The guests stayed out of the way on one of the benches lining the meeting hall until evening fell and the fire was lit in the pit. The tables were brought down from the lofts and laden with platters of sliced roasted pork and parsnips on beds of sharp bitter greens, grilled river fish, white cheese drizzled with honey, and bowls brimming with berries and the last of the winter nuts. The lull before summer harvest could be lean, but not in the wealthy, fertile Riverlands. The rich scents of the food left a haze of mingling colours at the edges of Feilan’s vision, not quite strong enough to be annoying, soon fading away.
Freyja had bid not just ale but mead and fruit wine served, copiously. By about halfway through the small feast, the Siftar residents were merry enough that when Gytha tripped and dumped a brimming jug of ale over Feilan, the drenching was greeted with uproarious laughter and friendly jibes aimed at both of them.
Feilan shook his head to clear his vision of the hazy amber washing across it, set off by the strong smell of his ale bath. Gytha had covered her face in mortified amusement, and he gave her a friendly nudge and a sly, ‘Did you want my clothes off for any particular reason?’
She scoffed and swatted him, retrieving the jug.
His soaked tunic was clammily sticking to his skin, and he pinched it away with some minor fastidiousness. He was promptly waylaid by a couple of women eager to help him peel it off so they could ostentatiously whistle at his bared chest, which was blatant teasing: he helped enough with Siftar’s physical work that he still sported solid muscle across shoulders and chest and thighs, but he was softer in the belly these days. There were plenty of bare-chested younger men about to admire, not to mention the anticipation of the incoming bersverdar, real Vaer men. But, given he was generally good-humoured yet uninterested, the women enjoyed pretending to swoon over him to tease.
He played along, obligingly preening and flexing. Wiping his hair and beard off with the dryish back of the tunic and tossing it aside, he caught Nivardus staring at him. His cheerful smile dimmed. Adeline was laughing at the raucous antics, but her uncle, arm protectively about her shoulders, looked – not contemptuous, exactly, but certainly unimpressed, eyeing Feilan’s bared form as if appalled by the indiscretion at the feasting table.
High spirits slightly dashed, Feilan turned back to his plate and his cup of ale, refilled with showy care by Gytha.
It wasn’t long after Adeline had finished her own plate that she began to droop. ‘Uncle Remy,’ she said sleepily, leaning against her uncle. The corners of her mouth turned down. ‘I want to go home.’
She wasn’t a composed young woman vying for her own crown anymore. She was a little girl, far from her own bed, and possibly trying not to give way to overtired weeping.
Nivardus gently stroked her dark hair as her head came to rest on his shoulder. ‘I know, sweetheart. We will, as soon as we can. Safe and sound. Ready to win you your crown.’
‘Promise?’
Nivardus frowned. He looked around the table, accidentally meeting Feilan’s eyes as he shamelessly eavesdropped, sipping his ale. Uncle Remy didn’t want to make a promise he wasn’t entirely sure he could keep, it seemed.
But he said, heavily, ‘Yes. Promise,’ and looked over at Feilan again.
His strikingly dark eyes were ink-black in the dim light of the hall, and Feilan felt a frisson down his spine. He was almost glad to break eye contact when Freyja leaned over to direct Nivardus to where he could put his half-asleep niece to bed, pointing him to the spare sleeping niche beside her own.
That surprised Feilan, a little, but then, he had already suspected Freyja liked the girl. She wanted to keep an eye on her. Doting Uncle Remy, presumably, would bed down on the floor beside his niece’s bench, wrapped in his thick cloak.
Feilan thus didn’t expect him to return once he’d settled his niece, but he did, without the cloak – he must have given it to Adeline, extra padding for a princess habituated to soft beds and layers and layers of linens.
He took a seat by Feilan, and accepted another cup of ale. By now, Feilan’s fascination with the carnelian hair and those dark, sharp eyes outweighed his awareness that neither of them liked the other.
‘Why are you staring at me?’ Nivardus asked, on the very edge of leaning into Feilan’s personal space and demanding it.
He was drunk, or at least not sober. Vaer ale was stronger than the local brews, though from the face Nivardus had pulled when he’d first sipped it, it didn’t taste as good to local tongues. And he’d tried both mead and wine before circling back to the ale, too. Definitely not sober. Still a bit of an arse.
But that pretty hair was probably long enough to wrap around Feilan’s hand a turn or two.
