Chapter Six – Osric
Chapter Six
Osric
Esme stops halfway up the stairs and looks down at me.
I’m standing at the table with two plates of uneaten food in my hands.
Our eyes meet, and the clicking starts low in my chest and climbs into my throat.
I turn my head and cough into my shoulder until it dies.
When I look up again, she’s at the top of the stairs, following Darina toward their rooms. I hear their doors close, one and then the other.
I carry the plates into the kitchen, throw out the food, and fill the basin with water.
The work is good because it keeps my hands busy while the rest of me settles. It has a clear beginning and a clear end, which is more than I can say about anything else in my life right now. I scrape the plates, stack them, and start washing.
She’s my mate, and the clicking starts every time she’s near.
It fired in the auction hall when she stepped onto the stage, then in the car, where I could smell her hair loose in the wind.
At dinner, while she pushed my sorry excuse for food around her plate.
Each time, I killed it with a cough or a cleared throat.
Nim comes in through the gap in the vent she treats as her own door, and settles on the counter, ears up, tail curled over her paws. I cut a strip of the leftover meat and set it down in front of her. She gobbles it without a single complaint.
“At least someone appreciates my cooking,” I tell her.
She licks the stone where the meat was and looks up for more.
“Don’t pretend it’s good. I can barely eat it myself.” I give her another strip. “When I lived in the city, I ate at the cookhouses. I never made a single meal until I moved out here. You can see how that’s going.”
She purrs and works on the second strip, and I go back to the basin.
I wash the plates, the pot, and the serving bowl, and I leave Esme’s cup last. I hold it in front of me and stare like a fool at the faint imprint of her lips.
She asked me to let her go. She sat across from me with her chin up and her voice steady, and asked me to let her go.
I told her the truth. She can leave whenever she wants.
She can stay as long as she needs. I’ll ask nothing from her.
I meant every word, though I could tell she didn’t quite believe me.
Her face told me she was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
If she can’t trust anyone, it’s all her parents’ fault.
She’s frightened of me. At the market, her eyes went to my stinger, and the fear hasn’t left her since.
She told me not to touch her the first time I offered her my hand.
Her parents used law and money to control her, and the old male they chose for her would’ve used the marriage contract the same way.
I won’t be another male who does that to her.
Whatever my blood wants, she keeps her choice, and if her choice is a life far away from me, she’ll have it.
I set her clean cup on the shelf and let myself admit the rest, since no one is here to hear it.
I want her across my table at every meal, I want the sound of her voice to fill these empty rooms, and I want more than that…
More than I have any right to think about while she’s asleep in her bedroom and afraid of me.
I could carry the wanting for the rest of my life without ever laying it on her.
The rut is what I can’t carry, and it will come whether I allow it or not.
Varys’s tincture barely works on me anymore.
If Esme stays, the rut will begin in full, and once it begins, control becomes temporary.
My instincts will narrow to one command: chase, catch, mate, claim.
The male who promised to ask nothing of her will be gone, and what’s left could attack her, hunt her through the house, out in the desert…
So, my kindness has a limit I didn’t tell her about. “Stay as long as you need,” I said, and I was honest, but lying at the same time. Because I can feel it boiling in my blood. I hate that the one decent thing I have to give her comes with an end she can’t see coming.
I finish in the kitchen, put out the lights, and decide before I reach my room that I’m going to see Varys the next day.
I barely sleep that night, and I leave before the sun is up. The women’s doors are closed and their rooms quiet.
I take the car down the valley road, with the cliffs still black on both sides.
Varys lives in the center of Haara. Shaman work pays well here. Scorpii bring their shamans bloodline questions, mating troubles, venom rites, fertility fears, and every curse rumor in the desert. They pay handsomely for the answers, so a good shaman never lives poor.
Varys could’ve bought a place high on the cliffs, with the old families, where the air moves and the terraces catch the wind.
He stays at the center instead, at the level where the main stairways and bridges cross, so that no client has to climb half the city to reach him.
His house is broad and deep, carved straight into the black rock, with clean shade cloths over the entrance, and a heavy door worn smooth where clients push it open.
He opens before I knock a second time.
“Osric Aren.” He smiles wide enough to tell me he’s been waiting for my visit. “The male who went to Concord for one bride and came home with two humans. Come in before the neighbors count a third.”
“Does the whole city know?” I step past him.
“The whole city knew before the portal shimmered closed behind you. Aldric Elmsley’s daughter and her servant girl, riding down the valley road in your car.
” He shuts the door and waves me deeper into the house.
“I’ve heard the story from four clients already.
