by Kim Dare
“Hush,” Raynard whispered to him again, as he gathered him safer against his body. “You’re fine. Everything’s going to be just fine.” He pressed a kiss to Ori’s temple.
Ori sighed slightly as he settled, not brave enough to keep up the pretence, no matter how much he wanted Raynard to continue whispering to him that way.
As much as he wanted to fight real sleep when it danced around the edges of his mind, Ori couldn’t hold it at bay forever. It wrapped around him, blending with Raynard’s hold on him and lulling him into a deeper slumber than he’d ever been able to manage when he was away from his master’s side.
* * * * *
Raynard looked up when Ori jerked awake and let out a startled little whimper.
He watched as his fledgling reached out and slid his palm across the sheet where Raynard had slept through the night. When he failed to find him, Ori dropped his head back onto the mattress. His whole body shook as his fist closed around the thick satiny sheet.
“I told you I’d still be here when you woke up.” And masters always keep their promises. Raynard had never known it could be so hard to keep such silly, sentimental words back.
Masters keep their promises; they look after their submissives. Masters…
Except he wasn’t Ori’s master anymore, and he never should have been in the first place.
Ori spun around, tangling himself in the sheets as he turned to face Raynard. Lifting a hand, Ori pushed his fingers through his hair, brushing the pure white strands back off his face. “Sir…”
“I’ve already told you that there’s no need for you to call me that…sire.”
Ori dropped his gaze. Raynard went back to tying his shoelaces. He’d said he’d still be there when Ori woke up; he hadn’t said he wouldn’t be dressed and ready to leave.
“Do you remember your promise?” Raynard asked, doing his best to keep all trace of emotion out of his voice.
Ori was still staring at the bed they’d shared when Raynard looked up.
“Ori?” he prompted.
“Yes, sir.”
Raynard let the silence stretch out between them.
Ori closed his eyes. “I’m to get the identifier tattoo and stretch my wings properly, sir,” he recited.
Raynard sat there for several minutes, staring down at his shoelaces as if they contained the answers to every question in the universe. “It’s for the best. You’ll see that over time.” He couldn’t bring himself to add the honorific, couldn’t bear to see Ori flinch the way he did every time Raynard called his former fledgling by his new title.
Ori said nothing, quite possibly because there was nothing left for either of them to say. Raynard rose from his seat. He clenched his hand into a fist at his side as he forced himself not to walk across the room toward Ori. He headed for the door instead. His fingers were already on the handle when Ori finally spoke up.
“If you ever change your mind, sir—I’ll still be here. I’ll still…”
Raynard closed his eyes for a moment, but he didn’t look over his shoulder. Stepping out of the room, he resisted the temptation to vent his frustration on the woodwork and closed the door carefully behind him.
One of Ori’s new servants was clearing away the things from the dining room. He looked up when he heard Raynard walk through the entrance hall, but Raynard couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge the servant’s existence. He strode past him, as fast as he could without breaking into an actual run.
Out of Ori’s apartment, he kept going, desperate to be out of the building. He had no idea where he’d go. All he knew was the longer he stayed in there, the harder it would be to resist the need to rush back, to snatch Ori out of his bed and take him with him.
“Raynard?”
It wasn’t Ori’s voice. Raynard forced himself to look over his shoulder anyway. Hamilton stood in the doorway leading into his office. Raynard clenched his teeth.
Ori wasn’t the only man he had to answer to regarding his behaviour before Ori’s first full shift. All the avians were accountable to the elders of their chosen nest. There was no way he could leave, at any pace, and let Hamilton think he was running away from that fact.
Raynard walked slowly back down the corridor, his steps calm and measured, every trace of emotion wiped from his face. In Hamilton’s study, he closed the door behind him and stepped up to his desk, allowing no trace of hesitation or reluctance to creep into his body language.
“You wished to speak with me?”
Hamilton picked up a tumbler of scotch and handed it to him. Raynard stared down into the amber liquid for several seconds before tossing it back in one go.
It was a bad idea to start drinking at breakfast time, especially when he was going home to a house that currently contained a very large selection of fine spirits and no fledgling submissive.
Raynard set the glass on the desk very carefully. His hand didn’t shake. When he lifted his gaze to look across the desk, his eyes didn’t waver.
Hamilton stared back at him, his fingers steepled together as he rested his elbows on the well-cushioned arms of his chair. “Our swan is…well?” he asked.
Raynard was tempted to pick up the glass and pitch it at Hamilton. Ori wasn’t ours, he was Raynard’s—his and no one else’s.
“Ori will be fine,” he snapped. He would be fine, he reminded himself—providing his former master stayed the hell away from him.
Hamilton made a noncommittal noise in the back of his throat.
Raynard sat down opposite him, barely resisting the temptation to tell Hamilton to get whatever the hell it was he wanted to say over and done with.
“Ori mentioned that you told him about the role ducks tend to flock toward.”
