Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers: Magical Tales of Love and Seduction

The Eye of the Storm Kelley Eskridge

I AM A CHILD of war. It’s a poor way to start. My village was always ready to defend, or to placate, or to burn again. Eventually the fighting stopped, and left dozens of native graves and foreign babies. We war bastards banded together by instinct; most of us had the straw hair and flat faces of westerners, and we were easy marks. Native kids would find one or two of us alone and build their adrenaline with shouts of Your father killed my father until someone took the first step in with a raised arm or a stick. These encounters always ended in blood and cries — until the year I was fifteen, when a gang of village young played the daily round of kill-the-bastard and finally got it right: When Ad Homrun’s older brother pulled her from under a pile of screaming boys and girls, and Ad’s neck was broken and her right eye had burst. The others vanished like corn spirits and left us alone in a circle of trampled grass, Ad lying in Tom’s arms, me trying to hold her head up at the right angle so that she would breathe again. It was my first grief.

It was no wonder our kind were always vanishing in the night. “You’ll go too,” my mother said for the first time when I was only seven. She would often make pronouncements as she cooked. I learned her opinions on everything from marjoram (“Dry it in bundles of six sticks and keep it away from dogs”) to marriage (“Some cows feel safest in the butcher’s barn”) while she kneaded bread or stripped slugs off fresh-picked greens.

It shocked me to hear her talk about my leaving as if it were already done. Ad was still alive in her family’s cottage a quarter mile from ours, and I believed that my world was settled; not perfect, but understandable, everything fast in its place. I peered from my corner by the fire while my mother pounded corn into meal, jabbing the pestle in my direction like a finger to make her point. “You’ll go,” she repeated. “Off to soldier, no doubt. Born to it, that’s why. No one can escape what they’re born to.”

“I won’t,” I said.

“You’ll go and be glad to.”

“I won’t! I want to stay with you.”

“Hmph,” she replied, but at supper she gave me an extra corn cake with a dab of honey. Food was love as well as livelihood for her. She never punished me for being got upon her while her man screamed himself dead in the next room; but she never touched me or anyone else unless she had to. I grew up with food instead of kisses. I ate pastries and hot bread and sausage pies like a little goat, and used them as fuel to help me run faster than my tormentors.

One of the childhood games Ad and I played was to wrap up in sheepskin and swan up and down the grass between her cottage and the lane, pretending to be princes in disguise. We were both tall, after all, and looked noble in our woolly cloaks. What more did one need? To be the first child of a king, Tom Homrun said, and our king already had one. There could only be one prince, only one heir. The rest were just nobles, and there were more of them than anyone bothered to count. What’s the good of being a royal if you’re as common as ticks on a dog? my mother would say, with a cackle for her own wit. But I had heard too many stories about the prince. My aunt’s third husband went to court for a meeting of royal regional accountants, and told us in his letters that the prince was fair and strong and already had the air of a leader. And puts me in mind of your Mars, he wrote my mother; something about the eyes. My mother paused after she’d read that part aloud, and looked at me with a still face. It thrilled me to be likened to the prince, and Ad was rigid with envy until Tom carved her a special stick to use as a scepter in our games, with a promise that he would never make me one no matter how hard I pleaded. I could not care about her stick, about her silence and hurt feelings, even though she was my only friend. My head was full of daydreams of walking through the streets of Lemon City, of being seen by the prince’s retainers and taken up into the citadel, marveled over, embraced, offered … what? My imagination failed me there, so I would start from the beginning and see it all again. I began giving the pigs orders, and delivering speeches of state to the group of alder trees near Nor Tellit’s farm.

They were different speeches after Ad died. At first they were simply incoherent weepings delivered from a throat so thick with snot that I barely recognized my own voice. It sounded adult and terrible, and filled me with a furious energy that I didn’t know how to use; until one afternoon when I had run dry of tears and instead picked up a fist-sized stone. I beat the alders until the rock was speckled with my blood. I washed my swollen hand in the village well and hoped that my rage would poison them all. Then I found Tom Homrun and asked him to teach me how to fight.

From the first I was like a pig at a slop pile, gulping down whatever he put in front of me, always rooting single-mindedly for more. He taught me to use my hands and elbows and knees, to judge distance, and to watch someone’s body rather than their eyes. It was hard at first to trust him and his teaching: I’d always thought of him as a native, as a danger, in spite of his fondness for his yellow-haired bastard sister. And it hadn’t occurred to me that he would have to touch me. Apart from Ad, I’d only touched my mother by accident, and the village kids in desperate defense: but this was new and electric. The first feel of his muscle against mine was so shocking that the hair on my arms and legs stood up. I was desperately uneasy to think that I might be moved by Tom after what I’d begun to feel for his sister, as if it were some kind of betrayal of Ad. But I was fascinated by the strength and the power of his body, the way it turned when he wished, held its balance, reached out and so easily made me vulnerable.

I was just sixteen when we began, and the sky was always gray with the start or end of snow. I learned to move when I was too cold, too sore, too tired. I learned to keep going. All the things I wanted — Ad, my mother, a life of endless hard blue days in the fields, and just one true friend with dark hair and a father still alive — all those precious things became buried under a crust of long outlander muscles. I began to imagine myself an arrow laid against the string, ready to fly. I looked at the village kids with my arrow’s eyes, and they stayed out of my way.

By the summer I knew enough not to knock myself silly. I was tired of the same exercises and hungry now for more than just revenge: I wanted to be a warrior. “Show me how to use a sword,” I begged Tom constantly, sometimes parrying an invisible adversary with a long stick.

“No,” he said for the hundredth time.

“Why not?”

“There’s no point until you get your full growth. You’re tall as me now, but you might make another inch or two before you’re done.”

“You didn’t make me wait to learn how to fight.”

“Swords are different. They change your balance. You’ve got to make the sword part of yourself, it’s not enough just to pick it up and wave it around. It’s true that you’ve learned well,” he added. “But you haven’t learned everything.”

“Then teach me everything.”

“Leave it alone, Mars.”

I had no idea I was going to do it: I had never given him anything but the obedience due a teacher. But I was so frustrated with behaving. “You teach me, damn you,” I said, and swung the stick as hard as I could at his ribs.

He softened against the blow and absorbed it. The stick was dry and thin, but still it must have hurt. It sounded loud, perhaps because we were both so silent.

I stammered, “Tom, truly, I was wrong to do it, I just …”

“You’re stupid, Mars.” His voice was very quiet. “You’re not the strongest, you never will be, and no sword will change that. I’m heavier and faster than you, and there’s thousands more like me out there.” He waved at the world beyond the fields, and when I turned my head, he reached out and twisted the branch away as easily as taking a stick from a puppy. “All you have are your wits and your body, if you can ever learn how to use them.”

What had we been doing, all these months? “I can use my body.”

A bruise I’d given him at the corner of his mouth stretched into a purple line. Then his smile changed into the stiff look that people wear when they are forcing themselves to a thing they’d rather not do; like the day that he’d had to butcher Ad’s favorite nanny goat while she cried into my shoulder. I did not like him looking at me as if I were that goat.

“You want to learn everything.” He nodded. “Well, then you shall.” And he came for me.

I managed to keep him off me for more than a minute, a long stretch of seconds that burned the strength from the muscles in my arms and legs. But he was right; he was too strong, too fast. First he got me down and then he beat me, his face set, his hands like stones against my ribs and my face. His last blow was to my nose, and when he finally stood up, he was spattered with me.

“This is everything, Mars. This is what I have to teach you. Become the weapon. Do it, and no one will touch you in a fight. Otherwise it’s only a matter of time before someone sends you to the next world in pieces.”

I was trying to spit instead of swallow; it made it harder to breathe, and every cough jarred my broken nose.

“I regret this,” he said remotely. “But every time we meet from now on will be like this until you win or you quit. If you quit, I’ll teach you nothing ever again. That’s the lesson. I don’t think you can do it, you know. I don’t think you’re ready. I wish you hadn’t pushed so hard.” He spoke as if he were talking to a stranger on the road.

He left me at the field’s edge, under a creamy blue sky and the alders that were scarred with months of practice; all those pointless hours. After a long time I dragged myself up and limped home, turning my head away as I passed the Homrun cottage so that I would not have to see whether Tom was watching. I let my mother bind my ribs, avoiding her questions and the silence that followed. Then I wrapped myself up in wool blankets and shivered all night, bruised and betrayed, frightened, and hopelessly alone.

