Cozy Like That #2
They finished the food, and Lill ignored Halza’s protests, as usual, to get up and slip out of the infirmary.
It was beginning to get dark, the passages between houses draped in shadow.
He picked his way carefully to the path that led to the well yard and followed it, staying under the eaves of the houses.
He saw torchlight flickering ahead and expected to hear loud voices and laughter, but the gathering seemed surprisingly quiet.
The voices were subdued; he couldn’t make out words.
Frowning, he turned back. He wouldn’t be able to eavesdrop properly, and the risk of being found out would be greater.
It wasn’t worth it. Besides, there would be plenty of time.
There would be plenty of time if he wasn’t going to be sent back along with Halza—but he had no reason to believe Vanu’s daughter about that. She just didn’t like the idea of her father taking a lowland boy as a bride.
There was one section of the village that he hadn’t seen yet, and with everyone eating in the well yard, it seemed a good opportunity to explore.
Also to get used to finding his way around in the dark, something he’d need to be good at.
He followed the branch of the path through the middle of the village that he hadn’t taken yet.
It widened out into a smaller yard, overhung with another couple of fruit trees, and bounded on two sides by the walls of large, two-storey houses with freshly thatched roofs.
There was a door into one house, and closed shutters, but the other house presented only a blank wall, and the space between the two of them had been filled in with dry stones, neatly stacked to a height above Lill’s head.
Exploring, he found that the dry stone wall continued on either side of both houses, closing off this whole section of the village, with the only entrance through that one house.
The wall was a little bit like the blockade in the gate, a mixture of different kinds of worked stones, with a lot of broken roof tiles mixed in.
Lill wondered if it had been built in the last three years out of bits of the ruined houses in the village.
He could guess why it might have been put there.
If he were a man who’d let himself be captured by the king’s soldiers because he was trying to protect his daughters, he’d also want to protect his daughters from Khatu the bee-fucker and his brother.
Building them a walled compound within the fortress would probably seem like a good idea.
That was imputing some pretty human motives to a man who supposedly drank blood and killed whole villages for looking at him the wrong way. Maybe the wall had nothing to do with that.
Exploring the extent of the wall had taken Lill closer to the party in the well yard than he had meant to go, and he was creeping back toward the main path when he heard a footfall behind him.
He started to turn and felt a hand clench in his hair.
He gasped, mortified to be caught like this.
He would have been beaten for this kind of performance in a training exercise, and it had been years since he’d taken a beating for a failure in training.
The man who had hold of his hair and was gripping it hard near the scalp was a stranger, Lill’s age, smaller and more wiry than Khatu, but enough like him that Lill guessed this must be his younger brother.
Well, who else could it be? He had a pointed, pale face and wore his hair short except for a couple of hanks at the front that hung down to the collar of his coat.
He was giving Lill a self-satisfied sneer. As well he might.
“You’re the whore from Tora who’s going to marry Vanu.
” Like his brother, he spoke very good Zashian.
“Earth’s pussy, you’re pretty enough to be a girl, aren’t you?
We could have a good time, you and me. When he’s finished mounting you like a bull, or whatever cave-dweller shit he gets up to, you come to me for a real good time, all right?
Because we going to be really close. You’re going to tell me Lord Vanu’s secrets—you’re going to be in his bed, you’ll learn stuff—and I am going to tell you what to say to him, and we’re going to be really cozy like that, hey? ”
“Is that so?” Lill replied coolly.
The brother—Lill couldn’t remember the name Khatu had told him—didn’t like that. He gave Lill’s hair an excruciating twist, wrenching Lill’s head further back, and hissed, “Yeah, that’s so.”
“All right,” said Lill, because it wasn’t as if he was here to be loyal to Vanu Urártu, and tears of pain were stinging his eyes, which seemed unnecessary. “I’m open to an alliance, if you’ll let go of my hair.”
Khatu’s brother unclenched his fingers and disentangled them from Lill’s hair. As he withdrew his hand, Lill spun and snapped a kick at his stomach. Not hard—he was in no shape for a real fight—just enough to make him stagger back and double over for a moment.
“Oof, you’re tougher than you look.”
“Much,” said Lill, flicking his hair over his shoulder. “And I may be willing to intrigue with you, but I’m not interested in anything else.”
Maybe he shouldn’t even have agreed to that much; maybe he should have played the role of the scrupulously loyal bride.
This could have been a test, after all. But this young man was the first person he’d met here who didn’t seem slavishly devoted to Vanu Urártu, and Lill couldn’t pass up the chance to make an ally of him, however unappealing he might be otherwise.
“Barda?” someone called from the direction of the well yard. “What’s taking you so long?”
The young man snarled a curse under his breath in his native language.
“I will see you later, then,” said Lill sweetly.
He made his way back to the infirmary, willing the shaking in his limbs to subside, wishing he felt half as confident as he had made himself sound.
He stood outside the door for a minute trying to compose himself so that when he went in Halza wouldn’t ask what was wrong.
Though it was dark by now; maybe he wouldn’t be able to tell.
This was supposed to be the easy part. Infiltration, reconnaissance—this was what he was trained in.
But he was fumbling and flubbing the easy part; what was he going to do when it came to the part where he had absolutely no experience?
If he even got a chance at it, if they didn’t send him back over the wall before he got to meet Vanu Urártu properly, let alone seduce him.
Barda had seemed to think he was staying, and that might mean something. Or it might not; Barda was obviously not in Lord Vanu’s confidence—perhaps a remarkable feat, considering he and seven other people were the only living souls Vanu had seen for three years.
Lill thought about Shawa House again, the fountain in the cool courtyard, the women pouring tea and laughing.
He imagined living there, a part of that beautiful scene, sleeping on the roof under the stars where he had slept that night when it had first been suggested to him that he could belong there.
He would belong there. He was going back there, back to Torakand with his head held high and his mission accomplished.
He opened the door of the infirmary and slipped inside.
“Where did you go?” Halza asked immediately.
“Just out for a walk.”