“Another farmer’s wife, Nenz...?” the voice under him smiles.
He hears the teasing in the tone, but also the hardness underneath. He can’t fight back. He can’t even pretend to be who he normally would. The arms under him are strong, and other than jostling every bruised and cracked bone in his body, they don’t seem to be trying to hurt him. When they start walking, he grips hold of those arms, though, letting out another cry.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Home, runt,” a second voice answers, to his left. “I’d think you’d want a bed about now...if not a bath and a few stiff drinks...”
He realizes he knows the new voice. His fingers loosen on the man holding him, and looking down, he realizes he knows him, too.
Kandash. Wreg.
And to the other side of him, he sees another youngster, only a few decades older than him, and another beside him.
Tardek. Raddi.
They are from his uncle. They are from his unit.
He relaxes, fighting a relief profound enough to close his throat. They don’t like him, but they won’t hurt him. He almost forgets he’s not supposed to like them, either.
“I thought they had killed me, brothers,” is all he says.
Wreg chuckles from beside him, glancing at the other three.
“From the looks of your face...they tried.”
Kandash grunts a laugh from where he is carrying him, slung over his shoulder.
Nenzi nods, but can’t force himself to speak again, not without emotion.
It is the last thing he remembers before he is out.
He wakes, his tongue dried to his mouth, his lungs hurting with each breath. His clothes feel stuck to his skin, but he is sweating, lying under a thin blanket on a cot across from a larger wooden bed against the far wall.
He knows at once it is not his uncle’s house, and while he knows this place, well enough to recognize the blanket on him, and the heavy wood beams of the ceiling, painted with a blue and white sword and sun, it takes him a moment to place it.
Then it clicks...barracks. Under the inn with the red door.
He is in one of their rooms.
He has been in this catacomb of rooms before, although perhaps not in this room exactly. He has come to their common space for meetings and trainings with the other seers, with briefings from his uncle, and even religious ceremonies and other more social things.
He has always been an outsider here, though. More than that, he knows the other seers dislike him...those who don’t hate him outright. Most of this is his own doing, of course.
Pushing aside the thought, he focuses back on his body.
His jaw hurts, more than the rest. Wincing as he raises his arm, he touches it gingerly, feeling the swell of a bruise...maybe more than a bruise. It pulls at the skin of his face. He touches his face and jaw a few more times with his fingers, to get a sense of the breadth of it, and at the same time feeling something off in his mouth, a harder, more ragged pain that is muted somehow. It tells him they likely fed him something to dull the pain, maybe the guland he’s seen the seers use when they’ve injured themselves in the field.
“Guland, yes,” a voice says, in heavily-accented German.
When he looks up, he finds himself meeting the eyes of Wreg again. The thick-armed seer painted with body art motions towards his own mouth, laying down a few pieces of wood from where he entered through the door behind Nenzi’s head.
He stacks the wood by the fire at one side of the room, then brushes off his hands, looking at him. Nenzi still hasn’t spoken when Wreg gestures at his own mouth, roughly where Nenzi’s injury is.
“They broke three of your teeth,” he says, matter of fact. “We had to pull them.”
Nenzi feels a cold kind of fear, irrational in that what he fears has already passed. He wonders what he looks like then, and decides he doesn’t want to know, and is thankful for the lack of mirrors. The older seer gestures in reassurance.
“The teeth will grow back, Nenz...and they didn’t scar your face. What it looks like now, doesn’t matter.”
Nenzi nods, forcing his shoulders to relax, and the other seer smiles.
“Did you forget you are not human, runt? Only the worms are gifted with one set of teeth.” He grins wider. “...We are more like the sharks, yes?”
“Yes.” Nenzi speaks awkwardly and forces himself to nod, if only to distract himself from the pains he is still cataloguing. Glancing around him once more as the older seer begins stacking wood by the hearth, he closes his eyes, fighting back a reaction in his light as he realizes again that he is not in his own room. He has never been permitted to sleep elsewhere...certainly not around other seers. Even in Serbia, he shared a tent with his uncle and Turek, one of his uncle’s closest seers. He was never allowed to be alone with Wreg or the others while unconscious.