He beat me badly half a dozen times in the next year. Between our fights, I practiced and worked and invented a thousand different ways to keep distance between us, to protect my body from his. None of it made a speck of difference.

The day came when I knew I could never win. There was no grand omen, no unmistakable sign. I was milking our goat and I suddenly understood that Tom was right. Someone would always be faster or stronger, and until I learned my place I would always be hurt and lonely. It was time to make peace and stop dreaming of Lemon City. I should be planning a fall garden, and tending Ad’s grave. So there, it was decided; and I went on pulling methodically at the little goat’s dry teats until she bleated impatiently and kicked at me to let her go. Then I sat on the milking stump and stared around me at the cottage, the tall birch that shaded it, the yard with the goat and the chickens, the half-tumbled stone wall that bounded our piece of the world. If someone had come by and said, “What are you looking at, Mars?”, I would have said Nothing. Nothing.

Massive storm clouds began moving up over my shoulder from the west. The shadow of the birch across the south wall faded, and the chickens scuttled into their coop and tucked themselves up in a rattling of feathers. The wind turned fierce and cold; and then the rain hammered down. I hunched on the stump until it occurred to me that I was freezing, that I should see the stock were safe and then get inside; and when I tried to stand the wind knocked me over like a badly pitched fence post. I pulled myself up. Again the wind shoved me down. And again. This time I landed on one of my half-dozen unhealed bruises. It hurt; and it made me so angry that I forgot about my numb hands and my despair. I stood again. There was a loud snap behind me. It took a long second to turn against the wind: By that time, the branch that the storm had torn from the birch tree was already slicing toward me like a thrown spear.

I took a moment to understand what was happening, to imagine the wood knifing through me, to see my grave next to Ad’s. Then the branch reached me, and I slid forward and to the right as if to welcome it; and as we touched I whirled off and away, staggered but kept my balance, and watched the branch splinter against the shed. The goat squealed from behind the wall; and I laughed from my still, safe place in the center of the storm.

I had an idea now, and the only way to test it was by getting beaten again, and so I did: but not as badly. When he’d finally let me up, Tom said, as always, “Do you give in?”

“No.”

He was supposed to turn and walk away. Instead, he kept hold of my tunic with his left hand and wiped his bleeding mouth with his right. He took his time. Then he said, “What was that first move?”

I shrugged.

“Who taught you that?”

I shrugged again, as much as I was able with one shoulder sprained.

“I expect I’ll be ready for it, next time.” He opened his hand and dropped me on my back in the dirt, and set off down the road toward the village. He favored his right leg just slightly: It was the first sign of pain he had ever shown. But that wasn’t what made me feel so good, what made the blood jizzle around under my skin: It was the way I’d felt fighting him. I treated him just like the flying birch limb — allowed him close, so close that we became a single storm, and for just a moment I was our center and I spun him as easily as if I were a wind and he a bent branch.

The next time went better for me, and the time after that. It became a great dance, a wild game, to see how close I could get to him, how little I could twist away and remain out of reach, just beyond his balance point. He was heavier than me, differently muscled: It taught me to go beyond strength and look instead for the instant of instability, the moment when I could make him overreach himself. It was exhilarating to enter into his dangerous space and to turn his weapons against him; it was delicious to be most safe when I was closest to my enemy. I didn’t notice my hurts anymore, except when parts of me stopped working. Then I would retreat to my corner by the cottage fire, sipping comfrey tea and reliving each moment, sucking whatever learning I could from the memory of each blow. My body and his became the whole of my world.

And the world was changing. I got those last two inches of growth and my body flung itself frantically into adulthood. I suppose it must have been happening all along underneath the sweat and the bruises and the grinding misery. But now that I was noticing it, it seemed to have come upon me all at once, and it was a different feeling from the days when Ad’s smile could make me feel impossibly clever. This was the lust I’d seen at the dark edges of the village common after the harvest celebration, the thing of skin and wordless noise. No one had told me it would feel like turning into an arrow from the inside out and wanting nothing more than something to sink myself into. Sometimes it was so strong that I would have thrown myself on the next person I met, if only there had been anyone who wouldn’t have thrown me right back. But there was no one. I could only burn and rage and stuff it all back into the whirlwind inside me: make myself a storm.

And so one day I finally won, and it was Tom who lay on one elbow, spitting blood. When the inside of his mouth had clotted, he said, “Well.” Then we were both silent for a while.

“Well,” he said later.

And: “You’ll be fine now. You’re a match for anyone, the way you fight. It’s okay to let you go now. You’ll be safe.”

And then he began to cry. When I bent over him to see if he was hurt more badly than I thought, he gripped my arm and kissed me. He did not stop me when I pulled away, and he did not try to hide his tears. I didn’t understand then what kind of love it is that kills itself to make the beloved safe: I only knew that my world had shaken itself apart and come back together in a way that did not include me anymore.

I told my mother that night that I would leave in a week. She did not speak, and all I could say over and over was “I have to go,” as if it were an apology or a plea. Later as I sat miserably in front of the fire, she touched the back of my head so softly that I wasn’t sure if I was meant to feel it. Her fingers on my hair told me that she grieved, and that her fear for me was like sour milk on the back of her tongue, and that in spite of it all she forgave me for becoming myself, for growing up into someone who could suddenly remind her of how she got me. I had traded scars and bruises with the village kids for years, but never before had I hurt someone I loved just by being myself; and in one day I had done it to the only two people left to me. I felt my world hitch and shake like a wet dog, and my choices fell over me like drops of dirty water: none of them clean.

I set off early, just past dawn. Over breakfast, my mother said, “Here’s a thing for you,” and handed me a long bundle. When I unwrapped it, the lamplight flickered across the blade inside and my mother’s sad and knowing eyes.

“Don’t look at me,” she said. “That Tom Homrun brought it around three days past and said I wasn’t to give it to you until you were leaving.”

There was no scabbard. I made a secure place for the sword in my belt, across my left hip.

“Feel like a proper soldier now, I expect,” my mother said quietly.

“I just feel all off balance,” I told her, and she smiled a little.

“You’ll be all right, then.” She nodded, then sighed, stood up, fussed with my slingbag. “I’ve put up some traveling food for you. And a flask of water as well, you never know when the next spring might be dry.”

I tried to smile.

“Which way are you heading?”

“East. In-country.”

She nodded again. “I thought you might head west.”

“Mum!” I was shocked. “Those are our enemies.”

“You’ve had more enemies here than ever came out of the west, child,” she said. “I just wondered.”

I took a breath. “I would never do anything to hurt you, Mum. You’ve been nothing but good to me.” Another breath. “Tell Tom … give him my thanks.” Opening the door, the damp, gray air in my face. “I love you, Mum.” Kissing her dry cheek. “I love you.” Three steps out now, her standing in the door, half in shadow, one hand to her face. “Goodbye, Mum.” Four more steps, walking backward now, still looking at her. “Goodbye.” Turning away; walking away; leaving. Her voice catching up with me, “I’ve loved you, Mars. Godspeed.” The bend in the road.

I was alone on the road for a week. Every day brought me something new; a stand of unfamiliar trees, a stream of green water, a red-hooded bird that swooped from tree to tree above me for a hundred paces before it flashed away into the woods. I walked steadily. I didn’t think about home or the future. I became more thin. I played with the sword. It wasn’t balanced well for me, but I thought a good smith could remedy that, and meanwhile I learned not to overreach myself with the new weight at the end of my arm. Carrying it on my hip gave me a persistent pain in my lower back, until I found a rolling walk that carried the sword forward without swinging it into my leg at each step. Ad would have called it swagger, but she would have liked it. There was one moment, in a yellow afternoon just as the road lifted itself along the rim of a valley, when I could hear her laugh as if she were only a step behind me, and I missed her as fiercely as the first month after her death. And I kept going.

On the eighth day I met people.

I heard them before I saw them; two speaking, maybe more silent in their group. I stopped short and found myself sweating, as if their sound was warm water bubbling through the top layer of my skin. I hadn’t thought at all about what to do with other people. I had met less than a dozen strangers in my life.

