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One.
“Treaty marriages aren’t common among the Arike, but they’re not unheard of,” Captain Kentdessa said. “And they’ve promised that this Bashasa is—worldly.”
“Not bothered by—” Tahsia said, with a gesture towards Kai’s eyes that he knew referred to his visible demon nature.
“And they like the idea of allying with the Saredi and the underearth all at once,” Captain Kentdessa continued, with a brief quelling glance at Tahsia.
Grandmother had told him the same thing, when he visited her. It wasn’t the marriage that Kai had been expecting, but the Saredi planned their marriages. Enna had been fated to marry Adeni and Varra and Iludi, and so Kai would have in her place, and now instead he’d be sent to Arik.
*
The Arike built cities. Kai knew that, knew that it would be different from the tents of the Saredi, but he didn’t know how different it would feel until they rode into Benais-arik, on the strange clawed horses the Arike preferred. He’d spent his life on the grasslands, knowing all of the people he traveled with. Even the beginnings of the war and the Saredi partnering with the Witches hadn’t changed that.
A city wasn’t like that. There were all sorts of people here, more than a person could know, all in between buildings that could never change and adapt as the people changed. It was overwhelming, and Kai was glad when they reached the great stone building that housed Bashasa’s family.
They were welcomed into an inner courtyard to wait. Kai marveled at the trees and the burbling fountain in the center of the courtyard, the kind of thing that was only possible when you lived in the same spot for many years. Captain Kentdessa tsked at him, and Kai straightened up and tried to look dignified. He had been told, several times, that Bashasa was heir to a great family, and that he should comport himself well to make a good first impression.
He’d been dressed in clothes much finer than he usually wore, with his hair braided with small silver beads. They were heavy and tugged if he moved wrong, but he could remember an echo of Enna’s pleasure at being dressed like this for her coming of age ceremony.
There was a stirring on the stairs that led up out of the courtyard. Kai looked up just in time to see a young man step out onto the landing. He was wearing a blue jacket over a white skirt, and dark hair curled around a face that looked friendly.
So this was who he was to be married to.
Bashasa proceeded down the stairs. His posture was relaxed, but something the way he gripped the balustrade suggested he was not as relaxed as he was pretending to be.
“Fourth Prince,” he said, bowing.
“Prince-heir,” Kai said in return, with his own bow.
*
The ceremony was the next day, according to the Arike traditions. Kai and his escort rested in the guest rooms they had been given—different than a Saredi guest-tent, but still a place of hospitality, where they could room together for Kai’s last night with his people—and then arose early to wash and prepare themselves.
In an Arike city, washing meant a shallow basin. Kai hadn’t considered that advantage. His demon-senses were hardly bothered at all by that much water, nothing at all like bathing in a stream.
He dressed in the fine clothes they had packed, shirt and skirt like Arike men wore, then with a long embroidered jacket over it. It was the finest garment he had ever worn, even if he wished it hadn’t taken a war to need it.
The Arike began their weddings with a great procession through the city—first Bashasa and his family, then Kai and his entourage behind. He was given a basket of small flowers to throw to the children who lined the streets as they went. The procession ended back at Bashasa’s family home, where the guests all piled into the courtyard to find seats.
The ceremony passed in a blur, the ritual language unfamiliar to Kai. He had learned Imperial, along with all the rest of the scouts, and was working on Arike. Out of kindness, Bashasa and his family kept to Imperial when they needed to make sure Kai understood. The ritual itself was Arike, more formal than what Kai had been learning, and he had a hard time keeping up. He could tell when they reached the end, though, and the whole crowd cheered.
“And now, a feast!” Bashasa yelled ceremoniously, to the great doors opening and servants appearing with heaping trays of food.
Kai had been warned that the liquor the Arike served was stronger than the fermented mare’s milk that the Saredi drank. He wet his mouth with every toast but did no more than that, not wanting to seem rustic in front of his new husband.
Bashasa, on the other hand, had no such fear. He drank at each toast, and more in between them. At first, Kai wondered if it was some trick, but as the celebration went on, he could see Bashasa starting to blur around the edges, losing some of the crispness he had had that morning.
