Oath Bound (Book 3) (2 page)

“All right, Longshanks,
I’ll hear you later.” The barmaid sashayed away shaking her head.

When she’d gone, he
demanded, “The hell was that for?”

“She
likes
you,
dumbass!”

“What?”

“She said ‘all night’!”
Kessa hissed, leaning close.

“People say that,” he
explained patiently. “Those are words. People say them.”

“Yeah, but she meant
all
night!
” At his blank look, she let out a disgusted huff. “As in, you could
do it to her all night! You are so oblivious.”

“I’m not. She wasn’t—”

“Yes, you are, and yes,
she
was
coming on to you.”

“C’mon! Why’d she wanna
do a thing like that?”

“That, right there,
that’s why you’re oblivious.”

Dingus shook his head,
picking up his cutlery, and tucked into the stew. Kessa huffed again and
settled back in her chair, arms folded, until Vandis finished preaching and
came to fetch her to take her turn on the stage. Like Dingus had figured she
would, she did Margaret Dragonslayer, and it went down real well even if she
used her hands in some of the wrong places and almost lost her spot when the
place started to fill up with her story only partway through.

Vandis ordered a whiskey
from the same pretty barmaid. Dingus, looking at his palms, asked for one, too.

“Anything for you,
Preacher,” she said, and he flinched and flushed when she trailed her fingers
across his shoulders. Her footfalls receded, and he stole a glance at Vandis,
whose eyebrows looked about to disappear into his hair.

“It’s for Eagle Eye and
the Worm,” Dingus mumbled.

Vandis’s mouth curved up.
“You can have whiskey if you want it,
Preacher.
”

With a groan, Dingus
dropped his burning face into his hands. Vandis laughed—not too hard, but he
laughed.

“What am I supposed to
do?”

“You’re asking the wrong
guy. I know Point A, which is flirting,” Vandis said, putting a fingertip on
the table, “and I know something about Point B, which would be… you know.” He
put another fingertip a little ways away. “But in between? You’re on your own,
kid.”

“Aw, hell!” Dingus knew
Point B, all right, but he’d never even been to Point A, not as far as he knew.

“Guys a lot dumber than
you have figured it out. You can, too.”

“Thought you were the
Master here. Aren’t you supposed to know everything?”

Vandis was still laughing
when the barmaid came back with the drinks. “You were pretty good,” she said to
him. “I like how you tell those old stories. You had some
truth.
” She
darted a smile at Dingus, who pretended interest in a knot on the tabletop.

“I can preach, or I
wouldn’t be where I am,” Vandis said.

“True enough, but you
don’t have—”

“Oh, look, here’s Kessa,”
Dingus said, popping up from his chair. Kessa was just coming down the steps,
but he grabbed his drink and headed for the stage, passing her on his way
there. He shut his eyes, breathed, and imagined the Masters’ stares.
She
won’t be a problem,
he told himself, and refused to look the barmaid’s way.

He gave them Grandpa’s
absolute, bang-up, best stories, saving Eagle Eye and the Worm for last. His
fire-breathing dragon trick went down in a storm of gasps and applause, which
for sure he’d like to get used to, and he had to do it again twice before he
could go have his supper. Thank the Lady for Vandis, who’d ordered it for him
so the food already sat steaming in front of his chair. He didn’t see
her
anywhere.

She caught him coming
back from the privy after he’d eaten. Her arms locked around his neck and she
pulled him down. Instead of cool and smooth, like Moira’s, her mouth was hot,
and so soft, so slick his knees about buckled; instead of sweet, she tasted of
beer.

Dingus went up in sudden
flame. Sensation rushed down his spine and settled, glowing, in his groin—like
when the red came on—and like when the red came on, he wanted, just
wanted.
His hands gripped at her flesh and she yielded, swayed against him. His pulse
beat in his ears: take, take, take, and he felt as if his skin bound and
trapped him. He straightened, shaking.

Her fingers stole under
his hood and wound in his hair. She yanked him back down. “You don’t kiss,” she
said, “like a preacher.”

