Page 111 of The Boy Bride

“I’ll get it,” he said unnecessarily.

Vanu wondered if he was glad of the distraction. Did he think Vanu was going to ask questions he didn’t want to answer—which probably meant any questions at all?

Barda was at the door, and it seemed he had come to talk to Lill, because he dragged Lill outside and closed the door after him. Vanu sat where Lill had left him, drinking his water. He wondered how to let Lill know that he wasn’t going to ask any of those questions.

He heard the door open again and looked up to see Lill coming back in, hauling Barda by the arm.

“But—” Barda was protesting.

“Don’t be stupid,” Lill retorted. “You want his help, you’re going to talk to him. I’m not carrying your messages.”

He planted Barda at the base of the steps to the platform where Vanu was sitting.

“Now, tell him what you told me. Or, better yet, start from the beginning, because what you were telling me was a total mess.”

Barda laughed nervously. “It is a bit of a mess. Hello, Lord Vanu. Sorry to bother you like this. I had the thought that Lill here might be able to find a better moment to bring this up, but he, uh, doesn’t care to do that, as he’s mentioned. Soooo … it’s nothing much, just a small matter. Bit of a thought I had, something you might be able to help with. It’s about Khatu.”

“You told me he was in serious trouble,” Lill said impatiently. “You made it sound urgent. Is it or isn’t it?”

Barda squirmed and shot Lill a look like he wished Lill would play along better. “It is serious—I wouldn’t lie to you about that.”

“He’s got a girl in Sakka pregnant,” said Vanu.

Lill and Barda stared at him with totally different types of surprise.

“What?” said Lill.

“How did you know?” said Barda.

Vanu shrugged. “Wild guess. Lord Faru’s found out?”

“No! Uh, no. Not yet. Let me start from the beginning, like Lill suggested.” Barda made a move toward the steps as if he wanted to sit down, but then opted to stay standing. He squared his shoulders and cleared his throat. “We met Otoni when we were hunting down near Sakka. She lives just outside the village and gets her living hunting. She’s older than Khatu, has one kid already, no other family. We got to be friends, all three of us. We’d go hunting together—she taught us a lot. I don’t know when she and Khatu started fucking—I didn’t realize they were, till I heard about the, you know. That she was knocked up. That was a couple weeks ago, just after Lill got here.”

“So the difficulty is … ” Vanu prompted.

This wasn’t fantastic news, but he wouldn’t have called it a serious problem, so far. He’d assumed one or the other of the Gukhártu boys would find a partner of some sort out on the mountain before long and want to either bring them into the village or go out to live with them. There were various ways he could see managing it.

“Yeah. The difficulty is … ” Barda seemed to need a moment to think about this. “Khatu doesn’t know yet.”

“Then how do you know?” Lill asked. “She told you but not him?”

“No, she didn’t tell me, are you crazy? I overheard her talking to another woman, a friend of hers. They were washing stuff in the stream.”

“You were spying on them while they were bathing,” Lill translated with a disapproving frown.

“Nah, they were just doing laundry.” Barda leered at Lill. “I hoped they were going to bathe themselves, but they didn’t.”

“Still don’t see what the problem is,” said Vanu.

“I think,” said Lill, “the problem is he spied on his brother’s mistress weeks ago and found this out, but apparently she still hasn’t told Khatu. One wonders why.”

“He’s so smart, your bride—isn’t he so smart?”

Vanu said nothing.

“Yeah, so … the thing is, Otoni thinks we’re soldiers with the invader king’s army—or, we thought she did. That’s the story we tell down in Sakka, as you know, my lord. That we’re stationed up here guarding the infamous Lion of the Summer Pass.” He looked at Lill. “It’s good fun, pretending we’re our own jailers—or it was. See, uh, it turns out she didn’t really believe that’s what we were. I heard her say so to her friend. She said she hasn’t believed it for years.”

Lill tsked. “You’ve got to keep your story consistent. It’s not ‘good fun,’ it’s serious business. There are books about how to do it properly.”