Taji From Beyond the Rings

by R. Cooper

  “I am sorry,” Trenne said unexpectedly. His gaze was too much.

  Taji turned away to compose himself by exploring the walls until he found a panel for a viewing screen and then another for a comm system, presumably to summon servants.

  “Why are you apologizing?” he huffed. “Are you a pushy emperor or a confused assistant to a pushy emperor’s sister?” He stopped moving. “They believe I am your shehzha, right?” He pronounced it again slowly, accepting the sound of it. “I’m your shehzha.”

  Trenne’s words were soft. “I am sorry.”

  Taji rounded on him. “Trenne, I don’t care that they were shocked or made it a joke. I care that they were deliberately cruel, Larin and his friend and the others, and I had no way to answer them.” Trenne was tracking Taji’s every move as if Taji was rigged to explode. Taji forced out a sigh that took some of his tension with it. “I already got that they think we’re sleeping together, if that’s what bothering you.”

  “It is not that.” Trenne had apparently decided to speak, albeit with obvious reluctance. “Did anyone tell you about the emperor?”

  Taji pursed his lips but went along with the subject change. “Mumbles and rumors. Nothing I understood.”

  “He…Larin Emperor has shehzha. More than one, more than two, which would be a number only for someone with great honor.” Trenne shook his head and then his ears went flat. “Larin has no honor for them. They are not shehzha, they are toys. You cannot be alone with him. He will not honor you.”

  Trenne clenching and unclenching his hands was startling enough to make Taji listen.

  “Okay,” Taji agreed quietly. “I don’t want to be alone with him anyway. But okay. I won’t. All right, Trenne? Because it’s like the ambassador says, isn’t it? Shehzha are revered? Almost sacred? But not to Larin?”

  Trenne shook his head in a hard ‘no.’ “He insults them and…he insulted you.”

  “And you, let’s not forget.” Taji crossed his arms again. Larin had also sneered at IPTC and humans, but that was an issue for later.

  “It’s not meant to be like that,” Trenne insisted. Then he paused, and briefly looked as stunned as Olea Rinnah had. “He is—he is everything the rumors say.”

  “Sergeant Major, remember where we are.” Tsomyal signaled for him to lower his voice, although Trenne wasn’t loud. “It does me and the I.P.T.C. no harm for the Sha nobility to think this about the two of you. But I can correct them. Or we can leave it. A shehzha in our ranks is no small thing.” They turned to Taji, waiting.

  “Great. More speculation on my sex life,” Taji grumbled. “More smirking emperors complimenting my—they’re going to think it no matter what I do, aren’t they?” He threw his hands in the air as he stalked back to stand in front of Trenne. “Fine, if I get a real answer, and if Trenne doesn’t mind, I’ll be his shehzha.”

  Something tight and pained crossed Trenne’s expression. “You honor me, Taji Ameyo.” He took a breath. “But their cruelty was based on the idea that you would accept an animal like me. This will hurt you.”

  Taji had no doubt it would, but not in the way Trenne was suggesting. He gave the air—and the absent emperor—a three-fingered salute. “Anywhere else in the universe, Trenne, I’d be lucky to even be talking to someone like you.” The truth made his voice hoarse.

  Tsomyal made a polite noise of interruption. “You would not need to do much. I have no intention of forcing you to leave your work. I couldn’t, even if you desired it. I need you, Mr. Ameyo.”

  Taji considered Tsomyal, which was easier than looking at Trenne while remembering people thought he was Trenne’s lover. “So, I’m not a spouse. I’m a shehzha, which means I am special. Not just to Trenne, but to Shavians in general. But they aren’t supposed to see me?”

  “A shehzha has no honor.” Trenne was clearly choosing his words with care. Taji appreciated the effort. “They have given it to their partner, who is meant to protect it.”

  Honor again. Taji nodded slowly. “But why do they lose their honor, Trenne?”

