Under the Rushes

by Amy Lane

  Readers love AMY LANE

  Chase in Shadow

  “…a beautifully moving story of forgiveness, acceptance and love.”

  —Smexy Books Romance Reviews

  Gambling Men

  “…a great friends-to-lovers story about changing up the rules and reinventing the game midstream.”

  —The Novel Approach

  Super Sock Man

  “This is a sweet confection of a story, filled with lovely characters happily finding their way to love.”

  —Joyfully Jay

  The Talker Collection

  “The growth of these two characters is wonderful to behold and when we see that final chapter between these beloved characters…well, let’s just say tears were flowing and a smile was on my face.”

  —Love Romances and More

  Living Promises

  “Ms. Lane is not a pleasant afternoon curl-up read. She grabs her readers and never lets them go. Her writing is definitely in your face. Living Promises is painful and beautiful and so real.”

  —Black Raven’s Reviews

  By AMY LANE

  NOVELS

  Chase in Shadow

  Clear Water

  Dex in Blue

  Gambling Men: The Novel

  The Locker Room

  Mourning Heaven

  Sidecar

  A Solid Core of Alpha

  The Talker Collection (Anthology)

  Under the Rushes

  THE KEEPING PROMISE ROCK SERIES

  Keeping Promise Rock • Making Promises • Living Promises

  NOVELLAS

  Bewitched by Bella’s Brother

  Christmas with Danny Fit

  Hammer and Air

  If I Must

  It’s Not Shakespeare

  Puppy, Car, and Snow

  Truth in the Dark

  A Turkey in the Snow

  KNITTING STORIES

  Super Sock Man

  How to Raise an Honest Rabbit • Knitter is His Natural Habitat

  The Winter Courtship Rituals of Fur-Bearing Critters

  GREEN’S HILL STORIES

  Guarding the Vampire’s Ghost • I love you, asshole!

  Litha’s Constant Whim

  TALKER SERIES

  Talker • Talker’s Redemption • Talker’s Graduation

  Published by DREAMSPINNER PRESS

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com

  Copyright

  Published by

  Dreamspinner Press

  5032 Capital Circle SW

  Ste 2, PMB# 279

  Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886

  USA

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Under the Rushes

  Copyright © 2012 by Amy Lane

  Cover Art by Anne Cain

  annecain.art@gmail.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Ste 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA.

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  ISBN: 978-1-62380-244-8

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  December 2012

  eBook edition available

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-62380-245-5

  Dedication

  As always, this one goes to Mate because he loves me, and I’m not always sure why. But it also goes to Mary, who believes in my worlds and understands my craving for fantasy; and to Lynn, who likes all angst; and to Gin, who edited this one and didn’t, not once, threaten to throw me in a black and brackish quarry with a granite boulder necklace to commune with the muck at the bottom.

  Under the Rushes

  THE boy should not have been there.

  Dorjan almost stopped short, but the phalanx behind him was wearing steam-enhanced walking armor, and the subsequent crash-up and bottleneck would literally cripple the army. Still, the boy was not supposed to be there.

  Dorjan was nineteen. He’d enlisted two years earlier, because the age of consent was sixteen, and he’d wanted to finish his university studies before he joined to serve his province. He was young, brilliant, and well trained. He’d also practiced for hours while using the steam-enhanced walking armor, and he had a few tricks the commanding officers were not aware of.

  Fluidly, using some well-honed muscles he was justly proud of, he stepped sideways, taking all of the forward inertia of the steam system to propel both his armor and his body and redirect it. After two smooth steps, he disconnected the main copper tube tugging at the back of his neck, sending the steam into the frosty autumn evening. His armor suddenly drooped around him, pulling him down like weights in a quagmire. Of course, part of that might have had to do with the spongy ground and the tricky bits of gravity that rolled through the Karanos province.

  The gravity was, in fact, one of the reasons Dorjan’s government, the Forum of Biemansland, had refused to quell this threat of usurpation until the steam armor was perfected. Dorjan’s friend Areau had participated in that development—in the development of most of the army’s new technology—and was justly proud of his creation.

  The gravity was behaving at the moment, and that was good, because the steam armor without the steam weighed a bloody ton… but still.

  The boy was not supposed to be there.

  He was young—nine at the most—and Dorjan wouldn’t have noticed him, except his hair was blacker than sin-stained pitch, and he was hiding in some rushes that had gone brown with the chill of the season. The off color had caught Dorjan’s attention first, but as they’d made to pass, he’d seen the eyes—almost that same black, he thought, but then they glinted midnight blue.

  And that was when Dorjan broke formation.

  He squatted down next to the rushes and looked curiously into them. The boy had reached that age where his arms and legs were too long in proportion to his body, and his hands and feet were even longer still. But in spite of that protuberance of limbs and predominance of elbows and knees, he seemed small for his age, and quick, and the look he cast Dorjan was unfriendly and cautious but not frightened.

  “What’re you doing here, boy?” Dorjan asked before he grimaced and lifted his visor so the boy could see his face. Bimuit, what a disaster. “There were to be no people here. We’re destroying a building, that is all.”

