When he got Herfod’s pants undone, he couldn’t believe the feel of what swelled out. The kisses ceased. Ugoth looked at what he’d caught in his hand. For such a short man, when aroused, Herfod carried a package to contest his own.
“There’s this rumour that not using it leads to shrinkage,” he said and at once regretted his stupidity. Herfod made him regret it more.
“What? Are you stupid? You wouldn’t believe the number of groans I’ve overheard in the middle of the night. And you’ve never listened to Brother Launderer complain about stains on sheets. He’d like your rumour to be true, I can tell you.”
“Fuck, Herfod! How was I to know? I’ve only ever seen you piss! It didn’t look to be this big!”
“Well, put it back if you’re so damned terrified!”
“Ah, fuck! I was just surprised! All right? Just tell me what I am to do?”
“Same as you do to your own! Oh, get off! This is stupid! I’ll get Samel, and you’ll be cured!”
Herfod attempted to rise. Ugoth grabbed his shoulders and rammed him down. “It would be easier to do to you what I do to my own if your back were to me.”
Herfod stared, not an expression on his face, and Ugoth thought he’d refuse. It would have to be kisses and touch. Just kisses and touch.
But then Herfod let fly the last of his restraint. “You go slow. You understand? I haven’t done this in a long while.”
“I’ll go slow,” Ugoth agreed.
Herfod slipped his hands down his pants and shoved them lower. He rolled to his side. Ugoth fixed his eyes on bared buttocks and couldn’t move. Herfod’s reaction was a mortified and immediate need to withdraw.
“Ah, gods!” he cried and tried to rise again. Ugoth slammed him down another time. Herfod hauled his pants higher. “Fuck! Ugoth! You don’t like men!”
“No, but I like you.”
He grabbed the material at Herfod’s thighs and yanked down hard. Despite strapped on daggers, the pants travelled to Herfod’s knees, taking the weaponry with it. Herfod jerked his shirt hem over his failing erection.
“You don’t want a man, Ugoth! Just let me get Samel to bless you! You’ll feel better!”
“I didn’t stare because I didn’t want you!” Ugoth shouted.
“Then why did you?” Herfod shouted back.
“Gods, Herfod! You’re beautiful! Don’t you know?”
Herfod’s head thumped back onto the tarp and his eyes shut. “Gods fucking kill me.”
Ugoth laughed. Herfod’s expression was such an amusing mix of frustration and relief. “Turn again.”
“I’m not doing a damned thing you ask, son of a bitch. You want it; take it!”
“Fine!” He rolled Herfod to the side and settled against him. He aimed. Herfod knocked him backward with an elbow.
“Don’t fucking dry bugger me, you oaf!”
This wasn’t going at all the way Ugoth wanted. The grasp for molten power was rapidly becoming a sexual debacle. “What the fuck do I do, then? Tell me!”
“Fucking virgin.”
“Gods! Herfod—!”
“Spit on it!”
“Oh.”
He spat and rubbed saliva and preseminal fluid over his shaft. Herfod commenced to snigger, his erection drooping further and further with the passing seconds.
“Gods damn it!” Ugoth breathed, aimed again and wasn’t slow at all. He was amazed how fast the erection came back.
“Ah, fuck! Ah, fuck!”
It was agony, watching his friend of so many years turn into a submissive wreck in an instant, all from one violent, impatient thrust. Ugoth stared at Herfod’s rapt expression, thought of the man who had made it appear on his face before and lost his reason. He was an animal then, taking and forcing, punishing for an act done years ago, for a disgrace that should have been his to perpetrate, but that someone else had managed beforehand. He was unfair, he was brutal, and Herfod did nothing to deter him.
In the end, Herfod twisted around enough to give him his lips. Ugoth pumped the last of his seed into Herfod’s body, and the act became the melting into the molten pool that he had wanted. He sank to the depths of his soul in Herfod, sank until he lay dizzy and gasping.
The pavilion became a fuzzy blur, and he lapsed against the tarp, nothing left of him but the malleable glow. He felt only vaguely Herfod turning, the arms coming around, the tender kiss on his forehead. Then he sank so deeply he knew nothing except a strange sense of homecoming that surpassed his life, the world and the very span of time.