He didn’t stumble when they stood from the table, accompanied by cheers from the assembled guests, but Kai could see the way he tested his balance. Drunk, then, and more than that: used to it.
That hadn’t been in any of the information that Kai had been given.
It didn’t matter, though. They were married, and more important, their marriage represented an alliance. They didn’t have to like each other, for that.
Kai wondered if Grandmother had liked it, at first, or if she had found the underearth overwhelming, nothing like the Grass Plains. He wished he could ask her, but he couldn’t interrupt the night to visit the underearth. Maybe tomorrow, if she wasn’t too busy with the war effort, she’d be able to give him some advice.
He followed Bashasa through the house, up the stairs and then towards the back where the family’s rooms where. He hadn’t quite learned the way around yet—when you were inside, you couldn’t navigate by the stars like Adeni had taught him to do.
Bashasa led him to a shared room, but with one with two sleeping mats rolled up against the wall.
“We’re not going to,” and here he paused to make some sort of hand gesture that Kai assumed meant something to the Arike, their equivalent of the business of stallions and mares. “But there will be talk if we sleep separately, at least at first.”
“I don’t mind,” Kai said honestly. He preferred to sleep near other people, really. On overnight scouting trips, alone without hearing Second Uncle snoring, he never slept quite as well.
They got ready for bed separately, Bashasa showing him where to put his clothes and what to do if he needed to go out in the night.
With the lamps snuffed, there was only a faint light of stars through the window. They were the same stairs that hung over the Grass Plains, but Kai couldn’t see enough of them to draw the beasts of the sky.
“You look like my sister,” Bashasa said unexpectedly. “Did anyone tell you that? I wonder if they knew.”
Kai hadn’t heard that at all.
“Which one was she?” he asked. He’d met many relatives at the ceremony, but he couldn’t remember a sister.
“She wasn’t there,” Bashasa said. “The Hierarchs claimed her as a hostage.”
“I’m sorry,” Kai said. He had heard of that practice, but he hadn’t realized it had touched Bashasa. “What is she like?”
Bashasa laughed in a way that didn’t invite anyone else to join him. “Smarter than me. Good with people. The natural politician. She should have been the Prince-heir, not me, but—well, that’s why she’s a hostage and I’m here to be married.”
He rolled over, away from Kai, and didn’t speak again.
It took Kai a long time to fall asleep after that.
Two.
The letters that came for Kai were grim and infrequent, as were the occasions on which Kai was able to meet with his cousins in the underearth. He often wondered if it would be better to not get any news at all, except as weeks stretched out between them, his worry grew and grew in vague shapeless ways, until he received a letter or heard from a cousin and it all collapsed into a very solid real fear.
Iludi hurt—not life-threatening, but serious nonetheless. Dae-Fera missing, presumed dead, while on a scouting mission.
Kai itched to be there. He could go looking for Dae-Fera. He could help tend to Iludi. He knew, logically, that one more Saredi wouldn’t change the course of the right, not even one that was a demon. He knew he had his role to play, and his was alliance-spouse, not scout.
That didn’t make it any easier to go to parties in Benais-arik with Bashasa. Many of his friends refused to speak Imperial, and while Kai sympathized, his Arike wasn’t good enough to keep up in a loud room. He stood at Bashasa’s side as he introduced him to people and even more people, and then tried to keep smiling as the conversations wandered where he couldn’t go.
“This is Dalrama, she controls half the grain west of the city,” Bashasa said, in Imperial as always.
Kai greeted her with a bow, in the Arike way that he had learned from watching Bashasa.
Dalrama laughed, ignoring Kai. “You flatterer. It’s a third at most.”
“You know I’ve never had a head for math, Dal darling.”
Dalrama looked at Bashasa in a way that Kai found startlingly overfamiliar. He didn’t mind, really, if Bashasa had other bed partners—the custom of a pair marriage was awkward if one liked variety—but he knew the Arike would mind, and it seemed rude to rub his face in it.
