Scorpion Read online

  Kendras fell onto the wet spot underneath but couldn’t care about it, couldn’t move because the other man lay on top of him, his semi-hard dick slipped out but rested against the space between his legs, hot and wet. He relished the soreness in that moment, the exhaustion, and the sheer satisfaction so much that he didn’t try to get Gray Eyes to back off. Just a body.

  “You’ve done this before,” the other man murmured against his shoulder.

  Kendras huffed. He’d have been content to just sleep. “Maybe.”

  “So I was right.”

  “About?”

  “You doing this.” Gray Eyes rubbed his face against Kendras’s back like a cat.

  “That why you were alone?” Kendras asked. “Seeking your entertainment?”

  “Not quite.” Gray Eyes pushed himself up and off, then got to his feet but remained close to the bed. Kendras turned his head and ended up looking at an admittedly nice pair of thighs.

  “What are those?” The other man reached down to touch the back of Kendras’s hand.

  “Scars.” Kendras turned the hand fully and displayed the scarred, tattooed skin. “The officer thought that the tattoos weren’t visible enough. So he cut the outlines.”

  “And you call me crazy?” Gray Eyes shook his head. “And that?” He indicated Kendras’s wrist, and Kendras, half-amused, turned it to show the tattoo and scar there too. “Seventeenth? Your unit?”

  Kendras shrugged. A Fetinye might not have heard of the Seventeenth or “Scorpions,” and now he likely never would. It seemed pointless to display the symbols now if the people and deeds belonging to them were memories.

  The tattoos, not dark enough against his skin, and the raised scars of the etching remained. He’d worn the scorpion on his gloves, but he didn’t know where they were. The glaive was gone. Not that he could have wielded it now.

  “Thanks for the money,” he said and saw a smile form on the other man’s lips. Maybe he wasn’t so bad. Maybe he didn’t mind that Kendras had helped defeat his home city. Maybe it wasn’t personal.

  But there was still something tickling in the back of Kendras’s mind. If he hadn’t been so tired, he might have kept pondering it, but that, too, seemed pointless. He’d learned a long time ago to sleep when the opportunity arose, and right now, there was a bed and the low hum of satiation, and even his foot was silent. For the first time since he’d gotten injured, rest was a possibility. He closed his eyes and listened to the man dress and then pull the door shut behind him.

  He awoke at a touch against his shoulder. He startled to his feet to defend himself—only to scream as pain exploded white in his vision. He reached for the bed, keeping himself upright on the bedpost when all he wanted to do was squirm like a stuck worm. The pain was so intense he retched.

  Everything came back: The battle. The wound. And how he’d spent the night.

  When his vision cleared, he saw an old woman look up at him with watery eyes. She was so small she could have been a young girl, which, for a moment, disoriented Kendras further. Her soft tsking sound didn’t fit a demon, so he was most likely facing a mortal, despite the fact she’d just appeared in the room without warning. Not that any kind of demon would show him any interest.

  “What do you… want?” Kendras rubbed his chest, and heard a heavy silver coin fall to the ground. His payment. He’d slept on it. He cursed and reached for the rolling silver disk, but the old woman was more nimble and picked it up before Kendras could reach it.

  “Night shadows? It happens to many soldiers.” The old woman pressed the coin into his hand, and Kendras flicked it back to where it had been.

  “Be glad I didn’t kill you. What do you want?”

  “Look at your foot.”

  “Right.” Kendras furrowed his brow. “And you are?”

  “The Royal Guard’s medic,” the old woman answered. “Used to be, anyway.”

  She looked so ordinary and dignified that Kendras believed that outrageous claim. A flutter of hope in his chest, almost worse than being startled.

  “Sit down.” The old woman picked up a leather bag, formerly of good quality, embroidered with heavy silver thread. “Now lift the leg.”

  Kendras complied and tried not to look at the mess of swollen flesh, discolored skin and sloppily applied bandages that were dirty and grimy after two days now. “Who sent you?”

  “Your boyfriend.”

  Kendras coughed. “What does he look like?”

