by Megan Crane
The dumbass had chosen between danger and farmer and farmer had won, because it was the only thing that made sense.
Riordan had to tell himself a little sharply that the farmer disguise winning was a good thing. That this was a test and he’d passed it, and it meant he could do what needed to be done this winter, in service to his king and the clan. It meant that Riordan the tracker and brother of the clan could disappear into Random Riordan, the aimless fool with nothing better to do than traipse around the mainland.
It also meant that maybe he remembered his father more than he wanted to admit to himself and was channeling him. Acting him out. Mimicking his body language and posture all these years later, as if it had all been lurking inside him all this time.
He hated that. He’d betrayed his father. He had no right pulling the man up when it was convenient. It made him feel something a little too close to dirty.
Riordan wanted to crush noses and windpipes, then rip out a few spines, because how dare these little dipshits fail to recognize they were in the presence of a raider so feared and adored that they sang songs about him in the raider settlements? He wanted to demand these feckless little douchebags apologize for confusing him—him—for one of these shuffling, obsequious little shadow-creatures who called themselves men but were much too soft and spineless to deserve the use of the word.
He felt Eiryn’s hand against his side, her fingers digging into him in silent warning, and he forced himself to breathe.
“Next ferry leaves in the morning,” the guard was saying in a bored, condescending tone. “There are bunks for rent near the ferry landing if you can afford it, with guards on watch all night. Otherwise there are a few warehouses around where transients can crash, but the safety of your woman or your possessions can’t be guaranteed. You understand me?”
Riordan managed to indicate that he did, indeed, understand. Without opening his mouth, which would have been a bad idea just then. Especially with his woman clinging to him the way she was—because it wasn’t as if Eiryn would run away and leave him to it if a fight broke out. They’d expose themselves instantly.
And for what? Some dumb guard who was only doing his sad little job? It was beneath Riordan to even notice this fool.
“Summer curfew is at full dark,” the guard continued, already looking past them at the line snaking off down the road toward the wet green forest. Completely unaware of how close he’d come to his own death in the past few moments. “Pay attention to the horns when they blow and don’t try to get cute with the street patrols. You won’t be given a second chance, and it’s a long walk to Atlanta if you want to catch another boat before the rains.”
Then the guard stepped back, sighing as he waved them through, as if they were forgettable little mainland weaklings beneath his notice instead two of the deadliest warriors to ever walk the drowned and ruined Earth.
And Riordan had to sack up and take that, too, as a victory.
* * *
So far, compliance was like torture.
Or maybe that was just all this quality time with Riordan, which was killing her. Killing her. And Eiryn was entirely too aware that this was only the first day of a long winter. Which meant that basically, if she was finding it this hard to not only be around him but to have to throw herself all over that steel-cut body of his every five minutes, she was epically boned.
And all that before she’d had to step up and do her duty like all these compliant women apparently did. Daily.
It was better, she’d told herself repeatedly all day—and hell, since she’d thrown herself into this mess back in the Catskills—not to think about that part.
Entering the port city had been surprisingly low-key, all things considered. Riordan had gotten tense, and she’d had to cringe about next to him like some kind of flightless, fluttering bird. The kind she’d put out of its misery. She’d almost been offended that no one had called her out for impersonating a gutless coward. But before she could really spiral down into how ridiculous that was and how she’d basically signed up to hobble herself and pretend she was crippled like her father, they’d been waved into the dirty sprawl that was Louisville.
Eiryn had seen all kinds of settlements in her raiding years. The clan didn’t discriminate. They went after big and small compounds, cities and villages alike, if they had the sort of stores that the raiders liked to liberate for their own use. Or if they were dicks.
But Louisville wasn’t like anywhere else she’d been, for which she was deeply grateful. It was a muddy and grim little encampment with laughable walls on three sides and a sheer drop over the cliffs to the churning bay below on the fourth. The ancient city of Louisville lurked beneath the surface of the murky bay, with only a few tops of old buildings poking up from the brown water here and there and, come low tide, glimpses of the rest. The newer Louisville looked tossed together in a hurry, as if it had been an evacuation site during the Storms and had just . . . stayed there ever since. It probably had.
