His heart stumbled. “I thought you would want to protect me.”
“You have more than earned your right to this war,” Lisinthir said. “More than that, it is in my heart that you’ll be needed. But not immediately. I have been waiting for my Emperor’s summons. You will have to await mine.” He wound a finger through Jahir’s disheveled braid and tugged. “Come. We can talk while I pack.”
Jahir resettled the blanket around his shoulders and followed, stunned. “You mean that,” he said to his cousin’s back as Lisinthir pulled his case from alongside the dresser.
“Are you surprised?”
“Yes!”
Lisinthir snorted. “The therapist is surprised, perhaps. Galare’s heir? Who has cast aside at last his doubts about the use of his abilities?”
Put that way… Jahir curled the blanket closer, fisting a handful of the fabric in front of his heart. “What do you mean when you say your Emperor summoned you?”
“He told me he would send a sign when it was time for me to return to the fight. That I would know it.”
“And that sign…?”
Lisinthir set Imtherili’s swords on the bed alongside the case before looking up at him. “The Slave Queen has caused almost a hundred refugees from the palace to be sent from the throneworld. They are expected to begin arriving over the border in a week.”
Jahir grasped for the door jamb. “God and Lady.”
“Yes.” His cousin began tucking rolls of clothes into the case, the movements quick.
“What must have happened to inspire such an exodus?”
“She must believe the court to have become hostile to the Emperor. He cannot be there. If he was, they would not have needed to flee.” Lisinthir shook his head, a twitch like a horse shying. “No one knows the situation. We will have to ask her when she arrives with them.”
“She has left too?”
“It was her plan, or so I’m told.” No mistaking the pride there, and Jahir could not begrudge him it. The slave he had freed from spiritual chains had become a woman who could initiate a plan of such audacity… yes. His cousin had worked magic even before he’d become heir to powers out of legend. “I am to go now to meet my assigned team, and from there to the border to see what situation obtains.”
“And when you know how I will serve….”
“I will call for you. Have no doubts on that score.”
It was too much, to hear it said openly, to no longer fear that he would be left out of the fray, to acknowledge at last how much he wanted to be in it. Jahir managed to reach the bed and sat heavily on its edge, furling the blanket close against the gooseflesh that rashed his sides.
Lisinthir paused, then set down the shirt he’d been folding. Reaching over the case, he rested one finger against the far side of Jahir’s jaw, and Jahir let him turn his face by it. “You thought I would coddle you?”
“I still think you might.”
“It cannot be supported,” Lisinthir said, the words thick with shadows. “Moreover, it can’t be afforded. The stakes are too high, Galare. You are a mind-mage, and when you work with me we are far more effective than we are apart. I must send for you when I know how best we might be employed. Once I find the Emperor… I’ll know. Go home, re-connect with your beloved… stop by Sediryl’s abode and make your promises to her. And then be ready, because I won’t be long in calling.” Touching Jahir’s lip, creasing it. “Believe me. On this matter, I would not lie to you.”
“Would you lie to me on any matter?”
Lisinthir’s mouth quirked. “Point to Seni’s heir.”
Jahir kissed his fingertip, willing to be magnanimous given the promise. “At last. I have earned one after days of sparring.”
His cousin chuckled and leaned over to kiss him, and that began gentle and became hungry because Imtherili was already tense for battle, and it made him fierce with needs more passionate than any bed could serve… but Jahir fed on the incipient violence, on the whispered promise of lethality, and was dizzied by how quickly he could respond after so exhausting a night.
“So good, my cousin, my Delight,” Lisinthir murmured. “So willing.”
Jahir chuckled huskily. “What shall I say? You inspire me.”
Lisinthir smiled against his mouth. “Good.” And pulled back to resume packing.
“No regrets?” Jahir asked, tentative.
“Over last night? God and Living Air, no. Not one.”
“Even the talk afterwards?”
Lisinthir paused, smiled ruefully. “Not even. Though I can see a relationship with a therapist is as fraught as I’d thought when observing you with Vasiht’h. You are never done with thinking.”