  The medic gave him a glance that said, “My, aren’t you insatiable,” then shrugged, accepting, most likely, that it wasn’t her business. “A blond soldier.”

  “Gray eyes?”

  “Yes, that would be the one,” the medic added with a hint of humor as she tested a rickety chair before she sat down on it.

  Interesting connection for a Fetinye soldier, considering that Fetin and Dalman had just been at war. Why would Gray Eyes know the Dalmanye Royal Guard medic? Unless, of course, he didn’t and had merely followed the trail to find any kind of medic.

  Kendras ground his teeth when the old woman pulled his leg over and settled his knee and calf across her bony thighs. He really, really did not want to watch this.

  The medic unfurled a leather roll with steel instruments and hung it from the bedpost by a loop. “Now, let’s have a look at this.”

  “I can’t pay you,” Kendras said, realizing immediately after that he’d made a tactical mistake. He could have admitted to that after the treatment.

  “You don’t think very highly of your lover,” the medic chided, selecting a sharp, thin blade to cut through the bandages around Kendras’s foot.

  “He told you that… what we are. Why?”

  “It’s not uncommon to explain such things.” The medic kept cutting at the bandages, loop by carefully selected loop, until they fell away. “How old is this?”

  “Two, three days now.”

  “The swelling is bad.” The medic put the blade down and ran her dry fingers down the calf, tracing the ankle, following every line there, pressing into the swelling. Kendras groaned.

  “The next bit will hurt,” the old woman said, her fingers already creeping toward the middle of the foot. Kendras twitched with the impulse to fight, defend, and kill. Flashes of memories. The Scorpions’ medic tying down wounded men, Scorpions leaning with all their weight to hold a comrade for treatment, wounded men raging like lunatics, pink foam flying from bitten lips. Now he wished he had somebody to hold him down.

  “What happened there?”

  “Siege engine. The wheel went over my foot.”

  “You were already down?”

  Kendras indicated the side of his head, where a crust of blood covered part of his temple. The swelling was down, but the first two days the headache from whatever had hit him had been as crippling as that foot. “They thought I was dead. It woke me up.”

  “I bet.” The medic’s hands kept testing, prodding his broken bones, and Kendras felt the nauseating pain of broken bones rubbing against each other like walking on glass shards.

  “I’m amazed they didn’t amputate the foot.”

  “I didn’t let them.”

  “Ah, yes.” The medic then proceeded to the toes, but by now the foot felt so raw that even the lightest touch made Kendras grit his teeth and contemplate murder.

  “Well.” The medic took Kendras’s leg and set it back on the bed, then rubbed her palms on her trousers. “A few bones seem to still be intact in there, but the others are ruined.”

  “What does that mean,” Gray Eyes said from the door, then closed it behind himself and crossed his arms in front of his chest.

  “Healing this will take at least six or eight weeks, depending how well he heals and if he has the patience and money to wait it out. Even then the foot might not get as strong as it was.”

  Gray Eyes met Kendras’s gaze, then lifted his shoulders. “Amputation will turn him into a useless cripple. I’ve never seen a foot soldier fight well with a peg leg.”


  “It can be done,” the medic said. “It would get him back on his feet faster and quite possibly with less pain.”

  “I’d rather die,” Kendras said. He would. He had already extended his life by three days. Fetin should have ended it all, but it somehow hadn’t. He was running on borrowed time. How he spent it didn’t seem important anymore. But he’d be damned if he didn’t want to know why Gray Eyes had told the old woman he was his boyfriend.

  “That can be arranged, too, if you choose.” The medic’s watery blue eyes seemed oddly compassionate as she offered him death.

  “Maybe later.” Gray Eyes moved closer and cast a long look over Kendras’s leg, then up to his groin, chest, finally face. “I’d say do what you can. Bandage him up and give him something for the pain. I’ll move him into a proper place and call you if I need you again.”

  “As you wish.” She released Kendras’s leg and slipped from the chair. “We’ll have to set the bones. It were best if he was unconscious.”

  “No.”

