by Amy Lane
So when he started to see bloody shirtsleeves and pale men with death-rictus smiles, it was time for the armor to come out of hiding. There would be blood on the streets, and more often than not, without some intervention, most of it would be innocent.
“There is something brewing,” he said to Taern, aware that he’d been quiet too long. “It won’t be tonight—for one thing, the cold snap will keep them inside—but if it gets warmer tomorrow, it will be then, and if not, it will be the night after.”
Taern nodded unhappily. “I shall just have to train harder,” he said after gnawing on his lower lip. “I hate to think of you alone.”
Dorjan shook his head, thinking that what was really unfair was how young Taern could be when he wasn’t seducing Dorjan one determined moment at a time. “And I hate to think of you out there at all,” he said grimly. “Gods… I should have tied you up and stowed you aboard one of the empty trains that night in the station.”
Taern’s expression grew unaccountably sober in the light from the alcove sconce. “You were in no shape to do it—that’s the only reason. That alone should tell you that you need me.”
Dorjan opened his mouth and closed it, then opened it and closed it again. Damn him. Damn him for being right—about all of it. Dorjan wanted to tell him he needed Taern alive more than he needed him as a brother-in-arms. He wanted to tell Taern that he needed him desperately, but he needed Taern to respect Dorjan more than he needed a lover. Dorjan wanted to tell him his weakness that night had been mental more than physical—it had just been so long since a conversation with a partner, an equal, hadn’t been filled with scorpions and hieters, and he’d loved Taern’s smart mouth as much when the little snipe was talking as he did when….
Dorjan didn’t finish that thought. Didn’t finish any of them. He simply brushed by Taern and opened the door without preliminary, and the two of them listened for Areau’s weakened and hoarse groans. Some of them sounded satisfied, and Dorjan wondered listlessly if Krissa and Taern had been right and Areau really was getting better.
Most of him wondered if the course of his relationship with Taern was going to be dictated, in one way or the other, because he could not say what needed to be said. Or, at least, he couldn’t say it with enough venom to get the boy to see why Dorjan was the last person he should squander his energy on.
That had been the night before. What he recognized this morning, as he quickly donned his robe and slippers, was that the first night, he’d woken up huddled in a tight little ball on the side of the rabbit, his hand clutching convulsively for something that wasn’t there.
The second night, it had been there, in a cunning little box that wouldn’t open if Dorjan just grabbed blindly at it but would open instantly with the slightest pressure from his fingers in an obscure place under the lid. It was easily felt but very difficult to open by accident, and Dorjan had been moved and relieved when Taern had presented it to him as they ate their dinner at the small table in the stables their second night hiding from Areau’s recovery. The second morning Dorjan had awakened still tight in the corner and clutching the knife box to his chest.
But this third morning… this third morning he’d been clutching neither the pillow nor the knife. This third morning he’d been clutching Taern, and clutching him so tightly he could barely breathe.
“What are you brooding about now?” Taern asked as he hopped back into the rabbit through the smaller door by the head. “You look downright thunderous!”
Dorjan shook his head. “If I agreed to pursue a relationship,” he blurted before he knew which way his mouth was heading, “would you agree to not venture into the street with me?”
Taern crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue. “Dorjan, when we get home this evening, it might be quiet in that house. We might have dinner with one perfectly nice person and one almost human being. After that, you will go up to your own armoire to change, and I’ll follow you up, and if I’m good, I’ll get your trousers around your ankles as you’re changing, pull out your instrument, and blow on it until it fountains joy. If I do all that, is that going to keep you from donning your armor and venturing out into harm’s way?”
Dorjan swallowed and shifted his hips miserably. “Oh, fuck a rabid hieter, Taern,” he snapped. “Must you?”
