Gambling Heart

by Thom Lane

  I thought he was trying to persuade himself, as much as tell me what he’d decided, what my fate would be. I didn’t think he was making a very good job of it, either. He didn’t sound persuaded.

  It didn’t make any difference, whether or not he believed his own argument. What he did with me, that was all that mattered now. He took me down from the whipping post, bound my wrists again behind me, dragged me up to his room and chained me to the foot of the bed.

  “You’ll kneel there until I come to bed, and then you’ll sleep right there,” cold and uncomfortable on the bare boards, without so much as a blanket against the night or my master’s arms against the fears that consumed me. That was hard. I told myself that I should be grateful to have this last brief time whole-minded, that tomorrow would be worse than tonight and the days to come beyond imagining; but there was small comfort in that.

  I did just exactly as he told me, kneeling neatly upright in the empty room for long dreary hours until he came back up. He’d been drinking, I could smell wine on him, but he wasn’t drunk. He wasn’t either excited or sulking either, so I didn’t think he’d been gambling. He was quietly downcast, and I thought he’d been closeted with Master Lucan, discussing exactly what would be done with me.

  He checked the chain on my collar, checked the leather that bound my wrists, for all the world as though nothing else mattered to him than keeping me secure. Even so, he couldn’t keep his fingers from scuffing through my hair the way his habit was, roughly affectionate. When he realized what he was doing, he cuffed me instead as though it was my fault. Perhaps he thought it was. Perhaps he was right, though I hadn’t been leaning into him at all. He was my master, and he’d told me not to. I wouldn’t dare.

  I heard the bed boards creak as he sat down; heard him grunt as he wrestled with his boots. More than anything I wanted to be there where I belonged, at his feet, helping him. He was a grown man, of course he could undress himself; but boots are easier if there’s someone else to haul. I knew just the way of it. And he’d never think to put them out for the guildhouse boy to polish, so he’d start tomorrow with his boots all shabby and he hated that, he’d grown used to the shine I raised on them; and…

  And I said nothing, did nothing, didn’t move a muscle while he struggled silently, until one boot and then the other hit the floor. The rest of his clothes followed, haphazardly scattered across the room to gather creases in the night; then he blew the lamp out and went to bed.

  After a while, he thought to speak to me through the darkness.

  “Jay. Lie down and go to sleep.”

  “Yes, Master,” I said, but it was half a lie. I did lie down now that I had his permission—no, his order was what I had, and I did it in obedience—but I didn’t sleep. I had no chance of sleeping. All my back was on fire, and every movement made it worse and I couldn’t stop shivering; shock and terror held me like two claws, gripping and shaking. The brute shock of the whipping was bad enough. Everything else was worse. I thought I’d been so clever for so long, keeping myself hidden, living my life, managing my masters as subtly as I could. Just a tweak here and there, leaning on them lightly to nudge them this way or that, to make their lives a little better and so my own. One big mistake I’d made, but just the one, and I’d worked out how to fix that soon enough. Oh, I’d been so secretly pleased with myself, and now this. Now I was exposed, I was cruelly sore and terribly afraid, and my punishment had only just begun.

  I did try not to cry, despite the pain in my back and the cramps in my bound arms and the shuddering dread that possessed me. I did try.

  Then I tried to do it silently, not to disturb my master.

  He was sleeping no more than I was. I could hear him toss and turn, as restless as I was still. I could hear the effort in him when he tried to lie still himself, when he tried to force himself to sleep; I heard when he gave up that helpless endeavor, when he sighed and rolled over one more time.

  When at last he called my name, “Jay, come here,” I heard that loud as a shout, though he’d barely more than whispered it.

  I scuttled across the floorboards on my knees, ready for anything. His hands found me in the dark, found my wet cheeks; he murmured, “Poor boy,” with a rough sympathy.

  Then he laughed harshly at himself, said, “Poor Master,” and hoisted me into the bed. Laid me out beside him, belly down; stretched himself against me and sighed and said it again, said, “Poor me. I’ve grown used to this. Can’t sleep without my slave boy, apparently.”

