Chapter Two – Osric
Chapter Two
Osric
The thornbrush in this garden died before I ever owned the place.
The roots go deeper than anything still alive here, because whoever tended these beds gave up on them, and after the tending stopped, the brush grew wild.
Now it won’t come out of the ground without a blade and my full weight behind it.
I work the blade under each root ball, cut through, and drag the dead brush to the pile against the outer wall.
My hands have learned the rhythm of it: dig, cut, drag.
Underneath the brush, the old stone beds are cracked and dry at the joints.
I’ll repair them next. After the beds comes the broken shade screen on the east terrace, and after the screen comes the dry fountain in front of the house.
I’ve already put the tasks in order, because the order is the point; the work itself doesn’t really matter.
No one is going to eat from these beds, and if things go as they’re most likely to go, no one is ever going to stand looking at this garden when it’s ready. Not even me.
I keep clearing it anyway, because a mind attached to working hands stays quiet. And quiet is the only thing I can aim for these days.
The house is at the edge of Haara, where the city thins into black stone, thornbrush, and open desert.
It’s old, part dwelling and part watch post, built back into the dark cliff, with heavy doors and deep rooms. When I bought it, sand was packed into the corners of the rooms, and the terraces were cracked through.
I’ve made the main rooms habitable – cleared, repaired, reopened – and now that the inside is done, I’m working outside.
Nim hunts along the base of the wall while I dig.
She’s a duskcat, a small desert predator, about the size of a housecat but with a longer body, oversized ears, black paws, pale sand-colored fur, and a ridge of small scales running down her spine to protect her from the things she kills.
She works the cracks in the stone beds while I work the roots.
Her ears turn, she goes still, then her paw snaps into the dark and drags out whatever was living under the stone.
She pulls out insects, a pale thing with too many legs, and one small, venomous reptile that she eats head first.
Scorpii don’t keep pets, but duskcats are free creatures that sometimes attach themselves to a lonely house at the edge of a city, where the hunting is good and nothing bothers them.
I never put food out to draw her in. She came through a gap in the terrace wall while I was repairing the lower rooms, watched me work, and stayed.
She disappears into the rocks when it suits her, sleeps in the warm stone hollows when she feels like it, and she’s suspicious of everything alive except, for reasons she’s never explained, me.
I talk to her, and she watches my face with interest. When I feed her pieces of meat, she’s grateful.
The heat rises in my blood while I’m working the blade under another root.
The sun stands high over the valley, but my skin doesn’t register it; my shell was made for the desert, and outside heat has never bothered me.
This new heat starts inside, climbing from my gut into my chest and into my jaw.
My hands begin to shake around the handle of the blade.
I set the blade down in the dirt before I drop it.
The edges of my sight go dark, and the garden narrows to the patch of broken stone in front of me.
Then my throat begins to move on its own, the muscles gathering around a sound I don’t want to make.
One click gets out – a single, faded click, low and dry – before I lock my jaw and crush the rest of it down.
The clicking is a mating call meant to begin when a male has found his fated mate.
It should be the start of everything good in a Scorpius’s life.
But there’s no female around. Only a dead garden, a duskcat on the wall, and empty ground in every direction.
When the call fires at nothing, it isn’t a call at all. It’s a threat.
My throat keeps trying under the locked jaw, small pulses of muscle that I fight one by one. Fighting my own throat for control of my voice is exhausting and frustrating. It makes me feel like I have no control over my biology. Which is true. I don’t.
Nim stops hunting and watches me from the top of the wall.
I stand still and breathe, counting each breath like I was trained to count through pain.
My tail stays rigid behind me, the tip curled up above my head, ready for an enemy that doesn’t exist. The heat crests, holds, and comes down slowly.
I stay on my feet until it passes, and I silently record how long it takes.
I know what happens to a male who never finds his mate. The rut comes anyway, building with nothing to answer it, and the body burns hotter each time. The mind wears thinner between one burn and the next, until the male turns feral.
I’ve never seen it happen, and almost no one living has, because our cities don’t allow it to get that far. An unmated male is watched carefully, and a male who’s too far gone is exiled or put down while he can still walk to his own ending.
We don’t call the execution cruelty, because a feral male doesn’t know his own name.
He doesn’t know what his tail is doing, or who’s standing in front of him.
The little that’s known about the feral rut agrees on one point: the Scorpius who’s overtaken by it is not the same man he was before.
