Elek sat in the back room of Sleepy Dog Coffee Co., drinking a hazelnut latte, giggling over a romance novel, when a group of four men wearing camouflage hunting gear slipped into the back of the café with him and spread out to block the exits. Elek saw the exquisite compound bows and quivers of the lords of the Second Realm and he slowly lowered his novel, dread like a sudden deadness in his gut.
“May I sit down?” The words were a sneer—Lord Kesani'aan knew that Elek knew he was caught, and that there was nothing Elek could do about it.
Lord Kesani'aan Naltsiine didn’t wait for a response as his huntsmen casually moved to cover the doors. He settled into the booth across from Elek and steepled his fingers in smug consideration. “I have to say, beast, you were difficult to follow. You cover your tracks well. You gave us the first challenge we’ve had in two centuries.”
Elek stiffened, preparing for a fight he knew he wouldn’t win, setting down the coffee a bit too hard. Righteous adrenaline surging through him, he said, “I’m not going back.”
“Oh, but you’re a prize stud,” Kesani'aan tisked, picking a napkin from the canister and wiping from the tabletop a bit of coffee that had spurted from the top of Elek’s cup when he set slammed it down. He tossed the rag carelessly aside. “My father’s property. Some of the best lines in the Second Realms.” He smiled. “Of course you’re going back.”
Elek’s gut twisted at how casually Kesani'aan discussed his breeding. Like livestock, he thought, disgusted as he locked gazes with the second son of Lord Yazaan Naltsine, Lord of the Sky Clan. Leaning forward across the table at the feylord, he bit out, “I’m not going back.” The last ten years of freedom—a freedom he had claimed by following Tl'oghk'etnaeyen to the First Realm in the chaos after Lord Naltsiine’s firstborn son had cursed him to fear Two-Toes—had opened him up to a world he had never known before, a world that every one of his ancestors before the Decree eight hundred years ago had been allowed to enjoy. It had changed him. He would rather die than go back.
“That can be arranged,” Kesani'aan said boredly. “Though my father would like to have your bloodline back. He’s had several very lucrative requests for pairings from other clans. After your escape, everyone wants the Snowdancer line.” Again, that cruel amusement showed in Kesani'aan’s face. “It’s so…vigorous.”
Elek leaned closer. “Your father,” he bit out, “can get fucked. My home is the First Realm now.”
And then, as Kesani'aan eyes were darkening, Elek threw the latte into his face and punched him as hard as he could in the jaw—a feylord that couldn’t use his jaw couldn’t compel him to obey. With the punch, he lunged out of the booth, already starting to shapeshift when a sighing voice from the side door called, “Stop.”
The compulsion in Chidilch'etl'’s voice was impossible to avoid, even though Elek knew it was coming. He felt his body grind to a halt, even as his mind screamed in panic. Unlike Lord Naltsiine’s son Kesani'aan, his best friend Chidilch'etl' was a gifted compulsor, almost as good as Tl'oghk'etnaeyen himself.
“Strip him!” Kesani'aan shrieked, righting himself in the booth.
“Stand in one place and remove your clothes as befits the station of a beast,” Chidilch'etl' said boredly. “Don’t speak or call for help.”
No! Elek thought, frantically pounding at the cage that was his own mind even as his body obediently began removing the Carhartt jacket and bibb that he’d become fond of as a contractor building houses for the humans.
Fighting it got him nowhere. His body placidly removed his clothes and left them in a pile at his feet, even his socks and underwear.
No, no! Elek thought, in agony.
A wad of dripping, latte-browned napkins in one hand, eyes darkened in a scowl, Kesani'aan slid out of the booth and moved in front of him. A moment later, the feylord’s gloved fist took Elek in the stomach, making him double over and fall to one knee, gasping. Then the young feylord took the wet napkins and smeared them over El'eknadaz'a’s face in disdain, then slapped them to his now-naked chest. “Restrain him,” Kesani'aan said, looking directly into Elek’s eyes. “I was going to spare him the embarrassment and take him out the side door, but I think we’ll walk him out the front, instead.”
Run, El'eknadaz'a begged his body, seeing the outer door to the café through Kesani'aan’s legs. Please run. But his limbs remained totally stationary, immobile as Chidilch'etl' had commanded.
Then Elek felt his arms being sealed into iron behind his back, his ankles being locked into shackles, and he knew his brief glimpse of freedom was over, and his heart screamed with one final cry of despair for what he knew he’d lost.