“I think there’s something in the wood,” one of the voices said brightly.

“A wolf?” A hint of laughter.

“A bear.”

“A giant.”

“A creature with the body of an eagle and a pig’s head and teeth as big as your hands.”

I was beginning to feel ridiculous; it made me move again. I came out of the trees into an open place where my road met another running north and south. Just beyond the crossroads, three people sat with their backs against a low stone wall that bounded a meadow. I slowed my step. I had no idea how one behaved, and I’m sure it showed. The woman who called to me had the same glittery amusement in her voice that I’d heard as she’d described all the fabulous monsters I might be.

“Why, it’s not a bear. Ho, traveler.” She nodded. I felt awkward and I wondered if my voice would work properly after so long in its own company, so I only returned her nod, hitched up my belt, and kept walking. As soon as it was clear that I meant to pass them by, she scrambled to her feet, scattering breadcrumbs and a piece of cheese out of her lap into the grass. “Luck, don’t,” the man said, and grabbed but missed her. She darted toward me. I turned to face her, my hands out, waiting.

“Ah, ha,” she said, and stopped out of my reach. “Perhaps a bear cub after all. I don’t mean to detain you against your will, traveler. We have Shortline cheese to share, and we’d welcome news of the world beyond this road.”

She was relaxed, smiling, but she watched my body rather than my face, and her knees were slightly bent, ready to move her in whatever direction she needed to go. She looked strong and capable, but I could see a weakness in her stance, a slight cant to her hips. I could probably take her, I thought.

I put my hands down. “The place I’ve come from is so small, you’d miss it if you looked down to scratch. But I can trade flatcakes for a wedge of cheese and your news.”

“Fair enough,” she said.

She was Lucky, and the man was Ro. The other, silent woman was Braxis. We ate cheese and my mother’s cake in the afternoon sun, and they told me about the north, and I gave them what I knew about the west. I was nervous, but gradually their laughter, their worldliness, won me over. They never asked a question that was too personal, and they gave exactly as much information about themselves as I did, so I never felt at a disadvantage.

“What is it you want from me?” I asked finally. I don’t know exactly what made me say it. Maybe it was the combination of the warm gold sun and the warm gold cheese, the bread and the cider from Braxis’s wineskin. Maybe it was hearing about the great cities to the north, Shirkasar and Low Grayling, and the massive port of Hunemoth, the way they made me see the marketplaces and the moonlight on the marbled plazas of the noble houses. Maybe it was the looks the three of them traded when I answered their questions.

Braxis raised an eyebrow in my direction. It was Ro who answered.

“Okay, so you know when something’s going on under your nose. That’s good. Can you fight?”

I tensed. “I’ve told you how I grew up. I can fight.”

“We’re going to Lemon City, to the auditions. We need a fourth.”

“What auditions?”

“Hoo hoo,” Lucky said with a grin.

“Three times a year they hold an audition for the city guard,” Ro said. “They only accept quads, they think it’s the most stable configuration for training and fighting.”

“So,” I said. I thought of Tom under the alders, of Lemon City as I’d imagined it with Ad.

“So you probably noticed there are only three of us.”

“You came all this way from Grayling without a fourth?”

“No, of course not,” Ro said patiently. “He left us two days ago. He found true love in some stupid little town with probably only one bloodline, but he didn’t care. He’s a romantic, much good may it do him in the ass end of nowhere.”

“And you’d take me just like that, not knowing me at all.”

“What do we need to know?” Lucky said. “You breathe, you can stand up without falling over. You’re on the road to Lemon City, aren’t you? Do you want a job or not?”

“You mean for money?” She shook her head as if she couldn’t credit my being so dumb. But I’d expected to have to find honest work, meaning something dirty and bone-tiring, before I could start looking for someone to train with. The idea of getting tired, dirty, and paid to train was so exciting I could hardly believe it was real.

Ro said, “We’ll offer you a trial on the road. Travel with us to Lemon City and we’ll see if we want to take it any farther.”

“Not without a fight,” Braxis said. We all looked at her; Ro and Lucky seemed as surprised that she’d spoken as they did at what she’d said.

“I don’t take anyone on without knowing if they can hold their own,” she said reasonably. “Not even on trial. That’s the whole point of a quad, isn’t it? Four walls, stable house. We need strong walls.”

“They train you, Brax,” Ro responded. “All we have to do is get past the gate.”

“No,” I said slowly. “She’s right. And so are you: I do want to go to Lemon City, but it’s got to be properly done.” They looked at me with a variety of expressions: Braxis impassive, Ro with his head tilted and a wrinkle in his forehead, Lucky grinning with her arms akimbo.

“I can’t explain it. But I need this to be something I can be proud of. It needs to be earned.”

“Gods, another romantic,” Ro muttered.

We climbed over the wall into the field, and laid aside our swords. Lemon City was just behind that cloud, and I was a hot wind. It was such an amazing feeling that I almost forgot that I’d never really fought anyone except Tom, that I didn’t yet know if I could. Then Braxis’s strong arms reached for me.

When we were done, and Brax had finished coughing up grass, she said, “Fine. On the way there, you can teach us how to do that.”

We began to learn each other: Braxis woke up surly; Lucky sang walking songs out of tune, and she knew a hundred of them; Ro was good at resolving differences between others and peevish when he didn’t get his own way. I wasn’t sure what they were discovering about me. I’d never lived with anyone except my mother: It was one more thing I didn’t know how to do. I watched everything and tried not to offend anyone.

We got into the routine of making camp early in the afternoon, to keep the last hours of light for practicing swords and stormfighting. It didn’t take them long to work out that I barely knew one end of my sword from the other. I was ashamed, and halfway expected them to kick me back up the road. They surprised me. “I’ve never seen anyone fight like you do,” Ro said matter-of-factly. “If we can trade learning between us, it makes us all stronger.” Then he set about showing me the basics.

Two weeks later it was Lucky who came toward me with her sword. I looked at Ro. He smiled. “I’ve given you enough so that you can at least keep up with what she’s got to show you. She’s the best of us.”

I expected the thrust-and-parry exercises that I’d worked on with Ro, but Lucky came to stand to one side of me, just out of blade range. She extended her sword. “Follow me,” was all she said, and then she was off in a step, turn, strike, block that moved straight into a new combination. She was fast. I stayed with her as best I could, and actually matched her about one move in seven.

“Not horrible,” she said. “Let’s try it again.” We worked it over and over until finally she reached out and pried the sword out of my grip. “Those will hurt tomorrow,” she said of the blisters on my palms. “You should have told me.” But I was determined to hold my own with these people, so I only shrugged. My hands felt raw for days after; but I was stubborn. And it helped that I could teach as well as learn. It did not matter so much that I was the youngling, the inexperienced one, when their bodies worked to imitate mine, when their muscles fluttered and strained to please me.

And I had a new secret: I was beginning to understand the price for all those months that I’d wrestled my body’s feelings back into my fighting. I could scrub Lucky’s back after a cold creek bath, see Brax’s nipples crinkle when she shrugged off her shirt at night, lie with my head pillowed on Ro’s thigh — and never feel a thing except a growing sense of wonder at what complex and contradictory people I had found on my road. But when we met in practice, everything changed. The slide of Brax’s leather-covered breast against my arm during a takedown put a point of heat at the tip of every nerve from my shoulder to my groin. Ro’s weight on me when he tested the possibilities of a technique was voluptuous in a way I’d never imagined in my awkward days with Ad. Lucky’s rain-wet body twisting underneath me excited me so much it was almost beyond bearing: But I learned to bear it, to stuff the pleasure back inside myself so that it wound through me endlessly like a cloud boiling with the weight of unreleased rain. In my days with Tom I had learned to fight through cold and pain and misery: Now I learned to persist through pleasure so keen that sometimes it left me seared and breathless and not sure how to make my arms and legs keep working. I told no one; but I woke in the morning anticipating those hours, and slept at night with their taste in my throat. I was always ready to practice.

“I sweat like a bull,” Brax said ruefully one day when we were all rubbing ourselves down afterwards. “But you always smell so good.” I smiled and pulled my tunic on quickly to hide the shudders that still trembled through me.

It was a few days later that Ro approached me after supper, squatting down beside me near the fire. We smiled at each other and spent a quiet time stripping the bark off sticks and feeding it to the flames. Eventually, he said, “Share my blanket tonight?”

