Hounded [Wild Hunt Series: 2]

9: Ink

"I don't want to go and I don't want a gift."

"You are to be queen consort." The dragon's face tongue flicked through a dark wad of spit. A claw scraped across the ledge as he thrust his now-shrinking snout further into the dark, snaking toward me. "If you continue to demonstrate such a childlike attitude, you will find yourself alone through your entire pregnancy. I do not want to leave you in this tower the rest of your life. As I wish to be a kind husband, I have given you a long rope, Tay Wilson. Don't hang yourself with it."

"I don't want your gift," I said more strongly, then paused. "But I do have a request. A wedding present, if I may be so bold."

"You always are," he said, and settled down into the cursed curves of a half-human. It was then, as the grizzled wet feathers along his spine smoothed flat against grey skin, that I noticed he was carrying someone small: a child in rags, possibly a girl, no older than ten or eleven. He dropped her down on the stone. Her head clunked the tile but she did not cry out, merely rolled onto her knees, dark hair falling over her shoulders and face. I shoved the King aside to help her, heard him grunt against my shoulder.

Slight fingers gripped my arm, felt along my elbow and up toward my face. In the shadowed light of the window a tentative smile flashed across her lips. It was indeed a girl, with skin an ashy lavender, the telltale lift of a still-developing chest, a soft curve to her chin and delicate, thin lips. When I pulled her closer to examine her head under the sunlight, where the dust motes glittered in the early morning, it was then I recoiled sharply.

Her eyes were nothing but skin, smooth and lidless impressions in hollowed sockets.  She continued to feel me, even as I staggered back against the sill, her thin fingers groping for my hand, sliding over the puckered crust of blood and healing tissue. Searching, I realized. But for what?

"State your request," the King continued with an impatient tap of a clawed foot.

Feeling suddenly nervous, I cleared my throat and took a moment to compose myself. The girl's fingers had fallen off the side of my face, moved to my shirt collar as if hunting for a button, or string or some sort of clasp. I set her hand back in her lap and backed around to the side of the King. She followed me on all fours, crawled across the ground and waited at my knees.

"What'd you do to her?" I asked, shaking her fingers off my calf. "Who is she?"

I couldn't be certain, reading a beak, but the King seemed to be grinning, at least in tone. He bent, picked up his cloak, the one I'd been using as a pillow, and wrapped the congealed thing around himself. "Your request, my dear, and then we will get to the girl.."

When he looked away to adjust the cloak, I slipped the pottery back into my shirt. If I killed him here, or just pissed him off, I'd still be trapped in the tower. And I'd be trapping this unnverning woman, whoever she was, with me. I walked away from her spidering grasp, took a deep breath and wound my arm around the gooey, limber forearm of the King.

"I want Dot found." I had to say everything exactly right. No slip-ups. "Located and returned safe. I don't care what she is. She was one of us."

"She wasn't," the King said through a yawn. The gap of his maw made me look away in disgust. To have my face near that pus and blood, to hold his gnarled fingers in mine, to think that his....My stomach tumbled over itself. I'd rather have Akta. "Dot is a banshee, bit of a delicacy here, like a truffle. "

Tiny gears clinked off-topic in my mind. "So the screaming..."

"Death is a most common occurrence in the Oaks."

"Do you Hunt them?" I had to stay focused, but standing this close to him, having him address me like a regular person, was a struggle.

The King laughed. "They can't breed like human women, but their parts, the lungs in particular, have been found to be quite nourishing for pregnant women." His a gnarled finger brushed against my waist. "But I must tell you, Lady Wilson, finding an errant Banshee in a forest is not going to go over well with the other Lords. You could go a decade without finding them."

"I've already thought about the Lords," I continued, and kicked away from the girl's searching hands once again. "I would like to use Chiro's land and wealth as a reward. He is my conquest, his lands are mine to do with as I please."

"You will lose that reward tomorrow night when you become mine."

"No," I said. "I will be Queen. I will retain what I've won in the Hunt. Should Chiro or the other Lords takes issue with my status, then he or they may have every opportunity to bring it up with me, my husband and, after that show you put on a few days past,  what I suspect is a very loyal court."

"Ah," he said, stroking my chin, one claw gently pulling my lower lip, to scrape gently against my teeth. "You do have a lovely mouth." 

I checked him back a few feet, wiped my mouth on my shoulder. "Think of this as my wedding present to you. You support our search for Dot. In return, Chiro leaves. He'll be upset about losing his lands. If Chiro wants them back, he can retrieve Dot for me. So you win, because he's not around, maybe for a long time if Banshees are as difficult to track as you claim, and I win, because I get a competent hunter to retrieve Dot."

The girl scooted across the ground in the quiet.

"I'll consider it," the King finally decided. "For now, however, I will leave you with Terryl. She is a disciple, lesser on the totem pole, but important nonetheless for the marriage ceremony. We don't use rings here."

The girl tugged at my shirt hem. She was on her knees now, thin fingers lifting the hem, trying to pull it over me, and failing that, rip it off. In the soft struggle -didn't want to hurt her but she was trying to drag me to the ground like a lion on an elephant's haunch- I pushed her across the floor. Hissing, she crawled forward across the filthy floor, jumped on me like an unruly child. As we struggled, the King walked to the sill.

"You've got such lovely virgin skin, Lady Wilson, but I must say, on the eve of our wedding, it warms my heart to know it will be penetrated."

With that, the King turned toward the window, stretching his muscles, his body twisting and growing into a monster just small enough to scrabble through the window before exploding to his monstrous size. In that brief moment as his body contorted, I caught a glimpse through his hide of the dark ink of a dragon tattoo.

Something thin and sharp scraped my cheek. I banged the girl hard into the wall. She fell, stunned and whimpering, cupping one hand in the other. The forefinger of the injured hand  had grown and thinned out into a needle. It was broken, snapped. Her delicate lips covered up the end for just a moment, one sharp bite. Almost as quickly as she spat the tip onto the floor, a new one regrew. 

I went still.

She felt her way across the floor, long, needlelike forefinger lifted carefully off the ground, tap-tap-tapping every now and then as she turned. When she found me again, as she always would in the tower, I took the more human hand in mine and sat with her. She relaxed almost at once, a slight upturn of her mouth when I dropped my shirt into her hand.

"Terryl," I said.

Her head tilted. She dipped the tip of the long claw into her forearm, pulling it out dripping black in the sunlight. I reached out to pull the shirt scrunched in her other hand. Carefully, so carefully, I laid it over her chest.

"For you to keep," I said, eying the blind girl's needle. "But you must do as I say. I am the bride, after all. I need everything perfect for my wedding day. Do you understand, Terryl?"

The girl sat perfectly still, her needle slightly down-turned, a pearl of ink glistening on the tip.