Chapter 281

"What do you think you'll see in Ikari?" Layali asked while Brain snored.

The white and black haired half elf chewed quietly on the smoked fish that her 'guide' made earlier.

Camp fare at least was not unfamiliar, 'Though doing all this myself sure as hell was… not bad though, kind of fun and it beat the boredom.' Zesshi thought until the little girl spoke to her. A few feet away, Brain lay sprawled out with his arms and legs open and sticking out from under his cloak. He scratched his stomach in his sleep, and then Zesshi chose to answer, "I don't know. I just don't. The truth? Maybe? But I think I'll find something different than what I've always been told. Everybody I've ever known has been keeping things from me, so… just whatever they've been keeping back?" Zesshi had braved vampires, tentacle monsters, cyclops and demons, but while she stared down every danger without worry or fear, looking at the little half elf's face was too much. 'That empty socket where her eye had been… the hopelessness on her face when she saw me…' It wasn't pleasant to think about even now.

"Hmpf." Layali retorted and crossed her legs. "Everything is terrible, our King sells our people as slaves, or the Theocracy takes us as battle captives and makes us slaves, or we're born from a slave's torment or desperation or… there's nothing good out there, Miss Zesshi… nothing. Brain says he'll take me somewhere safe. But that's just a grave."

Zesshi frowned, "I don't think he plans on-"

Layali gave a bitter chuckle, stifling Zesshi's words in her throat, "I don't think he does either, that's the twisted part. He was supposed to get horses for us, he didn't. That means whatever he did to get that healing potion, it wasn't enough, and he didn't buy that much food either… so he spent almost everything he had on him, just to buy me a healing potion. I don't think he'd do that if he wanted me dead."

"So why…?" Zesshi let her words trail off as the little half elf poked at the dying embers of their afternoon fire with the burnt end of a stick.

"When I met him I wanted to die. We… kind of had a deal. And he said he's going to kill Cerebrate, I want to live to see that. But when he drops me off somewhere? I won't last ten minutes when he's out of sight." Layali promised. "Got no family left, got no friends left. Got nowhere to go. No mother to go back to, at least not one who can look after me, and even if he's telling the truth about 'safe places' where we're passing through, what is there for me but more farm work?"

"So why tell me this?" Zesshi asked while the little blue eyed elf stared hatefully at the dying embers that one by one winked out, their glowing red reduced to dead black remnants or gray and cooling ashes.

"Because you don't care if I live or die. Because I want someone to remember for a while at least, even if they don't care. Because I can't tell him." She pointed her stick at the sleeping swordsman. "He's kinda rough, he doesn't say much, and when he does he sounds like he doesn't care about anything, but…" She gave a little half smile at the snoring blue haired man, "I don't wanna miss anyone, and I don't want more nightmares. There's no future for me awake, and only nightmares when I sleep… even when Cerebrate is dead, even when the master who sold me is dead… they'll still have me. How'm I s'posed to be free of all that, especially all by myself again?"

Zesshi listened to the small girl's rant, "Is it really… that bad, for others like you, I mean?"

"I've never been to a city, but I hear stories from the ones who end up on farms. The elves do the menial work, and the cities have the great farms, the latifundias, huge estates with thousands of slaves working fields for miles around. Or so they say. If those farms work like my home? You'll see a lot more like me and you." Layali said and touched her half elven ears.

Even by Zesshi's standards, the subject was grim, and so she sought a distraction, and instead asked, "How did you survive? Brain said you must have been in that water for days."

Layali looked down and dropped the stick, "I dunno. I've just always been kinda tough? One time some of the master's children were throwing rocks at me when they were small, they let me dodge… but I wasn't very good, and I was tired. I got hit in the head a bunch, broke my nose, and some bones. I couldn't work for a long time, but I healed. When I got put out in the field eventually, I got hit a few times, I always healed. I just… heal. It just takes time. Like I said, I guess I'm just hardy." She spat into the last of the embers, the hiss of steam came up as the last glowing embers faded to black, "Lucky me." She said, and then looked over to where Brain slept.

"I'm going to sleep, okay?" Layali asked, and Zesshi nodded along, unable to think of anything to say at all. Though she watched as the half elf went to where Brain slept, and slipped under half of his cloak, closing her eyes to the lullaby of his steady snores.

Queen Draudillon wasn't sure what in the world the Elf King was talking about until after he was dressed. That process by itself was almost a degrading parody of attending to royalty. The Queen's own servants attended to her body by dressing and bathing her, but it was a quiet, dignified affair, almost like a dance or a religious ritual.

