The Voice

2.

“You really did it?”

It was the disbelief and admiration in my older brother Dariden’s voice that had me creeping a little closer to his open window. I was seventeen; I knew better than to eavesdrop on my brother’s conversations with friends. I found out too many things about him that diminished my feelings for him and gave me no liking for his friends. Especially Chayne, who had recently married Kobbi and was now one of The Voice’s caretakers—or guards, as I thought of the people who controlled her.

“Wasn’t easy, since Vision is such an unnatural city, but I managed to slip away from my father for an evening and find a particular shop.”

“And the stuff works?” Dariden asked.

Chayne laughed softly. “She’s pretty to look at, but when you spread Kobrah’s legs, she’s a cold piece. So I put three drops of this drug in her wine, and she falls into a sensual haze. I can do almost anything to her. She’s passive on the drug, but her body is so hot and willing it doesn’t matter that her brain isn’t in the bed.”

“A wife needs only enough brains to know when to spread ’em,” Dariden said with a smirk in his voice.

I didn’t dare move. Hardly dared to breathe. If Dariden found out I had overheard this, he would make my life a misery. Or more of a misery than it was.

“Will she do . . . that . . . when you give her the drug?” Dariden asked.

“No,” Chayne replied, sounding disgusted. “Even with an extra drop of it—which is all I dare give her, because I was warned that too much will make a woman’s brains go funny permanently—I can’t make her do that. But it doesn’t matter, because . . .”

Chayne lowered his voice, so I leaned a little closer to the window, still not daring to move my feet.

“. . . I put three drops on her tongue, give her a glob of that mixture we feed her when we aren’t stuffing her with the offerings, then close her up and wait a bit. Once the drug is working, I can spend hours in her mouth, with her tongue lapping and licking. And I know just how far to open the lever for the right tightness.”

“And then she does that?” Dariden asked, sounding breathless.

Chayne laughed softly. It was such a cruel sound. “Well, swallowing is what she does, isn’t it?”

They left Dariden’s room, and I said a hasty prayer to every goddess and god I could think of that they wouldn’t come around to the back of the house and realize I had heard them. My prayer must have been answered, because they left the house through the front door, and I was able to slip in through the kitchen door and reach my room undetected.

My father was a good man. I was sure of it. How could he have raised a son who would think such horrible things were exciting?

Is your father truly a good man? some part of me asked. He goes to The Voice’s house with moody cakes when he’s unhappy about something. Does he really not know what he’s forcing her to eat?

He couldn’t know. Couldn’t. But if he did know, that might explain the worry I had seen in his eyes over the past year.

I had kept my secret for five years, dutifully making the moody cakes when my mother felt I needed to visit The Voice, and just as rebelliously eating the cakes myself. During those years I learned that eating pieces of regular cakes and breads that we made at home and gobbling the pastries I bought at the bakery with my spending money absorbed the worst of the effects of the Black Pustules. I still got them whenever I ate a moody cake, but they weren’t as big or as painful. On the other hand, I had plumped to what my father had initially, and teasingly, called a wifely figure—meaning my fat-softened body was not the sleek shape a man looked for in a bride but accepted in a wife after the babies started arriving. After all, a man had to make some sacrifices in order to have children.

Then Tahnee blundered one evening when she told my mother she hadn’t seen me at The Voice’s house at a time when I should have been there. Realizing her error and believing that I must have been sneaking out to meet a boy and had used The Voice as an excuse, Tahnee did her best to deny her own words, but her suddenly vague memory about where she had been on a particular evening didn’t fool my mother, who then saw my days of being slightly ill in a totally different way.

After that, I had an escort for each visit to The Voice’s house, and when I watched the caretaker feed her the moody cake, I felt sick inside—because I felt better. But until I made the trip to Vision, I still didn’t know why.