Under the Rushes

by Amy Lane

  M was right behind him, bustling like the lady she was. “There are worse things!” she said, and he turned to see she’d hiked her skirts almost to the danger line (which was a bit lower than for other women, it was true).

  “Not for me,” Taern muttered, “and definitely not for him!”

  They arrived in Taern and Yael’s room, and Yael rolled out of bed sleepily, glaring at Taern as though his sleep were the only thing at stake.

  “You’ll have the room to yourself forever,” Taern told him baldly, “but you need to get the hell out for half-span an hour, yes?”

  Yael’s narrow-set eyes widened, and he looked around for trousers. Taern found them, neatly folded on the chair at the foot of his bed, and threw them at him. Yael caught the trousers, hopped into them, and ran a hand through tousled sand-blond hair, then wordlessly thunked to the door. He turned to Taern with his hand on the knob and said, “It’s been nice fuckin’ you, flower mouth,” and then left, shutting the door firmly behind him.

  Taern didn’t even pause as he grabbed a duffel from under his bed and started throwing his clothes, his few knickknacks, his shoes, his scarves, his pleasure toys, all of it, into the bag in a muddle. M took a moment to look behind her, though.

  “It’s a good thing that boy has a mouth like a vacuum tube and a cock the size of a bell jar,” she muttered.

  Taern barely spared the energy to roll his eyes.

  “And an arsehole like a wet rubber ring,” he added, because it was true, and for all his lack of personality, it was good to remember that his roommate had saving graces. “But I’m not going to miss him.” And that was the end of Yael.

  “Now explain about your life!” M said irritably. “You’re taking him up on his offer—don’t tell me you’re going to default!”

  Taern turned toward her in indignation. “Have I ever broken a promise to you, M?” he asked, truly appalled, and she shook her head.

  “Of course not! You’re the most honest whore on street or in brothel—but explain!”

  “He wants to tuck me away in the country—keep me safe, I think.”

  M snorted. “He doesn’t know you very well, does he?”

  Taern looked away. “It’s tempting,” he admitted. He remembered the girls, lively, squealing, fighting, hugging, singing nonsense songs to each other when they played. “I’d like to see my sisters—they’ll be young ladies now, and a handful.”

  “Then why not?”

  Taern looked back. “Did you see him?” he asked, trying to keep the sentiment out of his voice. “Wasn’t he handsome?”

  M shook her head and narrowed her eyes. “I taught you smarter than that, boy.”

  “He needs me,” Taern argued. “He’s… he’s exhausted—”

  “And hurt,” M said reluctantly.

  Taern nodded. “He tried to hide it, but he was moving stiffly—that armor he had on was something, but a steam spear—he must be trying to breathe through that bruise!”

  “That’s not what I meant,” M murmured, “but that too.” She shook her head. “But he’s grown—”

  “And so am I!”

  “Yes, but not so long ago that I’m going to let you run out of here with the first john to drop his guard!”

  “He didn’t pay me,” Taern said, curling his lip up impishly. “Not a penny. And he kissed me when it was done.”

  M jerked her head back with one of those surprisingly quick gestures that showed she had more muscle than most women. “So that means marriage?”

  Taern shook his head and dropped his overflowing duffel. “I saw him that night, as a soldier, when he was young as me. This whole battalion was trooping by in stiff bronze armor, and their feet were all in time, and every footfall felt like thunder, right?”

  M nodded, listening avidly. M loved a good story—was known to sleep with a man for the gift of a story. “You were a child.”

  “I was nine—just that month, actually. I was out that far in the bogland flying my new kite, but I saw the battalion and let it slip into the sky, then hid, but he saw me and broke ranks. He was….” Taern looked down, remembering how angry he’d been, how frightened. “He was appalled. He took me seriously, him and his lokogos, and suddenly he just raced into the night, trying to fix things. At first, when the news caught up with me on the road and I realized they were all probably dead, I hated him for that, but later? When the stories reached me here? Think of it—he risked everything… lost everything, on the word of a boy hiding in the brush.” Taern pulled himself away from the dark night, the handsome young soldier, the blinding blue flare of the cold magnesium fire sweeping the bogland.

