Under the Rushes

by Amy Lane

  Taern grimaced and shrugged. “Well, for the moment, he has us. We shall have to do. You’ll eat dinner with us in the kitchen?”

  She nodded. “But first I have to scare the spiders out of the stove. I don’t even want to think about what he’s been eating.”

  Taern would wager not much of anything. In the month since he’d left, Dorjan had sent regular missives, a packet about every four days. The bulk of the packets was political in nature—important things about recalling the military and reassigning the troops to rebuilding the areas they had just ravaged. Dorjan had insisted on rotating troops in and out of this duty—he was pretty sure the bitterness of the recently besieged provinces would be demoralizing for the men, even as they strove to repair the harm they’d recently inflicted.

  He’d also put the military to work distributing food among the poor and rebuilding some of the dilapidated housing of the poorer quarters, as well as shoring up the burned-out schools and making them havens for women and children who had been living on the streets. When the Forum Masters complained about the cost, Dorjan pointed out how much less expensive it was to provide for the children than build the machines used for war, and they shut up, mortified. (Or at least that’s how he explained it to Taern. Taern was reasonably sure his missives to his mother were a bit more restrained.)

  There had been personal things in the missives to Taern, as well—small, almost coded, but enough to sustain Taern as he strove to make himself useful during the day and lay in a strange and empty bed at night.

  The stews of Thenis have changed face a bit—although I look forward to running them with you again and showing you how much.

  It’s quiet here at night. I lie in bed and wonder what Areau is doing in his workshop, and then I remember.

  The Forum canteen can’t make bread. It seems like such a simple thing. Tell Mrs. Wrinkle she’s missed.

  They want to make me a Triari. I don’t want to be a bloody Triari, Taern. I want a life with you. I want to raise Areau’s child, and I want to spend time at Kyon’s Keep, and I don’t want to be a fucking Triari, and nothing they say can make me!

  That last one had alarmed Taern enough, but the one after that broke his heart.

  I’m forced to pay attention to everything now—no more sleeping, no more feigning idiocy, everybody needs to know my opinion and every motion must be fought for. I’ve taken to sketching your likeness when I’m struggling to stay awake or stay focused. They’re not good, but then, love letters aren’t my specialty either.

  The sketches had been decent—not fine art, but Taern had been particularly struck by the one that placed him in bed, a sheet over his backside, while Taern looked over a naked shoulder. He’d looked into his own eyes as Dorjan saw him, and was belted in the stomach with a terrible longing. He’d stared at the picture all that night, listening to Dorjan’s mother giving orders (Mrs. Kyon was particularly good at that—Taern thought he knew where Dorjan had gotten it from), and wondered what he was still doing there. His cold had gone away, and he was more than fit to travel. Perhaps for a little while, he’d stayed because he thought he could help. Krissa had been placed in charge of the children of the keep, and she was smashing at it—she joked quietly to Taern that all of her time spent disciplining errant men had made her a shoo-in. But while Taern could help at the mines or the kitchens or even with Krissa, he was rootless and unfocused, willing to be blown in any direction, unless he was at Dorjan’s side.

  He emerged from Dorjan’s old bedroom the next day wearing only his smallclothes and found Mrs. Kyon, who had probably been up for hours, organizing her little corner of the world. Her name was Abella, and she was a gorgeous, comfortably sized woman in her early fifties, with Dorjan’s thick brown hair and expressive brown eyes, but for some reason Taern couldn’t call her by her given name. She needed an honorific, just like Mrs. Wrinkle.

  “Mrs. Ky—”

  “Taern?” she corrected, and he sighed.

  “Mrs. Abella?” he tried, and she arched her eyebrows, conceding.

  “Close enough. What can I do for you?”

  “Is Mrs. Wrinkle still at Dre’s keep?”

  “Aye.” He’d found her in the kitchens, and as they spoke, she cut a new loaf of bread into four quarters and smeared a thick coat of honey butter on two of them.

  “Can I send for her?” he asked, and she handed him a quarter and took one for himself, and Taern smiled as they both took a blissful bite of warm bread and honey butter.

