Chapter 4 - Second Night

that is

A Short Tale of Tears, Memories, the Fate of an Elf Queen, and a Bath

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Her silent screams choked her awake. Dylan bolted upright as panic shrieked under her skin and pain burned through her. She fought desperately against the urge to be sick, biting down on her fist until blood welled up and dripped down her arm. Only then, as memory slowly seeped back into her mind, did the sheer terror ease its throttling grip on her throat a little, and she remembered how she'd gotten here.

The Elf had carried her to this bed, hadn't he? He must have, as she'd fallen asleep (or possibly unconscious), soothed by the comforting warmth of the Spirit in her chest, leaning against the table where he now sat. Was he awake?

Dylan shot the Elf prince one wild-shy glance and saw the pale man in a red tunic and black breeches asleep in his chair, his head tilted forward so that his chin rested on his chest and his long, blond hair curtained his face, shielding him from view.

At the sight of him, memory flashed through her mind - hands choking, fists beating, bones cracking, flesh tearing, and the blood, so much blood - and she gasped softly as her body constricted in pain, both physical and not. Tears burning her eyes, she curled in on herself like a snail, cradling her pain to her chest. Had he... had he done anything to her? Touched her? Or... or...

A sharp heat flared in her chest, a soothing balm against the icy terror threatening to shake her apart. No, he wouldn't do that to her. He'd saved her. He wouldn't hurt her, at least like that. No. Not this one.

But others would. Others had.

Not wanting to wake her rescuer, she didn't cry. Dylan had no idea as to whether he would be angry at being awakened by mortal weeping, and she didn't have to touch the raw necklace of shadows around her throat to remember how much damage he could do when enraged. But her entire body shuddered with pain and fury, shuddered because it had happened again. Those monsters... those monsters...

A whimper managed to escape her, and the slumbering Elf in the chair stirred. Dylan immediately forced herself to get quiet. To hold herself together, she clutched her fragmenting soul to her chest and bit her lip until her tongue tasted the copper tang of blood. Tiny tremors shook her body. She wouldn't cry. She would not. She wouldn't wake the Elf. From the look of him, he needed to sleep for a lot longer if he was going to recover. He seemed worn, stretched, too thin in body, soul and mind.

And she... she...

When her body had stopped shaking, the brunette reached up and hesitantly touched her face. Dylan found hard, crusted lines where her attackers had slashed her face, thin and thick scabs that hurt whenever she changed expression. Sighing, she allowed her hands to fall back against the soft quilt. Her brother had warned her about this when she'd decided to counsel troubled teens. Those men had attacked her not to kill her, but to send a brutal and terrible message from Tito, from their leader. They'd wanted to make sure it was driven home, right to her heart. Make sure she knew not to mess with them or one of theirs again.

Just the thought of their rough hands, like coarse animal hair, and their hot fetid breath... their beady, bestial eyes... Dylan fought hard not to be violently sick. As a child, she had seen... some awful things. Experienced far worse things. It was one of the reasons she could possess any measure of calm now.

"We warned you, puta. Never mess with our chicas, yeah?"

Lisa, they were talking about Lisa, but she'd had to. She'd had to. For Lisa's sake. For the girl who needed help and couldn't trust anyone but the therapist who Saw what she Saw, who knew about the magical world that existed like blood beneath the skin of the mortal realm. She'd had to help that girl, the girl who was so much like her beneath the skin.

And still the wolves growled and snarled, "Now you'll remember... every time you look in the mirror."

Her nails had left bloody crescents in her palms and her throat ached from holding back her scream by the time the memory faded enough for her to beat it back into the depths of her brain with a mental sledgehammer. She'd woken in an icy terrified sweat from dark memory-dreams nearly her entire life. After eleven years of poisonous thorazine pumped through her blood, Dylan knew how to deal with nightmares.

She could handle this. She could handle this.

Coldly, logically, she thought hard about her situation, trying not to think about the attack itself. With a mind as icy and clinical as she could make it, she assessed the damage done to her body. Dylan allowed the part of her mind not occupied with conscious thought to dwell on the pain in her body, the only thing keeping her collected.

Her face had more than twenty cuts criss-crossing her features, but there was no nerve damage. Of course, there would be scars, though she didn't really care. There was always the viable option of covering them with makeup. Or getting rid of the mirrors in her cottage. There was only the one in her bathroom.