Jahir huffed softly. “I have it on good authority that my mind is one of my best assets.”
“You certainly wield it with deadly precision, when it suits you.”
“I take exception to the characterization,” Jahir said, smiling at the teasing. “Now you are the one subjecting me to appalling metaphors.”
“I should think you would know better.” Lisinthir straightened, his smile grown suggestive. “A weapon can be turned to more than one purpose, cousin.”
“So it can,” Jahir said, ignoring the flush that brought to his face. “We have part of the day, if I am not mistaken, then?”
“We do. How shall we spend it?”
“I thought I would ask you,” Jahir admitted. “You are the one about to leave. I would like you to go fortified. But if you’d rather I decide…?”
“Go on,” Lisinthir said. “I’d like to know.”
“Then… we should eat,” Jahir said. “And dance. And spend the rest of the time here.”
Lisinthir chuckled, low. “Ah, cousin. You surpass all my expectations.”
“Not yet. But I hope to.”
That won him his cousin’s considering look, which he met, unafraid. Perhaps he was the less experienced blade, but he no less than Lisinthir deserved the chance to defend all that he loved.
“I have no doubt,” Lisinthir said, and closed the case.
“How quickly you pack!” Jahir said. “Did you bring so little?”
“More that I lost so much in the Empire. That sojourn put paid to almost everything I brought with me from the homeworld; what remains I bought here.” Lisinthir caught his hand and kissed it. “I shall be quit of the shower quickly and then you may have it, as I have an errand to run ere we go to our day.”
“You need not think of the shower as something to be rushed?” Jahir offered, and watched his cousin hesitate. “You have made a proper tangle of my hair, you know. The least you might do is comb the snarls from it.”
Lisinthir laughed. “Oh, very well then. You are impossible to deny, my cousin.”
Strange to be anticipating the future, knowing that it held the possibility of their mortality. And yet he was anticipating it, perhaps because their lives had been absent that threat for so long. What Eldritch thought themselves mortal? And how that had crippled them! That was part of what made his cousin so alive, he realized in Lisinthir’s arms, under the water... because Lisinthir had met Death, and those meetings had made him burn brightly with the life he had escaped to live again.
Small wondering their love-making in the shower left him breathless.
Jahir lingered after his cousin excused himself, leaning into the water. The tension had bled out of him, even as it had poured into his cousin. Perhaps that was meet, given who they were. The balance was what made it so easy for them to work together: passion with calculation, flesh and mind, unicorn and striking drake. The contrasts remained fresh in mind as he exited the bathroom some time later, dressed and calm.
There he found his cousin sitting on the bed’s edge, awaiting him, with a box.
“And this?” Jahir asked, curious.
“A gift, if you please. And if I may.”
“I would never turn back one of your gifts….”
That flustered his cousin the way any number of more salaci
ous or cutting comments would never, and Jahir prized as much that Lisinthir let him see it as that he’d been able to elicit the reaction. “Then I shall hope you find it as useful as I found mine.” He opened the box and withdrew from it a pale pendant that seemed to float in the air between his hands when he lifted them: an exquisite disc of carved ivory, shaved away to near translucence in places, left dense enough for intricate filigree in others. Jahir’s breath left him in a hiss as he cupped it in a hand. Not the unicorn he’d sent Lisinthir with the jackal chest, acquired at such cost from the homeworld: this was an Alliance creation, and on it was a drake twined around a unicorn, the latter rearing with bent head to strike and the former coiled, facing outward with gaping jaws.
“Surely there has never been such an amulet rampant!” Jahir whispered, stunned.
“Surely there has never been such need for one.” Lisinthir reached for him and Jahir hastened closer, drawing apart the high collar of his shirt. The pendant hung by some invisible filament, and once seated rested below the cleft of his throat as if by magic, bracketed by the collarbones his cousin so loved to caress. “I am convinced your amulet saved my life. We shall see if yours will do the same for you.” Setting his fingertips on it, Lisinthir added, quiet, “I hope you will take this as proof that I mean to send for you.”