His breath rasped. He
forced his hands into fists at his sides, tight, even though they twitched to
open and touch. “Don’t, please don’t. You don’t know what—”

“I know you want to
fuck,” she whispered, shifting her hips to press against his hard-on.

“I’ll
hurt
you.”
He tried to pull back, but she had a fierce, one-handed grip on his hair, and
she laughed at him.

“You’re hung, Preacher,
but not that hung.” She rubbed up between his thighs—right where it counted.
Fire and wanting slashed through him. If he didn’t get away, he’d do something
terrible.

He lurched back so hard
he landed on his ass and left her with what felt like half his hair.

“You have got to be
shitting me.” She stood there, fingers curled over one out-thrust hip, looking
down on him while he drew in choking gasps, and then crouched. “I’m offering
you free cunt, and around here, nobody gets it for free.” She reached for his
crotch and he scooted away. “What about it? Are you stupid, or are you going to
act like a man?”

“Fuck off my brother
before I wreck your face,” Kessa said, sweet as you please. Dingus almost
groaned with relief—and a healthy dose of humiliation—to see her looming tall
behind the barmaid.

“Your brother’s a mess,”
the barmaid said, straightening. To Dingus, she added, “What a waste of a big
dick,” before she strutted back into the tavern.

“Whore,” Kessa said. He
took the hand she offered. “You know you couldn’t hurt her with a rafter,
right?”

Dingus sat down hard
again. “
What?
”

“I heard you. I went to
pee. At first I thought you’d, you know… but on my way back, I heard you.” She
shrugged. “You wouldn’t hurt her, that’s all.”

“That wasn’t what I
meant.” He stood.

“Then what did you mean?”

He paused in the middle
of brushing down his pants to look her in the eye. Since they’d met, he’d grown
taller, so they weren’t quite eye-to-eye anymore. “It felt like I was going to
berserk.”

“Aw, Dingus…”

“Please don’t tell
Vandis.”

She snorted. “Are you
kidding?” Then she stuck her fingers in her ears and sang, “‘La la la, if I
don’t hear about it, it doesn’t exist, I can’t
hear
you!’ Let’s not
squish his illusions.”

Dingus couldn’t help
snickering at that. He stuck his hands in his pockets, relaxing a little. How’d
he forget how great she could be?

On the way back up to the
inn, she bumped his shoulder with hers. “Love you.”

“Love you, too,” he said,
bumping back.

In spite of Kessa’s
kindness, Dingus tossed and turned for hours in his bedroll, monstrously horny
and unsatisfied. It’d been so long since he’d thought he might find someone
willing to have him, and when the opportunity presented itself, what did he do?
He choked, that was what, like a little boy getting a first glimpse of tit. He
could promise himself not to do that again, but even if another one came along,
he doubted he’d make any better showing. He sighed, and the next time he
thought anything at all, Vandis was shaking him awake.

The yard of the Jackalope
bustled, even before first light, and Vandis, with Kessa at his side, wove
among the shouting carters, running porters, and stoic donkeys toward his
friend Farid. They’d set it up the night before: in exchange for sword arms and
stories, Vandis and his two would travel with Farid’s caravan up to Seal Rock.
Dingus trailed at a distance, and though he hadn’t said more than a few words
that morning, he carried an air of cranky disquiet that annoyed Vandis no end.

“Vandis!” Farid called,
before he could even open his mouth, and charged across the yard to kiss him on
both cheeks—the standard greeting in Hayed. Vandis had met him there a few
years back; he was in his mid-twenties now, and as garrulous as Dingus was
taciturn. “Come on, Vandis, you haven’t met my Aisha! I got married, I’ve got
kids now, did you know that?”

Vandis returned his grin.
“And you brought everyone along for the ride.”

“I wouldn’t dream to
leave them behind. Are these your guys? Of course they are. Kessa, isn’t it?”
Farid beamed and stretched up to kiss her on both cheeks, making her blush.
“And you, I can’t remember, is it Dennis?”