Kai started to wish he hadn’t come, even though he suspected that staying home alone would have been an insult. He liked Bashasa well enough on the mornings they spent at home. Bashasa had proved to have a surprising number of useful skills. He could darn socks neatly, which Kai had never quite managed to do, and Kai found a number of pieces of his clothing starting to grow subtle embroidered patterns at the hems or the cuffs. Bashasa talked while he worked, or read to Kai while he worked, and it was all pleasant enough.
Some nights, they would have one or two of Bashasa’s friends over, and Kai liked that too, when they could sit and talk late into the night.
But too often, there was a party. Either the rowdier set of Bashasa’s friends came to the house, or they went together to an event like this one. Kai had stopped asking what they were for: they were parties to have parties.
Kai had never developed much of a head for wine, and preferred to stay mostly sober as the parties raged. Bashasa didn’t seem to know what moderation was, even though Kai knew he would be aching and groaning about his head the next morning. As he moved through the party, he drank cup after cup, barely paying attention as they were handed to him.
Eventually he ended up in a game of cards. This wasn’t a game of chance that Kai knew, so he didn’t take a seat at the table to play. Instead, he stood at Bashasa’s shoulder, grateful at least that that way he could fend off people who wanted to bring Bashasa more wine. Bashasa had taken one look at his eyes and never been bothered by them again, but it turned out that wasn’t the case for most Arike, and even with Enna’s small stature, it was easy to threaten cupbearers with the right kind of look.
Dalrama, the grain merchant Kai had met earlier, practically fell into the seat across from Bashasa. “What are we playing for?”
“Coin,” Bashasa said, gesturing to the stacks of coin in front of him on the table. Kai had a poor sense of Arike money, but he had the strong impression it was a lot of coin. “And if you’re short, I’m sure we can come up with some other forfeit.”
“I’d be happy to forfeit whatever you like,” Dalrama said with a grin. “Because I find myself rather short on coin tonight.”
Bashasa grinned back. “Start with coin, eh? Then we’ll see where that takes us.”
The more round of cards they played, the more Kai suspected that this woman had previously had relations with Bashasa. It was something about the way she leaned towards him, or laughed when she lost cards to him. There was a familiarity about it.
Bashasa didn’t flirt back with her, but also he never looked back up at Kai. He just—let things happen, even as the coins on the table moved steadily over towards his side. Kai hadn’t expected that. He thought Bashasa would have been too drunk to be good at cards, but maybe that didn’t matter. Maybe everyone else here was just as drunk.
Dalrama made an elaborate show of pushing her last coin over to Bashasa. The other players had already lost their piles, so it was just the two of them left. “Well, I guess that’s it for me, unless there’s something else you’d want me to wager?”
“Right of first refusal on your grain sales this harvest season,” Bashasa said immediately.
Kai didn’t know if that was a common thing to wager, but from the way Dalrama reacted, he didn’t think so.
“Are you sure there isn’t something a little more interesting you’d want?”
Bashasa shrugged and didn’t say anything. Dalrama scribbled on a scrap of paper and tossed it into the middle of the table for her wager.
Looking put out, Dalrama dealt another round of the cards. She lost that one too.
“Bashasa!” she exclaimed. “What am I supposed to tell my family now, when they had plans to sell that grain?”
“That you’ve made a promise with your name, and you expect them to honor it,” he said. “But if you’d prefer not to tell them that, you can make another wager to try and win it back.”
“I should stop before you take everything from me,” Dalrama said, but for some reason, she tossed her hair and produced another scrap of paper.
Bashasa took the pen from her and jotted something down. She paled when she saw it, but folded it in half and tossed it back to the middle of the table. She said something in Arike, too fast and full of slang for Kai to follow.
Whatever was on that paper, Dalrama clearly wanted to win it back, but Bashasa took that hand too.
“Now what do you want to me to offer?”
Kai waited too, but Bashasa seemed to have lost interest in playing cards.
“I’m going to go home,” he said, pushing his chair away from the table. He carefully collected the two scraps of paper and tucked them into an inside pocket of his jacket. “I’ll call on your family in the morning.” He paused. “Maybe in the afternoon. You’ll want to be there, I imagine, to explain what happened.”
He bowed. Dalrama, still sitting at the table, looked like she’d like to call a storm down onto his head, but she nodded back.