Or she could simply get used to seeing the thin, raised lines the wounds would leave behind, as if her face had been flogged by the thin lash of a faerie waggoner's whip.

Then there was the bruising. She knew from the difficulty she had breathing that her ribs were cracked, but having had broken ribs before, she knew that this time, hers were not. Still, if the pain worsened at all, or anything else hit her torso, she'd have to find her way to a hospital immediately. Punctured lungs were one of her prime fears relative to broken ribs.

Her cheekbone was cracked, but since her eye was still in its socket, she seriously doubted it was broken. None of her limbs or fingers or toes were damaged, though she'd lost a fingernail in the scuffle with her attackers. The main threat to her health was the effects of her rape.

She had not been a virgin, thanks to the hell her life had been in the institution. Thanks to two vicious monsters who thrived on the pain of others. That fact had most likely saved her life. The blood and pain were from minor tears and severe abrasions, but she had seen young girls bleed to death from a hymen savagely ripped through during a rape. Luckily, she wasn't bleeding anymore; she'd made sure of that before going to sleep, and surreptitiously checked again now. No fresh blood. So that danger wasn't quite as prevalent in her mind any longer. It seemed that all she would need to do once she'd healed up a little was get therapy.

Therapy.

Two scalding hot tears rolled down her cheeks and soaked the pillow she rested her head upon. The idea of talking to a psychiatrist, even though that was her profession, made her shudder with revulsion, with a child's shame of weakness and a woman's rage at being made to feel helpless yet again. Shudder from phantom memories. The echoes of old wounds. The pain of the betrayed and confused. Self-loathing so deep only a child would understand where and when it came from, how it still breathed and festered.

She ignored it, refused to let it hurt her. Refused to acknowledge that she felt any of it.

It's not my fault, she thought. None of it was my fault. It has never been my fault. I won't let it be my fault. Memories more than two decades old. Memories more recent than those. A child's memories, and a girl's. A woman's pain mingling with a child's nightmare. But she wouldn't let herself be that child anymore. She wasn't seven years old anymore, or twelve, or fifteen, or nineteen. She was twenty-eight, nearly twenty-nine, and strong and she would not let those memories hurt anymore.

Dylan fought the tears back. A study-partner of hers in med school had often said she would die an early death from fighting back the urge to cry the way she did, and refusing to allow herself to vent disappointments in any way. As a psychiatrist, Dylan even knew that it was unhealthy. She thought her old partner, Julian, might have been right about the early death; every time she suppressed her tears, it became harder, and her chest ached, as if she were having a minor heart attack. Maybe she was. Maybe her body was storing up all the angst like a battery, and one day her defenses would crumble under the D-cell power.

"I will not fault you for weeping," the ice-cold voice murmured from the chair. "You need not stifle your tears."

Dylan jumped at the sound of his voice and winced when her body protested stridently. Glancing over at him, she opened her mouth to speak, but then thought better of it. She had no idea what kind of footing she was on with this person.

But she had to say something about the tears. She felt stupid, letting him see how shaken she was, how much the attack had upset her. After all the brutality she'd dealt with in her life, was she really going to cry about this? Cry, like some naive child who had no idea that men were vicious, cruel monsters? She wasn't Sorcha of Sevenwaters, after all, that innocent daughter of the forest from one of her favorite books, an untested girl taken unawares. Rape should have been nothing new to the teary-eyed woman.

It was nothing new, she reminded herself. She wouldn't let herself cry over old memories again. Nor new ones, either. She'd sworn to herself years ago never to cry over anything that happened to her. Never again. Never.

"You may not fault me, Your Highness," she muttered. "But I'd fault myself. I don't have a good reason to cry." The words were more for herself than him. "I'm alive, aren't I? I'm not going to die anytime soon. This isn't going to kill me. I'd only be crying about... anyway, it's stupid to cry over something I can't change." After all, all crying ever got her was a soggy pillow and a brain and body too exhausted to fight back when the time came. That route was never an option. Fighting back was the only choice, even if she died fighting.

"I am used to human weakness. It is considered acceptable by your people's standards to cry."

"But not by mine," she hissed. "I will not be weak." Never again. Never.

"Those are the words," he said coldly, "of one who has learned the painful lesson that enemies do not respect tears of grief, and only rejoice in their making. Is this not so?"

His words lanced her. She never cried if she could help it; it brought the predators down on her like rabid dogs. Self-preservation demanded she keep the tears back. But how could he know that?