One of them doesn’t even like you, so I charged her double. ”
I want to be angry about it but can’t manage any anger at all. Everyone in Haara talks, but Varys has never once repeated anything I’ve told him inside these walls. Exasperation is the most I can offer, and he sees it and enjoys it.
His receiving room is the finest room I’ve been in since I sold my house in the city. Cushioned benches line two walls for waiting clients, shelves of sealed vials cover the third, and racks of old family records fill the back, behind a low stone table and a lamp that’s burning low.
We sit down, and the jokes stop, though his face stays warm.
“The tincture’s failing,” I tell him. “Three drops used to put the heat out. Now they barely lower it. I’ve been taking more, though I didn’t tell you. I had to take four last night.”
“I expected it to fail at some point, if I’m honest,” he said. “No tincture holds a rut down forever. Your body has learned its way around it. That’s what happens when a male takes it as long as you have.”
“Then make it stronger.”
“I will. Five drops instead of three, and when five stops working, seven, and every dose will buy you less than the one before it.” He rises while he speaks and starts drawing vials down from the shelf. “Higher doses buy time, but that’s about it. I need you to hear that part, not just nod at it.”
“I hear it.” I watch his hands measure and pour. “There’s more. She’s my mate. The clicking starts every time she’s near me. I’ve kept it down so far, and she doesn’t know what it is.”
He keeps measuring and pouring without a word. He takes his time before he answers.
“A human,” he says.
“A human. So, tell me the truth. If she’s truly mine, if the bond is real, would she survive the sting?”
“Maybe,” he says. “The old teachings say a true bond changes the venom in the mate’s blood.
Her body accepts what should kill her. Maybe the teachings are right.
Maybe not. No shaman alive has watched it happen with a human, and the records that claim it are older than the ones I trust. It’s theory.
I won’t sell you theory as certainty, not on this. ”
“And there’s no way to test it first.”
“None that doesn’t end with your stinger in her skin.”
He corks the vial and brings it to me, dark glass, heavier than the last one. I turn it over in my hand.
“How long do I have?”
He takes his seat again before he answers.
“Not long.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have, and I’d rather give it to you gently than invent a number. Soon.”
I close my hand around the vial. He watches me do it, then he leans back, and the warmth spreads over his face again.
“Now,” he says. “Tell me about her. I’ve treated every trouble a Scorpius can have, but I’ve never seen a human close. What is she like?”
“She’s beautiful,” I say, staring at a point on the wall.
“Red hair, blue eyes, skin that shows everything she feels no matter how hard she works to hide it. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, of any kind.
She’s incredible, Varys. She walked into a bride market in front of a whole city that judges her, rather than let her parents hand her to the old male they’d picked for her to marry.
When nobody bid on her, she stood on that stage and lowered her own price, because going home meant obeying.
She pulled her best friend out of that life because she wouldn’t be free alone.
Her father might be the most powerful man in Concord, and she looked at him in front of everyone and told him he got what he wanted.
She’s strong, and she’s stubborn, and she’s braver than any recruit I ever trained on the guard. ”
He’s smiling before I’m halfway through it, and when I stop, he laughs, low and pleased, reaches across the table, and pats me on the back.
“You’re done for, boy. In love and in lust, and I don’t stock a tincture for either one.” He gives my shoulder a squeeze. “Maybe this all turns out right.”
“It won’t. She doesn’t want me. She made that clear last night, when she asked me to let her go. Of course I will.”
“Don’t think that way. Everything she knew is gone, Osric. The desert is new to her. Our kind is new. You’re new. She might come around. Stop grieving the woman while she’s still under your roof. Earn her trust instead. That much is fully in your hands.”
I shake my head, and I don’t say anything more. He’s kind enough not to push.
He walks me to the door.
“Five drops in water,” he says. “And come back before you reach ten.”
“The whole city will know I came to see you.”
“Probably. I’ll charge them double if they ask.” He gives me a wink.
I step out into the hot morning.
The sun is up when I take the valley road home, and the cliffs have gone from black to red on the east side. This is what I carry back with me: a stronger tincture, and a theory instead of an answer.
If I send her away, I honor my promise. The mating call goes unanswered, the rut takes me anyway, and Haara does with me what cities do with feral males.
If I let her stay, the rut still comes, and when it takes me, I hunt the one woman I want to keep safe. My venom will most likely kill her.
I don’t weigh the two against each other on the drive home. I can’t. Not yet. It’s hard enough to acknowledge the facts; I’m not ready to make a decision.
A laugh escapes me. As if it’s my decision to make…