Vandis’s boy submitted to
the cheek-bussing with bad grace. “It’s Dingus,” he said, and Farid burst into
laughter.

“Oh no, oh no, I
shouldn’t laugh. That’s not a Hayedi name for sure, friend—I can’t call you
that, no. What about your second name, what’s that?”

He made a face. “Dingus
suits me fine.”

“No, you’ve got to tell
me. I can’t give the guys that name for you, they’ll tear you apart. In
Hayedi,” Farid said, slinging an arm around Dingus’s shoulders to pull him
close for a whisper and ignoring the tension that rippled through his body, “it
means road apples. Horseshit.”

“Parsifal,” Dingus said
hastily.

“Much better, that’s a
good name. We’ll just forget your other name until we get where we’re going,
okay, Parsifal? Okay?” he added, glancing at Vandis and Kessa. “Try to call him
Parsifal. I don’t want my guys ripping on him. It’s bad business. Let’s go
introduce you around.” Farid took them over to the stables and told them the
guards’ names; Vandis filed away as many as he could, picking out
characteristics to match them to later, and the same with the merchants.

“I saved the best for
last,” Farid said, and guided them to his wagon to meet his new wife—at least,
she was new to Vandis—and three little ones: two girls about four and two, and
a baby boy. The girls stared up at Dingus and Kessa, round-eyed.

“You are tall,” said the
four-year-old, and Dingus’s eyes lit.

“Not always.” He fell
into an easy crouch. “See? I’m—Parsifal. What’s your name?”

She swished her body back
and forth, giving him a shy smile from beneath long lashes. “Jamila.”

“That’s awful pretty.
It’s nice to meet you, Jamila.”

“Parsifal is a pretty name,”
she offered, and Dingus affected a grimace.

“You think so? Can I tell
you a secret?” Her maiden braids bobbed when she nodded, and Dingus leaned
close, cupping a hand around his mouth. “I think it’s horrible,” he
stage-whispered.

She squealed a giggle,
tugged his sleeve so he’d bend an ear, and stage-whispered something back.
Vandis couldn’t make out the words, but Dingus laughed.

“I’m sure he’ll be a
wonderful uncle, when Kessa gives you children,” Aisha said to Vandis, smiling.

Vandis spluttered something
incoherent, even to his own ears.

Farid chuckled and said,
“No, my jewel, Vandis is not Kessa’s husband. He’s her teacher, Parsifal’s too.
They’re Knights of the Air, like those others we met, not a family.”

Not by blood or by
marriage, anyway,
Vandis thought, with an eye on Kessa, where she stood
talking to one of the outriders and admiring his horse. Both of the little
girls had drawn close to Dingus, who was letting them gape at—even touch—his
pointed ears.

The sun broke the
horizon, and Farid whirled into action. “All right, my darlings, it’s time to
go! Into the wagon with you,” he cried over his shoulder as he ran for his
horse. He swung himself onto its back and fit his feet to the stirrups. The
white mare trotted to the gate. Farid drew his broad falchion and urged the
mare to rear up, waving the sword so it flashed in the sun. “We ride!” he
shouted. Vandis settled himself on the floor of the wagon, and Kessa scrambled
in behind him. They sat among the family’s belongings. Dingus lifted the two
little girls, who shrieked with glee as he rolled them over the side. Aisha
shifted her baby in his sling and snapped the reins, and the mule team drew
them away. At the last moment, Dingus caught the back of the wagon and vaulted
gracefully in.

It went far better than
Vandis had dared to hope. The long summer days rolled one into the next, mile
after mile, across the broad plain. The winds kicked dust through the sparse
grass, short and browning where caribou had cropped. Before two days had
passed, Kessa had made friends with most of the caravan guards—under his and
Dingus’s sharp watch, of course—and she joined them each morning for drill,
excited to use her new hand-and-a-half.