It bore very little resemblance to the raider city or any raider settlement Eiryn had ever been in. For one thing, the raiders kept their streets clear. Here, there was garbage in the street and human waste in the alleyways. It was a stew of bad smells and unwashed, hungry-looking people who seemed desperate. Eiryn sensed that particular sharpness in every narrow street they walked down. She felt it in the overly bold way certain men eyed her and others followed suit from the shadows between the hulking warehouses. Everywhere she looked, someone else was sizing her up—her pack as much as her person, as if plotting the best way to liberate one from the other. There were various stands thrown up against the walls of the dank, soulless buildings, where vendors sold everything from overpriced skins of questionably sourced water to intricately tooled pieces of leather better suited to richer compounds to reconstituted computer tablets stuffed full of ancient movies to while away the coming winter, or so the salesman claimed. And the blunt roar of the generators was like a constant headache, a pressure right there against her ears.
Walking around a place like this without easy access to a blade made Eiryn’s skin crawl.
“This place stresses me out,” she said quietly at one point. She and Riordan had canvassed the whole of the city. They’d checked out the bunkhouses versus the empty, security-free warehouses and had liked neither. They’d walked the length of the walls and had wandered the tight grid of streets before finding themselves at the blocked-off entrances to the docks. Behind barred gates, there were long metal stairs built into the cliffs that led down to the dirty water of the bay, where a very large steamer ship loomed.
“It bites,” Riordan agreed. His gaze was on the ship. Eiryn couldn’t bear to look at it. Raider ships were sleek and quick. They danced across the waves and raced before the wind. The ferry might as well have been a block of concrete except less appealing. “Makes sense. Who would want to stay here? All these fuckers are trying to get somewhere else for the winter.”
Because however unpleasant Louisville was on an August evening, it had to be far, far worse come the dark, grim rains of November. Eiryn shuddered at the thought. There was nothing here. No trees, no mountains to block the wind, nothing. Just bleak warehouses in a listless jumble, surrounded by an inadequate wall and the gloomy bay filled with ghosts.
A winter here would be like dying. It was no wonder the people were so hard-edged and rough.
Riordan indicated that he wanted to move on with a lift of his jaw, and she fell into her new place at his side. Halfway up his ass, in fact, because that was how the women around her walked. They didn’t claim their own space. They didn’t call attention to themselves in that way or any way. They kept their eyes averted and they stayed in tight packs or close to their men.
Threat hung heavy in the air, worse even than the wet clasp of the summer humidity. It made Eiryn’s shoulders feel tight, as if there was already a dagger stuck there. She felt naked without her blades. Naked and furious. And she revised her opinion of the war
chief’s woman, who’d done all of this with only her petulant sister for company and none of Eiryn’s skills, with every step.
Eiryn followed Riordan as he walked down the busy main street again, navigating a path around the beggars and the shopkeepers in their overloaded stalls. The afternoon light was turning into that deep summer blue, and Eiryn started to notice activity in the shadows. A woman she’d seen with a friend on the other side of the gate followed a hatchet-faced man down a dark alley, with an extra swing to her hips. The friend passed her on the way out, smirking when they drew near each other, and then took up a position near the mouth of the alley. Moments later, another grim-looking man with too much drink in his red cheeks and a scraggly brown beard staggered from the shadows, adjusting the fly of his trousers as he went.
And when a pair of Louisville guards marched past, both the woman and the man melted away into the crowds.
Fascinating. But maybe this sort of furtive groping in the shadows was only to be expected in places where sex was supposed to be holy and purposeful instead of a way to get off.
She raised her eyebrows at Riordan.
“I saw it,” he said, his voice a low rumble, and kept walking. “It’s everywhere. So much for all that compliant shit.”