  He wasn’t actually showing any signs of sleeping, or of wanting to. His fingers stroked the welts he’d raised, all down my back; he was gentle but just the lightest of touches was enough to make me squirm beneath his hand and sob into his mattress.

  “Oh, hush,” he said, slipping those same fingers into the cleft between my butt cheeks, pressing against my sphincter, giving me something else to think about. Something to react to. “Don’t try to make me feel sorry for you. You deserve all of this and more, everything that’s coming to you. Young fool, working magic on your master. Trying to work it on a mage, of all people. What were you thinking?”

  “I didn’t”—I mumbled, hiccuping into the dusty ticking—“I didn’t know he was a mage…”

  “No. Neither did I to be honest. Even so.” His voice sharpened as he remembered he was meant to be disciplining me; his hand pulled free to slap my rising butt. “Working magic on a free man, on anyone—you deserve more than a whipping. Don’t you ever do that, understand me? Never again…”

  He seemed to have forgotten that I’d never have the chance again, after these last few days’ journey back to Amaranth. I muttered my obedience, but it didn’t satisfy him. He said, “I can’t trust you anymore, do you see? Even this, even now”—his arm coming round me, his body settling heavily, comfortably against me, the way a master should lie with his boy in the dead of night—“this feels so much better, but I can’t know if that’s really what I’m feeling or if it’s just what you want me to feel. If you can control my head, I can never have faith in anything I think or anything I feel around you.”

  It really wasn’t like that. I couldn’t control his thoughts or anyone’s; the most I could ever do was lean into them a little, try to push their choices one way or the other. Besides, he was my master and I’d promised. I didn’t say so, though. He didn’t want persuading. He was still trying to persuade himself. I thought in his head he was still arguing it out with Lucan. Arguing and losing all down the line, my poor master.

  His fingers tugged the knots loose, on the thong that bound my wrists. I lay perfectly still, barely daring to breathe; one by one he tugged my arms above my head, tied my wrists again, then bound them to an iron ring in the headboard.

  “I think that was my idea,” he said, “though of course I can’t know for certain. Either way: at least I know you’re safe, you’re here, you won’t be stealing away in the night to leave me sleeping, lulled by your magic.”

  He could be sure of that, with my wrists tied to the head of the bed and my collar still chained to the foot. I swallowed a painful, hysterical giggle and buried my face in my elbow, feeling grateful as a boy should be to his master. More than grateful for the warmth of his body against mine, even where I hurt. That didn’t matter. Nothing mattered so long as I could live in the moment, this moment, as a good boy should…

  None of my doing, truly, but his hand was on my butt again, just where I wanted it. One finger, two fingers, nudging at my ring.

  “Tell me why, Jay,” he said.

  “Master?”

  “Why aren’t you free?”

  I really didn’t understand the question. “I was born slave, Master.” Not his, of course, I’d had to work to find him; I’d had to keep believing, through years of disappointment. But, “I’ve always been a slave.”

  “That’s my point. You didn’t have to be. You could have used this…power…of yours to win your freedom, or to seize it. Long ago. Why didn’t you?”

>   “Master, I’m collared. I’m branded. Nobody would ever believe it, if I claimed to be free.”

  “Not now, maybe. A branded man is always going to face trouble, people thinking he’s a runaway, trying to collar him again. But Lucan says you will have come into your power as a kid, in your teens. Nobody brands that young. You could have walked away, and I don’t understand why you didn’t.”

  I shifted in my bonds, but only so that I could nestle my head into his shoulder rather than my own. So that I could nip at the tender skin of his armpit and feel the response in his body and then my own as his fingers pushed roughly through my ring and deep inside me; so that I could let our two bodies answer for me, because really, what can a boy say to a question like that? From his master?

  He laughed then, a little shakily. And he worked his fingers a little deeper as my butt rose up in response, and he said, “Oh, you little slut. For this? Is that all?”

