Hounded [Wild Hunt Series: 2]

14: You Aren't

Far From Home (The Raven) -- Sam Tinnesz

The blue-black sheet of pain stays with me when the morning light chases the cold from the stone window and my feet sink into the gelled puddle of blood beside the mattress. It stays wrapped tight around my shoulders, around my chest, around the quivering wretch of my stomach when I realize he has left. And it is a cold, alien comfort, that blanket of bruises, when I rub my arms and slip to that same window, squinting on those days I have the presence of vision to do so. 

And like clockwork, I hear my fears, my hopes, my worries, sung in a ruddy shrill voice from the base of the tower, "You aren't pregnant, Tay Wilson."

Some nights he brings me trinkets: gaudy little gowns meant just for his greedy eyes. Other nights it is something kinder: a scroll or an interesting piece of history rattled off on his rasping tongue in the wake of what he deems a, "great night." Every few days, I find myself awakening on new sheets in a clean room.

"You aren't pregnant, Tay Wilson."

Once, he brought a woman with him to the tower. She was a few years older than me, had been captured in a Hunt over two hundred years ago and carried the tusked tattoo of a boar on her shoulder. Her lord had bargained her off in a deal with the King a few nights back. Two hundred years trapped in this place, and still she had the will to live. On her knees, she'd crawled across the blood-stained floor and begged me not to let her die.

All I had to do was all the King asked of me that night.

The first request I refused, he broke my leg and dug her eye out, made her sit holding the damn thing in her teeth the rest of the time. If she'd squished it, popped it like a grape and let the juice run down her throat, or if she let it fall onto her wet lap, he'd take the other one, too. "Actions have consequences for all parties involved," he'd told me, shoving his bloody finger between my lips.

She was gone, like him, when I'd regained consciousness around dawn.

"You aren't pregnant, Tay Wilson."

Every little act between husband and wife, between lovers, between soulmates and those meant to be: he finds a way to stamp into the realm of profanity.  It's not enough for him to have a butterfly to admire and cherish. He must handle it and pull it apart and glue it back together then roll the end results over his blackened tongue.

"You aren't pregnant, Tay Wilson."

His touch is guilt, and crime, and sin. And in the red quiet of my broken bones, those feelings eat the tattered dreams of what a marriage should be.

"You aren't pregnant, Tay Wilson."

He worms his way against my skin, every night relentless, every night endless, though I know forever can't be so, for the morning, just like him, always comes eventually.

"You aren't pregnant, Tay Wilson."

Once in the throes of pain, when I managed to rip through the pillow he'd pushed over my face and fling it back at him, I thought I'd glimpsed the round shocked face of my mother beyond the sordid candlelight. She looked ready to speak, and then her hand swallowed up her mouth and the ghost of her was gone.

Sobbing doesn't stop him, not that I expect it to. I'm not just his wife. I'm a job. A duty. A feisty little oven set to an unknown timer.

"You aren't pregnant, Tay Wilson."

What and how that ugly wretched mud beast knows of my inner workings I don't care to imagine. Looking down the long stretch of  the tower always yields the same result, the same reminder: its black beetle eyes will be glistening again tomorrow.

"You aren't pregnant, Tay Wilson."

Lately the King comes in a clattering rage of talons, a brilliant grey shadow in electric summer storms.  I'm cheating him, have tricked him, have made myself infertile through some arcane witchery.

"You aren't pregnant, Tay Wilson."

I'm a failure. Come dawn, I'm failing.

"You aren't pregnant, Tay Wilson."

I dread sunset.

I just want a night alone, a night off, a single night where that feathered zombie of a monster isn't rubbing up against me, digging that jagged edge of his beak into my flesh, grunting and slathering and demanding I enjoy it.

"You aren't pregnant, Tay Wilson."

He sits on the edge of the bed, tapping his marbled undead fingers against his knee. He regards me, bound up on a pedestal like a piece of clay, with that same inquisitive expression I used to make back when I was in Alaska working on a new design. It's that pensive, studious look of someone who's mentally carving out a half dozen possibilities to find just the right one for the real thing.

I was always one of those artists that thought long and hard before making a mark that might be permanent. The King, at least this evening, seems of the same mind. He chews on the wooden end of a small knife, bobbling then dropping it when he speaks, his tongue sliding through a gap in the sharp teeth revealed by the broken half of beak.

"You've stayed much longer this time. Dare I suggest your endurance has improved?"

I wobble, my toes digging to the bone for balance on the razor-lined box he's made me stand on for the past hour while he reads my hometown newspaper and fills me in on palace workings. The most prurient response is always to say nothing. So I raise my rope-bound shoulders in the barest hint of a shrug. 

"I tend to be of the opinion that endurance is tolerance, and tolerance is simply a stronger word for boredom. " He stretches to his full height, paces around the little pedestal then gives me a little push. My feet scream and feel relief in a hot rush as I hit the floor and roll to face him. "Have you grown bored of me, My Queen?" 

"That's not the word I'd use."

With his feet planted on either side of me, he stoops and cuts the ropes binding my arms to my core, taking no care to avoid dipping the tip into my skin. "And what word would you use?" he asks, and it's clear by his dark expression he's crafted a new game for us this evening. 

All the words I know to describe him I've spat in his face a thousand times by now. 

But violence never gets old, not for him, and not for me.

I slap him, knowing full well I'll pay, knowing full well I don't care anymore. 

But when my palm smacks his spongy cheek he screeches and draws away in a powdery white flash. Frost glitters sharp on his cheek, twinkles merrily in the ticks of feathers below one confused orange eye. 

I don't realize I've forgotten how to smile until my lips make that northward turn. I bring my hand around to smack him again.

Before I strike, a sharp crack of the candlestick holder ends my ambitions. 

When I wake, the dim glare of the sun fills the hellish sky. Frost melts along the stiff sheets, diluting the blood from the previous night's experiments. 

And just as I jump from the bed with a delighted whoop of having achieved one small victory, not bruised but for my head and not cut but for my  already healing feet, I hear the croaked voice singing from the forest canopy, 

"Rock-a-bye, baby, thy cradle is green;

Father's a nobleman, mother's a queen!"