Fires of the Desert (Children of the Desert Book 4) (15 page)

“Oh,
shit,”
he blurted aloud, and almost leapt across the room, hoping it wasn’t too late.

Deiq is going to kill me—and he’ll take his
time
about it—I’m a godsdamned idiot!

He knew, even before he cleared the doorway to the bedroom, that it was far too late; but momentum brought him unstoppably up to the side of the bed.

They lay tumbled together in an apparently exhausted sleep. Their clothes seemed to have been more shredded aside than removed. Eredion stared in horrified disbelief at the network of thick scars and poorly healed burns normally hidden by Tanavin’s clothing. Alyea’s old whip scars he’d seen before, but placed next to Tanavin’s assortment of childhood injuries, it made the lovers into a matched pair of grotesqueries.

A heartbeat later, Tanavin’s eyes snapped open. An intense blue stare locked onto Eredion’s face; then, with a speed at least equal to that of a new desert lord, he unwound himself from Alyea and lunged, driving Eredion back several steps. One of Tanavin’s hands fastened around Eredion’s throat, the other hand reaching back over his bare shoulder in an instinctive call for the sword left in the other room.

Eredion, shocked and caught off-guard by the unexpected burst of speed and ferocity, fought the impulse to react with matching violence. One of them, if not both, would wind up dead if he took that path.

“Tanavin!” he croaked instead, dropping his arms to his sides and forcing his hands to remain open. When that did nothing to ease the madness in that blue glare, he reached out silently, desperately, to Alyea.
Alyea! Wake
up
! Alyea, godsdamnit,
help
!

Tanavin’s hand tightened a fraction, cutting off Eredion’s breath. Then Alyea thrust between them, knocking that powerful grip aside as easily as breaking a twig, and pushed the young redhead back a step. The motion pressed her against Eredion; he instinctively put his arms around her, half-sheltering, half welcoming.

Her skin was still slick with sweat. One of her hands rested on Tanavin’s bare chest; the other hand pressed behind her, against the side of Eredion’s stomach. Tanavin’s glare hadn’t moved from Eredion’s face, even as he jolted back under the shove.

The contact sparked a change in the tension: from anger and violence it slid towards something even more basic. Tanavin’s glare shifted into an entirely different intensity, and Alyea arched between them, her hand sliding down and sideways to Eredion’s groin.

Oh, gods—
Eredion’s thoughts hazed, for the first time in years, with the overwhelmingly sharp perceptions and desires of a new desert lord, and he
remembered—

—going through uncounted numbers of Sessin Fortress kathain on a daily basis: two, three, five at a time, not caring about gender, appearance, or even age—just to be able to appear in public for half an hour before being forced to retreat to his rooms again. That stage had lasted for six months before fading to a bearable level, but even then, he’d required the services of three or four kathain a day. And that had lasted up until his encounter with Deiq....

Even thinking that name pulled Eredion instantly back to reality, dousing him with a mixture of horror and terror.

Deiq! Oh, gods, if I do this, Deiq will take
me
to pieces—

Alyea’s fingers curled and slid. His attempt at protest emerged as a faintly agonized choking noise.

Tanavin reached past Alyea, leaning a little, to grip Eredion’s shoulder hard. Eredion stared, already more than half-dazed, into Tanavin’s fierce glare, and an entirely different set of images—memories not his, but the redhead’s—unrolled in his head:

Boys huddled together in steamy dankness, listening to coarse laughter and the rattle of dice in the next room; a door opening, someone being separated from the pack, hauled away, returning endless time later with fresh bruises and terrified sobs held back until his return to the comfort of the others—

—a badly mauled, skeletally thin boy with black, black hair and eyes too large for his gaunt face, rattling through his last breaths, surrounded by the choked sobs and fury of the group: “don’ die, Tan, don’ die, please, we need you, we need you”—

—bought his way back in with baubles and trinkets,
someone said, and the group shivered as one, pressing even closer together in shared terror—

—a heated iron ring, a massive thing with a raised, thick design on its face, glowing as it moved through the air: “I like to know which of you li’l bassards I’ve already tried”—

Eredion smelled burning flesh, felt a searing pain in his leg, and gagged, staggering back in involuntary protest against that violation: against all the other violations that Tanavin’s experience attached to the word
kathain.

