The memory comes with so much sour intensity that I feel my mood darkening, like a storm cloud is coming to thunder and rain above me.
Samick’s cheekbone glistens as he turns to look at me.
The torchlights lifted around the camp dance over the pallor of his complexion.
His hand stills over the clasp of the satchel he’s crouched at.
He feels it, the darkness settling over me.
No.
Not feel.
Hehearsit.
I think of pots and pans clashing together.
It almost lifts the corner of my mouth, almost makes me smile—how fucking ridiculous it is. All of it. Darkness swallowing our world, fae warrior invaders, hordes of special captives, andhim.
I don’t smile.
I spare him a cold glance before I shift around to face the water—
Just as Arwyn’s bare arse moves into my line of sight.
My face crumples.
I swerve my stare to the next fae, but that one is just as naked as Arwyn, like all the others I quickly learn.
A horde of bare bodies moving towards the water.
Some carry soap and cloths, others are empty handed, but they are all too bare-arsed for my liking.
Far down the edge of the shore, where the guards keep watch, kuris start on their chores.
Laundry.
I watch them work, because it’s better than watching naked fae in the water, and there’s nothing else to entertain me.
I should have fought harder against re-joining the unit. I forgot how boring it gets.
The kuris just do laundry. Wash leathers, take toothbrushes to chain-link armours and scrub.
It’s mundane work, but they get on ok. They talk. Mouths move through the gleams of torchlights, smiles are bitten down on, hidden, and they work together.
The kuris help each other.
Ankle-deep in the water, leathers are dunked and scrubbed, then tossed to the next kuri whose arms are outright and waiting, then the leathers are carried back to another group who wipe them down with towels, and on and on that goes.
Still, just because they have started to get used to their lives now doesn’t mean they get to be happy about it.
That’s madness.
These supposed distant descendants of halflings and fae and kintas. All to be rounded up and taken into literal slavery.
I’m still not so sure I even know what that means. But I’m also utterly convinced my mind has gone into some sort of standby or default mode, a focus on survival only, and there’s no room left for all these spun stories of folklore come to life, of fae babies hidden in the human world and all that nonsense.
I see no signs of faeness in the kuris.
