Under the Rushes Read online

  “Alum Septra,” he said through his next breath. “Alum Septra bought most of the Forum on the night my father was killed—Kyon’s death was proof that he had enough power to keep them safe from censure. The few honest Forum members were rallying to put pressure on the Triari—we were a month, maybe, from pulling our forces from your province.”

  Taern’s hands had stopped their relentless quest for Dorjan’s skin, but he didn’t move back. He stayed, naked and unself-conscious, inches away, resting his hands lightly on the waistband of Dorjan’s trousers, and Dorjan had to close his eyes so he didn’t just look down at their bodies, so very close but not touching.

  “Were?” Taern asked, proving that he was as bright as Dorjan had supposed.

  “Well, the biggest supporter of the antiwar movement died under mysterious circumstances in his personal conveyance last night,” Dorjan said shortly. “If I can cut off Septra’s spare cash, maybe I can make that not the end of the movement.”

  Taern opened his mouth and closed it and stepped back, cocking his head a little to the right. “But… but… you had to kill him!” he protested. “You had to!”

  Dorjan nodded. “I’m not disputing that,” he said. He was running out of time and he still had his smallclothes in his hands. His natural practicality asserted itself, and he began to shed his shirt.

  Taern’s hands came up to help him. “But… but can’t this wait until tomorrow?”

  “No.” Dorjan looked at those hands—supple, long-fingered, well-manicured. He remembered the night before, when one of them had crept up and stroked his ribs, just to keep him still. His breath came uncomfortably fast. “If I wait until tomorrow, the money will have exchanged hands and Septra’s representative will have delivered it. Those votes on the Forum might have been mine. People hate Septra—if he doesn’t pay them, they’ve got no reason to come through.”

  Taern nodded his head then and slid his hands over Dorjan’s shoulders. Dorjan shuddered. Touch. Sweet, gentle touch. The coat and the shirt fell down, and Taern caught them in one hand.

  “I’m coming with you,” the boy said sensibly, and Dorjan saw red. He was used to pain. He bent down and thrust his shoulder into Taern’s midriff, hoisted him over his back, and wrapped his arm around Taern’s cleanly muscled thighs. Oh… oh no. Taern’s groin… rough pubic hair, smooth-skinned genitals… rubbing against his bare skin. He slowed for a moment but didn’t falter. He dumped Taern into the bed and pulled a pair of softened leather manacles from his drawer.

  Taern stared at them in shock as one clicked over his wrist and the other over the bedpost. There was a large ball on the end of the bedpost for decoration, and no, not even the soft manacle would stretch to accommodate that.

  “What in the name of a nisket’s balls are you doing with these things in your bed table, Nyx?” he gasped after they’d stared at each other in shocked silence for a moment.

  Unconsciously, Dorjan stroked the shoulder where the boy’s cock had touched, closing his eyes to savor the idea, before he opened them again to face what he’d done.

  “Areau,” he said gruffly. “If I didn’t comply with his needs, he liked to wander.” Dorjan looked away. “I had to sleep sometime.”

  It was Taern’s turn to close his eyes, and he leaned his head back against the pillows and let out a patient breath. “You need me, Nyx. You need me here in bed, you need me on the street. I don’t know how you survived without me this long.”

  Dorjan’s face—and his purpose—hardened to the cold expression he wore under his mask and cowl. “I survived by not worrying who else might be hurt if I failed,” he gasped. He turned around then, so he didn’t have to see the boy’s eyes on him, and made quick enough work of his trousers to don the black smallclothes. They’d been tailored, so they were modest, and they acted as a buffer between the supple armor and his skin. The boy gasped just a little as he was pulling up his trousers, and Dorjan couldn’t hide his flinch.

  He pulled the long-sleeved shirt over his head and said, “So see? Perhaps you don’t want to share a bed with me after all.”

  “If you think those scars will scare me off, that’s the hundredth thing you’ve been wrong about today!” Taern snapped, and Dorjan looked sideways enough to see him stretched out, pretty and naked, on top of the covers of his bed.

