Under the Rushes Read online

  Areau only visited the streets to seek degradation. Ten years ago the two of them would have tittered and giggled like schoolboys at the thought of visiting a whorehouse. Unless he was looking for a whore on purpose, or to whore himself out for the pain, for the most part, Areau had spent ten years in this house, visiting the courtyard for exercise—plenty of it—but not venturing beyond the gated gardens. Dorjan understood that a whore was a businessperson, nothing less. Areau still thought like a schoolboy.

  “Nobody in this house”—Dorjan glared at the boy he’d once loved, at the man he struggled daily not to hate—“is anything less than a lady or a gentleman. You are to treat her no more crudely than your sister or my mother, do we understand?”

  Areau did a curious thing—a sad thing. He backed up and bowed from the waist. “Yes, Forum Master,” he said formally.

  “Ari,” Dorjan protested, but Areau had already turned on his heel and started down the hallway. Dorjan caught hold of his temper and called after him in the same voice that had stopped him short in the first place. “Areau, son of Coreau, of Kyon’s Gate!” he barked, and Areau turned around, surprised again.

  “You left your companion in the foyer without so much as an introduction,” Dorjan snapped. “Your father taught you better manners than that, and your mother would be ashamed. Come back here and introduce yourself.”

  Areau glared at him but turned around reluctantly and made a short bow. “Areau, son of Coreau, my lady,” he said shortly. “I apologize for my rudeness.”

  “Not good enough,” Krissa said smartly, and Dorjan looked at her in surprise and approval.

  “I beg your pardon?” Again, Areau flinched back.

  “This man went to the trouble to procure you a companion to help you satisfy a need he never should have been asked to fulfill, and you’re rude to him? He claims you honor your parents. I’ve yet to see it happen!”

  Areau opened his mouth and shut it and straightened his spine. “I—”

  “You what?” Krissa asked, her voice brooking no argument.

  Areau looked at Dorjan and managed some shame, or some reasonable facsimile thereof. “I’m sorry, Dori,” he muttered. “You should have told me you didn’t want to do it anymore.”

  Dorjan felt a flare of temper. “Every time I tried, you did something so horrible, I had no choice,” he said honestly, and Krissa turned to Areau, her eyes narrowed.

  “I was told you were a gentleman, and I find a spoiled child,” she said coldly. “Clearly, we have things we need to work on.” She turned and bowed to Dorjan courteously. “Forum Master, if Areau may show me to my room, I can get settled in here. There is work to be done.”

  Dorjan bowed to her. “Agreed. If you could meet me in my study in two hours’ span, I would be honored, my lady.”

  Krissa bit her lip—the first bit of uncertainty he’d seen. “It would be good if we could all meet at mealtime,” she said, and he felt bad that he couldn’t accommodate her.

  “Forgive me, my lady. I often have other things to attend to. Areau and I usually take breakfast in the kitchen together, but very rarely am I here for dinner.”

  “Tonight?” Areau asked plaintively. “Really, Dori? Again?”

  Dorjan grimaced and looked pointedly at Krissa, and Areau flushed and tried again. “It’s been two nights running,” Ari said, still looking lost.

  Dorjan usually only ventured out in his armor a few times a week, but the night before, as he’d slid back slowly and silently through the shadows, he’d overheard something he couldn’t overlook.

  “It’s important, Ari,” he said earnestly. “And since Lady Krissa is here to take some of the burden off my shoulders, it’s best that I use the time I’m given.”

  Areau nodded and bowed. When they were children, they had joked about Dorjan’s status, had mocked the social hierarchy that would have Areau bowing to his oldest friend in public. Now, at this moment, there was nothing of mockery or of play in his bow, nothing of the snide and acid disposition Areau had shown since his time in the asylum. Simple deference. Simple concern. Dorjan felt like his next breath was his first true one in ten years.

  “Be safe,” Areau said quietly. Then—“This way, my lady. I shall find Mrs. Wrinkle for you, and you can give her a list of your needs.”

  “I think you should transcribe it for me,” Krissa said, her voice not breaking a bit as she issued the order. “I like to keep my crop hand fresh.”