***
Marun shook within his chair. He shook violently. The stone he clutched in one hand. His other grasped his shaft. He shook again, releasing the last of his seed onto his abdomen.
“Oh!”
He’d seen something. A face. A face from out of Kehfrey’s eyes. A brief image of a beautiful male face and cold, predatory eyes.
“Oh, no! Kehfrey!” he whispered.
Kehfrey had taken a lover.
“No!” he cried again. Tears shot from the glands in his eyes. Helplessly, he sobbed, the stone pressed hard against his broken heart.
***
Herfod awakened with a gasp. Weeping! A man weeping again!
He turned his head and squinted into the darkness. Ugoth slept on the canvas they’d earlier tumbled upon, one arm up over his eyes. Regarding him guiltily, Herfod pulled his pants straight and crept away with the utmost caution. His care was wasted.
“Where are you going?”
“Shit!” Herfod hissed. The man was a veritable cat.
“You had a nightmare.” Ugoth lowered his arm from his eyes, just a shadow moving in shadows. “What was it about?”
“Marun.”
A frigid, bitter silence followed.
“Ugoth, I’m trapped in a stone with him. I can feel him. He can feel me. He knows about you.”
Ugoth sat up. “He spies through you?”
“No! He just sees things when he catches me off guard. I think he saw your face while I slept.”
Ugoth considered that a moment. “So. You were dreaming of me. That’s all right, then.”
Herfod wanted to hit him, but restrained himself. “You conceited idiot!”
Ugoth laughed. “I’m sending Derell back to get Nicky. I don’t care if it is the middle of the night.”
“Forget it. She’s already here.”
“What! Where?”
“I don’t know where!” Herfod said impatiently. “She’s an elf! She has elven paths. You can’t make Nicky stay somewhere if she wants to be elsewhere.”
“Elven whats?”
“You roar too much. You’re going deaf.”
“I’m going deaf roaring at you! I only ever roar at you!” Ugoth smashed him a badly aimed accusation at the chest. Herfod batted his arm away. “Can you find her?” Ugoth asked.
“Not if she doesn’t want to be. She’ll likely try to keep out of both our sights. She thinks she’s distracting me from my destiny, and she thinks you’ll kill her.”
“Where’d she get such strange ideas?” Ugoth said testily.
Herfod sniggered helplessly. After a few seconds, Ugoth loosed a sheepish chuckle in response, but directly after tagged an impatient demand to it.
“Well! Just run about and shout something elvish at her! Hurry up! Go!”
“Shit, you royal bastard! It’s the night! I was just getting comfortable!” Despite this protest, Herfod pulled together the front flaps of his assassin shirt and started on the buttons. “You had better straighten up,” he warned. “Someone is trying to break the ward down.”
“What? Are we under attack?”
“I don’t think so.” Herfod rose to his feet. “The vibration feels a lot like something Samel would call up.”
“Vibration?” Ugoth lifted himself, righted the attachments at his groin and felt his way to the larger table within the pavilion. He found a taper and lit it with a striking sliver. He shook the lit sliver out and dropped it on a metal tray.<
br />
“You should have brought glow sticks,” Herfod said.
Ugoth grimaced at the taper. “Not worth the care of packing them. They’d be broken on a march. Too costly even for me. Better to stick to candles.”
“Right. Hadn’t thought of that. But you could have asked me to do a preservation chant over them.”
Irritation provoked Ugoth to scold Herfod for the belated offer. “When? While you were fucking around with Nicky and then pretending not?”
Herfod paused the settling of his shirt flaps and fixed Ugoth with a cynical grimace. “What do you want? For me to bend over so you can murder my bottom again? How much more sorry do you want me to get?”
Ugoth blushed red and averted his gaze. He responded with a careful change of subject. “The witches mentioned you were best at organizing their cooperative efforts with the monks. Is this vibration thing something to do with it?”