Raynard shrugged. Picking up the empty glass, he turned it around and around between his fingers. The light caught against the crystal, sparkling and shining as if all was right with the world.
“What would you have told him if you knew he was a swan?”
“Obviously, I wouldn’t have wasted my time telling him about ducks,” Raynard bit out.
“You’d have told him about swans instead,” Hamilton said.
“Of course.” Raynard’s jaw ached as he ground his teeth together harder than ever.
“And what would you have said?” Hamilton asked again.
Raynard pushed himself up out of the chair. If the elders wanted him raked over the coals for the way he had treated a swan, he’d take it. Hell, if they wanted him to be publicly whipped, he deserved it for hurting Ori. But not this, not Hamilton pulling his time with Ori apart, piece by piece.
“Raynard?”
Raynard shook his head as he reached the window and looked down into the courtyard below.
“Maybe you’d have said that swans are the gentlest souls of all the avian species,” Hamilton suggested. “That they have to be protected and cosseted from the outside world—that they aren’t suited to being thrown into society and left to fend for themselves.”
Raynard swallowed down the bitter taste in the back of his mouth, wondering if there was any more scotch where that last double had come from.
“Perhaps you’d have told him that swans are too easily taken advantage of, too easily used and abused by those who don’t understand their true worth. They need the constant support and guidance of those who have their best interests at heart if they are to flourish.”
Raynard closed his eyes and clenched his fist tightly around the glass still in his hand.
“Or maybe you’d have mentioned to him that that’s why they are generally appointed some sort of guardian—a man who is often taken from one of the highest ranking local families and—”
Raynard spun around. “You can’t mean to—”
Hamilton merely gazed back at him over his steepled fingers.
Raynard strode across the room. He slammed his hands down on Hamilton’s desk. “Don’t you think I’ve already hurt him eno
ugh?”
“You consider him damaged, then?”
Raynard took a deep breath. He looked down at the desk. The glass had shattered beneath his hand as he’d smashed it into the mahogany. His palm bled where he continued to crush the shards against wood. “He’s strong,” he said, the words barely more than a whispered hope. “He’ll heal.”
“I’ve seen him show strength,” Hamilton agreed.
Raynard took his hand away from the broken glass. Peering into the wounds, he absentmindedly checked them for splinters of glass before wrapping his handkerchief around the broken skin.
“Once,” Hamilton added.
Raynard knotted the cotton in place. Red immediately seeped through it. One show of strength wasn’t much, but it was something—it was a start that could be built upon.
“That day you brought him back here wearing your collar—he was strong then, strong enough to floor a bullying crow, to take a whipping from his master and enjoy every lash, strong enough to serve you in whatever way you saw fit.”
“And that’s what you want for him now?” Raynard bit out, barely keeping another wave of anger in check. “For a man who was never cut out for service to spend his whole life serving a man of lower rank and—”
“It makes him happy.”
Raynard stared down at him, his hand clenching around the handkerchief until pain shot through him. “It’s not the way things are meant to be.”
“It could certainly be considered an…unconventional arrangement,” Hamilton said.
“Uncon—!”
“Someone who will protect him, lead him, take care of him. Someone who will stand between him and the rest of the world and look after him. Some could say that’s the very definition of a good avian master.”
Raynard glared down at Hamilton, completely speechless.
“A man who loves without boundaries, an avian whose soul is so pure he wishes to give everything he is and everything he has to one person. A true submissive by any other name…” Hamilton went on.
Raynard shook his head.
“While he was under your care—”
“Swans are not suited to submission!” Raynard was sure of it. It was damn near the only thing he felt sure of right then.
Hamilton seemed to think about that for a moment. “While he was under your care, did you give any thought to what he needed, what he might want?”
“I thought he was a duckling,” Raynard yelled as guilt flashed through him. “So did you!”
Hamilton rose to his feet on the other side of the desk, his hands pressing against the old polished wood opposite Raynard’s. “Answer the question!”
“Yes!” Raynard spat out. “Are you satisfied now? Yes, I thought about what my submissive would want. I thought about what he’d need in order to be happy under my protection. I was wrong.”
“You’re sure about that, are you?”
“What?”
“Are you sure you were wrong?” Hamilton shouted.
Raynard stared at Hamilton as if he’d lost his mind.
“The elders have come to the conclusion that your initial instincts toward Ori may have been far closer to the correct method for dealing with him than we originally suspected.” Hamilton sat down, and modulated his voice. “It’s possible that, as a swan, he feels the need to please everyone. Having a master, one person to devote himself to, might be what he needs. Lord knows we’ve tried everything else since we found out what he really is…”
Raynard lowered himself to his seat.
“Do you really think this sort of arrangement was our first choice?” Hamilton asked, annoyance seeping into each word. “Everything we offer him only makes him withdraw further into himself. The only time I’ve seen a hint of life in his eyes is when he speaks about the time he spent serving you.”