  “Because they are wild.” Trenne closed his eyes. “Because they need and they show this need without fear or shame. They desire, and they are vulnerable for it, not meant to be displayed or used how Larin…” Trenne opened his eyes again and looked at Taji, and his eyes were still so painfully delicate. “There is nothing braver than that.”

  It took effort to swallow, to breathe. “Thank you.” Taji was supposed to be that brave, when he knew for a fact he wasn’t. “I knew Shavians would be obsessed with a lack of self-control, but I didn’t realize….” He distantly noticed he was whispering. “So they are revered, but they also lose status while they are shehzha?” Koel Phyta’s shehzha was not allowed in the public eye. That made sense now. But… “I don’t understand. Even people in love for the first time aren’t that out of control. Maybe a little wild, but they hardly need to be banished.”

  “That is why…” Trenne dragged the explanation out. “That is why it is a matter of honor. One may become shehzha for a short time for the person they are tied to. But in many cases it is more. That is why they are courted. Why it means more honor for anyone who has earned the right to call someone shehzha.”

  Courted was not the word Larin had used. But courtship rituals were very much in use across the galaxy, so Trenne’s choice was probably more accurate. Taji rolled his wrist to indicate Trenne could go on.

  Trenne’s voice was rough. “Sometimes, one courts a shehzha with no hope of winning them, as a way to express admiration. The rest of the time, it is deliberate, in order to generate good feeling, for a good life for you, and hopefully children.” Taji startled at the mention of children, but saved that question for later. Trenne turned toward the ambassador and grew increasingly Shavian as he spoke. “If the shehzha has feelings for the one they have chosen, a relationship of care or friendship, it will create more of a…it will make them more wild, more needy, for a time. That is why they should be treated well.”

  Taji’s mouth dropped open. “Is this about the sex? I don’t…Shavians have sex all the time, from what I hear. Nobody loses their mind that much over sex. Well, yes, but also not that much. It’s not as if you lose all skills and intelligence by going a little out of control once in a while.”

  Trenne looked distinctly unhappy in his subtle way, lowered ears and all. “It is more than sex, Taji Ameyo.”

  “You can have this discussion later,” Tsomyal interrupted. “What do we need to know now? Will they allow Taji to keep working?”

  “Will they say Trenne is wrong for allowing me to?” Taji asked. The emperor had definitely implied that.

  “Not wrong.” Trenne straightened his shoulders.

  Taji almost thought he was embarrassed. Then he realized—if Taji was still capable of working, then, to the emperor, Taji wouldn’t be out of his mind with desire enough. Taji would have to act blissed out from being in Trenne’s bed. He would have to be Trenne’s adoring lover.

  A weird hiccupping sound left Taji’s throat. He was too hot. He needed to lie down or to drown himself in midye. He did neither of those things, mostly because this wasn’t his room and he had no midye.

  “Even his sister was offended.” He focused on that. “The Koel were offended. He’s the emperor and he leads by example and he has a collection of shehzha, doesn’t he?” Taji was unclear on a lot of things right now, but he knew for certain that there was no way Larin Emperor was getting anywhere near him and his wildness.

  He was going to examine all of this. Just not right now. He tipped his head back and took a deep breath.

  “I am sorry,” Trenne said again before Taji could speak. “There’s no other explanation for why you would allow yourself to be friendly with me. I am hurat and a foreign soldier.”

  “Friendly?” Taji tried to keep his outrage from slipping into sadness. “Because I ask your opinion and share my tea with you? How was I supposed to treat you, like the lowest of the lower classes, or a pet, o
r—oh.” That was his answer. He sighed in frustration. “I wouldn’t do that. Not even to Nadir at his most obnoxious.”

  Trenne’s fluttering ears were deadly. Maybe Taji really was born to lose his self-control over him. If Trenne had courted him, Taji didn’t think he could have hidden his feelings, not for anything.

  But he frowned. “How am I supposed to behave other than out of my mind from all the fucking?”