He dared a look. Herfod was now busy yanking his weapons higher up his thighs. Ugoth squinted at the straps and noted the leather showed older indentations from buckling. Herfod had recently tightened every one. He’d lost weight, too much of it.
And at last Ugoth realized that if he had been tormented, Herfod had suffered worse and for longer: because of his feelings for Nicky, because of guilt over his betrayal of his king, because of the secret anguish he hid, the love he denied the Shadow Master.
Damn him. Damn him. Even failing his duty and his faith, he did so with such nobility he couldn’t but be admired.
“Yes. It’s sort of a counterpart of the auras I see around everyone,” Herfod said. “I can’t explain better than that. It’s just something I do.”
Ugoth glowered. He did a lot of somethings, a lot of unexplainable somethings. Even after learning his life story, he was still a mystery. It wasn’t any wonder at all to Ugoth that Marun endeavoured to get Herfod back. The monk bastard could drive a person mad speculating why he was the way he was.
Herfod caught the frustrated stare and guessed what was at the root of it. “Oh, knock it off! I didn’t ask to be born this way!”
He stomped toward the flap, ignoring his soiled habit. It smelled of dog. All of him smelled of dog, soiled dog. He couldn’t begin to comprehend how Ugoth had managed to tough the stench. Must have been really drunk.
Or extraordinarily twisted by power.
Cringing mentally, he rotated away from his latest victim’s too intent gaze. “Are you ready? I’m going to pull the ward down.”
“Go ahead,” Ugoth said. Still in nothing but boots and leather leggings, he sat in his favourite chair and waited for the shouting to start all over. There was certain to be shouting. Herfod made everyone shout.
Herfod pulled the ward down with a simple word. Blue flashed momentarily. Just as Ugoth predicted, shouting commenced. It began with Vik thrusting through the flap.
“Kehfrey! Son of a bitch! Bastard! Gods busted asshole of a poxy ferret! You—!”
“Hello, Vik,” his younger brother said. “Missed you too.”
Vik grabbed and shook Herfod violently. Ugoth was reminded of himself. Hadn’t he shaken Herfod the same way? Placid seconds earlier, his emotions blew into a thunderous squall. “That’s enough!” he snarled.
Vik looked at him in surprise. He dropped his brother. “Are you both friends again?” he said, suddenly quite mild.
“Yes,” Ugoth answered, but the sapphire warning continued to flash in his eyes.
“Oh. So? You already shook him.” Smiling faintly, Vik strode away from the reason for their mutual upset and claimed a chair near Ugoth.
Ugoth laughed. “Yes, I shook him,” he admitted. “What has that to do with being friends again?”
“Can’t be friends if you’re still pissed off with him. Shaking Kehfrey does wonders for the soul. Better than confession,” Vik said equably. “Isn’t that right, Kehfrey?”
“What did you say?” Herfod stood where he’d been dropped, smacking the side of his head. “My brain is still banging between my ears.”
“Oh, shut up, Herfod,” Ugoth growled. “Unconscionable jester.”
Then it was Samel’s turn. He’d entered quietly on Vik’s heals. Becoming aware of him, Herfod stopped his teasing. All humour vanished from his face. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to stay away this time! I—”
Samel struck him across the face. “You …! You …!”
“Bastard?” Vik suggested. “Prick? Foul end of a disease-ridden goosed pig?”
“Yes! Yes, and more!” Samel cried. “A week! Another week! Where were you?”
“I was in the castle kennel being a dog,” Herfod confessed.
Samel blinked at him. Then he hit him again. Herfod received the blow and waited penitently in case the outraged monk wanted to deliver a third. He couldn’t blame Samel. The Turamen brother had taken almost eight years to lose his patience. Herfod knew he deserved more clouts than the aging monk had given him so far.
“Go ahead, Samel,” he said. “Get my punishment over with.”
But Samel threw a hand over his eyes to hide tears.
“Oh!” Herfod breathed. Not another man weeping! He stepped closer and wrapped his arms around the disquieted monk. “I’m sorry, Samel!”
