Desert World Allegiances (22 page)

“Crack the door open, and I can pass you some,” Tom suggested. Temar hung over the toilet, wondering if his stomach would try to turn inside out again if he stood up, but he risked it. The world spun a little, but Temar turned the handle and opened the door just enough for Tom to hand in a brown shirt and gray pants. “The wound is a burn. They always look worse than they are, but Hannal will call in the doctor if she can’t handle it.”

“And then Ben will find him,” Temar said as he pulled on the clothes. They were a little large, and the cut of the pants suggested they’d been made for a woman. The crotch rode up uncomfortably, but he felt better for having clean clothes on. However, he didn’t feel better about calling a doctor and risking more people finding out that Shan was alive and Temar on the run. He couldn’t see a way out of the trap Ben had built. Even if these men turned on Ben, he was nothing more than the leaf of a pipe trap plant. Unless they pulled out the root, the whole thing would grow back. The truth was that they didn’t know where to find the root. Ista Songwind was part of it, but from the way Ben talked to her, she wasn’t all that important.

“Ben won’t find him or hurt him,” Tom promised. “I made a promise to Naite once. I promised that he would always have a safe place here, and in ten years, I’ve never gone back on my word. I’m giving you that same promise now. You and Shan will always be safe in this house.”

Temar pulled the door open and looked at Tom. Now that the lights were on, he could see him more clearly. Age lines around his eyes and mouth suggested he’d smiled a lot in his life, but he had a serious expression on his face now. Temar wanted to believe him. He did. But he’d trusted wrong too many times. Cyla had destroyed their family through stupidity and impatience. Ben had betrayed them. His father had failed to protect them.

“If you hide in the closet, I’ll get Hannal. That burn needs to get tended.” Tom stepped away from the bathroom door.

“I’ll be fine, Temar. I just burned it on the bike,” Shan said, apparently not bothered by the huge, weeping burn on his leg. Temar’s father once put a nail through his foot and hadn’t even noticed it.

“The idiot will be fine,” Naite seconded. His hand rested on his brother’s shoulder, and Temar realized he couldn’t do anything to help. He either trusted Hannal enough to let her in on his secret, or he hid in the closet, but he couldn’t do anything to help Shan.

Without a word, Temar headed for the closet. He wasn’t ready to trust anyone else.

Chapter 17

T
EMAR
finally fell asleep to the sound of Hannal fussing over Shan. The closet had slits at the bottom of the doors to let air move, and he watched legs and feet enter and leave as she treated Shan, but no doctor showed up before Temar finally drifted off. The closet was small, and his elbow was jammed into a corner with a box that smelled like feet, but he was more comfortable than he had been in weeks, and he just couldn’t put off sleep any longer.

When Temar woke, he thought for a moment that he was home—that he had fallen asleep on the floor. He didn’t have any restraints on, and Ben always woke before him. Every day he woke to Ben’s hands exploring, finding the edge of the most convenient bruise and pushing his thumb into it. The feeling of stillness and the quiet left him disoriented enough that he panicked before he finally realized where he was.

After realizing that he was in Tom’s closet, Temar sat with his knees pulled up to his chest as he tried to give his heart time to slow.

“Is that you?” Shan asked quietly. Temar leaned down to look out the ventilation shafts, but there weren’t any legs in his field of view.

With infinite slowness, Temar pushed the closet door open and looked out into the room. Shan was clean and shaved and dressed in a dark green shirt that made his sunburn look even worse. “Are we alone?” he whispered, so softly he wasn’t sure Shan could hear him.

Shan nodded. “Hannal finally left me to rest. But then she keeps coming in and making me drink more water, so I can’t sleep.”

“Why?”

Shan shrugged. “Something about me looking yellow and her worrying about my liver. After all the pipe juice I drank on the desert, if I didn’t die out there, I’m not going to drop dead in here.”

Temar wasn’t sure that was true, but he didn’t argue. He stretched and came close to the bed, looking at Shan’s legs under the cover of the sheet. “Is your leg…?”

