Branded

by Clare London

  “Hush.” I murmured into the hollow of his throat, trying so hard to hold myself back, trying not to crush him against the hard ground. But I’d not been able to control myself properly since I left off my Devotions, and my body responded more quickly and more fiercely nowadays. The feel of him clutching at my shoulders, his thighs sweating and tense around my hips, the soft groans from him at each thrust—it was too much joy to bear for long! I came, shuddering, refusing to pull out, although I knew there might still be salvation for me if I left no seed in him. No—I surrendered completely to my overwhelming desire, climaxing into him, moaning his name, and pressing my fingers so tightly into his flesh that I was sure I’d hurt him. I could feel the sticky relief of his own climax on my belly, and I heard his soft young voice in my ears, but no words were clear except for my name, again and again.

  “Hush, hush.” My breath was ragged. “If this means death, Dax, there’s no other way I’d choose!”

  IT WAS a couple of hours from dawn and we were both awake. We’d barely slept the night, our emotions charged too fiercely for anything but the occasional drowsiness. We’d drifted asleep after the first time, wrapped awkwardly in the blanket but reluctant to let each other out of our arms. Then Dax teased me awake a time later, his mouth at my groin, sucking and licking with murmured laughter around my balls. My climax was sweeter this time, but just as incredible. I spent my seed all over him far too quickly, moaning with hot excitement, unable to control myself under the onslaught of his hungry tongue and lips. When he looked back up at me, his eyes were wide and bright. He was astonished at the effect he’d had on me. There was also the dance of amusement in those glimmering eyes, that I’d been so easily defeated. So in mock revenge, I rolled him onto his stomach, spread his muscled ass, and pressed my way none too carefully into him again. He moaned, but not with distress. We coupled and gasped and laughed with delight for a long time then.

  And now the dawn was near, and I thought I might be able to hear the sound of men on horses approaching the Place. I’d learned a lot about the lay of the land around the camp while I’d been working there. I hadn’t told Dax, but I’d gradually worked out the position of it in relation to the city. I knew there were ridges of rock between the two locations, hiding the sight of one from the other. During my miserable hours spent in the dry, treacherous riverbeds, I’d calculated the best route to quit the Place without falling foul of the rocks, and marked out the best crevice to begin the tortuous climb back toward the city.

  This information was critical if I were ever to escape. If we were ever to escape.

  And now everything had changed.

  I laid my hand on Dax’s hip, idly tracing the mark there. We had matching ones, a combination, I assumed, of letters from the arcane magic language of the Place and the brand of the Exiles themselves, burned into us when we were first taken. Dax remembered the pain, though I did not. Eila had smiled at her first sight of my design, a scarlet flash of scarred blood and ink on my skin. She’d visited me several times while I lay recovering my strength in that original cave. I’d been in no state to protest, of course, and I was still used to acquiescing to a woman’s demands without question. She’d wiped down the wound as it healed and traced her fingers over the mark, murmuring words that I didn’t understand, her eyes dark with something that was almost frightening. Her smile had been full of bitterness. As far as I was concerned, the brand was further evidence of how time at this Place had scarred us, in many more ways than physical.

  “Smile, Maen,” Dax said, softly. His own smile was bright, his teeth glinting in the pale light of the rising dawn. His voice sounded a little slurred, both from sleepiness and perhaps from other emotions. “You laughed last night. I heard it! You’re a different man when you laugh. Do you only let the pleasure out under cover of darkness?”

  I did smile then. I couldn’t resist it, when I had his body under mine and his mischief teasing at me. “Maybe you’re right. Things aren’t always as daylight-clear to me as they seem to be to you.”

  “You see how it is, with the Exiles? How it’s changed me?” His muscular, naked limbs stretched out beside me. He was totally devoid of self-consciousness. “I can be a person here, not just someone to use for his looks, for his masculinity. I had no respect at the city.”

  “You’re a Bronzeman! Your job has respect.” How could he ask me to forget everything? To turn against everything that’d been my life for so long? And yet I was afraid of disturbing him again; I wanted nothing more than to please him and to listen to his optimistic words. “Your Household has respect, and so do your fellow soldiers. There’s respect between your companions, for your mentors, your commander.”

