Faerie Story:  Chapter Two

According to legend, out of all the tribes that lived in the Northern Territories, the occupants of Crystal City were the fiercest warriors. They had never been conquered, lived in the most wondrous and impenetrable fortress and were led by the greatest fighter ever known.

As with all legends, the stories were wildly exaggerated and yet based on *some* truth.

Crystal City *was* almost impenetrable, but that was simply due to its location rather than its fortifications. When the settlement had first been established, it had been located on the banks of a fjord, in a small valley nesting deep within the Arken Mountains. By the time it grew large enough to be loosely called a city - in those days *any* substantial settlement was known as a city - it had been cut off from the north by the slow, steady progression of a vast glacier. With mountains on either side and a glacier at its rear, the city was naturally easily defensible against attack.

But there was very little that was ‘wondrous’ about the place. Its name ‘Crystal City’ evoked a vision of beauty, but the 'crystal’ referred to was actually the shimmering ice of the glacier, and the city itself was no more than a collection of rough hewn caves dug into the mountainside, fronted by a sprawling settlement of wattle and daub huts. That far north, even wood was scarce.

It wasn’t true that the occupants were fierce warriors. They were simply accomplished hunters, which was how they managed to feed so many occupants in a land so inhospitable to grain crops. It *was* true they’d never been conquered, but that was primarily because no one had ever tried. Although the boundaries of the Northern Territories seemed to permanently be in a state of flux, as tribes vied for control of the little good farming land, there was little desire to move to the freezing, most northern regions of that cold, inhospitable land.

Neither was their chieftain the ‘greatest fighter ever known’ but he was, possibly, the greatest hunter that had ever lived in the Territories – which made him a great leader for his people – and it wasn’t *his* fault that his name suggested he was something other.

Although, going through life with the name ‘Foe Slayer’ was naturally bound to cause a certain amount of confusion.

Actually, his name was supposed to have been “Foyed Slayer”. Foyed being the name of the bear he had slain single-handedly at the age of sixteen. By tradition, when a boy became a man he was gifted with an adult name that acknowledged the act he had performed to achieve the right of passage into manhood.

A boy’s rite of manhood wasn’t merely a private ceremony amongst his own people. It took place at the winter tribal gathering at Ragnarok, where a venerated holy man would announce the boy’s new name in front of representatives of all the tribes.

It was simply unfortunate, or perhaps fortunate according to one’s point of view, that the holy man who performed Foe Slayer’s naming was rather ancient and consequently hard of hearing.

Never one to miss an opportunity, Foe Slayer’s father chose not to correct the misunderstanding. In fact, as the evening progressed and the gathering began to exchange tales of valor, the bear became *ten* bears and progressed, with the pouring of copious amounts of ale, into ten *men*.

By the time Foe Slayer returned home, he was already a legend in the making.

So, perhaps it was inevitable that he would spend the remainder of his life attempting to live up to both the name and the legend.

Strong, brave and cunning, he continued to prove himself a hunter beyond compare, often being solely responsible for successful hunts that usually ensured his people a comfortable, well-fed existence. That alone might have accorded him the position of Chieftain eventually, but it didn’t hurt his prospects that his father was Chieftain before him.

Besides, in a stroke of either genius or madness, he left on a solitary hunt the spring after his naming and returned three months later not only with three wagons filled with pelts, smoked meat, dried fruit and bushels of grain, but also with an Eirendish wife.

The Eirendi were another tribe of great legend, though the tales that surrounded *them* were largely less than complimentary. It was said that centuries previously, many of the most beautiful Eirendi women had somehow become lost in the Northern wastelands, had fallen into the Faerie realm, and had eventually returned to their tribe, having aged not a day, over fifty years later.

That wasn’t the problem. It was well rumored that time moved differently inside the Faerie lands. The reason the Eirendi were subsequently virtual outcasts to the other tribes was that several of the women had apparently returned home pregnant and, in time, the entire somewhat isolated Eirendi clan were supposedly tainted with Faerie blood.

Since all this had happened centuries before Foe Slayer’s birth, it was impossible for him to know whether the story had any basis in truth. What *was* inarguable was that the Eirendi people were all unnaturally tall, and many had a certain ‘exotic’ cast to their appearance. Whether that was down to Faerie blood or simply a genetic anomaly due to their inter-breeding was open to debate.

So returning home to Crystal City with an Eirendi wife *should* have resulted in Foe Slayer’s banishment. Or at least have put paid to his ambition to one day become Chieftain.

However, the city had suffered a particularly hard winter. People were literally starving to death inside its boundaries. Rejecting Foe Slayer’s new bride would also have meant rejecting her three wagon dowry.

There were those who insisted she *obviously* had Faerie blood. However, although none of the tribe had ever actually seen a Faerie, it was well known that all of the Faerie people had luminescent blue or green eyes and, since Agnatha’s eyes were a normal, human dark brown, there were an unsurprising amount of hungry people who supported Foe Slayer’s claim that his wife was simply ‘a little on the tall side’.

After a long and heated debate, it turned out that the citizens of Crystal City were more pragmatic than superstitious.

So, despite being over two hand-spans taller than her husband, with slightly slanted eyes and ears that rose to a faint tip, Agnatha of Eirendi was accepted and allowed into the tribe.

Naturally, that wasn’t the complete end of the matter.

When Agnatha failed to produce a child for her husband, despite the fact that he made no secret of his enthusiasm for bedding his exotic wife, half of the tribe announced their relief that her Faerie blood wouldn’t be passed on, and the other half insisted that Foe Slayer should put aside his obviously barren wife.

Foe Slayer ignored everybody’s comments for five years, being completely besotted by Agnatha’s beauty, but then, in the winter of that fifth year, his father was killed while returning from a successful hunt by a pack of savage wolves known as the Valtere.

On the death of his father, Foe Slayer became the Chieftain of Crystal City, and so he could no longer ignore his obligation to provide an heir. With great reluctance, he prepared to set off to the gathering at Ragnarok to find and woo a new bride.

Two days before he was due to leave, Agnatha announced she was pregnant.

The timing was so convenient that many of the tribe were convinced she was lying and would soon declare a ‘miscarriage’. They told Foe Slayer she was simply trying to put off his taking of a new wife until the following year’s gathering. Others whispered that she’d used Faerie magic to conjure a child into her belly and so it wasn’t Foe Slayer’s child anyway.

Despite their words, Foe Slayer both loved and trusted his wife, so he accepted her promise that she was both truly pregnant and that the child was his. He still attended the gathering, but he returned home alone.

To everyone’s relief, not least Agnatha’s, the pregnancy went well and she gave birth to a baby boy who was indisputably Foe Slayer’s child. He had his father’s rounded eyes, wide-set face, a slightly splayed nose and ears that were perfectly human.

By the time he was a toddler, it was clear that he was also going to have his father’s heavy, muscular build. The only thing he seemed to inherit from Agnatha was his height. It was soon obvious that he was going to be unnaturally tall.

Initially, that caused him a few problems as a child. Although the adults of the tribe wouldn’t risk his father’s wrath by insulting him, their children dared to taunt him that he had “Faerie blood”. As that was just about the worst insult anyone could make to someone’s face, Foe Slayer’s son was involved in a lot of fights. Since he *was* his father’s son, not to mention a lot taller and stronger than his peers, he won all of those fights easily. So it didn’t take long before everyone decided to conveniently ‘forget’ his possible origins, and from then on he had a normal, perfectly happy childhood.

But, although his height was no longer mentioned, it *did* have a significant impact on his life. For one thing, it helped him to mature more quickly because people tended to treat him as though he was older than he was. By the age of fourteen he was already as tall as his father and that meant that whenever he went hunting – as all boys did from the age of ten – no one ever questioned that he preferred his own company. While other boys his age only hunted with an adult guardian, it seemed perfectly acceptable to everyone that he should hunt alone.

Which is how Foe Slayer’s son became a ‘man’ before he was even fifteen years old.

And not just a ‘man’, but a legend in his own right.

One day, in the late autumn of his fourteenth year, the boy left to track a herd of deer and returned to Crystal City three days later, much bloodied and bruised, but carrying the pelts of four wolves. He explained that he’d speared a buck some small distance away, had put it on a sling and had started back towards the City, only to be attacked by the same pack of wolves that had killed his grandfather. During the subsequent battle he’d lost the carcass of the deer yet had not only survived the encounter with the wolves but had managed to kill four of them. Unable to drag their huge bodies home, he’d settled for claiming their pelts.

At Ragnarok that winter, Foe Slayer’s son was proclaimed a man, and he left the gathering with the name Valtere Skinner.

In addition to the name, he also returned home with a bride.

She was a pleasant, well-bred girl named Shrona but, secretly, Valtere was far more pleased with his new name than with his wife. Although he was thrilled to be considered a ‘man’ now and thus in need of a wife, and was more than pleased with the size of Shrona’s dowry – which could only increase his standing in the tribe – he was convinced that the dowry was only so large because Shrona was so plain.

Well, possibly that wasn’t absolutely true, he admitted to himself reluctantly as he compared her to the other marriageable females at the gathering. She was prettier than most of the girls. The problem was that he’d always dreamed of marrying a woman who looked like his mother.

He said as much to his father, who’d looked surprisingly sympathetic before telling him it was out of the question. “Let sleeping dogs lie,” Foe Slayer advised him. “People already suspect you may have a little Faerie blood in your veins. If you marry an Eirendi, they’ll say blood calls to blood, and you’ll be cast out, my son.”

For the next six years, Valtere Skinner and his wife Shrona lived quietly, but reasonably happily, in Crystal City. Shrona bore her husband two children, a boy and a girl, which confirmed her standing in the tribe and, although he never quite lost his feelings of disappointment that she wasn’t an Eirendi, he grew honestly fond of her (if never filled with the lustful enthusiasm which Foe Slayer still clearly felt for Agnatha).

They were good years, in their way, although Valtere Skinner found himself constantly wishing that his life contained more excitement.

In the seventh year, Valtere Skinner gained his wish, but it came in the form of a nightmare.

The glacier began to move.

The nature of glaciers is that they *always* move, but their normal progress is so slow that it’s almost unnoticeable. Perhaps once a generation, the people of Crystal City might have mentioned that the glacier appeared to have crept a little closer. Perhaps once a century an outlying settlement would move a little closer to the city because their land had been consumed by the glacier’s slow drift.

But in the summer of Valtere Skinner’s 21st year, the glacier began to expand towards the City at a rate of several inches each day.

By the autumn, its flow had increased to three or four feet per day.

As winter approached, the glacier truly gained momentum and began to devour the outer buildings of the city.

And still it came, crushing buildings, flattening defenses, laying waste to centuries old fortifications, until, shortly after mid-winter, Foe Slayer had no option except to order an exodus from the now decimated city.

Thus began a new but tragic legend.

A terrible legend of a once proud people stumbling helplessly through an icy, snow-filled landscape in search of a safe haven that didn’t exist.

People died by the dozens, then by the hundreds, and eventually by the thousands as cold and hunger leeched the life from their bodies. And no one helped them. Not one tribe opened their doors to the refugees. Not a single town or city offered to share the warmth of their homes or the food they had stored against the winter to help the people of the once great Crystal City.