  She glanced at Kendras. “You’d wish you were too. He’ll have to pull the bone fragments apart while I put them in their right places. You’ll thrash like a horse and scream. He might not be strong enough to hold you still.”

  If it was that bad, he might even take the bed apart. Kendras gritted his teeth. Did he trust Gray Eyes enough to be unconscious with a medic who offered to kill him if he wanted? He didn’t. He’d have struggled with a comrade, and Gray Eyes wasn’t that.

  Gray Eyes watched him. “I can knock you out.” He drew a dagger from his belt, turned it in his hands to use the pommel for striking.

  Try it, Kendras thought and clenched his jaw harder. Gods below, he didn’t have any other choice. Death, pain, more pain. How tempting.

  “Believe me, if you move too much, I could do more damage than good,” the medic warned.

  Threatening a medic with retaliation wasn’t wise. Kendras looked at Gray Eyes, and despite everything, gave him a quick nod.

  “I’d rather not treat a broken head too,” the medic said before Gray Eyes could move, and dug in her bag for a small round stoneware bottle. “Drink this. It’ll numb you and put you to sleep for a while.”

  Kendras took the bottle, broke the wax seal and pulled the cork out. He recognized the smell from something the Scorpions’ medic had used. The same gods-awful bitterness that made most men throw up once they came back. He drank it and handed the bottle back, feeling the oily liquid run down toward his guts, leaving a foul taste in its wake. His mouth numbed first, which was a blessing. He settled back on his elbows. The numbness spread through his body, and he began to feel heavy and weak. Tired.

  “You’ll have to hold the heel and pull the toes away from the ankle. Keep them that way, while I move the bones into position,” the medic instructed Gray Eyes. “Don’t let go until I say so.”

  Kendras lay back and closed his eyes. Giving in to the drugs was easy. He didn’t want to be around when this happened.

  WHEN Kendras woke, the medic was just pulling a few rolls of fresh linen bandages from her bag and to finish wrapping up Kendras’s foot tightly. “It feels a little more secure now, but under no circumstances should the foot hit the ground.”

  “Yes.” Kendras tried to ignore the nausea in his stomach, instead watched Gray Eyes. He’d changed clothes and now wore a clean shirt over his leather trousers and heavy boots. A sword hung at his side, a simple weapon that clearly had seen use and possibly recently.

  “This, a pinch of it three times a day or when the pain gets too bad, in hot water. Boiling, not just steaming. Always with something to eat.” The medic pulled a waxed linen bag from her pack. “That should get you through the weeks ahead.”

  Kendras didn’t like that Gray Eyes took the bag, but there was precious little he could do. After all, the man had paid for it.

  “Let’s get you out of the city,” Gray Eyes said.

  “Yes, darling.” Kendras pursed his lips as if amused but gave the man a hard stare. Gray Eyes had the decency to look a little hurt.

  Kendras dressed in his leathers, a slow and laborious process when it came to the trousers, while the medic gave Gray Eyes more instructions.

  Kendras put on one of the boots, but not the other, then wrapped himself in the leather top, fastening it. He’d done this so often the routine was both calming and disturbing. What about the others? There had been heavy losses, but he couldn’t be the last one, could he? Maybe they had regrouped and buried the dead. He’d have to find them. Once he could move enough to have any chance to find them. That meant doing everything to ensure he didn’t end up a useless cripple.

  “Hey.” Gray Eyes stepped closer, knife out, and Kendras wondered if he’d attack him, but the man did nothing but cut open the already ruined boot with fast, forceful motions, splitting it into two halves he pried apart before sliding Kendras’s bad foot into the boot, hardly touching it.

  “Can you ride?”

  “Man or horse?”

  Gray Eyes laughed. “I have no doubt you ride a man well, but right now my mind’s on getting you out of the city. This is no place for you… or even me.” He wrapped up Kendras’s armor in a linen bag, then offered Kendras a wooden crutch. “I got you this, but you will have to ride. It’s a fair way away.”

  “I’m not going back to Fetin.”

  “Neither am I.” Gray Eyes hoisted the armor on his back then held out the crutch to Kendras. “Come.”

