by Amy Lane
There was a sound like a growl, and suddenly the jerking and fidgeting stopped and Taern was free to finish his task. It wasn’t too difficult—there was a perfect symmetry to the latches, and the armor itself slid off almost like living water.
Taern looked around the stable and saw a closet—a big one, with what looked to be a mannequin in it that was obviously supposed to hold the armor. He picked up the biggest pieces and took them toward the mannequin, and looked up to see that Nyx had picked up the rest.
“I’m supposed to be waiting on you,” Taern said lightly.
“You’re not my valet,” Nyx said shortly. “I… my friend usually helps me, the one who designed the armor. That way he can see if the new features worked.” He helped Taern attach the armor around the mannequin, and Taern noticed that now that the gauntlets were gone, he was very, very careful not to let their fingers touch. When they were finished, Taern looked at him expectantly, and Nyx reluctantly placed his hands under the edges of the cowl and mask combined and lifted them both off.
He darted his eyes almost nervously in Taern’s direction and looked away, putting the mask and goggle apparatus over the head of the mannequin before turning toward the door that connected the stable to the house.
“Nyx!” Taern called, and he kept walking. “Nyx, wait up!”
“If we’re quiet, we can get supper,” he said, stopping at the threshold. “Mrs. Wrinkle is kind enough to save some. If she knew you’d be out, she probably saved yours too.”
“But wait—Nyx!” He wouldn’t turn around. He wouldn’t look at Taern. He just kept walking. In the black smallclothes, his shoulders were broad and his waist was narrow (too narrow—he needed to eat), and Taern could see every muscle defined. He could also see an almost conscious effort to… to minimize himself. He didn’t slouch, but his height was not imposing, although he was tall. His form was not formidable, although his shoulders were broad. He took off the armor and the mask and he simply became…
“Dorjan!” Taern said, his voice pitched much more softly.
Dorjan froze in the doorframe. “It’s late,” he said just as softly. “We need to go in.”
Taern followed him on padded feet, trying to fight the compulsion to make himself just as small as Dorjan.
In the kitchen it was the same. He took their supper out of the icebox—cold chicken, salad, and some pistachio pudding for dessert—and served it up for both of them, Taern first, like he was hosting a dinner party. Except he didn’t make conversation and he didn’t make eye contact. When the plates were dished, he sat and ate without ceremony. Taern was damned hungry himself, but when he got to his third piece of chicken, he slowed down a little and looked at the satchel on the table. Dorjan had brought it in from his adventure, and Taern’s natural curiosity finally overcame the heavy restraint in the kitchen.
“Drugs and silver?” he asked, and Dorjan looked at the bag, startled, like he’d forgotten what was there.
“Yes,” he said. “The silver gets split between orphanages—I drop it off when I run to the Forum in the morning.”
“The drugs?” Taern asked, impressed in spite of himself.
Dorjan let out a heavy sigh. “Areau wants them. He’s trying hard to find a way to break the addiction—keeps analyzing the chemical, trying to see if there’s something close but less deadly, less addictive, that he can substitute instead.”
Taern blinked and looked at the satchel again, then at Dorjan. “That’s brilliant!” he said, breathless. “That’s… that’s amazing. It’s like a cure!”
Dorjan shook his head. “No. It’s exchanging a larger addiction for a smaller addiction. Right now one use is like a death sentence—the people who have the will to break the habit cold die nearly 100 percent of the time. The heart can’t take what the body does. We want… we want a way out for those willing to take it.” Dorjan sighed. “No,” he said, his voice dropping as though he was a shamed of his earlier passion. “A cure for it is a nice dream. Right now, we’ll settle for a way out for the willing.”
Taern searched his face, but Dorjan was looking at his plate with determination.
“Did someone you know use dust?” Taern asked, trying not to let his voice sink into that quiet, funereal tone that people used.
Dorjan was surprised enough to actually look at him. He shook his head and said, “No one and everyone.” A bitter smile twisted his face. “I run through the stews every day, often two, three times a day. I see children who don’t grow up and grown-ups that don’t grow old. You get used to a person on a street corner, selling trinkets or shipments of stolen fruit, and then, one day, they’re gone, and their twelve-year-old child just… just looks at the nearest flop for the dying, and you know. One day it got to be too much, and they… drifted away.”