In that cold inhospitable land, where continued existence had *always* been a case of the survival of the fittest, the concepts of charity and pity were unknown.

Even their offers to pay for food and shelter were refused. In mid-winter, gold lost its value compared to the comfort of a well-stocked larder.

And even in his desperation, as he and his people were turned away from town after town and city after city, Foe Slayer understood the choice that their occupants made. In the Northern Territories, all the Chieftains struggled to keep their people alive during the cruel winter. They would not share because they *had* nothing to share. They would not give food to strangers because they already feared winter would outlast the food they had stored for their *own* people.

The oldest and youngest were the first to perish. Valtere and Shrona buried both their children in the icy shadow of Riventhrall mountain.

The women were the next victims of the unrelenting cold. Shrona died in Valtere’s arms not 200 feet from the closed gates of Ragnarok. Agnatha was buried beside the narrow, northern pass out of Eirendi. Even *her* people had refused to help them.

And then the hunters themselves began to die.

Some, like Foe Slayer, left their camp to hunt and never returned. Preferring perhaps to die alone than to return empty handed to their starving comrades. Far more simply fell asleep in the snow and never woke up again.

By the third moon of spring, when the intense cold finally began to ease and the melting of the huge snow drifts made hunting possible once more, less than a hundred people remained of the seven thousand who had fled Crystal City.

Valtere Skinner was one of the survivors.

Although the death of Foe Slayer had made him Chieftain, under the circumstances he didn't consider himself by that title. He was, undisputedly, the leader of his rag-tag followers, and it was generally accepted that none of them would have survived if not for his strength, keen wit and natural survival skills. Yet with so *few* survivors, it was impossible for any of them to see their continued existence as anything to celebrate. All had lost their families, their wives, their children and their homes. They had also learned that their fellow man was selfish to the point of cruelty and so, although spring thawed not only the land but also the hearts of their countrymen, they all refused the offers of shelter that were made to them once the winter was over.

It was Valtere Skinner who suggested they should pool what little wealth they had, for many had escaped Crystal City with pouches of coins and jewelry, and buy passage on a ship to the warmer Southern Territories. It was, he said, more logical to attempt to start a new settlement in a land that was more hospitable.

Perhaps his followers accepted his logic, certainly there were few of them who wished to ever live through another winter of cold and starvation, but most of them agreed simply because they couldn’t imagine ever forgiving their fellow countrymen for so selfishly allowing the death of so many of their people.

So the few survivors from Crystal City greeted the fourth moon of Spring from the prow of the ship that carried them to a new, uncertain future.

They found that the Southern Territories were, as Valtere Skinner had promised, far warmer and more conducive to survival. The people of the south, however, were no more welcoming than those of the north. Fortunately, it mattered little because their leader, who began referring to himself simply as ‘Skinner’, was disinterested in begging the southern people to allow them to move into one of the existing settlements. He instead had a dream of creating a new Crystal City. One that was impervious to the assault of either man or nature.

The most northern tip of the Southern Lands, while still more temperate than any part of the Northern Territories, was a mountainous terrain. Most of the mountains were totally impenetrable and therefore an uninviting place to make a home. Further south, the land eased into hills and valleys, then smoothed into wide, grassy plains.

Skinner decided against settling in the plains because his skills and those of his followers were best suited to a more rugged landscape. He wanted enough land for them to learn the art of farming, since he felt the future of his people lay in developing a self-sustaining society, but it had to be located near forests and hills where their skills as hunters would compensate for any years of drought or crop-blight.

It was late summer before he finally found a suitable location for their new ‘city’.

It was a lush, green valley, some hundred miles south of the mountains, bordered on all sides by high, sharp-edged hills and accessible only by a single, narrow passage which could, in the event of attack, be easily blocked with boulders. Within the valley there was a wide fast-flowing, fish-filled river – undoubtedly what had once carved the sharp cliff edges into the hillsides - and a dense wood filled to bursting with wildlife. It was clear that the river frequently flooded the valley as snow melting from the tips of the surrounding mountains raised its water level, but beyond the flood plain there was a high plateau of land which would be perfect for the construction of their new homes, and the soil of the flood plain itself was so rich that the growing of crops would be easy even for inexperienced farmers like themselves.

It was, quite simply, a perfect place to create a home.

Which begged the question, naturally, of why no one else had settled there already.

It wasn’t a *burning* question in his mind. Skinner wasn’t prepared to turn his back on such an ideal location simply because of a vague sense of unease. Winter was approaching and, even though the climate was kinder in the Southern Territories, he knew his people wouldn’t survive without food and shelter. So they made camp within the valley and began the slow process of hollowing out caves. They also built one huge, wooden building in the centre of the ridge, a massive circular hall with a vast fire-pit in its centre and a cleverly designed chimney which would ventilate the fire without allowing rain or snow to enter. It was constructed with the corpses of over a hundred trees – each of which had to be chopped down, floated across the river and then hauled over the flood plain and up onto the ridge. The construction was torturous and exhausting, particularly because none of them had ever before attempted carpentry but, by winter, the building was completed. Large enough to house them all, it was named the Main Hall and became the heart of the city-to-be.

Meanwhile, although it was too late to plant crops for that year, Skinner’s people filled their newly dug caves with smoked meat, fish and vast quantities of dried berries and, thus, their survival was assured.

It was just after the second moon of winter that their peaceful existence was disturbed by the arrival of some strangers at the well-guarded passage into the valley. Skinner was summoned to the passage by a warning beacon to find over two dozen people, most of whom were women, huddling together in the cold and begging for admittance. They had, they said, inadvertently made a home for themselves too close to one of the Faerie settlements and were now fleeing from a Faerie raiding party that had destroyed their home and killed most of their menfolk.

The natural, though uncharitable, reaction of most of Skinner’s followers was to refuse the women shelter. Bitter after their own experiences the winter before, they saw no reason to offer a charity that none of their own people had been granted under the same circumstances.

Skinner, however, took his men aside and quietly pointed out that the supplicants were mainly *women*.

It took a moment, but then the point went home and the resentful expressions of the men transformed into looks of speculation and even reawakening lust.

And so the women were invited to join them and, by the late spring, it wasn’t only the rich soil of the flood plain that had been well ploughed and fertilized.

By that winter, several smaller buildings had been constructed around the main hall, the storage caves were filled with grain as well as dried meat and fruits, and the air was filled with the shrill cries of babies.

The third summer found them with sufficient surplus grain to send a trading party to a far off town. Skinner deliberately formed the party out of men who had failed to win wives of the women who had joined them and was pleased – though not surprised - that most of them returned from the trading with a bride in tow.

Three more years passed, and ‘Crystal City’ became a settlement of over five hundred people.

Over a third of those were children, because of the wild enthusiasm of the original Crystal City survivors to breed with their new wives and thus swiftly replace the families they had so recently lost. About a hundred of the occupants were women who had been wooed during trading with more southern cities. The remainder were all refugees who had come to their gates to plea for sanctuary. Since most of those were female too, many of the men took second and even third wives and then bred enthusiastically with *them* also. It was fortunate that the valley was so bounteous under the circumstances

Skinner was one of the few who chose not to take a bride at all.

It wasn’t that he was lacking in offers. Despite his unusual height, the fact he was the Chieftain of such a rapidly growing settlement combined with his good looks and strength, ensured that many women looked at him with coy, covetous eyes. Neither was his reluctance to marry because he was carrying a broken heart for Shrona. Although he’d grown fond of her over the years, he’d never actually *loved* her. He was heart-broken over the death of his children but that only made him determined *not* to have children again. Besides, he decided there were more than sufficient children being born in the new Crystal City without him taking another unwanted wife.

And that was the crux of the matter. He’d done his duty once. He’d married a ‘suitable’ girl, rather than followed his own desire to seek an Eirendish wife. He accepted that the chances of meeting an Eirendish woman so far from the Northern Territories were nigh on impossible and so he chose, instead, to remain unmarried.

Naturally, his decision not to marry didn’t mean he’d lost his desire to take a warm body to bed. In the long winter nights, no amount of food or ale in his belly could compete with the comfort of burying his member in soft, warm flesh.

Unable to find a woman who wouldn’t expect the offer of his bed to lead to a marriage wreath, Skinner chose to occasionally satisfy his body’s urges with one of the other unwed males.

Unlike them, he didn’t *prefer* a male bed-partner – though it was perfectly acceptable in their society for a man to love another man – but he definitely preferred the lack of complication that a male lover accorded him. No man he slept with would become pregnant with his child and then demand marriage. Neither did they demand affection he was no longer prepared to offer. He never wanted to again suffer the grief and loss of a loved one’s death, so it seemed easier not to love at all.

He soon learned which of the man-lovers were prone to become emotionally attached and so avoided their company completely. He settled for an always shifting rotation of lovers who enjoyed his attention but were content to quietly return to their own beds when he’d satisfied himself within their bodies.

And sixteen more years passed.

Skinner’s life in his new city should have been happy. He’d provided his followers with food, shelter, wives, babies and the promise of a wonderful, prosperous future. He’d found his own measure of peace, learning that a well-filled belly, the respect of his people and the occasional slaking of his bodily needs was all a man truly needed. And though he still dreamed on occasion of ending his days in the arms of a tall, dark-haired, exotic beauty like his mother, he accepted that was simply a fantasy which would never come to pass.

Yet Skinner found his life to be *far* from happy.

In fact, as the months and years passed, his feelings of unhappiness grew and intensified. He knew his dissatisfaction was that he was now over forty years old. He’d left the bloom of youth behind, had developed the strong muscular physique of a fully matured man and so was in the prime of his life physically. The problem of being in his ‘prime’ however was that all he saw ahead of him was a slow, gradual descent into old age.

He knew that he had already achieved more in his life than most men. He had surpassed even Foe Slayer’s legend. Tales of his ‘heroic’ leadership of his people to their new land would, he knew, be told for centuries after his death. He knew he had no need to add more to the legend except that he had remained a wise, strong leader right up to the point of his death.

He had learned better than to wish for ‘excitement’ but he can be forgiven, surely, for forgetting that lesson as the years passed him by. Definitely, his feelings of boredom can’t actually be held *responsible* for subsequent events – unless you believe that capricious gods truly do hold the fate of a man in their hands.

In the Northern Territories he’d fled from, the Faeries were little more than legend. They were no more than bogey-men to terrify small children or to justify the fears of the most superstitious of people. Although it was no secret that the Faerie had roamed and ruled the whole world when mankind was still incapable of making fire, they had begun disappearing from human sight long before mankind had reached the age of reason. Led by their Queen, they had apparently moved into some mystical, magical realm within the mountains and had rarely been seen again.

But for over five centuries, the people of the Northern Territories had spied not one single Faerie, and so most of Skinner’s countrymen believed that the Faerie had either ceased to be or had simply forgotten their time on the mortal plane and now lived in splendid isolation within the magical, timeless realm of the Ice Queen.