To Kai’s surprise, Bashasa made for the door. Kai had assumed that had merely been an excuse to escape the cards, but he seemed to be done for the evening.
Something had happened there. Kai didn’t know what, or why Bashasa had been so dead-set on winning the right to buy grain, but he was beginning to wonder if that encounter, with the wine and the cards, had been the excuse for the whole evening.
*
Kai forgot all about the grain deal until he received a letter from Iludi nearly a full moon later.
and thank your husband for us, Kai-Enna—we got much better grain prices at Erathi than we were expecting. Too often, the Hierarchs throw their gold and threats around to make off with all the best of the grain, but this year, the traders were willing to sell to us for a price we could pay. This will make a major difference for the campaign, now that we can worry less about finding forage for the horses.
Three.
Kai and Bashasa were caught on the road when it happened. There had only been the sounds of the countryside, and then all of a sudden, there were half a dozen desperate soldiers, too dirty and haggard to tell where their allegiances were, advancing toward them.
At first, Kai had thought they were lost. They’d had no reports of Hierarch activity anywhere near here. It was just supposed to be a short trip to Suneai-arik with only a small group of guards.
“To remind them whose side they’re on,” Bashasa had said, with the twist of his mouth that Kai was growing accustomed to, the one that said he was being serious about things but thought that the entire idea of being serious was a joke.
The visit had been successful—well, successful enough, Kai thought. He wasn’t subtle, and too many of the players and the rules of the game were obscure to him. He was learning how to read Bashasa’s moods, though, and Bashasa had seemed pleased.
Maybe that’s why they all had let their guard down a little on the road back to Benais-arik and missed the signs of the legionaries until they were on top of them.
Kai had been in fights before, and he knew how to use his demon heritage to his advantage. He shoved Bashasa behind him, took one minor cut to his shoulder—bloody and annoying, but it wouldn’t slow him down—then grabbed the jaw of the solider who had cut him. He dropped him a second later, already a husk, and turned to the next legionary.
This one was differently dressed, with a long coat and rings on his fingers. Kai didn’t spend more than a breath looking at him, though. He reached and pulled, but unlike most mortals, the man didn’t collapse immediately. Kai pulled again, and found an endless depth of power, and below that, the awful feeling of the Well: all death and despair and awful things he didn’t want to touch.
He had grabbed an expositor, he realized, and if Kai couldn’t drain him, he would kill all of them.
Kai gave one last hard yank. He felt something snap as he fell backwards, and then everything was black.
*
“Kai!” Bashasa was calling, when he could hear again. “Kai! Are you all right?”
Kai sat up. He felt wrong all over, like he was too far from the ground.
“Kai?” Bashasa asked, more cautiously. “Kai, can you say something?”
“I don’t feel well,” Kai said weakly.
“Kai, I don’t want you to panic,” Bashasa said, which didn’t make any sense. The fighting was over, and neither of them had taken serious injury. “But I need you to look at something over here.”
Kai turned. Lying on the ground just behind him was—
“That’s me,” he said. Or—Enna, at least, still and unmoving in a way that Kai knew all too well.
He reached, but there was nothing there. It wasn’t like when he had first taken his place in Enna’s body. It was gone.
“I don’t—this isn’t—”
He grabbed for something, anything, and landed a hand on Bashasa’s arm. He squeezed, probably harder than he should. He didn’t feel like he had any sense of this body or how it interacted with his demon strength.
Bashasa didn’t flinch.
“Sir…” one of the soldiers said. She was still scanning the horizon. Excellent scout behavior, Kai thought distantly. There might be more trouble coming.
“Do we need to handle this now, or can we keep heading back?” Bashasa said, not ungently.
Kai wasn’t supposed to do this—this was expressly forbidden—but waiting wouldn’t make it worse.
“We can go,” he said.
He let Bashasa guide him back to his horse, and then he let Bashasa adjust his stirrups for him. This body was taller, of all things: Kai would worry about that when he was less shell-shocked.
Bashasa had a quiet word with one of the soldiers, too low for Kai to hear, but the soldier nodded. She unclipped a bedroll from behind her saddle and wrapped Enna in it, then picked her up. She made such a small bundle.