Taern was never going to apologize—his fierce look straight at Dorjan’s swollen groin proved that. “Yes,” Taern said, then grabbed his own crotch and thrust straight into his hand. “Yes, I must. Because you’re talking about fucking rabid swamp lizards, and I’m telling you I just might if you make me wait much longer. And I’m telling you that the only thing keeping me on my best behavior is that promise of armor you’ve made Areau make. Krissa said he’ll work on that and the cure for dust and nothing else in the next week. Besides that, I think I smell desperation rolling off of you, and you may very well cave to my prurient desires before my cock shrivels up and falls off in frustration.”
Dorjan looked away, knowing he was sweating a little with the implications. “Well, let’s see if I survive tonight,” he said, thinking of some way of avoiding this conversation right now. He had to go back into the Forum and once again feign idiocy, and considering the fact that no amount of asking guilelessly, “If our enemy got this napalm from us, why didn’t we report it stolen?” was making anybody more eager to face the truth, the Forum charade was less and less attractive. He’d tried to raise a widows-and-orphans fund for the families of the fallen and had been told that they didn’t have resources to feed their live soldiers, and his proposal hadn’t even made it to the floor. It was just as well—he’d had Coreau set aside some of the many resources he failed to report every season and send them to Dre’s hold. Dre’s widow had assured him in correspondence that she would see the food, silver, and lumium was given to the people whose husbands, sons, wives, and daughters had been lost when Stratego Dre led his unit into a trap set by his own corrupt government.
Given that, death on the streets was beginning to sound damned attractive.
But not to Taern. “Don’t even say things like that,” he snapped, and Dorjan shrugged.
“I’ll say things like that until going out into the streets with me or sleeping with me seem like less attractive ideas,” he said stubbornly. “And if or when I get home tonight, maybe I can… I can penetrate that thick head of yours!”
Taern was clutching a robe to him against the bitter cold of outside, and suddenly he opened it. Dorjan gasped because his cock—which was not quite as long as Dorjan’s but almost as thick—was fully erect, and the head was shiny with slick fluid.
“Nnngghh.” Dorjan couldn’t keep his eyes off of it.
“Why do you think it took me so long to pee,” Taern asked, out of temper. He wrapped his hand around it at the base and squeezed, shuddering, and Dorjan watched when his thigh muscles shook as he attempted to remain standing.
Dorjan whimpered and looked at that fine, toned body, open for him, with a mixture of starvation and revulsion. “Not in here,” he managed to whisper, not wanting Taern’s body or his soul or any of him tainted by the things he and Areau had done not ten paces away, outside the conveyance, in the corner by the door, where the manacles used to hang.
Taern shuddered hard and pulled the sides of his robe together. “How long are you going to make me do this dance, Nyx?” he asked, and Dorjan knew his expression was bitter and couldn’t help it.
“A seven-day? That’s all you’ve known me?” Dorjan sneered. “Areau’s carried his scars for ten years, and I’ve carried our sins for most of that same span. Tell me when a man can wash that out of his soul, Taern, and I’ll tell you how long we shall dance.”
It was a pathetic attempt to build a void around himself, to keep Taern and the dazzling promise of intimacy he offered at a distance, but for a moment, it felt like it worked. He gathered his leather satchel for work and set his feet in his slippers and tightened up his robe with unnecessary force.
“I’ll go insi
de first,” he said, his voice kinder now that he felt girded. “If he’s not quiet, I’ll go fetch your running kit and bring it down after I change.”
Taern sighed. “Right, Nyx, fine. If running by your side is as close as I’m allowed to get, then so be it.”
“Imagine the fine young man who would fill the void when all your attention is no longer squandered on me,” Dorjan said and knew it for an awful attempt at levity even as he uttered the words.
“No time with you is squandered,” Taern told him firmly, but his face was turned away. “Even when you pay for it with blood and pieces of your heart.” He dashed the back of his hand under his eyes and Dorjan realized that… oh no.
