Battles of Salt and Sighs by Val Saintcrowe
CHAPTER THREE
DOMINISSA CYRIA MAGDALIAscreamed herself hoarse.
First, when she was galloping across the fields outside the Villa Prantia, and then, when she was shoved below decks on a ship, into a room that smelled of garlic and rot, and then, into the night.
She screamed and screamed and no one cared or paid her any mind.
She screamed until she was tired. She fell asleep screaming.
When she woke, she had no voice.
She rasped at the fae who came to give her food, demanding a chamberpot.
He snorted at her. “What’s that? Can’t hear you.”
She hurled insults at him, using words that weren’t proper for a dominissa to use, and he only laughed and left her alone.
Once he was gone, she was forced to confront the indignity that was being forced upon her, and she had to relieve herself in one of the corners of the room. She couldn’t understand why they would want the boards of the ship soaked with her urine, but maybe it was only to torture her. The smell made her gag, and she couldn’t eat the food that he’d brought.
Not that it was much of anything anyway. A bit of bread and hard cheese and some water that smelled strongly of sulfur.
She retreated to another corner of the room and cried.
She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t cried yet, because it was entirely the right sort of situation in which to cry. Everyone was dead. Her father and brothers were all dead, and she had been horrified to see their bodies flung atop each other like that.
She was being taken away to see the evil Night King, and she had heard the men speak to each other about her.
“Said to keep her alive, didn’t say to bring her undamaged,” one had said.
“Maybe we can cut out her voice box,” said another, sneering.
She should have cried then, but she had been too busy being indignant.
This sort of thing didn’t happen to her. She had never been treated this way in her entire life. She was Cyria Magdalia, dominissa of the Villa Cyria, daughter of the ancient and respected Cyrius himself.
Her father was not a senator, but he was very close with several senators, and they had visited senators’ villae numerous times. True, it had been mostly when she was younger, before the uprisings, when travel was easier.
If her birthright wasn’t enough, there was the fact of her beauty and grace and talents—not least of which were her magical capabilities.
She was not the sort of person who was thrown over the back of a horse or tossed into a smelly hole on a ship or forced to relieve herself without a chamberpot.
And so she sobbed, at the unreality of it all, and at the sheer horridness.
But eventually, her tears dried up, and she was too tired to cry anymore.
Then there was nothing but boredom and darkness and her stomach, which she was beginning to realize was very painfully empty.
How was it she hadn’t noticed?
It must be the situation itself, disturbing her body’s very capacity to function. These men needed to pay.
Under normal circumstances, she would expect her father or brother’s to exact from them the price of their insolence. But everyone was gone.
Everyone.
Well, there was Onivia, but Onivia had not even been able to stop the men from taking Magdalia, so she was utterly worthless to her. Onivia could not take revenge on the fae. She was useless.
No, all Magdalia could hope for was that the imperial legions would quash this rebellion and restore order. All of these fae should be strung up for what they had done to her, and she would personally oversee it. She would jeer at them as their necks cracked.
The thought cheered her as she tore into the food that had been left. Perhaps, if one was properly hungry, a bit of stale bread and hard cheese could be tasty after all.
Of course, once the food was in her stomach, she realized that the pain may not have been hunger and may have, in fact, been seasickness, because it all came back up, and then she had ruined another corner of the room with disgusting things coming out of her body, so she was forced to retreat to one of the other two corners remaining.
She cried again.
Time wore on.
She thought someone would come again, to bring her more food, but no one did, not for a long time. She was too far in the belly of the ship to be able to see whether it was night or day, but eventually, she did sleep, and when she woke, a fae was back.
He had brought a metal bucket, full of dirty water, and a scrub brush. He bade her clean up the messes made in the corners if she wanted more food.
“Never,” she said, and her voice had healed just enough that she was no longer whispering.
The fae chuckled at her. “It takes quite some time to starve to death, dominissa, so you’re in no danger of dying before we get to the Croith, and his only stipulation is that you’re alive, not well fed. So, know that I have no intention of breaking. We’ll see which of us does.”