“It’s fine.”

“It didn’t look fine.”

Shan flipped the sheet back so Temar could see the white bandage taped over his lower leg. “It is fine. It looked bad last night because it was so dirty, and the dead skin was all stuck to it. I burned it days ago.”

“Then why did it look… moist?” Temar asked with a moue of disgust.

With a shrug, Shan put the sheet back. “I don’t think it could heal right without me eating or drinking enough. It was a little crusty.”

“And full of pus.”

“It isn’t that bad. Hannal didn’t even threaten to call the doctor… at least not after Tom and Naite explained about the murder plot.”

Temar sat on the edge of the bed and tried to wrap his thoughts around it all. The sun was up, so he must have slept at least eight hours. His stomach rumbled unhappily, and he eyed the plate of food next to Shan’s bed. The man had nearly died, so taking his food seemed a little uncharitable, but Temar’s stomach felt like it was ready to collapse in on itself.

“You have to be hungry. Grab something,” Shan said, gesturing toward the tray. “Tom has snuck me some extra food, so we don’t have to share.”

Temar didn’t even argue. The tray had a bowl of nuts and another of fresh peas, bright green in the white bowl, and then fresh bread with some sort of fruit spread on it. He grabbed a piece of the bread.

“Did Naite go to get Cyla yet?” he asked. His neck muscles felt overstretched and sore, but other than that, Temar felt a lot better this morning. Shan looked at him with some amusement that Temar didn’t understand.

“Naite heard from one of the workers over on the Gratu farm that you vanished. Ben tried to keep it quiet until full sunup, when his workers found him searching for you. Then Naite told everyone that siblings knew each other’s hiding places before he headed over to Red Plain.”

“Hopefully he’ll get to Cyla before Ista can do anything to her,” Temar said, his mouth full of bread.

“He got her and came back already,” Shan said.

“But… how?” Temar looked at the clock, but it was only a little past noon, so Naite hadn’t had the time to go and get back.

“You lost a whole day, Temar. Naite went to get her yesterday and got back late last night. Cyla is loudly accusing the men over at the Gratu farm, and even Ben himself, of driving you away. She’s telling everyone that your artistic temperament couldn’t handle slavery.” Shan frowned. “You’re a lot stronger than your sister gives you credit for.”

Temar shrugged. “She only sees that glass is fragile, not that it can be incredibly strong when used right.”

Shan frowned again. “I guess that’s true. How are you feeling?”

Until Shan asked, Temar hadn’t given much thought to how he was feeling. His ass had a distant itch that had replaced the normal overly stretched and hot feeling he’d learned to live with. His neck hurt, and a few of the bruises were still bothering him. Physically, he felt better than he had in a long time. However, he felt like he was trying to walk down a sand dune. One wrong move and the whole mountain of sand would land on his head and drown him.

“Afraid.”

“You’re doing better than I am, then. I’m terrified and confused,” Shan confessed. “You see my casting down, and are afraid,” he said in that gentle voice he often used in church.

“Is that the Bible?”

Shan nodded. “The Book of Job. God decided to test a good man in order to prove a point to the devil. Div tells me that I should spend less time reading Job and more time reading Matthew.”

Temar had no idea what that meant, but he was starting to see Shan as not only a flesh and blood man with a life apart from the church, but also as someone who clearly didn’t see himself as a particularly good priest.

“I always thought you were a good priest,” Temar blurted out.

“Um… thank you.” Shan frowned. “While I always appreciate a compliment, is there a reason for this one?”

Temar stood up from the bed and moved to the wall. Someone had painted a picture of a lander, with its heavy, shielded bottom, rockets firing as it came down on the face of Livre. This room faced the rock, and it didn’t have a window. So the painter had painted a frame around the scene, as though the person in the room was looking out onto those early landings. “When you were drunk, you were saying some things.”

Shan groaned. “I imagine I said quite a lot.”