He would kill other males, females, and scorplings.
So, we end him first, and everyone calls it mercy. And everyone is right.
I pick the blade back up, work it under a root, and cut through. Nim drops from the wall and goes back to her hunting.
That’s why I live out here, and why no one had to exile me.
I didn’t wait for them to do it. Families in my old district started keeping count of me when they noticed I hadn’t found a mate.
Mothers started moving their children to the far side of the terrace without ever being rude about it.
The Elder Court judges mating crises in the council chamber, and I understood that my name would reach their meetings, eventually.
The math was simple. So, I sold my house in the city, bought this ruin at the edge, and moved before anyone could make me do it.
At least, this way, I’m not a direct danger to them all.
If it gets too dire, I can end it myself.
When my hands are fully steady, I go inside the house.
The main rooms are deep and cool, cut back into the cliff, with high ceilings and heavy walls that hold the day’s heat away.
I drink one full glass of water standing at the kitchen table, then pour a second glass and reach for the vial Varys gave me.
The vial is dark glass, small, and stoppered tight.
Three drops go into the water, because Varys measured the dose against my blood, and I trust his measurements.
Or that’s what I tell myself. The tincture is drawn from cacti, and it tastes like it: bitter, green, and heavy on the tongue, a taste of crushed plants that lingers.
I drink, slam the glass on the table, and wait.
The heat in my blood lowers somewhat. It doesn’t go away, but its intensity becomes bearable.
When my shaman first made it for me, the tincture took the heat away completely and left real quiet behind.
Now it only eases it so I can function. I haven’t told him its effects are weakening. He’ll know soon enough on his own.
I take the weekly paper to the table and sit down. Something to distract myself for another half hour. Time goes by slowly in isolation.
I read the trade columns, the water reports, and a records dispute out of Maara. I retain almost none of it. Then I turn a page and find Concord’s bride market spread across a full advertisement.
The market is held inside Concord itself, in a supervised trade district, under contracts, guards, and clerks.
Human women enter of their own will, buyers bid, and the bride holds final choice over who takes her.
Concord loves that last detail, because it lets the whole arrangement call itself civilized.
I know about the market; everyone knows about it. I’ve turned past this same advertisement before without letting my eyes rest on it. Because the mere idea of attending is dangerous. Irresponsible.
Scorpii don’t like humans. The distrust is old and general, and I was raised with it as everyone else here was.
Even if I set the distrust aside, the practical truth remains: humans aren’t built for us.
They’re soft-skinned and fragile, their bodies fail in our heat, and our venom stops their hearts.
Our whole lives are shaped around a desert that kills their kind fast. To bring a human woman into the desert of Otheera would be to sign her death sentence.
But no female of my own kind has ever woken my call. I stood in front of them in Haara, and in the other Scorpii cities, I traveled the whole land and attended events and parades, and my throat stayed silent every single time. No clicking.
Varys, on my last visit, told me something that nearly broke me.
He’d gone into the old records – because bloodline work is shaman work – and traced House Aren back until he found the detail the rumors have always circled.
Somewhere down the line, one of my ancestors mated with a human.
That means weakness in the blood. My blood.
That was how I got an answer I absolutely didn’t want: if a human strain runs through House Aren, then the mate my body is waiting for may not be Scorpii at all.
I’ve ignored that for as long as I could. I told Varys the records were old and the rumors older, and he let me lie to myself because he’s wise enough to let a male keep his pride while he can still afford it.
The tincture is weakening, the call is firing at empty air, and just now, it took everything I had to calm down and go about my day like nothing happened.
Nim jumps onto the table, walks across the open paper, sits down directly on the advertisement, and leans her weight against my arm. Her purr starts low in her chest and builds until I can feel it through my shell. She does this when she feels I’m not all right.
I scratch her ears, and she pushes her head up into my hand, eyes closing, purring louder, kneading the newsprint flat under her black paws.
“I may not have a choice,” I tell her.
She has no opinion on it. She keeps purring, and I keep scratching her ears.
So, I decide then and there. I’ll go to Concord, register at their gatehouse, stand in their supervised hall under their guards’ eyes, and look at what the bride market has to offer. Because my own kind has no answer for me, and there is no other place left to look.
Even if I come back alone, even if I stand in that hall and buy no one, at least I’ll be able to say I tried.