2.30. You’re Mine

“Fucking Necropolitan cape-candy.” Tiago’s grip on his glass was so tightfisted Seth feared for the vessel’s structural integrity, and for the relative dryness of their table’s breadbasket. “That’s all he is. Some useless picador who was sent off to his unlit unimportant uncle cause his family’s got too many breeders in it.”

“Okay so pillowdark,” Seth said. “That means…”

“Two kinds of unlit,” Ofelia said. She’d returned to the table without her dance partner and with zero visible upset about it. “Pillowdark and pikedark. And if you’re pikedark you can brag and brag about it. Personally I think there ought to be a third category that’s something like drank-mom’s-blood-dark, but I suppose that’s overly perscriptive.”

“And Riccy’s the only pikedark at this table.” Tiago indicated Riccana, who was hunched in her seat, still unspeaking.

Lisa ahem’d.

“Riccy and Mother,” Tiago said.

“It’s a quite meaningless division, I think,” Lisa said. “All that I ever did of note was after my unlighting, not before.”

Ofelia smirked. “We don’t rate?”

Lisa gave her a pretty smile. “Pass the compote please, beloved.”

“Too right, it’s meaningless.” Tiago buttered his bun like he was extracting information from it and stuffed a bite into his mouth. “You’re thrife the warrior he if.”

“You don’t know me,” Riccana snapped, suddenly animated and furious. “And I didn’t ask you to throw your sword at anyone and say my name all loud in front of everyone when he’s right. I shouldn’t be here. I should know my place.” She slid her chair back from the delicacies and the doilies of their table. “I should’ve been fucking buried there.”

“I—hey, I was talking about Seth.” Tiago swallowed as Riccana stood. “Where are you going?”

“Madam Verdugo.” Riccana didn’t look at him. “Thank you for inviting me to this and for the food. If you will allow it, may I please wait in the carriage for the rest of the party.”

“Go on, Riccy,” Lisa said, softly. The young savior of Shaheill went, hugging her arms to herself to fit through the cheerfully lunching crowd.

“I was talking about you, Seth,” Tiago said, lamely. “When I said the thrice the warrior thing.”

“Thanks, Tiago,” Seth said. “I’m actually pretty glad you threw your sword at that guy, if that consoles you.”

Tiago returned with misery to his bread. “Sure.”

“Look.” Seth cleared his throat. “People, when they’re upset—I mean, Annalise, even. You gotta let the silt settle. You know? I mean, she’s a soldier, too. Maybe she gets it. Like I wouldn’t necessarily mention it again, but she might find out she’s glad you spoke up. And if—”

“Il Gutierre,” Tiago interrupted. “Are you trying to give me fatherly advice?”

Seth sputtered. “What? No.”

“You absolutely fucking are.” Tiago pointed an accusatory salad fork at Seth. “Mom. He’s dad-talking me.”

“He’s trying to be nice, Sunshine,” Lisa said, though a laugh was lingering in her throat.

Tiago was clearly finding this a wonderful distraction. “Seth, would you teach me how to shave?”

“Seth, why am I bleeding every month?” Ofelia asked.

“I actually am also going to go to the carriage,” Seth said.

The psychelith jutted into the sky like a spire of glass, penning the deathspell in a deeper green than even the oversaturated clouds for which it reached. The massive crystal’s lower half was surrounded by a thicket of walkways and scaffolding, along which hundreds of unlit stood as if in formic trance.

Seth stepped through his third security checkpoint and turned to retrieve his satchel from the grim-faced legionnaire who’d searched it. “Going to need to pat you down, sir,” she said.

“No.” Lisa smoothly intercepted the woman’s arm. “You will not.”

“The policy, Madam Verdugo, is—”

“If this young man intends to mess with our fine city monolith, I will chop his head off tout de suite,” Lisa said. “Your need to touch him is at an end. Come, Seth.”

“Security’s tight around here, huh?” Seth glanced over his shoulder at the simmering soldat as they departed. “What’s the Legion worried someone’ll do?”

“They don’t know.” Ofelia buckled her blade back on. “There’s no real way to damage the crystal. It takes hours of work with enchanted tools to shave off the splinters for animaxi. And no known method to extract the souls from its depths. They just swim in there until the body dies, and then off they go to the Wheel.”

“But there’s still so much we need to understand about them,” Lisa said. “Best to keep them secure.”

“Huh.” Seth watched an unlit girl with a streak of powder-blue dye in her hair and a dreamy smile on her face. Her fingers brushed the surface of the psychelith. A silvery mote flickered there, on the other side of the crystal. “I thought the Legion knew all that was to be known about hexis and souls.”

