14. Insult and Recompense
Chapter fourteen
Insult and Recompense
Imalroc was dying again. It wasn’t real. It hadn’t been real any of the previous nights either, and yet this time he was sure something was cutting into his neck.
He hurtled upright in his sweat-soaked bed, ripping bandages off his chest and tearing free the one clamped across his head. His hair was lank and greasy, his scalp aching.
He breathed deeply to slow his bolting pulse. Set a hand across his eyelids, trying not to focus on the twitching, quivering motion. The shaking would spread through his whole body if he let it.
A gentle tap at the door made him look over blearily. Rerdas entered with a forced smile and a corked amphora, painted blue. Imalroc slumped.
“Last dose,” Rerdas said.
“My shoulder is fine.” He sounded utterly listless, but better that than the first few times Rerdas had come in to discover him still dreaming of Widran, sweating and flinching.
“Yes, but you need to finish the course of it. They stressed that.”
It wasn’t the worst-tasting medicine he had forced down, and it had undoubtedly sped his healing, but he hated how thoroughly it knocked him out.
Locked him in the nightmares. And it fucked with his coordination for ages after a dose.
He’d climbed out of the bed and fallen over the first time, scrabbling across the floor with limbs that wouldn’t respond to the impulse to run, escape, run.
Sometimes it felt like the flailing, snapping razor-saws coiled around him still. Part of the problem had to be the enclosing room and the fact that he couldn’t do much more than hobble around it, but the two days he’d spent in a medic’s supervision following the fight had been worse.
Foul as it was, the blue tonic did its work. He’d have refused it but for the fact that the rips and slices all over him were already scabbing after one dose. That, and the promise that it would prevent future dislocations. Imalroc drove the agonizing memory from his mind.
“Be right back,” Rerdas said.
By the time he returned, the medicine had started its woozy climb up into Imalroc’s skull. He hugged his legs to his chest, resting his cheek on a bruised kneecap.
Rerdas carried a stack of fresh linens and a shallow washbasin. He poured water into a little puddle in the basin and wrang out a thick scrap of fabric in it. “May I?” he asked, gesturing to Imalroc with the cloth in hand.
“Fine.” The cool, damp cloth felt good on his skin, but he didn’t like the way Rerdas moved it gently, steadily, so methodically. Like he was brushing a horse. He ought to remind Rerdas what he was, but he was so tired, and his limbs so uselessly heavy and clumsy.
He let Rerdas work the cloth carefully down over his shoulder blades, sweeping up stray droplets and passing lightly over healing wounds. The huntmaster was still fully dressed from dining with Almes. Too early for Umber to have demanded Rerdas retire with him to bed, then.
“Did he give you trouble about coming here?” Imalroc twisted around a little to see Rerdas.
Rerdas’s gaze stayed on his task. “Almes is keeping him entertained. I have a little while before I need to go up.”
“You could just let him sleep alone.” He couldn’t keep the bitterness from his voice. He’d spent too much time hoping that Umber and Rerdas were having a miserable, awkward time fucking in the duke’s bed, until he considered how much worse that would be for Rerdas than for the duke.
“I can’t risk angering him further.”
“You mean after I angered him,” Imalroc said. Rerdas had offered a million apologies for Widran, as if most of that debacle weren’t Imalroc’s fault for being distracted and underestimating an opponent, but they hadn’t spoken about his little foray into face-painting with blood.
“I assumed he’d be angry too, but he isn’t.” Rerdas sounded thoughtful. He frowned, trickling cool water down Imalroc’s back and sweeping it up with the cloth. “The most dangerous thing you did was make him see you as a powerful man. You were safer when he thought you were only a tool.”
Imalroc shook his head, smiling derisively. Powerful. Wouldn’t the duke love to see him now, puking up his supper most nights, screaming himself awake to tear the bedsheets away before they strangled him. Terrifying competition for him.
Rerdas hadn’t kissed him since Widran.
The huntmaster had slipped into his bed to hold him in the moments he could stand to be touched, and combed his hair, and fed him, and applied compresses and salves and changed dressings and administered medicine.
All of it without any suggestion of desire.
Imalroc didn’t know what it meant, and he couldn’t bring himself to ask.
“Etiana asked if she might come and speak with you.” Rerdas ran the washcloth down to Imalroc’s fingertips, swiping lightly between them. “There’s been a development.”
