Page 29 of Alien God

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Wylfrael

“Do you still wish me to bring her down to your chamber, my lord?”

I almost missed Aiko’s question. I’d been too busy running over the encounter with the prisoner, alternating between irritation and confusion.

“What? Ah. No.” There was no point, now. I did not even know what I had hoped to accomplish with that in the first place. I couldn’t understand her language, nor she mine. I’d gotten her to eat, which I considered a small victory, though a rather pathetic one. I doubted I’d get anything else useful out of her tonight.

I need to prioritise getting to Rúnwebbe as soon as possible. I had to be able to talk to her. To interrogate this little human with the summer-sweet eyes who seemed to oscillate so wildly between defiant and demure, willful and wary. This tiny invader who did not know enough of me to be afraid of me, but who felt it, sometimes, suddenly remembering the way one might remember a forgotten object in another room. I could see it when her eyes went white all the way around the gold. And when her heartbeat hammered in her throat.

An impossibly slender column, that throat. Stupidly thin, if you asked me.

Which no one did.

“Don’t you think her neck is too skinny?” I huffed as Aiko and I reached the landing outside my bedroom. “It’s a miracle she made it across the cosmos at all with a neck that breakable.”

“My lord?” A concerned warble had entered Aiko’s voice. She was right to sound worried. I sounded like a half-mad fool.

“Never mind. Thank you for everything, Aiko. You are dismissed,” I said, rubbing my fingertips viciously across my forehead. Aiko bid me a guarded goodnight, then turned tail and disappeared down the stairs and into the tunnel.

I went into my room. It was essentially a larger version of the one I’d just left upstairs, complete with a bed, a bath laid into the floor near the fire, a table and two chairs, and a smaller chamber with a toilet and washbasin off to the side.

My eyes landed on something that had not been there before. Though I’d dismissed them, either Shoshen or Ashken had brought a bowl of stew and a goblet of ale and left it all on the table for me. Considering how many stairs it took to get here from the kitchen, I was betting it was Shoshen.

Good lad...

I sat down heavily in the chair and took up the goblet, staring at it broodingly. The goblet was made of silver tree crystal carved into such a thin cup that it was transparent as a newly-formed sheet of ice. Inside, the ale was a dark umber swirl.

I tilted the glass, letting the firelight filter through it, turning the brown to red. But that reminded me of the light hitting the human’s hair upstairs, and suddenly all I could feel was the fine, silken strands sliding across the skin of my hand.

I chugged the ale, fuming.

Was I going to have to make sure she ate every meal?

The Sionnachans would be too timid for such a task. But I didn’t have time to watch her at every meal, making sure she didn’t starve. I still had to deal with Skalla. My fangs tightened, wings tensing against the chair’s back when I thought of him out there, unhinged and unleashed, with no one to hold him or help him or stop him. No one to help those he encountered, either.

Curse the council!

I finished the last sip of ale and wiped a violent hand across the back of my mouth, breathing heavily. They should have opened their gates! Without their power, there was no way I could deal with Skalla. Even Maerwynne and I together hadn’t been able to stop him and bind him. And even if I could somehow track him down and subdue him without killing him, what then? Bring him back here?

Impossible.

I thought of trying to hold Skalla prisoner here, the way I was doing with the human, and laughed bitterly. I’d be dealing with a lot more than pouty refusals to eat, that was for certain. I’d likely be faced with dozens of Sionnachan corpses in Skalla’s wake, and I absolutely refused to let anything like that happen. It was why I’d fought with him, forced him out of this world and nearly died facing him when he’d appeared here so long ago.

I ran my thumb back and forth over the crystal goblet, remembering what Maerwynne had said. That he was going to find his mate, cure his star-darkness, and join the council. Considering that seemed to be the only way to find out what was going on in Heofonraed, it seemed a decent enough plan. But finding one’s mate could take eons. Would he even find her in time? Before his star map went out like a candle burning down into nothing?

---