“We’ll bury her when we’re back, if that’s all right,” Bashasa said.
Kai nodded. He let Bashasa guide him back to Benais-arik and back to the house, fending off any questions from his relatives. He conveyed to Bashasa that a large ceremony for Enna would be inappropriate—her family already had mourned the Enna that was—but that her body should be treated respectfully. They didn’t burn their dead here, but Bashasa nodded and said that he could have her placed in the family mausoleum.
*
For the first few days after they buried Enna, Bashasa mostly gave Kai space. He didn’t try to take him to any parties, or even get too close to him in the evenings. Kai appreciated it—he wanted the news of his new form to spread before he had to explain it to anyone personally, and he was still learning about this body. It—Talamines—had retained more memories than Enna had, probably because of the way Kai had pulled him in, and Kai needed to sort through them.
Many of them were unpleasant, but some of them seemed useful nonetheless. Kai shunted them aside, to be dealt with when he felt more up to it. It was easier, at first, to learn the physicality of the his new body, so he went for long walks with Salatel pacing silently beside him. He wished he could walk as far as the Plains, but he knew he couldn’t, so he turned and let Salatel guide him back to the house, arriving shortly after dark.
He had gotten sweaty on the walk—Talamines sweat more than Enna had—and had to stop to wash before going up to their room.
Bashasa was already in bed, though he wasn’t asleep. He was reading a book that Kai didn’t recognize with the lamp turned down low, just barely enough light for humans to read.
“Making progress?” Bashasa said, putting down the book as Kai came in.
Kai shrugged and started working on his buttons. “Some,” he said. He still hadn’t found a way to use an expositor’s magic without drawing on the Well, but he had learned a number of cantrips that he thought would be useful.
He set aside his jacket and then pulled his shirt over his head. This body had required a new wardrobe, and he wasn’t used to it yet.
“I need the necessary,” Bashasa said, and practically bolted out of the room.
Kai didn’t think anything of it that night, or the next, but by the week’s end, he realized that he had never been naked in a room with Bashasa since their return. Bashasa made excuses every time, or stayed in his study until Kai was in bed, in a way that increasingly felt deliberate. Once, he had nearly walked into the doorframe in his hurry to leave.
Kai didn’t know what it meant. Was he uncomfortable with the way Kai had taken Talamines’s body? Kai couldn’t really blame him. He was uncomfortable with it, and he was the one who had done it. It had been an accident, but that didn’t change the way it was against all the rules that Grandmother had given him.
When it started spreading into their daytimes, too, Bashasa pulling away when Kai got too close at dinner, or sneaking out in the afternoon without him, Kai knew he had to figure out what was going wrong. He didn’t want to cause conflict by asking Bashasa directly, so after a day of thinking about it, he went down to the kitchens with a certain degree of intent.
He’d been working on learning Arike, and Calasina had been happy to let him practice on her as long as he didn’t disrupt any of the kitchens’ workings. With every new word he learned, he was more able to follow the stories she told him. She seemed to have near-omniscient knowledge of the city and everyone in it, and no shame about sharing the gossipy details.
After letting Calasina feed him, and then asking her about all her grandsons and how they were growing, and then being handed the sweet-stuffed grape leaves that seemed to be the civic dish of Benais-arik, Kai finally got to his real question.
“In the Saredi, taking a new body like this would be forbidden,” Kai said.
“Is that so?” Calasina asked politely. “From what I heard, it was an accident.”
Kai didn’t know if the Saredi would have punished him for it, but he knew it wouldn’t have been looked on well, even if it was an accident. “I think it made Bashasa uncomfortable, too.”
Calasina turned from where she was stirring a pot over the hearth.
“Is that what you think?”
Kai shrugged. “It seems so. He wasn’t uncomfortable with Enna.”
“She reminded him of his sister,” Calasina said. “You’ve probably heard that before.”
Kai nodded. Bashasa had told him that himself.
“Well, now you don’t look like his sister anymore.”
Kai sat politely, hoping that she would continue talking and explain what that had to do with anything.
“I don’t say this to make trouble, but, that boy had plenty of dalliances before he got married. You might have heard some of that.”
“I’m not offended by it,” Kai said.
