Leroh was feeling a combination of fear and discomfort as intense as he’d ever experienced. He was sure that the thin fabric of Teela’s undershirt had become transparent over his back with the constant beading of his sweat, and he absentmindedly wondered what he would look like just now. The oily concoction smeared on his face and lips was only making him that much more uncomfortable, both for its physical sensation and for what it implied about him to the world. He took a deep breath to try to control his accelerated pulse.

  Mantis was holding onto his elbow elegantly with a hand and pretending that everything was alright. From such harrowing proximity, the huge disparity in their heights was greatly evidenced, renewing Leroh’s shock at her stature. Her face looked almost normal, for her lips had been crimson to begin with, but the painted flush on her cheeks only seemed to accentuate her mortifying beauty. Her tied hair shone a bright orange under the Sun’s direct view, and her neck stood out to Leroh like an intimate part of her body. He realized at that moment that he’d not been given access to that sight before. Her skin was very smooth, uncannily so. The trap of her appearance made his limbs prickle with primal terror. He knew it was a deadly indulgence to look into her eyes, to admire her fluttering eyelashes and the curve of her nose. But he could not pull his foolish eyes away.

  “Keep looking down, I said. Imbecile.”

  Leroh did not reply and only did as she said, almost grateful for the reminder. He kept forgetting her order to not look up and lifting his gaze to his surroundings, to the monster at his side, to the people they were passing by and at times walking alongside with.

  “How much?” a man asked. He’d come up to Mantis’s side and matched their easy walking pace. Leroh could only see his moccasin-clad feet.

  “More than you can afford, sir. I’m Earth-sworn,” Mantis replied in a voice that Leroh would have believed belonged to a stranger if it weren’t for the fact that it emerged from her exact place on his right. It was an immodest, womanly tone that Leroh felt abashed only hearing.

  “Ah, too bad. Never had an Earth woman. Never even met one,” the man sounded friendly enough, but there was concealed hostility in his words. “Where you going now?”

  “We’re a gift for Prince Siebos. He’s having a gathering,” Mantis cooed at him. “Maybe next time, love.”

  The stranger grunted his acceptance then and disappeared. Leroh was not able to see him go, but he observed that his feet were no longer keeping pace next to Mantis’s voluminous skirts and let out a short sigh. The relief was short lived, however. More people approached them, and some were polite, asking rather than demanding or trying to take. There were shouts and undoubtedly a lot of leering, but mainly there were price enquiries done at various levels of covertness. Eventually, though, someone put their hands on Mantis.

  “Come, whore,” was all he said as he pulled her toward him and into a nearby house. She went.

  The new stranger was an average sized servant of middle age. His face was guarded but not overly expressive, and he was carrying Mantis by the elbow as one would a stubborn child despite the fact that she was following after him with eerie docility. Leroh watched them until they disappeared behind the dark wood of a well-constructed door, and only then remembered to lower his eyes once again. He waited, standing there defenseless and trembling with terror, for approximately two dozen heartbeats before he found he was no longer alone.

  “Walk,” Mantis told him and took his arm in that unnervingly delicate way again, pulling him to continue moving.

  They traversed the loud streets in silence with their gazes on the neatly-paved ground, trying to appear subservient and shy in a seductive way, modest and scandalous both at once. Leroh could tell that he was red beyond his greasepaint from the familiar way in which his skin felt hot around his face and neck.

  Their disguises were working, apparently. Or fortunately, Leroh supposed. If they’d been wearing their normal attire, they would have stood out more as outsiders. People would have looked closer and noticed a free man in their midst, seeming to all yellow eyes as vulnerable as an unaccompanied infant. They would not have found an issue with taking him from the relatively weak hands of a small woman, servant or not. Any strong Sun follower would have seen an opportunity in them and tried to claim Leroh for him or herself. But as they were now they really were only drawing a certain kind of attention, and it wasn’t a thoroughly analytical kind at that.

