Page 17 of Sword Dance

Varazda made his courtly little gesture.

“Having said that … ” Damiskos began.

“Yes?”

“Having said that, your patron is obviously up to something under my friend’s roof. You’ve more or less admitted as much, though it was already clear enough before you did. I don’t want harm to come to Nione, but I also wouldn’t wish to see you hurt—and you’ve obviously already been put in danger. I don’t think Aristokles is doing much to look out for you. I want you to know that if you need help, you can count on me.

“Also, if you’re up to something even slightly shady in my friend’s house, be assured that I will stand in your way.”

Varazda had been looking more and more surprised throughout Damiskos’s speech, and at the end he actually smiled, a broad, genuine, captivating smile.

“What was the phrase you just used? ‘You can’t say fairer than that’?”

Varazda moved toward the door, and Damiskos followed. He didn’t want to leave it like this. He sought for something more to say, something that might help to get them on the same side.

“If you’re showing loyalty to Aristokles because … ”

Varazda’s hand was on the door handle. He looked back, his expression guarded again. “Because … ”

“Because you’re lovers. I mean, I assume you are, and … ”

“Holy God.” Varazda dropped back into Zashian for the oath, and his accent was briefly provincial, no longer the polished syllables of the court. “You never stop. That is irrelevant to you, First Spear. That is the very definition of none of your business. Go back to negotiating about your rotting fish guts, or whatever it is, and forget about me and Aristokles.”

He pulled open the door, and would have slipped out and closed it behind him in one motion if Damiskos hadn’t caught it. Instead the two of them were framed there in the lamplight from the room, in full view of Helenos, who was crossing the atrium, headed for the stairs.

“Goodness,” said Helenos mildly, stopping to give them a humorous look. “I'm sure this can’t be what it looks like.”

“Certainly not, we were—”

“Don't be silly,” said Varazda, in a girlish tone and thick Zashian accent that Damiskos had not heard before. “Of course it is just what it looks like.”

And he turned in the doorway and lightly, precisely kissed Damiskos on the lips.

“Good night, First Spear.”

Chapter 5

Somehow Damiskos managed to get the door shut without looking at Helenos. What his own face might have betrayed he had no idea, but he had to hope that between the lamplight behind him and the shadows in the atrium, it had not been much. At least he could be reasonably sure that it hadn’t been dismay or disgust.

The kiss lingered on his senses like a vanished phrase of music, tantalizing and irrecoverable. The cool softness of Varazda’s lips; the tiny, fleeting brush of his fingertips along Damiskos’s jaw; the scent that he wore, citrus and something spicy, neither masculine nor feminine. Damiskos felt a warmth sinking into the core of his being, as if that strange moment echoed in some hollow place inside him.

It had been a long time since anyone kissed him. Years. Not since Shahaz, he thought. Was that true?

Not that Shahaz had ever kissed him—that would have been very bold—but he had kissed her, and it amounted to the same thing. And since then … there had been encounters here and there, but kissing hadn’t been involved. It was an odd thought.

He sat down heavily on the bed. His own reaction to the kiss was the least important thing here. He tried to sort out the things that had just become clear to him.

Helenos had seen Varazda slipping out of Damiskos’s room, and—perhaps because he still thought of Damiskos as a kindred spirit, perhaps because he was so attached to his own prejudices that he didn't see Varazda as attractive—he hadn’t wanted to believe he had witnessed the end of a tryst. But Varazda had been at pains to prove that he had.

Why? Well, possibly just to be a bastard. But more likely because there was some other interpretation that he didn’t want Helenos to put on the scene.

He didn’t want Helenos to think that he and Damiskos had just been talking.

Of course he wouldn’t have kissed Damiskos otherwise. From the beginning of their exchange in the passage, he’d been afraid Damiskos had been coming onto him, and he hadn’t welcomed it. In fact—Terza’s balls—he’d thought Damiskos was trying to blackmail him into his bed.

Staring at him all through dinner, following him out into the hall, wanting to talk to him alone after intervening to defend him from guests who wanted him whipped. That was what “What do you want?” had meant. Then Damiskos had capped it all by asking whether Varazda was sleeping with his former master. Immortal gods. “It’s irrelevant to you,” Varazda had said—meaning, Even if I’m not, that doesn’t mean I want to sleep with you. And then he’d felt compelled to kiss Damiskos in front of Helenos. He must have had a very good reason.

Of course Damiskos wanted to know what that reason was, but it was quite true that this was all very much none of his business. Still, it would be only decent of him to let Varazda know he hadn’t misinterpreted the kiss. “I realize you didn’t do that because you wanted to, and don’t worry, I didn’t want you to either—there’s no question of my being attracted to you, that was all just a misunderstanding, and I spoke in your defence because it was the right thing to do.”