“Not by a long shot,” Tiago said. “Good spot on the next level, I think.”

He set off. The other al Ydrises followed. Seth gave as friendly and encouraging a nod as he could broadcast to Riccana and fell in line with them, climbing higher seeking an open spot on the ramps and pathways. A wide avenue of front-row room was available on the next floor. The family halted there, and Ofelia stepped forward, resting her palm on the crystal’s surface as all the others were doing.

She laughed softly as from the depths of the psychelith a light approached, first diffuse and fuzzed by distance, then a clear, feathery orb poking around at her palm like a curious fish.

“Is that yours?” Seth asked.

“Yes.” Ofelia’s smile had never looked so soft. “Hello, little soul.”

Tiago put his hand on the crystal next to Ofelia’s. Lisa came up behind the twins. Whether it was their plainland blood that kept them from their mother’s height or just their extended adolescence lagging them, she was tall enough to put one arm around them both, and reach the other past them to join her palm with theirs. Their three souls danced like candles in a hexengenic breeze.

“Would you like to do the honors, Seth?” Lisa released her children and unbuckled the executioner sword from her back. “No need to unsheathe the damn thing and soak us. Just touch the pommel to the crystal.”

Seth reverentially took the blade from her, then bolstered himself beneath its blackbar weight. “Fuck me, that’s heavy.”

A murmuration of laughter from the al Ydrises. No malice in it. Seth found that the death’s head pommel shook as he raised it to the crystal and rested it against the clean-cut facet.

A vibration hummed through him, tickled his teeth, and drew that now-familiar green hexis glow from the blade. The bright, sylphic soul emerged, shivering at first as if working to free itself. It cleanly severed the tail connecting it to the outside world, and with piscine grace it mingled with the others, turning and twisting around them and drawing them into hypnotic, swirling paths. Seth had to remind himself to blink.

“Oh they’re playing,” sighed Ofelia.

“Not good to anthropomorphize them, Feeli,” Tiago said. “All the sense and feeling is out here.” But he was smiling. He turned to Riccana, who stood in their shadows. She huddled Shaheilli animaxis in which her soul swam to her chest. “Do you want to put yours, Riccy?”

“There’s no pressure if you need more time,” Lisa said. “We need the crystal back for the 842 season so I can return it to Shaheill, but that’s four whole months away.”

“Now is fine.” Riccana shuffled forward. “It’s just a… thing. Like Tiago said. Not important.”

“I dunno if I said it exactly like that,” Tiago muttered, as Riccana gazed into the animaxis.

She pressed its panel against the psychelith. Her breath came out in a tremor as her soul emerged with the same trepidatious care as Seth’s. It flitted into school with the al Ydris souls around it (and mine, Seth thought, that one’s mine).

As if they’d awaited her, they alighted, spinning up and away, growing indistinct as they departed the crystal’s surface. As his new family huddled close to him and watched them go, a bleary feeling of loss crept into Seth’s stomach, but a smile ached on his face. Newly he understood the beautiful thing that had been inside him, and wasn’t anymore. But they were together in there.

Ofelia gave the departing lights a slow wave. “Goodbye, souls. Have fun. Stay together.”

Tiago didn’t correct her this time.

“Well, that’s the souls dropped off and it’s what.” Ofelia flicked a silver pocketwatch from her waistcoat. “Two-thirty. And I’m fairly drunk. What shall we do now?”

“I guess I have a duel to practice for,” Tiago said, trying his best to avoid looking at Riccana.

“Morgana lives near the psychelith,” Ofelia said. “I believe I’ll check in on her. She was getting the most hideous portrait commissioned last year. I’ve been so anxious to see whether the artist finally got her nose right. You ought to come, Ms. il Teremi. You’ll enjoy her, I think.”

Riccana’s face executed a dancer diagram of indecisiveness, ending on “Will there be food?”

“Mincy little canapés and bread with a bunch of seeds in it,” Ofelia said. “So she can pretend it’s healthier.”

“What’s a canapé?”

“Like if food was smaller and snootier.”

An amused little snort from Riccana. “I guess I’ll have to eat a bunch of them in a really hayseed way to make up for it.”

“That’s the spirit.”

Tiago looked equal parts annoyed and relieved that someone else was looking after Riccy.

“We’ll be at the house.” Lisa beamed at her children. “Have a lovely time, my dears.”

Behind her and Seth’s back, unseen by her children, her fingers wrapped around the nape of his neck.

“Ydalf, my dear.” Lisa clapped her hands as she strode into her estate’s double-decked foyer. “I dismiss you and your niece early for the day, at full pay.”

Ydalf poked his head from a tributary hallway, in a grass-stained apron. “The solar’s in a state. The monstera needs an absolute slaying.”