In the Southern Territories, however, the Faerie weren’t romantic legend but inarguable fact. Faerie warriors roamed the land freely, mounted on huge white steeds, with their faces and bodies covered with magical armor that protected them from any human weapons. Nothing was truly known of the Faerie except that they were all over seven feet tall, had luminescent eyes, sharply pointed ears, were capable of magically summoning lightning to illuminate their way, and they loathed human beings.

Should a Faerie warrior party ever stumble accidentally over a lone human, they would halt their journey long enough to torture that human in horrific, unmentionable ways. Usually their victims were found still alive, but flayed of their skin and castrated if they were male, with both arms amputated and their eyes inevitably gouged out of their sockets (since they apparently knew humans believed that a person dying without eyes would become one of the lost, wailing, anguished spirits whose howls filled the winter winds). The Faerie deliberately cauterized the wounds of their victims, to ensure they didn’t simply bleed to death, and then left them to stumble, blind and helpless, in search of death at the hands of a merciful human.

Over the centuries, the people of the Southern Territories had become worryingly pragmatic about such happenings. If questioned, most people said that the torture was the victim’s own fault since *everyone* knew better than to travel unaccompanied. The victims had, they said, ‘asked’ for trouble and so had practically deserved their fate. In some of the cities it was even general practice that if one of the victims was discovered in the vicinity of the city walls, he or she would be captured by the city guards and then chained in the main city square for the few agonizing hours it took for them to die naturally of their injuries, so that they would serve as a grim warning to the other citizens not to be so foolish themselves as to venture out of the city alone.

It was well known that if humans stayed far from the mountains, never traveled alone and always remembered to leave a huge offering of food and gold outside of their gates at night lest any Faerie should pass by, they would be left in peace.

The problem was that there were far more humans than the plains could support. Over the years, human settlements had crept closer and closer to the hills and then had moved inside them. Everyone *knew* that to live inside the hills was to invite Faerie retribution, and yet the hills were vast and the Faerie were few, so people told themselves, that the odds of actually being attacked were low.

They were right in a way. The Faerie rarely attacked large groups of people, and so the larger the settlement, the safer its occupants remained. Conversely, if the settlement was small enough the Faerie would often disregard its presence as insignificant. Certainly, they’d be likely to send the occasional raiding party to terrify the residents but they were usually satisfied with torturing only a half dozen or so people and, perhaps, razing their dwellings to the ground.

All of the above had been gleefully explained to the members of Crystal City’s first trading party and so Skinner had learned, that first year, why such a wonderful place as their valley had been unoccupied. It had given him several long sleepless nights until he’d come to the conclusion that the best thing for his people was not to run away from their new home and beg sanctuary in the plains, but to grow the population of the city so quickly that the Faerie didn’t dare to attack them.

The Faerie men were, he decided, obviously cowards despite their inhuman size. They only attacked when in a pack, just like wolves did, and they never attacked at all if they were outnumbered.

Skinner’s wisdom proved to be correct. Although his sentries often sighted the Faerie men in the distance, the city was never attacked. He did, just to be on the safe side, follow the example of the plains cities in offering tithe to the Faerie. A building was constructed near to the entrance to the valley in which grain, gold and casked ale was left in offering. Sometimes the tithe was taken, usually it was ignored, but the important thing was that the city was left in peace.

Unfortunately, the chieftains of many of the surrounding settlements lacked Skinner’s wisdom.

At least once or twice a year, the straggling, usually female, survivors of a razed settlement arrived at the entrance of the city with horrific tales of how a Faerie raiding party had descended upon them, destroying their settlement and slaughtering their men folk. Other times, Skinner’s own city guards would patrol out into the neighboring hills and return shaken and ill, describing their finding of entire settlements that had been slain right down to the smallest babe in arms.

The patrols were Skinner’s idea. Despite the apparent safety of their city, he was determined never to become complacent. He never wanted *this* Crystal City to fall victim to a preventable disaster. Although he accepted that the glacier which had destroyed the original city couldn’t have been stopped, it should, he felt, have been anticipated. Albeit that it had moved with unnatural swiftness in that final year, the truth was that it had *always* been moving in their direction. Some evacuation plan should have always been in existence, ready for the day the glacier finally struck.

Skinner saw the Faerie to be just another kind of glacier. An unstoppable force that *could* destroy the city if they chose to. He accepted that an attack was highly unlikely, but then so had the sudden movement of the glacier been ‘unlikely’. His motto was ‘better safe than sorry’ and so he created a small ‘army’ for the city.

Four years of careful trading had bought him three mares and a good stallion. Careful breeding and further trading had given Crystal City a wealth of a dozen strong horses. Twenty-four men, including himself, had been taught to ride those horses, and so regular rotating patrols went out into the surrounding hills to report on Faerie movement.

Furthermore, Skinner ‘wasted’ a good amount of the city’s slowly growing wealth on iron weapons and insisted that every man (and any woman who wished) was trained to use a sword or knife. Before long the inhabitants of the new Crystal City had the same reputation as their predecessors for being great fighters. The difference was that *this* time the rumors were true.

Of all of the above, the only decision Skinner made that was possibly questionable in its wisdom was that of making himself one of the patrolling army. Certainly he *was* the tallest, strongest and fittest of all the inhabitants of the city but as the Chieftain it could be argued that he was more valuable to them as a thinker than a fighter and so had no business risking his life unnecessarily.

But, in those days, a Chieftain ruled only through the goodwill of his followers and could only keep that goodwill if he led his people by example rather than by mere wise words.

So it was that in Skinner’s forty-fourth year, halfway through the second moon of summer, the Chieftain and eleven of his men were patrolling some thirty miles from their border when they stumbled across a brand new human ‘town’ inside one of the forests that protected the borders of the Faerie Land.

An alarm rang immediately in Skinner’s head. There were less than a dozen rough huts formed of branches and mud, formed in a rough circle on land that was completely cleared of trees. Since the huts had been constructed of small branches rather than solid wood, the only explanation for the absence of the trees themselves was that they had already been removed from the site before the settlers’ arrival. Dismounting from his horse, he brushed away the top layer of ground soil and found what he suspected. Old black scorch marks, evidence that a previous settlement in the same location had been previously burned to the ground by the Faerie.

He explained the situation to the leader of the settlement, stressing that in his experience the Faerie always returned to such sites since they knew the high probability of new humans taking advantage of already cleared ground.

The man was rude, bolshie and defiant at first, blustering that he was perfectly capable of defending his people against any damned Faerie. Most men other than Skinner would probably have just mounted their horse and ridden away, leaving the settlers to their fate.

But Skinner had a wisdom beyond his years. He knew it was just the man’s injured pride talking. The man felt foolish in front of his followers and needed Skinner to offer him a reason other than Faerie danger to persuade him to dissolve their camp. So Skinner invited the man and his people to move to Crystal City. Instead of emphasizing its safety, he stressed its wealth of food and gold.

It took a couple of hours, but finally the man nodded his assent. By that time night was falling and it was decided that Skinner and his men would stay the night and then accompany the people back to the city the following morning.

Just past midnight, there was a sudden unnatural flash of lightning and then the Faerie attacked.

The swords of Skinner’s men proved useless against the Faerie armor. The men’s strength, courage, and fighting skill did *however* clearly take the invaders by complete surprise. The Faerie had obviously expected no more than a little cruel sport and had instead met armed, organized resistance. Within minutes they broke off their attack, wheeling their monstrous horses around and galloping out of camp. Two of the Faerie, however, snatched a couple of teenaged boys as they left, dragging the screaming, terrified youths over the withers of their horses and bearing them off into the night.

Skinner was sickened, having little doubt that the boys would be tortured and mutilated by their captors. He instructed his men to gather the hysterical settlers and start moving them immediately towards the city, and then he told them he was going to track the Faerie alone.

His men were horrified, until he explained he had no suicidal intention to confront the Faerie men in battle. He was simply going to follow them until he found where they abandoned their victims, ensure the boys a merciful death and then hurry back to join the main party. He refused all offers to accompany him, explaining that whether he was one man or twelve, he’d have no more chance of winning a confrontation with the Faerie but that, as a solitary rider, he’d find it easier to approach them without detection and then escape without pursuit.

Several of his men offered to take his place and follow the boys themselves, but Skinner had never been the kind of man who’d ask another to do something that he feared to do himself. So he insisted that he should be the one to follow the Faerie.

None of his men were happy, but they were too obedient to argue more than a few token protests and neither could they bring themselves to suggest he simply left the unfortunate children to die a long, torturous death. So, subdued and grumbling, they began to herd the settlers to Crystal City and watched their Chieftain ride off into the forest.

Skinner wasn’t a foolish man, so he knew perfectly well he was doing a foolish thing. But in his short life he’d seen the death of thousands of children, including his own, as they’d starved and frozen to death during the exodus from his birth city. Too much death. Too much suffering. While he could see no realistic way to prevent the death of the kidnapped boys, he decided he’d be damned before he let the boys die alone in agony, only for their bodies to then be eaten by wild beasts. He would, if nothing else, ensure the boys had a proper burial. And, if he arrived in time, perhaps he could ease at least a little of their suffering.

As he rode through the forest, following the deep tracks of the huge Faerie horses, he was burning with hatred for the Faerie men and was filled with disgust at the thought that he himself might have even a single drop of their blood in his veins. In the Northern Territories, saying a man had tainted blood was a grievous slight but no more so than saying that someone’s mother had lain with a dog. Since the Faerie were scarcely believed in, the idea of someone having Faerie blood was an abstract principle. Worthy of a bar brawl perhaps, but no more.

In the Southern Territories, however, accusing a man of being part Faerie was a mortal offence. A man wouldn’t throw a punch over such an insult, he’d plunge a knife into the speaker’s heart.

And Skinner understood why. Having seen Faerie brutality first hand, it was all he could do not to thrust his knife into his *own* heart. Only the knowledge that his mother had been the kindest, most beautiful, most gentle creature he’d ever known stayed his hand. He couldn’t curse his own blood without cursing his mother, something he’d *never* do.

Shortly after daylight, he found the boys alone in a clearing. He was too late to offer them any more mercy than a burial but that was, he had to admit, a good thing under the circumstances. The Faerie who’d captured them must have been in a hurry, because they’d considerably tempered their normal cruelty. From the state of the bodies, and the tracks of the horses, it seemed the Faerie had simply sliced the boys’ stomachs open with knives, thrown them to the ground while their horses were still moving, and had ridden off. The boys were lying in pools of blood and intestines, their young faces contorted with agony, but they at least had died quickly and with their eyes still in their sockets.

Skinner wasn’t a superstitious man, but neither was he arrogant enough to believe he had the right to dismiss the beliefs of other people. For all he knew, the blinded dead *did* become part of the wailing winter wind, so he was grateful he could bury the boys entire.

The ground was soft in that part of the forest, so it was barely mid-day when he laid the last sod back over the graves of the boys. He knew he should turn back immediately and catch up with his men, but he decided he should, at least, check that the Faerie men hadn’t been in such a hurry because they were planning to double-back and return to capture more of the settlers.

