Beneath the Veil Read online

  Rosten bent so close to me I could have counted the individual hairs of his eyelashes. He'd been smoking herb, and even in my pain I could be surprised. I hadn't thought Rosten indulged in such diversions. His hand came up to the back of my head and tangled in my hair, then pulled my head back until my throat stretched taut.

  The nasty slime of his tongue slid on my skin just before he thrust his fingers between my legs. He groped me roughly and slid a hand up to pinch my nipple. Disgust made me gag, and he calmly stepped away.

  "Get it dressed."

  The soldier who held me forced me toward the table where a pile of clothes lay. He picked up a tunic, a shirt, some stockings. The garments were fine, of linen and velvet and lace. I could only stare at them without moving. I didn't know if I could ever move myself again, ever operate my arms and legs, ever walk without someone to hold me up.

  "Now!" Rosten spat on the floor by my bare feet. "Oh, by Sinder's Arrow, I'll do it myself."

  He yanked up the shirt and pulled it over my head, then forced my arms through the sleeves. "Damn you, you've soiled it."

  He pressed the cloth against my back, and I screamed aloud. I don't know where I found my voice, but the strength of it made him stumble back. I sagged against the table. My back had turned to fire.

  Rosten began to laugh while I wept. I hated him more than I had hated anything in my life. I shook from the force of it. His laughter filled my ears until I wanted to go mad from the sound of it.

  "Shut up!" the cry wrenched from my mouth. "Book Monster!"

  He was silenced as neatly as the closing of a door. His hand cracked against my cheek and sent me against the wall. When I woke again, I found myself in one of his chairs. I'd been fully dressed in garments that would have made Daelyn jealous with their ornamentation and quality. My hair had been brushed and braided. I was tied to my seat.

  Rosten had sent away his soldiers. He hadn't bothered to cover his wound, which still seeped blood through half-clotted stripes. He sat in front of me, watching.

  "You fight like a man."

  I turned my head and spat to clear it of the blood from my bitten tongue. "I've been a man my entire life."

  "You're not a man." Rosten glanced between my legs, and his mouth pursed. "You're a woman. Sinder's Folly. You're a bedamned folly playing at being what you can never be. And you're going to pay for that sin."

  "It's not a sin," I managed to say, though by now my head was swimming again. "I've done nothing wrong."

  "Nothing but live your life as a lie. I'd say that's a pretty big sin."

  "And who are you to judge?" I thought I asked, but blackness had crept over me again and I might not have spoken aloud.

  "Wake up!" He tapped my face. "'Tis time to go."

  He undid the ties at my wrists and ankles and pulled me to my feet. I lost part of the journey upstairs, though I either walked of my own accord or Rosten dragged me, because the next I knew I stood, bound to a bar, on the platform in front of the House of the Book. It had been cleared of snow, as had the street in front, but the air was still bitterly cold.

  The crowd murmured when Rosten stepped away from me and faced them. I remembered with alarm that the last time I'd been on this platform, it had been to watch a mother and her child burned alive. Would the same fate await me? Or would I hang from the gallows that had been set up in the crowd? Penryn, Moravian and Gilder had met their fate there, I saw, and despite my pain and the fact they had never been my friends, my heart wrenched.

  "Good gentlemen!" Rosten addressed the crowd. "Some of you may know this person beside me. If you do not, let me introduce the Prince Regent's fetchencarry."

  The murmur grew louder. Rosten held up his hands to hush the crowd, but it did little good. I could see it in their faces and the way they stood. They hated me already, and had not yet been told of my crime.

  "A fine young man, is he not?" Rosten stroked my hair. "Fine clothes. Fine bearing. Handsome, is he not?"

  "Sin is pretty on the outside, too!" Came a voice from the crowd.

  Rosten acknowledged the shout with a nod. "Aye, and he's pretty enough, too. On the outside. But I ask you, my good lords. What about on the inside?"

  "Show us!" I heard many voices cry.

  I tried to struggle, but Rosten had two of his soldiers hold my arms still. He took a dagger with a jeweled hilt, and he slit my tunic and shirt from throat to waist, then yanked it off me. The crowd roared at the sight of my bare breasts. Next he tore off the fine trousers in which he'd dressed me, ripped the stockings from my legs, forced the shoes from my feet. I shuddered in the frigid air.

  "This folly has committed a most grievous sin, my lords! This folly, this woman," and he spat at my feet, "has dared pretend to be a man!"

  The crowd roared. They screamed. The force of their anger and hatred washed over me, and I was grateful for the height of the platform that kept them from attacking me. Rosten held up his hands. The crowd quieted, but not by much.

  "My good lords, we've been living in troubled times. Pornography and violence, the stealing of our sons in the dead of night. And this. A folly dressed as, and living as, a man. Have I not promised you I would bring you the culprits?"

  "Yes!" they roared as one.

  "And did I not promise to return Alyria to the old ways? The proper ways?"

  "Aye! You did! Yes!"

  "My good lords, this is not a man. This is a folly. A sin. A woman. Let us then make her what she is."

  The crowd erupted into furious shouts and cries. Rosten took up his dagger again. I waited for its bite on my throat. Instead, he held the blade to the base of my neck. He began to saw off my hair.

  His touch was rough and it hurt me, but I didn't weep because of that. It was foolishness for me to cry about the strands of dark hair falling and being swept away by the wind. It was insanity to struggle against him with the dagger so close to my skin. I couldn't help myself. He cut my hair, he took my clothes, he stole my dignity. He made me ugly in the eyes of the crowd and gave them leave to hate me, not for any crime I had committed but for what I was.

  At last he had shorn my head. He untied me and pushed me to the front of the platform. I thought he meant to toss me into the crowd, where I'd surely have been torn apart like a rabbit amongst hounds. At the last minute his hand pulled me back. He turned me to face him.

  "You are a woman, Aeris Delaya. A folly. And you'll die a woman, with woman's hair and woman's garb."

  He forced the kedalya over my head, and for a moment I was blind. The weight of the fabric forced me at first into a crouch. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't see. He tugged the material until the eyeslit lined up with my gaze, and then he forced me upright again. He shoved me until I had turned my back to the crowd and faced the House of the Book.

  "Here is one," I heard him say to the crowd now behind me. "And who is the other? Who has spent his days subverting our culture? Our history? Who has made a mockery of Alyria and of us?"

  "No," I whispered, but nobody could have heard me through the heavy follyblanket. "Oh, Invisible Mother. Please, no."

  I hadn't meant to betray him, but I had, not with words but with what Rosten discovered beneath my clothes. They brought him out, cuffed and tied as I had been, and dressed as elegantly. They'd beaten him as badly, too, but he moved forward on his own feet. His eyes looked dead. He didn't flinch when Rosten took the dagger and slit open his clothes, nor when the Book Monster tossed them into the crowd, which fell upon the scraps like starving beasts. His expression didn't change, not even when Rosten hacked his hair and gave that to the crowd as well.

  "See your Prince now!" Rosten cried in triumph as he shoved Daelyn toward the platform's edge. "See the maggot which has squirmed in our midst for so long!"

  Daelyn wavered on the platform's edge. He looked as though he were going to fall into the crowd, which surged toward him, but Rosten pulled him back at the last minute.

  "No you don't," I heard Rosten say. "Not that way. That would be