Under the Rushes Read online

  He was too busy worried about what kind of sex he and Dorjan might never get to experience.

  HE SPENT the morning hanging his clothes up next to Dorjan’s in the wardrobe and doing quick calculations. He had silver—he’d been saving his money when he was tricking, because as much as he’d loved coming into his sexual maturity in a gourmand environment, he’d known, even at sixteen, that he would eventually develop a taste for a specialized meat.

  He figured that Nyx was as specialized as meat got, but looking at his child’s paint box palette of clothes next to Dorjan’s somber gentleman’s dress, he had to concede that maybe he should spend some of his silver refining his image.

  Dorjan kept calling him “boy.” Taern thought that as he was younger, that appellation might stick for a while, but he wouldn’t mind having a slightly more mature look as well.

  But that would have to wait. After unpacking in Dorjan’s armoire and making room for his shaving kit in the bathroom (there was plenty of space on the counter. Why not?), he resumed his initial task of the morning—finding a place for Dorjan’s knife.

  He didn’t trust the suggestion to put it between the box spring and the mattress or between the bedframe. For one thing, those places weren’t easy to get to should they actually be accosted in the night. For another, they weren’t… alien enough. Dorjan moved better half-conscious than most men did while fully alert, and that was the problem. Taern wanted Dorjan to have to wake up before he had the capacity to do real violence, particularly upon Taern’s person.

  That meant that the hiding place had to be secure, within reach of the bed, easy to get to, yet difficult to access by accident. He’d seen Dorjan asleep, clutching his pillow. The man practically slept with a knife in his hand. He needed to sleep with a knife in….

  Hm. In a cunning little box, assembled on the bed frame, that required a simple catch.

  That was it. A long spring along the length of the box. That would do.

  Taern hadn’t worked with wood since that day playing in the rushes as a child, but he had worked with wood. He could close his eyes and remember his father in the workshop with a treadle-powered lathe, band saw, and jigsaw. There was not a light fixture in Kiamath Keep that Olem Kiamath hadn’t had a hand in crafting. It had been his passion—he’d gone to that shop when thinking, when Taern’s mother, Valie, had been angry, when the girls had been too rowdy, or just to do something peaceful and skilled. Taern had followed him in one day, and Olem had given him a whittling knife and a block of wood. The results had been, well, less than artistic, but Taern had learned the basics.

  But first he needed to… oh hells. He was reasonably sure that the only person in the house who could help him was Areau.

  He walked out of the room and down the hall, paused by the two rooms he was pretty sure belonged to Krissa and Areau, and listened. Through the door, he heard the whistle and snap of a whip—probably one of the softened ones Krissa had shown him were often used for this purpose, but still, the snap had been cruel, and Areau’s gasp of pain sounded genuine.

  Krissa’s voice purred, and although Taern couldn’t make out the actual words, he was very clear on the fact that Areau would very much not be available until after lunch.

  He ventured downstairs to find Mrs. Wrinkle, and she, at least, was helpful.

  “What is it you need?” She was at the clothesline in the courtyard, and Taern couldn’t help but finger the fine lawn of a simple white shirt. She must have been one of those servants with laundry secrets, because it was soft. He’d felt Dorjan’s clothes, and although they were nicely ironed, with creases, they had none of the stiffness of starch, and he was glad. Dorjan probably didn’t pay much attention to his clothing as long as it was comfortable, and apparently Mrs. Wrinkle made sure it was comfortable.

  “I need a box for him to keep his knife,” Taern said boldly, “so that he doesn’t kill me in his sleep.”

  Mrs. Wrinkle actually dropped the basket of wet laundry at her hip, and Taern spent the next several moments helping her pick the scattered wet clothes up and take them back to rinse before shaking them out to dry. By the time they got back to where she’d started, she had apparently overcome her shock.

  “He sleeps with a knife under his pillow,” she ventured, and Taern nodded and then explained his plan for a box.

  “He needs to be able to get it easily, but he needs to be able to get it consciously,” Taern said with emphasis, and Mrs. Wrinkle nodded vigorously.