“I do. And I am grateful. It’s exquisite.” Jahir touched it once, feeling the ephemeral warmth imparted by his cousin’s fingertips, then redid the laces on the shirt and tugged the tunic back in place, hiding it from view.
“It becomes you,” Lisinthir agreed, satisfied. “And will serve you in your need. And now, cousin… shall we to our day? I would find the distraction welcome.”
“Then let us.”
As a culmination of their assignation Lisinthir could have asked for nothing finer. That there were things left unsaid and unfinished went without saying; one night with the knife was not enough for either of them, when the knife had scraped so much loose in them both. But his cousin went with him into the gloaming of the Trenches and ate from his fingers and danced as if his spine had gone liquescent, and through fingers and mouth Lisinthir felt his pliancy, the seeping of epiphany through the fabric of a spirit. The lessons would take. More… the lessons would go with them both, because he could sense in his own heart a terrifying and exhilarating crack. He had thought himself so completely alone, without a soul to understand him; he’d been wrong. He didn’t know what to do with that knowledge, but it whipped his pulse to a quickness, made him aware of every edge in the world and under his fingers, and for that he was grateful, was ravenous, wanted more. He was a man who lived by the evidence of his senses on the eve of a war. All the advantage he could find, he would take.
They returned from the club to strip and rinse clean and fall to other things, and Lisinthir ate that off his cousin’s skin: his own cutting, ephemeral and crueler than any more tangible blade, threatening him with how much more complex his life had become, and how wrong he’d been about parts of it, and how much more precious it was. That he drank his power off his cousin’s skin made it bearable, for had he not freed this wanton from the prison of grief and guilt? And if he could, what was beyond him?
Too soon it was over and they were dressing, dressed, once more the princes in all their propriety. Lisinthir looked at the chamber, devoid now of his belongings, and said, “The room is under both our names, so you might keep it another night if you cannot find a flight home today.”
“I’ll look after you’re gone,” Jahir said. “Did you forget anything?”
“If I did, you can keep it for me.” Lisinthir plucked his coat from the chair and shrugged it on. “The porter is long gone by now. No doubt my luggage is already being stowed on the ship they’ve found for me.”
“If Alpha is like Veta, there’s a private pass-through for Fleet personnel to reach the base. I assume they’ve given you access?”
“You know about that,” Lisinthir said, amused.
“I have cause,” Jahir said, his smile lopsided. “Remind me to tell you of our history with Fleet.”
“This being the history that caused you to become my contact while I was in the Empire?” He straightened his lapels and glanced at his cousin. “Why yes, I believe I’d like to hear this story.”
“You will find it diverting,” Jahir promised. “The part about Alet Claws particularly.” At Lisinthir’s raised brow, he finished, “It involves baked goods.”
“As so many things your beloved touches do.”
Jahir laughed. “Yes. Shall I walk you to your port?”
Lisinthir hesitated. He wanted the extended contact, but not at the cost of the farewell kiss he planned to extract from his cousin. Did Jahir read his ambivalence and guess at its cause? What else explained the look thrown at him then, equal parts challenge and coquetry? He laughed. “God and Living Air, cousin. To see your face…!”
“I attempt flirtation,” Jahir said, modest. “Perhaps I need practice.”
“If you practice any harder I fear what you will achieve.” Lisinthir chuckled. “Very well. Walk with me.”
They went into the deserted corridor, their shadows stretching before them on the carpet. From there, they wound through the Trenches’ crowds, glowing in the darkness. The Pad station at the base of the Hull was one of the only facilities cleared to admit them to the administrative areas: Jahir followed him through that queue and into the central station that serviced all the base’s secured hubs. Fleet had its own gate, flanked with windows and barred by a security arch. The people here were intent on their errands, dressed as contractors or in uniform, and there was a steady flow of them passing through. Not one of them so much as glanced at two Eldritch, one in the tunic, blouse, breeches and boots that might have been made by an Alliance tailor, and another in the anachronistic coat and swords of an alien court.