So he followed the tracks of the Faerie horses for another two hundred paces. Then he stopped and frowned in confusion. The tracks abruptly disappeared. It was as though the animals had vanished mid-gallop. He rode slowly to the point at which the tracks stopped, and his horse began to shiver wildly, rolling its eyes, shying beneath him and refusing to take even one step further.

After a few minutes of trying to force the animal to his will, he growled with irritation, slid off its back and, holding its reins in his hand, he took a step beyond its head.

His horse disappeared.

It simply vanished in front of his eyes.

Heart hammering, he took a step backwards.

His horse rematerialized at his side.

It took him a moment to understand, a moment of stepping backwards and forwards again and not only seeing the animal appear and disappear but the trees surrounding him bending and twisting into a new formation, and then he shook his head in amazement and chuckled nervously as he realized that in that brief moment, the sun had moved so far across the sky that the clearing was now the soft hue of twilight. His horse wasn’t vanishing at all. It was *he* who was somehow stepping in and out of a reality in which the horse didn’t exist. He had, somehow, found one of the gateways into the Faerie realm. The place where time moved differently.

He had an almost irresistible urge to step forwards back into the magical place, but if a single step had stolen several hours of ‘real’ time, he didn’t dare risk it. Besides, it was obvious that his horse couldn’t follow him into the Faerie realm, being a totally mortal beast.

And didn’t the fact that *he* could enter prove he had Faerie blood after all?

He shook his head furiously. Maybe it had been a fluke or even a hallucination. He decided to try just once more. Just one brief step in and out of the Faerie realm.

He took a deep breath, stepped forward, saw his horse disappear once more, saw the trees contort around him, and found himself completely surrounded by Faerie warriors.

Despite the sharp swords of the Faerie, including the one he could feel digging into his spine, Skinner followed his instincts and leapt backwards again. Instead of being skewered on the sword, he found himself back in the clearing.

Grabbing his horse’s mane, he leapt up onto its back, swung its head around and kicked it so brutally that it leapt forward into a gallop.

Behind him, he heard the loud unmistakable sound of pursuit. It seemed that the Faerie had come through the magical entranceway after him and, without him even looking over his shoulder to check, he knew they were swiftly gaining on him. Their huge horses made his own mount seem little more than a pony and, although it was galloping its brave heart out for him, its stride was no match for the Faerie mounts.

Yet he knew its smaller stature could be used to his advantage if he could just reach the edge of the clearing. His only possible escape was to ride off the path and into the twisted trees of the forest. His horse would be nimbler through the closely set trees and able to slip through gaps that the Faerie horses couldn’t. It did occur to him that leaving the path would inevitably result in him becoming hopelessly lost, yet the alternative was obviously far worse. As a lone human he could expect no mercy from the Faerie under any circumstances, but his gut told him that the fate of a human who had somehow breached their gateway would be unimaginably worse.

Kicking his horse’s flanks and yelling war whoops into its ears to further encourage its flight, Skinner managed to evade his pursuers long enough to reach the edge of the forest. The dark trees beckoned him inside, offering him sanctuary, and a grin stretched his features as he began to believe he’d survive the encounter after all.

And then his horse fell.

Not a stumble, but a full-fledged collapse to the ground. It struck the forest floor so hard that it screamed in pain and agony and Skinner, tumbling head-first off its back, roared with shock as he landed heavily on the ground, so winded that only his sheer physical strength enabled him to immediately scramble to his feet.

He looked back momentarily at his horse. Its eyes were rolling with pain and it was squealing a high-pitched horrible scream. Its legs were broken, shattered beneath its body, and the reason for its injuries was clear. One of the Faerie had thrown a weighted hobble rope which had wrapped around its legs as it had galloped.

Skinner’s heart burned with sympathy for the animal. It had served him loyally, and he wished nothing more than that he could put it out of its misery with his sword. But he had no opportunity to do his duty to the beast, because the Faerie were already upon him.

He knew his sword was useless against the Faerie armor, yet instinct had him draw his sword, bellow with rage and attack the warriors anyway. He could no more stand there and be captured without resisting than he could have let those long-dead Valtere wolves attack him without fighting back. Both times the odds were against him, and *that* time he’d prevailed.

Besides, if he fought fiercely enough there was the chance that the Faerie would tire of trying to disarm him and simply run him through with their own swords. At that point, a clean swift death was probably the best possible outcome he could wish for.

The battle was swift and furious. Swift because there were more than a dozen Faerie so they surrounded him easily, but furious because he swung his huge broadsword in sweeping circles with such force that, although he failed to pierce any of their seemingly impenetrable armor, he managed to knock at least three of his attackers off their feet before he was overwhelmed.

Then it was over quickly.

He was disarmed, thrown to the ground, and his wrists and ankles were pinned to the ground by four of the Faerie. He could only lie there, breathing heavily, trembling like a trapped wolf himself, and wait for the manner of his death.

The process began with the four Faeries who were restraining him quickly stripping his arms and legs of their protective leather bands. Then another Faerie took a sharp knife from his belt and sliced through Skinner’s other clothing.

Since, in the fashion of his people, Skinner wore no more than a heavy wolf pelt around his loins, another slung over one shoulder, and thick woven leather boots and protective leather arm and leg bands, it took less than a minute for the warriors to strip him to complete nakedness.

Skinner was less embarrassed than terrified. He knew that all male captives of the Faerie were brutally castrated, their members and sacs sliced from their body, and then the gaping wounds immediately burned to prevent the victim from simply bleeding to death. He was sure his captors had stripped him only to perform that castration. So he struggled wildly as they rolled him onto his face, cruelly yanked his arms behind his back and bound his wrists together with a thick leather thong. He was convinced that, the moment he was helpless, they’d take a knife to his groin.

Instead they pinned his legs, leashed his ankles together with a thong long enough to hobble his stride without preventing him from walking at all, then put a noose of rope around his neck and attached the end of the rope to the pommel of one of their saddles.

As soon as he was so bound, all the Faerie remounted, then one of the warriors struck Skinner savagely on the back with the flat of a sword at the same moment as the Faerie riding the horse he was bound to kicked his mount into motion. Skinner leapt upwards and forward to escape the blow, and then the tightening pull of the rope around his neck forced him to continue his forward momentum into a compliant trot. With the leather hobbling his legs, it was difficult to move fast enough to prevent the rope from tugging him off his feet, and it suddenly occurred to him that it would be better to let himself fall and be choked than keep running. Dying in that fashion would, he was sure, be less painful than the fate the Faerie had in store for him.

So he deliberately allowed himself to stumble and fall, so that he was dragged face-down across the ground for several feet. The rope tightened around his neck so much that he could barely breathe. It didn’t however tighten enough to choke him. Some clever knotting clearly prevented it from actually killing him. So instead of achieving his suicidal aim, the rope merely burned the skin of his neck, bruising and tearing his flesh, and meanwhile his face, chest, groin and thighs were painfully scraped along the uneven forest floor.

When the horseman dragging him finally halted long enough for Skinner to drag himself upright again, Skinner gratefully struggled back to his feet and willingly trotted after his captor from then on.

The Faerie rode for so long that Skinner’s calves, thighs and chest were burning with strain and twice more he fell, though those times were genuine stumbles of exhaustion rather than deliberation on his part. So by the time they reached the high towers of a huge stone-walled castle, Skinner was almost uncaring of his imminent, painful demise.

He was dragged through a wide courtyard, blushing furiously as numerous Faerie within came over to exclaim their obvious fascination at his presence. The shocking, most humiliating thing was that all the Faerie in the courtyard were *women*.

All towering over him by at least a foot and so heavily muscled that they made him feel puny in comparison, but they *were* clearly females of the Faerie species and so the fact he was naked in front of them was somehow even more terrible than whatever fate awaited him.

The strangest thing was that they weren’t ‘ugly’ - they all had luminous, brightly colored eyes, high cheekbones, and fine, elegant features. In an exotic, inhuman way they were perhaps even facially beautiful. Yet the only term that came to Skinner’s head to describe them was ‘monstrous’. Because although they were clearly women, there was nothing ‘female’ about them. Each and every one of the women was so corded with hard dense muscle that their veins were prominent against their skin. And their bodies were so over-developed that they had no womanly attributes at all. Their elegant heads were strangely balanced on their over-thick necks and, from their necks downwards, they had physiques that made even *his* body seem tiny.

What stunned him even more was that several of his captors removed their helmets, now they were in the safety of the castle, and he realized that *they* were female too, not males as he’d naturally assumed.

His blood ran cold. If this was what Faerie women looked like, what manner of huge monstrous creature was a male Faerie? He could only imagine such a creature dwarfing the females, the way that the average human male was generally so much larger than a woman.

The idea was terrifying.

But he didn’t have time to dwell upon it. He was dragged to a tower at the far left corner of the castle, through a sturdy wooden door, and then pushed down a steep flight of stone steps. Unable to prevent his fall with his arms bound so tightly behind his back, Skinner bumped and bounced down the stairwell, his head frequently connecting with either the steps or the walls as he rolled over and over, and so by the time he landed at the bottom he was so dazed he could barely see.

“Just put it in a cell for now. We can begin interrogating it in the morning,” one of the Faerie women said, in a deep yet lilting tongue.

Skinner shook his throbbing head in confusion. He knew nothing of the Faerie tongue and yet he had heard and understood every word the woman had said. Was this some kind of Faerie magic?

Unless his brain was playing tricks on him. It certainly was aching so much that he wondered whether he had the head-sickness that made a man fall asleep and then never wake up again. He hoped so.

“You. Move,” the woman snapped, slapping his buttocks so hard that he jumped and winced. This time her words were human. Slightly twisted, as though she struggled to form them in her throat, but the fact she was making the effort to address him in his own tongue suggested she had no idea he had somehow understood what she had said in Faerie.

It was perplexing, the more so because his head ached so much from the fall, but he instinctively made the decision not to show in any way that he’d understood her earlier words. Perhaps it was magic or a trick of his blood, or even a long forgotten memory (because his mother *could* have possibly whispered Faerie words to him when he was a child so that his subconscious now could access their meaning) but, whatever the explanation was, Skinner had a deep gut feeling that concealing his understanding was absolutely crucial, and he listened to that instinct even though he had no idea of *why* he felt it was so important to play ‘dumb’.

It certainly wasn’t because he believed in any possibility of escape. Although he’d never been in a dungeon before, nor seen deliberate instruments of torture, he had no doubt whatsoever that the cell was both inescapable and a place wherein a man’s worst nightmares became reality. Shackles on chains hung at all angles from its walls and ceiling. One wall was dedicated to a collection of whips and paddles. Many of the whips were weighted with lead. Many of the paddles had sharp metal spikes.

There was a huge, unlit fire in one corner, and at its side was a rack of iron rods in various lengths and thicknesses. It didn’t take much imagination to understand the purpose of the irons.

There was a metal cage suspended from the ceiling in the vague shape of an oversized body. Next to the cage hung a two foot wide metal bar with shackles on either side which were too large for wrists but looked worryingly close to the size of his ankles. He could almost visualize someone being hung from them, upside down, and just the thought made him want to vomit.

