The voice cut off as both of the males in the room looked up. Rjmar was behind his cluttered counter, calmly doing something to the innards of a small device with a thin tool. The male who had been speaking had the coiled readiness of someone who expected trouble through every entrance.
He had a build made for speed rather than strength, his Tajiri blood plain in every line of him, but tempered with some other race, and he was young—still young enough to think anger was armor. He looked Njkall up and down and did not step back, which was either courage or foolishness and probably both.
“Let me guess,” Doren said. “Somebody sent for the clan leader to come frown at me. Do I curtsy, or is a nod enough for a clan leader? I forget my manners. Being abandoned on an ice ball does that to a man.”
“Njkall,” Rjmar said, not looking up from his work. “Ignore the noise. He’s louder when he thinks no one’s listening, so this is nearly polite.”
“You ownnearly polite,” Doren shot back. “You bought it wholesale.”
Njkall let the room settle a moment before he spoke. The pause was a habit, and he watched the young male chafe against it before filling the silence with his own tapping foot because he couldn’t bear to leave it empty.
“I understand Athtar left you here,” he said calmly.
“Athtar abandoned me here, which is the difference between a favor and a knife.” Doren bared his teeth, which was less impressive than a Hothian doing it and he seemed to know it, which made him do it harder. “I made one reasonable attempt to renegotiate the command structure of a ship I was doing allthe work on, and for that I get marooned on a frozen rock at the ass-end of the Empire with no ship, no credits, and a shopkeeper who charges me for the privilege of freezing indoors. So. If you’re here to add a lecture, get in line behind the cold and the debt.”
“You tried to take his ship.”
“I tried to improve it.”
“By taking it.”
“Semantics.” But something flickered under the bravado. Not shame exactly, but something older and rawer than shame. The particular fury of a male who had learned early that no one would ever give him anything, and had decided, therefore, to take it, and hated that the taking had left him here.
He knew that fury. It usually came from somewhere ugly.
“I’m not here to lecture you,” he said, his voice still calm. “You’re not clan. You’re not my responsibility. Rjmar’s given you a roof, which is more than the town owed you, so I’d suggest not spitting on it.”
“There it is?—”
“But,” he went on, and he injected enough authority into his voice that even Doren shut his mouth, “you’re on my world now. That means the same rules cover you as cover everyone here. No slaving. No taking what isn’t yours, which also means no renegotiating what isn’t yours. You keep your claws to yourself and your work honest, and no one here will trouble you. You don’t, and you’ll answer to Baralt, and after Baralt to me. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
Doren held his eyes. Njkall could see the effort it took, the refusal to be the first to look away, but he did, his jaw tight,and for just a moment the anger cracked far enough that Njkall could see the exhausted male underneath, the one who hadn’t slept properly in a long time because sleeping meant trusting the place he slept.
“I understand,” Doren said, “that everyone on this rock loves to explain the rules to me.”
“Then we’re finished.” Njkall turned to Rjmar. “He giving you real trouble, or just the loud kind?”
“The loud kind.” Rjmar set down his tool at last and looked up, and there was something in the trader’s weathered face that surprised Njkall a little. His expression was dry and amused and not at all unkind, watching the young male the way a male watches weather he’s decided to enjoy rather than curse. “He’s got quick hands and a quicker mouth and he actually knows how a manifold comes apart, which is more than I can say for most of the strays this town produces. He’s earning the bed. He simply prefers to shout about it.”
“I do not?—”
“He’s a great help,” Rjmar said over him, as serene as Baralt, “when he isn’t insulting me.”
“I insult youwhilehelping. It’s called efficiency.”
Njkall looked from the trader with no clan and no ties, who’d chosen a life alone in a rough town, to the furious young stray he’d apparently decided to keep underfoot, and thought that the two of them deserved each other entirely. Rjmar had spent thirty years perfecting the art of not caring about anything, and something about this loud angry male had clearly slipped under his guard, and Rjmar hadn’t even noticed it yet. Doren, for his part, was too busy being furious to notice that the only person onthe planet not trying to fix him or lock him up or ship him off was the very male he kept picking fights with.
They’ll drive each other mad,he thought.And it’ll be exactly what both of them need.He’d seen stranger family made from worse pieces.
“Keep him,” he said, and turned for the door. “He’s your problem.”
“I didn’t ask to be kept!”
The door shut behind him on Doren’s indignant voice, and he walked back out into the thin sunlight and the crowded streets and wished, not for the first time, that a clan leader could also be a ship’s captain. Captains had the freedom to make decisions and then leave them behind.
He began the long trek back towards the clan caves. Clan business had provided the distraction he’d wanted, but as soon as he thought of the small female waiting for him, and of grey eyes and a soft mouth andslowly, but with me, his steps quickened anyway.
CHAPTER NINE
