He scratched at the back of his neck, and one of the women behind him reached out to scratch the spot with her clawed fingernails. He stretched his neck out to one side to give her more room. “Yeah. Just a little. You’re boring, and I hate boredom.”
Boring.
“Hildr,” Sandra said, reaching out.
Her familiar darted along the length of her arm, four legged. It sprung from her hand.
While it was still in the air, she brought her chalice from the pile of spring jackets to her hand.
Hildr touched ground, eliciting a rumble, sending Jeremy Meath stumbling back.
Sandra dipped fingertips into her chalice, wetting them, and then drew her fingertips vertically down.
Putting stored power into connections, feeding that power through Hildr for the added strength and connection to the earth.
The impact of Hildr’s landing and the added help of the manipulated connections served to bowl over the entire group of Others. Jeremy Meath’s bottle crashed against the floor, the remaining contents and shards of glass spreading out from the point of impact.
“Sandra!” Auntie rebuked her.
“It’s fine, so long as she doesn’t attack,” Jeremy said. He took his time finding his feet. He had to half-walk, half-crawl to get back from Hildr, who loomed above him, breath visibly steaming. “Point taken. That was a three hundred dollar bottle, but I suppose good lessons should be expensive.”
Dark skinned, white furred, Hildr was more wart and scar than clean flesh where flesh was visible, her hair and fur were long and tied into braids as thick around as Sandra’s arm, the longest braids locked into place with iron shackles that could be used to dash a man’s skull to pieces. Her arms were disproportionately long, with lines and cords of muscle visible even beneath the long, brushed fur. All in all, she was of a size and bulk that suggested she could catch a charging rhino and wrestle it to the ground.
He looked the thing over. “An ogre? No. Not an ogre of any type I’ve read about.”
“No,” Sandra said. “A troll. Scandinavian. My family offered to pay for a trip, to reward me for completing my degree early. I took the time to go looking.”
It took eight months, two more to successfully bind her.”
“There aren’t many trolls nowadays,” he said. “They don’t hide themselves well.”
“Most have been hunted or bound already. The ones who have remained are either exceptionally strong, or they are very strong and very cunning. Hildr is more the latter.”
“I see. And it takes an exceptionally strong and cunning individual to bind one that has survived alone these last few centuries. I didn’t expect that of you.”
“There’s more to me, more to us, than you might see on the surface.”
“And a… stoat?”
“More fitting a form for a troll than you might think. Foul smelling, tied to the earth due to their inclination to live underground, large for their species, predatory, with a voracious appetite. Surprisingly vicious in a fight. Not well liked.”
“I see. Well, count me corrected.”
Sandra gestured, and even though her back was turned, Hildr obeyed, sensing the connection and moving aside. She came to stand beside Sandra, who rubbed at the fur on her arm.
He dusted himself off, gesturing for his coterie to relax and back away.
Sandra stood facing him, cup in one hand, other hand on Hildr’s arm.
“With your main cause for complaint already covered, I assume you would be open to further negotiations?” Auntie asked.
“Send her to my place in a week.”
Sandra felt her heart skip a beat. In her fit of pique, her pride and anger, she’d nearly forgotten what she was negotiating for, what she was proving.
Jeremy Meath would be her husband.
The three watched Jeremy Meath and his coterie retreat from the room, leaving them to show themselves out.
They gathered their coats, folding them over arms rather than donning them, and left the apartment.
“It’s your choice,” Auntie said, quiet.
Sandra looked at the woman in surprise. “I didn’t think it was. I swore oaths.”
“You did. When you were twelve, when we’d built up your excitement for power enough that you weren’t looking to the future. It was the same for Missy, for me, your mother.”
Sandra exchanged a glance with Missy. This was out of character, and it sounded like a dangerous admission.
Her aunt continued, “We deceive, and we tell ourselves it’s so our daughters can learn a lesson that will weigh on them all their lives, make them more cunning by necessity. But what we’re really doing is manipulating them to get them into our power, and hoping they’ll come to learn the same thing we did.”
“Which is?” Missy asked.
“This is the only way we’ll survive as a family.”
“As a dynasty,” Sandra said.
“You get a choice, Sandra. Do you want to marry him?”
No, not at all.
“You’ll marry me to someone worse as punishment if I don’t.”
“We reserve that for the girls who turn down good matches. Jeremy Meath is… what he is. It worries me that he wasn’t more willing to pick apart the deal or define terms. Seeing you in there, I think we can find you better, if you want it.”
“But the family wants him?” Sandra asked. “They want to take the gamble?”
“Yes,” her aunt said, and it was said in a way that suggested she already knew the answer she’d get.
■
Twelve years doing this, and she still felt out of sorts. It was worse, if anything. Which was the point, she supposed.
The landscape had been sculpted. More a painting come to life than a real place. Every tree and stone had been strategically placed, with the whole in mind. The placement of every branch… it was art. Sandra could stand virtually anywhere and see how the elements complemented each other, find hidden images and decorations in the layout of things. She had taken art classes as her electives, she knew what to look for.
But it was hollow. The beauty was forced.
Sandra sat patiently as her goblet was overfilled. Wine spilled out, flowing along the outside of the goblet, down the stem and onto the gold-inlaid table, where it found grooves and drew a brief image before filtering out through holes in the surface. The candlelight, even, seemed to play off the image. A nude woman with her back arched. Suggestive, heavy with implication and accusation. No doubt entirely intentional, directed purely at her.
The Faerie at the table shifted position, their expressions placid and slightly interested. She couldn’t help but feel as though they were silently mocking her for the spill. Which they were.
But it was a fairly important rule, that one didn’t eat or drink here. Even if it meant being mocked, pressured from every direction.
The entire place was a kind of pressure. She knew the techniques at play. Get someone hungry, get them tired, get them stimulated. Create a need and then fulfill it, to build a kind of dependence. Cults did it. The Faerie did it better.
There was no reprieve, in the short term or the long term. Everywhere she looked, everything she smelled or touched was art. Everything she heard was music to distract the attention, or were exceedingly dangerous words that demanded it. The simple scene of a patio with wine, crackers and cheese served in the center, a short ruined wall and numerous statues was a complicated piece of machinery, where every single thing around her was working against her or working for the ambassador.