“Not that I’m not grateful, brother...” he says after another pause. “But why am I here?”
Wreg tosses a small log on the fire, waving away the sparks that rise. Straightening from a crouch, he grunts a little, looking at the younger seer.
“They must have hit you hard in the head,” he says. “That was almost polite.”
Seeing the younger seer’s face twist in a half-scowl, stopped by the pain in his jaw and mouth, he smiles wider, shaking his head.
“...Not that I’m complaining,” he adds.
He pauses, still assessing the other with his eyes and light.
“The truth is, they did hit you pretty hard, runt,” he says. “Your uncle was not happy about this. He wanted some of our people to discuss this problem...with the humans who did this.”
Nenzi feels his heart beating harder, almost hurting his chest. When he grips the side of the wooden frame though, struggling up to a seated position, Wreg abruptly holds up a hand, clicking as he walks closer to the cot. He gestures sharply for him to remain where he is, using the command form, rather than the polite one. Sending a pulse of his light to emphasize the point, he continues to stand over him until he feels the younger seer’s acquiescence in his light.
“...You’re to stay here, Nenz,” Wreg adds. “At least a few weeks. Boss’ orders. He wants you off the street for awhile...” He gives him an apologetic shrug. “...And I’m afraid your fighting days may be over. You’ll have to find another way to earn extra coin.”
When Nenzi doesn’t answer, Wreg sighs a bit, wandering back to the other bed, against the opposite wall. Still, Nenzi doesn’t feel him relax until he gestures his understanding.
“You can take orders, then,” Wreg smiles. “Just not from me.”
Nenzi doesn’t answer that either.
He hopes this will discourage the other from talking, but it doesn’t.
“...So you slept with the Franzin girl,” Wreg says after another brief pause. “She’s pretty Nenz. Very pretty.”
The other speaks before he knows he intends to.
“She’s a fucking bitch,” he says, wincing at his jaw. “Her brother. He was with them...at least one of them. Maybe more.”
Wreg chuckles at this, resting his arms on his knees as he leans against the wall, sitting on the blankets covering his wider bed.
“Yes,” he says. “We know. What did you do to her, runt, to make her so angry?”
“I broke it off with her.”
“Really?” Wreg grins wider. “And she did not take this so well?”
Nenzi gestures at the blood-stained shirt he still wears, the lump on his jaw, the gash in the side of his pants where another of them cut him.
“...Apparently not,” he says.
Wreg chuckles a little again. His eyes continue to watch him though, holding that vague humor, but with something else shining brighter underneath. Nenzi feels it before he sees it, a cold calculation under the more surface guise of camaraderie. He is being scanned, he knows. Probed. He suspects he knows the reason why, even before the other speaks.
“She knew what you were, Nenz,” Wreg says
.
Nenzi gives him a hard look. “That was an accident,” he says.
“An accident?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of accident?”
“What kind do you think?” he growls back.
Wreg just looks at him for a moment, his eyes holding a kind of irritated impatience. When he breaks the silence again, he is shaking his head, his mouth hard.
“You know, Nenz,” he says softly. “You are quickly becoming more work for me than all of my other seers combined. Not a one of your brothers under my command pains me so often, nor so deeply.”
Nenzi doesn’t answer that.
When the silence stretches, he fights to turn himself slowly on the bed, gripping the edges to try and lower his body to the thin mattress. His arms are weak, however, and he grips until his knuckles are white, fighting his own breaths. When he lands on his back on the padding, he gives a low gasp of pain, unable to make himself move further for a moment, once he is there. He lays with his eyes closed instead, fighting back the image of the woman’s face.
“Why didn’t you erase her, Nenz?” Wreg asks.
“I was going to.”
“When?”
“I was going to,” he repeats stubbornly.
“But you didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Again I ask you...why?”