And why was he suddenly being so kind to her? His voice, like ice. His words, like friendship. It was almost as if he were trying to console her, trying to tell her that he understood. The thought made her face burn and her hands clench beneath the quilt. He didn't understand. She was so sick of people saying they did. At the most, he might think his words applied to common human bullies or perhaps torturers who worked for her enemies. Maybe her attackers. After all, he was an Elf in a time many fey considered to be wartime.

But that wasn't what she meant. It wasn't what she was referring to at all.

Suddenly, the faces of her family swam before her eyes, and she gritted her teeth. Loneliness and a feeling like homesickness, but different, a longing for a person instead of a place, welled up in her chest. She missed her twin brother. And how she despised the rest of her family, even though she didn't want to. Even though she loved them, too. How she hated the world, and humanity, and yes, even the rescuer who had been too late to save her before such vicious damage had been done. Men. She hated them, all of them, even though she knew it wasn't fair.

For just a moment, Dylan allowed her loathing, her hate, her rage, to wash up and over her, to pour off of her like a black tsunami; all of that pain, all of that anguish and hatred, directed at men.

With something that might have been a snarl, she flung back the quilt and got to her feet. She didn't know what she was going to do, but she wasn't just going to sit here and stew in her own distress. Dylan noticed distractedly that her abrupt movement had caused the Elf in the chair to suddenly jerk upright, eyes intent on her form. Her face, she knew, was a mask of ice-cold rage.

Unfortunately, the effect of her mini-tantrum was thwarted by the fact that she then had to sink back down to the bed as a roaring filled her ears and her vision began to go gray.

"I hate you," she moaned softly.

Images of her parents, her siblings, the men who'd attacked her, all filled her mind. Her eyes burned. The mortal had no idea whether or not she were speaking to the Elf in the room with her, her treacherous family, the twin brother that had never been there when she needed him, the wolf-men who had attacked her, the demons from her childhood, or herself, huddled and pathetic on the bed. I'm not a little girl anymore. They can't make me a little girl again. Not ever.

Biting down on her lip until fresh blood from the cuts flowed, she sank her nails into her palms. Her shoulders were shaking, and her mouth was twisting into a grimace of despair. Dylan covered her face with bleeding hands to hide the evidence of her lack of composure.

"I hate this. I hate this." The word 'this' referring to her ever-increasing compulsion to weep aloud, sobbing like the terrified child she'd been all those years ago. She couldn't be that child again or she would shatter into a million pieces.

A hand fell on her shoulder, and she jerked back in surprise, a soft sound of fear escaping her lips. She looked up quickly into the blank, empty face of the blond Elf standing above her. He was expressionless as he sank onto the bed beside her. With a wild cry, she scuttled off the bed and hunched against the nearby wall, shaking. Too close, he was too close. How had she allowed herself to be so consumed by her own thoughts that she hadn't noticed his approach? Never mind the fact that he was an Elf. She couldn't let her guard down! She'd only slept because she'd been so exhausted and couldn't help it!

He said, very, very softly, "I hate humans. I have always hated them, nearly as far back as I can remember. They are empty creatures without hearts or souls. I despise them. Every act of cruelty and pain and suffering they inflict on themselves is well deserved by their breed. If not for the debt I owe you, I would cut off your head before you could draw a full breath. I hate you."

He fell silent for a while, as if thinking, and her tears cut at her eyes. Her lips trembled. Why was he saying these things to her? Was he trying to say the attack was her fault?

Dylan drove her nails into her forearms, trying to suppress the hurt and black emotion in her chest. She narrowed her ice blue eyes at him, knowing and hating the fact that her nose was swollen and red, her eyes flecked with gold, her eyelashes spiked by tears, her cheeks splotchy with color. She hated that. She hated to be vulnerable, but more importantly, she despised looking that way. Why was he saying these things to her?

Not my fault. It's not my fault.

Then he said, "I have a twin sister, Nuala. She is my life. But when I was a boy, she and I were very close to our mother, Queen Cethlenn. A mortal like yourself, born after the time of magic and wonder that you humans could never fully come to appreciate, has never seen a creature like my mother." For a moment, Nuada trailed off as memory swamped him, and he spoke almost to himself. "A creature of grace, ethereal beauty, dazzling charm. The fey praised my mother for her wisdom, even though she was Fomori and we were Tuathan. For centuries, she was my father's greatest advisor. Unlike my father, her hair was... blood red, rubies and garnets spun into the finest silk strands. Eyes like leaves hammered from emeralds, but they turned to beaten silver in the moonlight. Skin the color of marble, like an alabaster statue. My mother was so very beautiful, and kind. So very kind. I... my sister and I... loved her very much.

