“You want to talk about it?”
“You want to be tossed into the sewage?”
“Shutting up now.”
The next few moments were tense and silent, and when we came to a jumble of femurs, I hopped back over to the other side of the water.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“The silence is so thick over there I couldn’t breathe. Figured the air might be a little more clear on this side of the crap river.”
He failed to hold in a chuckle and leaped to my side. “Touché, bébé. Here’s the thing. The Brigands of Ruin are patriarchal, which means leadership is expected to pass from father to son. Follow?”
“Got it.”
“My Abyssinian mother was part of the camp only long enough to bewitch my father and leave me behind, which means I have less status and don’t fit the pattern. I have always been rather a disappointment, while my brother, Lorn, is a boot-licking bludweasel with champion bloodlines.” I cleared my throat, and he smirked. “Pardon the comparison. In any case, my father is past his prime, and I am expected to challenge him for leadership, but everyone knows I would be horrible at it. The obvious choice would be for my brother to challenge me, but he knows it would kill my father if something bad were to happen to either of us. So we’re all bound by ridiculous traditions, and no one can do what he wishes.” He reached back to help me over a little avalanche of broken stone. “But he is still a nasty little bludweasel.”
“So run away.”
Vale snorted. “Everyone half hopes I will. But that’s the thing. As much as I don’t wish to be responsible for dozens of families and a hundred mares, I love my father and don’t care to disappoint him. So I abide, getting on everyone’s nerves and mucking things up, hoping the slavers will just shoot me with a flaming arrow so the whole damned thing will be over.”
I turned and put a hand on his shoulder, stopping him in mid-step. “There’s no shame in being unsuited to your expected role.”
He cocked his head, considering.
“At least, that’s what my guidance counselor told me once when I disappointed my parents in high school. Wouldn’t it be better to just make the choice and leave and have it be over with?”
Vale looked down, face lit by the green glow. “Not if I have to see my father’s heart break when I tell him.” He motioned forward with his chin, and I obliged him by continuing along the ledge. After a few footsteps, he went on, voice low and sad. “When I was ten, I asked him if I could go stay with my mother, learn more about her people and their ways, and he turned me over his knee and whipped my arse until I bled. Not only because no Brigand of Ruin had ever asked to leave the tribe before but also because it showed the people I would one day lead that I didn’t feel proper responsibility for their safekeeping. That I would leave my duties and go to stay with foreigners, giving up my place as a man. It was the worst thing I could have done to him. Emasculated by a weak son, disappointed in his firstborn, and then the poor man had to make me cry to save face.” He snorted softly, sounding much like his mare. “I don’t think either of us can withstand a repeat of that night. No amount of freedom is worth that price. Not that he could whip me now. I’m much faster than he.”
I tried to imagine a tiny version of Vale going through the regular preteen rebellion. I couldn’t help smiling, just a little.
“How were things, after that?” I asked him.
“Ah, yes. The fallout. You see, after that, I had to prove myself, do something to save even more face on behalf of myself and my family. It was simply understood. So when my father and his men galloped away on their next raid, I took up my bolo and an old man’s neglected gear and slipped away to capture my first bludmare. I returned that evening missing a chunk of my arm and riding Odalisque’s mother, Olympe, leading a wobbly little filly behind me. Men of my tribe are supposed to go through careful training and ritual before they bring home their first horse, and I skipped all that and just took what I wanted, times two.” He laughed and rubbed the back of his head, the rasp of skin on stubble the only sound in the tunnel and one I already recognized even though I couldn’t see it. “Best mares in the camp, and I’d pulled it off four years before tradition allowed.”
“And then?”
“And then he beat me again for breaking the law. And complimented my horsemanship. And told me he’d done the same thing at my age and my grand rebellion had just convinced the camp that I was the one who must lead them one day.”
“Is there no other choice? No other role you could fulfill?”
He held up his fingers, counting them down. “Target? Eunuch? Laughingstock? Stew meat? Bludmare bait? Sadly, nothing appeals.”
“But what do you want to do? With your life?”
He exhaled raggedly, leaped over the water, and ricocheted off the far bank and back to my side, landing in front of me without missing a beat. As if I didn’t even exist, he started moving again, this time with more purpose and anger. I scurried behind him, boots slipping on bits of rock and bone.
“Vale, what?”