“Men like pussy,” Eiryn replied. “Pretty much everywhere you go.”
Riordan smirked. “I object to that word.”
“Pussy? That’s adorable. I had no idea you got so precious in your old age.”
His smirk only deepened. “Men.”
It said something that Eiryn didn’t feel like looking at too closely that they were getting along better tonight than they had in years. She wanted to pretend it was because they were such professionals, so dedicated to their jobs and what they needed to accomplish here. And maybe it was, to some extent. Or maybe it had as much to do with the fact they were both pretending to be a part of this strange mainland world when, Eiryn was quite sure, Riordan would probably prefer to scrub this ugly little city off the map as much as she would. They were both walking around acting like strangers to themselves and their clan. They were the only ones for miles and miles around who knew the truth about each other.
Though it would be very, very dangerous to start thinking of this man who had haunted her for so many years as any kind of safe place, Eiryn knew. Or any kind of friend.
Riordan traded a few packets of seeds for some food as the sky edged toward dark and the air finally started to cool. They sat in one of the overcrowded courtyards—it was more like a feeding pen, but who was Eiryn to debate the semantics of that with the notably uncharming women who’d taken their seeds—and ate the slop they’d been handed, slurping it out of the questionably clean bowls like everyone else.
Unlike everyone else, if the grunting and rooting around in the bowls was any indication, neither one of them was particularly impressed with the cuisine.
“Vegetable, yeah?” Riordan asked in an undertone, his face carefully blank as he looked down at his bowl. He took another careful taste. “I mean, at some point.”
“That sounds like a bold claim,” Eiryn muttered, trying to keep her face as much in her bowl as possible so no one could read her revulsion. Helena was mouthy, but that was how she’d gotten kidnapped by the raiders. She was probably not the best role model. Better to ape the behavior of the cowed little brown hen-like creatures all around her, who seemed terrified by their own two hands.
Riordan snorted. “Better than if it’s meat.”
Eiryn repressed a shudder. And wondered if it wasn’t better to go hungry than to choke down this slop. But no one around them was wasting the food, so neither did she. And neither did Riordan. They each grimly downed their thankless portions, then dutifully placed the bowls in the big bins of dirty dishes near the exit gates.
“Let’s never speak of that again,” Eiryn said darkly, and as close to Riordan’s ear as she could get. And it was better not to question how those bowls ever got cleaned, since she hadn’t seen anyone who looked like a cleaner since they’d walked through the gates.
Riordan only shook his head, then continued walking in that disconcerting way he’d adopted when they’d gotten into line outside the city. One shoulder in a weird position and his knees out of alignment, so it looked as if maybe he was injured in some way.
She reminded herself to flutter like a hen as she scurried—she, a warrior of the brotherhood, scurrying—along at his side.
They headed back down near the stairs that led to the docks as the horns started blowing out warning blasts that heralded the coming of full dark and the curfew. Riordan talked their way into one of the supposedly guarded bunkhouses—though guard was not the word Eiryn would have used to describe the skinny twig of a boy who stood at the door with a sullen look on his unpleasantly narrow face and an Uzi she doubted he could lift.
If the little punk was supposed to keep her safe, Eiryn thought she’d rather take her chances in the alleys.
They were allocated one bunk in the vast, cavernous space and if the muttering behind them in yet another line was to be believed, were lucky to have it. Eiryn heard the officious woman at the door say it—one bunk, then, and there’s only three left tonight—but reality didn’t truly penetrate until they both stood there beside the tiny, completely inadequate cot. Just a bare mattress on a metal stand. She doubted Riordan would fit on it if he was alone. And there was no possible way the two of them would fit on it in any way that wasn’t . . . problematic.
But there was no way around it and no discussion to be had. They had no privacy and no other options. Eiryn couldn’t cause a commotion. She couldn’t even complain. All around them, people were hurrying to throw themselves down on their shitty little beds and wrap themselves up in lengths of sleeping fabrics.