"One day, over three thousand of years ago, we were walking in the woods of Renvyle, my mother and sister and I, thinking it safe, and humans attacked us. Men, thirteen of them. A pack of wolves in men's clothing. They murdered our simple guard and defiled my mother. They...." The Elf prince's hands curled into fists that trembled slightly. "They used more than their bodies. She fought them, but she was not armed for war, and there were too many. Still, she tried... desperately, she tried to give my sister and I a chance to escape. We ran, but we were only children. They caught us.

"My mother bled to death from what they did to her. Having made us watch our mother's desecration, they were going to kill my sister and I, but a passing troll warrior attacked and killed them, saving us. That is why I saved you," he added softly. "I would not have what happened to my mother happen to any woman, ally or enemy, mortal or immortal, Elf-kind or human. I would," he said softly, tonelessly, "that I could have been there before any damage had been done. You are the only human who has ever forced me to taste the bitterness of regret. The only human," he whispered, "to whom I owe a debt. Think on that."

He got up and went back to his chair, propping his chin on his fist and looking resolutely away from her.

Dylan blinked, and wondered why she had felt revulsion radiating off of him when he'd been near her, even as he'd been speaking to make her feel better. Why had he confided such a painful memory to her? Unless he was trying to tell her something, and she had missed it.

Sighing, she realized she would probably never figure it out while her skin crawled like a thousand insects and her eyes burned with unshed tears.

Dylan asked tentatively, "Your wounds, Sire... how do they feel?" She felt like she ought to do something to break the ice, even though all she wanted was to run and hide in the shower and never come out. Water had always made her feel safe.

"They are well enough." His voice was firm again, and icy. The brunette woman felt as if she'd been tossed into a mountain stream in January.

"May I see?" Dylan asked softly.

When in doubt, she thought, resort to medicine. Excellent conversational topic. Her sarcasm could, unfortunately, only be appreciated by herself inside her own head. Wiping at her cheeks, she wondered absently how much longer she could hold back her tears before they broke out of her in a flood. Days? Weeks? Months? A year or two more at the most? She doubted it would be longer.

But only a portion of her mind dwelt on this. The main part of her consciousness was spent trying to futilely exploit her nearly non-existent psychic powers against the Elf in an attempt to force him to remove his clothing, so that she could examine his injuries. He only turned to stare into her eyes, the pale yellow ice of his gaze boring into her skull.

"You're not going to let me see, are you?" She muttered. Somehow, he shook his head without moving a muscle. It boggled the mind. Sighing, she asked, "In that case, is there any chance I could take a bath, Your Highness?"

He gestured impatiently towards the door to the left of the fireplace, which she assumed led to a wash room. Slender etchings of golden-haired nymphs frolicked in a pool on the door. Dylan glanced at the Elf, but he wouldn't look at her anymore. Great. Now he was just making her nervous.

Irritated, she got up slowly, her knees quaking, pain radiating from her joints, and, after grabbing her purse - and its comforting collection of stones - made her incredibly slow way to that door, wandering how she was going to manage all by herself in there. Trying unsuccessfully to put the thought out of her head, she opened the gold-etched, wooden door and slipped into the room.

Nuada waited until Dylan had quietly shut the door behind her before the Elf muttered something that sounded like,

"Candles. Rose.
Towels. Clothes.
Water hot and blue,
Soap and shampoo."

For some reason, a reason the Elf prince had never been able to discover, crinaeae and other elemental faeries had an affection for silly rhymes. They liked them, apparently, and so silly rhymes so simple and ridiculous that a child might have invented them were then recited as spells. It was basically all a game of pretend, but the chores got done. He felt an acknowledgment from the crinaeae, salamander, and sylph that were bound to the bathing room, and knew they would easily handle his wishes.

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Dylan found the bathtub full when she closed the door to the wash room. It was a gargantuan bath made of white marble veined with gold and silver, in the shape of a tree. A foot of tub wall stood between the floor - which was rough, red stone - and the surface of the water, which steamed. The white mist rising off the water smelled of rose petals. Placed in little cubbies set about a foot apart in that wall were candles, fat pillar candles the color of a twilight sky. Tiny candle flames flickered and danced, illuminating the room. Beside one of the candles was a shelf that held an ivory bar of soap in the shape of a sea shell, and a dark green bottle of what was probably shampoo shaped like a rose. Rising up behind that shelf and cubby was a wall, set apart from the actual walls of the room, carved by thousands of tiny shelves to create a waterfall effect.

