Chapter Five
“They’re saying it was a dare?” Andros said with disgust. He’d been lying on his bed when Theos arrived to check on him, but now he was propped up on his elbows and seemed about to swing his legs over the side of the bed and march off to right a wrong.
“Does Finnvid really seem like the sort of person to cross a border on a dare? Like a raw recruit trying to earn his sword?”
“According to them, Finnvid wasn’t the leader,” Theos grumbled.
He’d already gone through disbelief and was settling down into resignation, heavily tinged with confusion.
“They said it was the old guy. He’d just been passed over for a promotion and wanted to prove he still had balls, so he led his men into our territory. ”
“There’s no way the old guy was in charge. Finnvid was. It’s obvious. You need to go tell them the prisoners lied.”
“I already told them. And you know, the Elkati were a bit bruised when I dropped Finnvid off, but they weren’t really messed up.
Not like they’d been beaten hard.” Theos frowned.
There was more to this situation than incompetent interrogation, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was.
“The interrogators didn’t listen. For some reason it was the warlord’s crew who were in charge, and .
. .” He realized what the problem had been.
“They acted like being Sacrati meant nothing. Like I was just another soldier with a stupid opinion they didn’t need to listen to. ”
“There are always rust stains who are like that,” Andros said slowly. “Usually it’s the ones who thought they should have been chosen, but weren’t.”
“No. I’m used to that. This was . . . It was something different. And when I asked to see the captain, he was busy.”
“On the yards, doing training.”
“No. He was in his office. I saw him.”
“He was in his office, and he was too busy to talk to a Sacrati iyatis?”
“I know. It’s— It didn’t make sense. But that’s what they said.”
“What’s going on, Theos?” Andros’s voice was quiet and serious, and somehow reassuring. Theos wasn’t being paranoid. “There’s something not right.”
Theos pushed himself to his feet. “Keep quiet about it, okay? For now, at least. Tell Xeno to lay low, and I’ll talk to the other two. We shouldn’t say anything different than what the interrogators found. Just until I can talk to the captain and figure out what’s going on.”
Andros nodded. “If you need support, tell me. There’s no way that old guy was in charge. No way. So we still don’t know what they were doing on our side of the line. But if they had a cover story figured out, and they were all strong enough to stick to it during interrogation . . .”
“I know.” Theos stood up and clapped a hand onto Andros’s shoulder. “But I’ll take care of it; you focus on recovery. The rest of the world will still be around when you’re better, and I want you at full strength.”
Andros lifted a hand and laced his fingers through Theos’s. He lay down again, keeping Theos’s hand where it was so Theos had to lean over him. Then Andros raised his other hand and wrapped it around the back of Theos’s neck, tugging gently.
Theos obliged, lowering his head to Andros’s and kissing him. Just lightly at first, but when Andros didn’t release his grip, Theos deepened the kiss.
It wasn’t the start of anything; Andros was mending, but still not fit enough for sex. It was just to show solidarity. Whatever was happening at the higher levels of the military, Andros and Theos would present a united front.
There was a quiet thud behind them, and Theos turned his head to see Xeno standing in the doorway, smiling at them both.
“Feeling better, then?” he asked. He took the two steps across the room and crouched down next to them.
A quick kiss for Theos, and then Xeno’s attention was all on Andros.
“I got the poppy juice, but they said to use as little as possible. Let me know if the pain gets to be too much, but otherwise we’ll just give you a few drops before you sleep.
And I can get a mat for the floor, so you’ll have more room . . .”
“There’s room here,” Andros said. He’d taken his hand away from Theos and was gripping Xeno’s wrist now. “Lots of room. I want you in bed with me.”
Theos stood up and headed for the door. He and Andros were friends, but Andros and Xeno had been a pair for years.
Finnvid seemed quite clever, sometimes, so how could he have missed their devotion?
How could he think that they must be lonely because there were no women in their bed most nights? It made no sense.
Just one more thing that was hard to understand, Theos reminded himself as he jogged down the stairs toward his quarters. And not one of the more urgent puzzles to be solved. He needed to put the Elkati boy out of his mind, and figure out what was going on in his own barracks yard.