But the elven women who acted as the Elf King's body servants were clad in a mockery of clothing, merely golden cloth near the shade of their skin that hung down at the front and back, he kept them nearly bare, and such was the ease with which they moved, avoiding even a look up at him, that it was clear this was routine. They moved footstools into place on which they stood in order to drape his golden and green robes, and still had to rise to their tiptoes and stretch out their limbs to get clothing onto his shoulders. 'A true monster in every way…' Draudillon reflected.

Her own servants looked at her with either maternal affection if they were older, or adoration if they were younger. Their gazes were pure and certain. 'They trust… trusted me, now look at them…' Draudillon all but wept as she watched while other young elven women approached and took up the battered human captives with a surprising degree of familiar gentleness and carried them out of the tent.

The women lay in the arms of their bearers as if dead, only the light of life in their eyes still indicating that they were not gone in body even if they were gone in spirit.

The looks of the women who attended their King were fearful and anxious, they moved with nervous fingers that paradoxically drew the process out even as they tried to rush it. The reason behind the raid became ever more evident. 'Trying to spare their own women…' It was a very 'human' thing to do, to put the burden on someone else to spare one's own loved ones.

It turned her stomach to sympathize with them as she now did, and Draudillon's hand drifted over her stomach, she pressed her hand there, willing the sick feeling to go away.

When it was over, the Elf King pointed at her, "Seedling, get out and get into the cart with my things."

"My lord." Queen Draudillon bobbed at the knees and rushed out while the elves took down the tent. That much at least went quickly and Draudillon found that the cart she was to climb into was a little too high off the ground for her small body. A hand stretched out to her, it was that of an elven woman.

"Come on, climb up…" She said while Draudillon looked up with a little frown on her face. "Do you want him to see that you're not in when he comes out?" The elf asked, and Draudillon thrust her hand up to accept the offered help.

The elf woman pulled and Draudillon grabbed the edge with her other hand, put her knee up, and hauled herself into the back. It was a broad cart pulled by four slender looking horses. The cart was made up entirely of women, some were her fellow humans, they lay silent and unmoving, staring up at the endless sky thinking nobody knew what.

Those seated were elves, and they lined what was essential storage chests turned into benches.

A few of the women there were showing the first hints of pregnancy, and given the way various elven warriors looked at them, with absolute shame etched on their own faces, and resignation on those of the showing women, paternity was either in doubt, or undoubted for the wrong reason.

It only urged the disguised monarch on, she sat on the floor near the closest, and youngest of her servants and drew the woman's head into her lap. "I'm sorry…" She said down at the once sunny faced young woman, who made no response.

"Hold my hand, child." The nearest elf woman said, and held her hand out again.

The way she said it with such urgency, Draudillon accepted it, and it was then that she saw the lumbering elf king approach his horses.

She couldn't hear what he said, but he laid a hand on the rump of each horse in turn and muttered something, then the horses glowed like white gold in the sun, one by one, and only then did he depart and vanish inside his carriage with one quietly weeping companion letting the door creak closed behind her.

What he'd done became evident when the horses and carriages and wagons all lurched forward and began to race at breakneck speed, bouncing over the grass, their hair was snatched up by the wind and carried high into the air behind them, and what was a breeze became like a gale wind that prevented all conversation for hours before the horses finally began to slow down.

When they did, and it was no longer necessary to cling to anyone, the same elven woman said down to her, "Don't worry, child. You won't be of child bearing age for years, you're safe at least until then… and maybe the chance will come for you to escape."

The Queen looked down at the barely moving husk whose head still lay in her lap.

"What about them?" Queen Draudillon asked.

"What do you think? They'll have his children until they die… our King is obsessed with this… we don't know why. But he is… they'll get used to it. They'll survive, whether they want to or not, that's up to them. Some… some they don't. Just do your best for them, and try to survive as long as you can, child…"

It was unexpected to the Queen, to hear pity from people her Theocracy neighbors referred to as enemies of humanity, even the warriors who slew her people and carried her and her servants… 'I hate them, but I pity them… dragged down into the same shit… if I still believed in the gods, I'd be praying for a drink…'

She thought.

But she didn't.

Because she had no more beliefs than the emptiness that stared up at the sky in the eyes of the woman in her lap. 'How far have we come…?' She wondered when the glow of the horses finally faded away and the rattling of their wagons finally became a more gentle rumble.

Only one answer came to mind, 'Far enough that it's even less likely we'll be found by anyone who might even consider a rescue.'