For once, socializing
came easily to Dingus. As unhappy as he’d been about traveling with the
caravan, he was delighted now. Farid’s girls weren’t the only children around,
and before dinnertime the first day he’d collected them all like chicks under
his lanky wing. Even Hussein, the baby, had been caught in an enchantment woven,
as far as Vandis could tell, of silly rhymes and sillier faces.

However he charmed them,
their parents loved it. The little ones’ naked idolatry left them free to talk
amongst themselves, or better, to Vandis. He gathered plenty of tidbits about
Muscoda’s borders, though nothing from within; he wasn’t too big to admit, had
anybody asked, that he’d checked to assure himself that no Muscodites were
traveling with Farid. None of the People had joined the caravan, either, though
there was a family of human carters hauling fine wool up from Wealaia. Vandis
spent a couple of days riding on their wagon, listening to the news—which
wasn’t much—and filling their ears with pro-half-blood rhetoric, but Dingus’s
distracting their three rough-and-tumble sons did more for that cause than
anything Vandis could have said.

Just now he strode back from Aisha's wagon, carrying the
middle boy kicking and squalling over his shoulder. He deposited the child in
the wagon with his parents. “Now you stay here and have a time-out ’til you’re
good and ready to say sorry to Dimi for kicking him, and don’t you bug your ma
and dad neither.”

“He kicked me first!” the little boy yelled, right next to
Vandis’s head.

“
No, sir, he did not. I saw the whole thing, and you
didn’t act right, Joey Bob, so you just sit here ’
til
you can.”

“
You’re not fair!” Joey Bob
screamed at the top of his lungs. Vandis winced and covered one ear. “I hate
you!”

Dingus made
an elaborate gesture of apathy and walked away. The boy’s mother gasped. “Did I
just hear that, young man? Were you talking ugly to Parsifal just now? Because
I truly hope my ears deceive me!”

“Huh!” Joey
Bob slid down in the wagon and kicked the side, rattling the board. “Parsifal’s
mean! He’s just a—just a dumb old dingus, that’s what!”

Vandis pretended
to cough into his hand while Joey Bob’s mother put a solid slap upside the
boy’s head.

Eventually, even Vandis
grew bored. He’d heard all the gossip he was likely to. He did enjoy the
compliments that flew his way about Kessa and “Parsifal,” but he’d be relieved
when he could call his Junior Dingus again. He’d gotten accustomed to the name,
and it didn’t conjure the same feeling as it used to. Vandis reviewed the
images in the illuminated book he’d gotten at Moot and composed letters in his
mind, which he wrote by firelight after supper once the wagons had stopped
bouncing for the day. He dug through his pack for the signet he carried, melted
his blue wax, and sealed the letters for posting in Seal Rock.

The next afternoon found him
snoozing in the back of Aisha’s wagon with his hood pulled over his eyes to
shield them from the sun. There was nothing better to do, and besides, he’d
walked alongside the wagon all morning to keep his knees from stiffening. The
bumping disturbed his rest not at all, but Kessa woke him when she thudded into
the wagon.

“You’ll wanna be awake
for this anyway,” she said, once he’d finished grumbling. “There’s barbarians
coming!”

Vandis sat up.
“Where’s—Parsifal?”

“Right here.” Dingus
walked alongside the wagon, unaccompanied by even one small person. The Xavier
swords hung from his belt. “Ahmad came back a while ago,” he said, naming one
of the outriders. “They want to trade, he said. Meat and hides. We need
anything?”

“No, but get the beads
out of your pack, the glass ones.”  

Dingus swung over the
side of the wagon and landed lightly inside. He produced the beads right away
from the depths of his organized pack, gave them to Vandis, and leapt out
again. The whole thing took less than a minute.

“You know, you could ride
in the wagon at any point,” Vandis told him, but he only shook his head and
slipped his hands into his pockets, behind the swords. He held himself loosely,
and appeared relaxed, but Vandis read a predator’s awareness in the posture.
“Take it easy.”