  Chapter 2

  GRAY EYES helped him down the stairs, out on the street and then onto the back of a horse. Kendras didn’t comment on any of this. Wherever Gray Eyes was taking him, it would beat begging on the streets. In his state, he couldn’t fend for himself. So he did what was necessary. No alternative. It had served him well before.

  Thankfully, their horses were even-tempered well-fed geldings. His might have been a cart horse, as Kendras’s inexperience didn’t encourage it to do what it wanted. Gray Eyes tied its reins to the other’s saddle, but that seemed hardly necessary. Both horses walked side by side like they’d done so all their lives. Like men, horses were creatures of habit.

  They drew little attention on their way out of the city. The guard was more concerned with soldiers streaming toward the city rather than away from it. Already, the ocean priesthood had decreed a “fortnight of peace”, which meant that anybody spilling human blood inside the city would forfeit their lives. Kendras had expected to see the tidal cages well-filled with corpses when he’d returned, but maybe that had been too early. Men’s hunger for other men’s blood had been sated during the battle of Fetin. Building fresh appetite might take a few more days.

  They followed the road that wound itself up the mountains—the Shoulders of Golgat—that protected Dalman from the land side. Dalman itself was a formidable fortress, surrounded on three sides by the sea, its white walls both attractive and impenetrable. Its harbor lay nestled below the heights by the river, the space between the white walls and the harbor taken over by the seedy underbelly of the city. Those that couldn’t afford the city’s taxes lived there in a labyrinth of constantly changing shelters. Riffraff, strangers, criminals, and beggars roamed the streets and were at each other’s tender mercies. Sometimes, the city guard showed up for the exercise, breaking a few heads, leaving some bleeding corpses in the streets to keep the lawless in line.

  By contrast, Fetin sat further inland between two mountains and the intersection of the northern-southern and western-eastern trade routes. Fetin trusted its walls and network of spies to keep it safe. The two cities hadn’t been so much rivals as brothers, with the smaller brother constantly testing his limits, until, finally, the bigger brother brought him low. Part of Kendras hoped Fetin would never recover from the attack. It was not something he wanted to remember.

  “How far is it?”

  Gray Eyes glanced at him. “We should arrive before dark. Since we’re on the road together, you could tell me your name.”

  “
Kendras.”

  “You can call me Steel.”

  “I can. Where does that name come from?”

  “My eyes.” Steel shrugged. “I assume. It works for me.”

  Kendras fell silent and shifted uneasily in the saddle. He’d hurt tomorrow. Well, worse than he already did. His horse took no notice and merely plodded along beside Steel’s.

  “Yes, they say people with gray eyes have no soul,” Kendras added after a while.

  “Nothing to lose then.” Steel grinned. “It’s a boon in getting hired.”

  Clearly a man without soul has no conscience either, Kendras thought.

  The sun was sinking toward the horizon, turning the sky blood red and bruised purple, when they took a path toward a farm. Fields lined the path, but the slaves were already being counted and locked in for the night. A couple of guards nodded toward Steel and then returned to their duties.

  The house at the end of the path was one of those lush estates that fed Dalman, producing the grain and wine and meat that the city needed to live. Why would somebody who owned this trawl the taverns for companions? Who was this man?

  “Nice place.”

  “It’s not mine.” Steel handed the horse over to a slave girl. He stepped to Kendras. “Take my shoulder. Slowly. That’s it.” He steadied Kendras, holding him around the waist. Then he pulled the crutch free and handed it to Kendras. “Remember what the medic said.”

  He walked slowly enough for Kendras to catch up. In the inner courtyard, two men amused themselves with tossing chicken bones amongst the dogs.

  “Ah, our glorious leader is back,” the taller, bony man said with a half-assed, semi-drunk salute. “Looks like he brought fresh meat too.”

  “Shut up,” Steel said. He led Kendras down toward the guest quarters. Kendras didn’t speak until Steel opened a door for him.

  “What is this?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Fresh meat? Haven’t been called that in a while.”

  Steel cleared his throat. “They were drunk.”

  Kendras just gave him a level stare.