  “Or that could simply be your second lie,” he rasped, and then he slid out the door and down to the stables. By Bimuit and Karanos, he had better things to do.

  Meteors, Asteroids, and Other Things That Crash

  TAERN wasn’t stupid. He counted to two hundred after he heard the man’s padded footsteps on the stairs at the end of the hall. Somewhere in there, he heard the back door of the house—the one he figured was nearest the kitchen—slam, and that’s when he threw his head back against the pillow and let out a snarl and a scream of frustration.

  Then he called Krissa’s name at the top of his lungs until the door opened and a small, plump middle-aged woman opened up the door, her eyebrows up to her hairline.

  Taern struggled for the blankets to cover up his nakedness and smiled greenly. “I imagine this isn’t something you’re used to seeing in here,” he said, thinking that embarrassment was an unusual emotion and he wasn’t thrilled to have it washing over his bare skin.

  “Unfortunately not,” she said shortly and pulled a key out of her pocket. “The young lady said Master Areau thought you might be needing this.”

  Taern looked at the key and nodded. “That would be splendid,” he said brightly, but she made no move to draw nearer, and he tried a winning smile.

  “That would depend,” she said measuring him with her eyes. “Are those your clothes?”

  He looked down at what he’d been wearing that morning. He liked bright colors—turquoise ruffles at the throat, a brilliant scarlet topcoat, grass-green-and-gold-striped breeches that fit like a girl’s tights, and they lay there next to the bed like a circus tent. His smile widened. “Can’t miss ’em in the dark,” he affirmed, and she humphed.

  “They like to think I have no idea,” she said shrewdly, “but you and I both know the dark is where he will be living this night. If you’re going to follow him, you’ll need dark.”

  Taern’s grin settled to its usual cheeky grooves. “It’s adorable how he thinks this whole Nyx thing is a secret,” he said cockily. “The only person who doesn’t know is—”

  “Don’t say it!” the woman hissed, turning to him fiercely. “If this is all sport to you, I’d just as soon leave you locked to the bed!”

  “No, I—”

  “Fourteen years I’ve worked here. When those boys were in school, I made them rolls and sweets for between classes. I watched them, wide-eyed, as they bought their government’s lies and killed themselves to be the best soldiers they could be. He spent a month in bandages after Kiamath Keep, and Master Areau….” She shook her head and wiped her eyes with the back of a hand. “I watched them grieve his father, and their boyhood, and their innocence. I watched….” She looked away, her cheeks reddening. “No. I didn’t watch that. It wasn’t my place. But I could see the rot in his soul festering. For ten years it’s been them making a hell for each other and me cleaning up the brimstone and the nisket shite. And today he brings in a girl like warm wind, and there’s a boy in his bed. You’re hope, boy, but if you don’t take this serious, you’re a false hope, and you will kill him dead.”

  Taern stopped and swallowed. “I’m the boy he stopped for,” he said gruffly. “The boy who told him the keep was full of people. Don’t think he’s the only one who takes this seriously.” His lips twisted up, and he was aware that this smile was not bright or quirky or cocky. It was the smile he used when a john tried to get rough with him or before someone thought he would put out for free. It was flat-eyed and dangerous, and no one ever tried to cheat him twice. “I’m just so damned happy I’m alive.”

  The woman nodded and grunted. “I’ll be right back,” she said decisively and then turned and
left without another word.

  Taern stared after her, naked and exasperated. In a moment the door opened again, but it wasn’t the older housekeeper, it was Krissa, and she was dressed to work.

  Her soft chestnut-colored hair was pulled back into a tight bun, and her clothing consisted of strategically placed straps of leather crisscrossing her slim body and pushing her breasts up and together so they’d look fuller. She’d tucked a riding crop into the strap crossing her hip, and Taern remembered hearing screams coming from Madame Matiya’s dungeon on more than one occasion when she’d worn this outfit. When she turned a brown-eyed glare at him, he winced.

  “Well done,” she snapped.