“Live to fight another day, dear Ydalf,” Lisa said. “It’s a gorgeous day in the city. I know you’ve wanted to see the Foelnare exhibit at the Palisade Gallery. Here you are.” She held up a handful of coinage. “Admission on me. And dinner afterward.”

“Really, milady—”

“Ydalf, if you insist on staying in this manor through the fortissimo sex I am going to have with Seth il Gutierre, I will not stop you,” Lisa said. “But the reddening of your face at the very word of it tells me you would be scandalized.”

Ydalf hastily removed his apron. “I’ll give your regards to Master Foelnare, shall I?”

“Please do,” Lisa serenely said, and climbed the balustrade to the second floor, her hand around Seth’s like a vise.

In this fashion she stormed Seth into her spacious bedroom, and left him blinking on her thick shag rug. With a snap of her fingers she triggered some spell or hexentat that set a flame whoomphing to life amid the blackened bricks of the fireplace. She winched a sizable black curtain across the tripart window.

“There will be no Annalise al Ydris to save you from me this time, Seth il Gutierre,” she said. The room shifted from florid green to shadowed amber as the fire grew and the light of day smothered. “No hesitations or pretty little forbearances.” She released the curtain’s velvet rope and took a leonine step toward him. All lethal grace. “Now I will use you as I wish to, for as long as I please, and you will obey me. Do you understand?”

“As you order, Madam Verdugo.”

“You will not call Lisa Madam Verdugo in this room, Seth.” Another step. She was close enough to touch. “You will call me Mistress.”

“As you order, Mistress.” He grinned. She didn’t.

“What did you take from her?” she demanded.

He put his hands behind his back. She’d given him very specific instructions. He was curious what would happen if he disobeyed them. “From who?”

“From Desdemona.” She towered over him and suddenly disobedience seemed less fun. “Show me what you took.”

A minute tremor disturbed his arm as he produced the handkerchief he’d removed from Desdemona al Vhesse’s suit jacket.

“Give me that, Seth.” Her heavy contralto rasped with barely-withheld emotion. “Now.”

He held it out like red meat to a barely-trained beast. She ripped it from his grasp and threw it into the fireplace. A bright golden flare as it caught and burned.

She pushed him backward and he fell on his ass atop her bed, which creaked to receive him. She loomed above him, face made dark and strange by the silhouetting fire. “Did she touch you? Anywhere?”

“What? No, she—uh. She helped me up.” He held up his left hand. “Took my—”

Lisa shoved his fingers into her mouth.

He laughed in shocked surprise. “What the f—” The laugh sharpened into a gasp as she pinned him the rest of the way onto the bed, crouching atop him like a predator over its kill. His hand twitched on reflex as her wide, hot tongue bathed his palm.

“Don’t fucking move,” she snapped, around the thumb she was sucking.

“I just—”

“That bitch will never touch you again, do you understand? None of them will. Not her, not that legion guard at the psychelith, not anyone. You’re mine.” Her eyes were huge and manic and bright as ritual bonfires. “You’re fucking mine. Say it.”

“I’m yours,” he said, and then decided to throw in a “Mistress,” and she groaned in exultation. A shiver racked her spine. A triumph close to smugness settled over Seth. Here he was playing at powerlessness, and with just a word he could affect her like this.

She huffed a great gasp of his swallowing neck then reared up like a bucking colt and tore that beautiful, shining dress away. The discordant ring of the clasp, the metallic complaint of the zipper. She yanked the scintillating wreck up over her head and beneath it she was naked, gorgeously, gloriously naked but for the grooves the dress’s undercarriage had left in her dewy skin, and a single black garter along her thigh, looping over her dragon tattoo’s face like a blindfold.

Seth barely had time to wonder when the hell Lisa al Ydris had removed her panties before her massive hands landed on his chest and dug into the fabric of his lovely new Legion tunic. Her knuckles tightened. The buttons strained.

“Lisa,” he gasped. “Wait—meadowsweet.”

She froze solid. “Seth.” She was trembling with the effort of restraint. “Seth, please. I can’t wait any longer.”

“Just—I don’t want to tear this stuff.” Seth protectively unbuttoned his smart black tunic. “They’re the best clothes I’ve ever had. And you gave them to me.”

A whine rose in her throat. “How are you so fucking cute?” she groaned, sounding genuinely distraught. “Leave the underclothes. Give me those at least.”

“Okay. Okay.” He kicked his pants off. “Just go easy, okay?”

“No,” she said. “Unfreeze me.”

He breathed in, held it, and let the air out on a slow four-second count. His heart thrashed against its reins.

“Meadowsweet,” he said.

Lisa pounced.