Madurasha’s Son #2
Vanu snorted. “No, of course not. I mean to be with you, though. Mean to try. Is L-ih-l”—he did his best to pronounce the name correctly—“your real name?”
Lill looked as if the question startled him.
“Your brothers all had Zashian names, as I remember, but yours … ”
“Chiddeng. Yes. My mother was Chiddang. My father was Zashian—well, you know that. Lill is the name my mother gave me.” For a moment he looked lost in thought—or maybe just lost. “I do have a Zashian name too, if you … ”
“So long as you don’t mind the way I say it, I’ll call you by the one you got from your ma.”
Lill frowned. “You’re speaking in complete sentences again. Should you be doing that?”
Vanu grinned. “Maybe not.”
They sat together in silence for a minute or two. It was beginning to get dark and would soon be time to light a lamp.
“So,” said Lill presently, shifting a little on the cushions, “you had my father’s seal from Na Gurti, and you knew who I was before the wedding. Were you not worried that I might have come here with revenge in mind?”
“Did you?”
“No.” He spoke easily. “I came because Lord Davanu said you would treat me well, and I … wanted to be a boy bride. I thought, when he first took me in nearly a year ago—I hoped he might make me his bride. But he has only one wife, as I realize now is your Hawa custom. I don’t know if he always intended to send me to you, if that was in his mind when he took me in, or if he only thought of it when Tirtu wrote to him.
But he was good to me. He had already erased any thought of vengeance from my mind.
I never had very many such thoughts, to tell the truth. I suppose it is not in my nature.”
Vanu thought of that holster full of little throwing knives, which told a rather different story. He didn’t believe all of this, but he couldn’t have said what he thought the truth behind it was.
In fact, though he pretended otherwise, he did have a habit of honesty himself, and he was never sure how to deal with people he knew or suspected were lying to him. He just didn’t fully understand why they did it. What was the point, when the truth was so apt to come out anyway?
“You liked him? Lord Davanu.”
“I was very grateful to him. He took me into his household at a time when I was destitute. He never called my father a traitor but spoke warmly of the friendship he’d had for him before things … changed.”
He’d forgotten that Lill did not know what had happened to Davanu. He wished he didn’t have to be the one to report it. “I’m sorry to tell you … I heard that he died shortly after you left.”
The boy’s face was a mask, but that was to be expected. And the sadness in his voice sounded genuine: “Oh no! Truly? I am so sorry. You must—you must miss him.”
Vanu nodded, and quite suddenly, as if something had broken that had been holding them back, tears filled his eyes.
It was a good feeling to finally let them fall.
He rubbed the heel of his hand over his cheeks, wiping them away once they had stopped coming.
He caught Lill looking at him with shock.
Maybe he hadn’t imagined a man like Vanu could shed tears. Maybe it was something more.
“I do miss him,” Vanu signed. “I loved him.”
“Loved?” Lill translated tentatively, repeating the sign.
Vanu nodded. “I’ve missed him for a long time. Thought I would get to see him again … some time. Sorry. Didn’t mean to cry in front of you.”
“No … it’s all right,” said Lill slowly, as if working something out as he spoke. “You are my husband … you can show me how you feel. You should.”
Vanu wanted to repeat that back to him, but he didn’t because he had a good idea of the answer it would get. Lill would say, “Of course,” but he wouldn’t mean it. And what would be the point of that?
What he really wanted to do, because he was basically a beast, was draw Lill over to sit in his lap.
Put a hand up under the boy’s shirt and get him worked up the way he’d been yesterday.
Even if it ended the same way as yesterday—though maybe it wouldn’t.
But they’d just been talking about their dead.
His friend, his first real lover. Lill’s father.
His brothers. Heart of the Blue Heaven. It would feel to Lill as if ghosts were in the room with him.
He’d be revolted if he knew what was in Vanu’s mind.
“Haven’t shown you around my place yet,” he said instead, moving to rise from the cushions. “Want me to?”
“Yes, but—show me the signs for things as you go. Could you? For instance, what’s the sign for this room?”
Vanu showed him: “Main room. Seating platform. Cushions. Cupboard.” Lill repeated all the signs dutifully and precisely with his thin hands.
(Vanu was distracted thinking about how he’d like to press them to his lips, take the slim, calloused fingers into his mouth one by one.) “Stairs. Door. Come.”
Lill followed him into the kitchen with its cold hearth, unused in the warm weather when they preferred to cook outside.
“There’s just the two upstairs rooms, yours and mine. There’s this room … ” He opened the door under the stairs to his room. “No use for it. You want a room for anything, it’s there for you.”
Lill leaned in the doorway to look at the bare room. “We could put our bard in there.”
Vanu laughed. From where he was standing, he had a lovely view of his bride’s neat, trousered ass. He wanted to squeeze it or maybe swat it lightly. (Beast.)
“Nah, he can have his own house. We got plenty.”
“I suppose you do.”
“We do.”
Lill looked at the floor. “We. Yeah.”
Vanu gestured toward the door at the back of the house. “I’ll show you the yard,” he signed.