“And it’s not because of me?” Yves asked.
Because he was too clingy, too besotted, too involved in every moment of Charon’s life. Because he was starting to blur the lines between love and desire, thinking of Charon’s rough hands making tea while Yves fucked clients who called him beloved. Because Yves was, in the end, too much for even the most patient man in Iperios.
Charon stared at Yves, his expression open and startled for the first time in years.
“No,” he said. “It’s not you.”
Yves stood. “That,” he said, “was the worst lie you’ve ever told me.”
That was the worst lie you’ve ever told me.
Nikos was sixteen when he’d met Aster.
He’d been having trouble eating again. It hadn’t been an issue when he was a boy, but ever since he started his apprenticeship under Haris, his mentor in the Strategos’ interrogation rooms, he could barely keep anything down.
It wasn’t that he was squeamish. The others chosen for the apprenticeship were—two had to be carried out on the first day, and the third had only lasted four weeks before Haris had moved them back to the barracks. Nikos was the only one who could look into the hollow pit that was once an eye and carefully clean it out while the man trembling beneath him opened bloody marks on his arms, reaching for any small comfort in the dark.
The trouble started when Nikos left for the day. His old friends from the barracks had stopped eating with him after he’d been chosen for the interrogation rooms at thirteen, but he didn’t blame them. Most Arkoudai thought the interrogation rooms were unlucky. They held their breath when they passed them, and few interrogators had friends outside the department, if any. So Nikos ate alone, went back to the house set aside for interrogators, and spent the rest of the evening in the privy.
In the end, the only food he could manage came from a small tea shop on the other side of Axon. It didn’t look like much from the outside, but when Nikos first entered, he smelled honey—real honey, the kind they had in the south—and he sank into a seat by the window with a sigh of relief. Something about the shop felt right, and when a young man Nikos’ age set a cup of tea down on the table, he met Nikos’ gaze and winked.
“Haven’t seen you around,” he said. “Where are you stationed?”
Nikos looked into the man’s beautiful, dark eyes, and said, “Marriage certifications.”
“Oh, that’s fun.” The man sat down in the other chair. “I bet you get a lot of stories there. I’m Aster. My parents own this place.”
“Nikos.” He hadn’t met many Arkoudai who grew up with their parents. It was culturally acceptable to give your children to the army once they were old enough to walk and talk. Even the Strategos did it, though his boys were put in the same barracks. Still, couples could apply to keep their children at home. He wondered how it worked. How did they handle discipline? Did their children apply for jobs through the barracks, or did they have to depend on their parents having a business to pass down?
“Is it all right if I sit with you for a while?” Aster asked. He blinked at Nikos slowly, and Nikos felt something tickle in his chest, his dominance stirring uncertainly. Was Aster a submissive? “It’s so slow here that I might start screaming in the kitchen just for something to do.”
“Oh. Oh, sure.”
Nikos wasn’t sure if it was the meal itself or the fact that he finally had someone to talk through it, but he managed to keep his food down long enough to avoid running for the nearest exit. Aster told him all about working in the tea shop—the fire dragons that slithered into the oven in the evening, the honey they bought from an apiary in the south, his parents’ arguments and the amusing customers. He was only a few months older than Nikos, but he seemed to have a century of experience, and Nikos hung on his words with the hunger of a starving fox at the door.
“You should order the cookies next time,” Aster said, when Nikos had finished his third cup of tea. “I’ll put in extra honey for you.”
Nikos went back to his room that night with a strange, buzzing feeling in his fingers and chest, and he laid on his small bed above his mentor’s bedroom and thought of the way Aster’s fingers had traced circles over the table.
The next day, he helped Haris bury a man who’d died in the interrogation rooms overnight—that was how Haris put it,they died, they expired, they were found,never who or what killed them. Everything they did was described in those terms, as though some mysterious ghost had done it all. While Nikos wasn’t allowed to do more than provide a comforting dominance and a gentle hand after someone’s visit with Haris, he started to see his own actions as distant and vague, guided by another’s hand.
“What was his name?” Nikos asked, as they tossed the body into the pit they’d made. “That man down there.”
“It’s only a body,” Haris said. He leaned on his shovel and sighed. “Bodies don’t need names. They don’t need mercy. It is easy to confuse yourself when you do the work we’re training you for, but when we are done with you, you will know the difference between a body and a man. There’s a trick to setting yourself aside when you do this work. Look at me, Nikos. Do you see mercy in my eyes?”
Nikos stared into the cold, blank gaze of his mentor and shook his head.
Haris nodded. “I see it in yours. That’s all right, though. You’ll learn one day. We all do.”
Nikos looked down at the body in the pit, and he wondered what kind of tea he’d liked when he was alive.
He went back to Aster. He told him a lie about a couple who met over a broken archery post, and Aster actually laughed. He told him stories from the barracks, and Aster told Nikos about his aunt and her beehives down south, the rituals they held inthe apiary, the way honey could still be poisonous to the wrong people.
Nikos held a woman as she wept secrets into his ear and thought of beekeepers walking slowly through the grass in southern Arktos.
“I don’t know why they put kids in the barracks like they do,” Aster said a week later. “We’re a military, but what war are we fighting?”
“It’s how it’s always been done,” Nikos said.