#
“Oh, stop pouting, slave.” Kesani'aan Naltsiine, the second-born son of Yazaan Naltsiine, his father’s preferred heir of the Sky Clan, gave Elek a sneer over his shoulder. “Why, the way you’re dragging your feet, one would almost think you weren’t looking forward to returning home.” The feylord casually gave a sharp tug on the faewire leash around El'eknadaz'a’s neck with a gloved hand, making El'eknadaz'a lurch forward in a stumble to keep it from cutting off his head. “What’s the matter?” Kesani'aan mocked, as Elek fell to his knees, unable to catch himself due to the way his ankles were lashed together and his arms were bound behind his back with the iron cuffs. “Can’t wait to get back home and get started breeding the other beasts in the stables?” The feylord and his fellow huntsmen snickered before returning their attention to the trail ahead.
Elek stared at the forest mosses between his bruised knees through tears. The feylords had been using him for entertainment as they tracked Tl'oghk'etnaeyen for the last two days, and it was clear they actually intended to take him back to the Second Lands and return him to the status of an animal.
That surprised him. Elek thought his escape to the First Lands would have doomed him to death, but with an intact Horn so close, Kesani'aan had to have been telling the truth when he spoke of lucrative breeding deals for his father. After all, most feylords since the Decree removed their mounts’ Horns and sold them to buyers in the First Realm, effectively neutering them and rendering them sterile. Lord Naltsiine was one of the few who maintained viable breeding stock rather than removing the priceless Horn in exchange for powerful artifacts from the Catholic Church.
No, Elek thought, shaking away the thought. Already, the feylords’ mindweaves had begun to geld his thoughts, returning him to complacency despite his desperate last two days’ attempts to fight back. We’re not animals. We’re not ‘stock’.
“Yes you are,” Chidilch'etl' said distractedly. “And once you’ve got a few foals on their feet, Lord Naltsiine will sell your Horn to merchants in the First Realm, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.”
There was nothing he could do about it…
Elek shuddered at the power of the compulsion and desperately shook his head, forcing the intrusive thought away, insulating himself in what he knew he was. He knew he didn’t want to be a beast. He knew he had a mind of his own. He knew he didn’t deserve to be bred like an animal. He knew he deserved to be free. Living in the First Realms had taught him extraordinary new concepts, ideas about freedom, love, honor, courage…
“Oh stop.” Kesani'aan jerked the tether again. “I’m tired of listening to your pathetic mental drivel.” The faewire around Elek’s neck bit into his skin, cutting it, making it bleed, and he was being forced to wear a human-shaped bridle that cut off any retort, but the worst cut was to his pride.
To these lords, he was just an animal. A rebellious, badly-trained animal, one they planned to neuter as soon as they had a decent replacement.
Elek had lived for ten blessed years as a human—ever since the uproar of Tl'oghk'etnaeyen’s disappearance had allowed for him to slip from his bonds and escape the Second Lands in search of the one man who had had the courage to stand against Yazaan Naltsiine—and it had changed him. Given him hope. He had spent those ten years blending in with the First Lander mortals, desperately looking for the firstborn son of the Sky Clan, all the while having no idea he would also learn what it meant to be free.
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Free. He’d been allowed to say his name, to use a human form, allowed to speak…
It hurt too much to contemplate what was coming. Kesani'aan would return him to the stables, bind him to his equine form, fit him with a harness to subdue his thought, force him to act and breed like an animal….
El'eknadaz'a swallowed a feeling of revulsion at that. The Two-Toes hated breeding as animals. It was the ultimate demeaning act. A gesture of complete intimacy, of love and respect, twisted to be no more than one animal mounting another while feylords stood by, discussing outcome and technique, as a buyer paid for the service.
Elek tightened his fists in his bonds, disgusted and angry.
…but there was nothing he could do about it. Faced with four feylords, each of which could compel him to think or act however they wanted, it was all he could do just to maintain his sense of Self.
…or was there something he could do about it, and Chidilch'etl'’s compulsion simply lingered in his mind? Elek felt his own grasp on reality crumbling. They had spent hours compelling him around the fire each night, laughing as his mind struggled not to break. The feylords, for their part, had found him to be great entertainment. Amongst the Two-Toes, El'eknadaz'a had been one of the strongest minds, from a long line of the Second Realm’s strongest minds—minds that, eight hundred years ago, had co-ruled the Second Lands with unicorns.