He didn’t want to see that woman. Although maybe if the proud Lady Toriem watched her cousin handle him like a rag doll while he shivered and shook, she might finally be convinced he wasn’t about to rip Rerdas’s throat out. “Alright,” he mumbled. “Tell her I’ve invited her to tea.”
Rerdas smiled faintly. But he didn’t laugh, or tease, or do anything besides carefully sweep Imalroc’s hair over his other shoulder.
It must have been more pressing than Rerdas let on, because as soon as he finished with the washcloth, he went off to get his cousin. Etiana’s perfume wafted into the room a moment before she did, and Rerdas drew the door shut behind them after a cautious peek into the hallway.
“How are you?” she asked stiffly. “That tonic should help, after what we paid.”
Imalroc forced himself out of his protective hunch. He lounged back against the wall and crossed his arms. “Good thing I’ve earned enough onyx for it.”
Etiana’s jaw worked, but she gave him a curt nod.
“You’ve earned far more than that. I wanted to discuss a few things with you.
I’ve asked Dantin Heckly to look into selling our Kirinoll house, and I’ve inquired about a few holdings in the East. The condition of the estate house will raise questions, but we’ll need a story anyway, to explain our exit from the city.
” She glanced at Rerdas. “Being destitute should be enough of a scandal to satisfy the gossipmongers.”
“How much more do you need for one of these Eastern holdings?” Imalroc asked.
“I believe I can find something secure if we stretch a bit further. Maybe two or three hundred ingots more, assuming we get something for the house quickly.”
Imalroc blinked. It was so little. He hadn’t expected her to name a number that felt… possible. “That’s only one more fight.” He held his breath.
“If the purse is—”
“Yes,” Rerdas interrupted. He gave his cousin a sharp look. “It’d be over.”
“The main question is where you want to fight. We’ve had two offers. One from Alsot, the Tamasyad booker, but it’s for a front fight. I don’t know how large the purse will be for that. The other is an overture from the east.”
There was only one battlebox in the east that could make even Etiana look so dubious. Bren Kul Mari, in Drida. He never wanted to go anywhere near it.
“I’ll do the front fight.”
Etiana frowned. “Look, I know Bren Kul Mari has a reputation—”
“For brutality,” Imalroc prompted. “You have some longing to discover how a place develops a reputation as particularly brutal in a sport like battleboxing? Is your curiosity just killing you?”
Her cheeks colored, but she didn’t take the bait. “Not at all, but—”
“Good, me neither,” Imalroc said loudly.
Etiana opened her mouth, but Rerdas cleared his throat, and the cousins gave each other identical glares.
“Imalroc made himself clear, Eti. The Tamasyad front fight,” Rerdas said.
“We don’t know enough about it,” she seethed. “And it’s in two days’ time! He’s not fully recovered, and I won’t have time to determine the fighter, weapons—”
Rerdas looked at him, brow creasing. “Can you be ready by then? You’ll be alright?”
“I’ll be fine.” Especially if he didn’t have to take any more of that tonic. Gods, even if he did, he’d be in the fight. The last one in a long line of horrible death pageants. He’d stagger his way through it if he had to.
***
He was better in body, if not in mind, by the appointed day. The weigh-in was perfunctory, and he was deposited directly in the holding cells beneath the battlebox.
Beyond the wall of his cell, something paced and huffed, a snorting, inhuman sort of breath.
Imalroc crossed to the other side, eyeing the wall.
There were all sorts of hungry creatures a battlebox could toss onto the sands, but it’d be for a speciality match.
He was mostly sure they wouldn’t add a tiger or some other creature to a lowly front fight.
He heard no one else and spotted no other fighters in the corridor. The ring of chains and rapid footsteps occasionally punctuated the quiet. He listened to the battlebox guards’ pounding feet and the assassin-light tread of battleboxers, but he saw none of them.
Rerdas had asked to walk the box at the weigh-in, but they were told it was too close to the fight. It was going to be standard anyway, as promised. Nothing to worry about, or so the booker claimed.
Imalroc bent, pressing his fingers into the tops of his toes. He wouldn’t make the mistake of taking concentration off his opponent again. Even if it was only a front fight, likely with a less experienced fighter, he would be relentless. End it quickly.
And once that was done, finished… There was a blank space at the end of the vicious hunger that kept him from lying down on the sand to die. All that mattered was that he could make himself free.