Taern nodded and took a tasteless bite of the once savory chicken. “Paenny’s sister—she’d be someone to test on. She’s almost quit… more than once. But….” Taern looked away. He’d been there when the shakes got to be so bad Paenny had needed to give her a small dose, just one, to keep her heart from giving out. But you didn’t wean off of dust. The small dose had sucked her under just that quick.
“If Areau comes up with a solution in time, I’ll tell Madame Matiya,” Dorjan said. “Are you done? I’ll clean up and show you to your room.”
Taern scowled. “All my stuff is in your room,” he pointed out, feeling stubborn.
Dorjan was still not looking at him as he took both plates and scraped the leftover salad and bones into a compost bucket. “That’s not why I bought your contract.” It was clear that he had his own stubbornness to rely on.
Taern stood up and wrapped the cloth around the chicken plate, then returned it to the icebox. When he looked up, Dorjan was leaning over the sink, rinsing the heavy glazed dishware, and Taern had the sudden urge to close the distance between them.
He walked up behind Dorjan and put his hands on his hips, pushing up close against his back.
And Dorjan dropped his dish into the washbasin, where it broke with a clatter.
Taern jerked at the initial noise, which sounded like steam cannon shot in the quiet house, but he was a professional, after all. He stayed pressed up against Dorjan’s backside and clasped his hands around Dorjan’s middle.
“I don’t want to be close to you because you bought my contract,” he whispered. Dorjan made helpless gestures with shaking hands to pick up the plates, and Taern moved to stop him, twining his fingers with Dorjan’s and pulling both their hands to clasp at Dorjan’s waist.
Dorjan’s breathing quickened, and Taern was close enough to smell the sudden heat—and sweat—through the wool of his smallclothes.
“I sleep with a knife under my pillow,” Dorjan said, his voice far away and remote from his shaking shoulders and the way he tightened Taern’s fingers in his grip. “I wake up suddenly. You need to sleep somewhere else.” He didn’t move for a long moment, and Taern wrapped his arms even tighter around him and squeezed.
Taern had been hustling at Madame M’s for a little over two years. He’d touched ugly men, men who sweat, men who were too fastidious to put their cocks in his mouth. He’d had handsome men who knew they were good in bed and wanted to showboat, and ashamed men who didn’t want to admit who they were but needed human touch so very, very badly they had no choice. He’d made love to virgins, some of them twice his age, and he’d fucked bullies who wanted it in the ass and wanted it raw so that just once, they didn’t feel like they ruled the world. He’d even touched the occasional vulnerable soul who had been beaten by family when they had discovered he was sly, and who chose a brothel over the shame of his family.
Taern had thought he knew all the ways of touching a potential lover—he’d been sure of it. But Dorjan… Dorjan was a mystery.
A mystery who slept with a knife under his pillow and woke suddenly.
“Perhaps,” Taern murmured, “if you kiss me before you go into your room, you’ll be more used to me in it.”<
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Dorjan laughed a little, but it was not a sound of comfort. “I need to bathe, boy. I have blood on my hands.” And those words apparently gave him the strength to break free. He picked up the broken crockery and threw it away before combing the sink to make sure there were no slivers left for any unwary soul. Taern leaned against the sink and heroically refrained from saying that any blood on his hands had been washed off with the food on the plates.
When he was done, Taern followed him silently up the stairs. Dorjan’s bedroom, with the bath suite, was all the way at the end of the hallway, so Taern shouldn’t have been surprised when he stopped immediately on top of the stairs and opened the first door to his right.
“Krissa and Areau are in the middle two rooms on the left,” Dorjan said, his voice still maintaining that unearthly quiet. “This room is the farthest away from any of us—no noises should bother you.”
“I doubt they would anyway,” Taern said, grinning past Dorjan’s sober demeanor. “Krissa’s a right hand with a ball gag.”