  “But no personal respect allowed,” he said, almost sullenly. “No personal ambition, no personal attachments. Nothing to signify your life except duty and sacrifice and denying everything that challenges those.”

  “I always respected you.” I sighed into his shoulder. “I hope I give that credit to every one of my Guard. But you, especially… your life could be so much easier if you accepted the honor and gave way to the discipline. You’re fine-looking and very strong. You’ll be a superb soldier one day, a Gold Warrior even. And you’ll have an intelligent Mistress, one who will protect and appreciate your loyalty, as mine does.”

  “I won’t be a Gold Warrior,” he said, in an uncanny echo of my earlier thoughts. “I don’t have the taste for it. I would disappoint you in the end, Maen. And what else does a man have in the city?” I tried to reply, but his words overrode mine. “Nothing! A man only has to fight and to serve. He’s not required for anything else.”

  “He’s admired for that. It’s an honor—”

  “It’s not enough,” Dax protested. His anger was rising again: I could almost feel the heat coursing along his veins.

  “There is nothing else, Dax. Your thoughts are dangerous. Speak those in the city and you’ll be punished, sent back to the Remainder quarters, and will never set foot in the Household again.”

  “With never a chance to fight back,” he muttered. “Did you ever fight back? I can’t see you as a timid Bronzeman, eager to obey, submissive to all.”

  “Never.” It was the only answer he would get from me, however I felt about him, however vulnerable I felt toward him now. There were things about myself that only I knew, and no one else ever would. His childishness sparked pain in me, and I wanted to strike out at him in retaliation. “You’re a fool if you think that’s an option for you. Some have fought the rules in the past, indeed. Some deliberately, and some have just lost control.”

  Dax was silent for a while. “What happened to them?”

  “They were punished. Exiled. Some were killed.” I felt his body tighten against mine. Inappropriate though it was, I felt the shiver of sexual excitement along my spine; I thought I’d never feel anything as good as his lithe body against mine. “It’s rare, but it happens. And some were executed by me and my men. Don’t protest! As a Bronzeman, you’d also have learned the way of punishment and executions at some time.”

  “What did they do wrong?” he whispered.

  “Many different things. They challenged the Mistress—the Queen, even. They were unreliable. They put their comrades’ lives in danger. They refused the Devotions. They were disrespectful to their commander, or they disobeyed orders.” I sighed again. “Many reasons.” Treason, I wanted to add. They coupled with a Bronzeman. But I didn’t say it aloud. The boy wasn’t stupid. He knew how it was. Some men had been more deserving of their punishment, but there was always a political agenda to be taken into account. My Mistress made the final decision on such serious crimes; she determined the punishment. I’d never questioned her wisdom aloud. Not before now.

  “They should have left the city. Escaped to somewhere like here,” he said. It was only bravado. He was intelligent enough to know the strength and power of the city and its Households. Escape from the city was something fiercely resisted, and never admitted officially.<
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  “Impossible.” I touched my lips to his throat to distract him and he shuddered with pleasure. “We’ll go back, and you’ll be a magnificent Silver Captain. Your Devotions will enhance your skills and your strength. Everyone will admire and want you. Everything will seem clearer. You’ll be more emotionally mature.”

  “Emotionally mature? I’ll be drugged, Maen, that’s how it’ll be.” He raised himself on his arm, now staring down into my face. His hair lay awkwardly, and there were shallow bite marks on his neck, marks of my possession and fever. His hostility toward me was a palpable hurt. “I’ll be the puppet they want, not the man I am now. I’ll rut with anyone, like an animal. Not like this, like this night! Not with you.” His eyes were angry and wet with emotion at the same time. I didn’t see how I could think the less of him for his anguish when I was racked with it myself. “I won’t love you like I do now, Maen.”