I’d seen from the first night how it was between them, bedding two at a time but in a relationship of three. I had already guessed at their idea of what a quad should be. I wondered how sophisticated people handled this sort of thing.

“No, but thank you,” I said finally. “It’s not you, Ro, you’re a fine person and I’m pleased to be part of your quad. It’s just—”

“No need to explain,” he said, which only made me feel more awkward. But the next day he treated me not much differently. By the afternoon I had recovered my equilibrium, and I’d noticed their quiet conversations, so I was only a little surprised to find Lucky at my elbow after practice.

“Let’s take a walk,” she said cheerfully. “Fetch water, or something.”

“Fine,” I said, and went to gather everyone’s water skins. “No need to rush,” Braxis said. Ro nodded agreeably.

“Fine,” I said again, and off we went.

We found a stream and loaded up with water, and then sat on the bank. I laid back with my head on my arms while Lucky fiddled with flower stems. Then she leaned over me and kissed me. Her mouth was dry and sweet. But nothing moved in me. I sat up and set her back from me as gently as I could. She didn’t look angry, only amused. “Would Braxis have been a better choice for water duty today?”

“No, it’s not that.”

“Don’t you know what you like, then?”

“You know what?” I said, “Let’s go back to the others so I only have to have this conversation once.”

We all sat around, and they chewed on hand-sized chunks of bread while I talked.

“Anyone would be proud to have you as lovers, all of you.” It was nice to see the way they glowed for each other then, with nothing more than smiles or a quick touch before turning their attention back to me. “It’s not about you.”

I stopped, long enough that Braxis raised an eyebrow. It was hard to say the next thing. “If you need that from your fourth, then I’ll help you find someone else when we get to Lemon City, and no hard feelings.”

We were all quiet for a while. Finally Braxis wiped the crumbs off her hands. “Oh, well,” she said. “Of course we don’t want another fourth, Mars, we’d rather have you even if we can’t have you, if you take my meaning.” Lucky hooted, and I went red in the face, which just made Lucky worse.

“No, truly,” Braxis went on when Ro had finally put a hammerlock on Lucky. “We like you. We’re starting to fight well together. We learn from each other. We trust ourselves. We can be a good quad. The other,” she shrugged, and Lucky made a rude gesture, “well, it’s nice, but it isn’t everything, is it?”

It stayed with me, that remark, while I did my share of the night chores, and later as I lay on my back in the dark, listening to Ro’s snores and the small, eager sounds that Braxis and Lucky made together under a restless sky of black scudding clouds. It was strange to think about sex with them so intent on it just a knife-throw away. It’s nice but it’s not everything, Brax had said: But for those moments it sounded like it was everything for the two of them.

I hoped they stayed willing to take me as I was. I didn’t know if I could explain that what they did wrapped in their blankets was like being offered the lees of fine wine. I could tell they thought I was still grieving for Ad, or Tom: Let them believe that, if it would obscure the truth of what I had become and what stirred me now. Keep your mouth shut, Mars, I told myself, and twisted onto my side away from them. They’ll never understand and you’d never he able to explain. They’ll think you’re insane or perverted or worse, and they’ll send you packing back to your no-name village before you can say “oh, go ahead and fuck me if that’s what it takes to let me stay with you.”

I never was much good at cheering myself up: But in spite of it all I finally fell asleep, and I woke to a hug from Braxis and pine tea from Ro, to a sleepy pat on the shoulder from Lucky, and for the first time in oh-so-long I felt the hope of belonging.

It took weeks to get to Lemon City, mostly because we were in no hurry. There was always so much to do each day, so much exploring and talking and the hands-on work of turning ourselves into a fighting partnership. And other kinds of work, as well. In spite of what they’d said, the three of them made a concerted effort to seduce me, and I did not know how to reassure them that they had already succeeded, that they had turned me into a banked coal with a constant fire in my belly. “Damn your cold heart, Mars,” Lucky spat at me one day, “I hope someday someone you really want turns you down flat, and then see how you like it!”

“Luck, it’s not like that!” I called out after her as she stalked off down a side trail into the woods.

“Leave her,” Ro advised. “She’ll accept it. We all will.” He and Brax exchanged a wry look, and I felt terrible. I must be cold, I thought, cold and selfish. It was such a small thing to ask, to make people I loved happy. But it wasn’t just my body they wanted, it was me, and they would never reach me that way, and then we would all still be unsatisfied. And I was not willing to explain. So it was my fault, my flaw. My failure.

I was packing my bedroll when Lucky came back. “Oh, stop,” she said impatiently. “You know what I’m like, Mars, don’t take it so personally. Just stay away from me tonight and I’ll be fine in the morning.” And she was; and the next afternoon, when she took hold of me so unknowingly, I gave her myself. I gave to all of them, a dozen times each day.

“The hardest part about all this,” Brax said one evening as we all stretched out near our fire, “is overcoming all the sword training.”

“Whaddya mean?” Ro mumbled around a mouthful of cheese.

“Well, the sword makes your arm longer and gives it a killing edge, so that you still strike or punch, sort of, but it’s with the blade. But the stormfighting, well, like Mars is always saying, the whole point is to become the center of the fight and bring your enemy in to you. So with the sword we keep people out far enough to slice them up, and with the storm art we bring them in close enough to kiss. It does my head in sometimes trying to figure out where I’m supposed to be when.”

“You think it’s hard for you?” I replied. “You’re not the one with half a dozen cuts on every arm and leg trying to learn it the other way around. I always let Lucky get too close.”

“So maybe there’s a way to do both.” Lucky reached out to swipe a piece of cheese from Ro’s lap.

“What do you mean?” Ro asked again.

“Pig. Give me some of that. I mean that maybe there’s a way to combine the moves. All the sword dances I do are based on wheels, being able to turn and move in any direction with your body and the sword like spokes on a wheel. It’s not that different from being at the center of a wind, or whatever.”

“Gods around us,” I said. She’d put a picture in my mind so clear that for a moment I wasn’t sure which was more real, the Lucky who smiled quizzically at me from across the fire, or the one who suddenly rolled over her own sword and came up slashing at her opponent’s knee. “She’s right. You could do both. Think about it! Just think about it!” They were all bright-eyed now, caught in the spiral of my excitement that drew them in as surely as one of the armlocks we’d worked on that afternoon. “Imagine being able to fight long or short, with an edge or a tip or just your bare hand. They’d never know what to expect, they couldn’t predict what you’d do next!”

“Okay, maybe,” Lucky said. “It might work with that whole series that’s based off the step in and behind, but what about the face-to-face? A sword’s always a handicap when you’re in that close.”

“That’s because everyone always goes weapon to weapon.” Lucky looked blank. “If you have a sword, what’s the other person going to do? Get a bigger sword if they can. Try to beat your sword. But we don’t need that. Our weapon is the way we fight. Go in and take their sword away. Go in and do things with a sword that no one thinks possible. In my head I just saw you roll with your own blade and come up edge-ready. Maybe staying low would give us more options for being in close.”

“Come here,” Lucky said, and scrambled up, and we worked it out again and again until the fire was almost dead and we trod on Brax in the dark. “Stop this idiocy and go to sleep!” she growled; but the next day we were all ready to reinvent sword fighting, and we ate our dinner that night bloody and bruised and grinning like children.

We came into Lemon City on a cold wind, just ahead of a hard autumn rain that dropped from a fast front of muddy clouds. We crowded under cover of a blacksmith’s shed inside the city gates, with a dozen other travelers, three gate guards, and two bad-tempered horses, while manure and straw and someone’s basket washed away down the waterlogged street. Everything was gray and stinking. I couldn’t help laughing, remembering my fantasies about the golden streets full of important people in silk with me in the center, being whisked toward greatness.

When the rain had passed we walked in toward the heart of the city. My boots leaked and my feet got wet, and Ro stepped in goat shit and swore.

“So far, I feel right at home,” I told Lucky, who cackled wildly and reminded me for one sharp moment of my mother, bent over in laughter with her hands twisted in her apron and flour dust rising all around her.

