The rebels shouted “Never!” and “No pipeline!” It appeared there was a schism. Some wanted more money while keeping the water flowing to Resedna. Others didn’t want Thassli to have the water at all. Amyar wondered if this division could be exploited. He glanced at General Eppon, who seemed amused by the display of defiance. Amyar was proud that on his side, everyone kept their cool. He tried to keep his face a mask of neutrality, especially because he had an inappropriate urge to smile at the former harem boy. He’d had plenty of easy sex with current harem boys. Would sex with a former harem boy give him the challenge he craved?
The answer to that question would have to wait. Eppon’s voice boomed and cut through the chaos.
“The Matriarch gave me the power to bring these negotiations to a halt if they didn’t reach a satisfactory conclusion. We are rapidly reaching that point,” Eppon said. “We’d prefer to reach an agreement by the time the suns set today.”
“And if we don’t?” Wyke asked.
Amyar watched Eppon. He said nothing for several moments. Perhaps Eppon was weighing his next words or rethinking his strategy, but then something Chadan said to Amyar several years ago came back to him. Chadan had told Amyar that sometimes people with power aren’t necessarily thinking deeply when they say nothing. Oftentimes, they were simply counting beats, waiting to make their opponent nervous, trying to force them to make a move out of desperation to break the silence.
Wyke didn’t seem nervous, but the other rebels were agitated. The harem boy, though, seemed calm. He leaned over to Wyke and whispered something in his ear. Wyke looked straight at Amyar for the first time and nodded, then returned his gaze to Eppon.
“If we don’t, we have many options. None of them will be to Tanshar’s benefit,” Eppon said.
What Eppon was talking about was invasion, war, and destruction, and Amyar knew he had the troops to do it.
“Is that a threat?” An older rebel who hadn’t spoken before asked.
Wyke smiled and turned to his compatriot. “My dear Alban, our counterpart spelled it out for us to the extent he is able. True honesty is not the Thasali way. They’re soft and pampered. They keep poor boys and girls as playthings. We can’t expect real honesty from the likes of them.” Another nod to Amyar. His royal ring was off his finger. There was nothing external to indicate his royal stature, but it seemed like Wyke knew. “We may need to change our plans.”
Captain Ishlir Timendum, who had been sitting next to Eppon, stood and pointed at Wyke. “How dare you! The harem system has helped give many young people a better start in life, including him.” He pointed to the former harem boy who put his hand over his Thasali tattoo as if he were ashamed. “Many former harem members have gone on to live fulfilling lives, have thriving careers, and contribute significantly to their communities. It’s interesting that Tanshar has sent only one of its residents to our harem. You don’t need independence. You should send more of your people to the harem, so they can bring back to you what we gave to this young man.”
The harem boy looked as if he would jump over the table and throttle Timendum. His lips were so tightly clenched, they had turned white. His hands were balled into fists.
“Fulfilling lives?” The harem boy yelled. “You take poor boys and girls and turn them into subservient playthings! Any boy or girl you could ever want, there for Thasali royals and their cronies to take as they wish. The harem system is foul.”
The charged atmosphere suddenly felt dangerous to Amyar. Time seemed to stop. The air felt still.
The silence was broken by Timendum leaping up and jumping across the table. He barreled into the rebel closest to him, who pitched backwards into the rebels who were standing behind him. Chaos ensued. Amyar got to his feet along with the rest of the Thasali contingent. He grabbed for Timendum. The rebels poured over and around the table. The fury and glee on their faces frightened and enraged the prince. He was surrounded by savages.
He managed to get a grip on the tail of Timendum’s coat. Some rebels pulled Timendum over the table. Amyar kept his grip on Timendum so he got pulled to the other side of the table. A pair of very strong hands clamped down on Amyar’s coat and yanked. Not hard enough to loosen his grip on Timendum. Not yet. Another yank. Some rebels must have pulled Timendum at the same time that Amyar was yanked because this time he did lose his grip on his distant cousin. His forward momentum carried Amyar across the table to the floor. He cried out. Someone stepped on his arm. Timendum screamed obscenities. Amyar felt a hand on his leg.
