Текст книги "Alien god"

Автор книги: Ursa Dox

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

Marry me.

His hand was still there. Open, waiting, like a trap.

God help me, I took it.

Oh, my little human bride. As if you ever had a choice.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE Torrance

After breakfast – which was very good, some kind of fruit preserve slathered on warm, red bread – Aiko asked if I was ready to move my things into the lord’s chamber in the Eve Tower. I scoffed at her mention of my “things,” as if I had a whole suitcase of human essentials to unpack in the new space. All that was in here with me now were my boots, socks, and the clothes on my back. Plus, the toothbrush they’d given me. Even my snowsuit was in Wylfrael’s room, probably still in a heap where he’d left it.

“This is about it,” I said gesturing vaguely to myself, my hand swinging up and down from head to toe. “Oh, I did have a cloak last night, though...”

“Oh, yes! I saw it in the kitchen this morning. It was hanging near the fire to dry. I suppose Lord Wylfrael did that if you know nothing about it.”

I was disconcerted, just the way I’d been when he’d started making the milk drink in the kitchen for me. I hadn’t seen him hang the cloak up to dry, but I wondered about the motivation behind it. I assumed he would have been the kind of proud, impetuous sort to leave it wet in a pile on the floor. Did he not want to leave a mess for Aiko and Shoshen to clean up?

Or did he not want it to be damp and cold the next time I wore it?

He’s probably just a control freak. So meticulous he can’t stand something out of place in his kitchen...

“I’d rather have a tour of the castle right now, actually, instead of going to the Eve Tower room,” I told Aiko. “If that’s alright,” I added. For some reason, I felt a little shy about asking, like I shouldn’t be doing it and that Wylfrael was going to come back and scold me for it. Going from a prisoner to the lady of this castle was giving me whiplash.

But Aiko did that open-close thing with her hands, agreeing happily, and after a quick brush of my teeth, we were off.

We took the stairs down through the tower instead of going through the adjoining tunnel. As we walked, Aiko chattered enthusiastically about the castle, about the marvel of creating it, carving it out of standing trees when Sionnachans usually used crystal slabs or bricks to construct buildings.

“That was Lord Cynewylf’s idea,” she said. “He was said to have loved the natural state of Sionnach and wanted the castle to fit in with the landscape. He used much of his own power to carve out the insides, shaping it into the design he and Sashkah desired.”

I tried to imagine growing up in a place like this, as Wylfrael had. Although I couldn’t imagine someone as intense as he was ever really being a child. There was a luxurious beauty in every chamber Aiko showed me, sitting rooms and storage rooms alike gleaming with jewelled light coming through the crystal walls.

It took us all morning just to get through the tower I’d been staying in, which I learned was called the Dawn Tower. I also learned that Aiko had an exceptionally good memory for the history of this place. “You’re a great tour guide,” I told her as we finally made it to the ground floor of the Dawn Tower.

“Thank you,” she said warmly, obviously pleased by the compliment. “As the castle’s Mistress of Affairs, it is my duty to know everything about the property.”

I could see plainly that Aiko was proud of her role here, and it eased some of the weirdness I felt about everything. It would have been a whole lot harder to work together with Wylfrael if his staff seemed unhappy, or he mistreated them. Nope, seems like he’s only an asshole to me.

We took a different tunnel – the one on the ground, this time – to the centre tower. The tunnel down here had the same intricate, beautifully arranged crystal, but barely any light came through due to the drifts of snow outside. My breathing came a little quicker as the sudden image of collapse, of rushing, roaring, burying snow chilled me to my core.

I thought the tunnel on the ground would be less unnerving than the one way up in the air, but apparently not.

I wondered, briefly, what it would be like to walk through this tunnel in the spring or summer, then remembered that, if all went to plan, I wouldn’t be here to find out. Aiko seemed oblivious to the way I eyed the walls warily, continuing to fill the air with facts about this place as we walked. I learned that there were three high-up, suspended tunnels connecting the three towers to each other in a triangle shape, but there were only two tunnels on the ground, more of a V-shaped line connecting the three towers. That made sense, as when we’d gone out the back door of the centre Day Tower, there hadn’t been a tunnel ahead, blocking access to the barn and forest beyond.

