Sons of Destiny Prequel Series 003 - The Shifter (19 page)

Fascinated, if disturbed, Solyn watched him transform once more. She pointed at one of his eyebrows. "That brow is a little off. It's supposed to be a little thinner right there in the middle of that one, and the hairs are a little more scattered toward the end... There, that's close enough."

"Thanks." Clearing his throat, Kenyen shifted that, too. He offered her a sheepish smile, and spoke with Traver's lighter voice. "I think I feel uncomfortable now, wearing this when I know you know otherwise."

She smirked. "Good. Use it to act awkward. Or at least less graceful. Come on, let's finish cleaning up and readying things for tomorrow."

"So, did you twine with her yet?"

Kenyen slanted a look at Tarquin Tun Nev. Having finished his morning chores early, Traver's father had sent him on the task of gathering deadfall from the semi-wild woods at the bottom of the valley. A quick check showed they were more or less alone, but Kenyen didn't take any chances.
His
ring didn't let him know about such things. Which was a good thing in retrospect; he couldn't imagine it squeezing or sliding on his...

"Well? Is she any good?" Tarquin asked again, smirking.

"She let slip how many times she's turned you down," Kenyen countered calmly, stooping to pick up more twigs and toss them in the barrow cart. "She also implied how she wouldn't touch you even if you offered her your weight in gold." A glance showed the other man reddening. "So does it really matter how good she is?"

For a moment, Tarquin looked angry. Then a sly expression crept onto his face. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "You know... if I shifted shape to some stranger's face... I
could
find out. And then you could have fun 'comforting' the leftovers."

Bits of twigs flung out and down. Before most of them could hit the ground, Tarquin's back thumped into the nearest tree, thrust there by Kenyen. He choked and grabbed at the hand pressing his throat into the bark. Pressing, but not crushing. Kenyen kept most of his weight braced on the palm he had slammed into the trunk beside the other man's head.

Leaning in close, he growled in the other shifter's ear. "
My
prey. You don't steal honey from a bear, you don't take a kill from a tiger, and you don't touch
my prey
." He paused, mind racing, then added quietly. "... Not unless you offer me something much, much better. Like
you
."

Shifting his tongue broader and longer than normal, Kenyen slowly licked the other young man from chin to temple. Tarquin squirmed, gagging in disgust. Letting him go, Kenyen reshaped his tongue back to normal and licked his lips. He kept his gaze flat but quirked up the corner of his mouth in what he hoped was an unsettling half smile.

"Gods! You're
sick
!" Tarquin scrubbed at his cheek with the edge of his short sleeve.

"And
you're
an idiot. Which is more important, you forcing yourself on a single woman—when there are a hundred in this valley for you to choose from—or you
ruining
what your own elders have specifically ordered me to do?"

Tarquin wrinkled his nose. "You're acting like you couldn't use the old 'comforting the victim' routine to worm your way deeper into the family!"

Kenyen thumped the pad of his forefinger against the other shifter's head, right where Tarquin's Banished scar would be located, had he been an exiled criminal like his so-called father. Tarquin staggered back and scowled. Kenyen didn't let him speak.

"
Think
, you spawning defect," he ordered roughly, finger-thumping again until the other young man dodged the third time. "If you do
that
, her family will focus on it, and they won't let down their guard! They'll be worried your attack is somehow linked to whatever precious secret the others want, and they'll clamp up tighter than a dog guarding its first fresh meal in weeks! The best way to worm the secret out of them is to get them to
relax
, and that means letting me do my work. Preferably unfettered by any idiocy on your part.

"Besides, if
you
could do it, you've have wedded and bedded the girl, and dug up the secret by now," he added, giving Tarquin a dismissive, scornful look. "But you're so wrapped up in pursuing your own pleasures, you've hobbled yourself with shortsightedness. You don't have the discipline to go after bigger game.
You
can go after all the rabbits and sheep you want.
I'm
after a fat cow."

