Grayling: Nocturnal Creatures Book 3 Read online

  “So the courthouse has become a brothel now as well? How kind that you shall sell my body to the highest bidder rather than permit me a chance to learn a trade, foregoing men altogether.”

  “We could only do that if you were pure, and your lovesickness suggests that you are far from pure, Ashling. You are educated in the harsher ways of the world, but you are still frustratingly innocent in other ways, child. You fought so hard in your eligible years not to let yourself be ruined because you were afraid of precisely this. We seek to ease the transition. The auction will make purchasing you prohibitive for men like Jace. They will not be able to afford the novelty. And the profit from the auction will allow you to stave off having to accept men like Jace…for a while. It is all the letter and spirit of the law will allow us to gift you.”

  “The law,” Asha snapped in barely restrained fury.

  Tumin rose to his feet, his elder’s robes like those of a judge passing sentence upon her when he presented his back. “You denigrate the law, Asha, but it has protected us for centuries.”

  “It has protected you. Not once in my life has it protected me.”

  “I do not wonder that you resent it. The law cannot protect all. There will always be those who slip through the cracks and must depend on more than the law to save them. Perhaps you will be fortunate once a small fortune—at least for a Grayling—passes into your possession. Perhaps a man will want your hand to save you from whatever corruption the devil has inflicted. The law has not condemned you, Asha. Only you can condemn yourself.”

  “Easily spoken by a man who has never gone hungry and always has the pick of prized women whenever he is in need of a wife or a whore. It is easy for the one given all protections and privileges of the law. I did not slip through the cracks, Your Honor. I was placed on a crack and systematically crushed into it by your law.” Asha spat on his expensive rug. “You were given the best education offered in the kingdom, yet you know nothing but what you wish to know. You do not see that you condemned me to the king, and now you condemn me back to the Gray, all because of circumstances out of my hands and well in yours. May the devil in the afterlife have more mercy upon you than you ever showed upon me. Perhaps if I am as fortunate as you think I will be, the devil himself will hand me the whip.”

  “We will help you whether you welcome our help or not,” Tumin said. “If we are correct about the king. Take heart, Grayling. A devil’s affection for the soulless may yet bring him here to retrieve you. Pray for it, if you must, I shall see you again at nightfall. Reserve your strength, and do not hope to escape. There will be guards outside this apartment and outside my window. I would not deny our kingdom their God-given chance to save you.”

  Asha screamed at him long after he had closed the door behind him.

  7

  She was tied to a pole on a familiar platform—familiar because many a traitor or murderer had been executed upon it. The block for beheading had been removed, as had the scaffold for a hanging. The trapdoor had been latched. Given that she had screamed hatred until she had gone hoarse, she considered the gag redundant, but Tumin had insisted upon it as he had overseen her transfer from the elders’ apartments to Snow Lily Square, the well-maintained cobblestones and gardens in front of the courthouse where all the most high-profile punishments were meted out.

  After all, they did not want her to be confused for criminal, platform and conspicuous presence of lawmakers and the executioner notwithstanding. They only wanted to ensure the fairness of the proceedings and provide her protection from the crowd that had gathered—some with fear and suspicion in their eyes when they gazed upon her, others with conspicuous lust, leering upon all the assets displayed by pulling her arms back.

  So considerate, the chief elder. He had arrived with the ceremonial rope of ‘interim’ removed from his robes, and he sat in the center of the elevated platform made for the elders, in a makeshift throne that could not begin to compete with the king’s.

  She glimpsed other familiar faces in the square than Jace. Tomas and Lest—the last men who had used her for their personal entertainment and nearly kept her from the king with their antics—were there, purses heavy with gold.

  They were not prepared to take her for wife, of course, even if that would give them the chance to have her whenever they wanted. Slaking their lust was not their primary aim, merely a consequence. The ones here with bulging purses and pockets wanted nothing to do with vows. They did not want her. They wanted the prize of taking her…once. The demon had ruined her, yes, but one of them would be the first to bed her as a whore, bed the demon’s wife and mark her divorce for the record books. They desired conquest—the bedroom was their chosen battlefield. Nothing more.

  She had always known that. The knowledge was no more satisfying now, to see it laid out before her in a crowd comprised primarily of men with coin.

  Torches along the edge of the square provided light for when the sun finished setting behind the mountains. For now, the amber glow gave her the illusion of color, and the crowd spoke in baleful murmurs. When they were not watching her, they cast their gaze to the horizon, awaiting the promised moment.

  Asha twisted her fingers behind her back beneath where her hands had been bound to the pole. She peered into the shadows of the houses around her, seeking the darkest ones in hopes a figure would shift or emerge as the sunlight continued to dim and more shadows made themselves available between buildings and within alleys. He could move about in shadow, as long as he did not suffer the sun’s rays directly. Clothing was not adequate cover, since he had not been able to travel during the day despite his cowl and robes, but in the dark of the evening, surely he would have more avenues open to him before twilight.

  Provided he came at all.