After passing through the tunnel into the Day Tower, we had a brief lunch in the kitchen, meeting up with Shoshen, who was just coming in from his chores outside. We had the same awkward moment of him trying to address me as “My lady,” and me basically begging him not to. He accepted the informality of the relationship much more quickly than Aiko had, and I snickered at the frown she shot him as he so instantly agreed to call me Torrance.

He’s definitely the younger brother.

“Didn’t even have to shovel a path to the sontanna’s enclosure and the barn this morning!” Shoshen said, grabbing a chunk of bread and leaning against the counter, sounding half-confused and half-grateful. “I suppose that was Lord Wylfrael’s doing. Can’t think of anyone else who could have made such a wide, smooth path in snow that deep. It’s incredible.”

There was a note of awe in his words, and for the first time, I fully understood the gravity of the situation from the Sionnachan point of view. They’d been taking care of this castle, generation after generation, waiting for Wylfrael to return. He must have become like a legend to them, a mystical figure of ancient history with extraordinary power. And now, they were seeing first-hand that his powers were real. That their grandparents’ bedtime stories about him were actually true.

I chewed my bread, suddenly finding it hard to swallow. I decided not to tell them that the reason he’d cleared all that snow was so I could walk through it, and so that we could have a midnight sontanna ride that turned into a fucking marriage proposal.

After lunch, Aiko and I continued our tour through the Day Tower. This tower, Aiko told me, was the largest – both the tallest and the widest at the base. Many of its rooms were devoted to practical uses. Rooms for drying herbs and meat, the room where laundry was done, a room with what looked like weaving and sewing materials. It also had the servants’ quarters, which I hurriedly told Aiko she didn’t need to show me, not wanting to invade her privacy.

“Most of those rooms are unused, now,” she said. “The castle used to have a much larger staff.”

We continued upwards. My legs were beginning to get shaky, but I wanted to see more. Now that I was allowed to move freely through this place, I was more curious than afraid. The incredible nature of what I was doing struck me, several times, as we climbed the stairs. I was walking through a real-life, honest-to-goodness alien dwelling. Seeing an otherworldly culture – in fact, the blending of two cultures, stone sky and Sionnachan – up close and personal. It was fascinating, and despite the violence of how I’d ended up here, I found myself touched, tenderly grateful, to Aiko for sharing all of this with me.

Our tour ended rather abruptly, not because I got too tired to keep going (although my legs were rubbery by then) but because I found a room I didn’t want to leave.

“This is the library,” Aiko told me as we entered. “Oh, Father! Good! You’re here.”

I could barely take in the expansive sprawl of the room before I saw the man Aiko had spoken to. I would have known he was related to Aiko and Shoshen even if she hadn’t told me – he had the same orange colouring, though his was a little duller. His tall form leaned on a cane when he rose from where he’d been sitting.

He advanced towards us, and we met him halfway through the large room.

“Hello, hello!” He greeted us warmly. “This must be our new lady of the house!” He said it with so much obvious pleasure that I almost felt guilty when I asked him to just call me Torrance.

“Torrance, then,” he said easily. I was surprised, and grateful, that he’d agreed so quickly. I’d worried that he would be stuck in his ways, older and stricter about rules than his children. But he was much more easygoing than I’d expected. Like he was just so happy about the way things were turning out, he didn’t care what he had to call me.

“What do you think of the estate so far?” he asked, a keenness entering his eyes, as if very interested in my answer.

I hesitated, unsure how to phrase what I was feeling, how to describe the gorgeous place they called home that was both a palace and a prison.

“It’s... Well, it’s beautiful,” I said, settling on something that was objectively true. “And huge! I’m impressed only three of you have taken such good care of everything.”

Aiko’s tail fluttered in something that seemed like shy pleasure, and Ashken grinned.