“It is awful!” Samel blurted into Herfod’s messy, matted hair. “The witches are outrageous! They tease our brethren constantly! It’s impossible to work with them anymore! And where were you?” He shouted the last, then pulled away and swiped off unwelcome tears with a woollen sleeve. “Why do you smell like that?” he added.
“Like a dog?” Herfod said. “I told you. I was in a kennel.”
“In a kennel?” Samel repeated. “What were you doing in a kennel?” He watched Herfod redden with embarrassment.
“I fell off the castle wall,” Herfod admitted, voice low.
“What?” Samel said. “What did you say?”
“I fell off the castle wall!” Herfod shouted. Everyone was deaf today! “I fell off and broke my back and my crown! I lost my memory! The blind, senile kennel master rescued me. He put me in a cruddy kennel with four wolfhounds and fed me scraps for three days!” He glowered at his mentor. “He named me Lumpy,” he ended caustically.
Samel stared at him. “You fell off the wall?” he repeated. Herfod nodded grumpily. “You were in a kennel?”
Vik snickered. Ugoth soon followed. Samel’s lips quivered upward.
“Oh, yes!” Herfod snarled. “Laugh it up! Laugh at Brother Lumpy, the dog!”
They obliged him. Samel was the first to break down into howls of mirth. Vik lurched forward in his chair, laughing so hard he lost his breath and gasped to get it back. Outside, even the guards and persons who’d stopped in passing laughed. Herfod grimaced. Well, the eavesdroppers outside likely thought he jested, but still, the combined laughter hurt his already wounded pride.
Ugoth recovered first. He wiped tears of mirth from his eyes, but as he looked at disgruntled Brother Herfod, in his mind he saw the kennel, the dogs and Lumpy. He lost it completely again.
“Oh, very funny!” Herfod snapped.
Prodded onward, Vik and Samel howled yet more helplessly. Herfod shut his eyes in dismay. They were never going to let him forget this. He was going to be Brother Dog, Brother Woof, Brother Yap from here on out. He stomped up to Ugoth’s end table, poured the last of the wine and swallowed it all. Then he thumped over to his habit and snatched it off the canvas floor cover.
“I’m going for a walk!” he said.
Samel’s laughter ceased. “No! Not another walk!”
Herfod was at once contrite. “Not that kind of walk. I’m going to find a stream. I stink like a—”
Vik sniggered again.
“Shut up, Vik!” Herfod shouted. He thrust out of the tent and into the view of the camp.
Samel rushed after him. He didn’t trust him not to disappear again, not yet in any case.
Ugoth regarded the waving entrance flap in silence. After a moment, he looked at Vik, who returned
the glance, the light blue of his eyes still bright with amusement.
“He told me the entire story,” Ugoth said and observed Vik’s expression grow solemn.
“You be careful, Ugoth. Marun has permitted the other monarchs to live, but he won’t with you. He will hurt you because of Kehfrey. He would have done it even if you hadn’t become his lover. He would have done it just because you gave him asylum all these years.”
Ugoth listened to these words, and he was astonished and mortified. “How did you know?” he whispered.
“I know jealousy when I see it,” Vik answered. “You’ve been exhibiting it for years; only tonight it was possessive.”
“Why did you know when I didn’t?” Ugoth asked. “Why do I feel this way about him? I don’t with any other man.”
Vik shook his head. “This is not so easy to answer. Kehfrey seems to cross all barriers, but he only does it with those he loves dearly. He’s not like this with other men either.”
“Except Marun!” Ugoth spat. “How could he love someone like that?”
“Marun wasn’t always so vicious,” Vik said sadly. “He was noble once. Kehfrey was able to bring his natural state back to the fore for a short time. The Ancient Power has all but swallowed him now.”
“You mean the goddess of the old worship? Why is she doing this?”
“She was worshipped here once. She wants to be again.”
“She’s a monster!”
“According to what I have read, she wasn’t so bad before. She’s angry now. She’s angry with the heavenly gods for taking her worship away. She wants to exact retribution for the slight they perpetrated against her.”
Ugoth turned away, his thoughts caught up with this possibility. Vik interjected a further caution into his contemplation.
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