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Her Instruments, Book 1
Episode 7
“Hirianthial,” she said—slowly. The consonants in the name seemed to exist only to add a lilt to the vowels.
The sound of his hair against his back announced him. She wondered how he could walk without making any other noise. She didn’t like it. “There was a man upstairs.”
“Dead,” he replied. For once the accent, the blanket-soft baritone fell flat. “Bait for me.”
“They knew you were rooting for information.”
“Of course. It was foolish to think otherwise.”
Reese frowned at him. “And you stuck around?”
“I had a duty.” A wry smile ran to the corner of his lips. “Granted, I should have remembered that part of that duty included returning to the Queen with the information she sought, but even Eldritch make mistakes.”
“Mistakes,” Reese repeated, eyeing him. “With so much at stake.”
He shrugged, a tiny motion involving the ends of his shoulders. Had she not been watching him, she would have missed it. “I became angry.”
“Angry?”
He was staring out through the bars, but even in profile she could see his face change. Harden. The red of his eyes seemed less like wine and more like blood, like the color Reese saw on the inside of her eyelids when she wanted to explode. The doctor, the alien, the inconvenient object of an unwanted mission, those faces became masks, and something darker looked out. “I found a man whose tastes were repellant, even for a slaver.”
For some reason Reese didn’t want to ask what those tastes were. She didn’t even want to ask, “What did you do to him?” but by the time she realized that she didn’t want to hear the answer the question had already escaped her.
“I set his house on fire. With him in it.” He didn’t look at her, but even in profile his lack of expression terrified her.
“REESE!”
Irine’s wail dragged her attention away, and she crawled to the Harat-Shar. The tigraine had Sascha’s head cradled in her arms and she was rocking, her ears flat and eyes wide. “Reese, what’s wrong with him? Why won’t he wake up?”
“He’s not ready to wake,” said a steady voice behind Reese’s shoulder.
Reese jumped. “Stop doing that!”
“Doing what?” the Eldritch asked absently as he slid past her to Sascha’s other side, running a hand above the tigraine’s face.
“Sneaking up on me,” Reese said. “At least have the grace to make a little more noise.”
“Grace and noise aren’t usually associated with one another,” Hirianthial murmured.
“What’s wrong with him?” Irine asked the Eldritch. Reese could hear none of her typical skepticism in her quivering voice and she wondered at this instant trust. Was he influencing her mind?
“There’s nothing wrong with him,” Hirianthial said, his voice gentle. “He isn’t ready to wake, that’s all.”
“But this burn—”
“Just a palmer, alet. He took no greater harm from it. He’ll wake soon.”
Only then did Irine look at Reese, still holding onto her brother’s body. “Captain?”
“He’s a doctor,” Reese said. “He’d know better than me.”
“What about Bryer?” Irine asked after a moment. “Is he okay?”
“Everyone’s okay,” Reese said. “We’re just in a bit of a fix.”
Irine’s gold eyes flicked to the walls of the cell. “Yeah, I see that.” She looked back at the Eldritch. “This is him, isn’t it? Our spy?”
“At your service,” Hirianthial said.
“I guess you already have been,” Irine said, stroking Sascha’s mane.
Reese sighed and turned back to the bars. She prodded the back of her molars with her tongue, searching in vain for any minuscule deposit of chalk that might have stubbornly clung to her gums. Her stomach was going to kill her. “So how many people are guarding us?”
“I’ve counted six,” Hirianthial said. “Two personal guards and four up the corridor.”
“Six,” Reese repeated, musing.
“There are five of us,” Irine said from behind them.
Reese said, “They have palmers. And the keys.”
Irine shrugged and didn’t reply.
“The ship’s coming tomorrow to pick them up,” Hirianthial said after a moment. “Presumably we’ll be going with them.”
“So we have…what, twenty-four hours to break out of here, overwhelm six people, get to the Earthrise and flee far enough to lose a slaver-ship?”
“Twenty-two,” Hirianthial said. “Days here are shorter than Alliance mean.”