“Of course, Torrance, of course! We always expected Lord Wylfrael to return. We have been diligent, and happily so, in our duty to the castle in his absence. And, of course, now that you are here, you may direct us in whichever changes you wish to make. So that you may feel at home here.”

His kindness made my throat feel like a rock was lodged in it.

So that you may feel at home here.

There was no more home for me now. I’d been taken from Earth, from the doorstep of the house that held my whole heart. My parents were gone, and even if I got out of here, I wouldn’t be safe on Earth again. Not with what I knew, what I’d seen.

The best shot I have at a home now is finding the other human women. Making sure they’re safe, and figuring out how we’ll all survive without being under the thumb of the ship’s military crew...

“So, tell me about the library, Ashken!” I said, my voice high and sounding overly cheery as I changed the subject.

“Of course, of course!” he said, turning and brandishing his silver crystal cane around the space. My gaze followed the sweep of the carved silver stick.

It was a truly massive room. It was about halfway up the Day Tower, and unlike other lower, wider floors of the house which were broken up into more than one chamber, the library dominated the entire floor. The ceiling was also much higher than most of the other floors, and unlike the tower I’d been staying in, this one was green, giving everything a rich verdant hue. A massive fire rock blazed in the centre of the room, and it took me a moment to realize it was encased in a sort of crystal grate which hardened into a chimney that arched up towards the ceiling. The silvery crystal was so thin around the fire that it was nearly invisible, allowing the golden-orange light to disperse around the space. Arranged in a circle around the fire were cushions, large crystal chairs, and fur throws.

Apart from the fire and the furniture, though, there wasn’t much more I recognized in the room. There weren’t bookshelves like a human library. Instead, the entire circular perimeter of the room had massive rectangular frames jutting out from the walls, with what looked like fabric stretched over the frames. Some of the rectangles were pressed close together, obscuring the fabric on them, others were splayed wider apart. It reminded me of rug stores back home, where the rugs were stretched and suspended in transparent plastic rectangles that you had to turn on the walls like pages of a book. Or, like how posters were displayed and sold in shops, if posters were more than ten feet tall.

“This is amazing!” I said, completely fascinated. If Orla were here, she would lose her fucking mind. Orla was our resident linguist among the kidnapped women on the ship. I wondered grimly if she would have seen this anyway, had Wylfrael not returned when he did. If we would have found and taken over this property and hurt the Sionnachans.

Knowing humans, probably.

But that reminded me...

“Why is this place invisible?” I blurted, distracted from the library. “Is that another one of Wylfrael’s powers?”

“Oh, no,” Ashken said. “Lord Cynewylf had trading relationships with the warlords of Riverdark. A mage who owed him a favour cast that protective spell over the property so that only those who knew the correct phrase could find it and enter. Oh, I rather suppose I should tell you, if you do not know it already. The word is mirreth. It’s the Riverdark word for home.”

Ashken needn’t have translated it for me. In the bizarre way of the webbing, I both heard the phonetic sounds of the word and instantly understood it. I really can understand any language...

“So, the warlords of Riverdark... Who are they? Stone sky gods?”

“No, no,” Ashken said. “They are a completely separate people. Although, there may be a stone sky god who is half Riverdark out there. But the warlords of Riverdark are mortal. They are mages, and one of the few races who can travel between worlds.”

“One of the few? How many have achieved space travel?” I asked. My voice had grown intense, my hands curling tightly into fists. But I couldn’t help it. It seemed that every moment I spent here, I learned something completely life-altering. I’d spent my entire career dreaming about space travel to places beyond the moon, not even knowing that humans had already achieved it in a secret program. Now, I was finding out there were other beings apart from the stone sky gods who could do so?

“As far as we know, only four races can travel between worlds,” said Ashken. “The stone sky gods, the warlords of Riverdark, the Tvarvatra, and now your kind.”

“Incredible,” I whispered. “Do they use ships – machines – like humans?”

“Only the Tvarvatra. The warlords of Riverdark have enchanted creatures who can travel between stars.”

“Creatures?” I gasped. “Like, animals that can fly through space?”

