Jem
The fire was too big for the tiny hearth in the corner of my tower room. The coals tumbled onto the stone floor, shooting sparks, but I ignored them. The sparks died on the bare stones.
The tower room hadn’t been designed for habitation. Before I’d become me, my father had brought me up to watch the glittery katara flying over the ocean through the large glass window. Just him and me, as he explained how the world worked as his son stared in wonder.
But that had been before. Banned from company, I’d made the small room mine to rest in peace. The tiny fireplace had never bothered me before, but it wasn’t I who needed it. With the fire roaring, the heat suffocated me and burned my cheeks, yet it only slowly melted the ice from Ilyas’ veins.
Ilyas lay as still and as cold as the dead. I’d towelled him off the best I could, counting the seconds as the fire dried his black hair. I slipped a fur hat borrowed from the royal children over his head and hiked the blankets up to his neck.
Underneath, he was naked. My cheeks were hot, and not just from the fire. It was ridiculous to even consider it. I’d seen Ilyas nude in his harem, striding around the mats like he was clothed in the finest silks.
But now, he lay so vulnerable, so approachable. His jaw relaxed, and his fingers curled, palm up, from where I’d set it. His lips parted, and when I leaned down my ear to check his breathing as instructed, warm puffs sent tingles down my neck. My eyes dropped to the blanket edge, Ilyas’ warm brown skin extending underneath. My fingers reached to raise the blankets an inch. I caught myself, jerking upright and slamming my flat hand on the bare stone.
Ilyas would sneer and ridicule me if he knew my temptations. He’d demand I bring him a new attendant to fend off my weakness. But I couldn’t risk clothing him. If I tugged the cloth too hard, his skin would tear and scar.
I’d checked him for signs of frostbite, frostnip, and chilblains. Her Majesty, well studied in medicine, had checked too, slipping in and out like a ghost. A single scar, a single nerve damaged, would ruin his perfect body. That was far more important than his nudity.
When would he start shivering? He’d been unconscious ever since I’d fished him out of the water. He’d sunk without a fight. Didn’t he know how dangerous the ice was? But he couldn’t. In Nuriya, there was no ice. No cold water. No reason to know he needed to fight as hard as he could, to freeze his arms to the ice to keep his head above water.
He didn’t even know enough to recognise the inlet. To know that while the ice never fully melted, it was thin at that time of year. Every Lumian child knew better than to run across.
But he didn’t know. Ilyas couldn’t be so eager to escape that he’d risk himself like that. He couldn’t, could he? No, he hadn’t known. He’d just seen it as the only escape route left him, because I’d stupidly believed he’d know better.
Where did he think I found the ice for the dragon?
I shook my head, and knelt by his pillow. He might have been clever in Nuriya, but in Lumi, he was like a babe.
Carefully, I laid my fingers across his forehead, just under the cap. His skin felt warm, and at the rush of reassurance filling my chest, I scowled at myself and pulled my hand away. How would I know how warm a normal human should be? I was only taking liberties with him.
He needed to get warm enough that he started shivering, warm enough so his body would start waking up instead of slowing down.
I glanced at the demon hovering outside the window, and it nodded its beak at me. It was not one of my usual snow forms, taken from the local creatures, but a creature I’d seen in Nuriya flying over the ocean like a bird, if birds bore wings and feathers instead of the serpentine, scaled form of katara. A snow form wouldn’t survive the heat inside, so I needed something capable of lurking outside in the scant moments I left the tower, to warn me should Ilyas take a turn for the worse.
As if I could do anything if he did. This was already the most I could do. If Ilyas died, Lumi died with him.
He wouldn’t die. I wouldn’t allow it. I hurried from the room and down the stairs until I reached the equally hot kitchen. Perhaps I should have brought him there instead, but no, the royal children were gathered around the main table, as were all the cooks, and they all cried in fright at my sudden appearance.
I turned my eyes away from all of them in favour of searching through the cupboard for a ceramic pig. Finding one, I held it out, keeping my eyes averted.
After a long moment, my temper simmering in my chest, tentative fingers accepted the pig. A few moments later, it was returned to me, filled with boiling water and wrapped in a heavy cloth to protect Ilyas’ skin. I muttered my thanks, although I wasn’t sure they heard me or even cared, and returned to my tower room.
I slipped the wrapped pig under the blankets and between Ilyas’ legs. A few moments later, I was rewarded with the blankets shaking, Ilyas shivering underneath. I collapsed against the wall in relief.
For hours, I half-slept, half-watched him, first shivering, and then after more long hours, he started to twitch, as if in a fever dream. When I touched his forehead, it felt warmer than before. That was a good sign, yes?
A servant knocked at the door, and I waited for the footsteps to retreat. No one wanted to see the vile nest the snowmancer had made. On the landing, I found a piece of snow tuber bread and another pig to replace the cooling one.
I kept my eyes on the ceiling as I swapped them, feeling with my hand underneath the blankets. My fingers brushed Ilyas’ ankle. I started. I raised my hand and moved it over three inches, and when I lowered it, my palm brushed the rough pig cover. I pulled it out between his feet, and pushed the new one to the same position.
