Page 85 of The Summer Pass

“Well, I don’t like it,” was all he said in the end. “I don’t like it at all.”

He made a show of stalking off to bed. She went outside, intending to clear up whatever remained after the meal. He had taken her away to shout at her before she could finish.

He always forgot that with the great house half in ruins, voices carried from inside. You could not shout in certain parts of the house without being heard outside. Tirtu was getting water from the well—or that is what he had been doing. Now he was just standing there, looking at the bucket. She could tell before he said anything that he had heard Faru, at least some of it.

She shouldn’t have said anything, all the same. For the sake of her husband’s honour, she should have kept quiet. But it was just the two of them in the moonlit gathering place, and he was Lord Vanu’s hearthman.

“I’m afraid you heard my husband speaking rashly,” she said.

“No no,” he denied it, but it wasn’t convincing. After a moment, he said, “I heard him say you looked like a girl tonight, dancing. He wasn’t wrong. I was glad to see it. You looked lovely.”

He nodded when he’d finished speaking, as if he felt satisfied he’d said what he meant to say. He wasn’t asking for anything. He didn’t even look at her after he’d spoken. She could almost imagine he offered the compliment as words of comfort.

She made no reply, but it was some moments before she moved, headed for the untidy table. She resumed clearing away the dishes, and he came to help, a thing he’d done many times before—it felt natural. He never held himself above any kind of work that needed doing. It was one of the things she liked about him.

It felt natural, when they found an open bottle of wine still half full, to sit down and finish it off together. That was not something they’d done before.

When she followed him back to his house, she knew what would happen, but it felt like the unfolding of a tale that she was hearing, not something she was choosing to do herself. She didn’t know how it seemed to him. Maybe it was similar. He didn’t ask her to come with him, but he didn’t seem surprised when she did.

Chapter 29

That Word Again

Vanu staggered out into the common room of the hostel, weak with laughter. Darma was there already, seated on a bench by the unlit hearth. He looked over at Vanu’s entrance.

It was the summer after the first Tawa Valley campaign. Vanu was seventeen. Darma, a few years older, had been down here before and was supposed to be showing Vanu around, introducing him to the pleasures of the lowlands. It was going great so far.

“You took long enough,” Darma drawled. “I thought you’d gone to sleep in there.”

“Not exactly.” Vanu held up the gold bracelet he had brought out from the room, then slipped it onto his wrist so he could sign properly. “Tell him to take this, will you? He’s saying no, but I know how it’s supposed to work—I know I’m supposed to pay him.”

Darma stared at Vanu for a moment, his expression souring.

“Fuck off,” he signed finally. “You’re not funny.”

“I’m not joking!” But Darma wasn’t looking at him anymore. Vanu turned back to the boy, who had come out of the room by now, all his clothes back on. “Take, please,” Vanu said aloud, in his horrible Zashian, holding out the bracelet. “Is stolen—better, yes? You like that better, yes?”

The boy’s smile was as pretty as everything else about him. He said something that Vanu couldn’t make out through his thick Chiddang accent. He took the bracelet and slipped it on. “But it was good time—I mean what I said.”

Vanu just grinned back. He wished they could talk properly, have a real conversation, but between his voice and their accents and shaky Zashian, they could barely make themselves understood. It made it all the more wonderful that they’d matched together so well in other ways.

The boy went back to his main job of serving drinks, and Vanu bounced back over to Darma, still grinning.

“Was that one of the bracelets from the Khoromaru raid?” Darma signed.

“Yeah, I kept one of them.” Vanu stretched out on his back on the empty bench opposite Darma.

Darma snorted. “Were you really so desperate for his ass? Or was it his cock?”

Vanu made a rude gesture. “It was both. It was a really good time.”

After a minute, Darma remarked, “I gave the girl I was with a couple of Andun copper pieces.”

“I hope she enjoyed herself.”

Darma growled. He stretched his legs out toward the cold hearth.

“Could you even get it up for a girl?” Darma asked.