  And no, of course that wasn’t all, and he was going to make me say it after all, my cruel master. No boy should have to expose himself like this, it wasn’t fair; but I was slave and of course it wasn’t fair, he was my master.

  So I answered him like a good boy. I said, “No, Master, that’s not all,” though this was surely some best part of it and I thought he thought so too, the way his cock was all stiff against my flank. We lay almost perfectly still against each other, and wrestled with words more than bodies, and were slick with sweat anyway and it was almost the most erotic time I’d spent with him, exposing the core of me, peeling myself more naked than I’d ever been with anyone, more than I’d ever dreamed of.

  I said, “I was a slave all my life, it was all I knew, but more than that: I liked it. You’re very safe when you’re a slave, the world is very simple. By the time I realized that I could nudge other people towards doing what I wanted, even free folk; by the time it even crossed my mind that I might be able to walk free, one way or another, I really didn’t want to. I knew by then where I belonged, at a master’s feet. Or at his heels. Or in his bed”—with a sudden thrust up, my butt against his hand, to drive his fingers deeper yet. Especially in his bed, my body wanted to say, just then. Please, just fuck me? Now?

  He wouldn’t do it, though, not yet, my mean master. He said, “So what, you moved from one master to another, influencing one after another until you found what you wanted?”

  Until I found you, my body wanted to say; but apparently he wasn’t understanding me, because he made me say it out loud. “Until I found you, Master, yes. Master, please…?”

  Now I guess at last he noticed what my butt was telling him, or else he was done tormenting me, or else I just couldn’t disgust him anymore, it couldn’t be more clear what a worthless thing I was. Because he did fuck me, finally, the way I’d been yearning for: hard and hot and hurried, the master using his slave and never mind that it made me happy, that wasn’t the point at all. And then at last he did manage to sleep, my weary master; and then, still in the wrap of his arms, under the weight of his body and nestled into the heat of it, so did I.

  And woke to the touch of his fingers, fumbling with the knots that bound my wrists, unclipping the chain on my collar; and heard his voice whispering into my ear, “If you’ve been asleep all this time—and you were snoring—at least I can be sure this is my idiotic plan and not your own. Be very quiet, and step lively. Help me pack.”

  It was still dark, barely a hint of light beyond the windows. In a Wayfarers’ guildhouse, people come and go at all hours, but not like this: tiptoeing around the room, fumbling clothes into packs any old how; finding black boots in the black and then finding his feet, working the one into the other; wondering in whispers what we might have forgotten and then shrugging it off. If it mattered to him, he’d beat me for it later, which wouldn’t matter to me at all if I was right, if he was really doing what I thought he was doing. If he was really sneaking me away, out of the ken of the Mages’ Guild and against all their rules, against his own training and instincts, whole and undamaged and myself.

  “You’re my boy,” he said in a whisper as he strapped his pack to my back, ignoring my hiss of pain where it rubbed against my welts and woke all that soreness again. “I won’t let them burn half your brain away.” He clipped his leash to my collar and tugged me away, down the stairs and out through a back door to the stable yard. “We’ll be miles gone before he wakes”—as we slipped through the yard unnoticed, not even the stable boys up yet, not even the horses—“and he won’t come after us. Not his concern. He has bigger fish to fry.”

  I did hope he was right, my optimistic master. I walked swiftly and obediently at his heel, one mile and then another and another. Just once he stopped in the road, hesitated, I almost thought he was going to turn back; but he looked at me and said, “This really isn’t your idea, is it? This isn’t you working in my head to make me do this?”

  “No, Master.” He had whipped me for it once; that was enough. Even to save my own skin, I wouldn’t meddle with his mind again. Not because I feared his whip—although I did, of course I did—but because he was my master and there was an ache in my heart as well as my back when he was angry with me.

  That was all I said, the simple soft denial: all I needed to say. He grunted, nodded, tugged the leash, and set off again.

  By then the sun was up, so I knew he must be hungry. It was no surprise when he stopped a second time and sniffed and said, “I smell bacon. Do you?”