  “Are you going to let me out?”

  “Mrs. Wrinkle will, when she gets back with some clothes. I’ve got about thirty seconds to ask you what the bloody hell you’re playing with before I decide to order Areau to throw you out of the damned house.”

  “You knew I was coming back!”

  “I didn’t know you were going to… to play with him!”

  “Karanos!” he swore. “For the love of baby niskets, Krissa, have you ever known me to be cruel?”

  Her scowl in no way comforted him. “I’ve never known you to be serious, either,” she muttered. “I just don’t want him to be hurt.”

  Taern snorted. “You know, for a man who boldly professes to be sly, he’s got all the women in this house panting after him in a hot second, but the naked man in his bed? No, he’s getting no love whatsoever.”

  Her lips pulled up at the sides, and she shook her head. “If it’s love you want, Taern, perhaps you should have taken that millipede. If he’s anywhere as damaged as his friend, love is not something that will live easy in his heart.” And with that she was gone, leaving him to wait for the nice woman with the key.

  “Great. Just great. The whole world knows he’s the Nyx, the whole world is trying to help him, but the one man who’s got a snowball’s chance in a nisket’s kitchen? He’s handcuffed to the bed naked and hard… oh shite.”

  Because he really was hard. It wasn’t the handcuff, either, because that had never turned his key. No, this hardness was all leftover from Dorjan throwing him over a bare shoulder in order to toss him into the bed. Dorjan’s skin was scarred—old scars, new scars, old bruises, new bruises. There were scars on his arms where his bones had popped through his skin and scars on his chest where knives or other pointed things had penetrated. His back was a nightmare of jagged little ones and the occasional long slash, and Taern? Taern wanted time with that naked body to worship every one.

  Every. Damned. One.

  He’d known—hell, he’d known from the night before, when the Nyx had come apart under his hands—that this man needed in ways Taern had never fathomed. But now? Taern felt it, the clicking of lock and key—

  A real key disturbed his thoughts, landing on his lap from the doorway. He looked up in time to catch a set of what looked to be smallclothes, but soft, wool and black, as they came sailing for his face.

  “Oh, you darling, you!” he crowed, grabbing the key with his free hand and unlocking the manacles. He paused for a moment to flex his hand and let the blood flow back through his wrist. “I don’t suppose you know which way he went, do you?”

  Mrs. Wrinkle might have had ginger hair once, and her tanned, freckled face might have been girlish and sweet. She was a “Mrs.,” so she might have had children who loved her, and she might have picked them up and tickled them and cuddled and laughed with them, as Taern remembered his own mother doing. Maybe she had laughed like that, maybe.

  But she didn’t crack a smile, not once, as she told him where she thought he’d gone before he started his night’s work.

  By the time she was done talking, he was dressed, including a pair of old boots of Nyx’s that were only a little big, much like the suit that had apparently fit the Nyx quite well when he was younger, before he’d sprouted three inches after he’d passed his twentieth year (according to Mrs. Wrinkle). Yes, every piece of clothing had a story, and it meant Taern had to roll up the sleeves and ankles of the suit as it was, and it was still too big across the chest and the shoulders, but even then he couldn’t spare a smile for the absurdity of slipping around in a larger man’s underwear.

  Of course, by then he was dressed and she’d given him directions and he didn’t feel like smiling at all.

  THERE was a graveyard nearby, a place for Forum members and their families. Some Forum members preferred to be buried on their estates far away from the central city, but they still had a marker, a memorial, a “thank you for your service to our province” sort of thing.

  It was a forbidding place, the lawns impeccable, the memorial stones in perfect symmetry and alignment, and any statues or busts set strictly within size and display limits. Flowers were cleaned up every morning before sunup, and nothing else was permitted graveside, or the family who had left the picture or keepsake would be charged with the grave’s upkeep.