This is who I am:
more a solid sense of stubborn self-awareness than a real sentence, it definitely came from Tanavin. Then came an image of Alyea, her arms wrapped around Tanavin; Eredion translated that as:
She accepted it. Can you?

Tanavin released his grip, his gaze clear and cool. All traces of desire died from Eredion, mind and body alike. He couldn’t help looking, and yes: the scar was there. He jerked his gaze away, afraid he really would vomit in a moment.

“No!” he cried aloud, retreating a step and grabbing a chair back for balance. Alyea, off-balance herself from his sharp movement, leaned forward into the redhead’s arms. “That’s not how it is at all!”

Dimly, another alarmed thought went by:
When did he learn to transfer memory like that? Did he learn that from Alyea?
But the question faded and was lost a moment later.

“Not for yours, maybe,” Tanavin said. He shut his eyes and drew in a deep breath, then let it out in a near-bark. Gently, he set Alyea a step away from him, murmuring something to her that Eredion didn’t catch.

Alyea turned, gave Eredion a searching, intent look, then moved unhurriedly to scoop up what remained of her clothes. She made a face at their shredded state and dropped the fabric to the ground again with a faint shrug.

Tanavin sat down on the bed and deliberately looked up at Eredion, as though emphasizing his decision to put himself in a lower position. He casually draped a hand over his lap, hiding himself without embarrassment or ostentation.

“Sorry,” he said. “I don’t startle well.”

“Apparently not,” Eredion said dryly, rubbing a hand over his sore throat. He’d probably have bruises, and embarrassing ones, for a few hours. He looked at Tanavin’s now-calm expression and decided that a bruise on the throat could be considered a minor discomfort, all things considered. He’d wrap a scarf around for a day and call it a southern fashion of some sort if questioned.

“Do you have some spare clothes?” Alyea asked, her tone utterly practical, as though nothing of consequence had just happened. Eredion grabbed for that normalcy with relief.

“Wian keeps her clothes in that chest,” he said, pointing, and only thought after he spoke that Wian would quite probably be incensed at what he’d just done.
Well, hells,
he told himself,
I’m the one bought her the damn clothes, I can certainly offer them if I see a need. I’ll buy her more.

Alyea, with a wry smile as though thinking along the same lines—or, more likely, hearing that thought—nodded and moved to rummage through the chest. Eredion grimaced and belatedly took control of his scattered thoughts and emotions, retreating behind a sufficiently thick shield to block anything random from escaping.

Tank relaxed at last, his shoulders sagging and rounding. He leaned forward, tugging his clothes up into his lap, and said, “Do you have a spare shirt, Lord Eredion?”

After finding Tanavin a clean shirt, Eredion took a moment to open the windows. He normally liked fresh air, but most of his windows sat at just enough slant to the wind that a rainstorm came right through. Just then, however, Eredion was more than willing to endure damp curtains and floors if it would ease the thickness that now permeated the entire suite.

Tanavin and Alyea retreated to the outer room as Eredion went around the suite, putting dry towels under the windows to minimize the inevitable flooding. He hated having servants in to clean his rooms. Wian had been taking over some of those duties, but he had a feeling she wouldn’t be back until she was sure that Alyea had left—especially as he now strongly suspected she’d seen Tank and Alyea together. That would explain the seething anger trail she’d left behind.

He returned to the outer room to find Tanavin strapping on his sword harness. “That ought to be peace-bound, you know,” he said mildly.

“Nobody’s said anything yet,” Tanavin said, tugging the final buckle tight, and offered a small shrug without looking up. “How did your meeting with the king go?”

“He’s glad to hear the problem appears to have moved outside of Bright Bay.”

Tanavin’s head came up sharply, a peculiar expression on his face. Eredion realized the boy hadn’t heard that part yet, and neither had Alyea.

“Apparently someone took Deiq out of the city,” he clarified, deciding against mentioning the source of his new information. Tanavin certainly knew who Teilo was, but Eredion wasn’t sure how much Alyea knew or understood, and didn’t want to take time to explain. “Into the southlands somewhere. We don’t know just where, or who took him.”