  He would not do this to her. Not after last night. Not after the way he had looked at her ever since his return, with wonder and bewilderment. The way he had bucked up into her mouth. The way he had given her the custom blades after baiting the captain. The way he had watched them. The way he had kissed her before he had left, as though reluctant to so much as part his skin from hers. The way he had regretted changing from a monster into the semblance of a man because she had desired him before. The way he had pushed her into orgasm after orgasm after taking her blood, ensuring that she received much from his now natural control over her. She drew upon all those memories, yet still could not find a flaw in her perception, some tell that he had treated her like a queen because he had wanted to use her.

  But how would she know of such designs? Ever since she had become a woman eligible to marry, men had made plain what they wanted of her. There had been no courtship, no seduction, no cajoling or gifts or sweet words. Men had done so for other women around her—easy to notice from an external perspective even if the women had not recognized the manipulation. No man had bothered concealing his true motivations with her.

  They had played with her as a cat with a beetle. The closest they had come to guile was when they had lied that she would be well taken care of as a whore, that they would ensure she lay in a nicer brothel, that they would be gentle, that they would give her pleasure. Never marriage. Never romance. Never love.

  Perhaps she did not discern the king’s machinations because she had never had to protect herself from manipulative kindness and had been unable to recognize it.

  If it were so, then, that the king was truly a devil and had taken what he wanted from her, did those devilish qualities extend to his army? They were bound to him, bound to his commands, and the captain was his devoted servant. But could that truly explain all the wolves’ actions toward her, those of friend, confidant, lover, and teacher? Could that explain Lysan and Callina?

  Had it all been a lie, from wedding to divorce? Every last show of affection, friendship, submission, respect, desire… Had it all been false?

  “It’s twilight, Your Majesty,” Jace said from his place at the corner of the platform. “Where’s your charming king to whisk you away on his
black horse?” He came close enough to push down her gag.

  She coughed against her dry mouth. “Wait. It is not yet dark. He may need time to arrive.”

  “It is no task to wait until the sky has gone completely dark,” Tumin said, with all the manner of indulgence. “Let some vendors come into the square to keep the crowd occupied. We can wait another hour. Two, if the people remain patient.”

  THE CHIME of the hour from the cathedral sounded eight times before Tumin finally stood, alit with flame. “The king does not come to claim you, Asha of the Gray.”

  The crowd sent up raucous cheers, an unknowing mockery of the wolves and their feasts. Asha’s chest had never felt that particular pain before.

  “We can only conclude that your returning to the kingdom was the king’s design, that by bringing you back to us, he nullifies your marriage and all the privileges as well as horrors that might have accompanied it.”

  “May you, too, one day experience those horrors, sir,” Asha said, outwardly calm but for the tension in her jaw and the trembling underneath the rope. She thought she might lose the contents of her stomach.

  Tumin blinked. “Yes, well… The kingdom has been notified of the itinerary for tonight. Now that night has fallen and Asha of the Gray has returned to citizenship from a brief tryst with monarchy, we find her to be an eligible woman no longer, by her own admission. The rejection by the king was, as far as we know, no fault of her own—though we have never once had a queen returned to us and can only speculate as to the king’s motives.”

  “I can think of a few reasons,” a man muttered so as to nevertheless be heard. “That cold fish in my bed, I’d throw her back, too.”

  “Then why’re you here, Gent?” slurred another man, halfway into his wineskin.

  “I need a laugh, same as everyone else.”

  “That is enough from the spectators,” Tumin called. “Asha of the Gray, ruined for men, you are also ineligible for apprentice work, for you are still of procreative age. You have two options before you. The first is to plead for a man’s hand to take yours in marriage, which would strike out the ruination brought upon you by the king’s divorce. Does any man here offer his hand to a fatherless woman, to save her from the blight upon her soul left by the devil’s possession?”

  “When you attempt to persuade them with such robust promotional rhetoric, it is a wonder, sir, that you never went into commerce,” Asha said dryly.

  “You are welcome to sell yourself.” Tumin swept his hand to give her the floor.

  “I imagine that comes later,” she replied.

  “Just like me,” another man said from the laughing crowd.

  Tumin turned back to the kingdom folk milling about the square. “Any man? Any man at all to take her hand?”

  The marriage request was not what they had come for; that was abundantly clear by the deafening silence that followed Tumin’s query.

  Asha did not leave a pair of eyes unmet. If one of them had experienced the slightest twinge of guilt, she would have felt herself served by the entire humiliating situation. If she had possessed the power to make every man retch from the shame they had made her feel at least once in her life and that they now made her relive all over again—and all at once—she would compel the street cleaners to earn their bread.

  “Very well,” Tumin said quietly, as though he were resigned and not relieved to move forward from the uncomfortable silence he had known would answer him. “I take it that the majority of spectators are here for the bidding. In the absence of a husband to bind Asha of the Gray to honor, we have no choice but to put her to auction, with proceeds to support her as she transitions from her unexpected separation. A married man is not eligible to bid. Infidelity might be a common enough sin, but I will not condone it here. Neither will we accept vouchers. All bids are to be in coin you possess, not what you expect to possess. You pay tonight for the pleasure of a night in a private room. Who will start the bid?”

  “I start the bid at five golds.”

