Ransom

I shut up because he is telling me a whole lot right now. All the things Blackmane wanted to know and could not work out for himself. This is how their ships moved so fast. They’re not moving in traditional space. They’re slipping between something like existences. I don’t understand the precise details and I don’t really need to.

If I know anything — and right now I know literally nothing, their tech has something to do with the shiny blade. I bet it doesn’t cut people. I bet it cuts the world.

“Terrifying,” I say in a tone that doesn’t truly impart that emotion at all. In fact, the word terrifying sounds an awful lot like the phrase fuck you. Strange how that works.

I look around myself to see what the faye world looks like. I am expecting to see great pillars and dancing lights moving of their own accord. Perhaps wonderful tapestries spun from silk so fine that it seems to breathe with the wind. And carvings, so elegant and complex that no human could ever hope to reproduce them.

That’s what I expect.

Instead, all I see is a shadowy dark room surrounded by rusty iron walls. The elves, sorry, faye, are wearing inexplicably moth-eaten clothing, every bit of it with at least one hole. They no longer shine with ethereal grace. They’re gaunt. They look hungry. Their skin is sallow and their cheekbones look as though they’re about to burst through paper thin skin.

“What the…”

“Welcome to the real world.”

“The real world is shitty,” I point out. “This is your royal chamber?”

“This is the inside of a shipping container. This will be your realm until you swell with the seed of our kind.”

“Is this how you treated my mother?”

“Your mother, by all accounts, was also reluctant to be bred. In the end, the human king took her.”

“And Blackmane has already taken me. You are too late. Again.”

“Not at all. There are ways and means of making your womb empty if it is full of the wrong thing.”

Just when I thought they couldn’t become any more evil, there they go with even more unspeakable evil. I am fairly certain I am not yet pregnant, mostly because I can feel my temper, which is always bad, rising to a particularly achy intensity that precedes my cycle. I always hate everybody, but over the next few days I will come to loathe them with the intensity of a thousand suns. And these are perhaps the most loathable creatures ever to exist.

“Nothing to say, Astaria?”

It is not that I have nothing to say. It is more that I have far too much to say. I keep it to myself.

Their problem is they assumed because they abducted me from my bed, I had nothing on me in the way of defenses. They think because my hands and feet are tied and because I am locked inside a thick metal container, they have me where they want me. When will people learn that nobody ever has me where they want me? If you have me, you don’t want me.

“Let’s leave her in here to think about her situation,” Savork says. “Dark confinement teaches wenches.”

“Oh no! Don’t leave me alone here, not without anybody! Please!” I widen my eyes and put on my most plaintive voice. “At least leave a guard nearby. Someone who can help me if I need help.”

“There will be nobody to help you, Astaria,” Savork rattles. I can see loathing in his eyes, it makes him stupid. It makes him take me at face value, or maybe that’s what he would have done anyway. I doubt he sees me as a complex being. He sees me as a womb with a face.

“Oh! Noooooo!” I let out a hopefully satisfying wail as they leave me lying on the floor, a helpless royal waif at their mercy. The second the door closes behind them, I get to work. I always have a blade in my bosom and one in my hair, and sometimes one right in the crevice of my butt. The one on my bosom is the easiest to reach. I put my head down and pull it up and out of the boob sheath. From there, all I have to do is rub my wrists on my chest and I am free. It takes less than a minute to get out of the bonds. The door is ostensibly closed from the outside, but all of these sorts of things have emergency internal mechanisms. A lever or a latch, something to let the people who made it out if they were to get stuck inside.

Less than two minutes later, I am out of confinement. Sorry to say, the view does not improve. Not even a little bit. I am now in a bigger, rustier, even more decrepit hold of some kind. There are other containers. I wonder if they contain other princesses. Going to the nearest one, I crack the lever. There’s no princess in there. There’s nothing. I try another one. Same thing. Nothing. It’s a cargo hold with no cargo in it.