Tanavin stood rock-still for a moment, then straightened. “Well, looks like you don’t need me any longer, then,” he said. “Because there is
nothing
you can offer or threaten that will make me agree to go south again.” He aimed a dry, measuring stare at Alyea, and she returned it as unemotionally. “Sorry.”

She shook her head and made a faint gesture with one hand, as though to say:
I understand.

“Tanavin, wait—” Eredion said, coming forward a step as the boy turned for the door.

“No,” Alyea said, not moving from her chair. “Let him go, Eredion.”

“Wait—”

Tanavin, not looking back or hurrying in the least, quietly opened the door and let himself out. The heavy door shut behind him with a tiny click as the latch caught, and that was the only sound, except for the rain drumming outside, for a few long breaths.

“Gods
damnit,”
Eredion said at last, turning a scowl to Alyea. She met it with a stony impassiveness that stopped his anger cold.

“You have nothing he wants,” she said. “All he wants is to be as far away from where those things happened as possible, and be someone other than Tanavin Aerthraim. It might have helped if you’d called him Tank, by the way. He really hates that other name now. Did you know it comes from two dead boys? Tan and Avin, both kathain in his village. I didn’t see the full memory of that, but it’s a powerful, and painful, one for him; he keeps it deeply buried.”

Eredion shut his eyes, remembering the image of a gaunt child gasping for breath, the surrounding kathain begging him to fight for life:
Tan, we need you, don’t die, Tan....

He put a hand to his mouth, his stomach roiling. “That’s not what it’s like,” he whispered feebly. “Not at Sessin Fortress. Not at any Family Fortress. I can’t—I
won’t
believe that.”

“But in the coastal katha villages,” Alyea said, “that’s exactly what it is. He won’t go back, Eredion. Whatever happens next—is our business, not his.” She paused. “But you can’t leave, can you?”

He shook his head dumbly, horrified anew at the ever-expanding problem.

“So it’s me to carry the message about Deiq south and go on the hunt for him,” she said, and sighed. “You said Deiq’s been taken from the city. Where’s my mother? Where are all the servants? Are they gone too?”

“I—” He stared at her, appalled that his thoughts had been so focused on the ha’ra’ha that he hadn’t even considered her family. “Gods, Alyea, I’m sorry,” he blurted.

She raised an eyebrow, more composed than he’d expected. “I imagine they’re still in the city,” she said. “There’s really no point to taking them if all they wanted was Deiq. I’m probably supposed to spend all my time here, hunting for my mother and her household, instead of going after Deiq.”

“And will you?” he asked, fascinated and delighted with the cold calculation she was displaying.

“Should I?” she countered, her cool mask slipping and allowing a moment of anguish to surface.

“Your first responsibility, as a desert lord, is to your Family,” he said slowly, rubbing his throat and swallowing against the developing bruises. “Excuse me.” He went in search of water, returning a few moments later with two cups and a more clearly thought-out answer.

Alyea hadn’t moved from her chair, but her expression had shifted away from composure into a more open misery. She stared at her hands, mouth twisted to one side in a self-mocking expression, and didn’t look up as he settled into a nearby chair.

“Here,” he said, passing her one of the cups; she took it without interest and sat staring at it.

“Your first responsibility is to your family,” he repeated, leaning back in his chair and sipping his own water every few words. “But the decision you need to make is what will serve your family better in the long run—rescuing them, or rescuing Deiq.”

“How could hunting for Deiq be better?” she demanded. “My mother
hates
him.”

He shook his head. “What your mother thinks of him isn’t the issue,” he said. “Deiq is the most powerful ally your Family has at the moment, and losing that influence would set you back in ways you couldn’t recoup for fifty years or more.” He paused, thinking it through, then said, carefully, “If you knew that someone else could be trusted to search out and rescue your mother, repair damages at the mansion, and restore everything to normal, without needing your help—then, what would seem more important to you?”

She blinked several times, slowly, as she considered that.

“Lord Eredion,” she said at last, “would you—”

He didn’t let her finish. Humiliating enough to ask; no need to rub it in. “Of course, Lord Alyea. Go.”

Alyea stared at him, eyes vague with the intensity of her thoughts; then she stood with a sharp, jerking movement that splashed water across her hand. She glanced down at the cup in her hand without really seeing it, then simply opened her fingers and let it fall to the floor.