Under the Rushes Page 9

  “Such as the boy you wanted but did not ask for,” Madame said coyly, and Dorjan almost spat out his tea. She threw back her head and laughed. “You’re adorable,” she said, a sweet smile playing with the corners of what could have been a lean mouth. “Look at you. Did you think Taern wouldn’t come straight to me last night and tell me about his adventures?”

  Dorjan swallowed and wiped his mouth. “I hope he didn’t get in trouble,” he said softly, because the thought had preyed on him. He’d seen the lives of whores on these streets, even in the best of the places.

  Madame rolled her expressive honey-brown eyes. “Please, my darling. I would have done more than played your instrument in an alleyway to have my girls safe—and I wouldn’t have let you get away at the end, either.”

  “That is….” Oh Bimuit. “For the last ten years two people in the world have known that,” he said quietly. “Two. And now four know. It was a mistake on my part, one I can’t afford to repeat. I can trust on your discretion on this?”

  Madame blew on her tea and eyed him over the rim. “Oh, now you’re insulting my professional ethics. And Taern’s as well. You get nowhere in this business without discretion. And,” she added soberly, “that goes for the girl—whichever girl—you decide to hire at the end.”

  Bimuit. Dorjan took a breath and let the blush just wash right over him, and tried not to count the minutes until he could leave this place with a solution to his and Areau’s dilemma. “My apologies.” He inclined his head. “But about that boy—where did he come from?” he asked, that niggle of curiosity, of familiarity, unable to leave him alone.

  Madame Matiya raised a perfectly sculpted eyebrow. “Of all people, you should know, Forum Master.”

  Dorjan startled and scowled. “Why me?”

  She startled and scowled back at him for a moment, and for just a moment, he saw the very strong man inside (or outside) of the very strong woman. “Does the world really have such a short memory, Forum Master Dorjan of Kyon’s Gate?”

  Dorjan maintained her gaze steadily, refusing to be unnerved. “I am unaware of what it is supposed to remember,” he said politely, and she shook her head and tilted her lips in a disbelieving smile.

  “Oh, you’re good. You’re better than most of my whores at dissembling. Do you get paid to pretend to idiocy, or is that a perk of the job?”

  Dorjan swallowed and maintained his polite smile. “Let’s call it a perk, shall we?” he said, so grateful for the solid ground of dissembling and maneuvering that it didn’t even occur to him to tell the truth.

  Madame nodded and took a breath, obviously to quiet a zinging temper. “Yes, yes. I understand. Your need for secrecy is very likely more important than my own. I’ll bend to that and say it outright. I am old enough to remember Kiamath Keep, Dorjan. The streets were whispering about you for years—you made a wonderful tale. The young man who dared to question his superiors and almost died of his injuries. We don’t get any Forum gossip down here, but the idea of you there, working to restore Thenis to glory—don’t think that hasn’t put some children to sleep with more security than we’ve had in years.”

  Dorjan sat up straight and fought to breathe. Black spots danced in front of his eyes. “Kiamath Keep?” he asked, his throat almost too tight to let the words through. He remembered the flashes of midnight blue, the dark hair—it had been straight and glossy. Sometimes hair did that, he thought randomly. It was a thing that happened at puberty. Mostly he remembered the attitude, the courage, the insistence from a young boy. Uncomfortably, he juxtaposed that memory with having a hell of a time keeping a grown young man from finding the stay to his trousers.

  Madame regarded him steadily from under lashes thick with something black and purposefully sooty. Her eyelids were powdered in purple and green, and she really was exquisite. He had a thought that in spite of what genitalia she may have been sporting beneath her dress, she was far too much of a woman for his tastes, and he wondered if she would be flattered by that. He hoped so—it was a compliment.

  “Yes, Dorjan,” she said simply. “Does this mean something to our young friend?”

  Taern. That was his name. Dorjan nodded. “He should know his sisters live,” he said gruffly. And then, because he must: “And that his parents do not.”

  “You should tell him,” she said softly.