Ilyas grunted. I crawled to his head. Was he waking? I folded myself on my knees. He murmured, the words as loud as his breath and half as distinct. I leaned closer. His lips slowed, then stopped, parted.
I stared at them. The colour of his lips was the only colour name I’d ever wished to learn. They were so much wider than my own. Plusher too, as if they’d be as soft as the feather-stuffed pillows in his harem. I could always find out. I leaned closer, my lips inching toward his.
The other pleasure slaves had kissed Ilyas, arching against him and gasping as if they breathed him in. I had pressed my hands onto my lap. Not that hiding my state had been necessary. When Ilyas stepped through those doors, all eyes turned to him.
My tongue darted across my bottom lip, moistening it. What would it have been like to drape myself in Ilyas’ lap with his arm wrapped around my back, nipping at my mouth?
What would it have been like to be that man, pulled by the arm into Ilyas’ private chamber? I wouldn’t have wasted the moment smirking over my shoulder at my unchosen peers. My bare feet would have floated over the tiles.
I thrust myself away from Ilyas. Falling back, I stopped myself with my hands, and crawled away as fast as I could until I hit the wall. My chest heaved. I leaned my head back into the window sill.
None of that was for me. It would never be for me. I’d known that since I became me. But never had the knowledge stabbed me with so much pain. Slipping my hand to the tattoo on the back of my neck, I sighed and tried to remember my place.
When I finally got my body until control, I fetched my ration and returned to the wall. I gnawed on the crust. Ilyas might have been right about one thing. It wasn’t bread, the light and delicate pastry I’d tasted in Nuriya, but hard and dense, needing to be soaked in saliva before it softened enough to eat. Perhaps Ilyas knew a more fitting word in the trading language, one that wasn’t rubbish.
But then again, even the poorest Nuriyite was assured a full belly. Ilyas needn’t have food baked hard so it would last just a little bit longer, to fool the stomach into believing it was getting more than it really was.
The bread wouldn’t do while Ilyas recovered. He wouldn’t have the strength to chew it. Perhaps if we mixed the tuber flour with water…
Leaning against the wall, I dozed again, and dreamed of birds, their scales glistening as they swam above my head.
Then blankets hit me in the chest. I jerked away, just in time to hear the pig shattering on the floor. The bed was empty.
I rose to my knees. The wood on the glass pane shrieked in protest. Unmindful of his nudity, Ilyas had one knee on the ledge while he dragged up the sash.
He wasn’t trying to climb out. He knew we were too high up, didn’t he? Only the ice wall loomed below, far, far below. He saw that, right?
The snow demon flew at the window, beating the pane with its wings to try to scare off Ilyas, or at least keep him from slipping out the window.
Ilyas muttered under his breath, too quiet and too stuttered for me to understand him. His cheeks reddened and sweat dotted his brow.
The delusions. They came like a fever dream, urging their victim to strip their clothes and flee in circles in the cold, without realising they pushed themselves closer to death.
I dashed up behind him, hooking my arms underneath his armpits and hauling him back, his hot and sweaty back and arse flush against my chest. Ilyas struggled against me. I cursed under my breath, but while I wrestled with him, his spicy scent enveloping me and playing more havoc with my wits than the man ever could, the snow demon managed to bang close the window. Its wing shattered, and it tumbled and smashed against the castle wall.
I’d make another one, after I wrestled Ilyas back into the bed. With his elbow slamming into my side, I managed to drag him back towards the bed and drop him onto it.
For a moment, I held my breath, ready for full panic if in his delusions he thought I or some other villain attempted to rape him. Limbs trembling, he attempted to rise onto his forearms again. His skin was red where my fingers had grasped him.
I hissed in a breath, before cursing myself again. I dropped down to my knees to examine his skin, to make sure that in my manhandling, I hadn’t torn his delicate flesh.
Ilyas pushed himself against my hands, and carefully I pushed him back down. He dropped like a sack of snow tubers.
I glanced down at the shattered pig, and then back to Ilyas, who had started to shiver again. The fight had left him for the moment, but I couldn’t take any chances. Leaning over him, I pulled the blankets back over him and myself. My arms, slow and careful, encircled his torso while I pressed my chest into his side. I inhaled the scent of cinnamon and nutmeg, humid afternoons too hot to work and the faint spray of a turquoise sea. Even after all this time, after being submerged under Lumi’s icy grey waters, he still smelled like Nuriya.
My body wasn’t warm enough to help him, his body blazing against mine, but this way, I could keep him in bed even if I dozed off again. The disks of my spine felt welded straight, my hands and chest sizzling where they touched him.
After hours, though, the heat and comfort of Ilyas’ touch dragged my eyelids down. I dozed, until Ilyas tugged himself away from me. I woke in an instant, holding onto him harder, until I looked up into his expression.
The delusions had left, leaving a scared little boy who had woken up naked in the bed of his captor, with no memories of how he’d gotten there. I released him.
“How dare you!” He crawled away from me, away from the fire.
Comments (0)
See all