  “Why? What do you have in mind?”

  Taern grimaced, hoping she didn’t take offense. “He’s alone,” Taern said, feeling his eyes burn at the thought of it. “He was alone for so long, and then he had me, and now he’s more alone than ever—”

  “So you’re going to go to him?”

  Taern shrugged. “Of course. It’s what I do.”

  She nodded and took another bite. “It’s about time. But do me a favor, if you could,” she added, looking sad. “Leave Krissa, could you? Areau’s mother….” Mrs. Abella shook her head. “His father too. They… they knew things weren’t right with Areau, for the longest time. They need to hear about him as a hero. It eases their grief, and so does the promise of the child.”

  So matter-of-fact—much like her son. Taern remembered moments when Dorjan’s extremity had sanded away his tact—You’re so short! And Have you any idea how long it’s been since I’ve slept? This sounded much like that.

  “I’ll leave her now,” he said, although it pained him. “But”—he grimaced—“after the child—she may want to come to the city. She’ll visit, of course, but we had a life there, Mrs. Abella. We—” Oh hells. Madame M was dead. “We had friends. And Dorjan misses people. He’d never confess it in so many words, but it pains him that all of his people are here, and he’s in Thenis.”

  Abella nodded. “His father used to worry, you know. Even when he was full of mischief, the boy was still all about doing the right thing. Kyon used to say that no man was ever great unless he doubted the difference. I think our son is a great man. But that being said, I wouldn’t mind if he was an ordinary man who spent a little more time at home.”

  Taern nodded and swallowed hard. “I miss him,” he said baldly. They’d never talked about Taern’s place in Dorjan’s bed. “I miss him. I’m content to be ordinary, and I’m certainly small, but I can’t even be functional unless I’m by his side.”

  He got a brilliant smile in return, warm in the center with eyes crinkled at the corners, and then a strong embrace. “Are you sure you won’t wait for your sisters?” she asked, and Taern grimaced.

  “Can they be here tomorrow? I can leave two days later.”

  She nodded, and because she was Mrs. Abella, she made it so.

  The meeting with his sisters had been… warm and awkward at first. Abella had put them in her nicest sitting room, the one with the furniture with the long legs carved of dark wood. They’d stood in the middle for a moment, after brief bows and curtseys, and looked at each other, trying to find the children they remembered in the adults and teens facing them now. They were definitely his sisters—they had Mum’s curly black hair and both Mum and Da’s blue eyes, just like him—but he seemed to remember them wearing his breeches, and certainly not the fine sober-hued dresses they were tightly laced into at the moment.

  The silence dragged out, and for once Taern couldn’t think of a thing to say until the oldest, Brina, looked him up and down with their mother’s customary skepticism and said, “Are you as sly as you look, or was nature just cruel to you?”

  Taern looked up into her face—damn her for being nearly as tall as Dorjan!—and grinned. “Yes I’m as sly as I look, and if nature wasn’t a bitch, you wouldn’t have a face like a cricket’s arse!”

  Brina (who actually had the same elegant oval to her face as Taern, along with fuller lips and ripe curves, all at seventeen) laughed richly and hugged him then, and they spent hours tumbling words and experiences and memories over each other
. Abella came in with dinner and sat with them, and when Taern spoke of his first meeting with Dorjan, her eyes widened.

  “You’re the boy!” she breathed, and Taern flushed.

  “Yes,” he acknowledged. “I’m the git under the rushes who ruined his life!”

  Abella shook her head. “Ruined it? You’re the boy who made him step out of line! You made him different. You made him great!”

  Taern snorted and looked at his sisters while soberly shaking his head. “He made himself great,” Taern assured them. “I just made him smile.”

  They laughed at that, but he knew it was the truth. And now, as he and Mrs. Wrinkle aired out their home, replaced the sheets (which looked hardly slept on), and shopped for food at the market, Taern thought about that moment in the sitting room a scant two days ago. That was what he wanted to do—make Dorjan smile. He didn’t have to run about the city as the Cricket as long as he could look after the man in other ways. Of course, Taern assumed he would find things to keep him busy. Schools, orphanages, shelters—those things needed tending, and Taern found he longed for a project that he could be proud of, but at the end of the day, what he truly wanted, the culmination of his misspent youth, was to make Dorjan smile.

