thene (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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last_herald_mage2014-12-07 08:47 pm
thene) wrote in last_herald_mage2014-12-07 08:47 pm
fic - Strandline - part 7 (NSFW)
^^ I only posted part 6 this afternoon, so if this is your first time stopping by today, go read that first. If you just read it? Stretch your legs, get something to drink, and reflect on the fact that I could have left you right there, if only i hadn't been writing this story backwards from the porn all along. seriously if you have any response, type it now before part 7 ruins this fic forever. which it will. eh i just bet it ends in the wrong place. I'll try not to leave it hanging too long.
Loa moved first.
In the thoughts-breadth it took Valdir to react, Loa grabbed a coil of robe by her feet and dived into the Culway, piercing the water as Stefen surfaced, thrashing and screaming. The rope unspooled behind her as she cut the current like an arrow. She might intercept Stefen - but Valdir had no time nor tolerance for might and he threw a spell-net out into the water. Stefen slammed into the magical barrier, held in its lattice as the water slipped through. Valdir pulled it, feeling Stefen's movements weakening in shock - Hold on. Hold on - and Loa surfaced beside him, threading her arms about Stefen's body.
The rope was still slipping loop after loop into the water, sinking under its weight and inertia. Valdir grasped it, and its momentum jerked at his body, making the whole vessel list dangerously as he braced his feet against its hull.
Even fighting the water it didn't take long to reel Loa back in; she kicked hard towards them, Stefen tight in her arms, as Valdir and the tugged her hand over hand back towards him.
He held the line with raw fingers as Loa grabbed the edge of the hull, Stefen lifting weak arms to meet his own. Loa shoved him up as Valdir hoisted the dead weight of him aboard. He raised himself on one weak elbow, spitting water back into the Culway. Valdir crouched over his body, blood rushing to his head. He dared a little more of his scant reserves of magic - he daren't not - he clutched Stefen's shoulders with hands that radiated an unnatural warmth.
He held Stefen as Loa waved to her crew, tugging the mooring-ropes to bring them back close to the jetty. A sailor threw Valdir a length of tattered cloth - his own cloak, discared before Loa had fought him. He murmured his thanks, and threw it over Stefen's body. Valdir's skin throbbed, chilled and tense from proximity to the river's madness.
He stood, eyes searching for Silona.
Silona watched from the prow of his flagship, staring at Loa as she wrung out her hair. She looked back at him. The current between them, Valdir would not have braved at any tide. It was the worst moment to watch unfold on any battlefield; the silent threadsnap of someone deciding that their commanding officer is a dangerous fool.
He waited for the inevitable recoil; one of them must raise the first word in their defence.
Loa would never let another strike first. "What the fuck, you think of what we lose if Stef goes down?"
Silona shrugged lazily. "Sink or swim, what is he to me?"
"Fucksakes, without Stef we got no song truce, and without truce, Morn got nothing but the river. You want to back to living shore to shore? No dropping anchor at Lighthouse Market, no trade with Yorann or the Duchess? It was a whole other city, you even remember? Cul Aber weren't nought but blood and scum before Stef came home."
"The city, child? I've never been there," Silona reminded her, and he stepped down into the Sunrise's depths.
Valdir did not think about where Loa had gone.
He faced the door of her cabin, feeling the Sunrise strain with the ebb of the water. The belowdecks air felt stale. Stefen shifted in Loa's bunk, stretching out his chilled limbs; unbeknownest to him, there was a warming-spell set on the bed. Stef wasn't hurt, save for a rapidly blooming bruise that Valdir had seen through a shirt turned close to transparent - but the shock alone could have killed him.
There was a sort of feverish vigilance that always came upon him when someone near him had brushed close to death. Like combat, a focus close to madness. Perhaps there was no other way to watch over someone at the border between your own and your enemies.
And however many years he'd spent defending Valdemar with his life, seeing senseless violence - play and pettiness with someone's life - would always disturb him. The sword rested in his hands, swaying a counter-rhythm to the shifting water.
"You surprised me," murmured Stefen. His voice was shaky, but carried an odd pride. "Figured you could fight a bit...wouldn't have sworn you could hold Loa on t'river. Remind me not to wager 'gainst you."
"You don't gamble."
"How you know that?" Stefen grunted.
"I'm starting to understand you."
It was an instinct born of that same fever. Visions from a border. Seeing someone snatched from death would always make it seem one knows them.
You treasure every last detail, even the ones you shouldn't be able to see. The posessiveness of it made him feel all the more mad - because it's you, and I would have been lost here without you. The streets are yours - they're your tamed three-headed beast that should have eaten me alive - and now I am keeping watch for you.
What you watched over, had to be your own.
Stefen's low laugh was broken by a gale of coughs, and Valdir dared to turn his head. Stef's pale face lay in the shaft of sun from Loa's window. His hair fanned on her pillows in dull, flat clumps. "You might be. S'true, I don't like to bank on nothing I can't control."
"Makes two of us." And yet.
"And yet you trusted me," Stefen wondered, and Valdir's stomach dropped like ballast lead.
With nothing. There's nothing in me to trust with. Not so much as a name to swear on. "I was right to do so. You brought me here at your own peril," he replied, his level voice belying the currents that ran under him. "Why did he do it?"
"Ain't no use asking," Stefen said. "I don't chase no reasons of Silona's, or anyone else's -"
"Why not?" Valdir challenged. "It's not because you don't know, is it? It's because you do know."
Stefen was still as the Sunrise strained in the roiling water. "Yeah, I do know. I know it's always my own fault. I come by evil through my own mistakes. I think too much on that, I couldn't do aught."
There was more truth in those words than he could bear to think on.
Stefen had turned in the narrow, hard bunk until he faced the sun. Light bleached his closed eyelids to a porcelain white. How old are you? he wondered, unsure when the tough young man had become a sleeping child, as if his youth had been smuggled past the border gate, hidden in a wad of sunlight. "What mistake?" Valdir asked softly. He held Loa's sword straight down, heedless of the scratches he was cutting into the polished wood of her cabin's floor.
"I got between the two of them, and he ain't forgiven me for it. I owed Loa a favour - a hella favour - and I wanted it off my back. She was a kid, then - fought me bare-handed in a rowboat. Still think I held my own 'cause I hadn't a choice otherwise." His words were muffled, as if he had turned his face away. "Loa knew I was from Scale land, so she asked me to take her to Lighthouse Market - her! You imagine, a face anyone would know even without them marks, walking Scale streets with her?"
Valdir bit his lip, remembering a border. Remembering what it felt like to draw fire.
"I were scared as hell, but I figured I had to do as she said - if I stayed in hock to the Morn they'd only pull me in on something worse. And I knew how I could get her there. I could work any man down from a fight. Talking to them or singing for them...I can take the fight out of them, even easier than making pain go away. And didn't seem right to tell her no when all she wanted was a walk downtown - not her fault Silona sooner torch Lighthouse Market than go trade there. Took some talking to make it happen - telling toughs to put their knives back down, because she weren't starting nothing and did they really want the Morn on their heads? After that jaunt, I started hearing from other people who wanted to get places they shouldn't be - wanted to pay me, like I was a riverman running a ferry. Was just a coin here or there at first, but Polly got me figured - all kinds of types stopping by the market. She remembered me, was the funny thing. Used to see me there when I was younger." When you were - He pictured a child growing up in the riverside smokerooms. Your life really couldn't have been more different from mine, he thought painfully.
"Poll had some words with Loa, then she tells me she wants to meet with Silona and with Yorann. Rockharbour was my sleeping dog - I didn't want to get near those teeth, no way, and I wondered about giving the whole thing up - couldn't keep going near Lighthouse Market if I'd let down the Duchess. But it was like I was seeing my first chance to knock a hole through the walls. I didn't like people's marks being something that trapped them in a corner. Wasn't right with me. Wanted to see people go as they please, whatever ink someone stuck them with."