Dorjan swallowed hard and his eyes grew wide, but he kept talking like Taern hadn’t ventured into someone else’s bedroom without so much as a by-your-leave.
“Feel free to draw yourself a bath,” he said. “Your guest bathroom is through the adjoining door.” He opened up the armoire at the far end of the room. “There are robes and smallclothes of various sizes in here. I’ll have Mrs. Wrinkle put your things in here tomorrow morning.”
“Not going to happen,” Taern said cheerfully. “I’m sleeping in your bed if I have to cuff you to it to let me!”
This time Dorjan did flinch, and then he laughed self-consciously. “Bimuit, boy, the things you say.” He put his hand on the doorknob then and turned as though he was going to say one more thing, but Taern knew an advantage when he saw one. He took two steps forward before Dorjan could startle back, and this time, when the Forum Master representing Kyon’s Gate and the Nyx, scourge of the Thenis stews, looked up, Taern met his eyes.
Taern was mesmerized. The expression therein was burning, soulful, and, if Taern was not mistaken, frightened.
“Good night,” Dorjan said, and he went to turn his head again, but Taern put a hand on each cheek and stopped him.
“Thank you, Nyx, for saving my arse. Thank you, Dorjan, for feeding me and giving me a place to sleep.”
Dorjan grimaced as though very aware of the dichotomy in himself that was so painfully apparent. “You’re welcome, Taern,” he said softly. “Sleep well.” He moved closer, and Taern let him, relieved that finally, finally, he would let himself have this freely offered kiss.
At the last moment, Dorjan jerked his head and kissed Taern on the forehead and then pulled away and shut the door in his face.
“Coward!” Taern called, but not too loud. For one thing, it was untrue for most of what he’d seen. For another, this thing between them, it was the definition of private. Not even Taern would sell that moment with Dorjan’s full regard on his face, and certainly not to assuage his hurt pride.
TAERN drew a bath and luxuriated in having the hot water there on tap. Madame M had two shower stalls, and she made them all bathe thrice in a seven-day, more if they could manage. Being clean was a luxury, and the bath? It sure did soak away the hurts and bruises from Taern’s brief sojourn on the streets.
But it also made him acutely aware of Dorjan settling his bruised body, ribs in particular, into the hot water, to emerge and wrap them all on his own.
Taern wasn’t sure he could think of a lonelier image—or a lonelier man.
And a misguided one, if it came to that. The man owned Taern’s contract. Taern owed him. Taern drained his tub and rinsed the sides, then dried off and used an available comb to tame his curly black hair for the moment. Men liked his hair, or so they told him. The crude ones said it gave them a good grip, and he thought that was sexy all on its own. Dorjan had seemed entranced by it earlier that day, and Taern would keep it tidy for that alone.
When he was done, he took one of the dressing gowns from the armoire and forsook the smallclothes. After wrapping himself in the gown and then burrowing under the covers (since it was getting cooler and cooler in the big house), he lay still, calming his breathing, and listened with all his might.
Once he got past the beating of his own heart, he could hear Dorjan. First there was the draining of the bath, which was loud enough through the pipe system. When that was done, if Taern held his breath, he could hear him moving around in his bedroom. After a sufficient period of silence, Taern rolled over once and listened again. There was a creak in the mattress, so Taern waited another ten minutes. Then he rolled over and listened again.
And heard nothing.
He rolled over two more times, the usual squeaking and rustling of his bedsprings and the bedclothes sounding abnormally loud each time. Each time he stopped and listened, and when nothing happened again, he threw back the covers and tiptoed in bare feet toward his door.
Still nothing. The house was shrouded in silence, even after he opened his door and padded down the hall, the tiny blade he’d kept up his sleeve cupped in his hand. It was a leftover from his pre-Madame M days, when he’d made his living as a thief, and he hoped he wasn’t too bad at it. He hadn’t gotten pinched, and that was a relief, since thieves got sent to the military on the worst of the battle lines.
So he was fairly confident when he set his mind to Dorjan’s door at the end of the hall. It was an inside lock of a gentleman’s home. Taern was pretty sure he could open that with no more noise than a hungry mouse.
