“There is a struggle, some brave test for the prince to conquer,” he whispered as he walked over to her. “But in the end, he reaches the top of the tower-” he took the hilt jutting from her bicep, “-he kicks in the door-” he twisted the blade slightly, ignored her snarling, “-and he carries the pretty princess out.”
He drew the blade out slowly, listening to it whine as it was torn from its nice, cozy tower, listening to the flesh protest. He caught his reflection in the steel, saw that his smile had disappeared.
“Always the same,” he said. “The fairy tale is how we tell ugly children to survive. This is why the same stories are told. Through repetition, the child understands.”
He lifted the blade, tapped it lightly on her nose, leaving a tiny red blot upon her purple flesh.
“And we can repeat this story forever.” He slowly slid the blade over, until the tip hovered beneath her eye, a hair’s width from soft, white matter. “The princess can keep going back into the tower until you tell me. Until I know where Jaga is and what you handsome princes want with it.”
Now, he waited. He waited for the fear to creep up on her face. He waited for something he could use. He waited until she finally spoke.
“I have to piss.”
He sighed; mistake. “Just let me-”
She wasn’t making a request. The acrid smell that hit him a moment later confirmed that. He blanched, turned around; bigger mistake.
You’re showing weakness.
More like disgust.
You’re turning your back to her. Shall we get back into this? People counting on you and all that.
Right you are.
He turned around to face her. Tremendous mistake.
She was sitting there, grinning broadly as the liquid trickled down her chair to stain the hut’s sandy floor. He showed her no disgust, though for how much longer he was hesitant to say. There was something in her grin beyond the subdued hatred, the pleasure in suffering that he had come to expect. There was something in her eyes that was beyond scorn and fury.
Something that made it seem as though she wanted him to smile back.
“What?” she asked.
“You disgust me.”
“Why would a man who asks for piss and blood be surprised at getting piss and blood?”
He blinked, looked down at the stained sand. “I’ve known of your breed’s existence for almost a month now, so if this is a riddle, I don’t feel ashamed saying I don’t get it.”
She smiled; not grinned. “Master Sheraptus said you were stupid.”
“Your master is dead.”
“Master Sheraptus is never wrong,” she said. She looked at him curiously, sizing him up. “But. . you’re not stupid.”
“Thank you.”
“But you desperately want to be.”
It was generally agreed by most torturer and interrogator manuals that cryptic musing from one’s victims was generally a poor reaction. He flipped the knife around in his hand, noting that there wasn’t a great deal of blood on the blade.
Possibly because there wasn’t a great deal of blood from her wound.
“It doesn’t work that way,” she grunted, smiling at his recognition. “Cut me however deep you want to. I won’t bleed.”
“You won’t,” he said, forcing his voice cold, trying to force the conversation back into his grip. “Because you’re going to tell me.”
“No.”
No defiance. Only fact. She would not talk. It made him cringe to realize that he believed it as much as she did. It made him cringe again when she noticed this and smiled. Broadly.
“You’re not stupid,” she repeated. “There is a way it is. Everything works as it should. You call it inev. . inva. .” She grunted, spat onto the ground. “You give it a stupid word. Netherlings know it because we are it. From nothing to nothing. We live, we kill, we die. This is how it is.”
She looked at him, searching for a reaction. He felt his skin crawl under her gaze; there was something about not being able to follow her eyes, milk white and bereft of iris or pupil, that made him shudder.
“But you want to be stupid,” she said. “You want to think there is another way to do this. You want to think I’m going to break under this pain. I’ve had worse.”
There was a sickening popping sound and he knew she was clenching her fist behind her. That he couldn’t see the ruined mass of flesh and twisted bone that was her arm was a comfort that grew smaller every time she made a fist. The bone set back into place, the flesh squished as she overcame the injury out of a sheer desire to unnerve him.
It was working. It reminded him of just how much pain she had gone through. He was there when it had happened. He had seen Asper do it.
“You want to think I’m going to tell you everything you need.” She smiled a jagged smile. “Because then, you can tell yourself you’re as stupid as everyone else, that you just didn’t know. That’s why you pour reeking water down your throat. That’s why you talk to invisible sky people.”
He felt her smile twist in his skin.
“I bet you have a stupid word for that, too,” she said.
He meant to smack his lips. His mouth was so dry all of the sudden, so numb that he didn’t even feel it when the word slipped out of his mouth.
“Denial,” he whispered.
“Stupid,” she grunted. “As stupid as anything.”
“I disagree.”
She fell silent. She was listening intently. Unpleasant.
But he continued.
“If you accept that things happen a certain way, then you accept that there’s no particular point in trying to change them,” he said. “Thus, there’s no particular point in withholding information from me. You’re here. I’m here. I’ve got the knife. If the future is set in stone, then why are you fighting it?”
“I said you weren’t stupid,” she grunted. “Stop trying so hard. Things are what they are, not what they should be. We are solid, nothing else is. That’s what you don’t understand.”
“About you?”
“About you.”
She leaned forward. His nostrils quivered, eyes twitched, ears trembled, full of her. Her foulness, her sweat, the heat of her blood rushing in her veins, the creak of heavy bones under heavy muscle, everything that should disgust him, that did disgust him, that he knew was in her.
“You want to think there’s a way that this doesn’t end with you killing me,” she whispered, breath hot and hard like forged iron. “Because if I live, or if someone else kills me, you can pretend that you aren’t what you are. You can tell yourself that you didn’t know you’d have to kill me the moment we met.”
“We didn’t meet. You tried to kill me. I stabbed you.”
“And that’s how we do it. With metal.”
Nothing primal in her smile: no hate, no rage, no hunger. Nothing refined there: no delight in his suffering, no complex thought. It was something else, something simple and stupid and immutable.
Conviction.
“But you’re not stupid. You know this ends with your hands slick.”
He snapped. Spine snapped. Arm snapped. Fingers snapped. The knife went hurtling out of his grip, whined sharply, continued to whine even after it had struck.
She looked to her side as it stood in the sand for only a moment longer before drooping down to lay flat and impotent upon the dirt. She looked up and he was walking out the door.
“Missed,” he grunted.
“No, you didn’t,” she said after him.
He was gone. She was still smiling.
When he emerged from the cramped confines of the hut, he found the outdoors intolerable. The bright sunlight, warm winds, unbearably fresh air struck him with such force as to make his head ache.
Or that might have been his own fist as he brought it up to his temple.
“What was that?” He struck his head, trying to knock the answer loose. “What just happened?”
No idea. His conscience answered him in a jarring, disjointed train. What was that she did? Mind trick? Brain magic? What was that? That was. . what?