air you breathe, the water you drink, the light of your eyes. I can never be free of you though you, without a care, wish to be free of me. How dare you!
"And how dare you take out your anger on G'rkyr? Do you not see that he is more child than adult? As are they all."
Rastín looked past Dierá to the hulking mass of gargants clustered tightly on the far side of the cell. Most were half crouching with their heads bent over. In this position, their fisted hands touched the floor. Although he looked and looked, Rastín could not see youth.
"If G'rkyr and the others were adults, they would not be here with us. You do not understand what it means for the masters--" Dierá used the gargant's word for the ageless. "--to make us gifts to them. We have known nothing save lies. Go beyond the doors of this cell. You will see the truth of it all. You will pray to your mother in the blessed land then. You will pray for one such as G'rkyr.
"When all others had forsaken us, G'rkyr dared befriend me. G'rkyr kept me alive in the masters' halls when so many others were not as fortunate. The masters' halls are places beyond horror--beyond the horrors of your worst imaginings."
Dierá pounded her fists against Rastín's chest, but it did nothing to slow her angry outpouring. "Oh, it would all be so much simpler if you would just do what the masters wish. It is why they punish us and make us a gift to the Empyrjurin. Why can you not do this one thing? Why can you not do this one thing for me? You said I was beautiful. Are your words as full of lies as theirs?"
As she pounded and pounded her fists, her words became increasingly hateful and wrathful. She blamed Rastín for anything and everything that had ever happened to her and hers. She blamed Rastín's father for his failures on the day of reckoning. She cursed the House of Túrring. She vowed to kill him in his sleep. She cried out until she was spent and there was nothing left but fitful sobs.
Although Rastín's heart was cold because of all the hateful, loathsome things she said, he held her. They remained thus, with her at his feet and him hunched over, holding her, through the long tolls of the night. While she slept, he lay awake whispering the words he wished he had had the courage to say earlier. "I see you, Dierá," he told her as she slept. "I see you and I find your beauty beyond anything I had ever dreamed. You have beauty in your heart and in your face and in your form. Hate me, curse me, if you now must, but I know now for a certainty my father chose well.
"I forgive all you have done in my name. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. You kept me when there was no other. You held faith when no other would. And yet I could not, cannot, do the one thing you so wish.
"You do not understand that this thing you wish can never be. It is simply another lie, another way to control, another way to bend and break us. Alborn understood. He helped me see the truth within the lies. I am a king, Dierá, I feel it in my heart, but I have no land and no people save you now. And what will happen to this dream, to this wish that is Élvemere. Does it die with us? Or has it already died within us and we are as yet afraid to say that it is so?
"In Élvemere, you would have been my queen--you would have been the High Queen. Our people would have loved you as I would have loved you. But this is not, nor will it ever be, Élvemere. I have lain with Wërg--the beast people--and I am ashamed to say I did not dislike it. At times I feel that I am Wërg, Dierá, and at these times Élvemere is not even a dream in my heart."
Drawing back her hair from her face, he whispered a promise into her ear, "Whatever comes of this defiance, I take upon myself."
In the morning, Rastín and Dierá were called out. Dierá's tears and sobs began anew as they followed a chained and manacled slave of a winged and horned race Rastín had never seen before. As the cell door closed G'rkyr held out a burning hand to them, but neither saw this. Rastín's attentions were on Dierá, for she was in such a state that it took everything he had just to keep her moving.
"Tell me of the songs you sing?" he asked her, to change her focus.
At first he thought she did not hear him, for his voice was very soft, and then she said in hushed tones, "They are songs of Élvemere lost."
Through the eyes of his father, Rastín had traveled to many lands and feasted in the halls of many kings. But those experiences hardly prepared him for the great hall of the masters, with its ceiling lost from view in shadow and its walls so far off that it seemed he walked in a chamber without walls. Yet it was not so much the hall itself as what was in the hall that made his stomach churn and his heart pound. Here the ageless walked.
Before this day, before this very moment, Rastín would have sworn that he would have gone to the blessed land before ever seeing a living ageless. For in his mind the ageless were the never seen, and yet there they were--everywhere as far as the eye could see--and they were more terrible, more horrendous to behold than his worst imaginings.
The winged and horned one had been silent as he hurried Rastín and Dierá along dark pathways and up stairs; but as they raced along a curbed path behind a table of impossible dimensions, the creature spoke.
"Slaves must keep within the slave runs. Slaves do not deign to look upon their masters. It is not for slaves to behold unless beheld. It is not for slaves to speak unless spoken to."
Rastín cast his eyes down and concentrated on quieting Dierá, yet he could not shake the images of the mammoth, scaly darkspawn he had seen. In many ways they appeared both humanoid and lizardlike, yet each had a pair of great wings protruding from its back and thick spikes longer than he was tall along the shoulders, arms, and tail. He was certain these were the ageless. Although he knew he should fear them as Dierá did, he did not, for if they were truly of flesh and bone, they were no longer the dark whisperers who walked veiled in shadow.
