Grayling: Nocturnal Creatures Book 3 Read online

  “That did not distress you too much, did it?” Asha noted with her fingertips all the places where the injuries and mess had concentrated. “Was it such a terrible thing to submit to your hunger? Did it wrest command from your iron fist? Did it make you less of an alpha to take me, less of a captain to bury yourself inside a queen?”

  “Your Majesty…” The captain nearly unseated her by rising up without warning, but he kept her from falling by bending his legs to cushion her. He brought a hand to her throat and kissed her soundly until he stole her words—and some of his own. “D-do cease speaking.”

  6

  She woke up freezing.

  It was not even like waking. One moment she had fallen asleep in her bed with the king on one side and the captain on the other—both he and she far cleaner than when they had finished. The next thing she knew, she opened her eyes with her swollen cheek almost stuck to cold, icy cobblestone.

  Coal dust, boot leather, and horsehair scent eminently familiar, she nearly tore her skin to get away from it, but she forced herself to stay put in the darkness and direct her breath until the thin frost melted enough for her to sit up without consequence.

  The winter had always been unkind, even in the castle halls where there were no torches and no hearths, no giant glass windows to let sunlight warmth in. It was why she preferred the audience chamber, the rose window hall, the master’s room, and her own bedroom, although she had willingly stepped into the gardens and out onto her balcony to welcome cold against her fever when it had burned too high.

  But before the castle, cold had been a constant companion except in the summer months, present in the damp and the freeze, the chilled rains and the north wind. When she and her mother had been able to afford firewood, the stove had staved off some of the winter while they had slept, enough to at least keep ice crystals from forming on their eyelashes.

  Some days, however, the marketplace had brought blue to her gray skin, though the fires of the forges and those warming the brothels as well as the heat of passing horses had provided some ambient warmth that prevented most frost from skin. Some of the weaker beggars around her had fallen during lean winter months, their bodies dragged away by death collectors like bags of rubbish to the furnaces. Death collectors—dishonorable though their station, like the executioner—stayed warm on the bodies of the frozen dead.

  Heat had not yet seeped over the square in the pre-dawn morning, with beggars and shopkeepers still abed or just awakening, and with the women of the night rising late—some with their men, some to feed their children, some to pretend behind closed eyes that the day would not be as the last. Most men would not come to brothels so early on a cold morning. Beggars arrived for their daily bread well before whores emerged.

  She had been gone from the kingdom proper for less than two months. When she rose to find herself in the center of the empty marketplace square, it was as though she had never left.

  “The Ashling. As I live and breathe. I never thought we would see you again.”

  Asha whipped around toward the voice. She immediately winced, hissing through her teeth and clenching her eyes shut. The king had dealt with her black eye and the worst of the scratches, but he had left some of them alone and had not touched the bruises at her behest. She did not know how long she had been unconscious, but her body protested the quick movement all the way down to her marrow.

  When she could see through the strong but brief stabs of protest from sore muscles and rent flesh, Wendla stood before her, her hands on her hips and an unpleasant smile upon her face.

  The madam who controlled the brothel at the entrance to the Gray kept every young female beggar within her view. An eligible woman who sold herself to avoid the king could keep all earnings from their first time, but Wendla was there as soon as the ink dried in the registry of ineligible, unwedded young women. She offered a room, a bed, and a dress for a heavy percentage of the whore’s trade in order to pay for them. She was enterprising, opportunistic, and demanding of her women, having survived long enough to fight her way up to her position, where she finally took money from women instead of men.

  Wendla had been a beggar herself in the beginning. When she stared at Asha, she stared upon what she had once been, with the same cynicism of Asha’s fate. Asha had contradicted Wendla’s implied prediction when the king had whisked her away in the dead of Longest Night. Yet here Asha was, back in the marketplace square, and there Wendla stood, regarding her with the same sour, superior disdain so many people displayed when they deigned to grace Asha with their attention.

  “How unfortunate that after everything you have had to go through, Grayling brat, here you are once again—though I am not certain the landlord will allow you into my brothel now, if even the king rejects you.” Wendla arched her eyebrow, then turned and walked away, her hips swaying the red dress over the stone, which dampened and darkened the hem of the fabric.

  Asha grunted slightly as she climbed to her knees. She stopped before she could stand.

  Her gown was one from her bedroom wardrobe, not from her Grayling home. It was simpler, a plain dark gray at first confused for black, the structure quite similar to her old dresses. This gown had been made for winter—not for winter exposure, but it had contributed to her not freezing to death nonetheless, the sleeves thick and fitted to her arms and the skirts layered over her legs. Any trace of fever had passed, so she could not keep herself warm by desire alone, but she wore leggings beneath the skirts.

  They were not the clothes in which she had retired with the captain and the king. She had climbed in with a new nightgown, which would have been too thin for the marketplace square at dawn. She had not gone to bed in boots either, but that was what encased her feet.

  Now girls from the brothel and shopkeepers from the marketplace emerged onto the square. They creeped out from behind storefronts and open doors, peered through windows, approached her as street-keepers approached street cats with hemorrhaging eyes.

  She slowly climbed to her feet, the first shivers shuddering through her.