  “If he wishes to go visit his sisters, may he?” He ran a shaking hand over his face. He didn’t want to do it. He didn’t. This was not within his purview, speaking to the people he had failed. Was it not bad enough that he failed? Was it not horrific enough that he was damned near ineffectual in his work to change his city, his people, his world?

  “Would you be interested in buying his contract?” she asked, her voice sharp. Of course. Of course. He was already buying one employee out from under her. She would need compensation.

  “If he wishes to go,” Dorjan said honestly. “If he wants to leave here—”

  “Thank you,” Madame said quietly, and he pulled himself out of his own anxiety enough to see that her eyes were lowered and that she meant it.

  “For what?”

  “For not assuming that anyone would rather be anything than a whore.”

  “I spend all day in the Forum,” he said absently, “pretending to be a moron so that I can lead gullible men. Quite frankly I’d rather fuck men for money. That, at least, is honest. How am I supposed to tell him?”

  It was Madame Matiya’s turn to spit out her tea. “Bimuit!” she coughed, and Dorjan stood courteously and clapped her on the back a few times. When she was done coughing, she looked up at him with amused exasperation. “You’re perfect for each other,” she said when she could speak. “Don’t worry how to tell him. Buy his contract, and I’m pretty sure one of you will blurt out an uncomfortable truth within seconds of speaking.”

  There was a banging down the pipe, and she stood. He rose to accommodate her, and she walked to the door and opened it.

  “Hello, ladies. Krissa?”

  “Yes, Madame.”

  Dorjan recognized the girl from the night before—tiny, delicate as porcelain, barely of age. But she’d stayed there and stood next to Taern as he’d faced down a man who was obviously dangerous.

  “Go fetch Taern and then come back and join us, please.”

  Krissa curtseyed and grinned up at Dorjan impishly. “Taern will be happy to be summoned,” she told him exclusively, and he found himself smiling. Brave. She was exceptionally brave. He turned toward the other women and tried to look at them objectively.

  The first was as tall as Madame Matiya, with white-blonde hair and an icy demeanor. He gave his best bumbling smile, the one that seemed to have all of the men in the Forum convinced that he was a nice, well-meaning man, just easily led astray.

  He was rewarded by a cold disdainful smile, and he paid that back with a raised eyebrow. No real smile, no contract, he thought grumpily. He had to live with this woman too.

  He smiled at the next girl and was graced by a smile in return—a distracted smile, to be sure, from a plump girl with enough curly red hair to choke a hexacow.

  He bowed to her, and she bowed low enough for something to fall out of her cleavage.

  “Let me retrieve—ow!” Apparently it was a race to see which one of them could get there first, and both of them backed up, glaring, rubbing their heads after knocking them hard.

  “I’m sorry,” she fluttered, and then she squatted like a peasant to get the damned pen and tiny pad of paper. “I’m a bit of a dangle-weed. I think Madame M just asked me here so you could see the bottom of the scale.”

  He laughed at her, charmed. “I’m sure that’s not true,” he said, trying to reassure her. “But while your friend here leaves me with no doubts, I do need to ask—I need pain.” Madame Matiya cleared her throat, and he rephrased that. “My friend needs pain—this is, honestly, for another soul, and it is not an option. You seem sweet, but….” He trailed off delicately, and she grimaced.


  “Don’t get me wrong,” she said frankly, pushing that mass of hair back from her face. “I’m a right whipcrack at the pain thing, Forum Master, but….” She grimaced and looked apologetically at Matiya. “This is to buy a contract, is it not?”

  Matiya grimaced. “Paenny—”

  “She won’t make it without me,” Paenny said soberly. “I know I’m a right mess—”

  “It’s asteroid dust, Paenny. She… she won’t make it at all.”

  Dorjan grimaced. Asteroid dust—it wasn’t really from the asteroids at all; it was, in fact, a dried distillation of flowers that only grew in Karanos and the blood of a rodent commonly found in Biemansland. Highly addictive, instantly pernicious, it could reduce a user to a coughing husk of humanity within months.

  He looked at the absentminded Paenny with new compassion. Distracted for a sister? A lover? It didn’t matter. Yes, a loved one with an addiction—it was not like he didn’t know what one of those was like, was it?

