Page 18 of The Boy Bride

“Why?” Lill put his hands behind his back. “What’s this about?”

“Just do it,” Barda growled. “I’ll make you.”

“Lash his arms to his sides if he won’t cooperate,” his father said impatiently.

Before Lill had a chance to change his strategy—before the lord of Umtúshta had even finished speaking—Barda had looped the rope expertly around Lill’s body and begun to cinch it tight. He was fast; he’d been able to catch Lill unawares last night. And he knew that Lill wasn’t harmless himself.

“No kicking,” he hissed.

It was too late for kicking to have done any good. Lill put up only a token, feeble struggle, mind racing. What were they planning to do to him? What did they want? Barda tied his arms firmly to his sides, wrapping the rope around several times. It dug into Lill’s sore back and wrenched his injured arm, and he bit his lip against the pain. Think, he had to think. He had to stay calm and think. He felt dizzy.

“Look what a tiny waist he has!” Barda remarked gleefully to the other men. “Just like a girl!”

Barda’s father ignored this, and the man in the white cloak pursed his lips and looked disapproving. Who was he, and why did his presence seem somehow … wrong?

Barda’s father was giving his son some instruction that contained too many words Lill didn’t know.

“Why?” Barda asked, frowning. “Sir?”

“Do as I say!”

Barda shrugged and tugged on the excess rope, a large coil still in his grasp. Lill stumbled backward in the direction he was pulled. Barda tossed the rope, and Lill twisted around to see it go up and over a limb of one of the fruit trees at the edge of the yard. He had a moment to realize what was intended before he was jerked off his feet as Barda hauled on the rope.

The pain of the rope around his waist stole his breath and nearly made him lose consciousness. When he stopped swinging, gasping and nauseous, he saw that Barda had secured the end of the rope around the tree trunk, suspending him just a few inches off the ground.

The grey-haired man, Faru, got up from his seat on the bench and came toward Lill. The man in the white cloak followed. They were both tall enough that they were still looking down at Lill, even when his feet were off the ground. Faru’s blue eyes were very cold. Lill swallowed down a wave of nausea.

“I haven’t yet decided what to do with him,” Faru said, speaking right into Lill’s face but not addressing him.

Barda, by the tree trunk, shifted uncomfortably. “He’s Vanu’s to do with, though, so … ”

“Vanu is a—” Faru used a word Lill didn’t understand. Even his tone, icy and flat, didn’t help Lill guess his meaning. “And he has said already that he does not want to keep this one. We are sending him back over the wall. What I have yet to decide is: in what state?”

So they were trying to decide whether to kill him or not. Why? Just because they liked killing?

“He’s not keeping him?” Barda cried, sounding crestfallen. “Did he say that?”

“Your father has told you he did,” said the white-cloaked man, managing somehow to sound both unctuous and reproving.

“If Vanu doesn’t want him,” said Barda, “I’ll keep him myself.”

“You will not,” his father snapped. “No son of mine will lay a hand on a lowland boy whore except in violence.”

“Your father speaks wisely,” White Cloak intoned.

Barda bared his teeth at him.

Lill saw someone approaching behind the men, from the half-ruined great house. It was Khatu. He felt a flicker of hope. Khatu had seemed to like him.

“Da, I’m supposed to tell you—eh? What’s going on here? Are we doing the bride hunt already? But isn’t that a bit … ” He waved a hand doubtfully at Lill. “His feet are off the ground, there. Doesn’t look comfortable.”

“Your father is carrying out Lord Vanu’s wishes with regard to the lowland boy,” said White Cloak.

“Which are what? For him to be tied up and hung off a tree?” Khatu looked sceptical.

“Vanu has no use for this boy,” said Faru. He glanced at Lill and seemed to come to a decision. “Geld him and throw him over the wall.”

There was a moment’s shocked silence.