The Taming

by Imogen Keeper

  Fandig rolled his massive shoulders. He was one of about ten men Tor would be scared to face hand to hand. Wide shoulders, long arms, hard sinew and weathered skin. Fandig was no joke. “Your father fired me.”

  “That’s a hell of a commendation in my opinion.”

  Fandig laughed, but it sounded like a hiss. He was really just blowing air through his teeth. It was more a sound of acknowledged humor than an actual laugh. “Don’t you want to know why?”

  “Not really. I knew you, before. I fought with you. I never fought with him. I trust you. I didn’t trust him.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “Don’t know. Not sure I really care.”

  “Sanger?”

  “Probably.” The bug landed on Tor’s finger, its slender body so light he scarcely felt it. The wings moved so fast he could barely track them. He brought the bug closer, and he’d have sworn it cocked its head at him, round green eyes trained on him.

  Fandig tilted his head. “They say you’re a slave to a foreign whore who won’t even fuck you.”

  Tor spread his free arm wide, letting the breeze blow in his shirt, still studying the broadfly on his finger. “You knew me from boyhood, Fandig. Why would I tolerate that?”

  “They say she bathes a lot, but no bath could wash away the truth.”

  Tor caught his tongue in his teeth and looked out over the land beyond the boat. “She wears my mark. She sleeps in my bed. She’s my wife.”

  Fandig opened his mouth, but the buzz of the comm on Tor’s belt stopped him.

  Tor glanced at the read. Jeor. He tapped the screen. “Yeah?”

  “Klymeni went into the city with a group of felanas.”

  The bug’s wings drew together tight when his hand tightened, and it lifted off, getting lost in the breeze. “Who the fuck authorized that?”

  “No one,” said Jeor quickly. “They aren’t prisoners.”

  “I know they aren’t fucking prisoners, Jeor. Who’d they take?”

  “No one.”

  He turned away from Fandig’s shrewd gaze. “I hope to hell you’re calling to tell me someone just brought her back.”

  “There was a riot.”

  Tor bared his teeth against the hillside. She’d run off before he could give her the comm. Fuck. “Where is she now?”

  “We don’t know.” There was a pause on the line, silence but for the slap of the river water against the hull of the boat and the purr of the engine. “But we found a guy who had her hair.”

  Tor froze. “What does that mean?”

  There was silence on the line.

  “What the fuck does that mean, Jeor?”

  “I don’t know. The Polizei found some guy waving it around like a trophy. He was selling off strands of it near the market.”

  “How much of her hair?”

  “A lot.”

  “Get every man on the Roq into the city searching, even that fat chef from the kitchens. Set up a reward, and get it on the news. I’ll be back in an hour.”

  Fandig was staring at him hard when he turned around. But he didn’t ask. Fandig was like that. He’d wait.

  Tor looked down at his boots, gritting his teeth against the heat rushing up his cheeks. He’d bungled their entire conversation earlier. He just kept making the wrong steps. Vaniiya, if she was killed, he’d never forgive himself. It was like sucking on acid, but he forced himself to meet the eyes of a man he respected and admit the words allowed. “My selissa is missing in a riot.”

  Fandig whistled.

  “Do I have a new captain of the guard?” Tor forced his voice to stay flat, but his hands fisted with the effort. If anyone touched her, if anyone so much as breathed at her wrong, he’d tear them apart. And fucking Jeor too—that bastard was supposed to be in charge in his absence.

  Fandig rose and dropped a hand to the handle of his sword. “Let’s go, Regio.”

  30

  What if I’m not enough?

  KLYM DIDN’T HAVE TIME to find the face of whoever had grabbed her in the crowd. A shove to the back sent her sprawling through a doorway. She hit the concrete floor and landed on her hands and knees.

  A dark-haired man yanked the door shut. He flipped the lock and turned on her. “Are you hurt?”

  She backed away. He was a Prime. There was no doubt about that, not given the enormous breadth of his shoulders, nor the massive height. She’d come to know the difference.