  “No,” he said gently. “You wouldn’t be able to visit your friend on the streets if you came with me.”

  The girl looked beseechingly at Matiya, who grimaced and sighed, and at that moment the other door opened and Krissa came in, her dark hair pulled back from the tumbling fall down her back into something more like what the blonde ice queen wore. She was pushing a hairpin into place, and Taern was behind her, securing everything there, and Dorjan had another moment to smile.

  “You don’t need that show for me,” he said, sharing a look with Madame Matiya. “Krissa, Taern, if you could stay for a moment, I have an offer for you.” He dismissed the cool blonde with a nod, and she flounced off without uttering a word. For Paenny, he took her hand and kissed the back gently.

  “Don’t let your friend’s misfortunes be your own,” he advised soberly, feeling like a hypocrite, but it must have meant something to her, because she dabbed at her eyes and curtseyed before turning from the room.

  Krissa was looking up at him, her dark eyes impish and dancing, and he felt another unlikely urge to laugh.

  “Bimuit, you’re not lacking for spirit, either of you!” he said, feeling grateful. This had been a day of surprises and of painful revelation, but the thought of this bright-eyed girl in his sullen, cold household, eating at the table with him and Areau, speaking with them on the odd days when he could linger in the sitting room in the evening… it was beguiling, that’s what it was, and he was suddenly grateful for the perky resilience of the children of the streets.

  “Krissa?” he said gallantly. “I do have an offer for you.” He outlined the situation as cleanly as he could, without any of the hesitation that had plagued him with Madame, and he was reassured as she nodded and hesitated thoughtfully at some points. When he got to the part about the time span and the option to leave, she looked almost disappointed.

  “What if I want to stay?” she asked almost plaintively. “You’re asking me to exchange one home for another… what if he dislikes me, and yet I want to stay?”

  Dorjan blinked. He honestly hadn’t thought of it. Then his common sense reasserted itself. He ran his keep’s affairs from his loathed office in the town house. He knew the rules he and his father had always abided by.

  “No one in my keep who wishes to earn a living of any sort is ever forced to leave,” he said after a moment of quiet regard. “If you and Areau are not compatible, I swear to you, you may either stay at the town house in some capacity or, if you like, you may go into the country and spend your time working in Kyon’s Gate. I doubt you will find the same employment, my dear, but my mother will find you something to do.”

  Krissa smiled confidently and then bowed to Madame. “May I go pack my things?” she asked, and when Madame M nodded regally, Krissa launched herself into the woman’s arms for a strong, content hug.

  “You’ll be magnificent,” Madame Matiya murmured. The women released each other, and Madame looked directly at Dorjan. “I shall leave the two of you alone.”

  With that, she and Dorjan’s new employee left, and Dorjan was left looking into a pale oval of a face with midnight eyes and an impish grin similar to that of his friend’s.

  “So,” Taern said grandly, “what is it you wanted to discuss?”

  Stubbornness and Tea

  TAERN scowled at the bloody stubborn man. Yes, he understood that his sisters were alive—he even understood that Nyx had saved them, had, in fact, been the same soldier who had listened to him at the beginning of that bloody awful night and gone bounding up to Kiamath Keep on the great metal cricket. Madame Matiya had brought him square with the odd and amazing history of Forum Master Dorjan, son of Kyon, during the long winter nights when they’d sat and sipped their tea and told stories of the appalling state of the world.

  It hadn’t been that hard to put together. Forum Master Dorjan had tried to save his family, and until this very moment, Taern thought he’d failed miserably, but that was not the case. His memory of his little sisters was dim yet powerful, and yes, oh yes, he’d love to see them again.

  But not right now, and that was what he didn’t understand.

  “You wish to buy my contract,” he asked for what must have been the fourth time, “and send me to some keep on the edge of the gravity roll so that I may… what? Go be schooled with my sisters? Don’t you think I’ve learned enough on the streets of Thenis to make that unlikely?”

