Chapter 11 #2
The cards have stopped. Dane is leaning back on his barrel, arms crossed, and his flat expression has shifted to something more alert.
The stocky man has his elbows on the table and is picking at the edge of a tile with his thumbnail.
Torsten is still beside Evran, his arm still stretched along the wall, but the playful energy has drained away and what remains is quieter, more focused, the attentiveness of men who have been waiting for the room to empty so they can talk.
Dane looks at Evran, then at Torsten, his eyebrow rising a fraction.
"So," Dane says. "Are you taking your brother's sloppy seconds tonight, or what?"
The table laughs. Dane, the stocky man, even Torsten, a short breath of amusement through his nose.
Evran does not react. He is looking at his cup of water, his face still flushed from the wine, his posture loose and his eyes half-focused.
He makes himself look the way a man looks when he is too far gone to track the conversation, even though every word is landing in his mind with the precision of an arrow hitting a target.
The phrase turns his stomach, but he keeps his expression blank, unfocused, the vacant stare of someone looking into his cup and thinking about nothing at all.
"Don't be crude," Torsten says, but there is no real admonishment in it. He takes a drink and stretches out further on the bench, his knee still pressed against Evran's under the table. "Though I won't lie, there are plenty of things of my brother's I'm happy to take."
He says it openly, casually, as though the man whose husband is sitting right beside him is not a factor in the conversation.
Evran keeps his eyes on his cup and breathes.
The casualness of it is what makes it worst, the offhanded way Torsten refers to Evran as a thing to be taken, an item on a list of possessions he intends to acquire, filed alongside the throne and the stronghold and the title.
The dehumanization is so complete and so effortless that Evran suspects Torsten does not even register it as such, because to Torsten, people have only ever been instruments.
"The question is how," the stocky man says, his voice lower now, conspiratorial. "Windfar is a dead end since the triplets. If you want a seat at any table, it has to come from somewhere else."
"Drakkari," Dane says, the word carrying the weight of certainty rather than question.
"Drakkari," Torsten agrees, turning his cup in his hands, slow and thoughtful. "The seat's been occupied too long by one man. That breeds complacency. Makes people lazy, makes them forget that power is supposed to rotate."
"Power doesn't rotate," Dane says flatly. "Power gets taken."
Torsten smiles. "Exactly."
The stocky man glances at Evran, his eyes lingering for a moment, assessing, measuring, and then he leans toward Torsten. "Probably best not to discuss this with the Warlord's husband right there."
Torsten waves a dismissive hand. "Look at him. He can barely keep his eyes open."
Evran makes a calculated move.
He lets his body go slack against the wall, lets his head tilt sideways, and then he tilts forward, slowly, deliberately, as though his body has simply given up the effort of sitting upright.
His shoulder hits Torsten's chest and his forehead comes to rest against Torsten's collarbone, and he lets his weight settle, limp and unresisting, the dead weight of a body that has lost its fight against Fire Wine and exhaustion.
Every point of contact burns. Torsten's chest beneath his cheek, the arm that shifts to accommodate him, the warmth of another man's body that is not Vaike's and is therefore wrong in a way that goes deeper than discomfort and settles into something that feels close to violation.
But the position is necessary, because a man who is slumped against someone's chest with his eyes closed is a man who cannot possibly be listening, and that is exactly what Evran needs them to believe.
Raucous laughter erupts from the table.
"There you go," Dane says, grinning for the first time all evening. "The lightweight southerner isn't in any condition to comment on politics."
"Or anything else," the stocky man adds, and they both laugh again. Torsten chuckles beneath Evran's cheek, and Evran can feel it, the vibration of it, and it makes his skin crawl, but Torsten's hand comes up to rest on Evran's shoulder, steadying him, keeping him close.
Evran breathes. In through his nose, slow and measured, tasting the ale-thick air and the faint scent of Torsten's clothing, soap and something sharper, metallic, foreign. He keeps his body loose and his eyes closed and his ears wide open.
"As I was saying," Torsten continues, and his voice has dropped to something more serious now, the playfulness stripped away and replaced by the flat, focused tone of business.
