Lips Like Ice

XIII

 The first creatures besides the Prince that Lydia ever sees are clearly a pair of guards. They slam into the Prince's apartments three days later, throwing back the door and startling Lydia so badly that she lets out a little abortive yelp and stumbles backwards over her writing desk.

They wear identical clothing, form-fitting and sturdy, with blades strapped to their backs and hips, and each sport a hat that looks a bit like a beret. They say nothing to her. One grabs her upper arm and begins to pull her off the floor. The book she was trying to translate flops onto the floor, the pages crumpling, and she shouts, "Hold on, hold on! Let me get my feet under me!"

The second guard recoils slightly, as if disgusted to realize that she can speak, and then reaches out and snatches her other arm. Lydia is grateful to be wearing the soft, tall boots the Prince gave her and the thick warm dress that covers her arms and falls just past her knees. She wouldn't want to be wriggling away from them nude. She scrambles to keep up as they pull her out of the bedroom and across the parlor to the far door.

The door that the Prince never leaves open or unlocked. The door that is now standing ajar and letting cool air seep into her cozy den.

"Wait!" Lydia yelps. "No, I'm don't think I'm allowed to— Wait—!" The scar on her back flares and burns and Lydia writhes, groaning in agony. As she's hauled across the threshold the pain becomes instantly unbearable and Lydia shrieks. The guards do not let go, however, and the moment they've all passed into the hall, the burning abruptly stops.

Lydia lets her head hang, trying to suck the cool air back into her lungs, coughing against the fear and the lingering memory of agony. Any sweat that had sprung forth in her terror evaporates sharp and quick, like points of ice digging into her pores. She can't keep to

their pace, stumbling, and eventually they just haul her up, her toes skimming the marble floor as they march briskly down a hall that Lydia barely registers.

There are stairs, first down, and then up, the sharp humid smells of a kitchen, the piercing, over-loud clatter of pots and pans, and then music like a slap—sudden and abrupt and unexpected, but still slightly muffled. Lydia looks up, and she is mere inches from a curtain. It is too dark to see around them, the curtain so thick that all light is sucked from the room, save for through the gap. She is dangling right in front of it, her shoulders beginning to burn in protest of the guard's grip, but she cannot see anything. It's too bright.

Lydia's breath evens and slowly her hearing returns. Over her own harsh pants she hears someone speaking. No, roaring. The voice echoes and bounces, and Lydia gets the vague impression of a cavernous hall, filled with bodies.

"—really as clever as you claim!" the voice booms. "They're barely above being capable of speech! They are just constructing tools!"

"Their kind has evolved far more quickly than we anticipated," the Prince's voice cuts in. His voice is soothing, sweet, like spring water, and just as heady. "Speech, tools, advanced scientific discoveries, self-determination, rhetoric, culture, technology; they aren't much less advanced than us, now."

Horrified gasps pepper the air. There are dozens of people on the other side of the curtain. Hundreds, maybe.

"My sister has clearly spent too much time with this creature and reads more into its responses than is there," booms the first voice again.

"I've have told, you, I've Chosen, brother!" the Prince thunders.

The other voice laughs, and it is harsh, and broad, and cruel. Lydia suddenly has a good idea whose boot-marks she nursed the other night.

"Sister, hush!" the brother laughs. "You say these creatures, these pets are so advanced?"

"You forget their life-spans," the Prince hisses. "Dozens of generations to every one of our own. Civilizations change quickly when the turnover is high."