  “A good man,” M said evenly, “but that doesn’t mean—”

  “He hadn’t been touched in forever,” Taern told her baldly.

  “You don’t know the circumstances….” M sounded reluctant, and Taern looked up and tried to put things together.

  “You mean the friend and the pain?”

  She shrugged, and he knew he would get no more from her. She loved a good story, but part of the reason she held them in such high esteem was that she kept a confidence tighter than a dead man’s fist.

  “I don’t care,” Taern said recklessly. “He needed my touch. He will need me!”

  He stilled in the act of fastening his duffel bag and looked away, and behind him he heard Madame M let out a shuddering breath.

  “Taern—”

  “This isn’t what you think,” he said, but his voice sounded weak, even to him.

  Madame Matiya had been his confidante and friend from that first day when she’d chased him down in the market place, wearing four-inch heels and a corset. She got him—by the scruff of the neck—and said in a nut-shrinking baritone, “Junior, if you ever make me do that again, I’ll kill you.”

  Taern had stopped struggling immediately and glared at her. “Lady, if you can catch me in those shoes, you can do whatever you want!”

  She’d laughed then, heartily—and it was one of the few times Taern had heard her deep-down belly laugh. He’d discovered as he’d grown that she didn’t let it out often. She’d taken him to her place and, up front and without hesitation, told him the facts of life. When he asked if he had to become a whore, she replied, “Only if you have aptitude and inclination when you are grown.”

  He’d grown up a few years before she would have chosen for him to, but he’d enjoyed those years, and so had she. She’d taught him everything he knew about the business, and one of the first things she’d taught him was that love and business had absolutely nothing in common, certainly not when sex was involved.

  Suddenly her strong, blunt fingers with their scarlet-tipped nails were under his chin, and she forced him to look into eyes so brown and liquid that they had beguiled a hundred straight men to ignore the cock and believe in the woman.

  “Say it again, Junior, so I can believe it.”

  He faced her this time. “You’ve told me to believe in my instincts, M. My instincts tell me that this man needs someone. Whether that’s on the streets or in the sheets, I want to find a way to be that one.”

  She dropped her hand and slumped back dejectedly on his narrow cot. “You rhymed that, you wretched brat,” she said, and he pressed his lips together and bent down to hug her.

  “I’ll take care of myself,” he promised, and she glared at him with dignity.

  “You’d better. That’s how I trained you!”

  He kissed her cheek, which probably needed a touch-up with the razor this time in the afternoon, but nobody in her house told her that. “It is indeed,” he murmured and then threw his duffel over his shoulder and turned to change his life.

  HE WAS not surprised—even a little—when Dorjan ordered the rabbit to the train station. Krissa looked surprised, but Taern wasn’t. He smiled pleasantly at Krissa and pleasantly at Dorjan. Dorjan frowned thoughtfully and twitched his shoulders a little, and Taern’s smile only grew more pleasant.

  Good. The man should be uneasy
, because in their short acquaintance, Taern had yet to give up with this little fight. It spoke well of him that he could read the signs.

  The entire trip, Dorjan sat back on his cushion with a fountain pen and a parchment on a board, and when they arrived, he folded the parchment carefully, put it into an envelope, and then pulled out a small clever torch to melt the wax. He used the pendant at his neck to make the seal, and Taern noticed it glowed an intense blue after it had been forced into the wax.

  He didn’t say anything, though. He planned to get much closer to that pendant before this adventure was through.

  The door of the rabbit swung up and open, and Dorjan stepped through, then stood at attention, his hands folded neatly at his back, while Taern said his good-byes to Krissa.

  “Put a bright scarf outside an open window,” he whispered into her ear. “Preferably his, if you can manage it, you hear?”

  She nodded slightly as she pretended to wipe her eyes and then bussed him by his ear.

  “You’d better be sure of your welcome,” she hissed, and he grinned cheekily at her and winked before swinging out of the rabbit and shaking hands with and taking his letter of introduction from the very stern and forbidding Dorjan of Kyon’s Gate.