"So that's how you made the song truce?"
"I just got them to the river. They all wanted each other dead, but I figured out what things they wanted more than they wanted each other dead." That, there, is the very essence of negotiation, Valdir marvelled. "They all went up to Silona's boat, and I sang while they talked it out. No one quite remembers what they said no more," he smiled. "They left saying people should go as they want, buy goods wherever they want. It all works better now," he observed. "Silona even ask Poll if it's safe to leave the harbour, sometimes. She don't lie to him, either."
You're unbelievable. "You count that a mistake?"
"Bit of peace that won't last, and Silona after me for his daughter straying hither-tither along the riverside?" He coughed again, the river still trapped in his lungs. "I don't know. I made a bit of coin for a lot of worry."
"Loa said there'd be blood in the streets without you -"
"Got news for you," Stefen noted, and Valdir's eyes cast down, remembering the sight of the withered Dotrid. Under his feet, he felt the whole vessel strain again. The pieces of Stefen's stories mingled in his mind. Light and music, blood and stone, all swept into the same current.
Harri's blood, and the deck lurched under him.
The door swung open and he brought his blade into a guard, but Loa raised her empty hands as she stepped inside. She kicked the door closed behind her. "Down, you're good, I ain't going to try you again." He complied, frankly glad to be granted her amnesty. Loa's tunic was still heavy with damp, and her face bore a bruised expression that hinted she'd sooner be alone. "You were good," she repeated, as if that were all that mattered.
"I hesitated," Valdir admitted, eyes still searing with the image of her leaping for the river, hawk-dive swift through the air.
"Was it you my father was testing?" She swung onto the edge of her bunk, and shook Stefen's shoulder. "You done shivering yet?"
"Barely started," Stefen informed her, but he sat up gingerly, tucking in his clothes. He retrieved his tunic from where he'd laid it beside his body; with a little magical assistance, it had dried out enough to wear. "You been having words with him?"
"One or two," she replied. Valdir was beginning to read their games of understatement; while Stefen rested, he'd heard Silona shouting and muttering below. Loa, he'd heard not at all, and her quietness had somehow seemed more troubling. "He never been to Cul Aber?" she glowered. "Well, I never set foot in Iftel. Left as a babe in arms."
A comeback she'd clearly thought of too late to make use of, and it showed her youth, with all its ferocity and stickled loyalties. Stefen was watching her warily, as if being near her furthered his error.
Valdir couldn't afford to tread careful on her deck any longer. "You know something about what happened to Harri," he said.
She shook her head. "Wish I did. Two nights ago, was like the river turned my head around. Was that vicious rainy night, remember?" Stefen nodded, and it took Valdir a moment to also register his recognition, as he had supposedly spent that night under the same clouds as they had. "I was up on deck past midnight, and sober as a nun," she stressed. "And I saw lights dancing downriver. Oh, don't you ask," she sighed at Stefen's sceptical expression. "I hit myself upside the head enough times. It was dark over south - Lighthouse Market already packed up, if Poll had the lanterns out at all. But on the north side, there were lights moving on the river. I figured it was some fool got his boat swept out into the Rockharbour after one too many, and I went north along the wall to take a look at him. But I never saw a ship. Only light."
:Tran,: he called, and relayed her words while they were fresh in his mind, leaving the contact open so Tantras could hear anything else he might hear. "What kind of light?" he asked.
She hesitated. "Could have thought it was just a few lanterns from up here. Looked strange when I got close - white lights, red lights, moving about near the traps. There was barely any moon that night," she added, bristling at Stefen's incredulous expression. "I ain't trying to play you a fool," she insisted.
"I taught you that song," Stef said quietly. "About the will-o'-wisp, wandering light of the hells?"
"I saw it," she glowered. "You don't see things made up for songs."
"I do lately," Stefen said his voice flat and numb. "I seen a Herald out on the streets, and you seen the will-o'-wisp, or something right like. What if everything in music just shakes out sometimes -"
"You're hysterical," she said flatly, but her eyes narrowed at Valdir. "All that's shook out is trouble." Loa shook her head. "You need out of here. Next time he throws you in, not sure I can catch you. Maybe he won't let me. Damn lucky you got caught on something that time. Tree fallen under the dock, or something?"
Stefen shook his head at her slowly. It was not the first time he'd seen someone try, and fail, to piece together their perceptions around the intrusion of magic into their world.
"Anyway, you got to get abovedecks. There's this kid throwing stones at the prow," Loa continued. "Thyll was going to throw a grapeshot back, but the kid said she needed to talk to you."
"Huh, who'd be wanting to -"
"Not you," Loa corrected him. "You," she nodded at Valdir.
Valdir stepped down from the ship, and felt himself sway on his toes; Stefen looked up at him and grinned. "Morn got a lot to say about land rats -" He broke off suddenly, staring up towards the wall.
At the river-wall, a group of uniformed watchmen were looking down at them.
Stefen grabbed his arm and nonchalantly ambled up the quay, glancing along to the next one to the north of them. No barges were moored there; it was empty save for a few children slinging stones across the river - certainly it offered no cover. Vanyel's insides lurched, unbalanced and increasingly tense, Stefen's continuing shivers rattling his bones. Stefen dropped abruptly low, dragging Vanyel with him and playing with his bootlaces - and he pursed his lips to whistle a note so high that Vanyel barely even heard it.
From amid the crowd of watchmen, he heard a dog bark. On the quay, a child turned - a pale young girl - and she scrambled from her perch to run toward them. On the path along the wall, she ran in an inch of water; it would have soaked her shoes rotten if she'd been wearing any.
"Need your boots shined, mister Stefen?" she asked as she neared them, grinning angelically as if to indicate that she had seen exactly how Stefen had most recently got his boots wet. All of eight years old, and Valdir wouldn't have liked to fight her for a penny, nor take her on in a game of japes.
"Rayet," he greeted her, voice low and uneasy. "I heard someone wanted a word in Valdir's ear. Mayhap it's about your friends up there above the harbour -"
"Eyito," she spat. "My friends would cut their guts out and throw 'em in the river."
"I knew I was one of your friends," Stefen replied softly; nevertheless, she cupped her palm and twitched it in a mercenary gesture. "Spill," he demanded. "I know you always knows what's what."
She crossed her arms and grinned cockily. "There's a big man in town, some kind of tija. He told the watchmen to make trouble with the market-men. Tassa says they must want more money from the Rockharbour," she shrugged. "Now they're looking for a man who tried to buy a stolen ring. Must've belonged to someone important..." She looked up at Valdir, eyes bright and wily, and Stefen cut her off with a shake of his hand.
He reached into his damp pocket, and Valdir glanced a clutch of silver. "Here, and stay away from them," he hissed. "Don't think you're safe." Rayet snorted, reaching for his hand, and he pulled it back as she touched it. "I mean it. They don't look at you and see someone born here - they just see something they can sell for easy money. These thin times won't end when the river goes down, and one day, you'll be in the wrong place when they get greedy." She sighed longsufferingly, and Stefen opened his palm to allow her to snatch her silver. He added something else, in rapid Cejan, and she frowned thoughtfully as she hurried away.
:Tantras,: he thought frantically as he turned away from Stefen's searching gaze. :Who set the watchmen on me?:
Tantras responded with shock and a flash of indignation, and Vanyel relayed the child's information to him even as Stefen leaned into his ribs. "We're going to walk right up near them like we don't think nothing of it, right?" From here, they had little choice; it was that or the river. "Then we split south, and you follow me." Stefen squeezed his hand - his fingers still so cold - and Valdir dared to look in his eyes. There was a knife-edge light in them, a dangerous certainty and commitment. Like staring into the city. You can't afford truth, and when you see danger, you can't hesitate.