He meant it purely in hunting terms, but Tarquin threw back his head and laughed at Kenyen's word choice. "Ha! And you say
I'm
the spawning defect? Make sure you do succeed. Should you fail, when I go to comfort her, I'm telling her
you
called her a fat cow!" Still chuckling, he headed off through the woods, the tension between them thoroughly spoiled. "Good luck, 'Traver.' With seductive skills
that
smooth, you'll
need
it."

Aware that his time was shrinking, Kenyen returned to gathering fallen wood and tossing it in the cart. Rice and wheat stalks would be used later in the year to heat the homes of these Corredai folk, twisted into makeshift logs in styles similar to what the Shifterai did with dried grass from the Plains. The fallen limbs were still needed though, along with whatever else could be scavenged in the time he had left before he was supposed to meet Solyn.

When I do meet her, I'm warning her about Tarquin's suggestion the moment I can. And I'm going to ask her to tell me all the fighting spells she does know, so I know she'll have good ones ready if she ever has to defend herself.

Kenyen wrinkled his nose. Not from the pungency of the cheeses around them, but from the list of choices she had given. "That's not a lot of offensive spells. Plenty of defensive, but... well, some of them, I don't know why you even bothered to list them."

Solyn shook her head. "It isn't always about scorching, or... or zapping. The sticky spell, I could use that to glue someone's foot to the ground. Or their arm to their side. It's all in thinking up new ways to apply what you know."

"Except these are shifters," he reminded her, dipping his brush back into the lamp-heated pot of wax between them. The newly pressed cheeses had been wrapped in clean cloths to wick away the last of the whey as it escaped. These were some of the rounds from an earlier pressing, ones ready for protective waxing. "I'm not sure how well that spell would continue to stick in the face of our abilities. Most of what we do in the warbands is go up against feral livestock, bandits, or locals rebelling against the law, and mostly only in the neighboring kingdoms. We almost never go up against an evil mage, and the three times we did where I was along, either we knocked them out fast and wrapped them in bluesteel, or we killed them equally fast."

"Most of the surrounding kingdoms don't have that many mages, compared to the edges of the continent," she agreed, painting her own cheese with the green-dyed wax. "You'd think that after almost two hundred years, the ways of magic would have settled back down, but the birthrates have stayed low in Correda, and from what I hear, in Zantha and Morna as well."

Kenyen shrugged. His brother was more the type to think about such things, but he offered an idea of his own. "Maybe the explosion that destroyed the capital was a curse? Magic can be pretty potent when hurled with enough emotion behind it. Even we Shifterai know that much."

She snorted and dipped her own brush, coating the last bit of unwaxed cheese exposed on the round braced in her lap. "Even an ungifted farmer can hurl a curse and make it stick, if they really,
really
mean it. It won't be as strong a curse as a real mage's efforts, but... Well, whatever happened at that last Convocation of the Gods, they had plenty of mages in attendance, so any one of them could've been at fault. Or even a dozen of them."

"Whatever happened, it destroyed the Empire. Lucky us, we get to live in the shattered remnants of whatever was left." Kenyen chuckled wryly. "Literally, in the case of Shifting City."

They both reached for the maker's stamp at the same time, with his hand covering hers. He smiled at her and squeezed briefly, then withdrew his touch with a flick of his fingers, indicating she should go first. Nodding, Solyn picked up the stamp from the low table and pressed it firmly into three different spots on the soft wax. Setting the stamp back on the table, she twisted to put the cheese on the nearest shelf. The act of stretching forced a grunt out of her.

"Umff... I'm getting stiff and sore, sitting in one spot for too long," she grumbled. "We're about halfway done. How about we do something different for a bit?"

"Like what?" Kenyen asked, stamping his cheese before handing it to her. Setting aside the thick linen drop cloth that caught the excess wax, she stood to place it on the shelves. That meant Solyn had to bend over to rearrange the cheeses, and that in turn meant he found himself admiring her rump as it wiggled and swayed with each movement. There was nothing wrong, culturally, in enjoying the view, and it was a rather nice view in his opinion.