  The ambassador’s sharp, “Mr. Ameyo, please” gave him a jolt. So did the soft parting of Trenne’s lips.

  “I mean,” Taji corrected himself self-consciously, “we’re not changing anything, right?”

  Tsomyal sounded both exhausted and amused. “Sergeant Major Trenne does not need to change anything.”

  Taji made something close to a growling sound, then spun away. “I have to go. I’ll set my system to wake me up in seven hours. Will that do?”

  “That’s more than adequate, Mr. Ameyo.” The ambassador dismissed him with the same note of humor in their voice, but their eyes were large and glittering. “I hope you’ll get enough rest.”

  Trenne looked at them sharply but Taji gave up fighting for his dignity in favor of curling up in whatever bed he’d been given. He turned and marched out the door, only to stop when he almost bumped into someone, probably a young woman. Trenne came up close behind him.

  The woman was barefoot and simply dressed, a servant, which Taji would have guessed even before he glanced at her clothes because of the faint spray of speckles beneath her delicately tipped eyes and down the side of her neck, mixed in with fragments of swirls. Her hair was braided in the same manner as Mos’s, but this girl had to be partly hurat.

  “Mos sent me to ensure you could find your way to your rooms and that you were comfortable upon your arrival.” She glanced at Taji, but her awed, admiring gaze stayed fastened on Trenne for most of that speech. Taji didn’t remember her from when they had gotten off the flier although she might have been part of the crowd.

  “Excellent. Thank you. Lead the way.” Taji said that last part in Anglisky, but the woman didn’t appear to notice or care. The floor was so warm Taji could feel it through his boots, which explained how the servants and Olea Rinnah could stay barefoot all the time. Maybe in the older sections of the palace that was not the case, but here, among the smoothly carved archways, someone had embraced the newest technologies. Then again, if Shavians had always been barefoot before the arrival of IPTC and other cultures, maybe the heated floors were not a new technology.

  The thought was an attempt to distract himself and it wasn’t really working. “Is there any way you could bring us some food?” Taji asked her, although she didn’t take them very far from the ambassador’s rooms. She opened a door for them but did not step inside.

  “Are you hungry?” She seemed genuinely worried.

  Taji blinked, then frowned. He didn’t want her to get in trouble. “I am not. But he has not eaten.” He jerked his thumb at Trenne.

  Her face lit up before she remembered to school it to something calmer. “You should listen to your shehzha,” she scolded Trenne, with delight in her eyes, very likely for getting to say that word to another hurat. Then she nodded. “I will bring you something soon. I will announce myself when I arrive.”

  With one last glance at Trenne, she turned and headed down a series of steps and then through another door.

  “Well,” Taji said quietly, once they were alone, “that explains some of it. She was so happy.” He pushed his way into his rooms. “B’lyad.” Happy because Trenne had this wonderful, unprecedented thing, this shehzha, in Taji.

  Taji’s bag was already in the room, at the foot of a truly massive bed. So was Trenne’s gear, which meant the team probably knew about this development. On top of Trenne’s bag was Trenne’s uniform coat, which Taji hadn’t been able to return earlier. The team definitely knew, at least that Taji and their CO were sharing a room. They’d learn the rest tomorrow, unless Trenne told them first. They would have to participate for the act to work.

  There was going to be more teasing, but Taji wasn’t going to think about that right now, either. Not with a giant bed in front of him.

  Normally, his attention would have been on the luxury of the rooms he’d been given. To him, a private room was gift enough, but the air here was warm and sweet-scented. The panels to use as a screen or to communicate with others were open for him to see. A smaller doorway seemed to lead to a closet space. Another to what was probably a bathing room and hopefully a toilet. Everything was sleek and clean and likely soft to the touch, and yet the bedframe was dark and shone like polished wood. The bed was an honor for him to use, for Trenne to use with his weirdly revered lover.