  “Is it really you, Asha of the Gray?” Korin, a fish seller, edged a little closer, as though afraid she might be a ghost.

  Asha raised her hand to her hip. No chain belt. No dagger. When she turned her ankle, she found no flint dagger in her boot where she had kept one when begging. Whoever had brought her here ensured she would probably not freeze but had also left her defenseless.

  Who brought me back?

  She faced the fish seller warily. He had granted her small jobs in exchange for fish he could not sell—not always bad, but sometimes damaged pieces he could only give to feral dogs for scraps anyway.

  “You look fed. Still hungry, but fed,” he said.

  “Not too much different to me,” said Clair, one of the sellers of crude textiles—nowhere near the quality of Tapestry artisans, and intended for a more local clientele. “Men… Clothe a woman in a prettier dress, and they think she has changed. So she brushed her hair and washed her face, donned finer attire. She is still Asha of the Gray, hair to toe. Not a great change to my eyes.”

  “But why did you come back?” asked one of the whores, a young woman with black hair and a ragged neckline.

  “Why would anyone want to return?”

  “To die here, to die in a demon-infested castle, it is no difference.”

  “She has not died yet. She stands before us as healthy as a Grayling can be.”

  “Are you certain? She looks dead to me.”

  “Most Graylings do.”

  “Look at her now, the way she looks at us. She still thinks herself too good. A marriage to a king, and here she assumes the countenance of a false queen.”

  “She always looked like that. Every coin that struck her jar was always less than her due, though the bitch scraped us clean of scraps she rarely earned herself. All she wanted was for us to hand her everything.”

  “Yes, Prell, she spent her whole young life conning you out of your brownest vege
tables and blackest potatoes just out of spite. I am sure she laughed every time she convinced you out of a precious penny you could not be bothered to lift from a crack in the cobblestone. Have some compassion.”

  “Compassion breeds more brats, more bitches to suckle upon the teat of the kingdom’s good will. We are only fortunate the king relieves us of the worst Gray-bred leeches every year.”

  “You hush, cobbler. If we had no Grays, would you take their place? It is no gift to be born Gray, and it does no good to condemn her for a misfortune of birth. What is a girl to do, when she has no prospects and does not wish to join the brothels?”

  “Oh, so she stands too proud for the brothels, too, where thousands of women, even her own mother, laid on their backs before her? Where does she think she is headed now, disavowed by the devil and spoiled for any other man who would have been fool enough to consider marrying her before?”

  “I was not disavowed by the king,” Asha said. Her voice cut through the mutterings and overt gossiping of the townspeople.

  “Then why are you here?” the cobbler asked. “Hardly the finest threads for a queen to flaunt before her subjects. Not so changed from what you were. Does he make you get on your knees in the cold as well, to beg as you did in that corner? Did you flee him? Or did he discard you?”

  Asha spun around in the center of the marketplace square. Everywhere she turned she saw familiar and unfamiliar faces, but most with the familiar chilly glee.

  From those who had found their way out of the hands of the king or into the hands of men. From those born men who had never had to fear the conflict of women and cared not to consider it, just to play the savior. From those who had never faced the conflict themselves and assumed any woman could find what she needed. From those who had taken their only way out and chose to see their hell as the better one. They preferred her as their animal sacrifice, and like all sacrifices, they would have preferred to see her again as ashes than alive. It was not guilt that pitted them against her now; they were simply done with her.

  “What is this commotion? Do none of you have occupations with which to occupy yourself?”

  Asha swept around again, dizziness bringing her hand to her head to steady her.

  An elder with his entourage pushed his way to the front of the crowd. He wore the mantle that marked him as chief elder, with a rope that qualified him as interim.

  Tumin, the son of a prominent judge and elder before him. His hands were so soft, they could be confused for those of a young academic rather than a man of fifty, and his face had barely been touched by the lines, wrinkles, and spots a Grayling man would possess two decades earlier.

  Her fingers curled, but she kept them from fists. She could not seem threatening without a knife to defend herself. She had not been in the square in so long that she did not know which cobblestones were loose. With all these witnesses, less inclined now to protect her for their own amusement, she did not believe she would have time to search before one of them struck her down. Tumin’s entourage carried swords. They would not have to dirty their hands to neutralize her, should Tumin indicate her death.

  Then, from behind the entourage of viziers and guards and other lesser elders, Jace, the executioner, stepped out, wearing the broadest black smile that she had ever seen on his hard face.

  Most of his teeth had rotted by now, yellow and black, cracked, with empty spaces where whole teeth had fallen out. His nose and some of his fingers showed signs of the same rot. But he still carried his axe in its harness on his back, and the muscles of his shoulders and arms seemed more than capable of wielding it. The rot sometimes took over twenty years to kill its host. The man or woman who suffered it might end their own life before the rot could reach far enough inside to kill, but a person could endure much in the name of survival and spite.

  “Go about your businesses,” Tumin said to the surrounding crowd that had gathered in the square.