"Oh, I don't know. Stand and stretch, talk for a bit..." Glancing over her shoulder, Solyn caught him staring at her backside. She blushed and finished moving the newly waxed cheeses as she spoke. "This section is almost full. We should just go ahead and move to the next alcove, since we still have another twenty cheeses to do, and there's only room for three or four here."

He set aside his own drop cloth. "That'll help with the stretching, I suppose."

Mindful of the flames in the heating lamp, Kenyen picked up the hot pot of wax and set it on the table, then carefully moved the combination of brass stand and three-wick lamp. Once it was positioned, he came back for the pot of beeswax. Solyn, writing down the tally numbers for the current set of cheeses, joined him in moving the little worktable, picking up the cloths and brushes, the writing brush, inkstone and stick, and the thick-paged, age-stained ledger.

That reminded her of the papers she had snuck into her dinner bag. Setting everything on the table once he had it positioned, Solyn diverted to the oilcloth sack. "I brought some folding paper. It's not much; I had to cut it down small and pack it carefully so it wouldn't get bent prematurely on the trip down here. But I do have six sheets, and the ledger ink will do. Why don't we write out those messages?"

"Are you sure about that?" Kenyen teased mock-solemnly. "It
does
involve more sitting."

The dirty look she shot him was worth it. Chuckling, he set up their workspace for waxing, then followed her to the alcove where the ledger was normally kept. Kenyen picked at the bits of beeswax on his hands. The stuff clung, even when mixed with plant-based waxes to modify it better for food preservation.

"Here—
manumundic
," Solyn chanted, covering his fingers with her own. He sneezed as the magic cleaned both of their skin, quickly turning his head into his shoulder. She patted his pink-scoured flesh and released him. "Our hands need to be clean before I unwrap this paper—wait, didn't you bring the ink?" she asked, peering at his empty palms, then past his shoulder. "Go on, fetch it! The ledger table has a clean brush pen we can use."

Kenyen obediently followed her command, fetching the bottle in question. Unsure of how long this letter-writing would take, he paused to blow out the three flames flickering under the beeswax. It wouldn't do for the ceramic pot to get hot enough to crack and leak, permitting the wax to catch on fire without their being close enough to notice right away. There didn't seem like much to catch on fire down here, since the tunnel had literally been carved out of rock, but between the wax-covered wheels and the wooden racks supporting them, he didn't want to take that chance.

"What did you... oh, you blew out the wax lamp?" Solyn asked, turning away from the folded packet of papers. At his confirming nod, she smiled at him. "Thank you. It won't take that long to reheat it. Now... oh, bother." Her ring squeezed on her finger. Dropping her voice, she hissed, "Someone's coming—quick, your face!"

Not sure how quickly whoever it was might approach, Kenyen pulled Solyn close. Putting his back to the rest of the tunnel, he kissed her as he shifted his body. Lightening his dark brown locks, he kinked them into soft curls, then broadened his shoulders. Only then did he start altering the rest, shaping his flesh to match the image held in his mind. He was getting better at holding the shape of Traver Ys Ten, enough that he could no longer remember how to shape himself as small and mottled as a hunting cat, but better wasn't yet perfect. Better wasn't as fast as the shape of a stripe-cat, his oldest and most familiar shape.

Not a lot of his attention was going into the kiss; most of it focused on rounding and lengthening his face, altering his nose and his brow, his cheeks and his chin. Solyn didn't seem to mind, however. She wrapped her arms around his waist and leaned into his frame, tilting her head with a sigh of what he hoped was enjoyment. She was the one who nibbled on his lips even as he flattened out the natural bow on the upper one, making it smoother, more like Traver's.

"... Oh!"

Finally confident of his face, Kenyen broke off their kiss. He peered over his shoulder, trying what he hoped was an awkward, embarrassed expression. He blushed at the sight of Reina—a real blush, not a faked one—and reluctantly let her daughter go. "Uhh... hello."