  Dorjan noticed that Areau had turned down the hallway and that she had not attempted to move. He got halfway down and looked back. Krissa looked him calmly in the eyes until he looked beside her and saw the battered cardboard case that she’d brought with, Dorjan assumed, all of her earthly possessions. It lay at her feet, which were covered in cheap cloth slippers, but Lady Krissa didn’t bat an eyelash as Areau turned around, bowed deeply, and picked up the case.

  “It’s down the hall and to the left, my lady. I assume you will want the room next to my own?”

  “Does it have an adjoining washroom?” she asked tartly, and Areau conceded that yes, yes it did.

  Dorjan watched them disappear down the hallway and wondered, truly wondered, what it was like to be young again. Perhaps… perhaps he could almost stand without ache and breathe without that binding across his chest that he’d felt for the last ten years.

  It would be nice to see.

  A FEW hours later, he was working in his study, nibbling fitfully on the small sandwiches he’d asked Mrs. Wrinkle to bring him for supper. He looked up happily from the tentative knock on the door and stood to usher Lady Krissa inside.

  “It’s a bit foreboding,” he apologized as she came in. “But please, make yourself comfortable. Would you like Mrs. Wrinkle to bring you something?” He reached for the button that would ring the bell in the kitchen, but Krissa shook her head.

  “He’s worried about you,” she said abruptly, and Dorjan smiled his most disarming smile and shrugged.

  “And I him. It is what we do,” he said. “I will be here for dinner tomorrow.”

  Krissa looked around and wrinkled her nose. “Did he design this?” she asked, and when Dorjan grimaced, she finished the thought herself. “Of course he did. It was to punish you for an imaginary wrong,” she muttered. “Or to punish the rest of the world. Something.” She glanced at the heavy metal monstrosity of a desk he was sitting behind and shuddered. “Would you like me to design something less….” She made a fussy gesture with her hands, and Dorjan decided he liked her very, very much.

  “Gothic?” he asked, and she laughed faintly.

  “Look,” she said after a moment, “I’m going to cut to the chase here. I know you’re the Nyx—I’m not stupid, and I was listening through the dumbwaiter when Taern was talking to Madame M. Don’t worry,” she forestalled him when he felt his heart try to burst out of his chest with a delayed fright reaction, “I will tell no one. But I knew what it was I was agreeing to when you bought my contract.”

  “But why?” he asked, trying to stay calm. “But… why?”

  She cocked her head and thought. “Thenis is a horrible place,” she said seriously. “My whole life—what there’s been of it—I’ve thought of getting out. You could get out. You could have a proxy, spend all your time in your keep—hell, a lot of Forum masters already do that. But you don’t. You stay here and try to make it better.” Krissa shrugged. “Who doesn’t want to be a part of that?”

  Dorjan shook his head. “Most people,” he said bluntly. “But since most people aren’t caring for my dearest friend, perhaps your opinion has more weight.”

  She nodded. “He’s going to be… difficult.” She looked down at her hands and blushed, and it was the first time he’d seen her discomfited since that tense moment the night before, when he’d been hoping she and the boy by her side would run for it.

  “I am aware,” he said, hoping that helped.

  “I just thought that if we’re going to work together on him, you should be able
to be honest with me. It would be easier, I suppose, if I started with the honesty, so I did.”

  He nodded and then saw perhaps what she was getting at. “Our past pattern,” he told her carefully, “was for him to greet me in the stables. He started out by… by picking fights and driving me to strike him.” He looked down, shamed. “When I realized what he was doing and that he wouldn’t stop, even if I said no, we turned it into….” He swallowed on the nausea. “Foreplay, of sorts. I would come back and he would greet me, asking me for… for his choice of pain.”

  She nodded and then asked, “Do you perhaps have some sort of permanent restraint? I would prefer leather, but—”

  “I’ve got some leather ones in my room, if you like, and he’s bolted manacles to the barn door,” Dorjan said through a dry throat, and she nodded too.

  “Is he capable of moving them to his bedroom on his own?” she asked seriously, and Dorjan shrugged.

