A/N: Trigger alert for rape, but if you have an issue with that, why are you reading this book?
More as a side topic, I'm officially back on schedule here! Yay! :D
—————————————
Onlé hides, though I'm not certain how. It can't be with her magic, else Darnell or his children would have noticed. I know I see her little, as Evonalé grows through infancy and toddlerhood, but I don't know how long it's been since my half-brother's seen her at all when he catches her slipping in to see me, one evening when I've been dusting the rooms that belong to his wife, while she's on an all-to-rare trip. Some sort of retreat, ostensibly for her health—as if anything out there can fix what's broken in here.
Onlé sees me, sees Darnell over me, and turns away with silent, swift feet.
But Darnell has already seen her, and his magic wells up in a wall of purple flame, blocking her from the doorway.
The girl considers that fire. She would survive breaching it, though Darnell doesn't know that.
She would not survive his retaliation afterwards.
She pivots back on the ball of her foot, dropping into a lump on the floor with the movement. Maybe he didn't notice her hips, her bosom, her signs that she is a woman and not a child. She hasn't been for years, though she's only come of age in the past...
I do the math and come up with seventeen. Evonalé is five. How did she manage to hide that long?
"Who is this?" Darnell demands. "I don't know you."
Onlé reminds me so much of her mother as she feigns fear and worry—the way a child would display them, not the cautious evaluation that she and her mother do naturally. Masking the observation and intelligence that make them both so dangerous.
"Who are you?" he asks directly.
She casts me a desperate glance, and I realize she's playing mute. A dangerous role, if they ever learn she lies.
"It's just my court fool." I don't let my voice show anything more than dismissiveness, despite how I hurt. Don't you dare do this to her.
But he's going to, I see in the way his eyes roam over her, over her curves that are enough to make anyone familiar with elfin women notice that she has human in her ancestry.
It's only by how well I know Tully that I even see that Onlé is furious.
Darnell pulls off me, and I force a whimper of protest. Leave her be. You have me.
He gives me a sharp look. I curse myself for my misstep—he knows I don't want her hurt, and I've never fought to keep his attention from the other women. Never mind that I've never had to keep his attention from the other women; he's long preferred me, despite the daughter we share that let him steal the Bynd from our father.
He smashes my head into the table. Everything spins and my ears ring and I can't intervene as he casually approaches Onlé.
I try to get between them, and I stumble into a wall and hit my arm hard on the dresser.
For her part, Onlé manages to keep her mannerisms and expression pure naïve confusion. I'm not sure whether to cry or laugh. Telves like her can block fertility, but if she can't use her magic, it's as apt to cause conception as it is to prevent it. That was how her mother had come to have her.
Darnell hurts her with a casual curiosity that tests her act, but she keeps it intact, borrowing details from various girls' reactions over the past years, so she must've kept a closer eye on me than I realized. How did Darnell not see her before now?
Why did she even risk him seeing her? Surely she knew how he'd react. He doesn't take well to being made a fool, nor to even the suspicion of it.
He keeps us both there with his magic and his blows, sullying his wife's bed. By the time he leaves, neither of us is in any condition to leave, not on our own.
His wife will find us here, and it'll add insult to us all. The man has no shame—but then, I knew that from the first time he forced me.
"If there's a child—" I whisper.
"There already is," Onlé answers, and her smile at me is as angry as it is resigned. "They killed the father yesterday."
Her voice breaks, and tears slip out. I hadn't even known she'd had a lover.
I don't even keep track of or remember who lives, anymore. We're all as good as dead.
"He was trying to protect his mother," she says. "They're all dead, now."
Without moving her head, she looks to the door, now empty of the fire. "Gaylen said I couldn't hide from him, anymore. That my son's life depended on it." She swallows and looks at the ceiling. "Well..." Her laugh is anything but positive. "That answers why. Will he kill me when the child comes out elfin, you think? Or just because it's a boy?"
I can't have this conversation—can't listen to Tully's daughter so blithely speak of death and horror while there's a child in her womb, can't deal with the fear that my half-brother might've left another one in mine.
I can't.
It's rude to Darnell's wife, to not at least try to be gone before she returns, but I let the pain pull me into sleep.