Page 60 of Something Human

“Now these are real mountains,” said Adares. “The mountains of Pheme are just big hills, compared to this.”

Rus leaned back against Adares, and Adares drew him close, still looking up at the mountains. His right hand gripped Rus’s shoulder. Rus traced his fingertips over the barely-visible lines of ink on the back of it.

“You kept the snake,” Rus said.

“The what? Oh. The snake. Yes, I did. On impulse, the day after I heard that you’d … when I thought you had died. I found a Getti woman in town who did the work for me. I knew the Getti use brown ink, almost the same colour as those berries.” He held his hand out to look at it. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand, but that was quite possibly the craziest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

Rus gave him a sceptical look over his shoulder.

He shrugged. “I’m a Phemian. We don’t tattoo ourselves. It’s not even on the list of things Phemians never do, like wear long sleeves or grow beards—it’s just too bizarre. Of course, as it turns out, I’m setting myself up as an independent chief in the Karhan, so it’s entirely appropriate—but I didn’t know that at the time. You didn’t tell me the snake was the mark of a headman.”

“No, I couldn’t have. I was still pretending not to know who you were.”

Adares put his arm back around Rus, and they stood like that for a little longer.

“Did you write that letter, about the tribute?” Adares asked.

“Gunthanaruth told me what to write, but yes, I did write it. I even signed my name to it.”

Adares considered that for a moment. “Your full name. Was I supposed to be able to decipher that?”

“No, I didn’t think you would. It didn’t occur to me just to write ‘Rus’ at the bottom of an official letter, though. It would have looked odd.”

“No one would have seen it but me.”

“No?”

“No! It was addressed to me—no one else reads my correspondence unless I show it to them.”

“I didn’t think of that.”

“And I suppose even if you had, I’d have just thought Rus was a common name.”

“It isn’t.”

Adares nuzzled his face into Rus’s hair, laughing softly. He was standing behind Rus, and the sloping ground beneath their feet added extra inches to the difference in their heights. He moved his hand from Rus’s shoulder, stroking slowly down over Rus’s chest to his belly, warm through the thin fabric of his shirt.

“Part of me,” he said, his breath warm on Rus’s neck, “wants to just sit and talk with you all night.”

Rus pressed back against him, eyes shut. “What part of you is that? The inhuman part that … that delights in the suffering of others?”

He felt Adares’s tongue trace the curve of his ear, and he made a noise low in his throat. Adares’s hands travelled lower, one gathering up Rus’s kilt, the other moving over the inside of his thigh, smooth fingertips tracing over sensitive skin.

“You’ve changed,” Adares whispered. “You’re not so skittish. I like it.”

“You should. It is all your doing.”

Adares’s left hand was under his shirt now. It was so strange for this to happen here, in the heart of the Luth territory, almost within sight of the headman’s hall. It didn’t seem real.

“Rus? Say something to me in Firhat Luth.”

“What?”

“Anything.”

He turned in Adares’s arms, looping his hands behind Adares’s neck.

“You are so beautiful,” he said, lingering on each word because it was such an astonishing thing to say in the Luth language, the word for a desirable woman but with the masculine ending. Something no one ever said. He wanted to explain this in case Adares’s understanding of Luth grammar was not advanced enough to grasp it, but Adares was looking at him with a little smile.