  “I understand, young master, and I even have a friend who will do that.” She paused in the act of pinning up yet another shirt and looked at him kindly. “Are you sure you wouldn’t just rather”—her cheeks stained a blotchy orange—“return to your own quarters for sleep?”

  Taern resisted the urge to tell her that as a whore, sleeping with a man had not been part of his duties, and that it was the sleeping that would make his relationship with Nyx so very special. Instead, he simply shook his head. “If I’d wanted to sleep in my own quarters, dear, I wouldn’t have snuck into his bed, now would I?” He winked at her then and was gratified when her blush intensified.

  “Yes,” she muttered. “Yes, I see. Well, if you give me the knife, I’ll see if Mr. Innes can’t fix it.”

  “Mr. Innes?”

  “He’s our handyman. He keeps the place shipshape, but he’s sort of a free contractor, seeing as we don’t have enough work to hire him full-time. He’s a right hand with wood and metal. Tell me what you want, and I’ll have him make it.”

  Taern wasn’t comfortable with that. “Uhm, Mrs. Wrinkle, you understand that the sooner we get this thing back, the better, right? I can hide it from him tonight, but he’ll be… uhm, extremely uncomfortable without it by his side for longer than that.”

  Mrs. Wrinkle’s eyes got extremely large. “He should be next door in the next five minutes, young man. If you can hang up the rest of this laundry, we can have it tonight!”

  Taern didn’t mind hanging up the laundry after that, and when Mrs. Wrinkle returned, she said the box should be ready after dinner.

  “Will he be home for dinner?” Taern asked, and she let loose with a pleased smile, although her eyes were strictly focused on the dry laundry she (with Taern’s help) was taking off the next clothesline.

  “I think, with you here, he might.”

  Taern suddenly liked her very much, and he felt a compulsion to be honest with her. “You know… you know what Krissa and I were before he bought our contracts, right?”

  Mrs. Wrinkle shrugged her shoulders. “Same thing about half the city has done at one time or another to make ends meet. Not all of us get the good fortune to work for Mr. Kyon, now do we?”

  Taern smiled at her and ducked under the clothesline to kiss her impulsively on the cheek. “You’re a good dame, Mrs. Wrinkle. I think we’re going to be great friends.”

  She let out a schoolgirl’s giggle, and he finished helping her with the laundry.

  WHEN he was done, he took a good look around the courtyard and allowed himself to be seriously impressed. There was a giant barrel set up to spin in place, rings to run through, two climbing structures united by suspended and free-falling ropes, and a number of cannons that confused him at first until he hit a spring button on the end of one and launched a small yet heavy sandbag about twenty feet in the air. At first he laughed, because the thing was not traveling fast enough to seriously injure anybody, and then he stopped laughing because the fact of the matter hit him: that was the point. The sandbag cannons had the same purpose as the rings and the rope structure and the cave of barbed wire and all of the other hard, practical items parked on the acre of land behind Dorjan’s town home. They were part of an obstacle course—this was how the Nyx trained for what he did on the city streets, and a confused battle of anger and gratitude occurred in Taern’s chest.

  He settled on anger.

  Oh, how Areau must love it when one of those sandbags found its mark.

  Taern left the courty
ard quietly fuming, and unfortunately, his next stop was lunch.

  Areau had bathed and dressed to eat, and his hair had been combed and pulled back in a queue. For a moment Taern had hope. This could be civilized, this thing with him and Areau. Areau was Dorjan’s oldest friend—that’s what Dorjan seemed to think.

  Then Areau turned those beautiful blue eyes on Taern and sneered. “I see we’re still here.”

  “I can say the same about you,” Taern muttered, and Krissa cleared her throat. Taern took a deep breath and looked at her resentfully. She shrugged, and the message was clear. They’d both enjoyed Dorjan’s house so far. Obviously neither of them was looking to leave this new position. Taern needed to make nice with Areau or all of that was at risk. “You’re looking fit, my lord,” he said brightly, meaning it, and Areau flicked a spoonful of soup at him.