  “No.” She reached for her hair and remembered belatedly that it was gone.

  He nodded. “Then come with me. We need to be fast.”

  She glanced at the door outside, where the mob still shouted, that amplified voice droning on. Capturing the Selissa of the Roq would put someone in a powerful position. The last thing she wanted was to lead to Tor being extorted.

  She looked back at the man standing in the rear doorway. He and Tor could practically be brothers.

  He looked like the kind of man from whom she’d never be able to escape. But at least there was only one of him.

  She expelled a long breath. “You’ll take me back to the Roq?”

  He nodded curtly, and she followed him into an alley that stank of urine and rot.

  “This is the direction of the cassia?” She tried to keep any suspicion from her voice, but it was hard. She had no choice now but to disregard them again—with this man. She needed help.

  He was big, and he moved like Tor. Like a predator. He moved the way men moved when they’d been trained to look for threats and respond to them.

  It was hard not to panic as she followed in his wake, scanning the murky shadows for something she might use as a weapon in case he turned on her.

  “What the hell was he thinking, letting you come here alone?”

  She stiffened. “Tor doesn’t know I’m here.”

  He stopped walking and peered around a stucco wall in an alley. He looked back at her. “Can you do anything about your hair?”

  The reminder brought a vain pang. She sank her fingers into her hair. Raggedly cut to above her shoulders, jagged. “Like what? Shave it off? I’m afraid I’m fresh out of razors.”

  He made a pfft sound and gestured that she follow him across the alley, past metal containers the size of a hover that stank of rotting things.

  She stepped around a puddle oozing from the bottom of one.

  “Wait here,” the man grumbled.

  In the distance, that amplified voice shouted now about taxes and price hikes and hunger.

  She wanted to run, go find other people, but that instinct was dead wrong. While on Argentus, a crowd would mean safety, on Vesta it was the opposite. Her hair would stand out like a beacon. There was no fighting this Prime, and there was no running either. She hesitated, reaching down to lift her skirts before she remembered she wasn’t wearing skirts.

  The man came back and shoved a shawl at her. “Cover your head.”

  She tied it under her chin like she’d seen some of the elderly Vestige women do.

  A second after that, he tossed a rag at her. It was wet, with some sort of strong, antiseptic-scented fluid, and it squelched in her hands. “Wash his mark off your chest.”

  “Why?”

  “If we run into anyone, I want to be able to pretend that you are just a regular woman. You stink like him.”

  “I thought that was the point, though.”

  “Up at the Roq, maybe. But down here, you’d be better off smelling like a woman than like the marked property of a Prime.”

  She looked at the rag.

  “The humani are angry at anyone smacking of authority right now. Down here, that mark is like a heat signal, partly claimed and up for dibs. The bolder they get, the more trouble they’ll become.”

  “Aren’t you a Prime?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wouldn’t they just assume I belonged to you?”

  “Maybe, but I don’t want to have to fight a hundred humani just to preserve Tor’s pride. Wash off his mark, or I leave you here.�
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  The orange puddle in the corner bubbled.

  She thought of all the grasping hands, and all the shouting people, and lifted the rag to her neck and washed off Tor’s mark.

  The man inclined his head.

  She fell into step behind him, narrowing her eyes at his broad back. “How much farther?”

  “Twenty minutes to the base of the cliff. From there, a solid three hour’s hike up the cliff.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve got an extra pair of stout boots and a nice pair of soft socks in your pocket.”

  He gave her a look over his shoulder. “Fresh out.”

  When they arrived at the bottom of a cliff, Klym nearly sighed with relief. He hadn’t been lying after all. She recognized this spot from the ride with Staria earlier. “You can leave me here.”

  “No.” He gestured at an old staircase that had been carved into the rock, weathered over the years so that the steps were deeply slanted and concave in the center. So many feet had climbed those steps. “Go first. If you fall, you’ll hit me before you hit the ground.”