  The boy’s eyes grew huge. “A building? The only building is mine!”

  Dorjan frowned and tried to speak nine-year-old boy. “Yours—you mean you have a hut around here?”

  The boy’s mouth pulled up in a sneer, and too late Dorjan recognized the fineness of his clothes: small-weave linen with leather patches at the elbows, and boots that were supple and had two buckles on the sides. “A hut? I’m not a bloody peasant, you prat bastard! You’re heading for Kiamath Keep—I live there. That’s the only place this road leads!”

  “Lokargo!”

  Dorjan swore to himself and looked up at his lokogos. “Yes, Lokogos Dre!”

  “What are you doing out of ranks? Your battalion has gone on without you!”

  Dorjan frowned at the man and gestured to the boy. “He says we’re not heading to a weapon stockpile,” he told the man, feeling lost. The stratego had been most clear—Dorjan had
been in the room when he’d briefed Dorjan’s superiors. He’d said they were eliminating a weapons stockpile and that there should be no civilian casualties. It would be a righteous victory, Stratego Alum Septra had proclaimed, one they could be proud of.

  It was, Dorjan knew, the only reason Areau had agreed to work so many sleepless nights on the armor. He wanted peace. Hell, all of the citizen soldiers wanted peace. It was the banner under which they’d enlisted. As young as he’d been, Dorjan had plowed through his studies like he was being ridden by a steam-powered nisket so he could enlist in the damned army and fight for peace.

  The lokogos swung down off his mechanized cricket and flat-handed the spot right behind the creature’s ear. “Not a stockpile?”

  To his credit, he sounded stunned.

  “That’s my home!” the boy shouted, and Dorjan was right—he wasn’t stupid. “You’re taking all these scary people to my home? And the company that went before?”

  Dorjan blinked at him, the full horror of the situation descending. His company was supposed to ride cleanup. Areau was probably approaching the compound now with the stratego, the better to simply destroy the place so Dorjan’s company could put out the fire and keep destruction to the surrounding marshland to a minimum.

  “Lokogos!” Dorjan said, suddenly fearing.

  “Connect your armor,” the lokogos muttered. “Connect it. Now. Get on the cricket—I said get on!”

  Dorjan looked at the boy. “Boy,” he muttered numbly, “stay here.” He looked at the lokogos, who nodded. “Stay hidden. I’m going to try and stop a disaster, you hear me?”

  The boy’s face had frozen, and for the first time, Dorjan saw fear. “My mum?” he said, sounding shocked. “My da? My wee baby sisters—there’s three of them! You monsters wouldn’t hurt the wee babies, would you?”

  Dorjan didn’t know how to answer that. Two minutes ago he would have said no, but now? They’d been told no casualties. They’d been told a bloodless exercise—a warning shot. How could this intelligence they’d been given be so wrong?

  He reconnected the steam pipe at the back of his neck and threw his leg over the cricket. He lifted his arse just so, plopped his bottom down, and felt the steam jack of the cricket fit into the port in the armor, and suddenly the generator that made the armor so heavy was now powering them both.

  “Hide, boy,” he shouted and pointed the cricket toward the south, where Areau’s regiment had been heading. He rubbed his hands flat down the back of the cricket’s head. The legs—useful for hopping among the burdocks of weeds in the swamp—suddenly folded behind the cricket’s metal body, and the big rubber-gum covered wheels descended and began to whirr.

  The lokogos shouted through his amplifier for the entire battalion to adjust right, and a corridor opened down the road on the left. Dorjan closed his eyes, said a prayer, and thumped twice on the cricket’s head to ride at full speed ahead.

  It was a nightmarish ride, made worse by the cricket’s speed and its tendency to leap whenever an obstacle appeared. If Dorjan hadn’t been jacked into the generator port, he would have been thrown, and sometimes, in his worst moments afterward, he wished he had been. But that night, hurtling across the dirt road and through space, he still believed in honor and that this entire debacle was just an honest mistake.

  The cricket arrived at Kiamath Keep after a particularly hairy bound. Dorjan actually had to close his eyes at the sight of battalion after battalion marching upon what he could see clearly from this vantage point was exactly what the boy had said: a compound, a simple keep, much like the one Dorjan had been brought up in. It wasn’t an armory, it was a country town house designed to cater to the farmers who were supported by the landholders, who did their duty in the Forums and Triaris of town.

  It was a large farm with perhaps ten to twenty families. From the cricket’s terrible height, Dorjan had seen the people huddled against the walls of the compound, the better for the metal arrows of the infantry to miss them. He looked down at the beginning of the cricket’s descent and quickly surveyed the chaos of the night. It was war, filled with the magnesium flares of soldiers preparing to launch munitions, the shouts of the techs performing maintenance on their armor, and the scream of metal and gears as the machines of war defied inertia and began the slow hurtle to murderous momentum. Dorjan landed directly in front of the other crickets in the battalion, pretty sure of what he’d find: the three lokogos as well as Stratego Alum Septra, the man who had brought wars to the borders of Biemansland.

