Chapter Text
There is little to be heard inside these chambers. Though the hearthflame whispers and rustles in the unheard language of its ancient tongue, it is needless of wood to sustain it: no snapping, no hissing. Any servants who might be scurrying through the walls are busied tending guests of import and too well-trained to impose their presence besides. Hosted at such a distance in the sprawling keep, the noise of the banquet carries not.
Iphigenia despises being left alone like this, trapped in the unbroken quiet that breeds a clamorous mind. She reaches beyond her keening thoughts, into a long-forgotten dream, into the hazy memories of a life once known.
This late in the eve, the tables will have been cleared of fare and wetted through with spilled drink. Candlewax will have splattered onto the silken table runners, themselves red like overripe pomes, skin split and leaking out, or else the deep purple of fading injury. Back when she could attend such an event, fae would not have been so bold as to steal away with one another even in private, but here, in this rancorous keep, the alcoves will already be writhing with sweat-slick bodies and stinking of the pleasure taken from them with hand and teeth.
Her eyes begin to prickle, then blur over with tears. She blinks these away before they can spill—but the burning remains, spreading further down her throat and into her lungs.
Smoke, Iphigenia realizes. There is smoke filling the room.
She frowns through the accumulating haze and over to the hearth, but the fire there flickers pure. It is as she toes into her slippers to locate the source that the smoke gathers thicker to itself. The tall silhouette of a male is unmistakable in its cloying depths.
Her stomach drops.
Only the court’s spymaster is known to possess such abilities and have permission to use them within the confines of the Forest House. She has never met the male, but she knows the displeasure he elicits in his father as a forceful thrust past her tongue, as a grip tight in her hair. She has seen the throat-bobbing fear of the females he selects for a night, then witnessed the aftermath of him on their naked bodies: handprint bruises and bloodied teethmarks, blackened eyes and swollen mouths.
It takes force to leave such lasting marks on a fae. It takes rage. It takes hate.
Iphigenia lowers at once into a curtsy, her head bowed, her eyes downcast. She fixes her gaze on the point of his shoes as they materialize, a spot which she has found to be safe on any male. Firelight flickers balefully back at her in the shine of them.
Emile Vanserra does not speak in his approach, so neither does she. Nor is she foolish enough to rise until he has given her leave.
Even in her periphery, he cuts an imposing figure. The fineness of his dress is austere and understated. He does not embellish himself with anything more than gilded embroidery along the trim of his doublet, a fashion plucked from the frame of Lord Eris. On his hand of flesh, he bears only his signet ring and his marriage ring. She does not let her attention drift to his hand of metal, though neither does she make her avoidance apparent. She has heard that either can spur his anger.
The acrid bite of smoke threatens to seize her chest.
At length, he says, “Let me see your face.” Hours spent deep in a cup muddle his words through. He must have been in attendance at the feast.
Iphigenia straightens up and lifts her chin, dutifully ignoring the unsteady of her pulse.
His mouth is the High Lord’s when she lifts her eyes to it, and it curls with disdain in just the same way. He snorts. “Father always has preferred his whores to look like his lady wife. Funny, that.”
So Iphigenia has often heard whispered in her wake, though she has never laid eyes on the Lady of Autumn herself.
Emile steps closer, close enough that Iphigenia can smell the brimstone and ash of him, close enough that his body heat gropes at the thin, sheer fabric of her peignoir. If only it were the corseting of a lady, holding her tight, keeping her safe; if only she might scold his impropriety and storm for the door at the intrusion of him in her chambers.
She stands, and she waits.
“Are you without a tongue?” he rebukes. “I cannot imagine you maintain father’s favor absent one.”
“Beg pardon, Lord Emile,” Iphigenia replies. She gestures behind her, where an ornate flagon rests atop a small table near the bedside. “May I pour you a glass of wine?”
Perhaps he will drink of it and swoon, long enough that his father will seek her out and rebuke him upon being found in the same room as her—though it is just as likely she will suffer these consequences in kind and will have to soothe the High Lord of his anger.
It would be worth it.
Emile considers a moment, then waves a dismissive hand. The metal one, heavy and punishing in its arc through the air. “It would only go to waste,” he says. “Father has need of you.”
Odd that a son would then be sent, seeing as only females are permitted to prepare her for his use, and even that is done under his watchful eye, for his pleasure.
All the same, Iphigenia lilts, “Of course.” She takes a step towards the door, eager to overlook the strangeness of his arrival if it means she can be free of his presence. “Shall I go to him now?”
Emile eats up the space she won between them. “Tonight, it would please him for you to entertain one of our esteemed guests.”
Iphigenia’s brow dips.
The others, she has heard, are enlisted to these tasks by any with the coin to sway them, especially those without the security of a well-positioned lord or lady. They set pleasure herbs in the hanging braziers and fill goblets so that they never empty. Long accustomed to such vices themselves, the lush of their bodies distracts easily from the threat of their minds. Information is drawn out as simply as a moan, then echoed back to whoever can best make use of it.
But this is only what she has heard, for the High Lord does not share that which belongs to him.
Earlier this night, while the others were perfumed and rouged and ornamented for presentation to those attending the banquet, she was instructed to keep to her chambers so that there could be no doubt to him that she would remain untouched. All of his immediate cortege in Autumn know who she belongs to, but it would insult his lady greatly if he were to claim Iphigenia as his own before visitors beyond their court. So here she has waited, his pretty petal, perfectly preserved for his plucking.
And his alone.
“The High Lord requested me by name, highness?”