“Well, he stepped out with all types at least once. But the most common of his dalliances, they were men. Tall, handsome men, like this body you’ve got now. Another grape leaf, child?”
Four.
Three weeks later, when they left to go to a summit between several of the Arike city-states, Bashasa still hadn’t said anything to Kai about his new body.
Now that Kai knew what he was looking for, he could see it—the way Bashasa’s eyes lingered on his body and skipped away, like he was afraid to be caught looking; the way he touched Kai to adjust his jacket or tidy his hair and let his hands linger; the way Bashasa had started bathing privately.
Kai didn’t say anything either. He didn’t know how it was done with the Arike, and he didn’t want to offend Bashasa, especially if Bashasa hadn’t decided how he felt about his feelings. They had agreed to an arranged marriage, but that didn’t necessarily mean they needed to have that particular intimacy. The Saredi would have liked a child from Enna’s line, but since that wasn’t an option now, Kai saw no reason to press the issue.
“You don’t have to come to these meetings,” Bashasa said at the last minute. “They’re just going to be endless talking and nothing is going to change. You could—I don’t know. Go see the city, or something.”
They had both been strongly discouraged from wandering. Bardes-arik was reasonably safe, they had been assured, but there was always the chance that some legionaries had disguised themselves with the rest of the refugees arriving, or some other disaffected displaced person would try to take matters into their own hands. Kai was much less vulnerable than most people thought, but his black eyes made him a target and meant he couldn’t surprise an attacker.
He knew Bashasa well enough to read him now. That much diffidence meant that it was something that Bashasa was uncomfortable asking for directly. He pulled on the fancy coat, hastily remade for him from one of Bashasa’s spares.
“I said I’d come,” he said. “I have to speak for the Saredi.”
In truth, none of the Arike states were particularly interested in the future of the Saredi, and his words would do nothing to convince them. But Bashasa smiled at him, one of his rare real smiles, and Kai knew he had done the right thing.
“Kai, after the meeting, I was wondering if you’d like to —”
He was cut off by their escort arriving to take them to the meeting, so Kai never got to hear what Bashasa was asking him to do. He would have said yes, though. He would have followed Bashasa anywhere.
At the meeting, Bashasa insisted on introducing him by full name and title to everyone they met at the gathering, leaning on the importance of Kai’s connection to the underearth. The connection to the underearth had been sealed by some trick of the Hierarchs’ magic, but that didn’t stop Bashasa. Kai did his best to look dangerous.
After everyone had a plate full of dates and nuts, they settled in to talk. It took a long time for any of them to get to any matters of substance, with questions about each other’s family, or how the harvest had gone, and only occasional mentions of the war.
Gradually, Kai picked up on a pattern in the conversation. Karanis, one of Bashasa’s distant cousins, would make some vague suggestion that they might be better off coming to some sort of agreement with the Hierarchs, to convince them to pass over Arik as they swept across the continent. Bashasa never challenged him directly, but a few exchanges later, he would mention some people who had been destroyed by the Hierarchs, or otherwise been betrayed. It wasn’t hard to do—the Hierarchs were leaving a trail of ruined cities behind them as they made their way across the continent.
Karanis was losing his temper. Each time that Bashasa did it—subtly, never contradicting him directly—the other heads around the room nodded, and Karanis grew redder.
“I heard ill-tidings from Suneai-arik,” Bashasa said—not to Karanis, but to a woman whose name Kai had forgotten, sitting at the other end of the table. “Have you heard from any of your fishing contacts? Did they survive, or were they lost in the disaster?”
The woman shook her head. “We still have hope, but I haven’t heard anything yet.”
Karanis finally exploded. “Will you just say what you want to say rather than dancing around it, Bashasa?”
Kai expected Bashasa to smile and laugh and say that he didn’t have any point at all. It was obviously what Karanis was expecting—and indeed, counting on, as a way to remove any of Bashasa’s points from discussion.
He clearly wasn’t expecting what Bashasa did. He turned to look Karanis directly in the face.
“As long as I’m alive,” he said crisply, steel in his voice, “Benais-arik will never accept any treaty with the Hierarchs. I will fight them as long as I have breath to stand, and I will keep reminding all the rest of you just why we must refuse to surrender.”