“Why do you think?” he says, opening his eyes just long enough to glare at the other seer. “She got off on it. She sucked me off...I liked it.”
Wreg grimaced a little, averting his gaze.
“You’re pathetic, Nenzi.”
The younger seer only smiled, but that hurt his face, too. Wincing, he lay an arm over his eyes, avoiding the worst of the bruises, and resting it there gingerly.
“Fuck you, Wreg.”
“...I’m not even talking about your obsession with human pussy,” Wreg adds, as if he doesn’t hear him. “...Although that is pathetic, too. I am talking about your complete lack of self control...no matter what the cost to others of our kind. I am talking about your seeming inability to put the needs of the cause before your own dick...” His voice grows harder. “If they hadn’t done such a job on you, I’d be taking a strap to you myself...do you know that, little Nenz? I don’t give a fuck who your uncle is...I would beat you if only in the hope that it might finally be the thing to reach you...”
Nenzi laughs at this, he can’t help it. But the words depress him, too.
“Give it your best shot, Wreg,” he says.
Wreg clicks at him a little, shaking his head.
“Again, you miss the point,” he says, his voice now holding a thread of disgust. “Did it not occur to you, young brother, that you put all of our lives and identities at risk, with your love of this woman’s mouth on you? And now I have to hunt down those fuckers...eliminate them and whoever they’ve bragged to. Including the brother seer they hired to help them bring you down...” His voice hardens more. “I do not like killing my own kind, Nenz. I do not like it at all. Not for any reason...but certainly not for your stupidity.”
At this, the younger seer can’t help but look at him.
After studying his eyes for a moment, Wreg clicks softly, but his eyes hold a fainter thread of satisfaction.
“Yes, brother Nenz...what did you think we would be doing, to clean up this mess? Or did you presume that we could simply let it be known that we have seers here in Dresden, masquerading as humans? That we are armed, and skilled in hand-to-hand combat...and that we like to seduce German girls when we are not drunk and shooting at Serbs?” Clicking again in annoyance, he folds his fingers together.
“To do this killing risks us, too...but then you knew that. And it can’t be helped.”
Nenzi feels his jaw harden more, despite the pain.
“And the girl?” he says finally. “Gretchen?”
Wreg frowns at him, his eyes holding a faint disbelief.
“The girl is dead, Nenz,” he says, clicking almost to himself. “What do you think? That we would let her tell more people about your dick?”
Nenzi feels something cold in his stomach, even as he opens his eyes, staring up at the ceiling. For a moment he sees her face again, her eyes and lips laughing. He sees her as he first knew her behind his eyes...then forces it out of his light. He fights to feel nothing about this, then to simply pretend he feels nothing at all about anything.
“Do you want food?” Wreg asks.
After a faint pause, Nenzi gestures a yes.
Wreg climbs off of his bed, long enough to walk to the fire and pull a pot off the hearth that Nenzi had not seen sitting there. He watches as the ink-covered seer ladles broth into a deep wooden bowl, then brings it over to where he lays. He struggles once more to sit up, but the other seer holds up a hand to relax him. Then, sitting by him on the cot, he slides an arm under his shoulders and back, moving him up with surprising care.
“Mind the ribs,” Nenzi says. “I think some are broken.”
“Four,” Wreg acknowledges with a gesture.
Letting him rest against his side until he is resting on his own legs instead, Wreg hands him the bowl once he is situated. Nenzi takes it with a gesture of thanks.
“Anything else?” he says, meaning his body.
“You have a concussion,” Wreg says. “A fracture on your hip...the ribs and the teeth. A stab wound in your side that nicked your liver. The one on your leg is less serious...as is the one in your shoulder. Your jaw is fractured, too...but there was not a clean break, which is good. It is already starting to heal, according to Josef.” Making another vague gesture with one hand, he puffs out his cheeks with a sigh. “Those are the serious things. Mostly you are bruised, Nenz...pretty much everywhere, from what Josef told us last night. But no internal bleeding, and no arteries cut. It is lucky for you, that they did not know seer physiology. If you were human, they would have ruptured at least one organ...possibly more than one. It is good for us that the brother they hired only did what they paid him for...”