  “Stop!” Dorjan screamed, ripping off his visor so they could see not just the insignia of lokargo on his uniform but the human behind it, and the commanding officers all stopped in what looked to be a last-minute conference and stared at the boy wearing lokargo insignia and riding a lokogos’s cricket.

  “Boy, you’d better have some explanation as for what in the hell—”

  “It’s not a munitions warehouse!” Dorjan cried, gesturing to the castle walls, especially the fortifications with very worried-looking people on the ramparts. “Aren’t you people looking? I could see it myself from the cricket—it’s a keep! There are women and children in there!”

  Dorjan would remember that moment. The three lokogos, they looked surprised and skeptical, their faces frozen in the glare and flicker of the magnesium torches and the arc-welding that was going on in the chaos of setting up for battle.

  But Stratego Alum Septra? Dorjan saw his face, saw the way his mouth quirked up at the corners, saw the calculation in his eyes.

  “You know!” Dorjan shouted, and Alum drew twenty years as stratego and counselor around his shoulders and lied.

  “I know nothing of the sort, and I don’t believe you either.”

  The three lokogos all jerked back, stunned, because now they were fucked. They could either believe the raw young lokargo or they could believe their stratego. What were they to do?

  “Who gave you permission to ride a cricket?” the youngest lokogos demanded. Even Dorjan could tell he was dodging the point.

  “My lokogos!” Dorjan snapped. “Even he felt this was important information!”

  “Who told you this?” the stratego asked. “Why would you break formation, Lokargo, to learn intelligence that is obviously above your pay grade?”

  Dorjan’s jaw hardened. “A child,” he said, making sure his eyes never left Septra’s. “A child who was afraid we were going to slaughter his family, because his family occupied the only dwelling within walking distance of the damned army! Now are you people too damned lazy to even get on your lousy crickets and look? Or are you so sure of your souls that you’ll risk demolishing innocent people for politics?”

  The lokogos looked at each other uneasily, and for a moment Dorjan thought he might actually have their attention. And that’s when he saw Stratego Alum Septra push a button on the side of his cricket while the lokogos were all looking at each other in confusion. Suddenly the chaos of the battlefield was silenced as a single massive flare launched up in the eerie quiet. It was burning so brightly that its shallow arc—designed to descend a mere half klick away—could hardly be seen.

  Dorjan gazed at Alum Septra in horror, seeing him for the first time. A handsome man with a long jaw and silver hair pulled back into a smooth queue, he wore his dress uniform trappings over his armor for what was supposed to be nothing more than a training exercise.

  He looked, Dorjan thought in shock, like a man dressed for the copper glyph that would make him famous.

  “Oh dear,” Septra said urbanely. “It seems that even if you’re right, you arrived a moment too la—”

  Dorjan didn’t hear what else he said, because he had launched his own cricket straight up into the air, preparing the same flare Septra had launched—but preparing it to fire at the flare that was still gracefully arcing toward the innocent civilians in the compound.

  “Can you do this?” he asked the cricket. The machine, which knew only what it had been programmed with, circled the probability
dial slowly, even as they hovered in the air.

  Dorjan looked at the dial and swallowed: 15 percent probability.

  “Then do it,” he muttered and pushed the same panel Septra had.

  The magnesium bomb traveled a lot faster and a lot straighter than Septra’s, and it connected, but not solidly, sending both projectiles spinning wildly into the brush beyond the castle.

  There was an explosion so bright he closed his eyes behind the tinted goggles of his visor and barely had time to open them again to sight the cricket’s landing plane.

  By the time the cricket touched down, the fire sparked by the magnesium bombs in the dry grasses of the autumn bogland had turned the horizon a fiery bronze-blood red.

  The cricket landed hard and Dorjan was tossed off, his armor disengaging and pummeling his body as he landed. Without the steam to provide a cushion and protection, he knocked about inside the metal plating like a plum in a steel box. Odds were good he’d be the same color the next day, but it didn’t matter. He was running on adrenaline now, and he’d actually pulled himself up off the ground and was looking wildly around before the golden-haired god of his childhood intruded on his tinted vision.

  “Bimuit and Karanos!” Areau thunked a wide-palmed hand on Dorjan’s shoulder and was hauling him around—probably to tackle him and pummel him some more, knowing Areau’s temper.

  Dorjan yanked off his visor and goggles before he could try, and fought for breath. “People!” he gasped. “There are people in the keep!”

  Areau stopped with his fist hauled back behind his ear and became a focused beam of stillness in the mayhem of the night. “People?”

  “It’s a keep, Areau! There’re families in there, probably ten or so—they’re huddled away from the safety arrows—”

  Areau looked up to see the blood-bronze flare of light, and a sudden new wave of bedlam washed over the battlefield. “Bimuit! Dorjan, the fire is heading right for them!”

  They locked eyes, a lifetime of understanding between them. Dorjan’s father, Kyon, ruled the keep, but Areau’s father was his right-hand man. Their keep had been one of the most productive of Biemansland until the war had forced them to strip away most of their gain in the form of taxes, and there was nothing—horses, lessons, their first girl, Dorjan’s first kiss with a boy—that the two of them had not shared in their hearts.