As if he were somebody important, a servant led Osmund away and to the baths, speaking to him politely in Meskato and gesturing as they walked. Osmund tried his best to listen, though understanding was another matter.
More informatively, he observed that this building had multiple wings: Down the end of one hall, scholarly types fiddled with books and scribbled on parchment, and in another room, mages of the state discussed theory animatedly. When they turned a corner, he saw soldiers.
Eventually they emerged onto a new section of the grounds, standing before the telltale shape of a bathhouse. The Meskato were fond of hot steam rooms, and their bathhouses were almost all large public structures rather than the private washbasins favored by the nobility of Osmund’s homeland. Once inside, he awkwardly nodded the servant away, stripped off his dirty clothes (wearing only a thin wrap around his waist for modesty), and found a place in the steam room to be alone, where he sat doggedly ignoring the other men.
In other circumstances, this could have been a paradise! Still, he tried not to attract too much attention. He didn’t know the prevailing attitudes towards people like him in this country, and he wasn’t ready just yet to find out in a place like this, surrounded by strangers and almost totally exposed. Not to mention bone-tired.
Osmund sighed and leaned his back against the layered stone platform in the center of the room, feeling the warm temperatures slowly ease the tension out of his body. Oh, how often he wished he could sink into a hot bath! …But this was its own style of luxury. His eyelids drooped. The room blurred. For one blissful moment his mind was completely empty.
Valcrest. The memory of home crept up on him like it so often did, but here in the steam it too had lost its sharp edges. Instead of cruel hands and bloodied knuckles, he remembered riding with his hardiest mare, Minerva, crossing swathes of hilly countryside for the thrill of it until his back ached the next day. He remembered the kind nursemaid who had been his only solace when Mother died, and the baker in town who used to regale him with the local wives’ gossip, as if he were just another customer.
He remembered his sister.
Osmund scrunched up his face at once. Thinking about Evanor was strictly off-limits. Remembering his horses was painful enough, and they might actually still be alive.
Evanor was dead. His father was dead. The throne of Valcrest was lost, with a necromancer queen sitting it.
That was the reason he’d ended up here. There was no going back.
As much as a certain Tolmish businessman had tried to sell him on it.
It had happened shortly after arriving by boat to Shebyan’s stony shores.
When he was alive, Father had had the kind of voice that made someone afraid to disobey, which was why the poor boatman had followed a deposed king’s orders and brought them all the way here to safe ground. Away from the usurper queen and her demon, and the fire, and home.
Osmund bore their burden – all the trinkets and finery that former King Valen Haldebard could stuff into a sack – on his back. It was the first time, but not the last, that he would carry everything he owned in this world. Together with his father in front, and Osmund trailing behind, they trekked up the incline for the first glimpse of their refuge.
“This place is a bigger eyesore than I imagined!” were Father’s first words at the top of the hill, as the city of Shebyan stretched out before them. “What an unsightly sprawl!”
Osmund looked, but he didn’t see much of anything. His vision was blurry with tears. Ever since they’d started rowing the little boat he’d been mourning his beloved horses. He hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye before he and Father fled the castle, which had gone ablaze in the conflict. What had happened to the stables? How much of the castle town had survived?
Thankfully, while Osmund fretted pointlessly, Father had took charge. Valen Haldebard eventually navigated them to the palatial estate of a certain self-styled “Lord” Pravin, a Tolmish expatriate who conveniently lived here in Shebyan. With a very marriageable daughter (and very high ambitions to match), he’d promised them he had the connections in the empire needed to send an army across the sea and re-take Valcrest for the rightful king. For a price, that is. Even with all his trappings of nobility he was still, after all, just a merchant who knew how to bargain.
“Very well,” Father had groused, trying to seem displeased when Pravin had brought out his daughter, a lovely maid around Osmund’s age. “I suppose it is high time I take another wife.”
“Pardon me, my King,” Pravin had said, grinning ever so slightly at Osmund, “but I had a different approach in mind…”
“You’re ███ .”
Osmund straightened in alarm, jolting back to the bathhouse. He hadn’t even noticed the wide orcish man coming to sit next to him on the stony platform. “S-sorry?” he stammered in Meskato. “I… don’t understand.”
This new stranger wasn’t exactly handsome – he had a face that looked like it’d softened one too many punches – but his naked muscles flexed in the steam as he stretched his body on the bench, and Osmund’s mouth went utterly dry. There was a neat scar down the side of his pale green bicep. One of the soldiers? Osmund wondered, but it was hard to tell out of uniform.
“You are stress,” the orc said in broken Tolmish, smiling craggily. He must’ve recognized Osmund’s accent. “Very stress.” Then he laughed. “Not now. Come, you relax. This is place for it!”