The Croith was a new wrinkle in the revolts. Near as she knew, he had been born a fae slave—as had they all, of course—but he had apparently been very strong with magic. Quite strong. Terrifyingly strong. He must have some human blood—but then there were many, many half-breeds amongst the number of the slaves—for he was not overly bothered by iron or metals. Usually, human blood would lessen the magical nature of a fae, but not in this case.
Anyway, he had escaped from his villa and somehow made his way to the capital, where he had amassed a following of not only fae but also human businessmen, who also supported the revolution, as they called it.
But in this, Magdalia understood, the businessmen were only mercenary. She had no head for such things, but Onivia had explained it to her once, slowly and deliberately, that the human businessmen had a machine that they wished to sell, and it would clean and sort any number of crops. It had a great number of settings and it was powered by steam, and it was made of so much metal that fae would shriek going near it, and they could not make the machine without metal, so they sought to end slavery so that they could sell their machine and make a profit.
Magdalia found it all confusing, because she didn’t understand about sorting crops for one thing, and she also didn’t understand how it was that fae couldn’t use the machine if they all had metal rings in their ears and noses.
Onivia had said that it was a matter of degree, that a bit of metal was one thing, but that a great deal of metal was another entirely.
The businessmen had already sold many of their machines to various places within the empire where fae slave labor was not as prominent, but the bulk of crops were grown in the Eeslia, the native home of the fae, and the place where the villae were concentrated, and it was currently cheaper for the villa dominem to use slave labor than to purchase the machine. The businessmen had enough money, however, to fuel the revolts of the slaves, and the ones in the capital, and the Croith had used these men to bring greater organization to the various rebellious factions.
Under him, the skirmishes and revolts had become systematic and coordinated. Now, the rebels were all working together, and they were freeing fae slaves left and right. They funneled the newly free slaves into the army, and Magdalia thought this was ridiculous. How could the fae not see that they were trading one kind of structured life for another, and that the army wished to use them worse than dominem?
The dominem, for instance, had a vested interest in keeping the fae alive, but the Croith and the rebel armies sacrificed them daily on the battlefields.
Remembering this, she thought she might enlighten the fae who kept coming to her room. Perhaps if she only explained it to him, he would see his folly and then help her escape this ship and go back to the safety of his own villa and his dominus.
But he did not come back, and she began to grow hungry and consider that perhaps she might scrub after all.
But no, she did not wish to give in, not to that brute who held her.
So, she resisted and the hunger within her grew.
At first it gnawed and then it roared.
But after a time, she was not sure what happened. Perhaps she grew sort of used to it, and it was bearable. She slept again. She was very tired.
When she woke, it was to see that the bucket had been overturned in her sleep, due to the pitch of the ship undoubtedly, and spilled all the water.
This made her cry again, even though she was relatively sure she wasn’t going to scrub after all.
The fae came back with food and he saw that she hadn’t cleaned, so he took the food away again. He did, however, refill the bucket.
She, sobbing, went to work immediately, though the work was difficult because her vomit had dried and grown crusted into the wood, and it was so hard to remove that she began to wonder if there was some technique to scrubbing to which she was not privy, if perhaps her upbringing had simply not prepared her for such work.
She sniffled and rubbed at her eyes and nose and continued to scrub, and when she was done, she banged on the door and tried to yell, but her voice still hadn’t quite recovered.
The fae came back, though, and inspected her work.
Then he took her down the hall to a latrine, which was a disgusting trough in a room, and he stood with his back to her, not leaving her while she used it, but she was grateful all the same not to be locked up with her own mess.
And then he gave her food, and she ate it very slowly this time, determined not to vomit it back up.
Several more days passed in this same manner, though she lost track, and she wasn’t sure when she slept anyway—if it was truly at night or just whenever she could. She felt as if she was sleeping a lot. She cried quite a bit.
When the ship docked, she had her voice back.
She was bound hand and foot and taken from the ship.
Then there was another journey across land, during which she was tied to a horse, and jostled for hours.
Eventually, they came to a villa—though not a villa like would be on the islands, this was a villa on the empire’s mainland, and it was an estate with a big, stone house, surrounded by a stone wall. The villae on the islands had been designed on this same model, but they were larger and more ornate and they owed much to the climate of the islands. They had larger windows and favored smaller buildings of one story, because building high into the air was a recipe for heat and discomfort. This villa, however, was three stories high, an imposing building that glared down at the surrounding brown grasses and leafless trees.