Now, they were simply slaves to be bought, sold, and bartered. They were so valuable as mounts that they were kept carefully subdued, and ever since the Decree eight hundred years ago, Elek’s kin had been trained over generations to be subservient, docile, mindless, complacent.
El'eknadaz'a was one of the six who had found the willpower and presence of mind to fight the mental subjugation and flee, and all of them had been Horned, and all but one had been stallions of their herds. Most of those who had preceded him in escaping, however, had come back in chains, to be tormented and flogged to death for the rest of his kind to see, a warning to those who would consider trying to remove their harnesses themselves. Elek’s K’eljeshen line was too valuable to the feylords to outright kill him, but he knew as surely as the sun rose that he would not go unpunished for his escape, especially after striking a son of the Sky Lord.
Elek’s mind had spent the last two days obsessing over the potential punishments he was soon to face in his head, and most of those he could think of were, as they did now, humiliation and degradation. He was too valuable to the Naltsiine breeding program sterilize by removing his Horn, nor could they maim or kill him.
They could, however, knowing his mind worked as well as any feylord, treat him like a beast.
And now, trailing his captors on a leash like an animal, his feet hobbled, gagged by an iron bit that even then burned his mouth, El'eknadaz'a felt a little piece of himself dying. He had been of high blood, before the Decree. His grandmother had secretly passed the family histories to him when he reached his sixteenth year. He was the seventh son of the seventh son of a long-forgotten Two-Toe prince, one whose name was scrubbed from the official histories of the Second Lands as soon as the feylords seized power from the joint-conservancy and banished the unicorns to live like animals as their mounts eight hundred years ago. Slaves, where they had once been equals.
El'eknadaz'a’s grandmother had been a Seer, and one of the last alive who had stood on equal footing with the feylords before the Decree. She had been killed twenty-three years ago, executed in public for ‘fomenting rebellion’ for trying to give El'eknadaz'a’s sister a family name, rather than the demeaning pet names the feylords used for them.
Khrysilla, El'eknadaz'a thought, in agony. His sister had never had a chance to learn the histories. After Lord Naltsiine had found his firstborn consorting with her, the leader of the Sky Clan had tied every unicorn on the property to the hitches outside their stalls and whipped her to death in the courtyard, forcing them to watch her die.
And Tl'oghk'etnaeyen, in an act of total rage, had compelled his father to a life of choosing between walking or riding mundane beasts to get from place to place.
El'eknadaz'a still didn’t know what he thought he could accomplish by following Tl'oghk'etnaeyen to the First Realm—it had been some half-formed idea, not a coherent plan. He’d just seen the power in the feylord’s eyes—which, for a minute as he was cursing his father to forever fear unicorns, had flickered back to the angry green of his true form, rather than the cursed brown of the dog—and El'eknadaz'a had felt some kinship to him, some desire to speak to someone who would recognize him as an equal.
…someone who would get angry on behalf of a unicorn. Someone who would seek justice…
If nothing else, El'eknadaz'a thought he might find an ally in a world that wanted nothing more than to bind, control, or kill him.
The Lord of the Sky Clan had been touching El'eknadaz'a when his firstborn son had driven the fear of unicorns into his mind, the curse itself borne of and powered by sheer rage, and it was the single most important moment of El'eknadaz'a’s life when Lord Naltsiine had yanked his hand back and returned El'eknadaz'a’s look with terror when their eyes met.
In the chaos that followed—Tl'oghk'etnaeyen compelling the guards not to follow him and Lord Naltsiine retreating to the opposite side of the property from the stables to get as far from the unicorns as he could get—their caretakers had forgotten to lock the gates later that night.
Elek had stood with the other unicorns as they watched Tl'oghk'etnaeyen stalk off the Sky Clan property after cursing his father, but Elek had been the only one with anything but deadness in his eyes as he followed Lord Naltsiine’s firstborn son’s progress. The others had simply…watched. Like it didn’t matter.
But to El'eknadaz'a, it had been earth-shattering. Someone had defied the Lord of the Sky. In public. And not only defied him, but cursed him. Frightened him. Humiliated him.
That thought—that a feylord could be humiliated—had shattered some barrier in Elek’s mind, and a whole new world of possibilities had opened up to him.
The other unicorns had eventually all turned away and returned to their stalls, their dull eyes mindwoven into complacency. For Elek, however, that one single thought had broken him free.