:Van,: Tantras sounded near-frantic. :The captain said he 'broadened his investigation' -:
:He wants a scapegoat who's not with a gang. Preferably not from the city,: Vanyel conveyed the obvious as he trod the creaking wooden boards at Stefen's shoulder, even as he wondered why it was obvious. Why do they want to blame an outsider?
A knotted plank bowed under his foot. Closer. The nearest watchman looked straight at him.
:Tran, can't you call them off?:
Stefen bolted before he'd completed the thought, and Valdir was fast on his tail, feet slipping as they leapt to the path that ran south along the river, scraping his body against the wall. He ran on, boots splashing through the high water, hearing footsteps thunder behind them. They ran past the next quay, and onto another. Tantras's mind found his again, their connection shaky. :With or without blowing your cover?:
Valdir grimaced. :I'm not sure what it's still worth,: he answered as Stefen veered unexpectedly up the quay. His feet realised why almost before his eyes did; the path ahead became a stair that led only back upwards, and he saw movement atop the wall, men rushing to cut them off, as Stefen slowed and stepped into a moored rowboat. He ran gingerly toward its stern, arms spread against its violent rocking, and he looked back to Valdir before he leapt.
Stefen barely reached his goal - a long barge moored from the next quay, heavily laden and low to the river, and he cleared its edge in the company of a torrent of water. Valdir gasped, and as he felt the pursuers nearing he called a net of magic, steadying the tiny vessel as he ran to its far edge, holding the other in place. He leapt, and Stefen grabbed his hand, scrambling and pulling him over the barge's canvas roof, onward and upriver. "Not safe yet," he called as they ran. "They'll come down the southmost harbour stair - less we get away first -"
Valdir heard shouting behind - doubtless they'd reached the same conclusion. He realised he knew where Stef was going, and he followed - bolder this time, unfazed by the shaky paths of rotting wood, even now that suspect floor was under inches of rushing water. :Tran,: he pleaded, hearing voices behind - above - a frantic regrouping. :If they don't stop this madness -:
:Not much I can do unless you're willing to let them arrest you,: he replied, with the grimness that came from seeing something slip from your control. :Speaking of, I did get them to show me Stefen's record.:
Stefen was getting ahead of him. They'd reached the path by the foot of the stair - the route ahead running shaky and fragmented and finally out. :Tell me,: he urged.
:Wasn't much of a record, but it's the blank spots I'm starting to notice. The southerly watch-post took him in once for vagrancy. That was five years ago, and there's nothing said about a punishment - only 'Not known of Valdemar.':
The words dropped through murky water. He scrabbled, grasping half of a truth before it slipped from his grip.
Valdir drew in a breath of chill air, and leapt up from the dock to the stone ledge of the wall.
His boots squelched as water ran from the soles; ahead, Stefen was moving faster than should have been possible, and Valdir mimicked his stooped posture. They were putting distance from their pursuers, but for how long? Wasn't it obvious where they were headed? But he couldn't think of a better place to shed a tail but the Lighthouse Market. Any truth could get lost in those coloured lights.
It was too early, he knew as soon as they'd rounded the curve and could see the makeshift stone beach. No fires lit, the crowd merely a clutch of sad smokers; the sun barely touched the mountains far over the city. Stefen jumped atop the stones and crouched, turning to watch Valdir with his hands touching the rough stone ground. He was still as a statue - wet hair clinging to his face, scarf trailing in the river as his hands rested flat on stones torn from the jagged edge of his city.
He reached for Valdir's hands. Cold, gripping hard, rising to his feet and pulling Valdir into the market's hollow depths. No time to linger by the water. The caverns were barely lit, and no more populated than the dreary jetty. There's nowhere to hide, it's too small, they'll be watching every exit - "Where's Poll," muttered Stefen, turning through the cavern, tugging curtains this way and that. One revealled a sleeper, a groaning drunk. "Polly!" Stefen hissed.
Valdir felt steel at his back.
He spun on raw instinct, kicking his attacker and turning to retaliate before he knew what he'd done or remembered he was unarmed. "Fuck," hissed the young man clutching his knees on the floor. "Fuck - what's you - Stef, you -"
"You watch who you pull a knife on, Jorry," and Stefen slapped Valdir's shoulder. Not-so-harmless Valdir. Valdir, reputable duellist and brawler, fugitive from the law - and a long way out of my hands. "Where's Poll?"
"I heard you."
The suddenness of Duchess Polly's appearance - a hand to her head in feined delicacy, a silk robe draped loose around her body - was Valdir's one comfort; somewhere nearby, she had a means to disappear within the spider-nest of tunnels. Not to hide from trouble; trouble had only summoned her, ready to milk and trade whatever she could.
"What brings you in such a tearing damn hurry to my duchy so awful early of a morning?" she continued, a knife's edge in her voice.
"Polly," Stefen pleaded. "All I done for you, and I don't need nothing but a place to hole up from the law -"
"The law? I can't fucking believe you," she hissed. "You spend years telling me you won't do nothing to make trouble with the law, and now you -"
"I don't got time to explain." He was swaying, a hand to the wall of the tunnel as if still lurching with the floodwater. The poise he'd had had mere hours ago was gone. Valdir thought of his first sight of Stefen - the easy, feline balance he kept as he stalked across a filigree canopy of temporary alliances. Silona had somehow sent them crashing through that delicate net.
Polly strode angrily through the maze of tunnels, jerking her head for them to follow. He heard soft sounds close by - the night's first tenants at the Lighthouse Market, doubtless paying by the hour. She paused to listen, and then pulled back a bright patterned curtain - Valdir could only be glad that no one occupied the tiny space behind. "Anyone asks me or mine, he's a sailor I seen around and he's paying you. Make it convincing," she added nastily, and Stefen pulled him into the dim space as she walked away.
He slid the curtain closed behind them, leaving them alone in a stone hollow barely four feet deep.
Valdir had nowhere to look but at the floor, which was littered with pillows and soft cloths. A thin shaft of lanternlight filtered through the curtains, flickering the colours of each panel. His eyes adjusted even as Stefen discarded half his clothing, scattering boots and breeches, cloak and tunic on the ground, his shirt and scarf still trailing down his body. "Got to be ready for a show," he explained. "She's right about that much. Have your trews off, at least."
The lanterns outside shook, sending Stefen's shadow scampering about the rockface. Valdir loosened his clothes. He was shaking and sweating, the stress of their escape wearing its way through his body. Oh gods, whose body? What was he now, some sailor? He stripped to the skin in moments - remaining half-clad like Stefen would have felt somehow more obscene.
Stefen's arms caught around his shoulders, drawing him down to the floor. Soft feathery pillows and silk drank up his sweat and grated soft on his aching nerves. Stef was almost still, an ear pressed close to the earth. Listening for footfalls - His eyes flickered, and he pulled Valdir close, trailing blue silk about their bodies as he kissed him.
Modesty deserted him. It cowered in some low place far away, perhaps alongside his name.
They kissed slow and open-mouthed, Stefen's legs catching his in a loose embrace, chill and soft from water. It was enough to make him feel he could melt into the floor. Somewhere beyond he heard the thud of footsteps and a rumble of voices - raised, arguing, Polly's unmistakeable tones declaring something unintelligible. Every muscle told him to run or hide or at least free his hands to weave illusion; he froze, shaking, and Stefen pulled closer and grabbed at a sheet behind him, pulling it over their heads.
Everything narrowed - no sound but breathing, nothing to see but Stefen's face close against his. His senses no longer mattered. It was like being in combat, where fear and awareness came together into perfect focus, complete ability to act. Nothing - no name, no dignity - would come between him and survival. He raised his head only to draw air, and saw the shadow of a man through two layers of cloth. He turned his face on reflex and kissed Stefen again, pressing them together, feeling silk caught between their bodies.