  He swung up into the millipede through one of the doors in the sectioned cars and then hustled to the very front of the train before it could power up. He smiled gaily at the conductor at the front and then hopped out the other side of the neck. He’d circled around and was out of the station, sprinting across the next trestle bridge and toward the Forum Master section of town, before the millipede even started its steam-powered clatter down the tracks.

  Sure enough, in one of the newer houses—a big one, with black shutters and gray paint, which must have been fashionable but certainly was not cheerful—a bright fuchsia-and-puce scarf fluttered from a window on the third floor.

  It appeared that he was done with whoring, and for a moment Taern was a little put out. He very much wished he had a way to put silver in his pocket, because as he spotted his route over the drainpipes and the cornices of the roof, he thought that he owed Krissa at least a week’s worth of wages.

  Refuse, Reject, Deny

  DORJAN was relieved that the boy left without much of a fight, but he wasn’t sure he trusted it. He waited until the millipede pulled completely out of the station before he got back into the rabbit, and tried to deny the sharp poison of disappointment. He reminded himself that he visited his family for a moon cycle and that he usually made it out to Dre’s keep to see the orphans his old lokogos had taken in. He’d see the boy again—and possibly hear stories of his recalcitrance then.

  The thought cheered him, and he turned his attention to not chasing Krissa away with his dourness—or with Areau’s theatrics, when they arrived.

  “Your….” He grimaced. “Your companion doesn’t know you’re coming,” he said baldly. “I haven’t told him about this. There will be some unpleasantness when we return.”

  Krissa widened her eyes and arched her eyebrows. “Well, I’ll just have to punish the man for unpleasantness, won’t I?”

  Dorjan was forced to make a sound that resembled a laugh. Bimuit, he was tired. He’d arrived late to the stables the night before and found that Areau—Areau, who had promised that Dorjan wouldn’t need to practice their perversion of pain and sex that night—had apparently forgotten.

  He was naked, his wrists bound from chains and manacles he’d outfitted above the iron pipe that delivered steam power to the rabbit as it slept in its stall at night. Dorjan hated those chains, hated the nights when Areau bound himself to them and begged. One night Dorjan had refused, and Areau hadn’t told him where the key was until Dorjan flogged it out of him. Areau… oh, damn him. It was Dorjan’s punishment to flog his friend until his back bled that night. Dorjan had never refused since.

  So the night before, Dorjan had left his armor on and taken up the riding crop next to the whip and the flogger. He liked the crop—pain, but not damage. “You promised,” he whispered. “You promised we wouldn’t do this.”

  Areau’s look over his scarred shoulder had been shamed and eloquent. “No fucking,” he offered. “I can spare you that. But… you were out on the streets tonight… look at you! It….” Areau wiggled, his engorged cock scraping roughly on the wooden wall of the stable. “I’ll come from the pain alone, Dori, but I need it. Please. I need it from you tonight.”

  Dorjan whistled the crop through the air and tried hard to forget the tender, happy touches of young fingers on his skin. The boy had wanted…. Yes, it was his profession—but Bimuit, Dorjan hadn’t paid him, had he? The boy had simply wanted. He’d been eager and excited and… soft. No pain. No disgust. Given what he and Areau had been engaging in for the past ten years, a whore on the streets of Thenis was practically virginal compared to Dorjan.

  Dorjan thought of that touch as he sliced the crop and smacked Areau’s bare, scarred bottom, and wished his balls would shrivel up and fall off in shame. Switch, switch, switch. Dorjan had learned long before that he could get Areau off faster if he varied the strokes, surprised him with pain rather than deadened him to it. He’d studied hard, how to be good at this, because the quicker Areau whimpered, moaned, and screamed his way to a climax, the less likely he needed Dorjan to….

  Dorjan shuddered.

  The thought of his flesh sheathed in Areau’s bowels, plunging away like an animal while Areau begged and screamed for harder, more painful, rougher, made him feel physically ill.