  Taern gaped. “What in the names of—”

  Krissa was faster with her riding crop than Taern was with his soup, and Areau received a blow to the cheek. Taern had soup dripping down his face, but that didn’t stop him from gaping at Krissa, whose fierce gaze didn’t waver from Areau’s cowed demeanor.

  “I warned you,” she hissed. “I’ve given you what you said you craved, and you promised to behave. That will be the last blow you receive until you live up to your part of the bargain.”

  “I can’t help it,” Areau rasped. “He’s here… he’s here to steal from me!”

  Taern grabbed Areau’s napkin, which was resting by his plate on the small homey kitchen table where they’d been eating, and wiped his face before throwing the napkin back at his opponent. “You can’t steal something somebody’s thrown away,” he said icily and then picked up his bowl of soup and drank it efficiently before something untoward could happen to it. Like Areau’s spit.

  Mrs. Wrinkle came by with plates of warm sandwiches then, and Taern and Areau contented themselves with exchanging mutual glares until she left.

  “You still need to come get fitted with armor,” Areau muttered. “I’ll still see you in the gymnasium.”

  “Looking forward to it,” Taern muttered, and then he looked at Krissa, who blew an imaginary piece of hair from her forehead. Apparently that lie was for the both of them, then.

  She was there, of course, and Taern could truly appreciate why Dorjan would keep cuffs in his drawer and why there had been the manacles that had disappeared from the stable. Areau needed constant supervision, and the thing the man wanted the most was to prove Dorjan wrong.

  He spent half an hour measuring Taern, and he misaligned the tape on purpose often enough that Krissa finally took it from him, took the measurements, then made Areau write them down and looked over his shoulder to make sure he did it correctly. When they had a satisfactory set of figures, she gave him the tape and told him to return it to his laboratory, which is where he’d brought it from, and while he was gone, she sidled up close to Taern.

  “Are you and Dorjan….” She trailed off delicately and blushed, which ordinarily would have struck Taern as funny, but it wasn’t—not in their new set of circumstances it wasn’t.

  “Are you joking?” Taern asked irritably. “After what that one’s put him through? It’ll take me months to fix all that damage.”

  Krissa stopped and cocked her head. “But you intend to? After only a couple of days, you intend to?”

  Taern shrugged. “Try ten years, Krissa. Ten years ago he was a god. The god fell that night. Knowing what the man has been through has only made him more interesting.”

  Krissa raised her eyebrows. “Good. As long as you’re in it for the long haul, you should know that tonight is going to be horrible. Areau’s going to want to be whipped and gagged and restrained, and all I’m going to do is restrain him so I can get some bloody sleep. His shouting is going to keep the entire house up, but I would like him to be obedient, at least, before he starts firing those sandbag things at you, do you understand?”

  Taern nodded vigorously, and she grimaced.

  “All I’m saying, Taern, is that tonight might not be the most romantic of times. Nor tomorrow. It sounds like you were planning to take things slow. I’m telling you it might be slower than you think.”

  Taern grinned at her, suddenly tickled. “Slow is good,” he said, excitement tingeing his voice. “Haven’t done slow before. It’s new!”

  She rolled her eyes, and he wrapped his arm around her waist and kissed her cheek, just as he had Mrs. Wrinkle. God, he loved women. Had no interest in fucking them, it was true, but from his mother to his sisters to Madame M, he’d had no problem earning their adoration, and the feeling was mutual.

  That was good, he thought as Areau clattered back and he stepped smoothly away without being told. It was good to have allies in a place where a man’s oldest and dearest friend had to fight himself daily not to have you killed.

  Taern took his time to wander around the gym as Areau sat at a small desk in the corner and nattered to himself about circumference and joins. Like the courtyard it looked out upon, the gym was a utilitarian place—there were weights and bands in one corner, with a chin-up bar and a mirror, presumably so Dorjan could make sure he was lifting correctly. There was a small punching bag and a heavy leather sandbag and a sparring ring (which apparently doubled as a tumbling ring, given the number of extra mats at its side) and jump ropes, and Taern found he was eyeing the place with a combination of interest and dislike. There hadn’t been a place like this at Madame M’s; all of Taern’s conditioning had come from walking the streets, although not always on the job. He was starting to feel a little stir-crazy and thought the gym or the courtyard might take care of that, and that was good.

