Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [59]
There was a whirlwind in the sky above her, descending rapidly down onto her. Her first instinct was to run—but of course, that was not what she needed to do. She stood her ground as the sand-colored, top-shaped vortex homed in on her, whining a high-pitched note that set her teeth on edge. Of course, this thing had waited until she was alone.
She ducked as it hit her, and used those long sleeves to screen her face; a good thing she did, or she would have been blinded by the debris in the wind. She was in the center of a whirl of hot, dry air full of sand and dust that engulfed her and almost stole her breath away. And then she felt her feet lose contact with the ground.
Despite her best intentions, she screamed. It did no good of course. She felt it take her, and with a sickening lurch, felt it hurtle up and sideways with her suspended in the middle of it.
All she could think of at that moment was Sasha….
It seemed to take forever, but the time between when the whirlwind picked her up and when it deposited her on the battlements of the Katschei’s castle could not have been very long at all. It had been mid-afternoon by the sun when she had called on The Tradition to disguise her. It was still mid-afternoon, though perhaps just a bit later, now.
But when the whirlwind dissipated and she could see again, she got a tremendous shock. The Katschei’s castle had once stood in the heart of a bleak, oppressively dark and overgrown forest, one where all the trees were droop-branched pines, more black than green, where the ends of the branches dripped endlessly, where fog wreathed the landscape and the space between the trees was host to unwholesome-looking mushrooms and briars with thorns as long as a finger.
Not anymore.
Now the castle stood in the heart of a desert.
In every direction, all she could see were sand dunes and little patches of scrub. The sun beat down on her like a hammer on an anvil, and the sky was like an upturned enamel bowl, glaring and pitiless.
“Hmpf.”
She turned, hearing the sound behind her, and stared.
He was twice as tall as she, and barely half-clothed. His skin was the color of beaten bronze, his eyes black and slanted, and his head mostly bald except for a topknot of black hair as coarse as a horse’s tail, bound at the base with a gold ring. He wore baggy silk trews of an eye-watering scarlet color, and shoes that matched with pointed, upward-curling toes, a pair of gold bracelets around his biceps, and nothing more. He looked down at her, arms folded over his hairless chest.
“And what are you?” he asked in a strangely accented voice.
She didn’t have to act to get her voice to tremble. As it happened, she knew what this was, because she had heard about them from her father, in his tales of his family’s war with Drylanders of the Southern Kingdoms. It was a Jinn. And most Jinn were evil. “A bereginia, sir. A simple dweller on the riverbank—”
“Enough.” He cut her off with a gesture. “Go down and join the others. You serve me now, whatever you are.” His voice rang in her ears, with overtones like a brass gong.
She looked where he pointed, down into the central courtyard of the castle, which was, at least, still a garden. She saw three other young women down there, one listlessly reading a book, one picking at embroidery, and one sitting and staring at nothing.
She glanced back at the cruel, scowling face of the Jinn and scuttled down the cut-stone stairs from the battlements to the courtyard, feeling entirely too much like a mouse in the gaze of a cat that is not quite hungry…
…yet.
She entered the garden not sure of what her reception was going to be. The first thing she noticed was that all the young women were wearing a very different set of garments than the ones she would have thought they’d have been captured in. Instead of blouses, skirts and vests, or shifts and sarafans, or even the brocaded silver-white gowns the swan maidens had worn, they all had on a variation in color and embroidery of the same outfit; filmy, baggy trews of the sort