“You insulted yourself a lot.”

“Why does that not surprise me?” Shan sounded tired. Temar turned around to look at him. “I suppose you could say I’ve been having a crisis of conscience lately.”

“About me?” Temar asked. He could put some of the pieces together. Shan’s father had hurt Naite, and Shan hadn’t understood that as a child, so he’d done his own share of trying to get his revenge on their father’s favorite son. Given that background, Temar wasn’t surprised that Shan had assumed that Temar’s father had hurt him, that he had missed the signs. However, during all their walking, Shan kept talking to both Temar and some hallucination of Temar, and some things simply didn’t make a lot of sense.

Shan’s gaze dropped to the bed. “I’m trying to figure that out for myself, Temar.” Shan seemed for force himself to look up and make eye contact. “Sometimes people expect priests to be perfect, and we’re people, with all the same flaws as the rest of the species.”

“Like fear?”

“Like fear,” Shan agreed with a nod.

“And lust?”

Shan froze. Temar could see the way he paled. “I wouldn’t ever….” Shan stopped and took a deep breath before changing tactics. “I took a vow. I committed myself to the church, and if I’m struggling with that vow, I still won’t break it.”

Temar didn’t even know what Shan meant by that. “So, you’re going to stay a priest?”

Shan closed his eyes. “I may question my faith, and I may choose to leave the priesthood, but I won’t break a vow. You are safe with me. I would never touch you,” Shan said in a contrite voice. “You don’t have to be afraid of me.”

Temar studied Shan. He’d never been afraid of Shan. Never. Okay, maybe a little at first. Or a lot. And when Shan moved fast, sometimes Temar’s heart pounded fast because it panicked before Temar could really stop and remind it that Shan would never hurt him. Drunk and suffering, Shan had still protected him. “I’m not afraid of you,” Temar said.

When Shan looked up, it was clear that he didn’t believe Temar at all.

“I know you’re not like Ben. I know that,” Temar said firmly. He needed to hear the words out loud. He needed to remind himself that not everyone would hurt him. His father had been a gentle man, even when drunk. The moment he thought that, Temar remembered a time when he’d been ten or twelve when he’d yelled at his father, and his father had exploded in rage. However, that had been the rare exception. Violence wasn’t inevitable. Shan hadn’t been violent. “Sometimes movement startles me… I remember Ben’s hands on me, or I’ll see something out of the corner of my eye, and I’ll think it’s Ben reaching for me,” Temar admitted.

Shan swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he fisted the sheets. Temar looked around the room, uncomfortable with Shan’s sudden discomfort. It happened. He didn’t want to give the memory more power than to just accept that it happened.

“When a blower has a piece explode in his hands,” Temar started slowly, feeling his way through the words, “he has to learn to watch the glass more carefully, or he has to give up working glass. I’m more careful, Shan. I’m not going to stop working glass.”

Temar looked over and made deliberate eye contact with Shan. Shan met his gaze and held it for several minutes.

“I’m glad,” he finally said. “Whatever I said when I was drunk, I apologize. I may not have behaved well—”

“You did your best to protect me, even when you were so drunk you fell on the rhubarb,” Temar interrupted.

Shan cringed a little. “Not my finest moment. And I suspect that I was verbally clumsy, so if I’ve said anything to make you worry about my commitment to the priesthood or my lust, I am sorry.”

“I have to pee,” Temar said before he turned and fled for the bathroom, not willing to have any more discussion on the point. You didn’t cool the glass too quickly. Glass had to settle on its own time, or it would shatter. Behind him, Shan didn’t say a word as Temar closed the bathroom door. Too late, Temar wondered if Hannal had heard any of that. If she had, Temar could only hope that they could trust her. His stomach churned at the thought that this was getting too large—too many people knew, and any one of them could let something slip to Ben. Worse, they didn’t know who else might be working with him.

Temar took his time coming out, and then he listened at the door before edging carefully out.

“Is Hannal around?”