To his considerable relief, however, all his captors did was replace the rope around his neck with a metal collar, which they attached to one of the wall chains, and then they freed his wrists and the rope hobbling his feet and walked away, leaving him to rub desperately at the burning pain of his reawakening arms, and shiver with cold in the chill, dank air of the dungeon.

Several hours passed before his captors returned, hours in which he became so cold his exhausted limbs struggled to keep him upright (although the short chain around his neck was cruelly holding him in a standing position). By that time, his throat was parched with thirst, his stomach was aching with hunger and his bladder was almost bursting.

“Water,” he croaked.

“Water?” one of the women repeated with a frown.

“The animal’s asking for ‘water’,” her companion replied, and again Skinner reeled with confusion as he clearly understood the Faerie woman even though *her* word for water bore no resemblance to his own.

The first woman shrugged. “The Queen wants to be entertained by it and it will hardly be much fun for her to watch if it simply collapses from thirst. Give it some water.”

Despite his dread at what ‘entertained’ meant, Skinner gratefully and greedily drank when the second woman picked up a bucket and thrust it under his head as though he were a horse. He slurped eagerly, knowing the water would give him enough of his strength back so that he might at least die with dignity in front of the creatures that had captured him.

Naturally, drinking the water just increased his need to relieve his bladder.

“I need to relieve myself,” he said, his voice clearer now that he’d drunk his fill.

“What did it say?” the first woman demanded.

The other woman smirked. “Stand back,” she advised. “The animal’s about to piss.”

Skinner gaped at them in horror. They clearly expected him to simply let loose on the dungeon floor. Then again, it wasn’t as though he had any alternative. So, red faced and with his hate of the Faerie growing exponentially, he eased the aching pressure in his bladder directly onto the stone slabs and tried not to wince with disgust as his lower legs were splashed with his urine, since he was sure any show of humiliation on his part would delight the women’s cruel natures.

He already knew the Faerie were brutal barbarians, but now he decided they were actually the animals they accused *him* of being.

Pride forced him to attempt a struggle as the two women attached a second chain to the collar and then released him from the wall but, between their height and strength and the fact the double chaining kept him harmlessly between them, he was helpless to prevent himself being dragged back up the stairs even though, this time, they didn’t even bother to restrain his arms.

They made him cross the courtyard again but, this time, the room he was hauled inside was a vast, warm banqueting hall filled with feasting Faeries. All of whom were women again, he noted with growing confusion. Monstrous beast-women though, all of them, with huge biceps and chests so well developed that they even had muscles where their breasts should have been. Most of the seated women were so large that they made even the huge women guarding him seem small.

And, although he *could* see traces of beauty in their faces that echoed with his memories of his mother, the similarity was so tenuous that it convinced him that if Agnatha truly *had* been the bearer of Faerie blood, then it had obviously been diluted so much that it was barely significant. Agnatha had resembled these cruel beings only to the extent that a horse resembled a donkey, since she had inherited neither their musculature nor their vicious nature.

And again he found himself wondering that if the women were this huge, then how monstrous were the Faerie men folk?

By then, he was almost past embarrassment at his nakedness because he’d decided that these beast-women were so inhuman that it mattered little whether they saw his body or not. It wasn’t like being shamed in front of a *real* woman.

But then a small, slightly high-pitched, gasp reached his ears through the drone of the women’s exclamations at his appearance and, following the slight sound to its source, Skinner froze in humiliated horror.

At the far table, seated next to one of the largest of the women, was the most beautiful girl that Skinner had ever seen.

Although her bright, luminous green eyes and pointed ears marked her to be Faerie too, she bore only the most superficial resemblance to the women in the hall. She was so pale that her skin had almost a bluish tinge and she was slight, so thin that it seemed that even a strong breeze might push her over. She was so fine and delicate of features that she made even his memory of Agnatha’s beauty fade in comparison.

Unlike the women, she was dressed not in battle garb but in a richly embroidered gold colored shift of silk. She was also wearing a city’s ransom of jewelry around her neck, and her hair was tumbling loosely around her shoulders, whereas the other women wore their hair either scraped into practical braids or chopped short to their heads. She wore a garland of delicate white and golden flowers over her forehead, and more buds and flowers were teased into her flowing locks. Furthermore, even seated, it was clear she was no taller than his mother had been.

She was *definitely* more exotically beautiful than Agnatha had ever been.

She was, quite simply, absolutely exquisite.

Skinner gave a loud, bellowing roar of outrage and began to struggle furiously against his chains. That he should finally find the woman he had always dreamed of, yet meet her as a captured, beaten ‘animal’ rather than as the proud Chieftain of a great city was more than he could bear. That her soft, innocent eyes should be subjected to the sight of his nakedness not only horrified him, but offended him on her behalf.

And she *was* innocent. He’d swear it from the way the color drained out of her face when she first saw him, and the way she then swayed in her seat as though she might faint from shock.

His instincts seemed to be proven correct when, at an angry gesture from the woman sitting at the girl’s left side, one of his guards ripped material off her own uniform and swiftly covered his groin.

Though he had never, in his whole life, hated as he currently hated the Faerie, his heart was thumping in his chest as he stared at the girl and a voice in the back of his head was insisting that *nothing* so perfectly beautiful could be evil. Surely the girl was no more guilty of the blood in her veins than he was.

That was it, Skinner decided suddenly. The girl *wasn’t* a full-blood. She couldn’t be.

To the left of the woman who had ordered him covered, there was another, even younger, Faerie child and *she* was comparatively as heavy-set and monstrously muscled as the older women.

So *his* girl wasn’t a real Faerie.

She couldn’t be.

She was so significantly different in appearance to the women *and* the other girl that the only explanation was that she was a hybrid like himself. Like Agnatha had been.

Perhaps the poor girl was even a captive of the women. The Faerie were well known for being significantly more brutal with male humans than with female, so perhaps the girl was a captive and was simply receiving better treatment than himself.

Perhaps her exquisite beauty was enough to keep her safe against the brutality of the Faerie. Perhaps, like the Eirendish women of legend, she was in the Faerie kingdom simply to be impregnated and then returned to her people. Although he shuddered at the thought of such a delicate child being bedded by a Faerie, Skinner still hoped he was right because he couldn’t bear the thought of her being cruelly treated, and surely even beasts like the Faerie had the sense not to harm a potential mother.

She was stunning.

He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

Even when his guards heated their swords in a fire and began pricking him with the burning tips to make him jump and flail under the assault, Skinner managed to distance his own pain with his worry over how the beautiful girl was growing paler and obviously more distressed at his agony as each minute passed.

When the guards forced him to stand on a burning metal plate, so he could only hop from foot to foot until his loin cloth fell to the floor and the watching women were all laughing hysterically at the way his member began to ‘dance’, his shame was purely that such indignity was being witnessed by the beautiful innocent girl.

And when she stood suddenly, swaying in obvious shock, announced she felt ill and then collapsed to the floor in a dead faint, Skinner realized that despite the helplessness of his situation, despite knowing he was unlikely to survive the ‘interrogation’ of the next day let alone ever see her again, he had, ridiculously, fallen head over heels in love with her.

When he was finally returned to the dungeon – dragged there on his hands and knees since he was unable to walk on his badly burned feet – his guards chained him to the wall again, but this time to a lower restraint that forced him to sit on the floor with his back flush against the wall and his collar locked directly to a wall bracket about three feet from the ground. Skinner was uncertain whether this was supposed to be an act of kindness or not. Certainly it would have been agonizing to be forced to stand upright all night on his abused feet, but sitting down wasn’t really a significant improvement.

Although none of the sword tips had actually pierced his skin, he was covered with a multitude of small but severe burns – most of which were on his buttocks – and he swiftly learned that the pain of *any* burn was just about unbearable. Sleep was impossible, with his feet and bottom throbbing their outrage at the torture and his throat parched once more as though the burns had leeched the moisture completely out of his body.

The dungeon was cold. Between its stone walls and the fact it was several feet underground, the temperature inside his cell felt more like a brisk winter night than the temperate summer Skinner knew it truly was. So the frigid air kept him shivering constantly – though a lot of his shaking was probably also due to shock – and yet his feet and buttocks burned incessantly and the juxtaposition of sensations stole what little chance he had for rest.

Not that sleep was a high priority in his mind anyway. Sleep would just hasten the arrival of morning and the beginning of his ‘interrogation’. If the pain he was suffering that night had been inflicted as no more than ‘entertainment’, it took little imagination to see that the *real* torture would be infinitely worse. Not that he’d ever really doubted it. From the moment of his capture he’d known that the very best he could hope for was castration, amputation and blinding. ‘Best’, because he’d witnessed with his own eyes the poor souls who had literally been skinned alive by Faeries, and theirs was the kind of suffering that Skinner would wish on no living being.

But, ultimately, he accepted that whatever was to happen to him would happen. He had no illusions that he might escape. He had no expectation of any mercy at the hands of his captors. He understood that the Faerie were not only cruel and vengeful but that they *enjoyed* inflicting agony on weaker beings. He had stepped inside their realm, and they would be satisfied with nothing less than to make him die in a most terrible way for that trespass.

His only hope and prayer was that he would remain brave throughout his long, agonizing death. He wasn’t foolish enough to believe he’d fail to eventually cry, scream and even beg for mercy. Sufficient pain could reduce *any* man to such apparent cowardice. And the Faerie were clearly masters of pain. He was realist enough to know he *would*, at some point, probably sooner rather than later, give the Faerie the satisfaction of seeing him reduced to craven, cringing terror.

But what was crucial, what was absolutely unarguable, was that no matter what was done to him, no matter what pain and degradation he suffered, the two words that would *never* leave his lips between that moment and his last breath were ‘Crystal City’.

That was the sole bravery he prayed for.

Simply to die without betraying his connection to his people, lest the Faerie might be dissatisfied with simply killing *him* and choose to also take their grievance over his inadvertent trespass to the gates of Crystal City.

That decided, he determined to put even the *thought* of his home out of his mind. It was not only that it hurt too much to picture it in his head, knowing he would never lay his eyes upon it again. He also didn’t know whether Faerie magic was such that they could steal the image out of his head if he allowed it to linger there. Just because they were intending to physically torture him didn’t mean they couldn’t simply read his mind if they chose. They *enjoyed* inflicting pain too much for him to be sure the intended torture was actually necessary.

So he tried to blank his mind, but he was too cold and sore and frightened to dwell on the cell in which he was sitting instead and so, again and again, he found his thoughts creeping towards the past.

Angrily, he shook his head and chose instead to picture the face of the beautiful hybrid girl.

Yes.

That would work.

Even though it pained his heart to do so, knowing that he’d probably never see her again, he allowed himself to fantasize what his life would have been like, had he met the girl under different circumstances. He couldn’t imagine a man could be more gods-blessed than to wake every morning with such beauty in his arms.

She would be his talisman, he decided.

No matter what he suffered, he would hold her sweet face in his mind and think only of her. He would even be brave for *her*, though she’d never know it. He would, he decided, die with the dignity that proved him worthy of her.