We found an inn that they’d heard of, and got the second-to-last room left. We were lucky; the last room was no better than a sty, and went an hour later for the same rate as ours. The city was packed tighter than a farm sausage, our landlord told us with a satisfied smile. He took some of Ro’s money for a pitcher of cider and settled one hip up against the common room table to tell us where to find the guard house for the coming auditions. The next were in two days’ time. “And lots of competition for this one, of course,” he said cheerfully, with a glance around the crowded room that made him scurry to another table with his tray of cider.

“What’s that mean, of course?” Lucky wondered when he’d gone away.

I shrugged. Brax drank the last of her cider. “I hate it when they say of course,” she muttered, and belched.

The next day was sunny, and we went out exploring. I left my sword for the day with the blacksmith near the city gate, who promised to lengthen the grip. From there we wandered to the market, and they laughed at my wide-eyed amazement. And everywhere we saw foursomes, young or seasoned, trying not to show their stress by keeping their faces impassive, so of course you could spot them a mile off. We followed some of them to the guards training camp, and waited in line to give our names to someone whose only job that day seemed to be telling stiff-faced hopefuls where and when to turn up for the next morning’s trials. Then we found a place to perch where Lucky and Brax could size everyone up until they found something to feel superior about: a weak eye, too much weight on one foot, someone’s hands looped under their belt so they couldn’t reach their weapon easily. Eventually the strain got to be too much, and we went back to the inn for an afternoon meal and practice on a small patch of ground near the stable. Working up a sweat seemed to calm them down; and touching them erased everything else for me.

That night, I laid an extra coin on the table when the landlord brought our platter of chicken and pitcher of beer, and said, “Tell us what’s so special about these auditions.”

He looked genuinely surprised. “Anybody could tell you that,” he said, but he put the coin in his sleeve pocket. “The prince has turned out half the palace guard again, and Captain Gerlain’s scrambling for replacements. Those who do well are sure to end up with palace duty, although why any of you’d want it is beyond me.”

“Why’s that?”

“Our prince is mad, that’s why, and the king’s too far gone up his own backside to notice.”

Lucky put a hand to her knife. “You mind yourself, man,” she said calmly, and Brax and I tried not to grin at each other. Lucky could be startlingly conservative.

“Oh, and no offense intended to the king,” he said easily. “But well done, the king needs loyal soldiers around him. Particularly now he’s old and sick, and too well medicated, at least that’s what they say. You just get yourself hired on up there and keep an eye on him for us.” He poured Lucky another drink. I admired the skill with which he’d turned the conflict aside.

None of us could eat, thinking about the next day, and the beer tasted off. We sat at the table, not talking much. Eventually we moved out to the snug, where the landlord had a fire going. It was warmer there than the common room, but no more relaxing. I turned the coming day over and over in my head as if it were a puzzle I couldn’t put down until I’d solved it. Lucky and Ro sat close together: their calves touched, then their thighs, then Ro’s hand found its way onto Lucky’s arm and she sighed, leaned into him, looking suddenly small and soft. When I looked away, Brax was there, next to me.

She cupped her hard hand around my jaw and cheek and left ear. “Don’t turn me away, Mars,” she said quietly. “It’s no night to be alone.”

“You’re right,” I replied. “But let’s try something a little different.” I felt wild and daring, even though I knew she wouldn’t understand. I took her by the hand and led her out to our practice area by the stable. They kept a lantern out there for late arrivals; it gave us just enough light to see motion, but the fine work would have to be done by instinct: by feel.

“You want to practice?” she said.

My heart was thudding under my ribs. This was the closest I had ever come to telling anyone what it was like with me. It was so tempting to say Take me down, Brax, challenge me, control me, equal me, best me, love me. But I only smiled and stepped into the small circle of light. “Put your hands on me,” I whispered, soft enough so that she would not hear, and centered myself.

They were fair auditions, and hard, and we were brilliant. I could tell they had never seen anything like us. The method was to put two quads into the arena with wooden swords. I learned later that they looked for how we fought, but that was only part of it. “The fighting is the easiest thing to teach,” Captain Gerlain told me once. “What I look for is basic coordination, understanding of the body and how it works. And how the quad works together.”

It was an incredible day, a blur of things swirled together: crisp air that smelled of fried bread from the camp kitchen and the sweat of a hundred nervous humans; the sounds of leather on skin and huffing breath interleaved with the faint music of temple singers practicing three streets away; and the touch of a hundred different hands, the textures of their skin, the energies that ran between us as we laid hold of one another.

After he saw our stormfighting, Gerlain started putting other quads against us, so that we fought more than anyone else. Most of the fighters didn’t know what to make of us, and I began to see that Gerlain was using us as a touchstone to test the others. Those who tried to learn from us, who adapted as best they could, had the good news with us when Gerlain’s sergeant read out the names at the end of the day; and Gerlain himself stopped Lucky and said, curtly, “You and your quad’ll be teaching the rest an hour a day, after regular training, starting tomorrow afternoon. Work out your program with Sergeant Manto. And don’t get above yourselves. Manto will be watching, and so will I.”

“Hoo hoo!” said Lucky. “Let’s get drunk!” But I was already intoxicated by the day, dizzy with the feel of so many strangers’ skin against mine. And I was a guard. I whispered it to Ad as we walked back to the inn through the streets that now seemed familiar and welcoming. I made it, I told her. Lemon City. I thought of Tom, and my mother: I’m safe, I found a place for myself. I saw Ad with her sheepskin and her special stick; I felt Tom’s tears on my skin, and my mother’s hand on my hair. Then Ro was standing in the door to the inn, looking for me, waiting: and I went in.

It was the stormfighting that kept us out of a job for such a long time. Gerlain and Manto saw it as a tactical advantage and a way to teach warriors not to rely on their swords. Tom would have approved. But many of our fellow soldiers did not. Our frank admissions that it was still raw, as dangerous to the fighter as to the target, and our matter-of-fact approach to teaching, were the only things that kept us from being permanent outsiders in the guard. Even so, we made fewer friends than we might have.

“Can’t let you go yet,” Manto would shrug each month, when new postings were announced. “Need you to teach the newbs.”

“Let someone else teach,” Ro was arguing again.

“Who? There’s no one here who knows it the way you do.”

“That’s because you keep posting them on as soon as they’ve halfway learned anything.”

“Shucks,” Manto grinned, showing her teeth. “You noticed.”

“Manto, try to see this from our point of view …”

“Oh, gods,” I whispered to Lucky, “There he goes, being reasonable again. Do something.”

“Right,” she whispered back, and then stepped between Ro and Manto, pointing a finger at Ro when he tried to protest. She said pleasantly, “We came here to be guards, not baby-minders. You want us to teach, fine, we’ll teach other guards. Until then, I think we’ll just go get a beer.” She turned and started for the gate, hooking a thumb into Ro’s belt to pull him along. Brax sighed and reached for her gear. I gave Manto a cheerful smile and a goodbye salute.

“All right, children,” Manto said, pitching her voice to halt Lucky and Ro. “Report to Andavista tomorrow at the palace. Take all your toys, you’ll draw quarters up there.”

Even Lucky was momentarily speechless.

Manto grinned again. “The orders have been in for a couple of weeks. I just wanted to see how much more time I could get out of you.” She slapped me on the arm so hard I almost fell over. “Welcome to the army.”

“Where the hell have you people been?” Sergeant Andavista snarled at us the next morning. “Been waiting for you for two weeks.” There seemed to be no good answer to that, so we didn’t even try. “Your rooms are at the end of the southwest gallery. Unpack and report back here to me in ten minutes. Move!”

The rooms had individual beds, for which I was grateful. The double-wide bunks at the training camp had made us all more tense with one another as time went on, and I was tired of sleeping on the floor — particularly after a good day’s work, when my body felt hollowed out by the thousand moments of desire roused and sated and born again, every time we grappled, when I only wanted to sleep close to one of my unknowing lovers and drink in the smell of our sweat on their skin.

Andavista handed us off to the watch commander, who gave us new gear with the palace insignia and a brain-numbing recital of guard schedules. Then she found a man just coming off watch and drafted him to show us around. The soldier looked bone-tired, but he nodded agreeably enough and tried to hide his yawns as he led us up and down seemingly endless hallways. He pointed out the usual watch stations: main gate, trade entrances, public rooms, armory, the three floors of rooms where the bureaucrats lived and worked, and the fourteen floors of nobles’ chambers, which he waved at dismissively. I remembered my mother saying ticks on a dog.

