Page 31 of The Sorcerer's Alpha
“They’re good horses,” Sycamore said, for lack of anything else to say.
“Come sit by the fire,” Marut said. “There’s food ready.”
Marut was never much for conversation, but his silence felt newly fraught now as Sycamore stewed in his memories of all the uncomfortably revealing things he had said and done during heat. He hated to feel that he had shown some part of his true self without meaning to. Marut was no shrewd courtier to use Sycamore’s weaknesses against him, but Sycamore had been too suspicious of everyone for too long to let his guard down now.
“We can ride out today, if you’re well enough,” Marut said after a while, breaking into Sycamore’s thoughts. “I don’t mean to hurry you, but I’d rather leave now before the weather changes.”
“Oh—I suppose so. It won’t do me any harm, certainly.” Sycamore was somewhat wobbly on his feet, but he thought he could sit astride a horse well enough. He would benefit from another day to rest, but not at the cost of encountering more bad weather. The wind didn’t say anything that indicated snow, but the last storm had blown up without him hearing about it, or maybe he had been too distracted to listen.
Marut accepted the plate of venison when Sycamore passed it over to him. “The Sarnoy won’t have moved to a different spot, I imagine.”
“Likely not. But I’ll check before we leave.”
“All right.” That matter settled, Marut bent his head to his meal.
The Sarnoy camp was, as expected, exactly where it had been before Sycamore’s heat: five days away at most, if Sycamore’s estimate wasn’t completely off the mark. They had the horses saddled and loaded before the sun came above the tops of the fir trees lining the ridge nearby. Sycamore’s shoulder ached with a dull throb, and he felt diminished from his heat, and crusty with dried semen in every crease of his body. Aside from that he was in good spirits as the horses walked down the hillside toward the open plain.
They rode all that day, stopping only to water the horses and fill the waterskins with fresh snow. Sycamore was warm enough aside from his feet, which troubled him enough that he finally worked out a way to heat them by encasing them in a shell of magic the way he would enclose a bubble around a plant to serve as a greenhouse. It was tricky to do with moving objects, but he managed it, and then did the same for Marut. He was learning to do all sorts of new things he had never thought of before.
“Are you warming my feet in some way?” Marut asked after a while.
Sycamore grinned. “It’s working, then, I take it.”
“Yes.” Marut glanced at him sidelong. “Thank you.”
“My talents are in protection and warding,” Sycamore said, reluctant to discuss the issue but feeling that he owed Marut some explanation. “I have no training in combat magic or anything that’s useful for survival. In Banuri I grow miniature trees, read books, and guard the royal household. I’m of no use to you because I never should have been sent on this mission in the first place.”
“You’re of considerable use to me,” Marut said mildly. “My feet are quite warm.” He looked at Sycamore again and said, more seriously, “I was worried enough about frostbite that I was about to call a halt for the day. Now we can keep going.”
“All right,” Sycamore said, mollified.
They spent that whole day riding across gently rolling steppe and camped for the night on open grassland unsheltered by any trees or hills. Marut lit a fire and cooked yet more venison, which Sycamore was already heartily sick of, even though not so long ago he had been desperate for any morsel of food. They sat by the crackling fire with the black dome of the sky spread above them like a tent and strewn with stars. The smell of dung smoke filled Sycamore’s nose, finally overcoming the scents of sex and Marut.
“Well,” Marut said at last, as the night chill began to creep inside Sycamore’s swathe of blankets. “I suppose we should sleep.”
Lying down beside Marut in the tent was as awkward as it had been the very first time. Sycamore felt stripped of even the memory of desire, as he always did after a heat, but even so he couldn’t stop thinking about Marut’s hands on him, Marut’s mouth on his throat. How could they go forward from here, knowing these things about each other?
“I’ll sleep outside,” Marut offered after a few minutes of tense silence.
Sycamore prodded at him with one foot. “Will you stop with that foolishness? I hardly want you to freeze.”
“You can use your magic,” Marut said. “Like you did on my feet.”
“All of you is much larger than your feet.” Sycamore prodded him again, less gently. “Surely we can sleep here together peacefully enough.”
“Surely,” Marut said. The bedding rustled as he turned onto his side. He sighed heavily. Sycamore couldn’t see his face in the darkness and held his breath in anticipation of what Marut would say next. But instead of speaking, Marut reached for Sycamore’s hand beneath the blankets and drew it toward him, and held it there against his chest. “Sycamore,” he said, then brought Sycamore’s hand to his mouth to press a single kiss against Sycamore’s open palm. “Go to sleep.”
* * *
Another three daysof riding brought them close enough to the Sarnoy village that they would arrive the next morning. The weather had been good aside from a single day of strong winds. Sycamore prayed to the Wind Below every morning for calm weather and clear skies, and his prayers were answered. They rode without incident and saw nothing moving but a single herd of gazelle in the distance.
“They call themselves the Sarnai,” Sycamore told Marut that last night as they sat beside the fire. “I don’t imagine they’ll be hostile, but I also don’t imagine they’ll be welcoming. Do your best to look grim and menacing. You’re good at that.”
“Menacing?” Marut asked, voice laced with skepticism.
“I notice you don’t contest the grim part,” Sycamore said, and grinned at Marut’s expression. He was so easy to nettle.
The sky was heavy and gray in the morning and scattered snowflakes fell. The horses came over a low line of hills and there was the Sarnoy camp, a cluster of ten round, hide-covered tents surrounded by an open fence of stone. Reindeer and sheep grazed in the patchy snow, their fur spangled with snow. Smoke rose from the center of each tent. Stacked outside were piles of what Sycamore realized, as they drew closer, was dried dung.