So he sat there alone in the dark, freezing cell, his body wracked with shivers and throbbing aches of pain, and at some point during the interminable night, his exhausted body somehow passed into the land of dreams. Not sleep so much as his mind giving way to a state of unconsciousness, and yet even unconscious he *did* dream, and the dreams were not of his city but of a green-eyed, beautiful girl.

Over the next two days, his fantasies of the girl became the only thing that kept Skinner sane.

On the first day, his guards didn’t ask him even a single question. That alone would have confirmed his suspicions that they were intending to prolong his torture simply for the pleasure of hearing him scream but, since they were unaware of his ability to understand their tongue, he had the dubious pleasure of actually listening to them as they casually discussed how best to ‘break’ his spirit.

The first day was filled not only with pain but with intense humiliation and yet, although his face burned at the painful indignities he suffered, his guards were unaware that the deepest flush of color on his face was sheer fury because he *heard* the women laughing and joking with each other as they vied with each other to come up with ways to best humiliate him. He understood, from listening to them, that his *real* interrogation wouldn’t begin until the following day since the Captain of the Guard was otherwise occupied until then, and that they had been given no particular orders regarding his treatment for *that* day. It was simply their *choice* to spend that day torturing him.

Although he couldn’t deny that a small part of him was relieved to spend that first day as the recipient of cruel torment rather than real torture, his overwhelming feeling was one of wishing they would stop ‘playing’ with him and get things over and done with. Although he was terrified of the pain to come, it was mentally torturous to be subjected to their ‘games’ while knowing that, whatever he suffered, things were only going to get worse.

Which isn’t to say that his guards didn’t hurt him on that first day. He was in agony by the time they finally tired of him. But more than any bodily aches, what had been hurt most was his pride. Just as the women had intended.

He’d been released from his chains and given an unexpected drink of water. That was the one and only kindness of the day. Then his head and wrists were restrained inside a set of stocks barely six inches off the ground, so that he was kneeling with his buttocks high in the air.

He heard one of the guards say that it ‘offended’ her to see a man with white buttocks and, though the comment had confused him, he’d instinctively realized what part of his anatomy was in immediate danger and had flushed with humiliation rather than fear as he heard the guards decide to take turns to demonstrate the effectiveness of their collection of paddles.

The paddling *was* more humiliating than painful at first and so he locked his jaw and refused to give his abusers the satisfaction of hearing him cry out loud . Having expected whips, knives and hot irons, the idea of being beaten with a leather paddle seemed almost anticlimactic.

But by the second hour of constant beating, on buttocks already covered with burns, he was quietly whimpering with each descent of the paddle on his rapidly swelling posterior and, by mid-morning, when they changed the flat leather paddle for one with sharp metal spikes, he began to yell out loud, in too much pain by then to even care that his cries were met with ever increasing laughter and derision.

Their assault continued, unrelentingly, until his throat was raw with screaming and he’d twice lost control of his bladder, and then the guards abruptly ceased the beating and left the dungeon to eat their mid-day meal, leaving the sobbing and agonized man still restrained in the stocks.

He was released on the guards’ return and, stupidly, imagined for a moment that the day’s torments were over.

Instead he was turned onto his back and locked back into the stocks, lying prone this time so that all his weight was pressed down on his swollen behind. Had they simply left him in that position, it would have been torment enough. Instead, one of the guards began to paddle his member and sac.

Although she used only the plain leather paddle and struck him with far less force than she’d used to beat his buttocks, the pain was indescribable. All pride fled him and he screamed and yelled both curses and pleas, drumming his legs against the floor in useless protest.

The only effect of his words was to spark a discussion between the three guards in which it was generally agreed upon that men were perfectly ‘designed’ for torture, since their most vulnerable anatomy was so easily accessible that it ‘begged’ to be abused. As the conversation progressed, one of the guards pointed out that not *all* of a man’s vulnerable places was so easily accessible, and Skinner listened in horror to them discussing whether or not they should use one of the iron rods to demonstrate the fact.

Then the guards began to argue over whether or not they should heat the iron before inserting it, one of them saying that heat would cauterize any bleeding and another saying the heat would make him immediately pass out so where was the fun in that? The third, fortunately, decided that inserting the iron inside him hot *or* cold might cause internal injuries and the Captain of the Guard would be furious if he was ‘damaged’ before the interrogation began.

So Skinner was saved the pain and humiliation of being raped – though he was already in such pain by then that he barely cared – and the guards contented themselves with simply ‘playing’ with his buttocks and groin until he finally lost consciousness.

He woke, several hours later, alone in his cell once more, chained to the wall with a longer chain this time so he could at least curl on his side and thus avoid putting pressure on either the burning ache of his buttocks or the even fiercer heat of his beaten sac, and though he was shamed by the tears he’d spilled and the screams he’d allowed to escape his throat during the day of relentless beating, he took pride that at least he hadn’t lost control of himself enough to reveal his understanding of the Faerie tongue.

“I was as brave as I could possibly be,” he whispered, to his memory of the beautiful hybrid girl. “I didn’t betray you. I lost my pride today, but not my courage. My body was weak, but my heart remains strong.”

On the second day, the torture began in earnest.

This time the guards were accompanied to his dungeon by their Captain and, after he was watered, Skinner was immediately hauled into the middle of the cell. The chain to the ankle restraint hanging from the ceiling was slackened, his ankles were secured inside its shackles and then the chain was tightened again until it pulled him off the ground and up into the air.

The lifting was excruciatingly painful in itself, but then, as he dangled there upside down, with all his blood rushing to his head, the true agony began.

For one thing, the longer he hung there the greater the strain on his ankles.

But the true agony came in the form of a whip.

Over the course of the day, he was flogged from foot down to head, front and back, and with each stripe of the whip the Captain barked out a question. Who was he? Where was he from? How had he broken the ward-spell? Where were his companions? Why was he so tall? How many people lived in his city? Where was his city? How many of his fellow citizens were tall like he was? Why did he carry an iron sword? Why was he trained to fight?

And, over and over, Skinner swore that he was no more than a lone hunter who’d stumbled into the entranceway by accident. He had no people, he said. His people had all perished in the Northern Territories and so he’d wandered alone for years, hunting to live and avoiding all cities and towns.

Dissatisfied with his answers, the Captain continued to whip him until there was barely an inch of skin on his body unwelted, his bowels had failed and he was screaming almost continuously.

“Tell me the truth, and I’ll let you down,” she said. “I’ll give you water. I’ll let you sleep on the floor tonight. I’ll even let you have something to eat. Just tell me who your people are and where they live, and this ends here and now.”

Skinner was sorely tempted to name one of the largest, most southern cities. He didn’t believe it would gain him food, water and sleep but he thought it might gain him a faster death. Yet, as he opened his mouth to speak, the face of *his* girl flashed before his eyes and he shook his head, remembering the glacier. No. Even though it was unlikely the Faerie would attack a city so large and distant, there was still the possibility they *might*.

“I have no people,” he croaked.

The Captain angrily spun on her heel and instructed the guards to leave him hanging by his ankles through the night. “By tomorrow, he’ll either be dead or a *lot* more co-operative,” she snarled and marched out of the dungeon.

The hours passed and, despite the complete darkness of the dungeon, Skinner counted their passing by the increasing frigidity of the air in his cell. In a way, he was grateful for the bite of the cold against his skin. His whole body felt as though it were on fire. Every welted stripe of the whip burned fever hot against his flesh, and the half dozen or so that had been applied across his already tortured buttocks were throbbing so intensely that he felt as though flames were literally spouting from his rear.

One of the strikes of the whip had sliced across his member, tearing its flesh so badly that it was twitching in permanent, quivering agony against his belly. Despite the cold he was trembling and shaking so much that his body was sweat-sheened, and each slow trickle of perspiration burned salt into his exposed wounds, making him sweat all the more.

The shackles from which he was suspended had rubbed several layers of skin from his ankles and blood was literally trickling down his legs. The sensation was maddening. Not the pain of his ankles themselves, since Skinner had lost the ability to distinguish one agony from another, but the tickling feeling of the warm blood on his over-sensitized flesh was distinct and crazing. So was the itching feel of his spilled bodily waste irritating the open wounds of his buttocks and back He’d been glad of two days of starvation when his bowels had opened and spilled their contents in a hot, liquid gush during a particularly intense part of the flogging.

Especially when he realized the Faerie had no intention of cleaning him off and would simply leave the filth to mingle with the blood, sweat and tears that they had also forced his body to release for their amusement. He considered himself fortunate, though it was a strange choice of words, that he was too dehydrated for his body to urinate. In this position, he would inevitably piss into his own face and he had a horrid suspicion that if he *did*, instinct would make him attempt to drink the flow to ease the terrible raw dryness of his mouth. At least he was saved from *that* self-imposed indignity by his member’s sulking refusal to do anything except twitch in misery.

And still he kept the face of his girl in his mind. Her perfect features the only clean, beautiful unsullied thing he could cling onto after two days of unrelenting suffering. Though he could hear himself whimpering and moaning, in too much constant pain not to express his agony aloud, he was less conscious of his involuntary groaning than of the fact he’d survived yet another day without betraying her.

Although he accepted that he probably was a piteous sight to behold, looking like no more than a hanging piece of raw meat and sounding as though he were so broken that just the sight of another whip or paddle would have him screaming for mercy, he hadn’t been broken and he hadn’t even *thought* about his city. He had protected his people. He had even retained enough sense to distinguish between questions spoken in his tongue and those spoken in Faerie as the Captain’s increasing frustration with his stubbornness had stolen her own facility with *his* tongue. So although he *had* howled and screamed and even begged for mercy on occasion, he’d protected his secrets from her.

And so, in his mind, he pictured the beautiful girl, imagining her face contorting with horror at his condition, imagining her gentle hands fluttering with distress and tears welling up in her emerald eyes as she understood the agony he’d suffered and yet, somehow, saw into his heart and knew that he’d stayed true to the promise he’d secretly made to her.

The image was such that it made tears well, though his eyes were so crusted with blood and the dried remnants of his previous tears that they were welded almost tightly shut, and so, when a faint orange glow began to light the cell – as though someone was descending into the dungeon by torchlight, although he didn’t hear the usual heavy-booted footsteps of the guards – he was uncertain whether he was dreaming.

He became certain he was when the light reached his cell enough to illuminate the darkness and, as the visitor to his cell eventually walked around his suspended body to face him, his slitted, tear-filmed eyes saw not the form of a uniformed guard but a vision of soft silk and long, dark tresses. Upside down, with his eyes barely capable of focusing, he had only an illusion of the girl’s face, but his memory filled in the blanks for him and he sighed with soft contentment. He was dreaming, he decided, and although he was disappointed that even a dream state was insufficient to ease the pain in his body, his heart was warmed by the girl’s gentle presence in his sleeping fantasy.

Had his throat not been too raw and dry for speech, he would have spoken to her. As it was, he settled for consciously muffling his sobs and groans of pain lest he distress his visitor enough for her to flee his dream.