There was a lounge alongside the Fleet hub, sharing a windowed wall with the station. Lisinthir walked into it, turned to his cousin and began to speak, and stopped when Jahir stepped into him. And kissed him there, before God and Lady and all Their people. Shocked, Lisinthir let him.
With a hand on Lisinthir’s cheek, Jahir said in Chatcaavan, “O Hunter. You are loved by this one.”
His breath stopped in his throat. He had told Jahir not to use such constructions. Had hated the thought of his cousin using the language of the disenfranchised and the enslaved. But somehow through their skins, Jahir had found the deeper truth: that it was also the way the Slave Queen had first addressed him... had been his first bridge out of solitude and into safety, and loving arms.
He had hated hearing Jahir use it without understanding. But he knew, through their touch, that his cousin understood now. It left him delirious with want and split open by grief and sweetness.
To be understood. How precious and rare.
Gently, Jahir said, “Do you believe?”
“I do,” Lisinthir managed. “And you are adored. Just as you are. Beautiful cousin. My Delight.”
Jahir smiled and rested his brow against Lisinthir’s, his hand warm against Lisinthir’s cheek, and stayed thus until their hearts synchronized, and their breathing, and of course that quickened Jahir’s and calmed his. Was that not who they were?
That, at last, allowed him to smile and kiss his cousin’s brow and speak all in gold and white. “Galare. I’ll send for you.”
“Imtherili, I hold you to it.”
Lisinthir stepped away, touched his cousin’s mouth, received on those fingertips a kiss. Then he let his hand fall and left, before he could sink into melancholy… and the moment he turned his back and strode into the Pad hub, his heart took wing again. He loved his cousin, was fond of the Alliance, had found respite and healing here… but the fight was calling him, and he wanted it with a joy he could never have explained to anyone, did they not already feel it.
One does not admonish the wolf when it hungers to be slaying monsters.
He lifted his chin and crossed over with
out a backward glance.
“Lord Nase Galare,” the ensign said, startling him. When had ‘Galare’ become so completely someone else? He was Imtherili. “If you’ll come with me? Your hold is waiting.”
The hold being his crew, if he recalled correctly from his briefing with the Night Admiral. An entire intelligence/special operations team assigned to him, along with their ship. Lisinthir followed the shorter Karaka’an feline, a stocky youth in the black and cobalt blue of a Fleet naval regular, through windowed corridors that bordered the enormous, pressurized bay where Fleet’s smaller vessels were moored for service… if moored it could be called. These ships could land on planets, so they were crouched on the floor, being repaired or resupplied by an army of technicians and their machines. The largest of these vessels were Fleet Intelligence’s, and could hold thirty crew; anything over that size was relegated to the spindle’s microgravity or the external slips.
One of these ships was now his. And it was apparently the one he’d been studying through the windows as they walked, because his guide left the corridor there and brought him into the bay, a lone alien in velvets against the backdrop of hundreds of Fleet personnel in their austere and modern livery. As he approached, a wolfine Hinichi stepped forward to meet them. He liked her instantly: the confidence in her leggy stride, the directness of her gaze. She offered her hand and he covered the palm, and she was not surprised that he’d touched her. A well-informed operative, then, and one accustomed to command. Excellent; he would not work with someone who lacked initiative.
“Lord Nase Galare. I’m Meryl Osgood, captain of the UAV Silhouette and commander of Hold 22. We’re your assets for the mission.”
“Alet,” Lisinthir said. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, and hope you are looking forward to an eventful few months as much as I am.”
She grinned, showing two pointed teeth. “Oh, I think we could use some excitement. If you’ll come with me, I’ll introduce you to everyone else.” She nodded to the ensign, dismissing him, and gestured toward the ship. “This way. This tall fellow here is my senior ops specialist—”
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