He heard the rattling twitch of the brass curtain-rings, and cold air washed over them.
Someone spat on the stone floor outside, and the footsteps moved on.
They stayed close and unmoving for long seconds. Valdir opened his eyes, and he sat slowly upright, the veil falling languidly away from him. No one had lingered to watch them; he pulled the curtain back closed. Stefen looked up at him from the floor, still lying on his back. His eyes were the dark green of the stones beneath the river, and without a touch or a word, Valdir was pulled back down into their swell.
Their next kiss was harder and impossibly closer, tongues lapping together far inside his mouth. They moved apart to breathe. "Convincing enough?" Stefen whispered.
"For them or for you?" he replied. Did I play my part well, good sir? Oh, gods - if it's come to this, I can't keep lying. "Wait," he continued, before Stefen could reply, slipping his hand between their bodies, pressing him away. "There's - I have to tell you -"
"Spare me," whispered Stefen, and he shook his head. "You don't tell me nothing. My rule is, I only do this with strangers."
"I only do this with friends." The truth spilled out unexpected, and Stef smiled at him, wide and wry; Valdir gasped as if the tide had broken over them and left him breathless, far adrift from who he should be, what Stefen should mean, what they should be doing. I'm a stranger. Just a body in a whorehouse, for a man who didn't so much as know his name. He doesn't want my name, my reputation, my history. He wants...me.
The thought shocked him, even as Stefen moved against his body and whispered, "So we can't. Couldn't ever."
Except now. Where they touched, he could feel the dark edges of Stefen's lust - a deep shadow in him, a fear of knowing another that defied simple understanding. But the shadows seemed further out of reach with each breath, no longer mattering.
Kisses wandered, making their way down his neck. Stef stretched out a knowing hand into the pillows piled against the wall. From some cranny in the rockface, he produced a wooden box. Inside were the expected brothel accoutrements; waxed linen sheaths for careful women, tools for the deviant, a bottle of oil. "How you want to do this?"
He didn't even have to think twice. There was nothing on his mind any more except the hard cock pressed against him. He ran his hands down Stefen's body, reaching between them. Stef's penis was hot in his hand, and with the satisfying swell of it resting on his palm his thumb explored the head, shifting the soft skin over it. That made Stef gasp, and he slipped down the hollow as he touched, knees sliding across the sheets beneath them. He bent low to kiss Stefen more intimately, lips wrapping tight around him, and the young man drew in a ragged breath. "Fuck, you this nice to all your whores?"
He raised his head. "Long time since I last took a whore," he admitted, and he fought the urge to laugh hysterically at the thought of the absurd task that young woman had set herself to on the night of his fifteenth birthday. He discarded the memory, favouring this fantasy within a fantasy; an impossibly beautiful young man spread under him like a welcoming shore, just wanting him and asking what he wanted in return. It was more than he'd dared ask for in so many years. This shouldn't be real and I shouldn't be -
He lowered his lips slowly around Stefen's cock, and with every languid touch he felt an echo of Stef's pure pleasure. Stef gasped and writhed under him, and he felt a surprisingly steady hand stroke at his face. "Say what you want," Stef insisted.
He'd never been good at answering, and it had been so long since anyone had asked. "Inside me," he whispered when he next paused to breathe.
Stefen flashed a smile, lit bright with filtered lanternlight. He sat upright, taking Valdir's face in his hands and kissing his lips, his chin, his throat, as he pressed him slowly down on his back in their soft hideaway. The cork squeaked out from the bottle of oil; an unmistakable cue to raise his knees. A moment later Stefen's mouth touched the head of his cock, teasing it between his lips while he set about demonstrating exactly how deft his oiled hands were.
"Long time since you last had a friend?" Stef asked softly, in a moment of respite from toying with the tightness inside him.
"Yes -" Or I never - Valdir's not me, he's never been loved, never been touched like this - He was trying, failing, not to moan out loud at the careful sucking and fingering when Stefen began to sing.
The low sound distracted him - a discord, humming around a mouthful of his cock. Barely an extra tickle, a party trick - but then Stefen's fingers turned inside him and he gasped, feeling a strange, numb pleasure. His song. I can't feel the least discomfort. All I can feel is him touching me and wanting me... He felt the sound pass right through him, falling right through to the stone, and wherever it touched him, he felt...completely desired.
Stefen was still singing low, wordless notes as he withdrew his questing hand, leaving him aching with lust, pulse beating to the music that lingered inside him. Stefen's voice rang free about the stone enclosure as Valdir watched him oil his cock. He fell silent only as he reached an arm about Valdir and slid slowly inside him.
And it had been far too long since he'd felt this.
Slow, the sensation building into something too much, too right, to exist in the false world he'd spun around them. Stefen looked down at him as they moved, and Vanyel wrapped his legs hard around him and looked back into strange eyes, hard green-brown eyes. He'd never, ever done this. Not been fucked by a man who didn't know his name. I'm a perfect stranger, staring out at you from inside a friend who never was. Each move - each smooth, skilled, rhythmic stroke - was as to pound his illusory self into specks of light and dust. His head fell back on the pillows and he moaned low as Stefen fucked that nameless stranger, head ducking to kiss his neck hard, hard enough to bruise him. To mark him. Briefly, only until he was gone.
As Stefen thrust into him, his eyes flicked from closed to open. The stray scarf was falling off him, silk shifting over his back as he arced upwards; Vanyel felt out the dark bruise that still showed through his shirt, at the side of his thin ribcage. His hand closed around Vanyel's cock, grasping delicately as he moved deep in his body, catching the rhythm of the song that was fading into his memory - the song that Stefen used to make his body feel so perfect. So wanted. He reached up his arms and Stefen murmured, "Oh, Valdir," and Vanyel clutched him in sudden, desperate rage. Why must I share you with someone who doesn't exist? Why am I a stranger?
The desolation led him into ecstasy.
He pulled Stefen into him as every inch of his body shook with the force of his pleasure, felt Stef gasp and list against him only moments later. Slowly, Stefen rolled to the floor, a tangle of limbs and linen and silk.
Vanyel sat up slowly, and looked down at his lover curled beside him. The scarf had fallen under him, forgotten, and his shirt had risen up above the shadow on the side of his torso. For the first time, he saw it clear. Not a wound. Not a bruise. Words and numbers, black Cejan script on his skin. Like the red-lit girls on the beach. Like proud, hiding Tajinet. Marks that meant less than a person, less than a name.
He tried to understand, and Stefen looked back at him coldly.
-->Part 8
Loa moved first.
In the thoughts-breadth it took Valdir to react, Loa grabbed a coil of robe by her feet and dived into the Culway, piercing the water as Stefen surfaced, thrashing and screaming. The rope unspooled behind her as she cut the current like an arrow. She might intercept Stefen - but Valdir had no time nor tolerance for might and he threw a spell-net out into the water. Stefen slammed into the magical barrier, held in its lattice as the water slipped through. Valdir pulled it, feeling Stefen's movements weakening in shock - Hold on. Hold on - and Loa surfaced beside him, threading her arms about Stefen's body.
The rope was still slipping loop after loop into the water, sinking under its weight and inertia. Valdir grasped it, and its momentum jerked at his body, making the whole vessel list dangerously as he braced his feet against its hull.
Even fighting the water it didn't take long to reel Loa back in; she kicked hard towards them, Stefen tight in her arms, as Valdir and the tugged her hand over hand back towards him.