  There was no point my smelling bacon; bacon wasn’t for the likes of me. But I did smell it, over the smell of fire smoke; and where there is fire and bacon, there may be breakfast for a free man and maybe even for his boy too. So I said, “Yes, Master,” and followed him hopefully off the road and down into a dell of trees.

  Where we found a slave boy, a few years older than me, as naked as me though apparently not as anxious, with not so much to lose. He was tending a pan above a smoky fire, and glanced up smiling at this total stranger and said, “My master’s just washing in the brook. He’ll be back in a minute. Please, sit and share his breakfast.”

  “Well, if he won’t mind…” He was already sitting down, my hungry hopeful master.

  “Truly not.” The boy poured him a cup of kaff from a pot in the ashes, then came to me, to lift the pack off my back.

  “Oh,” Master Jensen said, “sorry, I forgot that,” though it wasn’t clear whom he was apologizing to, me or the other boy. I think we both shrugged, meaninglessly. Regretfully, in my case. Weight and work had numbed my poor sore back; now, with the pack taken away, it was suddenly vicious again, waking to fire as I eased my shoulders. “Will your master be willing to feed my boy too?”

  “I’m sure so, Master. When he feeds me.” After he’d eaten himself, the boy meant, after both our free folk had eaten, there would be something for the slaves. He would know; he would carry it. Dry grain, most likely, to be boiled into gruel.

  Then, “I should wash this,” the other boy said, tutting over the state of my back, “before it gets infected. And the rest of him could do with washing too.”

  My heedless master tossed him the handle of my leash like an order, see to it. The boy left his pan of bacon hissing in the ashes and led me away, down to the edge of a babbling brook.

  Where a free man, his master, was naked like us and rubbing himself dry with a towel; and really nothing like us, naked or not, and we all knew it. And when he saw me he grinned savagely, and my heart plummeted like a rock and that only made him grin wider, because this was Master Lucan the mage, all unexpected as I guess the best mages always are.

  He said, “Good lad, Tam. Scrub him down and bring him back. I’ll settle his master.”

  “Yes, Master. Don’t let the bacon burn. And leave the eggs alone, I’ll see to them.”

  His master the great mage grinned, and flicked the towel at him threateningly; then tied it around his waist for decency and headed up the path towards his fire and my master, while the boy Tam pushed me unceremoniously in
to the water.

  There was nothing I could do about Master Jensen. I just had to trust him to luck, and he was never that lucky without me. Nothing I could do about myself, either: no way to save myself now. If I leaned on Tam, perhaps I could make him let go of my leash—but then what? I’d be snared again soon enough. I had no gift for living wild. Branded and collared, naked and afraid, I’d be known for a runaway the moment I was spotted. I’d be lucky then if I was handed back to my proper owner. More likely I’d find myself with a new tag and a new life, worse than any I’d known before. Runaways are whipped, kept chained and hungry, treated harshly all manner of ways.

  Besides, I just didn’t want to leave Master Jensen. No matter what he did to me.

  Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe I wouldn’t remember what I’d lost, that gift of power, the way I had of bending other people to suit myself. Slaves shouldn’t have such power anyway. I’d never wanted to be anything but slave, it was in my bones and in my heart to kneel and submit; now I’d just have to do it properly, learn the real truth of my collar.

  Maybe it would be worse than I could possibly imagine, but I still had no choice about it.

  Tam kept a wary hold of my leash, but he didn’t need to. I wasn’t about to leave my master now.

  He washed my back gently, letting the bite of cold springwater numb the worst of the pain away. Then he scrubbed the rest of me grimly, until I remembered that he was no free man, to make free of my body at will. I quit yelping, grabbed a handful of the same sharp gravel he was using, and started to scrub at him.

  Then there was some fierce wrestling and a deal of splashing, which all ended in the inevitable tumble into deep water. We came up drenched and spluttering. I pushed Tam up onto the bank, he hauled me out after him—still with a grip on my leash, just in case—and said, “That’s better. You were a sorry-looking thing before. All clean now.”