“And you cannot spare him?” Nenzi says, looking up as he swallows a spoonful of broth.
Wreg makes a concessionary hand gesture, but his eyes lose some of their coldness.
“That is up to your uncle.”
Nenzi nods slowly, sipping the soup after bringing the spoon carefully to his mouth once more. His jaw hurts, even with the guland, and the holes where the teeth were pain him with every mouthful, but he drinks it down anyway, laboriously slow. The pull of his stomach is more than any of the pains in his mouth, even then.
They do not talk again until he finishes the entire thing.
“Go back to sleep, Nenz,” the other seer says then, taking the empty bowl from his fingers, along with the spoon.
For the first time, Nenzi hears genuine sympathy in the other’s voice.
Wreg winks at him. “...We will talk more about your sins later.”
Sliding his shoulder back under his, Wreg helps him ease slowly back into a prone position on the cot, even helping him adjust his shoulders so they are laying almost flat. No matter what side he lies on, it hurts, but his back seems to be doing less damage to the rest of him.
When he looks up, he finds that Wreg has not moved away.
He sits there, watching him silently, until Nenzi closes his eyes and once more lets himself drift back into the Barrier’s folds.
He wakes again. Wreg is the only one there once more.
The Chinese-looking seer is crouched by the fire, his long, dark hair in a thick braid down his back, his muscular arms resting on his thighs. The seer is barefoot, his hair is wet...but it is the smell coming from the cooking pot hanging beside him that draws Nenzi’s eyes. Wreg periodically stirs the contents in that iron pot while Nenzi fights to focus his eyes, to remember where he is. When another whiff of the smell reaches his nose, however, his stomach growls loudly, even as he feels a kind of longing pain envelop his light.
Wreg glances up at him, smiling a bit, his
eyes almost friendly.
“I thought food might be the thing to wake you,” he says.
“How long have I slept?”
Wreg gives him another nod. “Over a week. Almost two. You shut down...went into ungrat. The stasis. Josef has been here daily...he told us you would be fine."
Nenzi thinks about this. He knows about the comas seers can put themselves into to heal, of course, but as far as he knows, his body has never done this before. It is an odd feeling, to realize he has been out for so long.
“It feels it,” he acknowledges finally.
“You are better then?” Wreg says, as he ladles stew into a deep wooden bowl that now sits in the palm of his hand.
Watching him, Nenzi feels his tongue thicken in his mouth. Swallowing with an effort, he closes his eyes, wincing as he fights to sit up.
“I’ll tell you after you give me some of that,” he responds, grunting a little as he rests his weight on his legs. “...If you don’t, I may have to fight you, and then I’ll feel worse.”
Wreg laughs, even as Nenzi holds the edge of the cot, fighting a rush of dizziness once his body is more or less vertical. He can't remember the last time he's felt so weak...or so completely at another's mercy. He watches the other seer pull up from his crouch in a single, fluid motion, closing the distance to the cot in only a few strides.
“There is plenty,” Wreg tells him, watching with hands on his waist as the other shovels chunks of potato and carrot and beef into his mouth, his eyes almost glazed. “...The others have eaten, so the rest is yours.” He glances at the pot, as if calculating. “...Four more bowls, anyway. If you want.”
“I want,” Nenzi says.
Wreg smiles again, sitting down as he watches him eat. He brings him a second bowl a few minutes later. Nenzi is nearly finished with that one as well, before he speaks again.
“You still do skin art, Wreg?” he says, motioning at him with the spoon. “The inks?”
Wreg gives him a puzzled look, then a smile.
“Ceremonial inks, you mean?” He holds up his own arm, showing a pattern with multiple colors, adorned with symbols the other recognizes from books, along with images of twisting snakes and clouds filled with fire. “Like these?”
Allie's War Season Two Page 91