He brought us to a massive set of wooden doors strapped with iron. “Royal suite,” he said economically. “Last stop on the tour. Can you find your own way back?”

We did, although it took the better part of an hour and made us all grumpy. “Not bad,” the watch commander commented when we returned. “Last week’s set had to be fetched out.”

And so we settled. It wasn’t much different from living in my village, except that I belonged. We learned soldiery and taught stormfighting and found time to practice by ourselves, to reinforce old ideas, to invent new ones. It was an easy routine to settle to, but I’d had my lessons too well from Tom to ever relax completely, and the rest of the quad had learned to trust my edge. And it helped in a turned-around way that news of us had spread up from the training ground, and there were soldiers we’d never met who resented us for being different and were contemptuous of what they’d heard about stormfighting. Being the occasional target of pointed remarks or pointed elbows was new for Brax and Lucky and Ro; it kept them aware in a way that all my warnings never could. So on the day we found swords at our throats, we were ready.

They came for the king and prince during the midnight watch when we were stationed outside the royal wing. Ro thought he might have seen the king once, at the far end of the audience room, but these doors were the closest we had ever been to the people we were sworn to protect. And it was our first posting to this most private area of the palace. Perhaps that’s why they chose our watch to try it. Or perhaps because they had dismissed the purposely slow practice drills of storm art as nothing more than fancy-fighting; it was a common enough belief among our detractors.

The first sign we had that anything was amiss was when two of the day watch quads came up the hall. Brax stepped forward; it was her night to be in charge. “We’re relieving you,” their leader said. “Andavista wants you down at the gates.”

“What’s up?” Brax asked neutrally, but I could see the way her shoulders tensed.

The other shrugged. “Dunno. Some kind of commotion at the gates, security’s being tightened inside. Andavista says jump, I reckon it’s our job to ask which cliff he had in mind.”

Brax stood silent for a moment, thinking. “Ro, go find Andavista or Saree and get it in person. No offense,” she added to the two quads in front of her.

“None taken,” their leader said; and then her sword was out and coming down on Brax. She struck hard and fast, but Brax was already under her arm and pushing her off center, taking only enough time to break the other woman’s arm as she went down. The other seven moved in, Brax scrambled up with blood on her sword, and then they were on us.

I wasn’t ready for the noise of it, the clattering of metal on metal, the yells, the way that everything reverberated in the closed space of the hallway. I could hear the bolts slamming into place in the doors behind us, and knew that at least someone was alerted: No one but Andavista or Gerlain would get inside now. Lucky was shouting but I couldn’t tell what or who it was meant for. Then I saw Ro shaking his head even as he turned and cut another soldier’s feet out from under him, and I understood. “Go on,” I yelled. “Get help! We don’t know how many more there might be!”

For a moment Ro looked terribly young. Then his face set, and he turned up the hall. It was bad strategy on the part of the assassins to arrive in a group, rather than splitting up and approaching from both directions; but they’d had to preserve the illusion of being ordered to the post. Two of them tried to head Ro off: He gutted one and kept going, and Brax stepped in front of the other. Three horrible moments later she made a rough, rattling sound and they both went down in a boneless tumble. Brax left a broad smear of blood on the wall behind her as she fell.

Lucky and I were side by side now, facing the four that were still standing. Out of the side of my right eye I could see Brax lying limp against the wall. Lucky was panting. There was a moment of silence in the hall; we all looked at each other, as if we’d suddenly found ourselves doing something unexpected and someone had stopped to ask, what now?

“Blow them down,” I told Lucky, and we swirled into them like the lightning and the wind.

I’d never before fought for my life or another’s. These people weren’t Tom; I couldn’t drop my sword and call stop. And these were our own we were facing, people we’d eaten with, insulted and argued with, and whose measure we had taken on the training field. Some of them were people I had taught, muscle to muscle, skin to skin. Now I reached for them in rage, and my touch was voracious. I went in close to one, up near his center, my arm fully extended under his and lifting up, taking his balance, thrusting my weight forward to put him down. It was sweet to feel him scrabbling under my hands, pulling at my tunic, trying to right himself, and then my sword was at his neck and I cut off his life in a ragged line. His trousers soiled with shit and he fell into a puddle at my feet. My body sang. I took the taste of his death between my teeth, and stepped on his stomach to get to the woman behind him.

I woke in our rooms. Ro was there, watching over me.

“How are you?”

“Don’t touch me,” I said.

He waited. “Brax and Lucky are going to be fine.” I put a hand up to my head. “It was deep, to the bone, but it’s not infected. They had to shave your head,” he added, too late.

“Saree came around. Those two quads were hired to win a place in the guards and wait for the right moment. The one they took alive didn’t last long enough to tell them who did the hiring. Poor bastard.”

I felt empty and dirty, and I couldn’t think of anything to say.

He swallowed, moved closer, but he was careful not to touch me. “Mars, I know it’s the first time you’ve killed. It’s hard, but we’ve all been through it. We can help you, if you’ll let us.”

“You don’t understand,” I said.

“I do, truly.” He was so earnest. “I remember—”

I held up a hand. “Blessing on you, Ro, but it’s not the killing, it’s — I can’t. I can’t talk about it.” I swung my legs off the other side of the bed, stood shakily, looked around for something to wear. My head hurt all the way down to my feet, but I wasn’t as weak as I’d expected to be. Good. I found my tunic and overshirt, and a pair of dirty leggings.

“Where are you going?”

“I need to get out. I’ll be fine,” I added, seeing his face. “I won’t leave the palace. I just want some time to think. I’m not looking for a ledge to jump off.”

He managed a tight smile. I did not come close to him as I left.

I really did want to wander: to get lost. I had the wit to stay away from the public halls, and I did not want the company and the avid questions of other guards, so I steered toward the lower floors: the kitchens, the pantry, and the enclosed food gardens. I found a stair down from the scullery that led to a vast series of storerooms, smokerooms, wine cellars.

I thought about the killing.

The sword work wasn’t so bad. The sensations of weapon contact were always more muted for me than hand-to-hand. But stormfighting was so much more intense: seducing my opponent into me, or thrusting myself into her space, or breathing in the smell of him while my hands turned him to my will. I’d got used to it being delicious, smooth, powerful, like gulping a mug of warm cream on a cold night. Until the hallway, until the man’s throat spilled open under my sword, until I broke his partner open with my hands. With my hands — and the fizzing thrill through my body was overrun by something that felt like chunks of fire, like vomit in my veins. I hated it. It made me feel lonely in a way I’d never thought to feel again. So I sat down in the cellars of the palace and wept for something I’d lost, and then I wept some more for the greater loss to come.

My head hurt worse when I’d run dry of tears. I gathered myself up and went to find my quad.

They were sitting quietly when I came into the room, not talking; Brax on one of the beds drowsing in the last of the sun through the west window, Lucky crowded in beside her with her bad leg propped on a pillow, Ro on the floor nearby leaning against the mattress so that his head was close to theirs.

“Ho, Mars,” Lucky said gently.

They were so beautiful that I could only look at them for a handful of moments. When I opened my mouth I had no idea what might come out of it.

“I love you all so much,” I said. I wasn’t nervous anymore; it was time they knew me, and whatever happened next I would always have this picture of them, and the muscle-deep memory of all our times.

“Being with you three is like … gods, sometimes I imagine leaving home a day earlier or later. How easy it would have been to miss you on the road. What if I’d missed you? What would I be now?”

They were silent, watching me. I was the center of the world.

“That time on the road, when you asked me to …” I made a hapless sort of gesture, and Ro smiled. “You thought I was saying no, but what I was really saying was no, not like that.” I swallowed. I wasn’t sure how to say the next bit; and then Brax surprised me.

“The night before the guard trials, out behind the inn, when I thought we were practicing. We were really fucking, your way.”

I felt like a lightning-struck tree, all soft pulp suddenly exposed to the world, ruptured and raw. And I did the thing more frightening than fighting Tom, or leaving home, or losing Ad. I whispered yes. Then I crossed my arms to hold myself in, and began to find any words that I could use to hold off the moment when they would send me away. “I didn’t know until I met you on the road, and we began to practice, and every time we touched in this particular way I thought I would the from it. That’s when I figured it out, you know. I was a virgin when I met you,” and I couldn’t help but smile, because it was so right. “For me, the touch of your palm on my wrist is the same as any act of love; it’s my way of bringing our bodies together. It’s no different from putting ourselves inside each other.”