He held the line with raw fingers as Loa grabbed the edge of the hull, Stefen lifting weak arms to meet his own. Loa shoved him up as Valdir hoisted the dead weight of him aboard. He raised himself on one weak elbow, spitting water back into the Culway. Valdir crouched over his body, blood rushing to his head. He dared a little more of his scant reserves of magic - he daren't not - he clutched Stefen's shoulders with hands that radiated an unnatural warmth.
He held Stefen as Loa waved to her crew, tugging the mooring-ropes to bring them back close to the jetty. A sailor threw Valdir a length of tattered cloth - his own cloak, discared before Loa had fought him. He murmured his thanks, and threw it over Stefen's body. Valdir's skin throbbed, chilled and tense from proximity to the river's madness.
He stood, eyes searching for Silona.
Silona watched from the prow of his flagship, staring at Loa as she wrung out her hair. She looked back at him. The current between them, Valdir would not have braved at any tide. It was the worst moment to watch unfold on any battlefield; the silent threadsnap of someone deciding that their commanding officer is a dangerous fool.
He waited for the inevitable recoil; one of them must raise the first word in their defence.
Loa would never let another strike first. "What the fuck, you think of what we lose if Stef goes down?"
Silona shrugged lazily. "Sink or swim, what is he to me?"
"Fucksakes, without Stef we got no song truce, and without truce, Morn got nothing but the river. You want to back to living shore to shore? No dropping anchor at Lighthouse Market, no trade with Yorann or the Duchess? It was a whole other city, you even remember? Cul Aber weren't nought but blood and scum before Stef came home."
"The city, child? I've never been there," Silona reminded her, and he stepped down into the Sunrise's depths.
Valdir did not think about where Loa had gone.
He faced the door of her cabin, feeling the Sunrise strain with the ebb of the water. The belowdecks air felt stale. Stefen shifted in Loa's bunk, stretching out his chilled limbs; unbeknownest to him, there was a warming-spell set on the bed. Stef wasn't hurt, save for a rapidly blooming bruise that Valdir had seen through a shirt turned close to transparent - but the shock alone could have killed him.
There was a sort of feverish vigilance that always came upon him when someone near him had brushed close to death. Like combat, a focus close to madness. Perhaps there was no other way to watch over someone at the border between your own and your enemies.
And however many years he'd spent defending Valdemar with his life, seeing senseless violence - play and pettiness with someone's life - would always disturb him. The sword rested in his hands, swaying a counter-rhythm to the shifting water.
"You surprised me," murmured Stefen. His voice was shaky, but carried an odd pride. "Figured you could fight a bit...wouldn't have sworn you could hold Loa on t'river. Remind me not to wager 'gainst you."
"You don't gamble."
"How you know that?" Stefen grunted.
"I'm starting to understand you."
It was an instinct born of that same fever. Visions from a border. Seeing someone snatched from death would always make it seem one knows them.
You treasure every last detail, even the ones you shouldn't be able to see. The posessiveness of it made him feel all the more mad - because it's you, and I would have been lost here without you. The streets are yours - they're your tamed three-headed beast that should have eaten me alive - and now I am keeping watch for you.
What you watched over, had to be your own.
Stefen's low laugh was broken by a gale of coughs, and Valdir dared to turn his head. Stef's pale face lay in the shaft of sun from Loa's window. His hair fanned on her pillows in dull, flat clumps. "You might be. S'true, I don't like to bank on nothing I can't control."
"Makes two of us." And yet.
"And yet you trusted me," Stefen wondered, and Valdir's stomach dropped like ballast lead.
With nothing. There's nothing in me to trust with. Not so much as a name to swear on. "I was right to do so. You brought me here at your own peril," he replied, his level voice belying the currents that ran under him. "Why did he do it?"
"Ain't no use asking," Stefen said. "I don't chase no reasons of Silona's, or anyone else's -"
"Why not?" Valdir challenged. "It's not because you don't know, is it? It's because you do know."
Stefen was still as the Sunrise strained in the roiling water. "Yeah, I do know. I know it's always my own fault. I come by evil through my own mistakes. I think too much on that, I couldn't do aught."
There was more truth in those words than he could bear to think on.
Stefen had turned in the narrow, hard bunk until he faced the sun. Light bleached his closed eyelids to a porcelain white. How old are you? he wondered, unsure when the tough young man had become a sleeping child, as if his youth had been smuggled past the border gate, hidden in a wad of sunlight. "What mistake?" Valdir asked softly. He held Loa's sword straight down, heedless of the scratches he was cutting into the polished wood of her cabin's floor.
"I got between the two of them, and he ain't forgiven me for it. I owed Loa a favour - a hella favour - and I wanted it off my back. She was a kid, then - fought me bare-handed in a rowboat. Still think I held my own 'cause I hadn't a choice otherwise." His words were muffled, as if he had turned his face away. "Loa knew I was from Scale land, so she asked me to take her to Lighthouse Market - her! You imagine, a face anyone would know even without them marks, walking Scale streets with her?"
Valdir bit his lip, remembering a border. Remembering what it felt like to draw fire.
"I were scared as hell, but I figured I had to do as she said - if I stayed in hock to the Morn they'd only pull me in on something worse. And I knew how I could get her there. I could work any man down from a fight. Talking to them or singing for them...I can take the fight out of them, even easier than making pain go away. And didn't seem right to tell her no when all she wanted was a walk downtown - not her fault Silona sooner torch Lighthouse Market than go trade there. Took some talking to make it happen - telling toughs to put their knives back down, because she weren't starting nothing and did they really want the Morn on their heads? After that jaunt, I started hearing from other people who wanted to get places they shouldn't be - wanted to pay me, like I was a riverman running a ferry. Was just a coin here or there at first, but Polly got me figured - all kinds of types stopping by the market. She remembered me, was the funny thing. Used to see me there when I was younger." When you were - He pictured a child growing up in the riverside smokerooms. Your life really couldn't have been more different from mine, he thought painfully.
"Poll had some words with Loa, then she tells me she wants to meet with Silona and with Yorann. Rockharbour was my sleeping dog - I didn't want to get near those teeth, no way, and I wondered about giving the whole thing up - couldn't keep going near Lighthouse Market if I'd let down the Duchess. But it was like I was seeing my first chance to knock a hole through the walls. I didn't like people's marks being something that trapped them in a corner. Wasn't right with me. Wanted to see people go as they please, whatever ink someone stuck them with."
"So that's how you made the song truce?"
"I just got them to the river. They all wanted each other dead, but I figured out what things they wanted more than they wanted each other dead." That, there, is the very essence of negotiation, Valdir marvelled. "They all went up to Silona's boat, and I sang while they talked it out. No one quite remembers what they said no more," he smiled. "They left saying people should go as they want, buy goods wherever they want. It all works better now," he observed. "Silona even ask Poll if it's safe to leave the harbour, sometimes. She don't lie to him, either."
You're unbelievable. "You count that a mistake?"
"Bit of peace that won't last, and Silona after me for his daughter straying hither-tither along the riverside?" He coughed again, the river still trapped in his lungs. "I don't know. I made a bit of coin for a lot of worry."
"Loa said there'd be blood in the streets without you -"
"Got news for you," Stefen noted, and Valdir's eyes cast down, remembering the sight of the withered Dotrid. Under his feet, he felt the whole vessel strain again. The pieces of Stefen's stories mingled in his mind. Light and music, blood and stone, all swept into the same current.
Harri's blood, and the deck lurched under him.
The door swung open and he brought his blade into a guard, but Loa raised her empty hands as she stepped inside. She kicked the door closed behind her. "Down, you're good, I ain't going to try you again." He complied, frankly glad to be granted her amnesty. Loa's tunic was still heavy with damp, and her face bore a bruised expression that hinted she'd sooner be alone. "You were good," she repeated, as if that were all that mattered.