“Lights out at the next blast,” a mother told a young girl on the next cot over. “I’m not getting up in the dark to take you to the toilet, so do it now.”
Eiryn was still standing there next to the damned cot. Paralyzed as it seemed to get smaller and smaller the more she looked at it.
If Riordan had reservations about their sleeping arrangements, he didn’t show it, and she decided she could hate him for that alone. He peeled his pack off his back and stowed it under the bed, then held out his hand for hers. And what was she going to do? Pitch a fit like the kid in the next cot? What was the point? It was going to end the same way no matter what she did, unless she really did want to go on a little alley adventure with the hatchet-faced men and the women who serviced them. And as fun as that sounded, Eiryn figured that even the dullard guards here would notice if there were piles of drunk assholes lying in bloody pieces in their muddy streets come the dawn.
She shrugged out of her pack and handed it over and watched as Riordan tucked it under the cot. But she shouldn’t let herself do that, she realized quickly, because Riordan was . . . much too easy to look at, even without his braids and wearing that same thermal that was now plastered to his body after a day out in all that humidity. Not helpful. She made herself move forward so she could sit down on the obscenely narrow mattress, as if she and Riordan really were a winter married or mated couple and spent a lot of time wrapped around each other in tiny sleeping spaces, the way they probably would have had to if they were traveling together like this across the mainland.
He sat down at the other end of the cot and her gaze slid to his as his weight made the mattress sag alarmingly, then stop abruptly when it hit their packs, which Eiryn could feel like boulders beneath them. What a comfortable night they had ahead of them. On the other hand, the fact the packs would be wedged in beneath them would make it harder for anyone to steal anything.
She knew Riordan was having the same thought when he cleared his throat.
“First or second?” he asked in a low voice she thought only she could hear through the din of this place, filled up with entirely too many people in all directions and the generator roar beneath them all.
She looked around t
o be sure, but it didn’t seem as if anyone was paying attention to anything but settling themselves down for a night. Everyone had their crap piled under their cots and spread out around them, practically begging to be robbed. There were families with kids, multiple generations, all kinds of couples, and far too many hungry-eyed men everywhere for Eiryn’s peace of mind.
“First,” she said. Because she doubted very much she could sleep anyway, so why not take the first watch?
Riordan nodded. He twisted around and dug under the cot, rummaging around in his bag. And again, she had to jerk her gaze away from a too-intense contemplation of the way his muscles played beneath that thermal he wore.
She’d spent all day pretending. That she wasn’t a warrior. That she was clingy, fluttery, a hen and a weakling. So far compliance was brutal—but here, now, face-to-face with the narrow mattress and the impending doom that was going to be the two of them wrapped up on that thing together, Eiryn admitted that the hardest part wasn’t pretending to be soft. It was the far harder pretense that she wasn’t entirely too aware of Riordan every damned second.
Her mouth was too dry. Her heart was doing something insane in her chest. She could blame the sudden flash of heat on the humid air and the stuffiness in this giant hangar, but she knew that was crap. It was him. It was how close he was. It was her body’s response to the fact of him, all those beautiful muscles and that grin of his that she hated every time she saw it, and no matter that it was wired straight into all that wet heat between her legs.
That was the trouble with these compliant places. Back home, sex was everywhere, all the time. If this was a raider-held settlement, most of the people in this room right now would be fucking and sucking their way to oblivion after their long day of travel or simply staying alive in Louisville. But there would be so much sex Eiryn could block it out if she wasn’t into it. Here, sex seemed to lurk wherever she looked and, even more, wherever she didn’t. It oozed in and out of the shadows. It was in the proprietary hand the round-faced man on a nearby cot kept on the ample waist of his woman as she spread a sheet over their mattress. It was in the flushed look on the face of the young woman who sat on her cot, running her hands up and down the length of her thighs while the older man with a certain gleam in his dark eyes stripped off his shirt beside her.