Karanis stammered. “That wasn’t—I wasn’t saying—”
Bashasa, looking faintly embarrassed about making such a fuss, ignored him. He turned to Lahshar,, sitting at his other side, instead.
“Aunt Lahshar, can I fetch you any more of these dates? They’re quite delicious, don’t you think?”
No one directly responded to what Bashasa had said, but Kai noticed that for the rest of the meeting, Karanis was silent and no one else suggested that they do anything to ally with the Hierarchs.
Five.
Kai was in the courtyard, practicing the intentions that he had learned from Talamines’s memories. There were more locked away there that he hadn’t yet learned how to make useful, but even the few he had learned so far would be useful in battle, he thought.
He had kept Bashasa up to date with his progress, even the trick he had found to power the intentions without using the Well. Bashasa clearly hated it, but he hadn’t asked Kai to stop. In return for that gift, Kai was trying to find something better.
There was a clatter behind him, and Kai turned to see Bashasa running in.
“We’ve gotten a message from the spies,” he said. “There’s going to be a Hierarch at Stios in six days.”
“You want to take the fight to them,” Kai said, though he didn’t need the confirmation. Bashasa had been quietly furious ever since they had received a letter from his sister, hostage at the Summer Halls, saying that she had been quite ill but was now recovered, with the help of a Witch, and that Bashasa shouldn’t worry. Even Kai, who had never met her, could tell that there were volumes of things that she wasn’t saying.
“Will you come?” Bashasa asked, as if Kai had not been longing to join the fight every day since he was married.
“I’ll come,” Kai said.
*
The planning was hurried but not scattered. Bashasa revealed more information than Kai knew he had been collecting: on the legionaries, expositors, the court around a Hierarch. It was the kind of information they needed to plan a targeted strike.
From there, it was a matter of coordinating all the details—who, where, when, with backup plans and backup to those.
After a long discussion, Salatel finally nodded. “That plan works.” Her mouth twisted. “Well, as well as any plan works. But it’s good enough to try.”
Kai knew perfectly well how plans failed in the heat of battle, but he too had to hope.
*
“Do you think it’ll work?” Bashasa asked, late at night when it was just the two of them in the dark.
“I don’t think we have any better option,” Kai said.
He himself was very hard to kill, and he was going to use all that power to keep Bashasa safe. He didn’t know if they’d be able to take down the Hierarch, though. He didn’t know of anyone who had done it.
But if no one did it—they had to do it. Fighting back wasn’t enough. So many people had tried to fight back, and it hadn’t been enough. They had to start winning.
“I trust you,” Bashasa said, soft in the dark.
*
The plan had fallen apart practically at the first contact. The guard around the camp hadn’t been where they were supposed to be, and only Salatel and the cadre’s quick thinking had saved them all from slaughter.
Bashasa pushed them onward with sheer force of personality, a glittering look in his eye that Kai had never seen before. It was all he could do to keep up so he could keep putting himself between Bashasa and the worst of the danger.
“Go, go!” Salatel yelled at them. She and some of the cadre were holding the door against legionaries rushing them. There were a few more legionaries in the room, coming to wakefulness too slowly to avoid Kai.
Bashasa dashed further inside and Kai, cursing, followed him. A few of the cadre followed, and they fell upon the Hierarch’s court, gathered together in a small room and unprepared for what was happening.
It was messy, bloody chaos, but finally, with Kai’s magic and Bashasa’s sword, they reached the center of the thing, the beating heart of it, and then the small man with too much power in his hands. Kai leapt, Bashasa followed, and, somehow, the entire scrum ended with the Hierarch dead on the ground between them.
Kai was breathing hard. He stared at Bashasa in shock. He didn’t think they’d really manage it.
Bashasa, blood on his face, grinned back, something wild and savage in his face. He looked like the had known they could do it, not at all like his voice in the dark. He looked like he could win this fight. Kai was prepared to stand at his side as long as it took.
He took Kai’s face between his hands, headless of the grime on both of them, and pulled his face in close until their foreheads were pressed together. He was so close that Kai could smell him, even with the smell of battle all around them.
