Page 32 of The Boy Bride

“Beautiful,” Rami supplied in Zashian.

“Nah, it’s more like … ” Deru frowned thoughtfully. He repeated the word Lill didn’t know, with a sensuous emphasis that made its meaning pretty clear. “Deliciously beautiful. Were they?”

Lill was fourteen that summer. Rami was his age, Deru a little older. He talked like this sometimes, and though Rami seemed to understand what he meant by it, he usually rolled his eyes. Lill was about to say that he didn’t know how “delicious” could apply to a person, when quite suddenly he realized that he did.

It hadn’t been one of the dancers. They had been beautiful, but in the same way that the curtains and wall-paintings in the lord’s house had been beautiful. Not in a way that made you want to consume them.

It had been—shamefully—Zish who had looked that way to Lill, for a moment, when he was performing before the lord’s guests. He had been tumbling, showing off the supple strength of his body just for the sake of it, no weapons in hand, not attacking or defending, and he’d looked lovely, in a way that affected Lill strangely. Delicious? Maybe it wasn’t quite the right word, but it was close.

“You might have thought so,” he replied to Deru. “I didn’t.”

The brothers laughed. “Laughter should not be ignored,” Master Hadda had said once. “It is useful to know how to make people laugh.”

“Was it strange to be outside the Order for so long?” Rami asked, tipping back his head to look up at the dark sky. “I remember you said you thought it would be.”

“Yeah,” said Deru. “You were worried about that stuff they always talk about—the angels coming after you for worshipping the king and all that.”

Had he revealed that to them? He was displeased with himself. It sounded too much like weakness. It was weakness.

“There is nothing in that to be worried about,” he said sternly. “So long as you follow orders, you remain safe.”

“Right,” said Rami after a moment. “Are you going to go out again?”

Lill nodded. “Master Hadda thinks that we will be tasked with delivering a warning to the same lord, sometime soon. That will be a different kind of mission, but he has said I would be suited to it.”

“Of course you would,” said Rami. “You’re the best in the stealth-craft cohort, aren’t you?”

“One of the best,” Lill allowed.

Master Hadda didn’t give out praise, exactly, but it was like the way that your eyes adjusted to the moonlight after you put out a lamp; at first it seemed too dark to see, but soon enough you found the light that was there enough. Lill knew when he was doing well, even when no one congratulated him. And he did well in stealth-craft. He was one of the best.

He left the roof before Deru and Rami, and on the way down the stairs, out of habit, took the opportunity to practice the technique of descending audibly then sneaking back halfway in silence, often useful to overhear conversations. He wasn’t really trying to spy on Deru and Rami; he didn’t think they would be talking about him after he left, but they were.

It was Deru’s voice that he heard first, low but clear: “He’s never going to like you back, Rami. Not the way you want.”

“Shut up. I don’t want him to like me some way. I just want to be his friend.”

Deru sighed. “I don’t know if he’s even going to do that. He’s not like us—he grew up here. He believes all this shit. You heard him just now.”

“I know.” Rami’s voice sounded miserable.

“It’s like they took something out of him. It’s like he’s not all there.”

They said nothing for a little while after that, and Lill crept back down the stairs and returned to the dormitory.

Master Hadda always discouraged friendship. He had once congratulated Lill on not needing friends.

“A spy needs to stay aloof,” he said. “These bonds may be harmless for an ordinary soldier—some even say they make him fight more valiantly. But they are not for our kind.”

He had felt honoured to hear Master Hadda say that. To be able to feel that he was set apart in a good way, not because he didn’t belong in the Order, was a disgrace to his lineage, was too pretty, and so on.

Maybe it was true that there was some part of him missing, but it was a good thing, if so. It was a part of him that was not needed. He was a tool of the Great King, he could not live outside the Order, and nothing that he had to endure to remain here was too much to ask.

* * *

The door of the round house opened, and Lill raised his head to see Halza stumble through.

“And no more nonsense!” Tirtu called after him before he banged the door shut and slammed home the bolt.