“Lord Wylfrael?”

Aiko was in the open doorway, wringing her hands. Her tail was a bushy orange puff of anxiety, her small upturned nose twitching nervously.

“What is it?” I asked, meeting her at the door.

“It’s the woman. The prisoner,” she corrected herself, clearly still not used to the idea. “She will not eat. She will not come down to see you, either. And... Forgive me my lord, but I do not think it is because she does not understand my words.”

“Of course, it isn’t,” I snapped. The human was choosing to be difficult, I could already tell. What an irritating species.

Aiko’s hands tightened against each other, her ears flattening.

“I am sorry, my lord!”

“Don’t apologize. Not your fault,” I muttered as I began taking the stairs upwards two at a time. Aiko, and likely Ashken and Shoshen, were too gentle to even think of forcing the human to do anything, let alone dragging her down the stairs to meet me.

But I was not.

I burst into the room. The human woman was seated in a chair that was too large for her, glaring at a bowl of Sionnachan stew as if the meal had killed everyone she’d ever loved.

At the sound of my footsteps, she flinched and turned to me.

We stared at each other for a long moment in the low, fire-warmed light.

She looked different from before. She’d shed her outer layers of clothing, revealing a frame that was even smaller than I’d thought, no longer puffed up with odd white fabric. She had hair, too – a revelation. I’d had no idea all of that was under there, trapped under the tight hood she’d worn. It spilled over her bony shoulders and down her back in rich undulations of brown that gleamed reddish-gold wherever the firelight hit it.

Her eyes, however, were the same as before. Snow and honey. Fear, defiance, and accusation, all bound up together under the shadows of curling lashes.

“Aiko tells me you won’t eat.”

She merely looked at me, muted by her lack of understanding. Or by sheer stubbornness.

This day needs to end.

Why, why would she not eat? Did her kind not eat after all? She had a mouth, and teeth, and a throat. I thought of her mad dash into the shelter-less snow of the forest and grimly wondered if she meant to die of starvation rather than stay here with me.

Before I was aware of it, my feet were moving. She scrambled away in her high-backed chair. Too late, she tried to get down, but I was already there, standing between her and the table, blocking her. Her feet bumped my shins, and I noticed that her feet looked different now, too. Clearly, she’d been wearing boots before. Now they appeared to be bare, tiny toes curling inward, retreating at the inadvertent contact with my legs.

“Eat,” I snapped. I grabbed up the spoon from the bowl with one hand, my other gripping the arm of the chair as I leaned over her. Her honeyed gaze darted back and forth from the spoon to my face.

“I did not bring you here to let you starve,” I said, bringing the spoon closer to her lips.

She rolled her lips inward in protest, her mouth thinning into a white line. The infuriating creature would not do it. Something like panic gripped me. I hardened it. Turned it to anger.

“I’ll force this down your throat if I have to.”

I would do it, too. I’d already decided that I would not kill her, and the idea that I’d let a prisoner die on my watch was unacceptable to me. I released the arm of the chair, threading my fingers through her soft, shiny hair. I made a fist and tightened it until her head lurched back, her small mouth opening with a soft cry of affronted surprise.

I seized the chance, bringing the spoon upward. But before I could shove it in her mouth, she fixed me with a burning gaze and hissed something that threw me utterly off-balance. Off-balance because, somehow, we’d ended up in the bizarrely uneven position of her knowing my name when I did not know hers.

“Lord Wylfrael.”

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OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Torrance

The alien’s fist in my hair grew tighter, and I knew that my instinct was correct. So that is his name. I’d heard the phrase several times down in the entrance hall, and then the tall fox-looking alien who’d brought me to this room had mentioned it many times as well, her voice curving with deference around the syllables. AH-sha WOLF-rye-elle.

I didn’t have any clever follow-up to that, though. I’d simply wanted to make him stop, just for a moment. To see that I was smart, that I could listen, that I knew more about him than he’d maybe planned for. It seemed to have worked. Me calling him by his name had frozen him into a statue.

It was an absurd reaction. A reaction that might have gotten me killed. But I couldn’t help the exhausted giddiness that suddenly rose in my throat. My lips parted. I started to laugh.

Instantly, the statue thawed. His eyes narrowed viciously, flashing to my mouth. The next thing I knew, I was coughing and spluttering, half choking on warm, salty liquid, my teeth banging against a stone spoon. Asha Wylfrael released my hair, and I leaned forward, hacking and wheezing. When I’d recovered from my coughing fit, I raised my streaming eyes to find Asha Wylfrael coolly poised and waiting, his face smoothed into expressionlessness. The spoon he held was already filled with more soup, an unspoken but easily understood threat.

“Fine,” I croaked, holding out my hand for the spoon. It didn’t seem like there was any way to avoid eating it now, and by this point, I doubted it was poison. Why get me all the way up here just to poison me, when Asha Wylfrael could have killed me with a flick of his black-clawed fingers?

Defeated, I scooted my butt forward on the huge, flat seat of the pink crystal chair, taking the spoon and eating. The meaty soup’s flavours were unusual, the herbs more bitter than I was used to, but not necessarily unpleasant. A worrisome thought entered my mind – that even if it wasn’t intentionally poisoned, it might still make me sick. But I couldn’t do anything about that now. The ship, with all the human-safe rations, was gone. If I wanted to stay alive, I had to eat.

I should have thought of that before, I bemoaned silently, trying and failing to ignore the blue heat of Asha Wylfrael’s gaze on my mouth. I shouldn’t have refused the soup when she brought it. If I’d just eaten it in the first place, he wouldn’t have had to come up here.

But the fox-looking alien (whom I was pretty sure now was a “she”) was so gentle, so soft-spoken compared to him, that for the first time since Asha Wylfrael had pulled me from the snow, I hadn’t been afraid. I hadn’t been afraid to say no, to choose something for myself, even if it was as small as deciding not to eat the dinner. Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Because now, he was here, my momentary illusion of safety and freedom evaporated under the cold scorch of his eyes.

I was too exhausted to maintain the defiance required to look at him, so I looked around the room instead. It was no prison cell. At least, not one with bars that I could see. It was fucking gorgeous, is what it was.

This was the highest room of the conical structure, and the ceiling arrowed upward into a point that gave the room a cathedral-like ceiling. The room wasn’t terribly large, since this was the narrowest point of the tower, after all, but the high, pointed ceiling made it feel expansive.

It seemed the aliens used their crystal trees in a similar way we’d use wood on Earth. The table and massive chair, built for an alien much larger than me, were carved from pink crystal, glinting like rose quartz. The walls were the same colour, and I was now fairly certain that the towers hadn’t been constructed from crystal, but rather carved out of gigantic trees that had grown up naturally in these spots. Behind me was a sumptuous-looking bed, its frame dark green, and ahead was a huge fireplace with a hearty fire that warmed the room. Still no wood there. Like I’d seen in the entry hall with the odd rock-like lanterns, this fire, too, seemed to have a large stone for fuel, a white boulder engulfed in a flickering, tear-drop-shaped flame. Beside the fire was a large indent carved into the floor and inlaid with spiralling designs of tile. I wasn’t sure what that was for, yet. Beyond that was what looked like a small room built out of the crystal wall. The door was shut, and the fact I couldn’t see inside unnerved me. A spark of panic ignited when I thought that it could be some kind of interrogation room.