The winged and horned one whirled around and cast his weighted chain at Rastín. "It is not for slaves to decide whether their masters are of flesh and bone."
Rastín dodged the chain easily and without a thought, but the creature's words caused him to retreat within his second self. It was from this place, once removed from the world, that he came face to face with the great king of the ageless--a behemoth who sat a colossal gilded throne like any two-legged creature might, yet his shape was that of a great, grave winged and armored caiman covered in thick scales, long claws, and curved horns.
The back of the throne was open at the bottom to accommodate the thick tail with its pairs of spikes that projected sideways and ran partway up its length as well. His head with its enormous rounded muzzle and great black spheres for eyes was monstrous and crowned with an elongated crest of burnished scales and curved horns that were ringed from base to tip. The gaping maw filled with razor sharp teeth had oversized canines, and below this an apron of thick bones embedded in the scales protected the throat.
Even as the great king of the ageless spread his barbed wings wide, and his guide and Dierá cowered on their knees, Rastín stood as if in his father's hall. His head was bowed, as he was outwardly tending to Dierá even while contemplating all that was before him.
His stance made the ageless king laugh loudly and raucously. "Impenitent, unabashed little bit of nothing," the king said as he reached out and picked up Rastín.
Coming to his own, Rastín knew he dared not speak, so he looked on silently, unable to keep hatred from his eyes.
"We disgust you. We abhor you…and yet you amuse us," the king said. Speaking to someone Rastín could not see, the king asked, "Pray, do tell us of little king's last."
A serpent magi slithered across the floor. Its head had two great horns, its long muscular torso rested on a serpent's body, and its body otherwise covered in gold and black scales had a broad strip of reddish scales running from its chest down the front of its body. "The little king told us, 'The Túrring crown shall be passed to my son, my heir. House Túrring shall stand and our people shall serve your masters as one.' "
Still holding Rastín by the back of his shirt, the king asked, "And did the duplicitous ones serve us as one?"
"No, no, your majesty, they did not."
"And yet we keep the little king's own--and have we mistreated it?"
"No, no, your majesty, we have not."
"Indeed, we have not. Perhaps this little bit of nothing would like to be impaled upon the roasting spit and served up with the others of his kind?"
Revulsion getting the better of common sense, Rastín stared directly at the king.
"Sullen, angry, little plaything. Does it want to say something?" Before Rastín had even started to speak, the king began shaking him and repeated his question. "Does it want to say something?"
As Rastín started to speak, the king tossed him up into the air, and now Rastín knew for certain that the great hall had a ceiling. He would have crashed into it had the king not snatched him out of the air an instant before impact.
"Plaything," the king said, "be careful lest you cease to amuse us."
"I am Rastín Dnyarr Túrring, of House Túrring. I am my father's heir. My people are the Élvemere and we have never done harm to your people."
When Rastín spoke, every other sound in the great hall fell away. The king kept his awed followers in check with a glance while he gripped Rastín between two fingers like a doll. "And yet you have done harm this very moment, by your very words. House Túrring, indeed. I do recall the little king standing before me. And did he not then cower and beg on his knees?"
The serpent magi said, "The little king begged and groveled on his knees. He begged your majesty to spare his people and the life of his son."
"My father could not have knelt before anyone," Rastín said boldly. "His body was ravaged from the waist down."
Without warning, the king dropped Rastín. The fall from over half a chain would have seriously injured the untrained, but Rastín rolled as he landed, distributing the impact. As he started to stand, Dierá grabbed his right arm in both of her hands and pulled him to his knees beside her.
The king's raucous laughter returned. "And did the little king not tell you it was he who declared war on us? We merely asked for homage and tribute. And did we not spare his people and his heir in the end?"
"Your majesty did most graciously, and for very little, I might add. One royal person to spare the people. One-half royal person to spare the son."
"One and one-half royal persons indeed, and what grand entertainment. The little king plotting and scheming. The little queen going behind his back. The little king pleading and begging for the little queen. The little queen with more pleading and begging until I finally delighted of her flesh."
"You spin lies within lies!" Rastín shouted. "My mother died in the camps. My father's legs were gone of the wasting before we came to this accursed place."
Without word or warning, the king snatched Rastín up from the ground, took up the spear of a guard and impaled Rastín. Dierá's screams and cries for mercy were nothing compared to the death rattle from Rastín's lungs as the spear entered his body between his legs and exploded out of his chest.
Chapter 11
Dierá was inconsolable when she returned to the cell. Whether she opened or closed her eyes, she saw only Rastín impaled, and it drove her to hysterics and madness. She was a shieldmaiden of the Élvemere, and yet she had done nothing but whimper and cower before the great king. She had failed her people utterly; she had failed her king utterly.
It was a day before she could lift her head and do anything other than sob. A day more before G'rkyr and the other Empyrjurin got her to speak. Her first coherent words were a prayer to the Mother, begging for forgiveness and strength. She needed the Mother's forgiveness to face herself. She needed strength to keep herself from slipping back into tears. Then just when she thought her heart could not break any further, she thought of Eldri and Síari, the sisters of her heart if not of her blood. Eldri was lost to her now and Síari had taken the Long Road.
