Page 30 of Enslaved

Then suddenly I’m rolling, tumbling. My body—I have a body once more—careens uncontrollably, battered from every direction at once. My senses whirl, confused and clouded with pain and fear. When I come to a halt, I lie flat on my back, staring up at a sky twisted and riven with magic. Raw, red, tormented magic.

“Up, Darling!”

I blink. The Prince’s face materializes seemingly out of thin air above me. He grabs my hands and hauls me to my feet. I gasp, stumble, nearly fall, and find my nose squashed flat against a broad chest. I lean into him, feel his beating heart and the warmth of his skin beneath my cheek. It steadies me. I would like to stand there a little while, maybe longer, as the rest of my body and awareness readjusts to physical existence.

Instead, the Prince pushes me back to arm’s length. “Are you all here?” he demands. “Every limb accounted for?”

I nod. Though, now he’s asking, I’m not entirely certain it’s true.

Before I have a chance to make certain, the Prince presses me against his side, one strong hand warm at my waist. Then we’re staggering forward. He urges me along with both the pressure of his arm and his low, urgent voice, forcing me to keep pace with him. My dazed eyes struggle to make sense of the world around me. I catch flashing glimpses of that tortured sky overhead. The landscape is cast in reddish glare, stark, scarred, and forsaken. Every now and then something green appears, but when I turn for a better look, it fades away like an illusion, replaced by more of this grim, blighted reality.

Worse than the land itself, however, are the creatures. So many of them, creeping, crawling, and slinking on their bellies all around us. They are either unaware of or entirely disinterested in the Prince and me, which is a relief. At first glance they look like the kind of beasts you’d expect to spy while strolling through the countryside: squirrels with bushy tails, rabbits, songbirds, hedgehogs, even a gleaming garden snake. But a second glance swiftly reveals the wrongness. The squirrels are fanged and bulbous monsters with awful, fleshy tails and scabby hides. The rabbits boast huge lantern eyes that glow an eerie green. Everything is twisted and unnatural. My stomach knots with hatredat the sight of them.

“It’s the air,” the Prince says in answer to a question I’ve not found the breath to ask. “Anything that lives so close to thequinsatraends up warped sooner or later.”

I get the impression the Prince is putting off glamours to deflect attention away from us as we hasten across the diseased landscape. “How long?” I ask when I can finally manage to put words together.

“Not very. Look!”

He points. I peer through the glare and strange, hazy atmosphere and see a house standing on tall stilts. Or not stilts but . . . legs. Giant, scale-covered legs. Even as I watch, one lifts and scratches idly at the other, shifting the house, which balances precariously on a crumbling foundation. For a moment the whole structure looks likely to fall. But the leg settles back down again, and the house remains in place.

I skid to a stop. I know that sight: I had a book of fairy tales growing up, and one of the stories told of a witch who lived in a house on chicken legs. Old Granny Greasespoon or something like that. It was not a favorite tale; Oscar always made me skip over it when I read to him at night.

I’d never in a million years believed I would see it in the flesh.

“Come, Darling,” the Prince says, ushering my reluctant feet back into motion. He presses me closer to his side. “You wanted to make this little jaunt, remember?”

I do remember. Vaguely. Though in this moment, I’d like to go back and give that former version of myself a sound slap across the face.

The chicken-leg house stands in what at first glance looks like a kitchen garden. The nearer we come, however, the more unnatural the herbs and plants appear. Some of them drip ooze from their petals. Others stalk and eat their fellow plants, razor-sharp petals like teeth munching noisily. A narrow path leads through the various planters, and the Prince guides us onto it, weaving carefully around the more dangerous-looking shrubs. Just as we draw near to the house, a clawed hand bursts from the nearest planter and makes a grab for my ankle. The Prince swings me to his other side and grinds the heel of his boot into that hand, which shrivels up and pulls back down into the dirt.

“Charming,” the Prince says, and looks down at me with a smile. “Shall we see if the lady of the house is home?”

I want to tell him he’s won. I want to beg him to take me home to Vespre. I want to give it all up—the bargains, the bloodgem, all of it.

Instead I nod.

The next moment, he’s leading me up the front steps. They sway like the deck of a ship on a stormy sea as the legs on which the house stands shift their weight from one foot to the other. Somehow we make it to the porch, and the Prince knocks a briskrat-a-tat-taton the sagging door. It swings open to reveal . . . nothing. Not dark, not shadow. Just emptiness.

“After you,” the Prince says.

I’d prefer it if he led the way. But that would mean leaving me alone in this terrible world. Not a pleasant prospect.

I grip my satchel strap, pull my head high. “Right,” I breathe. And step through the door—

—into a bright, well-lit room, tastefully arranged with old fashioned but respectable furnishings.

The shock of familiarity nearly stops my heart. I’d know this room anywhere: Danny and Kitty Gale’s front parlor in their house on Elmythe Lane. I remember when their mother purchased that set of needlepoint chairs positioned near the fire, and when Kitty crocheted the large doily adorning the tea table. That tea set too—I’ve sipped from those shepherd-and-his-lady patterned cups more times than I can count. It’s all exactly as I remember it, down to the smallest detail.

I haven’t moved a step when the Prince appears behind me, running into my heels. “Oof. Have a care, Darling,” he says, catching hold of my shoulders and just preventing both of us from taking a tumble. Then he too takes a look around the space. His eyebrow quirks. “Quaint.”

“How did we come here?” I gasp, finding breath at last.

“Do you know this place?”

“Yes, it’s—”

Before I have a chance to finish, the door across the room—the door which I know leads directly down a narrow passage to the kitchen at the back of the house—opens, and an ancient, squat, hunchbacked woman in a lace cap appears carrying a plate of sandwiches. At first glance I cannot tell if she is human or fae. She certainly doesn’t look fae, but something about her doesn’t feel human either.

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