  But he did not take his beady eyes from Asha’s. Age rather than the Gray had silvered the hair at his temples, and his well-fed belly pressed against his elder’s robes. He held himself imperious, his stature impressive and the tailoring of his robes highlighting his health and vigor. The leaner crowd of the marketplace listened to a man like him as though he were the one holding the axe. Not one guard had to rattle his sword.

  Tumin waited until most of the crowd had dispersed before he spoke. “Well, Asha of the Gray… What chaos do you bring with you? Bind her, executioner.”

  “I have done nothing wrong,” Asha protested, backing away.

  “Do not resist, Grayling. If you have done nothing wrong, there is no reason to fear. But your being here is wrong, child. Very, very wrong. Bind her and bring her to my quarters.”

  JACE THREW her onto the bed with her hands still bound behind her back.

  The elders had their own estates, but often when they were unmarried or needed time away from their wife and children, they spent their leisure in apartments attached to the courthouse. Tumin’s quarters were more expansive than the Gray church she had once attended with her mother. The ceilings did not stretch as high as the castle’s, but the apartment was open, rooms without partitions. In these apartments, a man needed no more privacy than his front door. Only his bed gave any illusion of privacy, with thick curtains hanging from the posts.

  Tapestry standards adorned the entire apartment. Rich textiles lined the floor and walls and draped over the gold-gilded furniture. The treasurer had spared no coin in furnishing and maintaining the apartment to its master’s impeccable, expensive tastes.

  Asha gazed with disgust upon the lavish apartment before glaring with equal disgust upon Jace, who dropped into a winged armchair angled toward the bed. In a private apartment, Asha could well imagine that company was what the armchair was intended for, just as the bed was decked in curtains as though for a traveling performance. Though the executioner would not have been a regular visitor, he made himself comfortable in the chair, slinging his leg over the arm as he took in the sight of her.

  “It pleases you to see me again,” she said.

  “Immensely. You can’t know how it pleases me that, after what you did and what the freakish warriors did to me at your captain’s word, you were still tossed out. The barbarians finished with you now that they’ve realized they can do so much better by picking from a handsomer kingdom selection?”

  “Your information was poor, executioner. The king returned, and he will—”

  “If you’re going to tell me your husband will hunt each of us down and slice our throats for anything we do to you, lose the dramatics. We didn’t take you from the castle, princess. We took you from the marketplace square, right before the entrance of the Gray. That means one thing. They didn’t want you. But they had you, didn’t they? They sank their pricks into all your prissy little holes, and now that you’re back, that makes things quite unpleasant for you. After all that extra work to make it to the king, you still have to be our whore.”

  The executioner rubbed his hand over the prominent bulge in his trousers. She had been made aware of it on the way to the Tapestry, when Jace had thrown her over his shoulders and her legs had bumped against the front of his pants. She had tried to kick him once she had ascertained where to aim, but he had anticipated her and pinioned her legs until the point he threw her onto the new chief elder’s bed.

  “Has it not fallen off yet?” Asha tried to wriggle to the side, but Jace had bound her arms more tightly than necessary. She could feel her fingers, but not well, and the extensive wrapping limited her range of motion.

  His efforts lacked the poetry of the king’s, but they were effective.

  The executioner unfastened his trousers and adjusted the placket so that his cock could swing free. The captain’s cock had been intimidating in its size. The executioner’s cock also swelled to impressive width, but his came not just from arousal but from festering disease, swelling that had nothing to do with the erection, except to apparently make his mo
re intense. Simply to touch it with his bare fingers, he shifted in his seat with discomfort.

  The rot discolored the shaft and had eaten away at the ridge of the head. The place where the captain had split the skin had scarred poorly, as though his skin was too taut to reach over the gap. It still oozed whitish yellow, foul-smelling, thick fluid whenever the executioner ran his hand over it. Asha gagged.

  “No, you arrogant, superior little bitch, although your barbarian friend seems to have quickened the rot’s progress. You are incapable of comprehending how this feels, Ashling—the overwhelming need mingled with pain like hundreds of needles through my cock. I would pay a fair wage to stuff this inside your holier-than-thou cunt. I don’t think I’ll have to wait long.”

  “He did not return me.” But Asha discerned the doubt in her own words, and from the executioner’s hysterical laughter, so did he.

  “He’s never returned a girl before. How terribly must you have failed for him to drop you off right where he found you. If the devil let you go, not even the cheap brothels will want to take you. What do you think I’ll have to pass over your sheets? Five gold coins? Two? One? Oh, perhaps I can afford to be generous.”

  He pulled a coin, then a second, from his pocket. He approached the bed, presenting them to her between two fingers, his smile cruel and crooked.

  “You won’t mock my disease then, will you? When the rot finally takes me, it will give me great pleasure to know that it will also rot you, that pieces of you will fall off at the most inconvenient of times. I will rob you of the very last of your pride, ashen little Grayling. Once men learn what festers inside of you, only men with rot themselves will come to visit…if they care half a coin for the health of their women. They’ll fill you with a different kind of seed until you start to show and they no longer care to touch you. Without men to pay for the dubious pleasure, you’ll have to crawl into a gutter. Then the men who sweep the street will kick you into their bag, and you’ll burst like bad wineskin, bones in the stew of what was once flesh.”