  But as he and Mrs. Wrinkle made dinner, ate dinner, cleaned up the dinner dishes, and then retired unhappily to bed, all without seeing Dorjan, he realized he’d have his work cut out for him if Dorjan never came home.

  Taern was fast asleep, curled into a miserable ball of missing Dorjan, when the electric lamp by the door snapped on and he startled, sitting up and blinking blearily as Dorjan came in from the cold.

  “What in the hell?” Dorjan sounded truly shocked.

  “Hey, Nyx. What, is sleep illegal now? How about eating? I knew it. You look like hell. Karanos, can’t you even take care of yourself, you bloody great git?”

  Dorjan stood in the doorway, gaping, and then he seemed to compose himself and started to take off his clothes. He was wearing his running kit—warm smallclothes, specially made boots, and a warm coat over the top since it was still the dead of winter. He took off his gloves and his hat, and Taern pulled back the covers, shivering in the chill in spite of the fact that he and Mrs. Wrinkle had primed the furnace when they’d aired out the house.

  “You’re naked,” Dorjan said in wonder. “It’s cold enough to drop a hieter dead, and you’re naked?”

  “You’ve got a talent for understatement, Nyx, do you know that?” Taern stood up, hoping his nakedness did a little tap dance on Dorjan’s equilibrium. Just seeing the man again was enough to send the blood galloping under Taern’s skin. “Now give over the coat—you couldn’t leave this in the mudroom by the courtyard?”

  “I didn’t think there’d be anyone home to be offended by my lack of manners!” Dorjan protested, and Taern tried not to whimper when the black wool coat slid from Dorjan’s shoulders and Taern saw how thin he’d grown.

  “Are you objecting?” Taern asked, hanging the coat over the back of the chair by the desk. He squatted down and gestured imperiously for Dorjan’s boots. When Dorjan was slow to comply, Taern looked up and saw that Dorjan was sitting on the bed with all of his attention focused on Taern’s naked body. In particular his gaze rested on Taern’s privates, which were on display from his position on the floor. Taern watched as Dorjan swallowed, his gaunt face growing suddenly slack with an obvious hunger.

  Taern yanked off one boot and then the other, swinging his hips a little to make sure his equipment bobbed ripely between his legs.

  “Nyx?” Taern asked slyly, setting the boots in the corner by the armoire and standing up straight. He reached his hands to the ceiling and stretched, showing off the line of his chest and stomach and making sure his semierect cock was clearly visible, peeking out from its nest of hair. Dorjan grunted, and Taern moved a little closer, taking Dorjan’s hands as they rested in his lap and pulling them to his backside, where they commenced kneading in a highly satisfactory manner.

  “Nyx?” Taern asked again, thrusting his hips so his cock—more erect than halfway so now—bobbed against his thigh. “Was there something you wanted?”

  “Crave,” Dorjan whispered before opening his mouth and sucking Taern’s erection all the way down his throat. Taern threw his head back and cried out, and Dorjan pulled back and engulfed him again, swallowing, the heat and the wet of his mouth gripping Taern like he hadn’t been stroked since…

  Oh hells. The last time Taern had been touched like this, Dorjan had done the touching, and that had been too, too long ago.

  Dorjan couldn’t seem to get enough of his skin—was, in fact, running his hand up and down Taern’s backside, the backs of his thighs, and then curving them inward. Taern let out a cry when Dorjan’s thumb brushed his balls from behind, and Dorjan took his cue, pulling his hand forward and cupping them, massaging them, squeezing them gently while his mouth kept up that incessant, insanely satisfying suck.

  Dorjan’s hair had grown long, was shaggy in his face, and Taern knotted his fingers in it, not guiding or holding, just touching, shivering at the sensuality of a part of Dorjan against his fingers.