  “He’s a genius with all things mechanical,” he told her honestly. “If he tells you no, he’s lying.”

  Her smile was both grateful and impish. “Very helpful information!” Then she sobered again. “Tell me now—and don’t be afraid if the answer is yes, because I’m stronger than I look. Will he strike me? Will he try to fight me back?”

  Dorjan thought hard and swallowed against a suddenly dry mouth. He stood restlessly, then came to sit on his desk instead of behind it, the better to dangle one foot off the thing and try to touch the floor.

  “When we were children,” he told her, “I would have said no. He was the gentlest child. He didn’t… drown kittens or pull the wings off flies. He used to protect his older sister—and me, for that matter, if the children of the workers tried to bully the keeper’s boy. He was gallant and funny and frenetic and charming….”

  “But not after the asylum,” she supplied when he couldn’t go on.

  “Or my father’s death, which happened the night we freed him.”

  She closed her eyes and covered her mouth with her hand. “That’s awful. I’m so sorry.”

  “Not as sorry as the two of us.” That was enough. He was done briefing her on the most painful moments of his life. It was necessary, and he knew that, but it was old.

  “So I don’t know,” he said seriously. “I like to think that there is still that kernel of boy inside him, who wouldn’t hurt a woman, but—”

  “But you never foresaw the two of you like this,” she supplied, and he inclined his head.

  “Does that help you?” he asked, and she nodded.

  “Oh, very much.”

  “Good. Then if you don’t mind….” He trailed off delicately, but she refused to take the hint.

  “I have one more question, and I’ll let you return to your work, sir.”

  “Indeed.”

  “So, you attended his ‘needs’,” she began, her inflection over the word obvious, “but who attended to yours?”

  He stood coldly. “That is a very impertinent question,” he said in dismissal, and this time she took the hint and stood too.

  “And you just answered it,” she said, her voice gentle. “Be careful on the streets tonight, Forum Master. They do not get any safer as the time passes us by.”

  She curtseyed then, deliberately, and he bowed and let her leave. But when he sat down again, it was impossible to work. He hadn’t wanted to talk to her about that, hadn’t wanted to tell her anything at all. But he couldn’t help it. She had asked him who cared for his needs, and all he’d had to answer her had been a single moment in a dark alleyway with a young man squatting at his feet. He had black hair and midnight-blue eyes, and if Dorjan could do anything right at all, the boy was currently bound by millipede to the edge of the province to see sisters he’d long thought dead.

  WHEN the bell rang for supper two spans later, he left his study and went upstairs to change.

  The boy was lying there in his great ebony four-post bed, naked under the covers, waiting cheekily with his hands behind his head for Dorjan to come in.

  Dorjan gaped at him for a moment and then shook his head. “I don’t have time for this,” he muttered and went to his armoire for the black wool smallclothes and a new overtunic that he wore with his armor.

  It was the boy’s turn to gape. “You don’t have time for this?” he asked, and it was almost worth the headache he’d just caused Dorjan to hear him flounder for words. “I’m likely the only man to come to your bed happy for years!”

  “Try ever!” Dorjan snapped, too out of patience to be tactful, and he hated the way the boy’s eyes widened with pity. “But I need to leave on the half hour, or my entire strategy for this evening will be for naught!”

  Taern blinked at that and looked twice at the black smallclothes that Dorjan was putting on. “No,” he said with authority, sitting up in bed. The sheets and comforter slid down, revealing a smooth chest, pale but defined, and Dorjan had to force himself not to take a moment to look appreciatively.

  “You’re not even supposed to be here,” Dorjan said after allowing himself a sideways glance. “You certainly don’t get to tell me what to do!”

  “Where else am I supposed to serve out that contract you bought?” Taern replied tartly. “And I’m telling you what to do because you shouldn’t do it! Not for your health, not for your household—let Thenis save itself tonight!”

  “You’re supposed to serve it out getting a stellar education with your sisters at Dre’s keep!” Dorjan snapped, going to his armoire without looking, which he felt was some accomplishment.

  “I’ll send them a letter, I’ve things to do here!” Taern returned, and Dorjan was forced to glance up from the layers of suits and Forum robes in order to glare.