His laugh was so easygoing that Osmund laughed along with him, though he still felt a little tense. He didn’t know what this newcomer wanted from him. Sex? he wondered. He was certainly pent-up enough, but they’d have to go somewhere more discrete. “I’m Osmund,” he said, deciding it wasn’t worth the trouble to try and assume a new identity now that he’d already given his real name to the governor.
The orc shook his outstretched hand obligingly, though Osmund actually wasn’t sure that was a custom here. “Nienos,” he said. “From Raughan. That way.”
At first Osmund thought Nienos was trying to get him to move, but in fact the orc was pointing in a random direction – the direction, one could only assume, of Raughan. Or maybe it was just a joke. “You’re not from here either, then,” Osmund guessed.
Nienos shook his head. “No. Raughan not part of empire, not yet. Soon, maybe. But emperor pays well.” He shrugged. “Wife back home not complain.”
Wife. Osmund couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed. Though he supposed it didn’t mean much of anything when it came to what men really wanted. “Are you a soldier?” he asked, curious.
The orc nodded. “Beasts in Meskat very angry,” he said seriously. “Attack people, kill many people.” Osmund had heard something similar. He remembered rumors back when he was a Tolmish prince in Valcrest that the magical creatures of the empire’s wild places were attacking remote villages and savaging caravans in broad daylight. Such extreme behavior spoke to an extreme cause –the animals must have felt threatened. Osmund almost felt bad for them, though he was careful not to say this because he’d quickly learned that it wasn’t popular to side with beasts over people.
“Can I ask you a question?” Nienos leaned in, and so Osmund continued: “What do you think of the governor?” At the soldier (or mercenary?)’s uncomprehending expression – he must not know the Tolmish word – Osmund tried again. “The, um.” He tried to remember the sound of the word he’d heard before, though he still didn’t quite know what it meant. “‘Shehzahdeh’?”
This time, Nienos understood. His face became – Osmund didn’t know how to read it, to be honest. He was smiling, but it wasn’t the governor’s small, brilliant smile. It certainly wasn’t a happy smile.
“Killer,” Nienos said, with that strange expression that Osmund knew he did not like. “Very very good killer, is Şehzade Cemil.”
“Killer?” Osmund echoed back in alarm. He remembered his host’s callused feet, his strong-looking body. “Oh — you mean a soldier, like you.”
“No, not mean soldier, no.” Nienos’ expression changed again, though it was just as unreadable as before. “Is nice, from distance. But unimportant man like you and me, stay away. Is all I say.”
Osmund left the bathhouse, his still-damp skin feeling chilled in the advancing hour. There were noises from the main house, the sounds of civil servants ending their day, he supposed.
He’d made his excuses to Nienos, not really caring anymore if his companion were amenable to physical pastimes or not. He’d meant to do – something, once he was out in the open air. Possibly leave this place, go back to his borrowed hovel, and forget that any of this had ever happened, beautiful man (and horse) be damned. Maybe it was silly to worry himself too much with one soldier’s account. But…
The more he thought it over, the more he realized that anything that seemed too good to be true in his life came with a curse. Always had, and probably always would. And if a curse was proportional to how lovely a thing seemed on the outside, he didn’t want to find out what kind of misfortune a man as beautiful as Şehzade Cemil (‘Jemy’? …He wasn’t quite sure how to spell it) could bring. He was better off sticking to the things he knew he deserved: grueling work and loose straw on the ground to rest his head.
As he drew closer to the main building, he started to sense that the commotion he was hearing wasn’t business as usual. People were swarming around one of the front entrances, many of them shouting. It was the kind of shouting he was used to hearing back home before something (or someone) got set on fire. Osmund stopped mid-gait. If he had the long legs of a horse, he would’ve known in that instant to flee.
On his back in the dirt was a figure, a human man, struggling to rise against the mass of people who restrained him. His face was contorted in fear as a shadow from within the main hall stepped closer and closer, swallowing more and more of the firelight.
The shadow belonged to Şehzade Cemil, and his beauty was transformed with an arced sword in his hand. The blade shimmered with fire: an enchanted weapon. He stood in the entryway, hilt gripped tight, looking like an image of vengeance. Even from here, Osmund could see the intent in his eyes.
Osmund’s disillusioned old tutor liked to claim he retained nothing he’d been taught, but in this moment he had a sudden flashback to one of his lessons. The Meskato Empire, he’d learned while daydreaming about horses, had a judicial system, with a process. Those accused of crimes did not face the peoples’ justice, like they might in a small hamlet on the Tolmish islands, but instead could make their case in court.
It was a nice notion.
Then, almost faster than he could see, the şehzade’s sword flashed, and the man crumpled. Blood sprayed in a ring on the trampled ground.
A nice notion indeed, Osmund thought. And then, he fainted.
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