  It really was a wonder that nobody had tried to capture Leroh so far. But at a beautiful seductress’s side, he mused, he might not make a very eye-catching whore. And those eyes he did catch would not be on his revealingly brown ones. She’d camouflaged him in plain sight.

  It was at the exact moment Leroh made the mistake of feeling some small sense of relief at their blending in that Mantis was taken from his side again by a drunken, mumbling man. Leroh tried relaxing and telling himself that she’d be back in no time as had been the case before, but by then his good fortune had run out.

  With his eyes obediently on the ground beneath his feet, Leroh only felt the large hand that gripped him by the upper arm and pulled him in what felt like the blink of an eye into a darkened alley and then behind the additional cover of a stack of worked timber.

  His aggressor was a Sun servant of maybe thirty years. There was a strangely shapely scar above his left eyebrow that vaguely resembled a T, and a blood-stilling sparkle in his eyes that had nothing to do with his God-allegiance. His breath was hot and acrid as it fanned across Leroh’s face with his loud pants, and his bright yellow eyes provided a dim source of light that illuminated his bellowing chest as he hastened to unfasten the leather ties of his breeches.

  They were standing face to face, and their heights were matched, but what they would not be matched in as men, Leroh knew, was strength.

  The stranger grabbed him by the hip with one hand and brought the other to the front closure of Leroh’s green trousers. It was only when his thick fingers latched onto the loose end of one string and pulled to undo the flimsy knot that was keeping the last of Leroh’s sanity together that Leroh finally found his voice.

  “No! NO! Stop. Leave me alone. Stop! HELP!”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  The stranger clasped a rough hand that smelled of dirt onto Leroh’s mouth and nose. “Shhh. What kind of a whore—” and then he looked into his brown eyes, and smiled wide with surprised delight.

  Leroh let out a small whimper of panic as the realization of his mistake dawned on him. The scarred man had not noticed his Godless eyes. Probably would not have noticed at all, had he not called his attention to himself. He’d have just released him with a few coins after… Now he’d do more than that.

  “What’s a little unclaimed mousey doing among his betters? Did nobody teach you to stay where you belong and wait for us to come to you?” His words were low, taunting. “Poor little boy-tramp got greedy, I reckon. Double luck for me, eh?”

  The man’s hand was still covering the lower half of Leroh’s face, and breathing through his fingers was starting to make him light-headed. He was burning with shame and focusing single-mindedly on his every inhalation when the scarred servant finished uncovering himself and prying Leroh’s green trousers and undergarments down to his upper thighs with his spare hand. Then he forcibly turned Leroh around and pushed his face against the stone wall that had previously been at his back. The stranger’s loudly-breathing mouth burrowed into the nook between Leroh’s head and his right shoulder as he reached down for his exposed skin with a questing hand.

  When the Sunman let go of him entirely and fell away without a sound, Leroh did not even need to look. He reached down to quickly pull his clothes back on, all the while keeping his face steadfastly hidden from her brutal gaze.

  “Did he—”

  He interrupted her before she could say anything that could mortify him even more. “No. No. Didn’t get to. Didn’t even touch me, my—he didn’t. Sorry. I meant—thank you. Sorry. Thank you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mantis said, loudly and unequivocally, and Leroh looked up to meet her terrible orange eyes, all of a sudden more confused than frightened.

  He did not understand.

  “What did you say?” he whispered shakily, his voice sounding like a prepubescent boy’s.

  “Let’s go. We’ve arrived. It’s the next building over.”

  “What is?”

  “The inn where the horses are stabled. I’ll hire a driver to take us to the Rays.”

  Teela breathed in deeply through her nose, ready to speak, but then let out the air that had been building inside of her along with her frustration and looked down as if she could see the gust of Wind from her lungs sweeping through the food before her.

  Pirria had made a watery stew with the strips of dried goat meat Mantis had brought back for them the day before and a leftover onion she’d fished from a cupboard. Only mildly stale bread rested beside little cubes of cheese and a pile of round, ruddy berries on a plate by the steaming bowl in front of Teela. She felt guilty to be devouring the last of the food provided by Mantis, as it seemed Pirria would be left with little else.