  But he thought about Dorjan, that fabulously muscled body, those amazing moves on the street, and the high price he’d paid for all of it, and the place suddenly took on the colors of a prison. How long had Areau been imprisoned and tortured? Areau had his scars to show for it, it was true, but then, so did Dorjan.

  Taern had seen them himself.

  Still, he did ask Krissa’s permission to strip to his smallclothes so he could avail himself of the jump ropes and the tumbling mats, and she asked Areau courteously if that was all right. Areau barely glanced at him, then went back to his diagrams and his muttering, so Taern did so before leaving his clothes in a muddle in the corner and setting up the tumbling mats with as much speed as he could.

  When he was a kid, he used to be good at this.

  He took a few tumbling runs—easy things, front rolls, cartwheels, walkovers, flip-flops—and stood excitedly. He was better at this than he’d been as a child. He took a few steps back and made a run, then vaulted up into the air and spun twice before he landed and tucked into a front roll. He came up with his arms over his head, doing a little dance of triumph.

  “I’m a nisket!” he crowed, and Krissa shook her head.

  “No, moron, you grew up in Karanos during the gravity rolls,” she said tartly, although she did not sound unimpressed. “It makes doing that kind of thing when you get here crazy easy!”

  Taern made a face at her. “Well, it wasn’t that easy,” he grumbled, because he was starting to sweat, but that didn’t stop him from making more passes until he was sopping with it, and sore to boot. But he was excited, happy, and triumphant, and that’s when Dorjan stalked in.

  Dorjan was wearing one of his outfits of black smallclothes that he’d apparently had made for working up a sweat. He didn’t seem to pay attention to anyone else in the room; instead, he spotted the giant leather sandbag and went charging for it, then let out his frustration in a long, wordless howl, beating on it savagely with his bare fist.

  An hour later, Taern was at an end. It had been an hour of watching Dorjan, sweat pouring from his hair and sopping his clothes, pummeling the bag with no less ferocity than he’d started. Every now and then he would roar, “Eight bloody thousand fucking men!” and throw a punch that, with any other man, would have broken his wrist.

  Oh, hells and aether,
his voice shook, but his assault on the helpless leather bag never relented. Areau finally met Taern’s gaze, his expression miserable, and Taern wanted to smack him. Yes, oh Karanos yes, he was despondent over the losses Biemansland had suffered in the constant war she was waging, but Areau, his oldest friend, could only stand there and watch? Taern needed to do something. The fact that even Areau was concerned meant it was time—finally—for someone to step in and save Dorjan from himself.

  Taern looked at Areau again and saw that his initial concern had been replaced. His eyes were glazing over now as he watched Dorjan throwing himself again and again at the bag, his knuckles splitting and scraping and bleeding. Areau’s mouth was open, and his breath was coming fast, and oh hells! His hand was rubbing at his crotch. Taern’s fury practically stopped up his throat, but he did manage to keep his head.

  “Krissa!” he snarled, and she snapped her gaze away from the vision of Dorjan lost in violence.

  “Wha—oh. Fuck.”

  Were it any other time, Taern would have looked at her twice when she swore. Krissa rarely polluted her language—she tried, in fact, to carry herself like a lady born and bred. Most days, she succeeded.

  “Oh hells, Taern,” she muttered, picking up her riding crop and walking toward Areau with purpose in her eye. “Could you have Mrs. Wrinkle set a tray outside my room near dinnertime? I’m starving.”

  “For both of you?” Taern asked, mostly just willing her to get Dorjan’s curse the hell out of there.

  “Fine. If you insist.” It did his heart good to know she’d just as soon Areau starve at this juncture, but it would do his heart better if the pain in the arse was just gone. “Areau!” she snapped, smacking him smartly in the swollen groin with the riding crop.