The Graves will kill us if it’s proven that we are abusing Pearl. If we kill her. We don’t have the numbers to combat the Graves by ourselves. Though my father is trying, through gritted teeth, to spread the word that she must not be harmed, we all know that these words won’t hold much salt if anyone stumbled across her on a dark night.
Before I leave the room, I turn once more to look at Pearl. She’s huddled up into a defensive ball under the blue sheets, with only a small slice of yellow hair poking out. She looks tiny from this angle, and it’s hard to imagine for a moment that this bundle of flesh under the sheets belongs to the most hated family in our state. She likely feels out of place in my room as much as I view her to be out of place. My room is all whites and blues, representing the Claymore colors. Along with my guitar is a fine mahogany table, now cleared of all the documents it used to contain. Those duties were shifted elsewhere.
There are two Graves guards outside in the white tiled corridor, wearing gray-and-black sashes and outfits who peek in at the room when I leave.
“She’s alive,” I tell them testily. “Just sleeping.” That doesn’t stop one of them having the audacity to go right in and check for themselves that she’s breathing. At least they do so with as little noise as possible. I have to suffer this insult in silence, because I don’t want to provoke the Graves any further. They continue to guard outside the rooms. As if concerned someone from our household might do as I fear.
I stalk through the familiar hallways, leaving the house so I can enter the little bar that hovers just on the lip of our estates. It’s a bar only the closest friends of the Claymores enter, an elite’s club, if you will, and when I enter, I already see a small knot of my friends there. Bobby, round-faced and red-cheeked, gulping down another of our mountain meads. Jensen, dour and nursing his own tankard, and Pippin, the shortest of our group, always trying to prove himself in other ways.
Bobby lets out a cheer when he sees me, though Jensen and Pippin are less enthusiastic.
“I’ll get you a drink!” Bobby slams me hard on the back, before dashing to the bartender to order a barrel of mead.
Jensen shakes his head when he stares at me. “I’m not happy with this.”
“Neither am I,” I agree. Especially since it was on the cards for a while that I might be courting Jensen’s sister, Mila Sycamore. “But it is what it is.”
“She’ll spy on us,” Jensen says, fixing me with his hard dark eyes. “She’ll pass on secrets to her kin, and we’ll end up murdered in our own beds. You see if we don’t.”
“You do know about why the marriage is happening in the first place?” I say. Jensen wasn’t there when the Graves threatened annihilation. Lucky him. “It was a do or die situation. We’ve specifically been told that if we dishonor the terms of this marriage, they will seek to exterminate us.”
“Hmph. The Graves are too big for their boots. Think they can just lord it around, tell us what to do.”
“They can, unfortunately,” I reply, which makes Jensen turn up his nose some more. “They severely outnumber us and I’m not about to bet on our chances to escape.”
“It’s awful,” Pippin says then. Compared to Jensen, who is lean, tall, and willowy, Pippin is short and stocky, perhaps below the average height for our people, but more than packing in drive and determination. His hair is a dark blonde color, giving an almost grayish tint to it. “To think you’re going to be shackled to that thing. I’d hate to stick my dick in that.”
“He already did at least once,” Bobby says, dumping a barrel of mead on the table, rousing some cheers from our group as we busy ourselves with filling up our tankards. “He didn’t know what he was getting into at the time.”
“I warned you against going to that bar,” Pippin says, shaking his head. I glance around at the other people in the bar. Only four of them, and all of them seem like they’re trying their hardest to eavesdrop.
“I wanted to try the local drink. We don’t import the Coughin’ Coffins here. And it seemed polite to take off the sash.”
“Fool. If you’d just kept it in long enough to get back home, we’d never be in this mess in the first place.”
“She was pretty hot, though,” Bobby says. “Wouldn’t have minded a crack at her myself. I mean, before I realized what she was,” he hastily amends. “Even I have standards.”
“With your current women pull rate, I’m surprised you have any at all,” I say to him, and he simply grins and clashes his tankard with mine. The table we sit at is rounded and pockmarked, with chipped at coasters and stains the cleaners were never quite able to get out. The floor is a good, solid wood, as are the chairs, and there are candles on every table for mood lighting at night, and also for the bar to conserve electricity. “You still haven’t pulled anyone.”
“It’ll happen one day. Some slutty, pretty girl will just jump right on me, and I won’t even have to pay!” Yeah, yeah, Bobby. Keep dreaming.
“It defiles the Claymore name, to have one of them as wife,” Jensen says, still fixated on the fact that my wife’s a witch. “You must make her suffer.”
Jensen’s loathing is starting to get on my nerves. He’s acting like I could have made a different, better choice about the marriage. Like Pearl could have made one. But neither of us can exactly go back and change the things we did. The mistakes we made. “And risk the wrath of the Graves? No thanks. I can’t make her suffer, or they will make us suffer. Besides, she hasn’t personally gone and killed anyone,” I say to him, though it’s not enough.
“You should let us have a turn with her, at least. Teach her not to fuck around with our clans again. Someone like her is probably used to having multiple cocks stuck in her –”
“She’s my wife,” I snap, and the anger in Jensen’s eyes finally clear. “Don’t talk of her like that. It’s bad enough without you talking up a storm as well! Christ!”
He finally and wisely chooses to shut up on the matter, and Bobby, bless his soul, steers the topics to safer paths. Unfortunately, Jensen’s sentiments will be the sentiments of the general Claymore vassals, since most have good reasons to hate. It's going to be a horrible, uphill battle to fight.
“I’m sorry you can’t marry my sister anymore,” Jensen eventually says, starting on what I believe is his fourth drink. “I know she was eager for a chance to marry up.”
“My father wanted me to wait. He had his eyes on a Tielman woman from the salt flats who had recently widowed. The salt flats have porous borders, a creeping desert and suffer a lot of banditry, and maybe the Tielmans would appreciate an accomplished clan like ours. All they have is desert and salt, after all. We’d be a great boon for them.”
Not that I wanted to marry a widow. But I know what my purpose is. Marriages for people like me are not ones that happen out of love. If we want enjoyment, we find it on the sides, out of the way of family scrutiny, and we don’t talk about it. My father had his wild times, as did my grandfather. In fact, I know my grandfather frequently sought other sources of pleasure other than his wife, because she hated sex. She’d told us all as much.