  The men of the crowd all reeled at a woman’s voice. Tumin raised his eyebrow, though he did not instruct the bidder that only men were permitted to participate in the auction. He had little expectation that the woman would engage in discouraged sexual acts with her own daughter, but Tumin would have no moral quarrel with Thora offering to pay for a night either way. Given the quality of the Tapestry sons’ coats, buttons, buckles, and furs, Thora would quickly lose the ability to challenge a bid, despite the dull purse that hung from her wrist.

  It held too many coins for her to have earned them all, and Asha doubted the church had permitted her coin from the charity donated to them. She had likely gained the money through a neighbor’s direct charity or by a single patron impressed by Thora in her own night, enough to provide her the generous coin.

  Tomas sneered upon the Grayling woman in her nun’s modest gown. “Fifty.”

  “Sixty and half.” Jace held up his leather purse.

  “Seventy.”

  Lest laughed. “That’s more than the bag of bones weighs after an afternoon in the summer rain. Seventy and a silver for this hellcat.”

  “Seventy and half,” Thora replied.

  “Seventy-five,” called another man.

  “Eighty.”

  “Ninety.”

  For all the silence when Tumin had asked for someone’s hand to give her, the crowd now dove into the auction for her body with unrepentant enthusiasm. They had waited nineteen years for her to fall, and now they could be the cause. That alone was worth a family fortune in many of the minds in the square—not just the young, impetuous ones, whose cruelty could be dismissed by the indulgent as impulsive. Old men bid for her with wetness on their lips and fingers fumbling with the strings of their purses. Men who had lost wives in childbirth not three months prior raised their hands and voices.

  “One hundred twenty-five.”

  “One hundred thirty-eight and half,” Thora called.

  Laughter from multiple fronts followed her bid. The men recognized from the exactness of the number that Thora now offered her entire purse to save her daughter.

  “One hundred thirty-nine.” Jace mocked Thora’s solemnity and weakness raising her purse, to the delight of the men around her. Entertainment indeed, to bring one woman low and heap insult upon the woman who bore her—for after all, though she served the church now, many of the older men in the square had tasted her for much more modest coin. Once a prostitute, no one ever forgot, even after death, when a mark on the gravestone would etch ‘whore’ upon her reputation forever.

  Thora showed no distress, her expression as stony as it had been when she had made herself known. The glint from her eyes seemed glassy, her lips thinned and her back ramrod. Asha recognized the efforts as though they were her own.

  Instead of loosing tears, Thora turned a reluctant gaze to the image of her daughter ruined, bound, a whore already, simply waiting for her first patron—no, second. The king had made her whore first, as Asha had feared from the beginning when she had struck at him and fought him all the way to her bed.

  “One-forty,” Tomas said. “Not a coin more for the mite. I can buy better for less.”

  “One-forty-five,” Jace countered. “It’s not a matter of better, boy. I would have her five times if it meant seeing despair upon her. See how it clouds the darkness under her eyes and the hollows of her cheekbones. Imagine, now, if it reached her eyes, her soul. I would pay a year’s wages to see that.”

  “Then you shall pay a year’s wages,” a man yelled from the crowd. “One-seventy-five.”

  “One-eighty-five.”

  “Two hundred.”

  “What makes you think even my despair can please you?” Asha said, not only for Jace. “I was a demon’s wife. I was servant of a devil and his servants since Longest Night, and the devil threw me aside, though none other had ever displeased him as I did. If I could not even entertain the devil, surely I would fail more a man.”

  Tumin stoo
d, accusation twisting his mouth down. “I do this for you, Grayling. You will not see coin like this again. Why do you sabotage your security?”

  “Find another way to satisfy your bitter kindness,” Asha said. “Perhaps pass a silver coin into the beggar’s jars. For every minute they freeze, charity shall keep you warm.”

  An elder raised his purse, saluting her. “Two hundred twenty. I shall sleep warmly tonight.”

  “Two hundred twenty-five,” Jace said, but the excitement that continued to bulge in his trousers had faded from his countenance. He had reached his end, and the Tapestry sons still clutched at their purses, waiting for the early excitement to die so they could exercise their perpetual right.

  “Two-fifty.”

  The auction climbed steadily to four hundred gold coins as the night grew colder. Pieces of Asha died, withered in winter cold, with each gold coin promising her to a man’s every whim. Disgust filled the places that had not grayed into lifelessness, her physical repulsion magnified fifty times from when she had considered the men of the master’s bed.

  The master’s bed had respected her wishes. Once she had been bought, especially for a king’s ransom, her wishes would mean nothing. The man could do everything and anything to her short of murder, and the new chief elder would expect her to thank him for it.

  “I will not go peacefully. You will have to fight for every inch you wish to take.” Once Asha could no longer depend upon the proceeds of the auction, that would have to change, or else she would need to revisit the options she had entertained in the first nights of being the king’s wife—seductive cliffs, perhaps, or a procured blade.

  Her rebellion, rather than deterring the bids, spurred them faster.

  “Five hundred five.”

  Men who had misered over coin to drop into her jar now offered a salary that she could stretch far beyond a single year, although the unknown percentage the elders would assume obscured any plans.