"I hesitated," Valdir admitted, eyes still searing with the image of her leaping for the river, hawk-dive swift through the air.
"Was it you my father was testing?" She swung onto the edge of her bunk, and shook Stefen's shoulder. "You done shivering yet?"
"Barely started," Stefen informed her, but he sat up gingerly, tucking in his clothes. He retrieved his tunic from where he'd laid it beside his body; with a little magical assistance, it had dried out enough to wear. "You been having words with him?"
"One or two," she replied. Valdir was beginning to read their games of understatement; while Stefen rested, he'd heard Silona shouting and muttering below. Loa, he'd heard not at all, and her quietness had somehow seemed more troubling. "He never been to Cul Aber?" she glowered. "Well, I never set foot in Iftel. Left as a babe in arms."
A comeback she'd clearly thought of too late to make use of, and it showed her youth, with all its ferocity and stickled loyalties. Stefen was watching her warily, as if being near her furthered his error.
Valdir couldn't afford to tread careful on her deck any longer. "You know something about what happened to Harri," he said.
She shook her head. "Wish I did. Two nights ago, was like the river turned my head around. Was that vicious rainy night, remember?" Stefen nodded, and it took Valdir a moment to also register his recognition, as he had supposedly spent that night under the same clouds as they had. "I was up on deck past midnight, and sober as a nun," she stressed. "And I saw lights dancing downriver. Oh, don't you ask," she sighed at Stefen's sceptical expression. "I hit myself upside the head enough times. It was dark over south - Lighthouse Market already packed up, if Poll had the lanterns out at all. But on the north side, there were lights moving on the river. I figured it was some fool got his boat swept out into the Rockharbour after one too many, and I went north along the wall to take a look at him. But I never saw a ship. Only light."
:Tran,: he called, and relayed her words while they were fresh in his mind, leaving the contact open so Tantras could hear anything else he might hear. "What kind of light?" he asked.
She hesitated. "Could have thought it was just a few lanterns from up here. Looked strange when I got close - white lights, red lights, moving about near the traps. There was barely any moon that night," she added, bristling at Stefen's incredulous expression. "I ain't trying to play you a fool," she insisted.
"I taught you that song," Stef said quietly. "About the will-o'-wisp, wandering light of the hells?"
"I saw it," she glowered. "You don't see things made up for songs."
"I do lately," Stefen said his voice flat and numb. "I seen a Herald out on the streets, and you seen the will-o'-wisp, or something right like. What if everything in music just shakes out sometimes -"
"You're hysterical," she said flatly, but her eyes narrowed at Valdir. "All that's shook out is trouble." Loa shook her head. "You need out of here. Next time he throws you in, not sure I can catch you. Maybe he won't let me. Damn lucky you got caught on something that time. Tree fallen under the dock, or something?"
Stefen shook his head at her slowly. It was not the first time he'd seen someone try, and fail, to piece together their perceptions around the intrusion of magic into their world.
"Anyway, you got to get abovedecks. There's this kid throwing stones at the prow," Loa continued. "Thyll was going to throw a grapeshot back, but the kid said she needed to talk to you."
"Huh, who'd be wanting to -"
"Not you," Loa corrected him. "You," she nodded at Valdir.
Valdir stepped down from the ship, and felt himself sway on his toes; Stefen looked up at him and grinned. "Morn got a lot to say about land rats -" He broke off suddenly, staring up towards the wall.
At the river-wall, a group of uniformed watchmen were looking down at them.
Stefen grabbed his arm and nonchalantly ambled up the quay, glancing along to the next one to the north of them. No barges were moored there; it was empty save for a few children slinging stones across the river - certainly it offered no cover. Vanyel's insides lurched, unbalanced and increasingly tense, Stefen's continuing shivers rattling his bones. Stefen dropped abruptly low, dragging Vanyel with him and playing with his bootlaces - and he pursed his lips to whistle a note so high that Vanyel barely even heard it.
From amid the crowd of watchmen, he heard a dog bark. On the quay, a child turned - a pale young girl - and she scrambled from her perch to run toward them. On the path along the wall, she ran in an inch of water; it would have soaked her shoes rotten if she'd been wearing any.
"Need your boots shined, mister Stefen?" she asked as she neared them, grinning angelically as if to indicate that she had seen exactly how Stefen had most recently got his boots wet. All of eight years old, and Valdir wouldn't have liked to fight her for a penny, nor take her on in a game of japes.
"Rayet," he greeted her, voice low and uneasy. "I heard someone wanted a word in Valdir's ear. Mayhap it's about your friends up there above the harbour -"
"Eyito," she spat. "My friends would cut their guts out and throw 'em in the river."
"I knew I was one of your friends," Stefen replied softly; nevertheless, she cupped her palm and twitched it in a mercenary gesture. "Spill," he demanded. "I know you always knows what's what."
She crossed her arms and grinned cockily. "There's a big man in town, some kind of tija. He told the watchmen to make trouble with the market-men. Tassa says they must want more money from the Rockharbour," she shrugged. "Now they're looking for a man who tried to buy a stolen ring. Must've belonged to someone important..." She looked up at Valdir, eyes bright and wily, and Stefen cut her off with a shake of his hand.
He reached into his damp pocket, and Valdir glanced a clutch of silver. "Here, and stay away from them," he hissed. "Don't think you're safe." Rayet snorted, reaching for his hand, and he pulled it back as she touched it. "I mean it. They don't look at you and see someone born here - they just see something they can sell for easy money. These thin times won't end when the river goes down, and one day, you'll be in the wrong place when they get greedy." She sighed longsufferingly, and Stefen opened his palm to allow her to snatch her silver. He added something else, in rapid Cejan, and she frowned thoughtfully as she hurried away.
:Tantras,: he thought frantically as he turned away from Stefen's searching gaze. :Who set the watchmen on me?:
Tantras responded with shock and a flash of indignation, and Vanyel relayed the child's information to him even as Stefen leaned into his ribs. "We're going to walk right up near them like we don't think nothing of it, right?" From here, they had little choice; it was that or the river. "Then we split south, and you follow me." Stefen squeezed his hand - his fingers still so cold - and Valdir dared to look in his eyes. There was a knife-edge light in them, a dangerous certainty and commitment. Like staring into the city. You can't afford truth, and when you see danger, you can't hesitate.
:Van,: Tantras sounded near-frantic. :The captain said he 'broadened his investigation' -:
:He wants a scapegoat who's not with a gang. Preferably not from the city,: Vanyel conveyed the obvious as he trod the creaking wooden boards at Stefen's shoulder, even as he wondered why it was obvious. Why do they want to blame an outsider?
A knotted plank bowed under his foot. Closer. The nearest watchman looked straight at him.
:Tran, can't you call them off?:
Stefen bolted before he'd completed the thought, and Valdir was fast on his tail, feet slipping as they leapt to the path that ran south along the river, scraping his body against the wall. He ran on, boots splashing through the high water, hearing footsteps thunder behind them. They ran past the next quay, and onto another. Tantras's mind found his again, their connection shaky. :With or without blowing your cover?:
Valdir grimaced. :I'm not sure what it's still worth,: he answered as Stefen veered unexpectedly up the quay. His feet realised why almost before his eyes did; the path ahead became a stair that led only back upwards, and he saw movement atop the wall, men rushing to cut them off, as Stefen slowed and stepped into a moored rowboat. He ran gingerly toward its stern, arms spread against its violent rocking, and he looked back to Valdir before he leapt.
