* * *
Glaive should never have agreed to take Red on as an apprentice.
He realized it too late. Red had been inching closer to him at night, wrapped up in their camp blanket with his hair wild and his mouth upturned, as though he were smiling even in dreams. Then one night, without much preamble, Red rolled over Glaive, straddling his hips, and Glaive fucked him while Red moaned and ordered him to move faster, harder,there, right there.When they finished, the tent was hot enough that they were sweating, covers kicked into a corner, and Red stripped off his shirt, revealing the stone pendant hanging from a leather thong around his neck.
Glaive stared up at the carving of a skull, and Red blushed, covering it with a hand. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Just a ritual we have in my hometown. A coming-of-age thing. It’s not like I worship him.”
Glaive knew what the stone meant. He’d seen it before, once on a Thalassan he’d killed on a contract and again on another who stumbled past him in a bar. People in some Thalassan towns picked out stones that symbolized their rite of passage, usually something practical and commonplace. But a few picked the Death stone, and they rarely returned to their homes. They wandered, lost, and a pang of pity stung Glaive’s heart as Red flopped onto his back, radiating heat.
Red whistled. “Gods, I’ve wanted to do that for months.”
“Why?” Glaive shifted onto his side to frown at Red, who was still holding the pendant in a closed fist.
Red shrugged. “I don’t know. You don’t put emotions into it. I mean, look at me. I’m all emotion, all the time. I can’t cut myself off the way you do. You’re strong, you’re clever, you get the job done when others can’t—why wouldn’t I want this?”
Glaive tensed. Once, he’d been loved because he was kind. Tyr wouldn’t have wanted Glaive. Azaiah… Azaiah didn’t want Glaive. Why did it take Red, a stranger from Thalassa, to make Glaive feel like a piece of metal on the anvil, hammered into the wrong shape?
Glaive sat up, and Red opened his eyes slowly, still smiling. “Need to clean up,” Glaive said. “Stay where you are.”
“Fine by me,” Red said, and Glaive stepped out of the tent. The fields at the border of Arktos were still dark, sparse grass bending in the breeze, and dawn was hours away. Glaive headed for the river, the moonlight on his naked skin making the scars on his body more pronounced. There was nearly a millennium of history in the wounds on his arms, his hands—the marks that formed after Death staked his horrible claim on him and all the ones that came before, that Azaiah once touched with such kindness and affection.
The river’s current was strong, but he waded into the deeper waters, which rolled past like ribbons sliding over his arms and back. Somewhere beyond the world, Azaiah had his own river, drowned in stars. Glaive would probably never see it until the world fell to the flood.
Thunder boomed behind him. It rarely rained in Arktos, but on the border, summer thunderstorms fed the grass that had once belonged to the hill people. They were eastern Starians now, but they still revered their women and had festivals where they wove flowers into their hair. Glaive had seen one of those festivals once. The music was new and strange, but the dances were not. They reminded him of the soldiers who would dance, jumping over small fires. He didn’t see the instruments they used to play—those were lost, like the tulip fields around the Needle and the springs where Tyr and Nyx swam when they were boys. Now that he thought of it, Glaive felt yearning tugging at his chest, a wound left untended.
Was there really so little left of the man he’d been?
The clouds opened, and Glaive cursed as rain marched across the river. At first, he looked to the tent with a spike of terror—had something killed Red, and Death had come to claim him? But the tent moved slightly as Red swore in Morrey, and no shadows emerged from the dark. Movement flickered in the corner of Glaive’s eye, and a deer tipped its head up from where it was drinking farther down the riverbank, its liquid eyes bright with moonlight. It trembled, and Glaive thought of its ancestors in the empire, which were small and fat, their antlers just little nubs. He’d woken Kelta up early to see a herd of them, sneaking around the line of tents to watch them graze.
Look, Kel,he thought, as the deer shook its enormous antlers and peered up at the rain.They call this kind of deer a…But he didn’t know what they were called. Spotted? Dappled? He used to know so much, before. He could point out birds by the sounds they made, and he knew the names of stars and the way the earth in the northern empire felt soft under his boots. Now, he knew how to trap and hunt, kill and torture, but he didn’t know the name of the deer that stood trembling in the rain.
Thunder boomed, and the deer fled, bounding into the heavy sheets of rain. Glaive stepped out of the river, and it wasn’t until he was almost in the field that he noticed the grass around the rocks on the bank was a limp, shriveled brown.
He turned, and Death emerged from the river, his cowl dripping.
“No.” Glaive braced himself, standing between Death and the tent where Red lay. “I didn’t call you here.”
“No, my butcher.” Death smiled, and Glaive stiffened as a cold hand touched his cheek. “You tried to call my avatar. But you failed.”
“I didn’t kill anyone.” Glaive shivered as Death’s cloak slid over his skin, enfolding him in a mockery of an embrace.
“There are many deaths. Nyx died, did he not, when you took my sibling’s sword?” Death leaned down to speak in Glaive’s ear. “Or perhaps he died here, in the river. Perhaps you’ve finally let him go.”
“I didn’t— Don’t say that.”
“Poor, confused butcher.” Death grabbed him by the hips, hard, and Glaive responded instinctively. They’d done this often enough, with Glaive chasing the man he’d lost, so desperate that even pain was a comfort. “Do you truly think there’s anything left of you to love?”
Glaive glanced over his shoulder, and Death chuckled. Pain blossomed in Glaive’s chest, and he looked down in horror as one of his old scars reopened, skin splitting into the wound it had been.
“You earned this in my service,” Death said, as Glaive’s knees shook with the effort of remaining upright. “You slew an innocent man. Did you know he was innocent? Did you care? He begged you for mercy, and when he died, his wife found you in the street and gave you this.”
Death touched the wound, and it twisted back into scar tissue, the blood disappearing in the rain. Death ran a hand over a scar on Glaive’s shoulder, and Glaive grabbed his wrist, putting all his dominance into his voice.
“Don’t.”
“And you earned this,” Death said, smiling when Glaive cried out, bone-deep pain lancing through him, “while breaking a man’s knees. Didn’t account for his accomplice having the strength to fight back, did you? The crows picked their bones, once their bodies swelled with rot in the hot sun. The accomplice had a daughter—my avatar took her when she starved that winter—”
“Stop.” Glaive grabbed at Death’s cloak for balance, head bowed. “You’ve made your point.”