“Get off!” Amyar screamed. He kicked the hand away and pulled himself up to standing. Almost immediately many more hands grabbed at him. He could not get free.
Amyar twisted around to face his attackers. He found himself face to face with the harem boy he’d been lusting after. He should have fought back. Or pulled away and ran. Anything but stand there staring. The man stared back at him.
“Rouden! Do it now!”
A fist crashed into Amyar’s cheek. He staggered and tasted blood. Another punch hit his face. Not his face. Anything but his face.
He hurled himself at the harem boy, but Amyar was tackled from the side. Pain ran through him as his body met the ground. He exhaled sharply. Rope. Darkness. A bag was placed over his head. More pain as the bag was cinched closed at the neck. Hands and feet tied. He felt a hand in his trouser pockets. It found his royal ring and removed it. Someone said something about selling it. He vacillated between anger and frustration. His mother had given him that ring. Its gemstone wasn’t as big as the one in the ring the crown prince wore, but it was beautiful and announced to the world that he was part of the royal family, part of an unbroken Thasali line. He was lifted and slung over someone’s back like a bag of dirty clothes. He gasped for air. The noise of the skirmish in the negotiation room faded away. He felt outside air, then the hard metal of a vehicle.
The vehicle bumped along a road full of potholes. Amyar tried to discern sounds and smells. He needed to figure out where he was and where he was going. The bag over his head smelled wretched, like a mix of vomit and rotten burninga milk, and it was so tight. Hard to breathe. He became woozy. Consciousness faded in and out. The face of that gorgeous harem boy came to him. He heard his mother telling him she wouldn’t allow him to go to Tanshar. He fell into an uneasy doze.
Chapter Seven
The Unexpected
Rouden could barely contain his disgust at Mattix. He had wrapped himself in an old red sheet, put a piece of crinkled cooking foil on his head, and kept offering his hand to people to kiss the prince’s ring that he had placed on his finger.
“You have me to thank for whacking him,” Mattix said. “Rouden couldn’t be bothered to do it.” His words were full of spittle and burn.
“I did enough,” Rouden said and tore off a piece of bread. He and the other rebels were eating in a small room at a safehouse deep in the Balford Pool Woods. The foliage on the trees was so thick here that little sunlight could get through. It always seemed like nighttime, and Thasali would never find them.
Raising his hand to show off the ring, Mattix said in a mocking tone, “Enough? If we relied on you to render him useless, we’d have been murdered by those Thasali goons eventually, harem boy.”
There it was, who they really thought he was. Few Tansharians attempted to join the harem, and only he had made the cut. They were too independent, too loud, and too proud. Rouden had wanted a chance at a better life. He even hoped to make life better for Tanshar, but he quickly realized that would never happen from the inside, especially as a harem boy. His value was not in his words or his own desires. The tattoo on his wrist was a constant reminder of what he had accomplished, what he had done, and what he had seen. He sometimes thought of having it removed, but he was still proud of it, even if his compatriots didn’t see it that way.
Rouden shook his head. “I alerted Wyke to the fact that a prince was at the meeting. I wouldn’t have known that, none of you would have known that, without me
being a harem boy. And from where I’m sitting, I’d say our comrades did a splendid job. Are you doubting our comrades’ abilities?”
Now, the attention was on Mattix and off Rouden. No one said anything.
“You know that’s not what I meant,” Mattix muttered as he took a seat. He took off the ring, placing it in the middle of the table. He glowered as he stuffed his mouth with some beans he had scooped up with a piece of bread.
A couple of the guys snickered while others started bragging about their own role in snaring the prince. One had held back the lead Thasali general. Another claimed to have tripped him. Thasali princes rarely traveled, and they certainly never visited a place where there was any chance of danger. Rouden thought Wyke had been smart to take this opportunity when alerted to it.
Mattix gave Rouden a look of hostility that Rouden would have expected from one of their enemies. He finished his bread and stood.