“I do not know many of the details, but I believe the creatures crawl rather than fly.”

They... What?

OK, I would definitely have to ask Wylfrael about that, too. How would that even work? Crawling through space? There was nothing to crawl on!

All I wanted now was to keep grilling Ashken about whatever he knew of these other aliens and their space travel, but I could tell that he was dying to show off the library, and I wanted to learn about that, too. I nodded and smiled in encouragement, and he launched into a tour of the space.

He and Aiko shared a talent for giving tours. Though he was clearly aging, his voice was strong and his mind most definitely sharp. He rattled off facts with the detailed precision of an encyclopedia and the enthusiasm of a young professor. As if having heard this speech many times before, Aiko said something about starting dinner preparations and disappeared.

Ashken leafed through the massive frames along the wall, like pages in a binder, explaining the Sionnachan writing system. Stretched in the large frames weren’t sheets of paper, but giant rectangles of pale silk. Instead of words written or painted on, the silk was embroidered. Unfortunately, the amazing powers of the translator in my head did nothing for written communications, and the threads looked like a jumble of little lines with no discernible patterns, broken up with the occasional sparkling bead. I decided I would learn how to read it, then remembered with something that felt a lot like disappointment that I probably wouldn’t be here long enough to do so.

And the time I do spend here will be dominated by Wylfrael, I’m sure.

“Where is Lord Wylfrael?” I asked Ashken. We’d moved on from the big frames on the wall that Ashken explained were archives and historical data, and he was now showing me much smaller rolls of embroidered silk – Sionnachan poetry and even some stories of stone sky god history that had been recorded by previous staff members.

“I believe the lord has travelled into one of the nearby villages today.”

I nodded, then blurted, “Doesn’t it feel weird to call him a god?”

Ashken cocked his head the same direction he leaned on his cane, giving him the appearance of a long, fluffy, orange reed blown sideways in the wind.

“No. We have our own gods, of course. There is Nacha, the ancient creator who moulded Sionnach from a ball of snow, for example.”

“Well, right! Exactly! Gods are supposed to create things, right? Where I come from, people pray to them. They’re supposed to help people.” I decided not to mention that the gods from some pantheons were as likely to be capricious or violent towards humans as they were benevolent. Looking at you, Greece.

“The stone sky gods perform a similar function,” Ashken said. “At least, they have in our world. They cannot hear prayers spoken from afar, but I know of many, many instances, too many to relay, where Cynewylf or Wylfrael used their immense power for the good of Sionnachans.”

“Really?” I asked, honestly shocked by this. All I’d seen Wylfrael do was stomp around this castle so far.

“Oh, yes,” Ashken said earnestly. “You are marrying an extraordinary being, Torrance. Why, I cannot even count the number of things he’s done worth noting. There was the time he saved an entire village from an avalanche, standing between them and the mountain’s rage, holding back the onslaught with nothing but his own raised hands. There was the merchant, whose sled went through an area of too-thin ice. Not only did Lord Wylfrael save the Sionnachan man, but he also saved the two sontanna, and then dove to the bottom of the ice-cold lake to collect the sled and all the merchant’s wares from the bottom so that his livelihood, as well as his life, was saved. There was the child, what was his name... Ohko! Yes, Ohko, who was separated from his hunting hound and got lost during a terrible snowstorm. The Sionnachan search parties could not find him, his tracks completely erased by the falling snow and the wind. But Wylfrael used his power to scrape snow away from every spot on that mountain, never faltering, never tiring. Two entire days and nights of flying and moving vast amounts of snow, long after the storm ended, until Ohko was found, cold, and very hungry, but alive, in a cave whose entrance was almost completely hidden by large drifts. There is even more than that!”

He saved Tommy from a well, pulled a kitten out of a tree... Seriously, was there any good deed this guy hadn’t done? No wonder the Sionnachans were so loyal to him. It wasn’t just out of fear of his abilities, but apparently out of love. Or maybe some combination of both.

I tried to keep a placid look on my face. This was my future husband Ashken was telling me about, and I was supposed to love him, too. Even more than the Sionnachans did.

