A Mischief in the Woodwork - By Harper Alexander Page 0,24

to the house. Tanen filed in somewhere after the others, but I was already back in the kitchen – where the stew pot sat bulging, and the only thing left to stew was the stew itself.

*

Letta drew me away after dinner to tend to my injuries. I lowered myself to my pallet and lifted my tunic over my head, and she loosened the corset that hugged my body. I held my tunic to my chest and drew my knees up to lean on them as she folded back the stiff flaps completely. Laces spilled down around my hips.

“Looking better, minda,” she said approvingly, then pressed on a slice. “Tender still?”

I winced. “Yes.”

“As it should be. Be thankful you did not have your nerves severed.”

I grunted.

Letta grew silent as she worked, and I listened to the trickling drone of conversation coming from the other room. It dwindled presently, and Tanen walked in. The room was very dim, but he saw me. His eyes took in my state, unblinking, and mine blazed with defiance and condemnation. He turned to go back out of the room.

My skin burned with exposure.

“You don't like him,” Letta observed.

“Should I?”

“You do not have to appreciate someone to treat him as he should be treated.”

“Please, Letta, not with the noble obligations.”

“Very well.”

And that was it. I knew what she thought of my behavior, and she knew I had that sense about me. In the end, it was up to me how I treated this stranger – and I had already established my own prejudice.

I twisted my fingers into my loose laces and clenched them into fists as Letta's probing began to hurt.

*

I dreamed of elphants that night – the giant, stony creatures from Serbae, with ears like great canvases and flesh like the leathery, cracked ground that covered the plains there. They tromped through my dreamscape in slow-motion, thunderous and clomping yet graceful, in their own way, their wrinkled trunks curled up to stay out of the way of their legs. They crossed the plains in a glistening cloud of dust, and came over into Darath – as if that dust cloud was magic in their wake, magic that could spirit them across days' journeys in the time it took to bat a sleepy eye. They plowed through the land, trampling the weedflowers and rattling Manor Dorn with their passing, then moving on to the city, where they trumpeted their bellowing, horn-like calls and tramped over the rubble, stomping it all into dust.

They disappeared into that cloud to the east, and as the tremors of their stampede receded after them, that's all there was left: dust. Like the thick ash of an erupted volcano hanging over the city. I wandered through it, obscure as fog, coughing. The only sound was the occasional echo of a spared section of rubble settling in a rush like toppled blocks, or granite splitting, that spasmed through the eerie, ash-drifting world of dust. My footsteps stirred through it, thick on the ground. I looked back at my footprints, which disappeared eerily into the obscurity a scant few paces behind me.

I coughed again, hunching as I pushed onward through the cloud. My breath rasped in the quiet, powder chaffing against my vocal chords like sandpaper. Before long, I could not speak. It wasn't as though I tried, and found out; it was simply an awareness that dawned on me.

My voice was gone.

Was this a nightmare? I did not understand why the elphants would raze our land so. It was not like them – not like my imaginings of them. I was fond of the Serbaen creatures that I imagined. It did not make sense for them to star in a nightmare.

But weariness began to weigh on me with the dust, like the ashes that settled on my shoulders. They grew into little piles there, feathery and like the nubs of tufted wings, until they had collected into increasingly weighty jumbles, and spilled down my back in what had indeed become full-fledged wings incarnate. They were like a heavy cloak, hampering me down. I stumbled under their weight.

Wings were supposed to carry you, not ground you, I wanted to protest. But my impression of what should be seemed to matter little.

For my wings were heavy, and there was no stopping them. I stumbled on, determined, but they brought me down.

I fell to my knees in the dust and ash, catching myself with a boom on my palms. A pall of stirred powder rose from the