“Is Ankran still with our guest?” Rouden asked of no one in particular. He picked up a hunk of bread, a cup of beans, and a bottle of ale. No one was looking at the ring. He grabbed it and put it in his pocket for safekeeping. He didn’t want something so valuable to get lost.
Most kept their focus on their food and their friends. One man with a boyish face nodded to Rouden and went back to eating and drinking.
The rebels had put Amyar in the basement of the safe house, which had been used by various Tansharian rebel groups stretching back to the time when Tanshar was a Corceus family possession. They had been fighting for freedom for so long.
The house was a ramshackle thing. Rooms had been added on over the years with no sense of harmonizing the architecture. The basement, dark and damp, was the constant. Rouden told Ankran, who was guarding their prisoner, that he could take a break.
“Get something to eat and drink. Felkar brought some of that ale he makes.”
Ankran grinned, revealing a dimple in his left cheek. “Now that’s something I can get into. I need more than bread and beans. I’m a growing boy.” He started to walk toward the stairs.
Just before stepping into the little room where the prince was being held, Rouden called back to Ankran. “How’s our guest?”
“All right, I guess. I haven’t talked to him.” He saluted and headed up the stairs.
Rouden opened the door. It took a few moments for his eyes to become accustomed to the dim light. After his eyes adjusted, he saw a cot in a corner of the room. The prince, who’d been chained by his right hand and foot to bolts in the stone wall, reclined on the cot. Rouden couldn’t tell if he was asleep or not. He knew some of the rebels, including Ankran and Mattix, had roughed him up during the ride here.
Now that Rouden was here, he wondered why he’d come. He’d had some vague notion of confronting the prince about his family’s autocratic rule of Tanshar, and their refusal to pay fair compensation for the water. Now that the prince was a captive audience, Rouden was at a loss for words. If he hadn’t found him so attractive, it would have been easier, he was sure of it. He hadn’t met him during his brief time in the harem, but he had been there long enough that he knew his name and what he looked like. That’s why he alerted Wyke, and he was glad he did.
Still, the prince was a man like any other, a man like him. He was uncertain of how to address him, but then this wasn’t the palace. The prince had no power here, and Rouden wasn’t a harem boy anymore, despite the tattoo.
Rouden knocked the pen light he always carried with him against the palm of his hand, activating the tiny glow rocks inside. The light it threw was bright and harsh, but at least it allowed him a better sense of his surroundings. He could see that one of the prince’s eyes seemed swollen. His unchained arm lay on his stomach as if it were the wounded wing of a bird. He was awake.
“Your name is Amyar,” Rouden said.
For several moments, Rouden didn’t move, and the prince said nothing.
“So your spies aren’t useless,” Amyar said and coughed.
“I didn’t need any spy to inform me of your name.” Rouden stepped forward, emboldened. “We know far more about you than you’ll ever know about us.”
A small table stood next to the cot. Rouden set the bread, beans, and a bottle of ale on it. He felt the prince’s eyes on him. Rouden glanced at him, and for a moment, their eyes locked. The jolt Rouden had felt the first time Amyar had looked at him stunned him again. The force of it momentarily disoriented him. He thought he heard Amyar chuckle.
“You probably know more about my family than I do,” Amyar said.
“What do you mean?” Rouden asked.
“Just that, as the youngest son I’m not important enough to know anything other than what the Matriarch wants me to know.”
Rouden wondered if this could be true. Recalling his brief experience as a harem boy, his skepticism at Amyar’s claim softened a bit. The Thasali harem was a rigid, tightly controlled system. When he thought about it, it made sense that the palace would operate similarly.
“What’s your name?” Amyar asked.
Rouden blinked and recoiled. “I can’t tell you that.”
“Of course not.” Then Amyar giggled.
Rouden was confused. He didn’t understand what was funny about any of this, and he doubted captivity had already driven Amyar crazy. Then the giggling turned into full-blown laughter. Amyar’s body shook and the chains rattled. Rouden squatted by the cot.