“So you try something else,” Raynard demanded. “You don’t give up on a man like Ori just because—”
“You’re in love with him.”
For a moment Raynard could only stare at the elder in slack-jawed silence. “Irrelevant,” he finally said, dismissing the fact with a shake of his head as he pulled himself together.
“Hawks have always had a tendency to mate for life.”
“Equally irr—”
“So have swans.”
Raynard stopped short, meeting Hamilton’s eyes across the desk.
“Last night, when he was with you, he was happy?” Hamilton asked.
The whole evening played through Raynard’s mind. Ori had been so relieved, so grateful for his attention, so desperate, so exhausted. But yes, he’d been happy too, so happy to be back under his master’s care, if only for a little while.
“He’s a swan,” Raynard whispered, just in case the whole world had suddenly forgotten that fact.
Hamilton steepled his fingers once more. “The elders can’t actually force you to take him on, any more than they could force a swan to accept such an arrangement. However, they wished me to make it clear to you before you left, that we would, let us say, look very favourably upon any such understanding…”
Raynard rose to his feet, turned his back on the eagle and all his stupid ideas, and strode across to the door.
Swan. Submissive. Swan. Submissive.
The two words warred against each other inside his head with every step he took, refusing to resolve themselves into one character, one man, one future.
When the door to Hamilton’s office swung closed behind him, Raynard looked both ways down the corridor, toward the exit, then toward the swan’s quarters, then back to the exit again.
The decision was his and, submissive or not, in that moment, Ori depended upon him to make the right choice for them both. It was all very well for the eagle to say his instincts were right.
If only the two sets of instincts warring inside him would just agree with each other, it would be so very simple.
Chapter Thirteen
“Whenever you’re ready, sire.”
Ori stared down at his bare wrist. He’d promised. No matter how much he hated the idea, he’d promised Raynard that if they had one last night together, he’d stop putting off getting the swan’s mark tattooed on the inside of his wrist.
He ran a fingertip along the skin just over his vein, tracing out the mark Raynard had once painted on him in just the same way. That combination of waves and lines would have marked him out as a duck. And every time he’d reached out to shake another avian’s hand, someone would have realised what he was, and they’d have looked at him differently. Then the orders would have started to flow and…
Ori took a deep breath and forced himself to picture another kind of tattoo on his wrist. The second he did, it was impossible for him not to imagine the kind of life that would come with it. Whenever he shook hands with people and they saw the swan’s mark inked beneath his skin, that knowledge would also cause them to treat him differently.
No orders. There would never be any orders, or any work. There’d never be any chance of being taken back under Raynard’s protection either.
Ori looked up.
The peacock who acted as tattoo artist for the nest had already spent over an hour patiently waiting for permission to practice his art. Ori nibbled his bottom lip. The poor guy would have probably had more luck if he’d simply ordered him to stop making a fuss and bloody well do as he was told.
Bowing his head slightly, Ori called Raynard’s order to the front of his mind and nodded to the peacock.
A deeply upholstered chair stood in the middle of the room. The tattoo artist’s stool was placed next to it, a tray with all his equipment laid out just to its right.
Ori settled himself on the chair and placed his elbow on the little support built into the armrest. The arrangement held his wrist out toward the tattoo artist like some bizarre sort of sacrificial offering.
“It shouldn’t hurt too much,” the peacock offered, as he perched on the stool.
If it had been another man offering him a different sort of pain, Ori knew he’d have welcomed it. He pressed his back against the softly cushioned chair, but no hint of discomfort flared from the whip lines that had once striped his back. The marks Raynard had left on him were just a distant memory. Even his collar was gone.
Ori closed his eyes as the tattooist’s needle touched his skin for the first time, not wanting to see the swan’s lines appear. The machine whirred, the only sound in the otherwise silent space, until a sudden click on the other side of the room made Ori jerk his head up and open his eyes. The door swung back. Raynard strode into the room.
The peacock jerked and pulled the needle away from Ori’s wrist.
Ori launched himself to his feet. “Sir!”
He covered his right wrist with his opposite hand, not sure exactly what kind of mark had already been placed there. If he was lucky, it was something that could be converted into a mark that would please his master. If he was unlucky… Ori swallowed, terrified that he might have ruined everything at the very last moment.
“Out.”
Rank ceased to matter. The peacock didn’t look to Ori for confirmation. The elaborately dressed young man rushed out, closing the door behind him.
Ori stared across the room at his master, unable to bring a single word to his lips.
Raynard took a step forward, then another. Moving around Ori, he made himself comfortable in the chair that Ori had just vacated. Never breaking eye contact, Ori turned to face him and lowered himself to his knees at Raynard’s feet.
Raynard held out his hand. Ori remained frozen, the beginnings of the tattoo still hidden beneath his opposite palm.
“Show me.”
Ori reluctantly offered his wrist to Raynard for his inspection. Raynard’s grip was strong. He stared down at the curved line that had already been inked in place with a serious expression.