“See!” he cried, panicked, with his hand on the door. “This—this is why you shouldn’t waste—”
“Just go!” Taern snarled, his voice thick. “It’s a wound, Dorjan, and not a mortal one. Let me tend to it, since you refuse to, and I’ll be up for the battle again.”
“I’m sorry,” Dorjan muttered, but he meant it. “I’m sorry I can wound you with words.” And then he couldn’t stand the rabbit or himself anymore. “I’ll send Mrs. Wrinkle if it’s not horrible inside.”
He didn’t wait for a reply, but then, he didn’t expect one either.
BESIDES being liberating, there was something almost… mystical about that run together through the back alleys of the city. They both wore stocking caps on their heads, and although the caps didn’t hide their faces, the black clothes, caps, and silent boots made them feel almost invisible.
People dodged them and walked around them, certainly, but nobody ever called out to them and nobody threatened them. There were plenty of thugs walking around with blood dripping down their arms from their latest tattoos or their latest rips, but none of them snarled at Taern, for instance, when he went rebounding off the side of a building to avoid a vendor’s cart and then leapt over a Hieter’s bald head. Nobody called out to Dorjan when he brought Taern up and over the tin-roofed shotgun apartments that made up the spaces of the alleyway, and nobody tried to stop them from scaling the smaller buildings and running along roofs to save time. Dorjan took a different route through the stews every day. He should have been as strange to the people on the streets of Thenis as they were to him, but in the same way he recognized which shopkeepers were still in business and saw the ebb and flow of families moving in, moving out, being pressed to service, disappearing, resurfacing in worse circumstances still, somehow the people of Thenis came to recognize that the young master and now his friend, were simply part of the ebb and flow of the streets.
It comforted him as he and Taern leapt, ran, and dodged the crowded thoroughfares that were now too crammed with people and detritus to let the monorails run. As far as he knew, nobody had put together the idea of the Forum Master who was too stupid to abuse his job and the darkly dressed young man who pattered through the city streets nearly every day. He liked it that way. The fewer people who put that together, the less likely anyone would ever look at him and see the Nyx.
And that run through the city was… exhilarating. Leap, dodge, spin, flip—every step, every turn was an adventure in finding the quickest, most efficient way through a landscape that refused to sit still. Although Dorjan hadn’t thought of it before Taern accompanied him, this time in the morning or afternoon, when he wasn’t wearing his armor but was allowed to run—that was the time he felt most free.
That didn’t change with Taern at his side. It was, instead, intensified: every moment Taern spent leaping into the air or running up the side of a building was a moment Dorjan was unfettered by gravity as well. Watching the boy was a pleasure, and running with him, knowing that when Dorjan vaulted the gaping hole in the sidewalk, Taern was behind him, finding his own way over or around—it was better than having wings.
It occurred to Dorjan that having the boy there while they were both masked, both of them moving without fear, both of them ready to execute violence if it were so needed—
He dropped to his knees and tumbled backward as a cart suddenly crossed his path and he had no room to slow his momentum and not enough momentum to leap the cart. As he was somersaulting backward, Taern executed a dive roll both over his tumbling body and over the cart, landed on the other side, and looked at him with triumph on his face.
Dorjan couldn’t help but laugh back.
He picked himself up and trotted around the cart, then joined Taern again, thinking that having company on the streets at night might not be the worst thing ever to happen to him.
They came to a stop in an alley about two blocks from that dismal entrance, and Dorjan turned to him, grinning. “Great move,” he praised, still excited from watching Taern’s grace and fluid body. “I love how you—mmm….”
Taern seized his shirt in both hands and hauled him down for a hard, breathless kiss. Dorjan melted, thrusting his hand up into Taern’s thick, curly hair and tugging so Taern’s head would tip back and Dorjan could have better access. Ah… oh yes… warmth and excitement and laughter and…
Oh… Bimuit. Arousal. Dorjan wanted so badly. He bent and cupped Taern’s tight bottom in his hands and hauled up. Taern took the hint and hopped, then wrapped his legs around Dorjan’s hips and ground them together hard enough to make Dorjan break off and gasp.