She glided towards him, her nightgown carefully lifted from the bodily fluids that covered the stone floor, and Skinner had a moment’s confusion that his dream should be so realistic as to include such an inconsequential detail as the girl’s concern for her clothing. Come to think of it, shouldn’t his dream girl be more concerned with *his* condition than with protecting her silken nightgown?

Shouldn’t his dream girl have raced across the cell, throwing her arms (carefully) around him, crying out her distress for his suffering and praising him for his courage in bearing it?

Instead, the beautiful creature approached him as though he were a strange but fascinating curiosity, her steps cautious, her pretty nose wrinkling with distaste at the smell of the cell and the worse stench of his body, and she circled him slowly, her intense green eyes drinking in the details of his injuries. And, although her face was almost white with shock, and her eyes were wide with fear, when she finally came to a halt in front of his face, her expression was oddly distant as though she were more perplexed than touched by his agony.

Skinner shook his head and blinked furiously, wishing suddenly to make this strange, alien visitation disappear. He was sure his mind was playing tricks on him. Perhaps the two days of torture by the Faerie women and all the blood flowing down to his head had twisted his subconscious so he could no longer remember the girl’s gentle beauty and so he now transposed it with the cruel indifference of the other Faerie.

It was, perhaps, not surprising that he refused to even consider the possibility that she was *really* standing in his cell. For one thing, for all his fantasies, he would rather have slit his own throat than been seen in such an undignified state by the girl who had stolen his heart in mere moments. It was bad enough that she had already witnessed him naked and ‘dancing’ like a performing bear under the cruel assault of burning swords. At least he had still retained *some* dignity by bearing the assault with angry pride. But his current physical state bore clear witness of what had been done to him over the last two days. His buttocks, member and sac were so swollen and torn that it was obvious his manly parts had been used as playthings by the female guards, and that was more than any man could bear to have known by a woman he was in love with. Perhaps he hadn’t actually been ‘raped’, but his claim to manhood had still been savagely assaulted. No woman could possibly look upon his abused groin and not see him as forever tainted and lessened in her eyes.

Perhaps, he decided, it was no wonder that his dream visitor now looked upon him with such dispassion. It was his own mind’s way of telling him that he was no longer sufficient of a ‘man’ to even have the right to fantasize about such an exquisite prize of a woman.

And then she reached out and touched him.

The touch of her finger was light and tentative, yet his sac was so swollen that even a whisper of breath against its surface would have been agony, and so Skinner bellowed with shock and pain and jerked in his chains.

More than that though, his cry was one of outrage and sudden understanding.

She was *real*.

This was no visitation of his dreams but the true physical presence of the girl.

And she had not only witnessed his degradation but had responded to it with a curious poke of her fingertip, rather than pity or sympathy.

To Skinner’s horror, she seemed fascinated by his first reaction to her touch and continued to poke and prod at his sac and, though her eyes were wide, as though she couldn’t quite believe she was touching something as clearly disgusting as himself, she was seemingly indifferent to the pain she was inflicting by her examination of his swollen flesh.

Skinner groaned and began to shake in his chains, not only overcome by the additional agony of her probing fingers but by the shattering of his illusions and the loss of the one thing that had been keeping him sane. The girl *was* a full-blood Faerie. She *was* as cruel and indifferent as the other women. The only difference between herself and the other women was the terrible lie of her beauty.

He cursed himself for a fool.

And yet… and yet… part of his shaking was that she *was* touching him.

Even if her touch was one of cruelty rather than love, to have his sac caressed by her perfect fingers was *still* somehow unbearably exciting.

He hated himself for that.

And he hated *her*.

Perhaps *all* Faerie were as cruel and heartless as wolves. Perhaps they were incapable of being anything other. Perhaps they all truly saw humans as nothing more than animals to be tortured and slain for their amusement. And so the girl, regardless of her beauty, was as evil as the rest of her race.

Yet, still, her beauty mesmerized him.

He was reminded suddenly of one of the Valtere, a wolf with a snow-white pelt rather than the grey fur usual to its kind. The day he had been set upon by the creatures, losing his kill to them but managing to wound most of them and actually kill four of the beasts before they fled, his knife had slashed the white wolf’s left hind leg so badly that it had been too lame to flee when he took chase of it, determined to take its gorgeous pelt home to his mother. He had trapped it, eventually, in a small copse and had already been visualizing how beautiful Agnatha would look wearing a cape lined with its unusual fur, when he’d stared into the creature’s fearful eyes and had hesitated.

He was a hunter born and bred, so had no excuse for the thought that suddenly struck him and, furthermore, the Valtere were all vicious dangerous beasts who never hesitated to attack a vulnerable human, but he realized, in that moment, that the reason Agnatha would look so beautiful wearing the animal’s fur was that the *animal* was beautiful. It was unique. It was the only pure white wolf he’d ever seen.

And so he found himself unable to kill it.

It was not to blame for its nature, he’d decided, and its beauty was, perhaps, sufficient justification for its evil existence.

He’d never confessed his ‘sin’. He’d skinned the other four wolves and had returned to his home a hero. He’d never again allowed himself to remember his moment of weakness when he’d left an enemy of his people alive simply because his heart had ached at the idea of killing something so exquisite and unique.

And so, although he felt foolish that he’d ever dreamed the girl was any different from her kind, and he actually *hated* her in that moment with perhaps even more passion than he felt for the women who’d actually tortured him, had he been free and capable of killing every Faerie woman in the castle in vengeance for their cruelty, he still had a horrible suspicion that he’d be unable to raise his hand to harm her.

Like the white wolf, her beauty was too great to be extinguished.

It came to him, suddenly, that even though he now knew her true nature, he *still* wanted to bed her.

He flushed with mortification at his own weakness, cursing himself for a fool, and that was when he noticed that she too was blushing furiously, biting her lower lip with perfect white teeth, and her right hand was trembling as it reached out, took hold of his right nipple and tweaked it.

He grunted with shock more than pain. Perhaps it was simply that his body had been left hyper-sensitive by the torture but the girl’s fingers had sent a fierce erotic jolt through his body that had made even his agonized sac quiver in anticipation. He barely had a moment to consider his reaction before the girl took the handful of flesh surrounding his nipple and squeezed it between her fingers.

Either inadvertently or deliberately, her fingers dug into one of the welts across his chest, so he roared with pain and the girl abruptly released him and jumped backwards in either shock or fright.

“Are you just a freak, or are all monkey-men female, too?” she demanded.

Skinner was so shocked and insulted by the comment that he almost responded before remembering he wasn’t supposed to understand the Faerie tongue. So he forced himself to simply growl and curse at her in his own language, even though he was aching to demand what right she had to call him a ‘monkey-man’ and how dare she suggest he was anything other than fully male?

“I came here to tell you to be quiet,” the girl continued carelessly, her tone petulant. “I can’t sleep with you making all this noise.” She even stamped her foot to emphasize her words, just like a little girl would have.

Although Skinner simply glared at her through his slitted eyes, his perception of the girl took a dramatic twist. She was, he decided, a spoiled vain creature but, obviously, somewhat dim-witted if she could stand there, hands on hips, and demand he be quiet simply because he was disturbing her sleep, in a tone that suggested not only that she’d never in her life been denied anything she requested but also implied that she honestly had no true perception of the agony he was in.

Was that the truth or was his broken heart simply desperately seeking excuses for her behavior?

He quickly ran their encounter through his head. Yes, she’d touched him and poked him with cruel, careless fingers, but she’d appeared unmoved by his pain rather than entertained by it. While the other women had delighted in his agony, the girl had seemed almost unable to comprehend it.

Something leapt in Skinner’s heart, something warming and soothing. He *wasn’t* a total fool, after all. He hadn’t been wrong when he’d judged her an ‘innocent’. He’d just been wrong about what *kind* of innocent she was. She was clearly one of those rare people whose brains never truly developed into maturity. There were one or two of those people in most human towns and cities.

She was simply a gorgeous, adult sized child-woman and her beauty was such that instead of being treated with cruelty, as most poor unfortunates in her position were, she had obviously been pampered and raised as a ‘pet’ by the other Faerie.

He watched as the beauty sighed, shrugged, and began to leave the cell. Although he couldn’t see well enough to judge her expression, he was sure her mouth was pouting like that of a thwarted three-year-old rather than twisted by the evil smirk of her kind.

And when she paused at the door, looked back in his direction and softly said, “If I were you, I’d tell them what they want to know. They’re going to kill you anyway. All you’re doing is giving them an excuse to be cruel to you first,” Skinner prayed that she’d immediately leave the dungeon before he totally lost control of his emotions and began to sob with relief.

She *wasn’t* evil.

She *wasn’t* cruel.

She was simply a ‘child’ who was incapable of truly understanding his situation but who, despite her confusion, *did* feel compassion for him. Why else would she have made that comment?

“You know something?” the girl said suddenly. “In a way, I think they consider *me* to be an animal, too. The only real difference between us is that *I’m* beautiful.”

And, for the second time that evening, Skinner’s heart almost broke.

In that moment, he realized that he somehow loved her even more now than he had before and that, in a way, she was in more danger in this castle than he was. All the Faerie could do to him was torture his body and kill him, but the possible future corruption of her childlike innocence by her evil guardians was, in his opinion, even more terrible a prospect than death.

“If there was any way for me to escape my fate and flee this place, I’d take you with me, sweet girl,” he promised silently. “I’d rescue you from this place of horrors and the evil people who surround you before you truly learn to understand what’s happening in front of your eyes.”