“Kai,” he said, his voice breaking. “Kai, I couldn’t have—I couldn’t have done this without you.”
“Next, the Summer Halls,” Kai said.
Bashasa pulled away with a laugh, and just like that, the spell was broken. He was back to being regular Bashasa, the one that Kai remembered marrying.
“We’re going to need a better plan for that one.”
Plus One.
It was a long hard ride back to where they had made camp. Kai healed quickly, but not instantaneously, and he had taken serious blows in trying to protect Bashasa. It had been worth it, but it meant he bit his lip as he mounted back up.
“Are you hurt?” Bashasa demanded.
“No worse than you,” Kai said, which was a lie, but at the same time, true in the way that mattered. He had seen how stiffly Bashasa moved once the rush of the thing had faded. By the time they reached camp, Kai would be no worse hurt than Bashasa was.
Bashasa looked at him like he didn’t believe him, but he didn’t ask any more questions.
By the time they made it back to camp, Kai was regretting not saying something earlier. Although, what could he have said? He didn’t want to stay in the slaughter of the Hierarch’s camp any more than the rest of them. Better to be away, even if it meant suffering through a trot on a rough path.
Bashasa took one look at him as he tried to slide casually down his house and started calling for the cadre to bring water to his tent.
“It’s fine,” Kai said, knowing that he had no hope of convincing Bashasa.
“It’s not, your entire side is covered in blood. Kai, why didn’t you say something? We could have stopped to dress the wound.”
“It’s not as bad as it seems,” Kai muttered, but let himself be herded into a tent.
He didn’t remember getting this injury. It must have been in that last desperate fight, or he would have felt it earlier. It hadn’t been enough to stop him at the time, and that was all he had been thinking about.
Someone brought rags and a bowl of water. Bashasa thanked them and waved them out of the tent, so it was just him and Kai there. He urged Kai to lie down, ignoring his own injuries, then carefully peeled Kai’s tunic from his side.
Kai winced when he saw it. It was looked worse than it was, still leaking blood sluggishly, but it was plenty bad. It would heal on its own, but he let Bashasa press a rag on it to encourage the bleeding to stop.
“Did you do this one?” Bashasa asked quietly.
“No,” Kai said. He would have, if he had needed the pain, but the legionaries had been kind enough to provide him with it.
He didn’t tell Bashasa that he would have done it. Bashasa hated the way he powered his magic, even though he had promised he would never ask Kai to stop. This allowed both of them to sidestep that.
Bashasa’s other hand, the one not holding the wound closed, traced lightly up and down his uninjured side, like Kai was a cat. It was pleasant feeling, in this stillness between the two of them.
“Kai,” Bashasa finally said. “I can’t do this without you. You know that, right?”
Kai nodded. With his power, he could serve the campaign in a way that very few soldiers could match. “I’m tricky to kill,” he promised. “I’ll stand between you and the arrows.”
Bashasa’s hand stopped.
“Kai. That’s—of course that’s useful, and I’m very grateful for it, but. That’s not what I meant.”
Kai stared up at him.
Bashasa laughed, a little ruefully. “Kai. Do you really not know?”
Kai was about to ask what exactly it was that he didn’t know, but before he could get the words out, Bashasa leaned down and pressed his lips to Kai’s.
Kai froze. That hadn’t been what he was expecting at all. But he thought about all the ways Bashasa watched him, and all the ways Bashasa carefully didn’t touch him, and—
oh.
Before Kai could react, Bashasa pulled away. His ears were flushing dark, as embarrassed as Kai had ever seen him.
“I’m sorry—” he started.
“No, don’t be,” Kai interrupted him. “Bashasa, come back, do it again.”
“Oh, you—really?”
“Yes,” Kai said. He pushed himself up on his elbows so he could kiss Bashasa.
The kiss only lasted a few minutes before Bashasa lifted his head again.
“This is all very nice, but Kai, your wound has opened again and you’re bleeding on me.”
“Don’t care,” Kai said. It would be gone soon enough.
Bashasa laugh. “I care, though. How about I finish wrapping it and then we can start this again?”
Kai supposed that would work.