“Ah….” Taern moaned. “This is a really bad time for this!” Then he pulled Dorjan’s head down for another kiss.
Dorjan kept tasting, kept plundering, until Taern bucked up against him and howled into his mouth, shuddering and trembling and shaking, and Dorjan was shocked, appalled, and so aroused he almost couldn’t breathe when he realized there was a spreading wetness and warmth against his crotch from Taern’s climax.
Dorjan groaned and whimpered, and Taern stayed up in his arms, wrapped around him, for a moment, resting his head on Dorjan’s shoulder.
“Oh Nyx,” he said softly, almost tearfully. “What are you doing to me?”
Dorjan groaned again, and Taern slid down and thrust his hand down Dorjan’s trousers to pull the front just low enough for his cock to stick out into the open air. Dorjan felt that clever hand wrap around him and squeeze and jerk, once, twice, three times, and then he buried his face in Taern’s neck while Taern stepped aside to let his spend arch whitely through the air and spatter on the brick wall behind him.
Dorjan couldn’t take his face from the hollow of Taern’s neck and shoulder. Taern smelled like sweat and the coffee they’d had at breakfast and like… like sex, which Dorjan could smell even above the fetid morning stench of the alleyway. Taern’s hand was gentle on the tender skin of his cock, even though his newly formed blisters caught a little when he tucked Dorjan back into his trousers.
“Bimuit!” Dorjan wanted a stronger word. He wanted a universal power to apply to, because the founder of his province did not seem big enough to give his blessing or curse to the painful drug thundering through Dorjan’s veins right now.
The summoning bells permeated his thoughts, and he straightened reluctantly, pausing for a brief kiss on Taern’s cheek. Taern closed his eyes as Dorjan touched his lips, though, and Dorjan needed to make that right. He shifted, captured Taern’s lips briefly, and Taern answered him. Dorjan pulled back before it became too heated, and leaned his forehead against Taern’s while they caught their breath.
“You’re late,” Taern whispered, and Dorjan nodded.
“I am aware.”
“You were going to let me go.”
“It’s what I said, yes.”
“Can you really do that?”
“Hells, Taern, I can barely stop kissing you.”
Taern nodded, their tiny alleyway closing in on them, becoming womb-like, dark and close in the heart of the bustling city morning. “I won’t push you,” Taern whispered. “I won’t. But you gave me hope today. Don’t take it back, Nyx. You’re afraid of being a cruel man—the cruelest thing would be to take that back.”
Dorjan made a sound then, something sad and hurt he cou
ldn’t believe he let escape. He pressed a brief kiss on Taern’s full mouth and backed away.
“You’ll be here at the end of the day?” he asked, hating that he sounded needy, hating that he sounded uncertain, but unable to change it or fix it or even address it with those damning bells still ringing from the courtyard but a sprint and a leap away.
“Have I let you down yet?” Taern asked, that surprising dignity surrounding his body like a brightening aura.
“Not once,” Dorjan told him truly and then turned and sprinted for the entrance to the courtyard, vaulted to the tin roof of the corridor in one smooth leap, and ran with steps that felt impossibly long.
SEPTRA was apparently feeling the pressure for resources, and Dorjan didn’t blame him. There had been food riots in the rural areas, as the military had come and confiscated harvests from farmers who were working their land with their children and their pensioners, since their hale and hearty workers had been pressed into service. The Triari needed to start farming his land instead of ravaging it, but that was not where Septra was looking to solve his problems.
“Really, Dorjan,” Septra cajoled, “what is one or two more shipments of lumium, or even gold—”
“When weighed against the lives of citizens who have never lifted a finger to hurt us? Nothing, Triari. Nothing at all. I’m glad you agree, completely unnecessary to increase the mining. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a meeting about the widows-and-orphans fund—”