“Wonderful,” Reese muttered, rubbing the bridge of her nose.
Hirianthial’s voice sounded quietly behind her. “You need only secure your escape from this cell, lady. You were captured and put here only to inconvenience me. If you disappear, they will not bother to track you. It’s me they want.”
“I can’t leave you behind,” Reese said, irritated. “You’re the debt I have to pay. If you rot here, I’ll have to do something else and I bet it won’t be any easier.”
“The Queen isn’t expecting you to save me if the odds are overwhelming,” Hirianthial said.
“Well, six guards isn’t overwhelming,” Reese said, then stopped. “Did you say…the Queen?”
His voice was quizzical. “Of course. I thought from our talk that you’d concluded she was your mysterious benefactor.”
Reese turned, setting her back against the bars. The Eldritch’s face remained composed, but somehow she could still sense his confusion. A polite confusion. She couldn’t quite mesh this courteous facade with the darkness revealed by the memory of the slaver. “Are you trying to tell me that the Queen of the Eldritch saved me from bankruptcy?”
Another one of those miniscule shrugs. “It seems that way.”
“Damn,” Irine said in wonder.
“That makes no sense!” Reese exclaimed. “What would a queen want with me? How did she even find me? Why would she bother?”
“Why did she bother with me?” the Eldritch said. “But she chose you and she cares what becomes of me and here we are. Why question it, lady?”
“I’m not your—”
“—lady, so you say,” Hirianthial said. “But you are an instrument of a queen, so what shall I call you instead?”
“My name is Theresa Eddings,” Reese said. “I am the captain of the TMS Earthrise. And you will call me ‘Reese’ because that’s what people call me. Not ‘lady’ and not ‘madam’ and not ‘princess’ or whatever else you can come up with. Just “Reese.” Or ‘captain’ if you insist.”
“As you say,” he said.
Such polite words, such courtesy, and yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was going to call her whatever he wanted, and damned what she thought of it. Reese pursed her lips and eyed him skeptically, but his expression never changed. With a sigh, she steadied herself against the bars and rubbed her temple. “These guards. Do they ever check on us?”
“They check about every hour. They don’t always come within eyeshot, but I can sense them.”
She glanced at him, then back at her crew. Irine had curled up around Sascha, her striped tail wrapped around his so tightly she could barely tell which inserted into which spine. Bryer remained unconscious. This was what she had to work with. Reese sighed and looked back at the Eldritch. “Can you set the guard on fire when he comes? Then we can grab for the field key and make a run for it.”
The Eldritch stared at her, white brows lifting. “Lady—Captain—do I look like a magician to you?” he asked.
“You did say you set someone’s house on fire. How much harder is a person’s clothes? If you were sent for your special talents….”
He laughed then, a breathy, quiet thing. Reese had never seen someone laugh without relaxing; it seemed unnatural. Did all Eldritch have this extreme control over their bodies?
“Good God! I can’t break the laws of physics at a whim, I’m sorry to say. The Queen sent me because I’m one of the few non-touch telepaths, not because I can set things on fire by staring at them, or teleport or anything equally preposterous.”
The hairs on the nape of Reese’s neck bristled beneath the tangle of her beaded braids. “How was I supposed to know? Your world is so cloistered it makes a monastery look positively cosmopolitan! I didn’t even know it was your Queen who sent me to rescue you… how do you expect anyone to know anything about you under circumstances like those?”
His cheeks colored a faint blue-tinged peach. “Your point is taken, lady. Pardon me.”
Reese snorted and looked away, clenching her hands on the bars. No knives, no data tablets, no pyrokinetic Eldritch, no peppermint chalk, and a hold full of rotting rooderberries. She stared at her dirty, broken fingernails. By the time she found another port she’d have to do some fast talking to get someone to buy the things—
Reese’s chin jerked up. She smiled, feral, and turned to face Hirianthial again. “But what if they thought you could set them on fire?”
Am I allowed to have favorite lines? I loved writing that last one. >.>