“Having a history lesson, are you, bride?”

Ashken and I both spun towards the door. Ashken flattened his ears.

“Welcome home, my lord! Welcome home!”

The old man seemed genuinely happy that Wylfrael was back, which only added to the idea that the Sionnachans really did adore him. I need to look just as excited.

I beamed at Wylfrael, and echoed Ashken’s greeting of, “Welcome home!”

Wylfrael looked at me in astonishment, and my smile took on a slightly wicked slant. See? I can play the good little wife.

He cleared his throat, brows pinching downward for a moment before he smoothed his expression into something that could maybe, very generously, be called pleasant.

This guy said I would have to play my part well, but so far I’m doing way better than him!

This excited me. Made me feel powerful. I was, for once, more in control than Wylfrael. I wanted to hold onto that power. To make Wylfrael see I wasn’t stupid, wasn’t weak, wasn’t someone to be trifled with.

I sauntered over to him, clasping my hands in front of me as if I were completely entranced by what was before me. Like I was praying to the god the Sionnachans considered him to be.

“I’ve missed you so much,” I breathed.

Wylfrael’s nostrils flared, his gaze intensifying with some unnamed emotion.

I halted, standing very, very close to him. I stopped just short of touching him, deciding I wasn’t quite that brave yet, and gazed up at him with cavity-inducing sweetness from beneath my lashes.

His jaw worked, his eyes a bright storm. He didn’t seem capable of speaking at the moment, which would have made me burst into laughter if Ashken weren’t here.

Torrance one, Wylfrael zero.

“The lord is so taken with his bride-to-be that he cannot even speak!” Ashken said happily from nearby. “Ah, my lord, I always heard it was the same with your own father. That he’d grow silent and look at Sashkah just like that.”

My smile turned pinched.

Well, shit. He was actually convincing Ashken with this brooding, silent treatment? I had to turn into a simpering idiot to hold up my end of things, but all he had to do was glare at me?

Whatever. I wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of honouring our agreement. I’d be the most obnoxiously loving human this alien god ever could have imagined.

My annoyance turning into courage, I reached forward, deciding to touch him after all. He was dressed in his usual fashion, with black boots, tight leather trousers, and a dark leather vest. I drew my fingertips gently, like a grazing breath, down the bare strip of skin on his chest that showed between the two sides of his vest. When I got lower, reaching his stomach, his abdominal muscles clenched. Something in my own stomach coiled in response.

Wylfrael’s hand snapped up to grip my wrist. I froze, wrenching my gaze upward in questioning anger. Don’t you fucking dare ruin the illusion of this. I’m only just getting started.

Still, he didn’t speak. He didn’t drop my hand either. Instead, he raised it to his mouth. I thought he was maybe about to plant some kind of chaste, chivalrous kiss on my knuckles, but my breath left my lungs in a hot sigh when instead, he turned it over and brushed his lips over my palm.

Whatever had been already growing warm and tight in my stomach strengthened, my entire core squeezing at the irritatingly exquisite sensation of Wylfrael’s mouth on my palm. He let his eyes fall closed, and I gawked at his face as he began to kiss along my screaming skin. He reached my sensitive inner wrist, and I let out a shameful peep of a sound when the kiss grew wet, his tongue sliding downward in a heated, silky stripe.

At the sound I made, Wylfrael’s eyes snapped open. There was something new in his gaze, something dark and savage, something that made my nipples prickle and my heartrate skyrocket. His mouth was open against my wrist, fangs grazing my skin, a reminder that he could bite down, that he could crush me if he wanted to.

But he couldn’t. Not anymore. Not when he was supposed to love me. Not when he needed me.

Heat flooding my cheeks, I refused to pull away. We were frozen in a tableau, each of us testing the other. His mouth, open against my wrist, his eyes on mine. Trying to steady my suddenly harsh breathing, I held his gaze in silent challenge.

He started to suck. And when a gush of arousal dampened the place between my legs, I learned that I had made a very, very big mistake.

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