  The place was a marker for the path of the Nyx, and Taern slipped through the lengthening twilight shadows of the pretty, perfect houses to find it. He looked four rows up and two columns over and saw the perfectly blown flower—they were sometimes called niskets because they looked so much like the legendary creatures who were described to whirl, full of light—but they were also called meteor roses, and Taern liked that name better. There were two sitting on Kyon’s gravestone, one blood red and one sapphire blue, and Taern marked their presence and then moved on. So Nyx was sad about his father—that was not Taern’s grief, not now. The marker simply meant he’d gone to his next place in his little ritual, and maybe, with luck, he had lingered just long enough for Taern to find him.

  There, two blocks over from the graveyard, Taern saw the house. Mrs. Wrinkle had apparently once told Master Dorjan about it, talking happily about how one of Dorjan’s old schoolmates had married and had children, and how the house was pleasant, with gardens and children’s swings and a young mother who liked to take her late afternoons outside if she could. It was a reminder, Mrs. Wrinkle said, of the times when many families in Thenis could be found outside, playing with their children. When the poorer quarters had been working class and not poverty class, and before the cardboard cities of the stews had sprung up like mushrooms in the dank loam of Alum Septra’s decay.

  “He stops there,” she said, “and watches. I saw him once, not long after I told him about his friend, and he didn’t see me. I began to return that way near twilight from the market—every night he leaves the house wearing black, he stops by the graveyard with two flowers, and then he stops there.”

  Taern could see it playing out then in Nyx’s orderly mind. (Taern thought of him as Nyx, now, especially when he was dressed for battle, or when Taern wanted to engage in one with him. He liked the nickname. It made the man less of a walking heartbreak.) One stop to pay penance to the past, one stop to remind him what he was doing in the present. Lovely. Just fucking lovely. Taking the grief for himself and leaving the peace for strangers. Taern was glad he was apparently good at taking blows as well as grief, because this made him want to hit the man himself.

  And there—in the tops of a tree, Taern saw him. Oh, he really was good. The tree was back in a corner of the yard, a place where darkness had already fallen, and Nyx was looking in through a window. Taern couldn’t see the window itself, but he could imagine. He’d been part of a happy family once. A mother, young children, a father. Would the father be reading? Would the mother be chasing them after the bath? Would they be eating fruit or cobblers after dinner?

  Taern hugged his own shadow next to someone’s converted stable and behind their (ugh!) compost pile, and watched as Nyx observed the life he had decided not to have.

  The masked, armored figure stayed crouched, head alert, nothing in his movements to show what he was thinking, and Taern wished he could imagine the man happy. But how could he be? Taern had been inside his great echoing, dusty mansion for all of an hour,
and two women—one he’d known for years—had come in and warned him not to hurt the man.

  How could Nyx be happy?

  Taern had known him through but a handful of encounters in two days, and Taern knew Dorjan of Kyon’s Gate was probably a step away from leaping off the bridge in the center of town into Thenis’s dank river, and seeing if the Nyx’s armor bore him down.

  But he didn’t. No, he spent a scatter of moments here, looking at a happy family, and then he flickered into the night like a moth’s shadow.

  It was a good thing Taern had needed to practice moving the same way, and an even better thing that his feet could find their way into and through the stews from nearly every part of the city. For his first few years at Madame M’s, he’d been her most trusted messenger, mostly because he was fast but also because he was reliable—not just to deliver the message and keep it a secret but to keep himself safe along the way. He was fleet on foot, if (he panted with the thought) a little out of practice. Karanos! The man was fast!

  But Taern knew which way he was going, and as soon as he turned left after the river instead of right, he knew which gang’s territory they were in and the most likely place for a meet.

  Yes—there it was, down past the solarium, to where the school had been before it was burned out. The superstitious held that it was a church and that Bieman and Karanos would come down from the heavens and smite the wicked. Taern had listened at his lessons, though—Bieman and Karanos had been men, two of many, who had gone forth through the northern hemisphere and established cities, governments, and whole provinces. Gods, they were another thing, but when people swore by Bieman or Karanos, they were swearing by the deeds of determined men and not by the superstitious wrath of phantom deities.