  Just as well the boy had gotten on the millipede. He would have wanted a thing from Dorjan that Dorjan could probably not ever give again without the sickness that tainted his every breath in his own home.

  He realized that Krissa was looking at him, her fingers knotting in a brilliantly colored purple-and-green scarf, and that he’d been silent for several seconds. “Punish him as you see fit,” he said weakly. “What needs to happen is that I cease to be a part of it. I don’t know if you recommend weaning him from my touch or simply cutting him off from it—he… he finds it loathsome. He was never a lover of men. But I was the only one either of us trusted with him for so very long.”

  Krissa’s eyes widened. “You’re not that old, begging your pardon, Forum Master.”

  Dorjan smiled thinly. “You’d be surprised,” he said, then took a deep breath and continued. He told her about his odd hours and how she needed not to worry about his appearance when he showed. He attempted to make up a story about a boxing club and other Forum Masters indulging in senseless violence. She tilted her head skeptically and raised her eyebrow, but she didn’t gainsay him. Good. Even if she suspected—even if she knew—she could pretend otherwise if Dorjan was ever apprehended. She was just an innocent whore, shanghaied to tend to a friend’s twisted perversions. It was no less than the truth.

  “When we get there,” he said as the rabbit left the stews behind, “we shall find a room for you, preferably near his and far from mine, so you will not be disturbed by my hours. The house is very large—Forum Masters used to bring their families in from the country during the seasons, but not as much these days. Mrs. Wrinkle will help you decorate: you’ll have a budget, feel free to make your space….” He smiled, remembering his mother’s tidy sitting room, his older sister’s flouncy pink meringue of a bedroom, the elegant, feminine space of Madame Matiya. “Make it you,” he said with an inclination of his head. “The house is musty and haunted at present. Don’t hesitate to breathe life into it, if you have such a penchant.” He tried for a tired smile. “It certainly couldn’t hurt things, could it?”

  Krissa nodded and then smiled brightly. “You’re paying me generously, Forum Master. You’d be surprised what some silver and a willing body can do for a place!”

  Dorjan nodded and felt some of the tarnish fade from his smile. “Excellent, but,” he warned, “Areau has certain rooms in the basement for his experiments. Those are his rooms—not even I venture into them.”

  Kris
sa’s eyes widened a fraction. “Warning taken, sir. Now are you sure you don’t want to rest up?”

  Dorjan grimaced and reached into another compartment for his parchment, quill, and board. “A lovely suggestion, my dear, but would you believe that Forum Master is actually a job? I have taken the day off from it, but that does not mean the work has disappeared.”

  He submerged himself in his details for the memorial service of a certain Forum member who had been found dead of a heart attack in his personal conveyance. Of the Forum members attending the funeral, he wondered how many others knew that the heart had been attacked by a knife.

  HE HELPED Krissa carry in her belongings, trying not to hold his stomach and cringe. That wretched steam spear had left his ribs tender and the very act of breathing normally an effort in theater.

  A very surprised Areau greeted them in the foyer.

  “Who is this?” he asked baldly, and Dorjan grimaced at Krissa. She had been nothing but pleasant, brave, and willing. It would be nice to make a better impression.

  “She’s your new companion,” he said, keeping his voice even.

  Areau flinched as though struck. “Were you hit on the head last night?” he asked, his blue eyes wide with shock. “Tasting asteroid dust? Sucking niskets through a straw up your nose? Did you bugger the wrong whore and—”

  “Enough!” Dorjan roared, and Areau closed his mouth with a snap. Dorjan so very rarely yelled, so very rarely fought back from any of Areau’s demands. But he had to. He had to. His country was falling apart, and sometimes it seemed as though he and Areau were the only ones holding it together. They couldn’t do that and sustain their destructive dance. Not anymore. Dorjan was… Bimuit! For a moment, he’d considered letting that spear find its mark.

  “She’s your companion, Areau—not a slave, not a whore.”

  “But—” Krissa protested, and Dorjan looked at her sharply.

  “You’re a paid companion with specialized talents,” he said, not backing down.