  Taji sank onto an unreasonably cushioned mattress and swept his hand over the thick, teal and white bedding.

  “You do not have to do this.” Trenne hadn’t moved far from the door.

  “It’s fine.” Taji had never felt a fabric this soft and was tempted to steal it. “All I really need is a place to sleep and clean up.”

  “That was not my meaning.” Trenne took a step closer.

  “I’m going to—” Taji abruptly got up while waving toward what he hoped was the bathing room. It was, and it had the shower-fountain-style bathing area that Shavians seemed to prefer. He closed the door and stripped off his clothes and then let hot water pour over him from too great a height with too gentle a water pressure while he thought dangerous thoughts about how, exactly, Trenne might drive him out of his mind with need.

  Then, because of Shavian ears, he made the water colder and stood there under an icy waterfall, until he was too busy shivering to be aroused. He didn’t use one of the spongey rocks Shavians cleaned their skin with or waste time with soap from his gear. He stood naked on the heated floor and dried himself off before slipping into the same clothes. His data device fell out of them, and he stowed it safely back in a pocket before drying his hair. He’d forgotten his skin and hair oils in his bag and sighed for it. He left his boots on the floor. He felt almost Shavian, standing barefoot on heated stone tiles.

  When he emerged from the bathing room, Trenne had taken the bags off the bed, but had returned to his previous position. He was on his comm, quietly ordering Markita to stand outside the ambassador’s door, and to make sure not to offend anyone with any visible weapons, except for at least one knife, of course. His gaze snapped to Taji the moment Taji stepped out.

  Taji made sure his clothes covered his hip. “Traveling. I needed to clean up,” he explained, as if any of this was normal, then flinched at the tap on the door.

  The servant from before returned, eyes averted when she walked in as if she’d expected to find them mid-fuck, as if a real shehzha would have been all over Trenne the moment they were alone.

  She peeked up at Trenne before holding out a tray. Her glance at Taji was either disapproving or disappointed. He felt it was mostly disappointed and didn’t want that for her or for Trenne.

  Taji came forward to curl an arm around Trenne’s back. He pushed his other hand across Trenne’s stomach, tugging at his shirt and accidentally letting his fingers graze the hilt of Trenne’s knife.

  Trenne took a careful breath.

  Taji’s palms felt sweaty. His clothes were damp. “Trenne,” he murmured, without being able to look at anything else but his hand on Trenne’s body, “you have to eat.”

  “I will put the tray here,” the girl said, happiness once again in her tone. Taji heard the sound of the tray as she slid it onto a table and then the door closing. He pulled his hands away and then went back to sit on the bed by the mountain of pillows.

  “Sorry.” He rubbed his palms against his thighs and looked up to find a mural on the ceiling above the bed. Two Shavians in a forest, wearing clothes he didn’t recognize, possibly about to fight. They both had knives drawn. “This is awkward.” Trenne still hadn’t moved. “Trenne, sit. Eat. You can’t take up position by the door the whole time we’re here.”

>   “No. Sometimes I will be following you and Ambassador Tsomyal.” Trenne’s dry sarcasm—if it was dry sarcasm—was somewhat reassuring. He picked up the tray, then sat at the foot of the bed.

  “Eat.” Taji almost stretched to poke Trenne with his bare foot, but he’d done enough touching without permission for one day. He coughed. “Was that…? That is—she seemed to want me to…us to…touch. And I don’t want anyone to get the impression that you aren’t desirable, that as your shehzha I don’t want you so much that I ache when I’m not near you, or that I’m not thinking of you, or that I don’t—don’t need you. They’re hostile to you as it is, and I don’t want that. And it’s…shit, Trenne, it’s not a sacrifice to touch you.” His palms were still warm.

  “They will not understand.” Trenne set the tray down next to him. “My own shehzha. You…” He raised his head and for the first time in Taji’s memory, Taji could imagine him as a young man, a teenager or the Shavian equivalent.