Page 15 of The Boy Bride

“Don’t know.” He really didn’t want to explain to Faru that Tirtu had made the request. He did his best to keep those two apart, the way you might have tried to keep your stupidest hunting dog away from a half-tame wolf.

Faru was regarding him now with a glittering intensity in the moonlight.

“My father put all his trust in you.” Faru’s voice was low. “Never could my heart betray the oath I made to him. Yet sometimes I wonder why he had me make it.”

Vanu shrugged. He was so weary of Faru’s nonsense. Three years of this he’d endured, every time he put up a wall or planted a new crop or painted a fucking doorpost: My father made me swear an oath to follow you, and yet sometimes I wonder why. You and me both, you tedious bastard.

“Don’t know,” he said again.

“Do you mean to keep the boy?”

Vanu clenched his jaw and wished there were more beer in his cup. Come to that, he would have liked to reach for the wine jug in front of Faru, which he knew was not empty. But he had made Susami a promise, and he hadn’t broken it lately.

“No.”

“You’ll send him back?”

Vanu nodded. It was the only possible answer. Another mouth to feed wouldn’t be the ruin of them, but it would put strain on their resources, and he couldn’t think of doing that for selfish reasons. They should wait until one of the younger men wanted a bride. Even Tirtu—he deserved a companion if he wanted one.

“Good,” said Faru. “Let it be soon. My lord.”

Heart of the Blue Heaven, he was tired. He wanted a drink. He wanted a fuck. A cup of strong, earthy red, the kind of wine that was sitting on the table in front of him, and a night in bed with a beautiful boy from one of the hostels in Torakand—the kind of boy that his old friend Davanu, who knew him so well, had sent him. That was exactly what he wanted. But he wasn’t going to have the wine, and he wasn’t going to fuck the boy, either. If he did …

Well, he couldn’t tonight, because the poor fellow was still recovering from his fall. And if he did it later, Tirtu and Faru would both think it meant he was going to keep him. Faru would disapprove, which Vanu didn’t much care about, but Tirtu would get his hopes up. He’d be waiting for Vanu to chew through the encircling walls and start murdering his way across the countryside. To what end, he didn’t know.

He remembered the days when he’d been a boy himself, learning what he liked with enthusiastic companions. To relive some of that with a young lover … Well. It was a dream, a foolish one. He was well past his own youth, and the boy from Torakand wasn’t one of his childhood friends. However willing he might be, he was still basically a conscript—it would be a kindness to him to let him go home.

Faru got up and left, but Vanu stayed at the table, watching the older man walk back toward his father’s half-ruined hall, which he insisted on living in. At the door, someone met him, a figure in a white cloak. Earth’s tits. That dung-brained ancestor-fucker was back? Vanu was denying himself the pleasure of keeping the lovely boy that Davanu had sent him, for the sake of conserving their resources, and Faru was welcoming that limp dick of a shaman back into the stronghold?

Vanu reached for the half-full wine jug on the table and tipped it to drink directly from the spout. It tasted good.

* * *

“He’s not an actual lion, but he does have a tail,” Temar said, swinging his foot as he sat perched on the edge of the long table.

“They all do in the mountains,” Zoha confirmed, as the younger boys’ eyes grew wider. “And they’re hairy like beasts.”

“Truth,” said Temar. “They’re not really human the way we are.”

“Deru and Rami are from the mountains,” said one of the younger boys, not objecting exactly, just as if the discrepancy puzzled him. “They don’t have tails.”

“Rami cut his off,” said Temar with authority. “He showed me the scar. I guess Deru’s never grew.” He shrugged.

Lill listened to all of this in silence from the other end of the library table. It was true that Rami had a scar on his backside, but it wasn’t in the place where you’d expect a tail to grow. And Rami was a joker; Lill could just imagine him making up that story. He and Deru were brothers, and Lill was glad to have them as allies. It had started as a means of learning their native language; it was still mostly about that. But they were big enough that even the boys who didn’t like them wouldn’t bother them, and if Lill stuck close enough to them, and did favours for them consistently enough, their protection would extend to him too.

They didn’t need Lill speaking up now to set the record straight about their lack of tails, especially since it seemed like they might have started the story themselves. So why was it that he somehow wanted to? He frowned down at the tablet in front of him.

“You know he killed his own father and mother?” Zoha took up the thread. “Started a feud between their families, too—they’re always feuding up in the mountains.”

This, everyone knew. Lill had only a few memories of his mother and a rumour for a father. The thought of a man so monstrous that he could actually have known both his parents and then killed them—who cared whether or not he had a tail at that point, because clearly he wasn’t human.

Usually the conversation would go on from here to a recounting of the familiar story of the Tawa Valley and the death of White Viper. Lill had long ago developed a picture of it in his mind: the man from the mountains a shadowy figure with a huge blade and hunched, bestial shoulders; White Viper standing straight as a pine tree in his orange, embellished robe of honour, hand on the hilt of his own sword, silver beard jutting proudly, just as he was shown in the painting in the central hall of the Order. And like a tree he had been hacked down by the beast from the mountain, in spite of his grace and learning and superior skill. And everything had changed because of that.

Lill banged the flat of his hand on the table to get the younger boys’ attention and stood up.

“Break’s over! Back to our lesson.” He picked up the clay tablet he had been reading from and found where he had left off. “Listen carefully, because this is the part that concerns us. ‘In the year 600 from the birth of the prophet Vaksha, I, King Xshamaya, Great King, King of Kings, King of Nations, first brought the land of Akramarra under the rule of the Zashian throne, increasing the kingdom of my father and expanding the might of Zash into the fertile land of hills between the mountains. There I subdued the warlike Chiddang people and recruited from their fiercest warriors a royal guard loyal only to me, sworn defenders of my truth against the liars from inside and the liars from outside.’ That’s us. At first the Order was made up of the best warriors of the Chiddang. That was more than one hundred years ago.”

“You’re Chiddang, aren’t you, Lill?” said one of the younger boys.