Chapter 17
Mary, a diligent student, understood the word escape, because the first item in the Basic Rules for Coexisting with Prince Anthony that Patricia had made her memorize was: no escaping.
The other two were: supply blood on schedule, and absolute obedience.
So Mary shook her head hurriedly. "No. Not escape." She assembled her recently acquired vocabulary as best she could, gesturing and stumbling. "Outside, um, snow. Is — is pretty."
Anthony listened to her talk like a child learning words, and something very close to a smile touched his mouth.
He came over, bent to pick up the fur cloak from the floor, shook it out, wrapped her in it from head to foot, lifted her easily — and turned and jumped straight out of the open window.
Anthony's movement from picking her up to going out the window was fast enough that Mary never saw how he opened a print-locked window at all.
Which no longer mattered, because what mattered was that Anthony's castle was built on the edge of a cliff, and outside that window was a drop of several thousand feet.
Inside the weightlessness of a fast fall, Mary was frightened clean out of her mind, the scream jammed somewhere in her throat, and could do nothing but curl up rigid against him.
Anthony, holding her, was entirely composed, and had leisure enough to put his free hand to his lips and produce one sharp whistle.
A low, commanding dragon-cry came up faintly from the bottom of the gorge like distant thunder.
Then a violent whirlwind spiraled up out of the abyss, and the snow banked along both cliff faces was shaken loose and came rustling down.
An instant later an enormous silver dragon of startling size broke upward through the falling snow as though tearing through a curtain.
It caught the two of them mid-fall, steadily, and with a single beat of those vast wings rode the wind into a glide and covered several miles at once.
In the setting sun, the magnificent silver-white scales of Anthony's mount threw back a rainbow halo graded from deep to pale, shifting as it moved — which made it, if anything, even more ostentatious than General Michael's black dragon with its butterfly wings.
Mary, eyes enormous, vision partly obscured by the soft fox fur against her face, emerged from that thrilling piece of aerial acrobatics with only one thought in her head.
This is the Rolls-Royce of Earth. A living, breathing Rolls-Royce Phantom.
His Highness Prince Anthony steered his Silvara all the way to a silent snowfield that looked like the end of the world, and set down slowly.
He found a patch of snow as smooth and clean as velvet, carried Mary down off the dragon's back, set her gently on it, then folded his arms and stood off to one side, watching her.
Mary stood in the soft snow for a while before she caught up.
Because she'd said the snow is pretty, this person had specifically brought her out to look at snow?
She took two experimental steps forward, then looked back at Anthony, who hadn't moved.
He was leaning against the Silvara at his leisure, arms folded, eyes shut, resting, his face carrying an expression that read approximately: you may move about freely, I am in fact a very generous person.
Snow-viewing?
No. This felt more like an owner taking a pet out for a walk.
Mary began to find it a little boring, and bare feet in snow really were very cold.
She looked once across that limitless world under ice, and understood something clearly.
For her, as she currently was, escape and survival were both entirely unrealistic fantasies.
So she crouched down, rubbed her numb calves with her palms, pulled the fur cloak tighter, and in a spirit of resignation wrapped herself into a smaller ball.
Anthony watched from a distance as Mary walked and stopped and walked again in the snow, turning back now and then to look at him with some confusion, and finally packed herself slowly into an entertaining fur ball and stopped moving.
He was about to laugh quietly when he registered, with alarm, that Mary had vanished.
His eyes went sharp.
Anthony appeared at the spot where she'd been crouching almost instantly, and then stopped short himself. The snow was very deep.
The surface had frozen into a thin hard crust with something extremely soft underneath.
Crouching had collapsed that fragile shell, and Mary had dropped straight into the drift below, where one round of thrashing had buried her deeper.
The white fox fur she was wearing merged with the snow around her, so that from any distance she appeared to have evaporated.
The patch of snow under Anthony's own feet lasted a few seconds before caving as well.
But he was a tall man, and the snow only reached his thigh. He remained standing without difficulty.
Looking at Mary sitting in the pit, very nearly interred, Anthony sighed soundlessly and reached down to lift her out. "You're simply too short."
Mary was in no state to feel relieved that he hadn't opened with you're also too heavy. She was still inside the terror of the sudden drop and being swallowed by snow.
She clamped onto Anthony's arm and climbed him with all four limbs.
Only once both arms were around his neck and she had folded herself entirely against him did she stop, breathing hard and badly frightened.
Anthony went briefly still.
The woman's cheek and her disordered hair were making the side of his neck itch, and Mary, held in his arms, was giving off a natural warm sweetness, with even her breath coming out hot. It was the first time she had ever moved toward him voluntarily.
Mm. He was suddenly seized by an urge to simply eat her.
His nails extended past his control, and were dragged back in only with difficulty.
Anthony closed his fist several times before his hand relaxed, and then he patted her back lightly, by way of comfort.
"Patricia says your weight has dropped again. If I go on feeding on you daily, you may die of it fairly soon." Anthony walked slowly through the snow carrying her, and said quietly, as though to himself, "I can reduce it to once every three months. But if the quantity falls, I require the quality to improve. Your blood has been thinner lately. You'll need to put on weight quickly."
Mary followed roughly half of it, guessed vaguely that it concerned eating and blood, and nodded obediently.
Lord Anthony, satisfied, patted her again, gently.
Mary was increasingly certain that this man was keeping her as a pet.
"On the food question, Patricia has established the general direction. The universe contains a great many species; the ingredients and seasonings you require should all be obtainable through import channels. Beyond that, do you have any other requirements?" Anthony looked down at her.
Mary hadn't followed that sentence at all and looked blankly back at him.
Anthony frowned with some impatience, switched to a simpler construction, and repeated the question. "You. Want what?"
This time Mary understood.
She looked down, thought about it, then closed her fist and said, very clearly, "I want a bed."