It was almost winter here on the mainland.
This villa had been taken over by fae.
There were fae everywhere, though this wasn’t necessarily different than things might have been, for there were many on the fae mainland who employed fae slaves here and there, though they might augment this with human slaves as well.
There was a difference between human slaves and fae slaves, however. When human slaves were purchased, their price was noted and a certain contract was signed. After the price had been worked off, the human went free. Fae, on the other hand, were too dangerous to ever go free.
These fae, however, were not slaves. They had taken out their earrings and they had let their hair grow and they treated her with contempt. They looked at her in such a way that made her feel horrible.
She hated this.
How long would it be until the legions put down this fae army and restored order? How long would she suffer before rescue?
She busied herself thinking about rescue because she did not want to face the fact that she was likely here to be taken to the Night King, and she did not know what he wanted from her.
She didn’t want to think about the Night King, so she imagined a rescue instead. She imagined an army cresting over the hills, humans with their pistols and rifles and cannons. She imagined the legatus—who would be someone like Legatus Naxus Albus, undoubtedly, a handsome and polite man—giving her a cup of warm, mulled wine and saying to her, You poor dear, how have you survived?
She clung to this as they untied her from the horse and marched her through the courtyard. It was colder here than it had been in the islands, but she had not been given a cloak or boots or anything to make her more comfortable.
They took her inside and she waited in a hallway, surrounded by half-bloods armed with pistols, who were talking to each other in lazy tones about a card game they’d witnessed the night before.
One of the fae who’d come with her, not the one who’d brought her food, but the one who’d taken her from the Villa Prantia, who had pushed Onivia down when her sister had tried to help her, left and told the men to watch her. He disappeared around a bend in the hallway.
The hallways were narrow and dark. The windows were small. The floor was stone. The ceiling was stone. The walls were stone.
It was cold.
She didn’t like it here.
And she knew that she was going to be taken to the Night King now, to the Croith.
She didn’t want to think of him, but now, she couldn’t help it. She thought of all the stories she’d heard about him. He was tall with hair the color of blue midnight, it was said, and with cruel blue eyes that flashed like lightning. He was strong with magic, with death magic, and he could touch things and kill them.
Not only that, but once a thing was dead, he could touch it again and bring it back to a half-life. It would not speak or think, but it would move at his will.
It was said that the Croith had made the son of a certain dominus rise and to come at the man with a sword, cutting at his own father, who had been too horrified to raise a hand against the abomination, even knowing his son was already dead. The dominus could not harm his son, and he was cut down there in the fields of his villa, and the Croith had laughed and laughed and then made the dominus rise and used his body to kill his wife.
This power was necromancy, and Magdalia had learned about it in her studies of magic. It was one of the unnatural evils that had been so awful that the Seelie fae had determined the Unseelie could not possess it. That was why they had conspired to imprison the death fae in the first place, because of horrors like necromancy.
But now… where were the Seelie when they needed them?
Why were the humans left at the whims of these evil fae now?
The fae who had left returned and came for her.
She planted her feet on the floor and shook her head. “No,” she said.
The fae sighed. He hoisted her up, as he had that first day, and threw her over his shoulder.
She screamed. “No, no, no!” She pounded her fists into his back.
He laughed.
The fae with the pistols laughed.
Everyone laughed.
She kicked and screamed and sobbed and fought and none of it mattered.
She was taken down the hall and tossed onto the floor in the midst of a vast room, where the floor was not stone but polished wood, and where the windows were a bit bigger, and where there were paintings on the walls of fields and sunrises and flowers.
She sat up, peering up at the paintings, peering around the room while she perched there on the wooden floor, and then she saw him.
He stood at the other end of the room, head down, swathed in black robes. His hair was blue-black, and it was long, hanging around his obscured face in long waves. His voice boomed out, filling the space. “Leave us.”
The fae who had dropped her bowed once and backed out of the room, shutting the doors behind him.
The sound echoed in the large room.
She licked her lips and waited.
He lifted his face, revealing inches of his pale, fae skin as he did so.
Then his eyes, deep and blue, like the sky at twilight, and that was when—
No.
“Magdalia,” he said. “Did you miss me?”