  She tilted her head back, and back, and back, and back. It really was quite a high cliff. She imagined losing her footing and falling all the way down.

  Not a pleasant prospect at all. The trail zigzagged its way upward. An unlucky tumble could lead to falling quite a long way. It was all too easy to picture her body bumping its way down the cliff’s face.

  Best not to dwell on it, then. Or Tor’s response when she got to the top. He didn’t truly intend to do the deed right where they stood, would he? He was certainly comfortable touching her, kissing her, throwing her over his shoulder in front of the entire cassia, but that didn’t extend to public fornication, did it?

  “Very well, then.” She took hold of a thick vine and began the ascent, replaying his words and wondering about her strange rescuer. “You know Tor.”

  A stream of hovers left the Roq above them, fanning out and spreading across the city.

  “We trained in the same unit,” he said after so long she thought he’d forgotten about her question. “We were bloodied together.”

  There was something in his voice, and she paused to glance back at him. “You care for him?”

  He smiled grimly. “You might say we were close as brothers.”

  “You respect him too.”

  “No one could see him fight and not respect him. He is the fiercest fighter I have ever known.”

  They’d climbed higher up now, and a breeze tugged at her hair, cooling the sweat on her chest. “That sounds like caring.”

  “Depends on your definition of caring.”

  He didn’t comment. For a long time, they climbed in silence. Klym had to bite her lip to keep from wincing when stones began to tear through the soles of her shoes. She slipped once, and he steadied her with a hand on her back.

  “I just realized, I don’t even know your name.”

  “Sanger.”

  Klym turned briefly to glance at him.

  He raised a brow.

  She knew that name. She’d heard it when they’d first arrived.

  They kept on walking until the sun sank low behind them and the lights in the city flickered on. Night-flying insects came. Her feet hurt so badly she couldn’t even think straight.

  When Sanger spoke, she nearly jumped. “Why hasn’t he fucked you yet?”

  “It’s hardly any of your business,” she said. What was the point of the bloody mark if it fooled precisely no one? When he didn’t respond to that, she blew out a breath. “We are enemies, for one thing.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “He abducted me.”

  “In the past.”

  “He shouts all the time.” She yanked on a vine and nearly lost her footing when it pulled loose.

  “Shout back.”

  She scrambled for a new vine to pull herself up a sharp rise. The sky darkened to a deep gray. “He spanked me.”

  That got a laugh. “You liked it.”

  “He’s scary. H—”

  “He’s not scary. Not to you. Scary means a threat, and Tor would never hurt his wife.”

  Klym was silent in the night, trudging up a set of rickety steps. No one could see her face, and there was freedom in that. “I’m scared,” she whispered. “What if I’m not what he needs? What if I disappoint him? What if, after everything, he sends me away again?” She’d never have asked that question of someone she’d have to see face to face. Not in a million years.

  “What do you think he needs?”

  “Don’t Primes need felanas?”

  “No,” he said simply. “If he needed felanas, he’d hardly send them away.”

  She bit her lip. She hadn’t been enough for her father to overcome his grief. She hadn’t been enough to instill any loyalty in Agammo. What if she unveiled the last hidden part of herself to Tor, and it just… “What if I’m not enough? What if he doesn’t really want me?”

  “I’ve known him my whole life.” His voice was soft, barely more than a whisper. “Tor does what he wants, when he wants it. If he took you, it’s because he wanted to take you. He wants you, and you’re enough.”

  The first stars winked. Darkness brought cooler air, but made it harder to see the vines that had been so helpful, and even harder to see the stairs.

  They didn’t speak after that for a long time. There was nothing to say.

  She was so busy squinting at the stairs that she didn’t even see that it was the last step until she looked around, surprised, and saw that there were no steps left, because she’d reached the top.

  Eyes burning with relief, she staggered awkwardly and would have lost her balance, but Sanger was there behind her with a strong hand on her forearm.

