The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter Read Online Free

wanted to die. He got into fights with other kholics, wheeling through rooms and narrow halls of the ostracon, staggering alleys and streets. He blacked out entire afternoons. He woke up sick and vomited copiously in gutters. He stopped working altogether, letting garbage and shit and dead animals pile up around him while he glared at the silhouette of Jesthe, rising crookedly above the cluttered slums.
    Because he was tattooed, his behaviour was tolerated, or rather, it was generally ignored. Perhaps even unnoticed, some would say. Kholics were known to be a morose bunch, prone to such outbursts. As long as the boy did not come into direct contact with a red-blooded hemo, who then complained to the palatinate, he could act pretty much any damn way he pleased, even dying on the streets with a mouth full of froth, for all anyone official cared.
    But the boy did come into contact with a hemo. During this ranting and drugged-out stumbling around, cursing the clouds, railing against his lot, a beautiful and untagged girl watched from a market stall, on Tornblanket Street—which passed behind the ostracon. She circled closer, drawn to the suffering and low status of the kholic boy. To be succinct, this girl craved challenges and drama, and she was the sort who, like the chatelaine herself, had a predisposition for flawed lovers and doomed relationships. Nowy Solum was large enough, and decadent enough, to have many types. Of course, it helped that the boy (and his sister, who, at that point, felt rather surprisingly lonely in the palace) were also beautiful to behold—at least for those who took the time, or had the inclination or ability, to behold the tattooed outcasts of the city.

    Bounding rabbit-like, braver children played in warrens that tunnelled into the rear of the palace, dashing out and then daring each other to go back in, farther and farther. One or two passages, children claimed—red-faced and breathless—led right into ramshackle rooms and cavernous chambers and larders stocked with dried foods. A few kids, mostly friends of friends, even returned with entire loaves of bread, or with actual stockings, but these treasures seemed few and far between, and the sources of the goods remained, predominantly, rumour.
    Most tunnels ended at solid rock.
    During the castellan’s reign, before he retreated up the towers, into the dungeon, and handed Nowy Solum over to his daughter, children told each other that if they were caught inside Jesthe, they would be strapped to an operating table and vivisected, to be used in experiments. But when the chatelaine took over, well, stories changed, became more vague. There seemed nobody left in the palace to catch them, and what did the woman do in there, anyhow? People said she banned the palatinate from the inner halls and rooms of Jesthe just so they couldn’t watch over her at night, and judge her. Many visitors, for certain, emerged looking a little worse for wear, into the cloudy dawn.
    And there was talk, as always, of a monster living in a cell under the palace, the fecund , and of a strange menagerie in the chatelaine’s bedchamber, beasts that she treated as if they were her own offspring, but no stories were passed down as clear and visceral as the tales of amputations and tortures done in the father’s time, and from the even more barbaric times before that. Just what the chatelaine might get up to inside the palace was elusive for the children, beyond the grasp of young and healthy conceptions. They scared each other with stories about what could happen if they got caught, but, in the end, imagination failed them. This failure, of course, and the dim chances of being chased, diminished the thrill of trespassing.
    That, and growing older.
    Maybe kids still went into the narrow passageways, with exhilaration in their hearts and throats. Who knew?
    Not the red-blooded girl, telling these stories to her kholic lover one afternoon as they lay on her thin mattress of