Stefen barely reached his goal - a long barge moored from the next quay, heavily laden and low to the river, and he cleared its edge in the company of a torrent of water. Valdir gasped, and as he felt the pursuers nearing he called a net of magic, steadying the tiny vessel as he ran to its far edge, holding the other in place. He leapt, and Stefen grabbed his hand, scrambling and pulling him over the barge's canvas roof, onward and upriver. "Not safe yet," he called as they ran. "They'll come down the southmost harbour stair - less we get away first -"
Valdir heard shouting behind - doubtless they'd reached the same conclusion. He realised he knew where Stef was going, and he followed - bolder this time, unfazed by the shaky paths of rotting wood, even now that suspect floor was under inches of rushing water. :Tran,: he pleaded, hearing voices behind - above - a frantic regrouping. :If they don't stop this madness -:
:Not much I can do unless you're willing to let them arrest you,: he replied, with the grimness that came from seeing something slip from your control. :Speaking of, I did get them to show me Stefen's record.:
Stefen was getting ahead of him. They'd reached the path by the foot of the stair - the route ahead running shaky and fragmented and finally out. :Tell me,: he urged.
:Wasn't much of a record, but it's the blank spots I'm starting to notice. The southerly watch-post took him in once for vagrancy. That was five years ago, and there's nothing said about a punishment - only 'Not known of Valdemar.':
The words dropped through murky water. He scrabbled, grasping half of a truth before it slipped from his grip.
Valdir drew in a breath of chill air, and leapt up from the dock to the stone ledge of the wall.
His boots squelched as water ran from the soles; ahead, Stefen was moving faster than should have been possible, and Valdir mimicked his stooped posture. They were putting distance from their pursuers, but for how long? Wasn't it obvious where they were headed? But he couldn't think of a better place to shed a tail but the Lighthouse Market. Any truth could get lost in those coloured lights.
It was too early, he knew as soon as they'd rounded the curve and could see the makeshift stone beach. No fires lit, the crowd merely a clutch of sad smokers; the sun barely touched the mountains far over the city. Stefen jumped atop the stones and crouched, turning to watch Valdir with his hands touching the rough stone ground. He was still as a statue - wet hair clinging to his face, scarf trailing in the river as his hands rested flat on stones torn from the jagged edge of his city.
He reached for Valdir's hands. Cold, gripping hard, rising to his feet and pulling Valdir into the market's hollow depths. No time to linger by the water. The caverns were barely lit, and no more populated than the dreary jetty. There's nowhere to hide, it's too small, they'll be watching every exit - "Where's Poll," muttered Stefen, turning through the cavern, tugging curtains this way and that. One revealled a sleeper, a groaning drunk. "Polly!" Stefen hissed.
Valdir felt steel at his back.
He spun on raw instinct, kicking his attacker and turning to retaliate before he knew what he'd done or remembered he was unarmed. "Fuck," hissed the young man clutching his knees on the floor. "Fuck - what's you - Stef, you -"
"You watch who you pull a knife on, Jorry," and Stefen slapped Valdir's shoulder. Not-so-harmless Valdir. Valdir, reputable duellist and brawler, fugitive from the law - and a long way out of my hands. "Where's Poll?"
"I heard you."
The suddenness of Duchess Polly's appearance - a hand to her head in feined delicacy, a silk robe draped loose around her body - was Valdir's one comfort; somewhere nearby, she had a means to disappear within the spider-nest of tunnels. Not to hide from trouble; trouble had only summoned her, ready to milk and trade whatever she could.
"What brings you in such a tearing damn hurry to my duchy so awful early of a morning?" she continued, a knife's edge in her voice.
"Polly," Stefen pleaded. "All I done for you, and I don't need nothing but a place to hole up from the law -"
"The law? I can't fucking believe you," she hissed. "You spend years telling me you won't do nothing to make trouble with the law, and now you -"
"I don't got time to explain." He was swaying, a hand to the wall of the tunnel as if still lurching with the floodwater. The poise he'd had had mere hours ago was gone. Valdir thought of his first sight of Stefen - the easy, feline balance he kept as he stalked across a filigree canopy of temporary alliances. Silona had somehow sent them crashing through that delicate net.
Polly strode angrily through the maze of tunnels, jerking her head for them to follow. He heard soft sounds close by - the night's first tenants at the Lighthouse Market, doubtless paying by the hour. She paused to listen, and then pulled back a bright patterned curtain - Valdir could only be glad that no one occupied the tiny space behind. "Anyone asks me or mine, he's a sailor I seen around and he's paying you. Make it convincing," she added nastily, and Stefen pulled him into the dim space as she walked away.
He slid the curtain closed behind them, leaving them alone in a stone hollow barely four feet deep.
Valdir had nowhere to look but at the floor, which was littered with pillows and soft cloths. A thin shaft of lanternlight filtered through the curtains, flickering the colours of each panel. His eyes adjusted even as Stefen discarded half his clothing, scattering boots and breeches, cloak and tunic on the ground, his shirt and scarf still trailing down his body. "Got to be ready for a show," he explained. "She's right about that much. Have your trews off, at least."
The lanterns outside shook, sending Stefen's shadow scampering about the rockface. Valdir loosened his clothes. He was shaking and sweating, the stress of their escape wearing its way through his body. Oh gods, whose body? What was he now, some sailor? He stripped to the skin in moments - remaining half-clad like Stefen would have felt somehow more obscene.
Stefen's arms caught around his shoulders, drawing him down to the floor. Soft feathery pillows and silk drank up his sweat and grated soft on his aching nerves. Stef was almost still, an ear pressed close to the earth. Listening for footfalls - His eyes flickered, and he pulled Valdir close, trailing blue silk about their bodies as he kissed him.
Modesty deserted him. It cowered in some low place far away, perhaps alongside his name.
They kissed slow and open-mouthed, Stefen's legs catching his in a loose embrace, chill and soft from water. It was enough to make him feel he could melt into the floor. Somewhere beyond he heard the thud of footsteps and a rumble of voices - raised, arguing, Polly's unmistakeable tones declaring something unintelligible. Every muscle told him to run or hide or at least free his hands to weave illusion; he froze, shaking, and Stefen pulled closer and grabbed at a sheet behind him, pulling it over their heads.
Everything narrowed - no sound but breathing, nothing to see but Stefen's face close against his. His senses no longer mattered. It was like being in combat, where fear and awareness came together into perfect focus, complete ability to act. Nothing - no name, no dignity - would come between him and survival. He raised his head only to draw air, and saw the shadow of a man through two layers of cloth. He turned his face on reflex and kissed Stefen again, pressing them together, feeling silk caught between their bodies.
He heard the rattling twitch of the brass curtain-rings, and cold air washed over them.
Someone spat on the stone floor outside, and the footsteps moved on.
They stayed close and unmoving for long seconds. Valdir opened his eyes, and he sat slowly upright, the veil falling languidly away from him. No one had lingered to watch them; he pulled the curtain back closed. Stefen looked up at him from the floor, still lying on his back. His eyes were the dark green of the stones beneath the river, and without a touch or a word, Valdir was pulled back down into their swell.
Their next kiss was harder and impossibly closer, tongues lapping together far inside his mouth. They moved apart to breathe. "Convincing enough?" Stefen whispered.
"For them or for you?" he replied. Did I play my part well, good sir? Oh, gods - if it's come to this, I can't keep lying. "Wait," he continued, before Stefen could reply, slipping his hand between their bodies, pressing him away. "There's - I have to tell you -"
"Spare me," whispered Stefen, and he shook his head. "You don't tell me nothing. My rule is, I only do this with strangers."
"I only do this with friends." The truth spilled out unexpected, and Stef smiled at him, wide and wry; Valdir gasped as if the tide had broken over them and left him breathless, far adrift from who he should be, what Stefen should mean, what they should be doing. I'm a stranger. Just a body in a whorehouse, for a man who didn't so much as know his name. He doesn't want my name, my reputation, my history. He wants...me.
The thought shocked him, even as Stefen moved against his body and whispered, "So we can't. Couldn't ever."