  For a moment, no one saw them. The cassia was bathed in moonlight. At the center of one cluster of men stood Tor, Gaspart by his side. Tor was shouting, and even though his back was to her, she’d recognize that bellow.

  She smiled, seeing the familiar broad expanse of his shoulders, the tilt of his head. He shouted something else, and a pair of soldiers turned and raced away toward a cluster of hovers.

  He stilled.

  Something must have told him she’d come back—maybe a note of her scent on the wind. The breeze ruffled the hair on the back of his neck. She barely dared to breathe as she met his eyes. His gaze roamed up her body and down.

  She swallowed, gripping her hands together as he came at her, part trepidatious, part hopeful. She braced herself for his temper, or shouts, or maybe even a grateful kiss that she was back. Her eyes burned because it felt so much better, so right being back in his vicinity.

  He walked toward them, all tense jaw, burning eyes, and rigid spine. In all her time with Tor, she’d seen him annoyed, infuriated, exacerbated. She’d seen him red in the face and bellowing, livid in the aftermath of the desecration of Jasto’s body, but she’d never seen him like this.

  Cold.

  He didn’t even look at her. Just stared behind her at Sanger. “Step away from him.”

  “Tor,” she started. “We c—”

  “Step away from him, Klymeni.” Still, he didn’t look at her.

  She swallowed thickly and turned to Sanger, wanting to thank him, but he didn’t look at her either. Just kept his eyes on Tor. “Risky game you’re playing, Regio.”

  Tor’s dimple flickered.

  “How long do you think you can keep it secret?”

  “Now.”

  Maybe she should have interjected, tried to defend Sanger, apologized more quickly, but something made her think that anything she said right at that moment would only make the situation so much worse.

  So, perhaps for the first time in their association, she did exactly as Tor asked, and meekly stepped away from Sanger.

  “Go,” Tor muttered.

  If he’d only look at her, she could wrap her arms around him. She’d known he’d be furious, she’d expected him to bellow. And she’d planned to take Sanger’s advice and bello
w back that he should have given her a comm. That he should check in sometimes instead of leaving her alone all the time. Every day, he woke at dawn and she barely saw him until dinner.

  She’d had her whole argument planned out.

  But he didn’t even look at her.

  She started to dig her feet in, but that hurt too badly, so she limped over to the stairs as gracefully as she could manage on her filthy, bloody rag-shoes.

  Whatever it was they said to one another, she didn’t hear. But after a terse moment, Sanger disappeared over the edge of the cliff, and Tor stalked back toward her. The wind pulled at his hair.

  His face, highlighted by the cassia’s exterior lights. The way his clothes pulled at his muscles. He was back in his black trousers and shirt, all strapped up with knives and rezals. He looked... deadly.

  “I’m sorr—”

  “Not now.” He didn’t even touch her, just stalked up the steps and into the cassia.

  31

  I wish you’d bellow

  THE ENTRY HALL of the cassia was crowded. Men stood in packs and leaned against walls, covered in armor, strapped with weapons, murmuring in deep conversation.

  It was as if someone had died.

  “What is happening?” Klym asked when he finally stopped at the bottom of the stairs that led to their private quarters. The starflies glittered in their columns.

  Tor looked at her for the first time. Eyes narrowed. The muscles in his throat moved, and his jaw clenched. “The Selissa of Tamminia disappeared.” His words came out in such sharp bites that she flinched.

  The muscle in his jaw bulged.

  She was much more comfortable with his bellowing and blustering. Quiet, simmering Tor was far more terrifying than fiery, furious, bellicose Tor.

  The space between them stretched. She wanted to cross it, touch him. “I didn’t think anyone would even miss me.”

  One side of his mouth twisted, that dimple flashing as his cheek moved. Not a happy dimple. “I gave you two rules. What were they?”

  She swallowed. “Don’t leave without you and don’t trust anyone.”

  “And what did you do?”

  She grimaced. “Both of those things.” She reached out to put her hand on his arm, hoping to reassure him, but he shifted out of her reach.