“If I knew what I wanted to do, if there was some secret calling in my soul, then I could walk away from Ruin and my father’s tears with a light heart. If there was meaning, if there was passion, if there was anything I was good at besides thievery and sarcasm, he would understand. As it is, I have no plans. No future. No wish. I am merely a rebellious bastard and a well-trained brigand who no longer cares to brig.”
“I used to be that way, too.”
The words were tiny, swallowed up by the huge weight of an entire city overhead, but I know he heard them, because he stopped moving.
“And what happened then, Demi? What did you do?”
“I got depressed and almost died.” I paused, not sure how much to tell, how many secrets the darkness and his desperation could coax out of me. “And then I woke up hungry.”
“And then?”
I giggled at a line from a movie he’d never seen because there are no movies in Sang, and for just a moment, I felt infinitely far away from anything resembling home or comfort, the weight of an entire country pressing down on me with the feather touch of a girl’s hairbob clutched in one hand. He turned to stare at me, Chardonnay-green eyes glowing, and something in my chest shifted.
“And then I ran away,” I said finally.
He reached for me, his fingers stretched out toward my face, and I closed my eyes and parted my lips slightly, needing to feel something, anything, other than crushing defeat. Instead, I heard a blood-curdling scream, and Vale’s arm flung me into the stone wall before drawing away suddenly.
I opened my eyes, heart beating an insane cadence, and found only darkness.
6
I reached for him, but he was gone. “Vale? What the hell!”
He was breathing heavily—that meant he was alive, at least, his boots scuffling on stone. There was another creature with us, something that smelled as stale and deep as the catacombs. And underneath that mildewy reek, there was pumping blood.
No. Wait.
Blud.
“Is it a bludrat? Can I help? God, it’s so dark. I can’t see anything. I frigging hate the dark!”
He growled and shuffled, and I wasn’t sure whether to run or fight or scream for his dad to come back. I was just about to start feeling around with my toe for something useful to kick when I heard the solid thump of stone hitting flesh.
“Mangy. Little. Bastard!” Each word was punctuated by a thump, the last one accented with a gushy splat that peppered the air with the reek of hot blud.
“Vale?”
He grunted with effort, and something dropped into the water. After a few moments of fiddling and cursing, his green light flickered back on, showing black splatters up his arms, a few on his cheeks. “Remember what I said about bludrats getting underground and going bad?” He pointed down, and the twitching thing I saw smashed at his feet looked more like a shaved capybara than a rat, its pale skin sprinkled with wiry pink hairs and its sunken eyes white and unseeing.
“Are you okay? Did it bite you?”
With a laugh that echoed through the tunnel, he kicked the scrawny carcass into the water, where it bobbed and floated sluggishly with the flow, webbed feet up. “It tried. And failed. Let this be a lesson to you: don’t try to kiss anybody in the catacombs.”
I was blushing before he’d turned around and started walking. I’m pretty sure he knew.
* * *
Time went as thick and slow as the water beside us as we trudged through the underground tunnels. We chatted of silly things to keep our minds off reality and flirted as much as a giant graveyard allowed. But we never got close enough to attempt another foolish, desperate kiss. Then, all at once, the air congealed, and I knew the tunnel was about to end.
Although slogging through sewers and catacombs wasn’t my ideal day, much less date, it had been all too easy to concentrate on the immediate, on the shiver that thrummed through me when I took Vale’s hand to step over rubble and long-gray bones. I was in the worst trouble of my life, beyond terrified for my best friend, but every time he touched me, my betraying skin jumped, my heart raced. Being on the move at his side was far preferable to holding still. I sensed the stone wall before Vale stopped but let myself run into him anyway. Whatever happened next, his warmth was a comfort, and this might be my last chance to indulge.
“Shh, bébé. The door to the cabaret is just overhead.”
It was darker here, and the scent of cold stone was overlaid with a fine patina of spilled liquor and echoes of cheap perfume and something else. Something rotten. A shimmering rectangle of gold light limned a trapdoor in the ceiling, and as I looked up, pounding feet sent dust to scatter over my cheeks.
“What’s it called?” My own voice startled me in the darkness, almost overbright with worry I could no longer hide.
“Paradis,” Vale said. “It means—”
I gripped the bludbunny foot in my pocket. “Paradise. I know. But probably not a paradise for me.”