  Forum Master Dorjan had short-cropped hair, a wide-cheekboned face, and a lantern jaw that came to a rather abrupt point. He had a bold nose and large brown eyes that might have been limpid and expressive, but Taern couldn’t tell; the flesh around them was puffy and sagging from lack of sleep, and Taern thought that this could be the one man in the world who needed to buy himself a whore as a matter of medical necessity. Taern was up for that job, oh yes he was.

  But not for that other thing, oh no he was not!

  “Don’t you want to see them?” Nyx (as Taern would forever think of him as) asked, sounding weary.

  “Of course!” Taern snapped. “Of course I do. I want to see them. I’d love for them to know I’m alive as well! And….” He had to breathe deeply here. He’d thought they were all dead. To know that his parents had died, that was something different. But he’d learned, these ten years, first on the streets and then in Madame M’s place, how to think about the now. Don’t think about the customer and his sneering use of your body, think about whether what he’s doing feels good. If it feels good, enjoy it. If it doesn’t, adjust your position until it does. Life could be boiled down to the simple if you thought of it that way, and Taern was good at boiling life down to the simple.

  The simple right now was that he’d finally found a reason this Karanos pissed-on city held any appeal whatsoever.

  “I’d like to grieve my parents,” he said after a moment in which the silence stretched too long. “It is true. I would. But what you do at night—that looks interesting! I’d very much like to be a part of that.”

  Dorjan’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head, and for the first time since he walked into Madame M’s, the man looked truly awake. “That is out of the question!”

  Taern scowled. “So let me get this straight—you’ll buy my contract to put me on a millipede like a good little schoolboy and then send me out to gravity’s edge so that I can see my little sisters, avoid telling them what I’ve done for the last few years because that’s something you want impressionable young girls to think is charming, and then find some sort of activity out there that doesn’t involved sucking the cock of handsome strangers in an alleyway, right?”

  Dorjan glared at him crossly. “Succinct,” he muttered. “Yes. What you tell your sisters is your choice, but yes. I would dearly love to know that the boy I saw ten years ago was finally safe with the family we could save. Is that so bloody awful?”

  Well, yes and no, right?

  “That time has passed,” Taern said brutally, thinking about it. “I’m not saying I plan to be a whore all my life—I didn’t
plan to be one for this much of it! But I am saying I don’t want to be a farmer. I don’t want to mine asteroids. I don’t want to be a steward or a housekeeper. I’d love to be a soldier, but not for this bloody province, and I’d love to be a peacekeeper, but the same thing goes. What I want to be… truly want to be, is you.”

  “Absolutely not!” Dorjan sputtered, and Taern looked at him in surprise.

  “Why not? It seems to me like you’d want some help!”

  “What I do at night? What I do at night?” Dorjan cut a fine figure in that suit, with the long tails and the responsibly tied cravat. It was amusing to see him destroy that impression with the flailing of arms and the mouth that opened and closed independently of words. “It’s awful! Nobody wants to do that!”

  Taern took a breath and looked at him. “Then why do you?”

  Abruptly that amusing loss of control ceased. Dorjan drew himself up, and the face he presented to Taern was, no doubt, the same face he wore under the mask and the cowl. “Regardless,” he said with icy calm. “Regardless of what I do and why, you will go pack your things. I will buy your contract, and you will have the life you could have had, if you had not been a bloody-minded child and run off into the night.”

  Taern raised his eyebrows. Oh really? “I was frightened,” he said rationally, and that grim-faced scowl intensified.

  “I was worried. Now go pack, and we can make the station before the last millipede leaves.”

  Taern laughed outright, but he didn’t contradict the man. “Right. I’ll go pack. You just keep deluding yourself that this is going to turn out the way you think it should.”

  He left Dorjan gaping and trotted out of the room—and practically into Madame M’s waiting chest.

  “So?” she asked, looking at him as though she expected him to gossip immediately.

  Well, it wasn’t as though he’d ever disappointed her, was it?

  “He thinks he’s shipping me off to my sisters and some sweet little hidey-hole in the country,” Taern snapped, charging through the foyer and to the stairs.