Feilan lowered his cup. He’d grown up marinated in the disdain of his countrymen, and lived all his adult life as the dishonourable nothing that was a Cursed, sifr, known to willingly take the woman’s part during the only kind of fucking considered obscene, so much so it was a profanity – serth and all its variants – in their language. He’d wrestled with shame and bigotry, and grown, perforce, a thick skin. He could even, without so much as a blush at the hypocrisy, insult other men by calling them serthar.
He shrugged and said it. ‘Here’s the thing, Uncle Remy. I’m wondering if you ever fuck men.’
Riverlanders were a good deal more relaxed about buggery than the Vaer were; it was part of the reason Freyja had settled here, having collected both a wide network of trading connections and a goodly number of loyal Cursed. He still readied himself to hear revulsion in response.
‘I…don’t,’ Nivardus said, without any particular distaste, or rather, with a rather nuanced tone that suggested any distaste came not from the notion of lying with a man, but of lying with a man he thought of as a barbarian.
Feilan shrugged again and turned to refill his cup. It was no loss to him. He had several casual bedmates in the trading post – one of them, Meik, was lingering nearby even now, waiting to see if he’d be looking for solace – and was anticipating the bersverdar’s visit just as much as half of Siftar.
‘I…might,’ Nivardus said, and Feilan glanced back with renewed interest.
The man looked at him, head on one side, gaze travelling over his bare shoulders and chest and stomach and arms, a slow evaluation that made that little shiver go down his spine again.
‘For Njorda’s sake, don’t leave me in suspense, Rufran,’ he said.
‘That’s not my name.’
Laughing at the querulous tone, Feilan hooked a friendly arm around his slender shoulders, making it heavy, letting him feel the press of the muscles he’d been appraising.
‘It means Little Fox,’ he said. ‘Like Feilan means Little Wolf. That’s all.’
‘I don’t prefer men, as a rule.’ Again, he eyed Feilan off in that unintentionally provocative way, now close enough, ensconced under Feilan’s arm, that he felt his ale-touched breath on his lips. ‘But…’
‘But you’re going to make an exception.’ Feilan was no longer surprised by how many men did.
‘I need another drink, first,’ Nivardus mumbled.
But he had three more drinks, fast, to Feilan’s one, and by the time Feilan got his arm around his shoulders again to take him to bed, he was wobbly on his feet. Feilan took a soapstone light-pot and lit its waxed rush wick from a glowing coal on the edge of the firepit, then guided Nivardus out into the night air, exchanging a rueful smile with the disappointed Meik as he left.
The stars overhead swathed the velvet sky, and the moon was just past the glare – full, to Riverlanders. Nivardus curled in close to his side as they walked. Under the ale on his breath, he smelled herbal, almost perfumed, a whiff of scent that gave Feilan a lightning flash of green as bright and new as spring grass. He turned his face up to Feilan as if for a kiss, but if he didn’t usually countenance men, he wouldn’t want kissing, not on the mouth. Feilan didn’t want to misconstrue an invitation, especially if it lost him the invitation he did have. He already had doubts on that front, if he was going to be scrupulous about it.
Vaeringans traditionally lived in large extended family groups, all within the same longhouse; Freyja was set enough in the old ways to have kept to her curtained-off niche within the meeting hall. But they did have private quarters, too, since Siftar wasn’t entirely Vaer. Besides, Feilan and some of his fellows had travelled foreign lands long enough to appreciate separate living spaces and some modicum of privacy.
The simple huts ran in a row between the warehouse and the overlander gate, the bathing pond beyond and the garden plots and latrine trench opposite. They were simple one-room structures, wattle and daub, thatched like the longhouses, with a hide to block the doorway. Their interiors were dark, hence the little oil-filled pot of light Feilan carried with him, though some had square windows cut, their hide curtains pulled aside to let in air or light. In mild weather, small iron braziers adequately heated them, and the residents simply relocated to the warmth of the longhouses in the bitterest of the long nights. Tonight was temperate enough, though the morning would be cold.
Inside was bare, his furniture only his heavy wooden trunk and a bench along the back wall, both carved with runes and iconography. He had thick layers of fur for his sleeping mat, a spare cloak on a hook, and a few personal belongings atop the trunk, a comb carved from an antler for his hair and beard, a whetted steel knife with a handle of bone, copper nailbinders of varying thicknesses, a scatter of glass beads, a clay ewer of water, a rounded cup of smoothed shaped leather, a copper bowl. He spent most of his time outside, and only came here to sleep, and even then not always.