  It was as Teela was trying to decide if eating just the stew and letting the older woman keep the rest for herself was a foolish idea when Yilenn cleared her throat and drew her attention.

  “Eat. We’re going to need the energy.”

  Teela dropped her spoon and, in her surprise, barely felt the splash of hot broth that flew onto her chest. “You’re agreeing? You’re coming with me?”

  “You were planning to go on your own?” The siren raised a humorless eyebrow at her, but Teela felt a smile come to her lips regardless.

  “When do we leave?”

  “Eat first. Fill up. And while you do that I can explain what we’ll be facing.”

  “Yes. Alright,” Teela tried not to show too much excitement, but feared Yilenn could pick up on her emotions anyway.

  The spoon felt heavy in her fingers, the food suddenly repulsive. She didn’t want to eat. She wanted to run to Mantis and her brother to deliver her heavy tidings. She wanted to be a part of what had to happen. When they’d left, they’d taken Teela’s life with them, and it felt as if there was a vital incongruence about her existence now that they’d gone and isolated her from the present time. Teela was not whole like this. She could not wait for the future to be an active participant in her own life again.

  The stew was cold and it tasted like nothing as it slid down her closed throat.

  “You know I’ve been fighting a command from my master, and that makes me behave…oddly.” Teela only nodded, admittedly not too eager to sit and listen to a cautioning speech right now, so the siren continued. “Well… That command is to, to reproduce. With men with strength of the soul, Sea servants or unclaimed men, it makes no difference. I’ve been fighting the…urges from the order, but they—the men—they can sense me too, come to me.”

  “There won’t be many Seamen or free folk where we’re going,” Teela pointed out, trying to appear less enthusiastic than she felt to be leaving Pirria’s house regardless of whatever danger the siren might be trying to warn her about.

  “Yes, but I don’t know if I can trust myself. We don’t know what could happen out there. I’ve never been here before.”

  “I understand.”

  “I need you to protect me,” Yilenn said with her eyes unflinchingly on Teela’s face, “and I give you my word that I’ll do anything in my power to shield you from harm, too.”

  Teela stilled at that and blinked a few times.

  She’d never heard those words before. I need you to protect me. It was exhilarating and frightening in equal measure to hear them, making her feel a ridiculous swell of pride in her chest. Even though she knew this was a matter of necessity, that it didn’t speak for her competence to offer anyone protection, it still gave her an utterly foreign sense of fulfillment to feel needed, to hear an older woman—a servant, no less—asking so outwardly for her help.

  Yilenn pulled out a small knife, a kitchen utensil from the look of it, from the large front pocket of her green linen dress—one of a number of clothing items she’d borrowed from Teela during their traveling and never returned.

  “I have been carrying this, but I’d rather you have it now.” Yilenn’s blue eyes were full of concern and guilt as she handed over the tool into Teela’s hands. Yes, a kitchen knife, certainly.

  The blade wasn’t very sharp and the hilt was of plain make. Wood darkened with use was smoothed down to a shape vaguely resembling the imprint of a right hand. Someone had cut meat and vegetables to feed a family with the unthreatening tool. For many years, probably. A person had handled the blade now suspended loosely in Teela’s fingers thinking it a perfectly mundane object, and now it would be used for who knew what—at her hands.

  Could Teela even do what she was having trouble just imagining?

  “Did you get this from Pirn?” she asked, eyes still studying her new weapon.

  “Yes. But I don’t think I can use it. You should carry it today, or just from now on. But don’t tell Mantis I gave it to you, please.”

  Teela looked up to meet her intense gaze. “Why can’t you carry it?”

  “If it comes to it, you’ll be able to wield that, Teela. You are strong, and bold. You’ll be able to protect us better than I can. I’m not…I can’t stand violence. I don’t trust myself with this.”

  Teela took a deep breath and nodded.