  The unfamiliar word sounded alien in his voice. It jarred my hearing, at the same time as thrilling me. I put my hand over his mouth and silenced him with the greedy touch of my body. It was all I could think of to do. It was getting lighter outside the cave, and after we were exhausted and spent again, I did nothing but lie still and hold him close. That was all I ever wanted.

  THEY CAME for us both, just after dawn.

  Chapter Ten

  I DREAMED I was at my own Choosing, so many years ago. I felt very young and very nervous. I smelled the sweet sweat of many other apprehensive boys, and I felt the heat of another hot summer on my half-naked body. I saw the fiercely polished armor of a Gold Warrior, Bernos, as he came to inspect me, and then the dark, liquid eyes of my Mistress; she was so much younger then, and even more beautiful. She looked at me far longer than the other boys. One of them nudged me jealously in the ribs, and the Negotiator slapped him on the head for not paying attention. I felt ridiculously proud, though I tried hard to swallow it down, to keep the eagerness from shining too brightly in my eyes. My only hope was to serve the city, to be chosen for that purpose alone. All I’d ever wanted was to be a fine soldier!

  That’s when the pain struck me, slicing through my body. I didn’t think it was in the dream; I didn’t think I was a boy any longer. I was a man, of course I was, a soldier already. My body shuddered under some vicious touch, but I didn’t know if it was from my Mistress, or Bernos, or someone else. After all, I’d received pain from each one of them in the past, why should now be any different? I could hear my name shouted, then whispered with something like horror. It was familiar; entreating; a foul, evil worm inside my head that threatened to suck out my brains and leave me a drooling wreck.

  I laughed, loudly. It sounded very ragged. I thought about Dax and his spectacular young body, and I laughed again, wondering how I could ever have thought it could be mine for the taking.

  His laugh responded to mine, but the sound was abrasive and mocking, not the joyful amusement I’d heard in the dark of night. His hands tugged at my arms. I wondered why I resisted him, but then I saw they weren’t Dax’s hands at all, but those of someone far older and rougher. Blood stained their fingers; light glinted off a curved blade that I knew wasn’t mine.

  Then the pain returned, sharp across my chest: I could smell the hot trail of blood trickling over my skin. I could smell fear! With every nerve of my body, I begged the fear wasn’t Dax’s. It wasn’t a conscious thought as much as an instinctive, anguished emotion that consumed me. I groaned, perhaps aloud. The voices hammered at me: again and again the same words, yet none of them ever clear. Or maybe I had learned the way to shut them out at last. I felt absurdly proud of that final thought, as if that was, in fact, what I’d always been trying to do.

  My memory—my senses—faded yet again into merciful unconsciousness.

  WHEN I was next fully conscious, I discovered myself in another cave hewn into the rock of the Place. I awoke, looking up at the high, stark ceiling, lying flat on my back. I stayed still for a while, gathering my thoughts and listening to a selection of whispers, groans, and coughs around me. It was a much larger cave than the one I’d been in originally, and obviously occupied by many other people. I lay on a wooden pallet on the ground, and when I turned my head carefully to either side, I could see other makeshift beds like mine. Some people had blankets thrown over them and some lay uncovered. I could see evidence of wounds and bandaging, and the occasional body that lay so still I knew it for dead.

  It was some kind of House of Physic, for the treatment of physical problems; unfamiliar to me, for I’d never been in such a place. We had so few sicknesses in the city. People rarely fell ill, except perhaps for the Remainders. Our House of Physic had been devoted to nursing the occasional refugee or nurturing research into the best methods of prolonging life and health. It was closely connected to the House of Magic, and the lines between the two disciplines were often blurred.

  I looked down at myself with difficulty because my neck was stiff and painful. To check I was still whole, I flexed each limb; it was a relief to find everything still worked, despite the agony every movement seemed to cause me. There was renewed pain in my knee and some light bandages on my torso. They were carelessly done; I could see the knife cuts underneath, across my skin, and one still oozed blood. The scars on these might never fade. I felt no particular emotion at the thought, for my body had taken enough abuse already. My mind carried out its inventory very objectively, numbed from misery and pain. But I couldn’t deny the fact I was still alive, and for a moment, I was filled with joy.