Feilan set the light-pot on his trunk. In its low glow, Nivardus was heavy-lidded, swaying. Feilan smiled and touched his face, feeling the rasp of incipient stubble under the rub of his thumb. He didn’t often meet men who went to the trouble of keeping their cheeks clean of hair, though he was aware Riverlanders preferred it. His own people found it unmanly, which had made him scrape his cheeks out of spite until he matured beyond allowing shadows from his past to dictate his behaviour in any way whatsoever.
The last truly beardless man he’d met had been a eunuch of the caliphates, an Incised, caught up in a raid by Vaer slavers – not Feilan’s people, as Freyja had been at pains to tell their guests – traded east, castrated, and sold south. He’d been the majordomo for a wealthy southern merchant household, icy with affront at the idea of linking trade networks. Some prejudices were too lodged in personal history to be argued with, and Feilan hadn’t tried.
Nivardus had his own prejudice towards the Vaer, but it appeared more generalised, the same suspicion that saw Feilan and Freyja escorted under guard into towns during their first years of trading, before Freyja’s name became a golden promise of exotic goods and scrupulously fair dealing.
It wasn’t deep-seated enough to stop him, anyway. Shifting restlessly, nudging against Feilan’s solid body, he turned his face into the touch, so that Feilan’s thumb brushed over his lips, which parted under the slight pressure.
‘You want…’ Nivardus said muzzily, lips tickling Feilan’s skin. ‘I suppose you want…’ And then, almost to himself, ‘It will take away the vile taste of the ale, at least.’
Feilan started laughing; he couldn’t help it. Renart made a noise, half-complaint, half-moan, and pressed closer to him, trying, if Feilan was any judge, to keep his balance.
‘Here,’ he said. He hoisted the ewer, held the spout to the man’s lips. ‘Drink some water, you sotty jolterhead.’
Nivardus reached up a hand, but took hold, not of the ewer’s handle, but Feilan’s wrist, in a surprisingly strong grip, fingers wrapping tight. Sucking the short lip of the spout into his mouth, he turned Feilan’s wrist to tip the jug enough that the water flowed into his mouth. Holding Feilan’s eye, he swallowed heartily and with some facility. Feilan watched the muscles of his throat flex and felt a bolt of lust shoot through him.
Still. He’d never consider a bed partner who wasn’t an active and willing participant, both aware of what they were doing and capable of enjoying it. So when Nivardus sank dazedly to the furs, he didn’t follow him down despite the persistent drag on his wrist.
Nivardus mumbled something fretful and irritated, on the edge of incoherence and too soft to hear anyway, and Feilan wasn’t surprised to see his eyes droop closed almost immediately, his grip finally loosening. He made one last mutter when Feilan rolled him onto his side and threw another fur over him so that only the flame-lick of his soft hair was visible.
Feilan strolled back to the meeting hall in the vague hope that Meik or some other regular bedfellow would be lingering, but found only Freyja, enjoying a cold herbal tea by the last embers of the firepit.
She handed him a cup. ‘You tuck our princeling in?’
He grunted a confirmation. She didn’t query further; aside from the brevity of his absence, she knew him too well to assume the worst of him. Though no longer a Vaer man, he’d been raised as one, and Vaer men had a strong taboo about that sort of thing. Forcing a woman was known to be unmanly: a real man never need stoop to it. Of course, Vaer men also tended to confuse fear with respect, silence with consent, and provocation with permission. Putting aside those rather large caveats, the absolute height of unmanliness would be to inflict oneself on someone too drunk or drugged to even wake up for it.
Feilan, Cursed, was the Vaer epitome of unmanly, but the taboo ran deep, even if he hadn’t had a strong preference for activities both parties would enjoy.
‘He’s a pretty one,’ Freyja commented, because, yes, she knew him too well.
‘Only in the face,’ he said. ‘Plenty about who’re pretty inside and out and don’t call us barbarians in the same breath as demanding our help.’
‘True enough.’ She took a slow sip. ‘Such good sense from my clever Little Wolf today. Will we see good sense tomorrow if and when Tryggvi Jansson comes strutting about?’
Feilan sniggered into his cup and said, ‘Doubt it,’ with enough charm in his smile that he earned a mere sigh instead of the censure he sorely deserved.