Eileen Gunn - Questionable Practices

Agnes watched. And she listened.

Sometimes, when Melisaundre was bored, she brought Richard out of his gem. He hardly noticed Agnes’s presence, so besotted was he with the elf-queen. Agnes, for her part, watched him steadily, but her stare was hard. Once, during the heat of passion, his eyes accidentally met hers and the elf-queen immediately plunged a hand into his chest and pulled out his living, beating heart. He arched and spasmed until she returned the organ to its proper place.

“You liked that, didn’t you?” Melisaundre murmured, looking Agnes straight in the eye.

“Whatever you want me to like,” he gasped, “I will.”

Agnes, as always, said nothing.

After the elf-queen had ridden him like a horse, Richard rolled over onto his back, and when Agnes emerged from the shadows with the ices, he looked surprised to see her. He grinned shyly and started to say something, only to be shushed by an imperious royal finger laid across his lips. “You two are not to talk,” the queen said. “Not now. Not ever.”

Then she turned to Agnes. “Do you envy me, little virgin? Do you envy how many men come to pay me court, your precious friend among them, and how avidly they do so?”

“Yes, your majesty,” Agnes said tonelessly.

“They’ll never do any of that to you, I assure you. He will never so much as touch you. I’ll make sure of that.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Oh, you don’t fool me. You may not want it yet, but already you know you will. And every night you’ll stand and watch, yearning, always yearning… Those whom I bring to my bed are a complaisant lot. They’d be only too happy to oblige you, especially your lovely, dimwitted Richard here. But you shall stand and watch and grow old and withered and filled with regrets, while I remain gloriously young forever. When you die, I’ll have your ashes made into a godemiché, which will rest near my orgies every night, with Richard immortal and at my service. But never — not even once! — will it be used.”

“As you please, ma’am.”

In a fury, the elf-queen seized a goblet and flung it down on the flagstone floor. It shattered, sending fragments of crystal everywhere. “You wicked, stubborn child! Do you think stunting your potential will make you happy? It will not! Embrace your anger, and it will bring you vividly alive. You will be an avid, thwarted, hopelessly vengeful avatar of spite!”

“As you wish, ma’am.”

Queen Melisaundre screamed in rage. Then she bade Richard mount her once more, as Agnes stood by.

But the prize of the elf-queen’s collection was Frederic.

“My rough little diamond,” the elf-queen called him. She dressed him in jester’s motley, and brought him out to amuse her guests at banquets. They would lie in triples, twains, and tangles, on chaises about the court, while Frederic stood in the center and harangued them.

“You have no emotions of your own,” Frederic said. He looked so solemn, Agnes thought, in those big round glasses of his. “That’s your greatest weakness, and someday it will be your downfall.”

The elves responded with gales of laughter.

“You made a terrible mistake when you destroyed almost all of my people. It made those of us who remain rare. It made us powerful. Without us, you wouldn’t even know you’re alive.”

“And what about you, little fool?” an elf baron shouted back at him. “What would you do without us?”

“I’d just go on living. I wouldn’t miss you at all.”

They howled.

Another time, Frederic said, “The Earth is a sphere that revolves about a spherical Sun. The Moon is spherical too, and it revolves around the Earth.” Then, as his audience convulsed, “How many years have you marched around this world without finding its boundaries? Always you search for the way back to your own world. The land you came from is as flat as a checkerboard and so ours baffles you. You stupids! You are trapped here forever by your own ignorance.”

Finally, Frederic said, “You think us your prisoners, but it is you who are held captive by the topology of your thoughts. I am free! Unlike yourselves, I can move as I wish in all Euclidian dimensions. The only reason I share this with you is that you cannot possibly comprehend it. Should I wish, I can leave at any time by simply turning from your plane.”

Abruptly he crouched down and somersaulted away, out the door and gone.

The elves continued jeering and laughing at his japes for another hour, just as if he hadn’t left.

After the queen’s orgies that night, Agnes lay on her pallet thinking as hard as ever she had thought before. Frederic had been speaking directly to her — she was sure of it. Was it rolling into a ball that had rendered Frederic invisible to the elves? Or was it simply his bold, spit-in-your-face self-confidence?

Agnes felt anything but bold. But the challenge had been put to her. She had to follow Frederic’s example, curl into a ball, and roll outside. Either she would survive or the guards would kill her. It was as clean and simple as that.

So she rolled herself into a ball and tumbled off her pallet and out of the tent. The demon-hounds crouching by the salient did not even see her, though their eyes darted everywhere, their nostrils flared, and their ears were pricked for sounds far subtler than those she made.

Agnes somersaulted out into the moonlight.

Out on the grassy sward and down the bank she rolled, out of sight of the guards. When she came to a halt, she was not surprised to see Frederic tumbling to meet her.

“It certainly took you long enough,” he said.

“Unlike you,” Agnes replied tartly, “I can’t simply do and say whatever I want, whenever I wish.”

“And whose fault is that? The elves have no concept of reality save what they see reflected through us. I’ve been trying to explain that to you since forever.”

“Do you know what happened to Richard? The queen —”

“What befell Richard would not have happened if he hadn’t allowed it.”

“She keeps him in a jewel around her neck!”

“He was the oldest. He had the choice of staying and protecting us as best he could, or a safe life of cosseted slavery, and he chose wrong. It was despicable of Melisaundre to offer such a choice to someone so weak, of course.”

“You understand everyone so well,” Agnes said bitterly.

“I think we have argued enough for one night,” said Frederic. “Be sure to somersault your way back to your pallet. It confuses the elves when we rotate or spin, and somersaults short-circuit their brains entirely. I suspect that, like paper dolls, they’re not completely suited to life in three dimensions.”

He tumbled away.

Agnes stood motionless for a long time. The tents of the armies of Elfland stretched away to the horizon as numerous as blades of grass in a meadow, and the queen’s tent sat at the very center of the camp. A lunar moth fluttered raggedly past, and Agnes reflected that they two — she and it — were equally free and purposeless. Yet the lunar did have a purpose: to procreate, to lay clutches of tiny eggs on the leaves of trees. She had no such destiny; in its place she was forced to watch the futile carnival of Melisaundre’s endless couplings.

Now that Frederic had given her the key to freedom, she didn’t know what to do with it. Where would she go? During waking hours, she could find the other children, for they were held close to the elf-queen’s court, in case her whim required them. But when the revelries wound down into exhaustion, they were packed away to the fringes of the camp, to tents pitched among the ogres, dwarves, and other enslaved races.

She would not find the children tonight. And tomorrow, after the marching was done, their tents would be pitched elsewhere.