Emile’s smile does not reach his eyes. “The whore is plenty clear, don’t you think?”
Shame reddens her cheeks as would the back of a hand.
With rapt attention, he watches the color bloom in the wake of his blow, a youngling marveling at a fireworm macerated and luminescent underfoot, just before he seeks out the next to see if its spectacular death will entertain him the same.
Floundering: “And—he was asking after me? A task such as this might s—”
“Father is not the only lord you answer to,” Emile snaps.
The words splatter Iphigenia like bile, acidic and foul. She startles first at the force of them, then the sting as they settle into her skin.
But she knew from the moment of his arrival, did she not? The wrongness of it, the strangeness.
The High Lord did not send him for her. This wayward son is here of his own accord.
Without preamble, Emile reaches for the gauzy overlap of her peignoir, splaying it open and exposing her chest. The dark gems inlaid into his marriage band scrape against the inner curves of her breasts as he samples the smooth of her flesh against his knuckles.
It is so presumptuous a caress as to freeze her in place—a tendency found in only the most helpless of prey animals.
In her stupor, he slithers his touch up to the collar about her throat, welded into place by the High Lord. He skims his fingertips along the base of the golden setting, and his nostrils flare. She knows from his father that this portends anger, or desire, or both.
Alone.
Iphigenia is alone with a male who displeases his father and beats his females, and he is touching her as no other has dared since she caught the eye of the High Lord upon her arrival at the Forest House.
The sylvan walls of the room begin to press in against her. She can taste her pulse around her tongue, metallic and throbbing. She meets his eyeline as though the sickening beat of her heart does not thud, thud, thud into her teeth, quick as that of a rabbit too frightened to flee.
His satisfaction with her rising panic finally glints at the flat of his stare.
“What pleases me,” Emile drawls, the alcohol on his breath souring her stomach, “pleases father in turn. So long as I am kept happy, he need not know who brought me the information I seek, nor how it was obtained. There are many in my employ.”
Then why must it be me? Iphigenia wants to demand. If you know what it will do to me should he hear tell, why must it be me, as it has never been before?
But Emile's heavy hand is still on her neck, overlaid atop the collar, and there is only a parted robe between her and his discontent. She thinks, too, looking now into his eyes, that he might hope for her to object—that her obedience in this is all that will keep him from ruining her himself. She does not understand it, but she does not need to in order to heed the threat he poses.
The fingers on his hand of metal twitch.
Her eyes burn.
“Who am I to attend, lord?”
Emile tightens his hold on her for a long moment, then, slowly, he drops his hand away.
“The cuckold of Spring has emerged from his dereliction," he says. "His attendance was not anticipated tonight. You are to ascertain what recalled to him his duties and whether it shall persist.”
Iphigenia resituates the drape of her peignoir as she listens. Once it is in place, she holds it closed just beneath her clavicles, her other arm pressed tight across her abdomen.
The High Lord of the Spring Court.
His clawed spectre has accompanied her throughout her short life. His role in the savage murder of the High Lord’s two sons is the stuff of lore, of cautionary tales and childhood admonitions. Do as I say, lest the beast of Spring come sate his appetite with you, too. She knows that long ago, he spurned an evil witch and doomed all of Prythian for it—and after, he sat idle and free for fifty long years, all the while the rest of their lands suffered in her gnarled hands. It was not until a young human came along, of all things, that their people were championed, and she had been so repulsed by him that she rejected his advances in favor of the High Lord of the Night Court, a land rumored to be darkling and hostile and barren, to say nothing of its master.
On the night Iphigenia was taken from the safety of her estate and carted off to the Forest House in the back of a lord's opulent carriage, she thought the terror in her belly would never find its match. Even catching the eye of her own High Lord did not give rise to this, for he, at least, was familiar to her, the way any god can be known to its followers in glimpses; she knew what obeisance he would expect of her in the very moment his gaze swallowed her up. Yet this simply, she is back in that carriage, her face pressed to the curtained window, her eyes screwed up tight against the world, the motion of the wheels thudding rhythmically into her skull.
The unknown leers at her with black-chip eyes and an acetic grin.
Her silence begins to stir Emile's impatience. It is something she feels between them more than anything he does, a tautness taking shape no differently from that of his father.
A plea for guidance, Iphigenia hears herself ask, “What does he enjoy?”
Emile laughs. It is a harsh, unpleasant sound. “What all males enjoy. A tight cunt and a wet mouth.”
Iphigenia flattens her palm against the beat of her heart. She knows her High Lord; she knows it is not so simple a thing. This one will have his own preferences and expectations for her appearance, her demeanor, her technique. He will want her to preempt him, and if she cannot, she will be faced with his discontent.
She thinks of the other girls and their lasting marks.
She thinks of the carriage ride and its silken curtains.
She thinks of the High Lord and his collar around her throat.
She looks to Emile’s hand of metal and absently murmurs, “The handlers will know that I have not been summoned. They will have questions.”
Lowly: “Are you so lofty a slave that you cannot prepare yourself?”
The anger in his tone yanks Iphigenia back to the now. She drops her gaze to his baleful shoes and bows her head. “No, lord."
“Then do so,” Emile rejoins. “And make haste. He retired to his chambers in the east wing some hour past." His edges begin to blur into smoke as a grin slashes across his face. "They should be simple to find. I'm told father summoned you there to mount often enough.”
In his wake, the chambers descend back into a thunderous quietude.
And Iphigenia, trapped with her too-loud thoughts and trembling limbs, makes ready for the High Lord of Spring all on her own.