He picked up clean clothes and headed for the communal baths, one of the few luxuries in the barracks.
On this late-fall day, the shutters of the bathhouse were thrown open, light shining in as steam poured out.
Most of the soldiers had duties during the daytime, so Theos had the place to himself.
It was nice to be warm enough to strip right down, to look at the Torian tattoo on the rounded ball of his shoulder, the Sacrati brand on his hip.
He’d gotten the tattoo as a young man, and it had stretched and faded a little as he’d grown, so he checked on it now and then to be sure it wasn’t gone entirely.
The brand had been hard-won; he liked to look at that too, sometimes, to run his fingers over the roughened skin and remember what he’d achieved.
And it was always good to pull the leather bracers from his wrists.
Every Torian warrior used them, not just to protect their arms but to keep the bracelets underneath them safe.
Now that he was in the barracks, though, he could shed the bracers and let the bracelets be seen.
He ran his hands over them all, then stepped into one of the large communal tubs.
Theos soaked for a while, then scrubbed himself clean, rinsed off in the fresh water, and headed to the mirrors to shave. He was almost done before he noticed that he had company.
Theos knew the soldier’s face, but not his name.
There were well over two thousand men on active duty in the valley’s military, with a couple hundred new recruits each year to replace the men who were killed or who went east to fight on the other border.
This was just another soldier in a long line of them.
“Shouldn’t you be on duty?” Theos asked, wiping the last of the shaving oil from his face.
“I’m the night guard this month,” the soldier said. “It’s not a bad job, but there’s no one to spend time with when I’m not at work.”
“But there is today.” Theos moved closer, and the soldier smiled.
“There is today,” the man echoed, and he pulled his tunic up over his head.
Their coupling was friendly, casual. The soldier just shed his remaining clothes and dropped to his knees, using his mouth to bring Theos to hardness, and then smeared some of the shaving oil on his cock.
Theos buried himself in the other man’s body, and the soldier braced himself against the wall and arched his back.
It was nothing special, yet it was just what Theos needed.
A return to the ordinary, a reminder of the simple things in life: tight, slick heat; a body strong enough to take whatever Theos gave; grunts of enjoyment and encouragement; and a climax that took them both away, at least temporarily, from their worries.
They rinsed off together under the flow of water, and then Theos clapped the soldier’s shoulder and wished him luck staying awake on sentry duty, and that was it. Theos dressed in clean clothes and set his laundry to soak in the tanks next to the bathhouse.
Fresh and clean, he went down to the kitchen in search of food.
Technically the soldiers were all supposed to eat at meal times, but Theos was Sacrati, he was just back from the field, and he was hungry.
The recruits scurried around to put food together for him, and he grinned.
Life in the barracks was a nice change from the mountains.
Theos took his meal outdoors, intending to eat it while he watched the drills under the warm sun. But before he got to the drill yards he was stopped short by a procession in front of the holding pens.
Prisoners were being taken out of the pen and lined up in the road.
Not the Elkati Theos had brought in; these men must have come from someone else’s patrol.
They already had heavy iron slave collars around their necks, and as they joined their fellows, the blacksmith was hammering red-hot iron into chain links, her hands quick and sure as she worked.
She was fastening the prisoners together into a web that would hold until their heads came off or someone with a forge and the proper tools released them.
This was the preparation for a mass slave transport.
Not that uncommon, but they usually happened after significant battles, and Theos would have heard from the captain if there’d been one of those lately.
He strode forward and spoke to a one-armed man who was watching the work with an overseer’s critical eye. “Where are you taking them?”
“Who are you to ask?” The man’s accent was subtly different; he wasn’t from Windthorn valley.
“I’m Sacrati.” But why was Theos wasting words on this man? He moved a little closer and made his expression dull and threatening. “Where are you taking them?”
The man sighed as if he were tired of stupid questions. “Back east, to the central valleys.”
“Why?” Slaves were usually kept in the valley that captured them until they’d been trained for their new lives. If they proved useless as soldiers, they might be sent to the mines, or if they had special skills, they might be transported to where they were needed, but it wasn’t routine.