“Mars, it’s—” Ro began.

“Don’t you tell me it’s okay!” I cut him off. “You’re always the peacemaker, Ro, but you don’t understand. You don’t understand what I’ve done. Every time we’ve touched as fighters, all the teaching and the practice, it’s all been sex for me, hours and hours of it with one of you or all of you, or other quads that we’ve taught. And you never knew. What’s that but some kind of rape? It’s bad enough with people I love, and then there’s all those strangers. I’ve probably had more partners than all the whores in Ziren Square. And I can’t help it, and gods know I can’t stop because it’s the most unbelievable … but what I did to all of you, that’s unforgivable, but I was so afraid that you’d … well, I expect you can guess what I thought and I’m sure you’re thinking it now. No, wait,” I said, to stop Brax from speaking. “Then there’s this killing. You were right, Ro, I’ve never killed before, and it was horrible, it was disgusting because I still felt it even when I was pulling her arm out of its socket. And I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to, but I thought of what they’d done to Brax and then I was glad to hurt them and then there was this fierce, terrible wave … oh, gods, I’m sorry.” I was panting now, clenching myself. “I’m sorry. But it’s there, and I thought you should know.” They were still silent; Brax and Lucky were holding hands so tightly that I could see their fingers going white, and Ro looked sad and patient. “I love you,” I said, and then everything was beyond bearing and I had to leave.

I went back to the cellars because I didn’t know where else to go. I did not belong anywhere now. I sat curled for hours next to one of the beer vats, numb and quiet, until I heard the chattering voices of cooking staff come to fetch a barrel for supper: I did not want to meet anyone, so I unkinked myself and went farther down the hallway until I found a small heavy door slightly ajar, old but with freshly oiled hinges that made no sound as I slid through.

I came into a vast, dim place, heavy with green and the smell of water. Not a garden: an enormous twilight conservatory in the guts of the oldest part of the palace. Even through my despair I could see the marvel of the place, feel its mystery. There were trees standing forty feet tall in porcelain tubs as big as our room upstairs. Light seeped through narrow windows above the treetops. There were wooden frames thick with ivy that bloomed in lightly perfumed purple and orange and blue. Everything felt old and unused, sliding toward ruin, with the particular heavy beauty of a rotting temple. The humid air, the taste of jasmine on my tongue, the stone walls that I could sense although I could not see them under so much green — everything collided inside me and mixed with my own madness to make me feel wild, curious, adrenalized as if I’d eaten too many of the dried granzi leaves that Brax liked to indulge in sometimes when we were off duty. The narrow path that twisted off between the potted trees was laid in the unmistakable patterns of desert tile. I followed the colors toward the sound of rain, and the sound turned into a fountain, a flat-bottomed circle lined with more bright tiles. Strings of water fell into it from a dozen ducts in the ceiling high overhead, onto the pool and the upraised face of the woman in it.

She was dancing. From the look of her, she’d been at it a while: Her hair was flung in sodden ropes against her dark skin, and the tips of her fingers were wrinkled, paler than the rest of her when she reached them up to grasp at the droplets in the air. She breathed in the hard, shallow gasps of someone who has taken her body almost as far as it can go. Her eyes were rolled up, showing white, and her mouth hung half-open. She whirled and kicked to a rhythm that pounded through her so strongly I could feel it as a backbeat to the juddering of my heart. Faster, faster she turned, and the water turned with her and flung itself back into the pool. I knew what I was seeing. It was more than a dance, it was a transportation, a transmigration, as if she could take the whole world into herself if she only reached a little higher, if she only turned once more. I knew how it must feel within her, burning, building, until her body shuddered one final time and she shouted, her head still back and her arms clawed up as if she would seize the ceiling and pull it down over her. Her eyes opened, bright blue against the brown. She saw me as she fell.

Bless her, I thought, at least I’m not that alone.

Her shout still echoed around the chamber, or at least I could still hear it in my head; but she was silent, lying on her side in the water, blue eyes watching me. I eased myself down onto one of the tiled benches bordering the walkway, to show her that I was not a threat or an idle gawper. There was a shawl bundled at the other end of the bench, and I was careful not to touch it. After a minute she rolled onto her back in the shallow pool and turned her blue gaze up to the high windows. Neither of us spoke. I was relaxed and completely attentive to everything she did: a breath, a finger moved, a lick at a drop of water caught on her lip. When she finally pulled herself up to her knees, I was there with the shawl and an arm to help her raise herself the rest of the way. She draped the shawl around her shoulders but did not try to cover herself; she seemed unaware of being naked and wet with a stranger. I stood back when she stepped out of the pool.

She looked me up and down. She was medium tall, older by a few years, whip thin with oversized calf muscles and strong biceps. An old scar ran along one rib. The skin on her hands was rough. I pictured her in one of the kitchens, or perhaps tending the smokehouse where the sides of beef and boar had to be raised onto their high hooks.

“I hope you closed the door behind you,” she said absently, in a dry and crackly voice.

“The door? Oh … yes, it’s closed. No one will come in.”

“You did.”

“Yes. But no one else will come.”

“They might.”

“I won’t let them.”

She looked me up and down. “You’re a guard,” she said.

“Yes.”

“So you’d kill anyone who tried to get in.”

“I’d meet them at the door and send them on their way. If they tried to come in further, I’d stop them.”

She drew a wrinkled finger across her throat.

“Not necessarily,” I replied. “I might not have to kill them.”

“Oh,” she said. “I would. I wouldn’t know how to stop them any other way. I don’t know much about the middle ground.”

She had begun to shake very slightly. “You’re cold,” I said, and pulled off my overshirt to offer her. She peered at it carefully before she put it on, dropping the shawl without a glance onto the wet floor.

“Most people don’t talk to me,” she said.

“I’ll talk with you whenever you like,” I said, thinking that I knew very well how people would treat her, particularly if she wandered up to the kitchens with one of the meat cleavers in her hand and tried to have this kind of conversation. Standing with her in the dim damp of the room felt like being in one of those in-between moments of an epic poem, where everyone takes a stanza or two to gather their breath before the next impossible task.

She appeared to be thinking, and I was in no hurry. Then she straightened the shirt around her and said, “Walk me back.”

“Of course,” I answered. I plucked her shawl out of the muck and fell in behind her with my hand on my sword, the way I’d been taught. She was so odd and formal, like a little chick covered in bristles: She wanted looking after. When we left the room, she watched to make sure that I closed the door firmly, then nodded as if satisfied and led me back up through the cellars. I was surprised when she bypassed the carvery and the scullery, and nervous when she took the stairs away from the kitchen, up toward the residential levels of the palace: I wasn’t sure what to do if someone challenged us, and I did not want trouble with Andavista on top of the mess I’d already made with my quad. But she held her head high and kept going, and then we made a turn and almost ran into Saree talking something out with one of his seconds. Oh, icy hell, I thought, and was absolutely astonished when Saree gave me an unreadable look and then bent his head. “Prince,” he said, and she sailed by him like a great ship past a dinghy, trailing me behind. As I passed him, Saree pointed his finger at himself emphatically, and I nodded, and then followed the prince. We came to the great wooden doors of the royal suite, and the four guards there stiffened. They opened the doors clumsily, trying to see everything without appearing to look at us, and I knew the stories would start a minute after the watch changed when the four of them could get down to the commissary.

The hallway was a riot of rich colored tapestries, plants, paintings, a table stacked high with dusty books: and silent as a tomb. I wondered if the king was behind one of the many doors we passed. A servant came out of a room at the far end and hurried toward us with a muffled exclamation. The prince waved her off, and I handed her the shawl as she stepped back to let us pass. Then the prince stopped in front of one of the doors and turned to me. Her eyes were hard, like blue stained glass. I saluted and bowed.

“You saw me,” she said, and her voice was like her eyes.

I imagined what it would be like to practice with my quad from now on, their knowing what it meant to me every time we touched, their distaste or their tolerance, my most private self on public display because I had not kept my secret. I understood how she might feel; and she deserved the truth.

