Kof
“I don’t even know who you’re talking about,” the human said.
Not surprising. Eli didn’t seem fit to curse anyone. In fact, he could barely keep his loincloth from sliding off.
Through the years, I’d seen my fair share of curses at work. Taruut specialized in smoking out the Last Breath curses that followed warriors home from battle. But the human, Eli, didn’t even know Ulka. What reason would he have to curse her? “Use your head,” I told Grok, as he blew heartily into each palm. “Would a witch be stuck pouring ale at the feast? Or would he be the one getting served?”
“Who can know the way of witches?” Grok shuffled backward and spat over his shoulder.
“There’s no such thing as witches,” Eli said.
Grok’s eyes went wide. “That’s exactly what a witch would say!”
My patience was wearing thin. “There’s no witch here,” I told the naïve pup. “Ulka had already dropped her bow before he even came here.”
“Time means nothing to a witch,” Grok muttered.
That should earn him six lashes with the heft of my spear for talking back, but pain has a way of fixing things more firmly into a person’s memory. And right now, I wanted the boy to forget this ridiculous notion and turn his mind to normal things: combat training, discipline, and playing dice with the other guards. Not jumping at shadows.
Once Grok hurried off, I grabbed the clothes and shoved them into Eli’s hands. And when I did, something slid to the floor with a long, serpentine clatter.
A string of virtue beads.
The colors glinted by torchlight. Some whores only wore one or two colors, but this necklace bore many. White to offer use of his hands, yellow for his mouth, green for his ass…and black to use him rough.
I checked the impulse to hurl the beads into the brazier. What business of mine was it how this human made his coin? As Eli shoved into Grok’s outgrown clothes, I was unable to take my eye off those black beads. Plenty of guards liked to brag about the way the whores whimpered while they fucked them, but I’d never seen the appeal.
Maybe Ulka was right—and as a stripling I’d spent too long stewing in the caves, and now I was softer than an overcooked fish.
The clothes didn’t quite fit Eli. As he cinched the trousers tight, the tunic drooped at the shoulders. I thought it would atleast cover the so-called witch tattoos, but when he moved, the neck gaped open so the edge of an inked star poked out. And though slaves had beaten the clothing well in the river and laid it to dry in the sun, the faint scent of Grok remained.
Of course, I could put my scent on him. Strong and fresh.
A yellow bead glittered from the piled strand on the floor. I imagined the wet heat of his mouth. And then I sought out a green bead….
Eli saw where I was looking and gave the beads a swift kick. The strand skittered across the floor. “Ignore those—they’re nothing. A cruel joke.”
I didn’t understand. “What’s the problem?”
“I’m no whore.”
Humans have such strange opinions. “It’s your body to use as you see fit. You have no wife to dishonor…do you?”
Eli snorted. “Don’t get me started on the useless institution of marriage.”
Maybe my own opinions were just as strange. His insistence that he wasn’t a whore only made me want to put my scent on him more. I took a step forward, and he took a matching step back, butting up hard against the cavern wall. Beneath the scent of Grok’s clothing, the smell of human fear blossomed—tinged with something else.
With desire.
Intoxicating.
I leaned in and let the musky sweetness play over my palate. I could only imagine how the scent would bloom around us whenhis release spurted onto his belly and mingled with the shared salt slick of our sweaty efforts….
But then I caught another elusive whiff of something beneath the mix of fear and need. A scent both familiar and foreign.
Something distant and vague tugged at my memory. Something that felt both closed in and expansive, as if I were seeing it through two eyes. The memory hovered there at the edge of my knowing….
Until Grok burst into the chamber and declared, “Ulka is dead!”