Once he was in Dorjan’s room, that was the hard part. Dorjan said he slept with a knife under his pillow, and Taern was inclined to believe him.
With the tiniest of clicks, the door lock gave, and the door swung open soundlessly on well-oiled hinges. Dorjan must not have wanted to make any more noise returning home than Taern wanted to make sneaking into his room.
Taern waited a moment, making sure his eyes adjusted, and saw Dorjan, clenched in a little ball on his side, clutching his pillow to his chest as tightly as a woman would clutch a child.
Taern took a deep, silent breath and hoped, because this could be the toughest prize he’d ever swiped—and the most deadly if he missed.
Slashing Blind
DORJAN sat up in bed, heart pounding, eyes blind in the darkness, and struck out with his clenched fist. The side of his hand hit something, so he leapt to a squat and, still blind, directed a barrage of blows at his opponent, until he realized that the mass of bone and muscle he’d been hitting was out of his reach.
Cautiously, he squinted in the dark and crab-walked back to his pillow to root around underneath it in concern.
“I locked your knife in the armoire,” said an almost-familiar voice calmly. “Smartest thing I ever did. Are you awake yet? Can I come back to bed?”
Dorjan crunched his eyes shut and then opened them wide in an attempt to orient himself. “Taern?” he asked carefully. Oh yes, he knew someone named Taern, someone who…. Why would he be…. “What are you doing in my bed?”
“Sleeping with you,” Taern said, and he must have taken Dorjan’s recognition as permission or safety, because in a moment he’d crawled back under the covers. “Now come on, get under. It’s cold out there.”
Dorjan squinted at him. “You’re naked,” he said, and part of him was excited about this, but most of him was puzzled. “Didn’t I give you a nightshirt?”
Taern grunted. “Like that thing you’ve got on? Women wear less clothing to funerals.”
Dorjan looked at his gown, which hung about midthigh and had drawstrings at the cuffs and buttons at the throat. “Keeps the chill off,” he grumbled and flipped over his corner of the bedding and crawled in. “I could have killed you!” he said, and he knew that through the layers of sleep, he was appalled and ashamed.
“You gave it your best. I’ll have a bruise on my shoulder from where you got me with your fist. Does that make you feel better? Can we go to
sleep now?”
“No,” Dorjan muttered, as confused as he’d ever been in his life. “Why are you sleeping with—” The boy, the naked boy—the naked man—had taken advantage of his recumbent position and snuck into his body, nestling in against his chest like a baby bird. Dorjan instinctively arched his shoulders protectively over him, bringing him in. His entire body shuddered at the rightness of having him there.
“Me,” he finished weakly. “What are you doing with me?”
“Mm?” Taern said sleepily. “What am I doing? I’m going to sleep. It’s still the wee hours of the morning, Dorjan.”
“I’ve got conditioning in an hour or so,” Dorjan yawned. “Mrs. Wrinkle will rouse me.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” Taern grumbled, and oh! He just felt so good there, in Dorjan’s arms, so sweet in a way Dorjan had never felt sweetness. Dorjan’s night terror had faded, and he’d get his knife back out of the armoire tomorrow, and in the meantime, he had learned to capture sleep as it came.
HE WOKE up several hours later because Taern was shaking him gently.
“Sorry, Dorjan. Mrs. Wrinkle says you need to get ready for Forum duties. I got you out of conditioning—whatever that is—but even I know you need to be on the floor when it’s time.”
Dorjan sat up so abruptly he nearly smashed into Taern’s chin. Taern jerked back in time and looked at him in amusement. “It’s when?” Dorjan demanded, his heart beating in triple time.
“Don’t worry!” Taern soothed. “You’ve got time to bathe, dress, and eat—that’s what Mrs. Wrinkle said—”
“Oh hells… you’re in my bed. With me. What are you doing here?”
“Well, sleeping when you weren’t trying to kill me. And then ducking, and then some talking, and then mostly sleeping.” Taern’s leer looked particularly dirty when his little apple cheeks popped.