And, as she left the dungeon and his cell was plunged back into darkness, Skinner finally allowed his tears to fall.

~~~

The third day was such that it made his previous tortures insignificant.

He was lowered from the ceiling and then shackled by four chains into an upright, spread-eagled position in the middle of the cell, with his legs and arms so cruelly stretched that his underarms and inner thighs felt like they would tear under the strain. The burns on his feet were barely scabbed over, so standing upright on them was painful, but the worst agony was that of his ankles. They were already raw, bruised and bleeding, and being shackled in the new way tore at their flesh even more cruelly.

That was the day the guards lit the fire and used the irons upon him.

The process took hours, mainly because he passed out every time the burning rods were applied to his skin and so his guards had to waste time reviving him to consciousness before burning him again.

They burned him everywhere he had sufficient flesh to feel the full agony of the application. They avoided his shins, because his skin was so close to bone there that he would have fainted with the first touch of the iron. Instead they burned his calves, so that he remained aware and screaming for several endless seconds before fainting. Similarly, they avoided his spine and burned the flesh to either side instead. They ignored his face and neck but laid the hot irons over a dozen times onto his chest.

His hips were spared, but his thighs were savagely anointed several times. The guards then demonstrated why his legs were spread so far apart by branding him high up on his inner thighs.

They even applied the iron to both his member and his sac. Both burns were so excruciating that it took several buckets of water thrown over his head to revive him.

Skinner’s buttocks received most of their attention however, with each of the already agonized globes receiving several applications of the iron.

And through it all, as each burn was proceeded by a question and then his failure to give the right answer resulted in another press of the iron against his flesh, Skinner remained strong.

Strong in that he failed to crumble.

He did, however, scream and beg for mercy. Even knowing he was simply amusing the Faerie women, he couldn’t prevent himself sobbing and howling and piteously pleading for them to cease the torture.

Unsurprisingly, they just laughed at his agony and continued until he was a quivering wreck incapable of even understanding their questions, let alone answering them.

Then they released him from the chains, tied his wrists behind his back, fastened them to a different chain on a pulley and lifted him off the ground until his legs were dangling and his arms felt as though they would tear off his body.

It was only when they left the cell and failed to return that he realized it was evening and that they intended to leave him in the brutal restraints until morning.

That was the moment that he realized there was a point at which a body was incapable of registering any more pain and instead, somehow, became almost immune to it. Although at some level he knew he was still in excruciating agony, he actually felt almost numb.

Weak from three days without food, dehydrated from being given so little water, his entire body in a state of shock from the abuse it had suffered, Skinner decided he was probably dying and the thought was not an unwelcome one. His body was shutting down, switching off, and descending into a state of unconsciousness which he might never wake from.

That he *prayed* he’d never wake from.

Because, though he cringed to admit it to himself, he knew he had run out of bravery. He’d reached the point where he couldn’t even conceive the idea of voluntarily suffering any more pain.

He didn’t sleep but he slipped into a half-conscious state in which he seemed almost outside of his body and, although his face was still locked into a grimace of agony, in truth he felt little, except relief that his torture would soon be over.

It was some hours later that a voice startled him out of his almost peaceful daze.

“How can an animal be so brave?”

Skinner might have been able to ignore any other voice, choosing to remain in his pain-free fugue rather than allow himself to return to the agony of reality, but the sweet husky tones of his visitor dragged him immediately back to the present.

It was like slamming his body full-tilt into a brick wall.

One moment he was almost ‘outside’ his body and the next he was made so abruptly aware of the myriad of pains assaulting him that he howled out in fury and cursed the girl for waking him. With the wave of returning pain crashing through his head, he even thoughtlessly blurted out a couple of Faerie words as he chastised her, and only the immediate look of total shock on her face reminded him he was ‘supposed’ not to know her tongue.

He froze in horror, sure she’d confront him about it. Perhaps she’d even run to tell the guards and they’d use the knowledge to drag his secrets out of him after all. At this point, realistically, Skinner had to accept that he was unlikely to withstand any more torture. He’d dug as deeply as he could into his store of courage and now it was empty.

He *would* betray his people if faced again with the hot irons.

But even as Skinner was cursing himself and wishing himself dead, the girl’s face cleared as though her mind had skipped on to another, more pleasing subject, and all she said was, “My name’s Alexin.”

When Skinner simply gazed at her in shock, she patted her surprisingly flat chest and repeated, “ALEXIN,” loudly and distinctly as though his failure to respond had proven him deaf.

“I don’t *want* to know what your name is, you stupid girl,” he roared. “All I want is for you to cut my throat for me, before I betray everyone I care about in the world.”

The girl’s beautiful eyes widened at his tone and her lower lip began to quiver with obvious misery.

Skinner forced himself to calm down. It wasn’t the beauty’s fault she was slow-witted, and was it so wrong that he wanted his last memory to be of her smiling, not seeming to be close to tears? So he forced his dry mouth to try to form her name.

The word emerged as a bare croak, more ‘Lesin’ than Alexin, but the girl’s face broke into a beaming, happy smile and she clapped her hands in obvious glee.

Even through his pain and despair, Skinner felt his mouth twitch at her childish, innocent pleasure and, though he would have sworn himself incapable of ever laughing again, he felt a rumble of genuine humor in his aching throat as her pretty eyes suddenly flared with horror and she looked downwards at the hem of her nightgown since she’d let it drop to the dirty floor in her excitement.

And then he went cold.

Not one of the hot irons applied to his flesh that day had hurt or shocked him more than what he suddenly noticed. Despite his many faints, not one of the burns had made him feel so instantly nauseous and light-headed.

The girl *wasn’t* a girl.

The fine silk of ‘her’ nightgown was so tight across her abdomen and groin that it clearly outlined the presence of a member. A blatantly erect member. Skinner could even see the faint suggestion of a sac nestled beneath the prominent maleness.

Skinner was a wise man. Even when the facts defied all reason, he weighed the evidence and accepted logic over expectation. He hadn’t seen a male Faerie but had naturally assumed them to be larger than their wives. He’d assumed Alexin to be a hybrid because ‘she’ looked more like his mother than like one of the Faerie women. Now he realized that the reason the Faerie warriors and guards he’d seen were female was that, in some strange reversal, the female of the Faerie species were dominant and the males (if Alexin was typical) were smaller and more delicate than their womenfolk. That even explained why hybrid children would have a delicate appearance because human women were impregnated by *male* Faerie and the females probably carried the traits of size and aggression.

He accepted all of that in a flash of insight. What he *couldn’t* accept was the idea he’d fallen in love with a *boy*. He may have lain with none except other men since Shrona’s death but slaking himself in male flesh was a world apart from the idea of his ‘loving’ another man. Besides, they’d been *men*. While the idea of a girl being soft, delicate and in need of a man’s protection was incredibly arousing, the idea of a *man* being so helpless absolutely disgusted him. Even by the age of nine or ten a boy should be capable of hunting and fighting. Alexin was perhaps almost twice that age and yet would probably faint at the thought of either pastime.

Skinner felt sick. He even felt a hot wave of hatred that the boy had deceived him (even though he knew the mistake had been his own).

“You’re a boy. A boy. A gods-damned BOY!” he gasped, even though the words tore at his throat.

Alexin merely shrugged his shoulders in obvious incomprehension.

Unable to bear the sight of that exquisite face, now that he knew it was male, Skinner closed his eyes, sagged back into his chains and groaned with despair.

“I can’t help you,” Alexin said, clearly misunderstanding the reason for his anguish. “I’m just a boy. I don’t have the *power* to help you. No one will listen to my opinion. They’ll just call me a foolish child if I try and tell them they’re wrong to hurt you like this. Maybe I *am* wrong. I don’t know very much. I’m not clever like a woman. I don’t really understand very much at all.”

For a brief moment, Skinner’s heart twisted at the boy’s soft words. Even without opening his eyes he could picture the sweet, beautiful face frowning with confusion as the boy’s dawning compassion warred with his obvious self-doubt. Yet, at the same time, Skinner was furiously angry at the boy. It was clear Alexin completely accepted his submissive role in his society. He seemed terrified of even the *idea* of thinking for himself.

Skinner was no longer certain whether Alexin was indeed slow-witted or simply a typical example of a Faerie male but, either way, the boy saying he wasn’t ‘clever like a woman’ infuriated him. Though the ‘I don’t really understand very much at all’ comment was quite pitiable, he reluctantly decided.

And he felt quite unreasonably disappointed when the boy moved away from him. Although Skinner would have sworn he wanted nothing more than to never see the boy again, he still hated the idea of him leaving. He was a hypocrite, he decided, because he *still* wanted to bed Alexin and still wanted to enjoy the vision of his beauty, and yet at the same time he felt nothing but contempt for him.

Amongst his people there were men who loved other men and *some* of them even had some physical or behavioral attributes of women. The difference between them and Alexin however was that most human women were as fierce and proud as their men folk. So the men that emulated them were still what Skinner considered *men*.

Perhaps human women were generally smaller and weaker than their males and, yes, the most beautiful of them often traded their beauty in return for a man’s total protection, but most women, even those who *seemed* to be dominated by their husbands, were fully capable of plunging a knife in her husband’s back if he abused her. Perhaps women *were* sold into marriage like chattel, but they soon became queen of their new husband’s household.

Even the fact Skinner had been attracted to Alexin’s ‘innocence’ didn’t mean he hadn’t fully expected ‘her’ to transform into a harridan the moment she secured herself a marriage wreath from some man. He’d been married himself. He was well used to the cunning wiles of women, the way that they *seemed* soft but then turned hard and cold as ice the moment their husband failed to bend to their whims.

So, perhaps, the oddest thing about Alexin wasn’t that he was a boy but that in all other ways he genuinely seemed to be what he appeared. Unlike a girl who ‘pretended’ sweetness to conceal her true nature, Alexin truly *was* an innocent.

Had he been a girl, Skinner would have considered him priceless.

But for a *boy* to be like that was unnatural. A boy who couldn’t or wouldn’t hunt was cast out by his people, to either learn to be a *man* or to die of starvation. A boy so delicate of frame and temperament as Alexin was useless to a tribe. The boy was an offense to nature.

And yet Skinner *still* desired him.

Though, Skinner decided, the point was moot. He was dying. Even if he survived the night, bound in such agony, he wouldn’t survive a fourth day of torture. So did it really matter whether Alexin was male or female? He could just *pretend* he hadn’t seen the outline of the boy’s member and continue to think of him as a beautiful girl whose face could ease his pain over his last hours of life.

And more than just his face, Skinner realized, as Alexin walked to the fire instead of the doorway and returned with a ladle full of water. Skinner still couldn’t prevent himself from glaring at Alexin as he noticed the boy could barely lift the huge metal ladle to his lips, but then he realized the boy might be interpreting his glare as a refusal of the offering, so he groaned and thrust his mouth into the bitter, brackish water.

Despite its foul taste, he drank it eagerly, the slimy liquid coating his abraded throat and easing his desperate thirst. Three more times the boy returned with the ladle refilled and, although Skinner couldn’t find a smile for him, he was grateful enough to at least speak the boy’s name once more.

It was almost pitiable the way Alexin’s face lit up with pleasure at the single word and, though the boy wouldn’t look directly at him, instead dipping his eyes shyly and glancing at him from under long, dark lashes, he seemed to be proud that he’d given Skinner the water as if, perhaps, he had done something truly courageous.

Perhaps he had, Skinner acknowledged reluctantly, though it was hard for him to apply a word like ‘courage’ to such a silly, ‘girlish’ boy.

Skinner flinched suddenly, as far above them he heard the sound of the dungeon door opening. Against his will he shivered with dread and his sore sac tried to shrink against his body as though to hide itself from further abuse.

The boy, however, seemed somehow even more terrified than himself. For a long moment he just froze on the spot, his eyes huge, his mouth open in a silent scream, and then, as one of the descending women spoke, the boy was suddenly galvanized into action, running to replace the ladle and then racing to conceal himself in the depths of one of the other cells.

A bitter, angry part of Skinner briefly hoped the boy would be caught and punished for being in the dungeon. But then he shook his head in disgust at himself. Alexin brought shame to all *real* men simply by existing and he was also a full-fledged Faerie (which was more than sufficient reason for Skinner to hate him) but he’d be a cruel and heartless man to wish the boy harm when he’d been the only Faerie with enough compassion to at least offer a dying man a drink of water.

“If it were merely a hunter, it wouldn’t have been carrying a sword,” a woman said, as she entered the room.

“Exactly,” a second woman said, following quickly on the heels of the first. “Perhaps it’s a mercenary and that’s why it doesn’t dare confess its origins. It knows that being a professional fighter is the worst crime it could commit. Whenever we begin a cull of the nearest settlements, these opportunists come and try to convince the local monkey-people to pay them to fight us