  I’d been interrogated. Of course I had. My training told me I’d have done the same with a captive, had our positions been reversed. But this had been personal. Some memories came back to me now—some I wished had stayed hidden. I’d faced physical danger many times in my life, but never had I suffered an attack like this. A vicious, deliberately cruel treatment of my mind and body, to make me release information I wished to keep secret. I may have been naive, but my training had sought to make me a worthy opponent on the battlefield against other soldiers. I’d never been prepared for cowardly enemy tactics as these. I remembered knives, and scalding water, and strange hooklike tools that clawed at my body. Blows had rendered me unconscious, and then freezing water woke me to my senses again. Hands had pulled at my limbs, stretching them, forcing back the digits of my hand….

  No, I’d never undergone any training that might have prepared me for all that. Nor had I ever perpetrated it so cruelly on another.

  But I drew heart from its very thoroughness. Obviously I’d stood firm and my secrets remained with me. I suspected this was why I was still alive, to be ready for the next onslaught. I could only hope they’d not turned on Dax, as they’d threatened—

  Dax!

  I wrenched my body up on the pallet, wincing with the pain of my bruises and sore, broken skin. There were other patients around me, and I searched their faces with a strange, cold, fearful hope. I couldn’t see Dax, but I didn’t know what that meant. Was I already too late to save him?

  “He’s not here” came a low, slow voice.

  It was male, and when I turned my head to the other side, I saw the man in question, squatting on the floor beside my pallet. He was tall and broadly built, but he moved easily. His hands hung casually by his sides, but there was a sharp concern in his eyes that belied his apparent calm. To my astonishment, I knew him. Should it have been so shocking to see him here? I’d not set eyes on him in over five years. It was a relief, actually; a comforting face in the midst of madness.

  “Varden.” I smiled, a little painfully. “What a pleasure to see you. Are you being held here too?”

  His gaze flicked up and down my injured body as if he, too, were performing an inventory of my troubles. He was taller than I, but thinner—much thinner than I remembered him. Varden had been born in the same month as me; we used to joke about it during training. I peered at his face, puzzled. Why did he look so much older, so much more worn?

  “Maen,” he replied gently.

&n
bsp; The word expressed weary surprise and, I wanted to believe, friendship. We’d been more than colleagues when he was at the Household, as I understood a lot more about that now. I felt my knowledge of human relationships had been a sorry, stunted thing for all my life, that my compassion and empathy had never grown from its infancy. But that was how they expected me to be in the Household. Only out here in the Place, where I was a prisoner, had I found the freedom to see people acting in a different way, to see that friendships could be forged and commitments given at will, rather than on command, and that the end of the world didn’t necessarily follow such independence.

  Though at the moment, I wasn’t too sure about that.

  I’d been wary of Varden’s friendship before, suspicious that it would compromise my position in the Household. And so I’d held myself back when he tried to get closer to me. He’d been a mentor of sorts, and definitely a comrade, in the way Grien had always been. But then my Mistress had found fault with him somehow. I thought he’d been moved to the House of Trade. I never heard from him, nor had his name been mentioned by other Gold Warriors. I was rather ashamed now to realize that I’d never pursued the matter further. Truly I’d been a very loyal, single-minded soldier.

  “I was looking for Dax,” I said dully. I don’t think my mind had quite recovered. “My Bronzeman. We were captured together. Takk is looking for information from us, though I think I’ve withstood him and his methods so far. But Dax is very raw in his training, still. I wouldn’t want them to harm him.”

  Varden’s smile was rather sad. “He’s alive.” His tone was very calm as if he were trying to soothe a maniac with his words. It was a surprise to me, because he’d always been a very aggressive challenger, and we’d sparred both physically and verbally. He’d never shown any unnecessary compassion, and he was as committed to the good of the city as I, disregarding any personal needs. So this strange new persona upset me in some undefined way. “Don’t worry, Maen. The boy is alive, and maybe you’ll see him again. But I don’t think it wise for now.”