Except now. Where they touched, he could feel the dark edges of Stefen's lust - a deep shadow in him, a fear of knowing another that defied simple understanding. But the shadows seemed further out of reach with each breath, no longer mattering.
Kisses wandered, making their way down his neck. Stef stretched out a knowing hand into the pillows piled against the wall. From some cranny in the rockface, he produced a wooden box. Inside were the expected brothel accoutrements; waxed linen sheaths for careful women, tools for the deviant, a bottle of oil. "How you want to do this?"
He didn't even have to think twice. There was nothing on his mind any more except the hard cock pressed against him. He ran his hands down Stefen's body, reaching between them. Stef's penis was hot in his hand, and with the satisfying swell of it resting on his palm his thumb explored the head, shifting the soft skin over it. That made Stef gasp, and he slipped down the hollow as he touched, knees sliding across the sheets beneath them. He bent low to kiss Stefen more intimately, lips wrapping tight around him, and the young man drew in a ragged breath. "Fuck, you this nice to all your whores?"
He raised his head. "Long time since I last took a whore," he admitted, and he fought the urge to laugh hysterically at the thought of the absurd task that young woman had set herself to on the night of his fifteenth birthday. He discarded the memory, favouring this fantasy within a fantasy; an impossibly beautiful young man spread under him like a welcoming shore, just wanting him and asking what he wanted in return. It was more than he'd dared ask for in so many years. This shouldn't be real and I shouldn't be -
He lowered his lips slowly around Stefen's cock, and with every languid touch he felt an echo of Stef's pure pleasure. Stef gasped and writhed under him, and he felt a surprisingly steady hand stroke at his face. "Say what you want," Stef insisted.
He'd never been good at answering, and it had been so long since anyone had asked. "Inside me," he whispered when he next paused to breathe.
Stefen flashed a smile, lit bright with filtered lanternlight. He sat upright, taking Valdir's face in his hands and kissing his lips, his chin, his throat, as he pressed him slowly down on his back in their soft hideaway. The cork squeaked out from the bottle of oil; an unmistakable cue to raise his knees. A moment later Stefen's mouth touched the head of his cock, teasing it between his lips while he set about demonstrating exactly how deft his oiled hands were.
"Long time since you last had a friend?" Stef asked softly, in a moment of respite from toying with the tightness inside him.
"Yes -" Or I never - Valdir's not me, he's never been loved, never been touched like this - He was trying, failing, not to moan out loud at the careful sucking and fingering when Stefen began to sing.
The low sound distracted him - a discord, humming around a mouthful of his cock. Barely an extra tickle, a party trick - but then Stefen's fingers turned inside him and he gasped, feeling a strange, numb pleasure. His song. I can't feel the least discomfort. All I can feel is him touching me and wanting me... He felt the sound pass right through him, falling right through to the stone, and wherever it touched him, he felt...completely desired.
Stefen was still singing low, wordless notes as he withdrew his questing hand, leaving him aching with lust, pulse beating to the music that lingered inside him. Stefen's voice rang free about the stone enclosure as Valdir watched him oil his cock. He fell silent only as he reached an arm about Valdir and slid slowly inside him.
And it had been far too long since he'd felt this.
Slow, the sensation building into something too much, too right, to exist in the false world he'd spun around them. Stefen looked down at him as they moved, and Vanyel wrapped his legs hard around him and looked back into strange eyes, hard green-brown eyes. He'd never, ever done this. Not been fucked by a man who didn't know his name. I'm a perfect stranger, staring out at you from inside a friend who never was. Each move - each smooth, skilled, rhythmic stroke - was as to pound his illusory self into specks of light and dust. His head fell back on the pillows and he moaned low as Stefen fucked that nameless stranger, head ducking to kiss his neck hard, hard enough to bruise him. To mark him. Briefly, only until he was gone.
As Stefen thrust into him, his eyes flicked from closed to open. The stray scarf was falling off him, silk shifting over his back as he arced upwards; Vanyel felt out the dark bruise that still showed through his shirt, at the side of his thin ribcage. His hand closed around Vanyel's cock, grasping delicately as he moved deep in his body, catching the rhythm of the song that was fading into his memory - the song that Stefen used to make his body feel so perfect. So wanted. He reached up his arms and Stefen murmured, "Oh, Valdir," and Vanyel clutched him in sudden, desperate rage. Why must I share you with someone who doesn't exist? Why am I a stranger?
The desolation led him into ecstasy.
He pulled Stefen into him as every inch of his body shook with the force of his pleasure, felt Stef gasp and list against him only moments later. Slowly, Stefen rolled to the floor, a tangle of limbs and linen and silk.
Vanyel sat up slowly, and looked down at his lover curled beside him. The scarf had fallen under him, forgotten, and his shirt had risen up above the shadow on the side of his torso. For the first time, he saw it clear. Not a wound. Not a bruise. Words and numbers, black Cejan script on his skin. Like the red-lit girls on the beach. Like proud, hiding Tajinet. Marks that meant less than a person, less than a name.
He tried to understand, and Stefen looked back at him coldly.
-->Part 8
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AND ALL THE EMOTIONS. GAH. THE MINDFUCKERY HERE IS SO AMAZING. Why is it so fun to torture Vanyel. So worth waiting for! <3
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(Yeah I had to stop and comment halfway through because seriously. I can't see Van getting it on with Stefen any other way. Seriously you are the best and I love this)
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ffff when I was editing all this earlier I realised how horrifyingly much heavy lifting that scene was trying to do. it wants to be an action scene and a cliche fuck-or-die PWP and a Vanyel identity crisis and a massive slab of plot, I DON'T EVEN. Really glad it didn't fall to bits under all that.
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That said, I would not have put it past Vanyel to resist even when nakedly snuggling a young man with a brilliant voice of whom he is enamored. If anyone could do it, Vanyel probably could manage it.
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It took me until the second read to notice the shift from Valdir to Vanyel
^I combed the Valdir part of Promise before starting this, and found he's Valdir in the narration throughout except for a few specifically flagged moments. In this fic, he's generally only been Vanyel when conversing with Tantras and Yfandes (plus a couple of other specific moments where it made sense, eg. when he was examining Stef with magesight). He's been Valdir with Stef up until now... I tried to name him as few times as possible when they were getting down to business - I'm hung up on Vanyel's insistence on total honesty with his lovers, but there's that liminal point where he can't put a label to himself. Even continuing to lie by omission, Van has to be real with himself.
and he doesn't know how young Stefen is...
I am figuring that the context is preventing him from noticing. Stef is self-sufficient, he's been socially dominant, and he's showing Van around a world he knows like the back of his hand. Maybe it's partly about class - unlike the Bardic students, Stef is not the kind of young person whose virtue Van has been cued to respect. So I guess he can have a meltdown about it later XD
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But then, of course, YOU LEFT ME HANGING AGAIN!!! There are so many things I can't wait to see, namely Vanyel finally revealing who he is (of course), but also Tantras noticing that bruise, Vanyel kicking everyone's ass, etc. etc. If those things are not coming, I'm sure whatever is will be equally engrossing, in a terrifying-I'm-reading-this-NSFW-fic-at-work kind of way.
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Tantras noticing that bruise
CHEKHOV'S HICKEY. I AM GRATIFIED THAT YOU PICKED UP ON WHERE THIS IMPORTANT PLOT POINT IS INEVITABLY LEADING. (No lie I already wrote the part where Tantras notices the hickey, like months ago, because awkward Vanyel is for always).
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I have reread this at least five times now. I really can't get over it. Please, please do not get discouraged or stop, because this is, without a doubt, my favorite Van/Stef fic to date.
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I don't even know what it IS about awkward Van. There is no other character who I awkward-fetishise like this. Awkward Van is just so wrong and so right.