Carefully undressing, Dylan laid the sash, dress, and shift over a chair by the door and walked slowly to the edge of the bath. Steps led from the floor into the tub. The rails gleamed golden. She walked into the water, grateful for the steaming liquid and its soothing touch against her skin. The brunette ducked under the water, and held her breath, relishing the feeling of weightlessness and isolation the water offered.

She wanted to stay there forever.

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Nuada had not the slightest idea what to do with this human that his sense of honor had dropped into his lap. Dylan was more of a trial than he had anticipated. He had forgotten, in his long exile, that women who had suffered defilement were skittish, paranoid, and hydrophiles. The human moved around him as if he were one of the craven beasts that had forced themselves upon her. She flinched every time he glanced her way. The competent, truculent, if somewhat nervous human who had seen to his wounds had vanished while he had slept. Perhaps he'd dreamed of the primitive surgery and Dylan's skill with the needle, her incogruously gentle bedside manner and strange sense of confidence.

But his fingers slipped beneath the collar of his shirt and unerringly found the wound in his shoulder, puckered and warm from the sickness he knew would be there. He fingered the end of the sewing thread in his flesh.

Could Dylan truly be a human? She did not move like a human, or speak like one - for the most part, anyway. No vile expletives, no blasphemies or curses. The only thing human about her was her scent and her features. That alone informed him that she was exactly as she said. She was mortal, a daughter of mankind, a Child of Mud. Yet this daughter of the Mud People had doctored his wounds, tenderly washed the blood from his skin, even though it was plain for all to see that she was stark terrified of him.

She made no sense. Of that, he was certain.

So wrapped up in his own thoughts was he that he didn't at first hear the soft, heartbroken singing coming from the bathing chamber. When the soft sounds reached him, he found himself on his feet before his abused ankle had enough time to protest. The Elf prince limped to the door. The melody was off-key and yet, hoarse and out of tune as Dylan was, Nuada felt as if he ought to recognize the tune.

"For you know, once even I was a
Little child, and I was afraid,
But a gentle someone always came
To dry all my tears,
Trade sweet sleep for fears,
And to give a kiss goodnight.

"Well, now I am grown
And these years have shown
That rain's a part of how life goes,
But it's dark and it's late,
So I'll hold you and wait
'Till your frightened eyes do close,
And I hope that you'll know..."

Then he heard a soft sob and a splash. There was no more singing.

Nuada waited for what seemed like hours. Seated at the table, absently tracing the bullet holes on his torso through the thin linen shirt, he watched as the sand in his tiny, copper and unpolished crystal hourglass trickled into the bottom. The sand was whiter than bones. Even as he watched, the little hourglass flipped itself over, marking the end of the second hour since the singing had so abruptly ended.

He did not wish to admit it, but he was starting to become concerned for the mortal. His honor demanded he keep the human alive as long as she remained in his care. How long could one mortal stay in the water? Had she possibly drowned?

Muttering to himself, he got to his feet, intent on discovering just what she did in the bathing room, her bath having most likely been over for some time. He refused to allow her to indulge in laziness while she remained at his sanctuary.

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Dylan blew the air in her lungs out with a whoosh that surrounded her with bubbles. She almost smiled. Every hour, it seemed, this bathtub drained completely and refilled. It didn't seem as if there were enough time for it to be done, but somehow it took moments only. She was grateful, however, as it kept the water deliciously hot.

Her skin, though she had scrubbed it until her flesh should have been rendered a raw and bloody mess, was sparkling clean and rosy pink, fragrantly scented with the essence of lilies and roses. There was no blood on her skin, either from the attack or from any bleeding that may have occurred during the night. That made her relax even further into the steaming hot water.

Leaning back to allow the cascade of hot water from the carved waterfall to pour over her hair and back, she sighed.

Dylan hadn't felt this relaxed or safe in years, since she was a child in Pennsylvania, surrounded by the forests and meadows that lay all around her parents' house. Grateful for the peace surrounding her, the glow of the candles and the sound of the water singing over marble, she smiled wanly and closed her eyes, allowing the tension to drain from her body completely.

Safe. This place was safe.

The door slammed open.