  “I hadn’t thought you were cruel,” he said darkly, and to his credit, Taern looked away in something like shame.

  “I’ll meet them,” he said stubbornly, “but not now.”

  “Then why did you get on the train?” Dorjan demanded, whirling around with his clothes in his hands. He usually changed into his sleek black smallclothes here in his room and then padded back to the stables to put on his armor. It needed to live in the stables because Ari was constantly refining it—and fixing dents, rents, and holes. Dorjan thought briefly of changing in the hall or in the washroom, but that would be ridiculous, and he was having a hard enough time maintaining his composure.

  “To get you out of the train station, obviously,” Taern returned. He looked at the clothes in Dorjan’s hand and seemed to consider Dorjan’s hesitation, then sat back in bed and smirked. “That way I could come back and enjoy the show.”

  Oh, niskets take this! “I’m going to change in the stables,” Dorjan said with as much dignity as he could muster.

  “Why change at all?” Taern asked plainly. Forsaking his own dignity, he swung his feet out of bed and moved across the floor into Dorjan’s space.

  Dorjan took a step back, and the insufferable boy looked up and matched him. Dorjan couldn’t help it—he did it again. In three more steps, his back was against his door and Taern’s hands were busy under his coat and starched shirt, fumbling with his smallclothes. His hands were cold, and Dorjan gasped when they got to the bruise on his stomach.

  Taern gasped too and yanked on his outer shirt so hard a button popped off and hit the wall and the floor with a tinkle and a thud. The bruise on Dorjan’s ribs was spectacular—it exceeded the bandages there to help support his breathing. Suddenly Taern was touching the soft skin above the bandage, his hands delicate as a nisket in flight.

  The look he gave Dorjan was eloquent.

  “You,” he said deliberately, “will get yourself killed if you go out like this. I’m surprised you can walk without stiffness.”

  Dorjan clenched the two halves of his shirt together. “It’s not my first injury,” he said tightly, “and certainly not my worst.”

  Taern parted the shirt again, and Dorjan let him in order to avoid touching his hands. Somehow taking those clever questing hands
into his would have been so very personal. “I can see that,” the young man said quietly, his fingers brushing upon the scars from other encounters—moments when the armor had failed, or when Dorjan had.

  Dorjan grabbed the shirtfront and whirled away from him, deciding that changing in his own washroom was better than this.

  “You may eat dinner with Krissa and Areau,” he said tightly. “We’ll discuss where you’re going to—where are you going?” He turned, harried, to find the boy, still naked, right on his heels.

  “I’m following you,” Taern said, his dark brows drawn tightly over his blue eyes. “You keep trying to get away from me because you’re changing. That’s not going to happen. If you want to finish this conversation in such an all-fired hurry, you’re going to have to take your clothes off in front of me, and that will be a start.”

  “A start to what?” Dorjan demanded, well and truly flummoxed. “You’re a boy—”

  “I’m a whore,” Taern said, his eyes hard, “and you’ve just bought my contract.”

  “You’re not my whore, you’re my ward!” Dorjan protested. “I’m not having sex with someone I’m responsible for!”

  “You would if I were your wife!” Taern laughed, and Dorjan thunked the wall next to him solidly with his fist.

  “We need to have this conversation at another time,” he said, hauling his self-control around him raggedly. “I was not joking when I said my time was limited.”

  “Well can you at least tell me what’s so damned important that you’re willing to go out there when you can barely breathe? Don’t think I can’t hear you struggling for breath, you almost filled the carriage.”

  Dorjan scowled. “I’m stopping a shipment of meteor dust—”

  “There will be another to replace it!” Taern snapped doggedly, and Dorjan took a deep, labored moment and tried to explain.

  “Yes, but this shipment is going to pay the man who set an army on Kiamath Keep,” Dorjan said, fighting for breath. The obnoxious brat was right; breathing had not been easy all day. All he wanted to do was lie down and sleep, maybe take some laudanum for the pain so that breathing was not quite such a chore, but he absolutely could not do that. Fortunately his last statement was enough to get Taern’s attention.