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“Yes. Are you ready?”

Kerik gestures down at his ridiculous outfit. “Don’t I look ready?”

With a flick of his wrist, Perl conjures a delicate silver chain from the air. Kerik shivers to see it. He has no doubt what it is for.

“Put your wrists back behind you,” Perl says, almost apologetically. “Lock the cuffs together.”

Kerik does as he is bid. He feels the sweet rush as the magic joins the wrist cuffs. He knows he can release them himself, but it still makes him feel vulnerable in a way that flips his belly.

Perl nods and clips the end of the chain to the collar Kerik wears.

But Kerik lifts his chin and says, “Now you're adding humiliations of your own. Is your name on my chest not enough?”

“It is merely how things are done.”

9

PERL

Perl leads Kerik into the Ice Hall. It is busy, far more full of fae than it had been when they arrived. And all of them wear their wings now, fluttering and moving on their backs. Kerik behaves sweetly, as instructed, walking behind Perl, posture erect in the strict collar.

As they pass through the hall the chattering fae seem to fall silent. Eyes are on them both. It makes Perl feel prickly.

He tries to focus instead on the sweet music that fills the air. Music that is beautiful to Perl’s ears. The fae music he has not heard for a century. Soft bells and chimes echoing over each other, building up and ebbing away like gentle tides. He feels a strange lump form in his throat. He has not allowed himself to feel homesick in the last hundred years, but he feels it now. He is bound deep to this place in his soul. Despite everything, it is the only home he has ever known.

But this feeling does not last. As they reach the centre of the room, Perl glances up at the most obvious reminder of why he hates Vylenor. At the highest point of the hall’s domed ceiling the cage is still there. It had been there when they’d been in this hall earlier, but Perl had been far too full of apprehension to look up at it. He looks up now. He can almost make out the figure still inside, still burning.

Some of the fae in the hall are using their wings to fly around in the high dome, so distant they look like insects. They stay away from the cage, not because it is forbidden, simply because they are so used to seeing it there that they pay it no heed. Like so much of the strangeness and cruelty of Vylenor, they have simply become used to it. A prisoner in a cage, burning in the eternal death.

But there is nothing Perl can do about that. Unless he wants to occupy a cage alongside it.

As he stops, Kerik moves up behind him. “Should I be crawling?” Kerik says, soft and low, only an inch from Perl’s ear. His breath is warm on Perl’s skin.

Perl turns. Kerik nods over to a group of fae whose thralls are crawling, behind them, leashed and dressed similarly to Kerik with painted letters on their chests.

“You should be doing ,” Perl says, low and slow, “whatever I command.”

“You’ve not commanded me do anything.”

“Apart from come here with me, dress in that outfit and refrain from speaking. The last of which you are failing at miserably.”

“I suppose that is quite a litany of commands. Is this really what faeries enjoy? I feel ridiculous in all this paint and jewels.” Kerik is smirking. For once, Perl is glad to see it. He seems more comfortable in the outfit than he had been in the chamber, perhaps it is the sight of others dressed the same way.

“It is meant so you can beguile me with how entrancing you look so I will be eager to take you later this night.”

“Really?” Kerik makes a huffing sound and puffs out his chest.

Perl frowns at him. How hard is it to follow a simple order? “Don’t do that,” he snaps, using the most commanding tone he can muster. “Stand daintily like you are desperate to entice me into using you. You look like a guard.”

“I do not think your instructions are very clear,” Kerik says, his tone teasing. “How exactly do you wish me to stand?”

Perl takes a breath. This is a conversation they should have had back in his chamber. “Enticingly,” Perl glances around. Trying to make it look like a simple natural gesture to anyone watching them, he cocks a hip and flutters his eyelashes.

Kerik cracks a smile. “Oh, that does look very enticing. You're a natural.”

Perl swallows, prickling with shame, and turns away.

He finds himself looking towards a corner of the hall where a set of stocks has been erected on a small raised platform. A fae thrall is in the stocks, in a collar and bitted bridle. His wings are bound and pulled aside so he can be whipped by his fae Master. The thrall’s face is twisted in pain as he cries out against the bit.