Dingus’s mouth thinned,
but he said nothing, and Vandis scowled. When the tribe and the caravan met, it
was dusk, but they’d seen the barbarians grow closer and closer on the great
flat all afternoon. “Take it
easy
,” Vandis repeated to his Junior. The
men, even the young ones, were Dingus’s height at a minimum; Dingus looked like
a piece of kindling, small and thin, next to the bulk of them. They must have
some Nuz blood. Their long blond beards and hair had a greenish tint ranging
from faint to grassy. Tusks jutted from one woman’s broad mouth.

They pitched their tents
by the road while the caravan pulled off to the other side, and everyone met in
the middle to do business. “Vandis, will you come?” Farid asked, and Vandis
followed him to meet with the chieftain, a gigantic specimen named Ingavi,
whose hair and beard were vibrant green. He had at least two feet of height on
Vandis, and the extra muscle could have made another person. His clothes, like
the rest of his tribe’s, were supple caribou hide stitched with sinew, and he
wore a long necklace of tusks and canine teeth that looked suspiciously human.

Vandis observed, for the
most part, though he threw in a handful of Brightwater flower beads to ease the
way for supper. Throughout the negotiation, Dingus’s gaze burned on his back.
When he looked over his shoulder, Dingus seemed at ease, lounging against
Farid’s wagon with folded arms. His expression was neutral, but his eyes didn’t
rest in one place for long, except when they stopped on Vandis.

Vandis sent him the
perch-eye, thinking,
I don’t like how you’re acting.

He lifted his brows, as
if to say, “Same to you,” and Vandis smoothed his face and turned back to the
conversation.
I am going to chew your ass so hard.

After the merchants
struck their separate deals with the tribe, the caravan joined them for roast
caribou, contributing flour for fry bread and a barrel of mead. They mingled
and spread over the road. Though most of the younger men, barbarians and
outriders together, gathered around the wagons, Dingus stuck to Vandis like a
hungry tick. “Go watch out for Kessa,” he hissed.

Dingus snorted. “Bashir’s
looking out for her better than I ever could. That guy’s got it bad.”

“Exactly why
you
should be there,” Vandis said. Bashir, the youngest of the outriders, was
openly smitten with Kessa, and it worried Vandis no end.

“He’s got muscles like a
bag of snakes,” Dingus said, “and he won’t let nobody hurt her.”

“Go away.”

Dingus shook his head and
when supper came around took a seat near Vandis, far enough away that Vandis
couldn’t send him packing without a scene, but close enough to grate. As Vandis
pulled caribou apart with his fingers, he began composing the most spectacular
bitch-out in history, and by the end of the meal, when they all had full
bellies and were enjoying cups of mead, he had about fifteen minutes of
excellent material. He would rain brimstone on Dingus’s empty, red head.

From across the fire,
Ingavi said, “I want a word with you, Vandis, if you don’t mind.”

“All right.” Vandis rose
from his spot; Dingus sprang up, too, and the chieftain frowned.

“A private word.”

Dingus folded his thin
arms. “I go where he goes.”

“I’ve never told you
that,” Vandis bit off.

Curious eyes lay on the
two of them, and Dingus shuffled his shoulders a couple of times, an
uncomfortable grimace crossing his face. “It’s not safe—” he began anyway.

“Are you saying I can’t
handle myself?”

“No! I’m just—”

“Easy, little berserk,”
Ingavi said, laughing. “I’m not going to hurt him. We’re here to trade. Where’s
the profit if he dies?”

Dingus threw a brief
scowl at the chieftain. “Vandis—”

“Boy, get out of here!”
he roared, his hands white-knuckling into fists. “We’ll talk later!” He’d had
well past enough of this fucking mother-hen routine. Less than a heartbeat’s eye
contact made Dingus about-face and stalk away. Vandis, seething, watched him
disappear into the darkness. He turned to Ingavi.

“Shall we?” Ingavi
gestured in the opposite direction. Vandis snapped a nod and followed him away from
the prying ears around the fires. “You know, he’s a good boy. He loves you. He
wants you to be safe. That’s good.”