“Hey. Hey. Keep this up and my friends will get the idea that you’re not suffering enough. They might come down here and make sure you’re miserable.”
Amyar’s laughter subsided a bit, but he still chuckled softly. “Do you know that I begged the Matriarch to let me come on this mission? She was against it, but I wanted to get out of the palace. The only time I ever left the palace grounds was for highly scripted events like the parade or annual carnival.”
“What about school? You went to school, of course,” Rouden said.
“Ha! School came to me. My brothers and I had tutors.”
“But you’re in the army. You have to leave the palace to get a military education.”
Now Amyar turned to look Rouden in the face. The prince was as handsome up close as he was from afar. His skin was smooth, unlined, and pale white, like someone who had spent little time outdoors. His cheekbones were high. His teeth were so white. His green eyes had flecks of gold.
“You’d think so, but you’d be wrong. I have more military training than my brothers. I’ve been itching to use it, but it’s been limited. This is the first time I’ve had real military experience of any kind and all I did was sit at a table and get taken hostage. Mother told me not to come.” He laughed again, only this time it was a gentler laugh. The edge was gone.
“I saw the palace a few times,” Rouden said.
“Really?”
Rouden held out his wrist, and let his glow light illuminate his tattoo.
Amyar tried to sit up. He reached out to touch Rouden’s tattoo, but he pulled his arm back.
“I wish I remembered you,” said Amyar wistfully. “You’re beautiful. I bet you were a great harem boy. Why did you leave?”
Rouden thought a bit before he replied. “I wanted to do good, but not just for me. I wanted to do good for Tanshar.”
Amyar settled back on the cot. Rouden remembered what the beds in the Thasali household felt like. He doubted the cot was uncomfortable, but compared to Thasali bedding it probably felt like nails against Amyar’s skin.
“That’s too bad,” said Amyar. “It’s a great opportunity for young people in your circumstances.”
That was pure Thasali propaganda rolling out of Amyar’s mouth, but Rouden reminded himself that Amyar was Thasali. Propaganda about the harem was all the prince would know.
“Maybe a ‘great opportunity’ like the harem wouldn’t be necessary for young people in my ‘circumstances’ if their towns and cities weren’t blighted by Thasali rule. If you didn’t take everything we had,” Rouden said. “I though
t I could help my family out. I thought I could help Tanshar, but I was just a royal plaything. I would never be anything more if I stayed.”
He watched as Amyar appeared to struggle to formulate a reply. The prince seemed at war with himself.
“I’d never heard that perspective before,” Amyar said at last.
“Have you ever talked to a harem boy before?”
Amyar laid there silently.
“Did you ever really listen to what we had to say?”
More silence.
Rouden noticed Amyar hadn’t taken his eyes off him in a good while. He found himself hoping that Amyar liked what he saw. He tried to push that thought aside. He wasn’t a star-struck harem boy anymore. He didn’t have to submit to any royal. He didn’t want to admit that the attraction had nothing to do with Amyar’s royal status. He thought Amyar was beautiful.
“Was being in the harem all bad?” asked Amyar.
Rouden had to admit it was not. He shook his head as the door to the little room opened. Felkar, the ale maker, stepped in.
“Wyke and Alban want to see you upstairs. I’m to relieve you from looking after our princely guest,” he said.
Rouden stood still. He was irritated at the interruption. He’d actually been enjoying talking to Amyar. He was strange, for a royal. He not only asked Rouden questions, he genuinely seemed interested in the answers. The prince may not have fully understood the harem boy experience, but he had an understanding of it and palace life that Rouden’s friends did not. It was nice having someone like that around.
Felkar looked at Amyar and pointed at the food and drink Rouden had brought. “All right. See that? It’s good stuff. Not like the fancy cachu you’re used to, but good. Take advantage of it.”
He turned to Rouden, who had not moved. He didn’t want to take his eyes off Amyar. “Don’t worry, my friend,” Felkar said. “I’ll keep him fattened up.” He laughed as if he’d made a hilarious joke.
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