"The summit is the time. All four clans present, all four Warlords in one place.
If something were to happen, the right nudge, at the right moment, the pieces are already on the board. "
"And if it doesn't work?" Dane asks.
"It will work. It's already in motion."
"The first one failed."
A pause. Evran feels Torsten's shoulder tense beneath his cheek.
"The first one was a test," Torsten says, and his voice is flatter now, harder, edged with the irritation of being reminded of imperfection. "To see how fast the response would be, how many guards, how the Warlord reacts under pressure. Information, that's all it was."
"Expensive information," the stocky man mutters. "That man's going to talk."
"He doesn't know anything. He was hired through three intermediaries. Even if the Rendari squeeze him, he can't trace it back." Torsten takes a drink. "The next one won't fail."
Evran's heart is beating so hard he is certain Torsten can feel it through his chest. He keeps his breathing steady, slow, deep, the breathing of sleep or something close to it, and his hands are limp in his lap and his face is pressed against Torsten's shoulder, and inside his mind every word is being recorded, cataloged, filed away with meticulous precision, because what he is hearing right now may be the only thing that keeps his husband alive.
The next one won't fail. The words sit in his chest, cold and heavy and real.
There is going to be another attempt.
The men talk more, about timing, about opportunity, about how the final days of the summit might unfold given the right nudge.
Evran listens, trying to catch every word, trying to map the conversation onto what he already knows.
The details are vague, deliberately so, he thinks, because even among allies Torsten is careful enough to speak in generalities rather than specifics.
But the shape of it is clear. Torsten has a plan, the plan involves removing Vaike, and it is going to happen before the summit ends.
After a few minutes, Torsten shifts beneath him. "Right. I should get this one back to his clan before someone comes looking."
"Good luck with that," Dane says. "He's out cold."
"He weighs next to nothing. I'll manage."
There is the scrape of the bench. Torsten's arm goes around Evran's waist, hauling him upright, and then they are standing, Torsten taking most of his weight, which is not much, and Evran doing his best impression of a person whose legs have forgotten how to work.
He stumbles convincingly, catches himself on Torsten's arm, stumbles again, and Torsten adjusts his grip with practiced ease, accustomed to carrying drunk men and considering it a manageable inconvenience.
"Easy," Torsten says, and his mouth is close to Evran's ear, and there is an intimacy to the word that makes Evran's throat close. "I've got you."
They move through the ale room. Evran lets himself be half-carried, his feet dragging, his head lolling, and he is acutely aware of every point of contact between his body and Torsten's, the arm around his waist, the hand gripping his hip, the chest against his shoulder.
And then Torsten's hand shifts.
It slides down from his hip to the edge of his tunic and trousers, to the seam where fabric meets fabric and, beneath that seam, the sliver of exposed skin at his waist. Torsten's fingers rest there, not moving, just resting, touching the bare skin that he could very easily avoid and is choosing not to.
Evran resists the urge to vomit on his shoes.
The touch is a violation, small and deliberate and calculated, a transgression that can be denied if confronted, explained away as an accident of proximity, and Torsten knows this, knows exactly what he is doing and what he can get away with, and the knowledge of it sits in Evran's stomach alongside the Fire Wine and burns worse.
They make it up the stairs, through the ground-floor corridor, and into the main passageway that leads toward the eastern wing.
The stronghold is quiet at this hour, the torches burning low, the corridors empty save for the occasional guard at a junction.
Evran counts the turns, left, right, straight, left again, and knows they are getting close.
Torsten guides him to a bench in the hallway near the Drakkari wing, set against the wall between two torches in a pool of light that makes the stone look almost golden. He eases Evran down, and Evran lets himself sag against the wall, legs stretched out, head tilted back.
Torsten crouches in front of him. His face is close, his blue eyes dark in the torchlight, the pupils blown wide, and he is alone with something he wants and calculating how far he can go.
"I probably shouldn't show up at the Warlord's door with his husband drunk and wrapped around me," Torsten says, and the smile that accompanies the words is slow and knowing.