Someone had defied the undefiable. Humiliated the very definition of dignity. Terrified that which had nothing to fear. Elek had felt the decades-old mindweaves fall away, leaving him mind-boggled, his whole world expanding with new possibilities.
El'eknadaz'a had been the only unicorn to stay as the others had returned to the barn, instead staying to watch the cursed feylord disappear into the line of forest. The further Tl'oghk'etnaeyen got without being smited, the more courage El'eknadaz'a had found, growing like a heat in his chest until he had been longing to follow after Tl'oghk'etnaeyen rather than follow his kin back to their stalls. It had been the fire he’d seen in Tl'oghk'etnaeyen’s green eyes that had finally given him the audacity to take that first step. That fire had been contagious, and it had made him burn for freedom.
Freedom.
El'eknadaz'a finally knew what that meant. He’d finally tasted it. He had lived it, from that first stunned moment where a barista at a drive-through window overlooked his nakedness and asked him what he wanted to the last moments before the feylords caught him in the back of a café and wrapped the collar around his neck. And now, after tasting that sweet ambrosia of self-determination, they were taking him back, to fuck, eat, and act as a beast.
El'eknadaz'a just hoped Kesani'aan didn’t catch Tl'oghk'etnaeyen, too. He glanced up at where the feylords consulted each other as they watched the gathering of humans out on the sandbar. Through their clustered bodies, he could barely see the outline of the mastiff on the gravel. Tl'oghk'etnaeyen still hadn’t managed to break his father’s curse, and that knowledge left El'eknadaz'a with a sense of dread. Both of them had defied the Sky Clan, and Yazaan Naltsiine was not known for his kindness to those who had defied him. El'eknadaz'a was more valuable as a breeding animal for the Sky Lord’s stables, but it was common knowledge that his firstborn son was an inconvenience he’d rather see disappear.
To that end, Kesani'aan had brought two of his father’s most seasoned huntsmen with him, along with his best friend Chidilch'etl', whose powers of compulsion they had already used two dozen times to move through human society unseen and unremembered despite the naked and bound unicorn in their midst.
Thinking of Tl'oghk'etnaeyen’s fate, El'eknadaz'a glanced back at the ground. Elek they couldn’t kill if the Sky Lord wanted to capitalize on his ability to breed. El'eknadaz'a had to look good for the other Clan Lords. But Tl'oghk'etnaeyen? Tl'oghk'etnaeyen would probably die screaming for what he’d done.
Please don’t let them catch Tl'oghk'etnaeyen, Elek thought, despite himself. He would be willing to endure years at the hands of Kesani'aan if that meant the brave feylord who had defied Khrysilla’s murderer could stay free.
“Shall we take him, milord?” one of Kesani'aan’s huntsmen asked. He was already readying his bow.
No, El'eknadaz'a thought, in agony, watching the oblivious feylord stretched out on the riverbank. Tl'oghk'etnaeyen run!
“My father wants him dead,” Kesani'aan said lazily. “But he wants it to be slow. Aim to wound.”
“Shall I call the saa łic'ae, milord?” Tik'uniyunen, the other huntsman on loan from Kesani'aan’s father’s staff, asked.
“Leave the hounds for now,” Kesani'aan said. “We’re not in a hurry. Let’s see what happens when we kill his friends. Start with the vampire in the chair.”
“He probably thinks he can use her to break his curse,” Chidilch'etl' said, smirking through the trees at the cursed feylord, still oblivious in the open.
Kesani'aan nodded. As if he were discussing shooting at a beer can or a pizza box, he said to a huntsman, “Tik'uniyunen, I’ll bet you a faestone goblet you can’t hit her in the eye.”
Tik'uniyunen bowed. “I’ll contact your father for payment, milord.” Then, righting himself, he smoothly pulled his own bow up.
Waiting until the huntsman was sighting down the arrow, about to release, El'eknadaz'a lunged up and slammed into Tik'uniyunen, sending them both sprawling. Immediately, the other feylords started kicking and beating him, and El'eknadaz'a had to curl into a fetal position, unable to protect his organs with his hands locked behind his back. El'eknadaz'a struggled as Kesani'aan yanked the riding crop from his belt and started whipping him with it, but, as he had been told many times not to speak, he could no more form the words to scream than he could fly to the sun.
Run, feylord, Elek thought, knowing his distraction was giving Tl'oghk'etnaeyen precious seconds to escape. Save yourself…