Lorkin: Minotaur Mates (Alien Matchmaking Agency #2)

Prologue

Lorkin

Metal didn't lie to you.

You put it in the fire, you waited, you struck it while it glowed. It became what you made it and nothing else, and it never decided overnight that it wanted to be something different.

It never looked at you with its entire face open like the world had ever once kept a promise.

I trusted three things on Ceres-9: The fire, the hammer, and the row of blades along my east wall that no one had ordered and no one would ever need. That was the hope, anyway. If the weapons I forged were needed, our old troubles had returned.

I'd hung eleven of them that winter. Short, heavy, balanced for a minotaur's grip, oiled and sleeved and waiting.

Remmen called it morbid the one time he saw the rack.

Kazan never said anything, which was worse, because Kazan had stood in the same transport hold I had with blood in his eyes, and he knew exactly why a freed man might want a wall of edges between himself and the dark.

We'd been slaves once, weapons before we were ever men. The Protos Empire bred us for the pits and penned our women like stock, and when we tore the bars off and took the fleets and bled our way to this cold wet rock, somebody decided we got to be farmers now. Smiths. Citizens.

Monsters who filled orders and paid taxes, and danced badly at feasts.

Fine. I could be a smith. But I'd watched too many good ones die behind a cage that wouldn't open, waiting on help that didn't come, to ever again be a man with empty hands.

Now, I forged blades nobody asked for, and I slept fine. Mostly. I slept fine in the way a man sleeps when he knows where every sharp edge in the building is and can put his hand on three of them between the bed and the door without opening his eyes.

The settlement thought I was respectable.

Remmen liked to say it at meetings, gesturing at me with his cup: there's Lorkin, he keeps forty workers honest, pays his taxes. He's never any trouble.

He meant it as a compliment. He didn't know that the respectability was just the war wearing work clothes.

A man who'd been a weapon his whole life didn't stop being one because somebody handed him a forge and a charter and a word like citizen.

He just found a shape for it that wouldn't frighten the neighbors.

The orderly shop. The tools racked to the inch.

That row of blades, oiled and patient, that I told myself was for the others, for the day the gate opened again, when really it was for me, because I could not lie down at night in a world I didn't have a weapon's reach away from.

Kazan had the orchard. Korfas had found a kind of quiet. Zarcal had cider and a laugh that fooled most people.

We'd each found our own way to carry the thing out of the pit. Mine was iron. I'd made my peace with it years ago, and I did not need a bride to come complicate the one arrangement I'd ever gotten to work.

The terminal on the wall pinged.

I knew what it was before I crossed the shop because it had been pinging for three weeks and I'd been ignoring it for just as long. The Agency seal had stopped being a surprise around the time Remmen sent a clerk out to read it to me in person.

You have been selected. An appointment to choose a bride. My name. My citizen file. A countdown blinking in the corner like I'd asked for any of it.

I hadn't.

Someone had decided for me. There were only two men in New Knossos soft enough or smug enough to do it, and one of them had spent the last year catching figs in his kitchen with a tiny human woman throwing them at his head.

Today the countdown read zero. Below it, fresh text. Non-compliance will be noted on your record. Mayor's office cc'd. Remmen, making it official. Making it the kind of thing that followed a man.

I set the tongs down hard enough to leave a mark and went to get my name struck off that list myself.

The Agency office sat in a clean off-world box wedged between the apothecary and the cider house, looking like a tooth from somebody else's mouth. The door was built for humans. I had to turn what was left of my horns to clear it, and I'd ground those down years ago.

I smelled her before the door had fully closed.

It came in under the cheap paper and the off-world solvent, and it had no business in that room. Warm. Bright, somehow, the way a struck spark is bright. Something green and sweet I couldn't name and wanted, suddenly and with my whole body, to put my face into and breathe until I drowned.

My nose flared. My hands closed on nothing.

Mine.

The word arrived ahead of thought and didn't bother asking permission. It went in behind my breastbone and lodged there like a splinter of hot iron, and every other thing I'd walked in to say went out of my head at once.

Mate.

No.

She was talking. She stood at the counter with her back to me, all that dark hair piled up and slipping loose, both hands going while she argued cheerfully with poor Theeodus about something, her voice pitched to fill the whole room and then some.

Small. They were all small. But she held herself like she was taking up exactly as much space as she pleased and daring the floor to complain.

"...and I'm just saying, if there's a box on the form for 'previously returned,' there should be a box for 'returned by an idiot,' because that's a different statistic and your records are frankly misleading."

Theeodus made a sound like a trodden glidewing.

Her file lay open on the edge of the counter near me; they must have wandered down as she spoke.

I read it the way I read everything, fast and without meaning to, a habit built in a place where missing a detail gets you killed.

Two trial matings.

Two returns.

A flag in red at the top of the page: third placement — final eligibility.

One more rejection, and the Agency shipped her back to wherever she'd come from, and washed its hands.

I'd heard of her, the way a man hears of weather he's stayed indoors through. The loud human down at the Agency, the one that didn't quite fit.

Town talk drifted as far as the forge whether I wanted it or not.

But I'd never been near enough to catch her scent because I was never near anything; that was the whole design of my life.

It took a summons I hadn't asked for to put me through that human-sized door on the one morning she happened to be standing behind it, and that was all it took. One lungful.

The patient work of all my life undone between one breath and the next.

She was the worst thing in the galaxy I could want. Human and breakable. A body I could snap turning over in my sleep.

And already half gone, a woman the planet itself kept handing back like a parcel addressed incorrectly, with a clock running on her that I could not stop with a hammer or a blade or anything I knew how to make.

I could love her for the rest of my long life and bury her in sixty years if I was lucky, or wave at her ship next month if I wasn't.

The wanting in my core didn't care what I'd decided. It had already decided for me. It sat in my chest, pulling toward her like a hook behind the ribs, and the only thing it left me was the choice of what I did about it.

I made the choice standing there in the doorway with her scent taking me apart.

I would not claim her.

I'd seen what wanting cost. She needed a male who dreamed of a soft, warm wife and a houseful of children and didn't lie awake counting the ways the people he loved could be taken from him.

She started to turn, drawn maybe by the cold off the open door, maybe by the thing in the air that I refused to call a thread.

I left before she saw my face.

I went back to the fire, where things only ever became what I made them, and I told myself it was the heat making my eyes burn.