  Taern shuddered, torn between riding this out, letting Dorjan bring him to orgasm, and simply doubling up, holding him close, and being a part of him when they’d been denied for so long. At his backside, the hand not teasing Taern’s balls was reaching, parting Taern’s buttocks, playing with his pucker. Dorjan let some spit trickle on his fingers and then prodded gently, entering a little, massaging his rim, and Taern had no choice. He clutched Dorjan to him and gasped, thrusting, spilling, gratified when Dorjan swallowed, and when his climax subsided, he jerked his hips back, to pull his cock out of Dorjan’s mouth, and clutched Dorjan’s head to his stomach, shaking with the force of his orgasm and the wave of things not said.

  The skin under Dorjan’s cheek grew wet, and Taern slid down to his knees so he could wrap his arms around Dorjan’s waist and bury his face in the crook of his shoulder.

  “Miss me, Nyx?” he asked, and Dorjan’s hand went to the back of his head and stroked his hair.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t?” Dorjan asked, and Taern could hear the effort in keeping his voice light. He tilted his head back and looked into Dorjan’s face, then moved a hand up to wipe the wetness away with a thumb.

  “Then why didn’t you send for me?”

  Dorjan looked away and told maybe the first real lie Taern had ever heard him utter. “I wanted to make it a home for you. It’s not a good home.”

  “Shite!” Taern snapped, and he seized Dorjan’s jaw in the cup of his hand and forced his head back. Dorjan’s misery was too naked for him to hold a grudge. “You can mourn him,” Taern said, hurting everywhere. “You can grieve. You won’t offend me, you know. He was a part of your life, even if he was in the wrong part of your life for a while. What did you think? I wouldn’t understand mourning a friend?”

  He closed his eyes against the thought of Madame Matiya, her arms akimbo, blood spilling down her throat and onto her most comfortable day dress.

  “You had your own mourning to do,” Dorjan rasped, and Taern scowled.

  “Yes, you git bastard, and I’ve had to do it all on my own thanks to you. Now shut up—anything you say is going to be a lie. I didn’t come here for that.” He sat up and started tunneling under Dorjan’s knit shirt, pulling it from his body and then thumping Dorjan on the shoulder in honest anger. “Dammit, Nyx! You are not taking good care of what’s mine! I may have leased you to your bloody mourning, but I did not agree that you could savage my fucking property, do you hear me?”

  Dorjan scowled at him and made an attempt to push him away. “Bimuit, but you’re pushy! I’m starting to rethink missing you!”

  Taern shook his head, not willing to be mollified by banter. “You,” he said, poking a finger at Dorjan’s scarred and thin chest, “will never, ever, leave me behind again, do you hear me? You will never not have me by your side. There will never be a time in our lives wh
en you have to be here and I have to be some other bloody place, because look at you! You must have lost two stone! You can’t be trusted with yourself, and that’s that! Do you hear me?”

  He scowled down at Dorjan and saw that even though the man was still wiping tears from his cheeks with the heel of his hand, he was chuckling a little and nodding his head in agreement. “I hear you,” he said soberly. “Don’t leave you behind, don’t abuse your property—any other strictures before we crawl into this bed together? I’m dying to hold you, you know.”

  Taern grunted, not completely placated. “Don’t grieve without me. He was your friend, Dorjan. Do you think I wouldn’t respect that? If nothing else, he was your friend.”

  Dorjan nodded. “Done,” he said, sounding hoarse and lost. “I accept your terms of surrender. I’m yours.”

  “You were never, ever anyone else’s.” Taern was deadly serious, and Dorjan nodded.

  Taern let him up then, and he stripped and didn’t make any asinine protests about underwear or nightgowns, and they slid into bed together. Taern tucked in against his shoulder, smoothing his palm against the mockery of a chest Dorjan was sporting at the moment.

  “Would you like to talk about him?” Taern asked hesitantly, and Dorjan made a sound in his throat that wasn’t encouraging at first.

  Then he sighed and said, his voice still thick with pain, “He was beautiful as a child—so bright and quick, I was always running after his shadow. I was so afraid he’d never want to be my friend, even though we’d been raised together since we were in nappies. Did I tell you that I once stole a pie just so I could share it with him and he’d like me?”