G'rkyr and Zanük cared for Dierá as they would have one of their own, and their fondness for the elf maiden grew. By the evening of the third day, G'rkyr could not contain himself, but it was Zanük who spoke for his brother. "Dierá," he pleaded, "For G'rkyr's sake, you must eat and you must return to yourself. We Empyrjurin do not often find what G'rkyr thinks he's found with you."
Dierá lifted her head, regarded Zanük with eyes full of tears. Normally she found G'rkyr's infatuation with her endearing, but at this moment she could only think of the impossibility of relations with an Empyrjurin. It was absurd. It was beyond absurd. Before she could stop herself, the anger and bitterness behind her tears became words. "I am Élvemere," she shouted. "He is Empyrjurin. Our people cannot mix. It is absurd. We are all pets of the masters. Would you have me as a pet too? Would I then be the pet of a pet?"
Zanük's response surprised Dierá. Turning to his brother, he said, "Tell her."
"I cannot," G'rkyr responded. "His Empirical Majestic Exalted One brought this on himself."
"Tell her or I will tell her."
Something in G'rkyr's expression stirred Dierá and helped her focus. "Tell me what? What can you not tell me?"
G'rkyr said nothing. Zanük spoke instead. "Was he truly a prince, a prince of the Élvemere?"
"More than a prince," Dierá said, "He was the son of the High King. When the king passed on to the blessed land, he became heir apparent. Save for the crowning, he was the High King of Élvemere. In my heart he remains my king."
At the same time G'rkyr said, "His Exaltedness was a king?" Zanük said, "I see now. What were you to him?"
Dierá started to speak, but held her tongue. She had already said too much.
"Very well," Zanük said, "but you must know G'rkyr is more than just G'rkyr?"
Dierá furrowed her brow, her eyes revealing a question she wanted to ask but did not. As her face paled and her expression fell away, Zanük raised the bowl of stewed meat and helped her eat. Nothing was said for a time, and then for some small amount of time Dierá slept.
When she awoke, one of the young female gargants was beside her and neither Zanük nor G'rkyr were to be found. Dierá asked of them in both the language of the Élvemere and the language of the Empyrjurin, but the other would not speak.
She was beside herself with tears by the time the brothers returned. When she saw them dressed in finery as if they had just returned from a celebration, she sobbed. Of the two, only Zanük approached her. G'rkyr seemed to want nothing to do with her.
When Zanük crouched beside her, Dierá lashed out at him. "Do you celebrate the death of my king with the masters? Do you gloat in my sorrow? Did you feast and drink to our deaths?"
Zanük reached out to her, putting his left hand on her shoulder, but it enveloped much of her small figure, too. "We do not celebrate death. We do not gloat. We do not feast and drink. We are as you."
"You are not as me! I have never been given another as a gift!"
"You are more punishment than gift," G'rkyr said quietly.
"What does he mean by that?" Dierá demanded.
"He means the masters' gifts are cruel as this day was cruel."
"Cruel?" Dierá shouted. "How can celebration be cruel?"
As she said it, she knew she should not have, because
Zanük pulled away from her as she did so; and none of the Empyrjurin spoke to her for the rest of the day. She pretended to be hurt by his actions, when in truth she was more confused. She did not eat her evening meal. She cast her food and drink on the floor.
When none of this roused their sympathy, she pretended to be sick and faint. When this got no response, she went to the open cistern on the other side of the room and disrobed, slipping into the cool waters. Scrubbing herself clean occupied her for a time. As she started to relax and drift away, she forgot she was trying to draw G'rkyr's attention and simply enjoyed one of the few pleasures that remained to her.
As she drifted there in the cool waters, her father's face floated before her eyes. In this dreamlike state, she spoke with him as if he was there before her. "I have twice failed, father," she said. "He did not see me as his queen, his equal. He did not love me even as I loved him. As I stood before the ageless, I could do nothing save tremble and watch him stumble onward to his death."
Her father took her hand in his. "Athania Dierá Steorra, you could not have changed the course once set upon."
"But I have the gift, father. I could have turned this aside, if only I had chosen to do so."
"To reveal such a thing…to what end…to your ruin?"
"We dwell within the mists of ruin. Our age is a lost age, as our people are a lost people. I chose inaction when action was called for and--"
"--and you chose selflessly. You put the needs of our people above the needs of your heart. You became a queen, when a queen was most needed. A queen cannot always follow her heart, and you have learned this, though the cost has been dear, very dear. But I sense that… I sense--"
Her father's words cut off and she could see him no more. The transition was so abrupt that she sank into the waters of the cistern and came up sputtering, gasping for air. As she started to go under again, G'rkyr scooped her out of the water and put her on the ground beside the cistern, where she choked and wheezed as she struggled to take in a breath while coughing up water she had swallowed.
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