“You were beautiful,” I said. “You were like a storm.”

She looked at me for a moment, then she took in a breath and blew it out again with the noise that children make when they pretend to be the wind. Her breath smelled like salt and oranges. The door shut between us.

“What happened?” Saree growled when I found him.

“The prince asked me to escort her back to her rooms,” I said evenly.

“Where did you find her? Her servants have been looking for her for hours.”

“In the hallway near the armory.” It was the farthest place from the cellars that I could think of.

“Oh, really?” he rumbled. “She just happened to appear in the armory hallway soaking wet and there you were?”

“Yessir,” I answered. “Honestly, sir, I didn’t even know who she was until we met you. I just didn’t think that she should be — I mean—”

He relaxed. “I know what you mean, no need to say any more. But we’d like to know where she disappears to.” I stayed quiet, and he lost interest in me. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?” he said, and I saluted and got out of his sight as quickly as I could. My head was too stuffed full of tangled thoughts to make any sense of anything, and I didn’t want to deal with Ro and Lucky and Brax until I felt clear. I took myself off into Lemon City for a long walk and did, in the end, get my wish: I got lost.

It was late when I came back to our rooms. The quad was there, and so was Andavista. They all wore the most peculiar expressions: Lucky was trying to send me seventeen different messages with eyes and body language, but all I got was the general impression that a lot had been going on while I’d been away. Then I looked beyond her, and saw the carrybags we’d brought with us all the way from the crossroads, packed now and waiting to be closed up.

“No, you idiot,” Brax said. “Your things are in there too, we’re being transferred. Don’t look at me like that, everyone knows what you’re thinking, we can always tell.”

“Ummm,” I said helplessly, and Ro grinned. Andavista stood up from where he’d been sitting, in our only chair. “Very touching. Sort it out later. You, I’ve just about run out of patience waiting for you but I’ve got direct orders to fetch you all personally and I suppose I can be thankful you didn’t decide to stay out all night. Particularly since this lot wouldn’t say where you could be found.” He squinted at me. “Well, at least you’re not stupid enough to turn up drunk. Now, all of you, get your things and follow me.”

He stomped out of the room and we scrambled to shoulder our gear and follow him. I shooed Lucky out of the way and picked up our biggest pack. “Get away from that, you can’t carry it with your leg.” She grimaced impatiently. “What’s going on?” I whispered.

“You tell me,” she whispered back. “All we got is some wild story at dinner about you and the prince, and then Andavista saying he’s giving us a new home and everyone who’s not on watch finding an excuse to wander by our rooms and goggle at us.”

“Shut up and move,” Andavista snarled without turning, so we did, Ro and I carrying everything between us while Brax braced Lucky with her good arm. Of course I knew where we must be going, but I could scarcely credit it: I’d only been nice, and certainly more free in my manner man what was due to her. But I was right: We went through the by-now-familiar wooden doors and into a room just beyond, where sleepy-eyed servants were busily beating the dust out of a rug and several coverlets, with a new fire in the hearth and a pitcher of mulled wine on a mostly-clean table. And my overshirt, carefully folded on the mantel.

Andavista said, “You’ve been assigned as the prince’s personal guard. You’re with her wherever she goes, all of you, which means more time on duty than before. She breakfasts at midmorning, you two—” looking at me and Ro—“report to her then. If she forgets to let you out for meals, let me know. I expect a full report every day from one of you, personally to either me or Saree, no exceptions. You’ll go back to teaching when you’re all off the sick list, at least until you’ve got others good enough to take over. Where you find the time is your problem. And don’t get above yourselves, I’ll be watching. And don’t let so much as a mouse near her,” he added, in a different tone. Then he glared around the room and left. The servants scuttled out behind him.

My three pounced on me with questions before the door was closed. “Wait, wait,” I said, trying to gather my wits while Ro poured us a cup of wine. I told them about meeting the prince between hot swallows, curiously content even though we all knew why I’d been downcellar in the first place, the unfinished business between us.

“Unbelievable,” Lucky said. “How do you do it, Mars?”

Brax said, “I wouldn’t go planting any gardens here, Luck. She’s thrown out more guards than we have ancestors. She could change her mind anytime.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “She’s never taken a personal guard before that I know of, just the shift watches outside the door. Can you imagine some of our mates in the barracks standing outside the conservatory doors while she … She’d have been a laughingstock years ago.”

“So why now?” Ro said.

“I understand her.” They looked at me. “Maybe I’m mad too, I don’t know, but seeing her dance — you know what I think? I think she wants someone to share with. I told her she was beautiful, and she was. Maybe no one else ever has. But whatever you think of her, you mustn’t — you mustn’t hurt her.”

“Oh, Mars,” Lucky said sadly. “Of course we won’t.”

“I know, I’m sorry. It’s just—”

“We know what it is,” Ro said. “And we decided we didn’t want to talk about it until you and Lucky and Brax are better. And that’s the end of it,” he said as I opened my mouth to speak. “Now, who gets the bed nearest the fire?”

We and the prince began getting used to each other. She spent a lot of time watching us; it was a bit unnerving at first. She tested us in little ways. She led us on some incredible expeditions into the belly of the palace. She seemed more and more trusting of us; but she did not dance. She seemed to be waiting for something.

And so was I. Every extra arc of motion that returned to Brax’s arm was one step closer to all my worst fears. By unspoken agreement, we did not practice, and the others stopped making love in front of me. There was a particular kind of tension between us that I could not define, but that made me miserable when I let myself think about what it all might mean, and what I had to lose. I wondered if the prince felt it and thought it was directed at her: It made me try even harder to be easy and gentle with her, who’d had so much less than I.

Ro and I came back to our rooms one night to find Lucky and Brax already toasting each other with a mug of beer from a barrel swiped on our last trip to the cellars. “Back on duty tomorrow,” Lucky grinned around a mouthful of foam. “Hoo hoo!” She poured, and we all drank. I felt numb.

“Oh, sweet Mars,” Ro said, “don’t look like that. Don’t you know we see right through you?” Then he took my cup away and opened his arms and folded me into himself, and Lucky and Brax were behind me, gathering me in, stripping off my clothes and theirs. “I don’t know if I can—” I began to say, and Brax murmured, “Shut up, Mars.” Then Ro shifted his weight and sent me backwards into Brax’s waiting arms, and she pinned me down for a lightning second while she brushed her breast against my mouth, and then rolled us so that I was on top and Ro’s arms came around me in a lock, and I hesitated and he whispered Go on and I turned the way we’d taught ourselves and felt his thigh slide across my back and heard his breath hitch, and mine hitched too. And then it was Lucky with her leg across mine, strength to strength, my heart beating faster and faster, everything a blue-heat fire from my groin to the tips of my fingers. They traded me back and forth like that for some endless time, and each moment that they controlled me they would take some pleasure for themselves, a tongue in my mouth or a wristlock that placed my hand on some part of them that would make them moan; and I moaned too, and then answered their technique with one of my own and changed the dance. Then Brax reached for Ro, and Lucky and I continued while beyond us they brought each other to shouts; and then Lucky was gone to Brax and it was Ro with me, whispering Best me if you can, and then Brax with her strong arms; until finally the world stopped shuddering and we lay in a heap together in front of the fire. And later some of us cried, and were comforted.

We are the prince’s guard. When she sits in a tower window and sings endless songs to the seabirds, we are at the door. When she roams the hallways at night peering through keyholes, we are the shadows that fly at her shoulder. She dances for us now, and we protect her from prying eyes; and when she is ecstatic and spent, when she is lucid and can find some measure of peace, we take her back to her rooms and talk of the world, of the rainbow-painted roofs of Hunemoth and the way that cheese is made in Shortline. She is safer now; she has us to see her as she is, and love her.

And there is still time for ourselves, to teach, to learn, to gossip with other guards and steal currant buns from our favorite cook. Sometimes the prince sends us off to Lemon City for a day, to collect fallen feathers from the road or strings of desert beads from the market; to bring her descriptions of her beggars and smiths and shopkeepers; to gather travelers’ stories from the inns. Sometimes we carry back a flagon of spicy Marhai wine, and when she sleeps, we drink and trade wild stories until the moon is down. Sometimes we sleep cuddled like puppies in our blankets. Sometimes we fight.