Eyeing her, he shrugged and stepped into the refreshing room. Left alone, Rexei tried to dredge up any excuse for not sharing a bed with her host. With this Guild Master, though, she didn’t really feel like a member of his guild, the Mages Guild. Picking her way over to the side of the bed, she investigated the coverlets. A sheet, a wool blanket, a feather-stuffed quilt, and a lightly felted coverlet in a soft dyed gray; the color of the coverlet was too uniform to have been from a naturally gray sheep.
Maybe if she stripped the bottom and top blankets and doubled them up, she might be comfortable enough. As a messenger, sometimes she’d been forced to sleep in the wild. A carpet-strewn floor in a fire-warmed building would be far more comfortable than dossing down on a bedroll inside a low-slung tent made out of an oilcloth tarp tied over the back of her motorhorse for a ridgepole and staked out to one side. Not often, but sometimes she had been forced to camp like that.
The door opened. She glanced at her host—and gasped, stumbling back. Alonnen Tallnose was naked. Completely nude. Hair brushed out and looking like gold and copper fluff around his shoulders, he padded out of the refreshing room on bare feet . . . bare legs, and bare everything else . . . and headed toward the same drawer he had used before. Only to stop and stare at her. “Are you alright?”
Wide-eyed, she shook her head. He looked around the room, then down at himself, clearly puzzled by what was upsetting her. Thankfully his organ was flaccid, but it was still there, exposed to the world amid a short thatch of reddish nethercurls. Rexei tried not to stare at it, but she couldn’t help backing away from it. She had spent over half of her life avoiding the horrid things, thanks to the memory of what that priest had done to her own mother, and if it so much as twitched, she would run. Except there really wasn’t any other place for her that was safe from the priests. Feeling trapped, she tried not to panic.
“What? You’re acting like you’ve never seen another naked man before.” Pulling out a second nightshirt, Alonnen padded over to her. She looked anywhere but at him. “Buck up, lad! It’s not like you’re seeing nothing you yourself don’t have, right? . . . Right?”
He wasn’t going to let the subject go . . . and there was really nowhere left for her to flee. Arms folded across her chest, shoulders hunched, she squeezed her eyes shut. Hoping—praying to any God that would listen—that he was as nice as he seemed, Rexei blurted out, “I’m a lass, not a lad!”
FIVE
“Gods!” Shocked, Alonnen smacked the nightshirt over his groin to hide it, then quickly fumbled his way into it while she still had her face scrunched up and her head averted. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t know . . .”
Her confession clarified several things in an instant, the lack of any beard hairs on her chin, her reluctance to share his quarters—not that there was much chance of finding a place for her this late at night—and other little things. “Rexei” was common enough when used for both girls and boys that it was probably her real name, or perhaps one she had chosen to cling to her true self in the midst of her deception.
He couldn’t blame her for that deception, though. Everyone in the Mages Guild knew what priests preferred to do to childbearing-aged women, whether or not they were captive mages. No doubt she was mortified by him walking around all but waving his piston in her face. As soon as he had the nightshirt tugged down over his knees, he spoke in hushed tones, hoping to keep her calm. Since she was something of a mage, he had to keep her calm so that she didn’t just randomly lash out with her magic. “It’s okay. You can relax. I’m all covered now, promise. I wish you’d told me a couple hours ago, when I’d have had a chance of finding you a female bunkmate. But it’s okay. I promise, you’re safe with me.”
She unsquinched her eyes a little, but she still looked like she was bracing for some sort of blow. It made him feel worse, that this otherwise brave and rather talented young woman could be so patently afraid. Sighing, he raked a hand through his hair, which he had unbound and given a quick brushing while in the refreshing room. She didn’t relax much more, just continued to give him a wide, wary stare while he stood there and thought.
“Oh, do stop looking at me like that,” he groused when Rexei didn’t relax. Her fear made him feel like a monster, which he was not. “I’m not going to pounce on you. Even if I were so inclined—which I am not—I’ve got my bloody youngest brother in the next room—who would flirt with you if he knew, since he’s a bit dense that way—plus our two sisters and our mum and dad all live here in the inner circle. And my elder brother himself would publically flog me ’til I bled to my knees if I tried to harm you. Now, it’s late; we’re both tired; we’re both polite, properly raised adults.
“There are more people crammed into the inner circle than I expected, which means I doubt either of us would find anything for you if we tried looking for another room right now. So we’ll just have to put up with things for one night. Go get changed, wash your face and whatever else, and pick a side to sleep on—and don’t even suggest sleeping on the floor. The woodstove doesn’t burn wood; it burns magic, but the spell’s set to drop the temperature once the lights go out, and that means it’ll get bloody cold in here. Don’t freeze just because you only think you have to be afraid of me. Because you don’t.”
Her jaw dropped. Alonnen held up a hand, forestalling her argument.
“Not for the reason you’re thinking. Frankly, you’re insulting me with that look on your face and those suspicions in your eyes. The natural state of a man is not a rapist, and I’ll thank you to remember that. And I am certainly not one,” he asserted. “I’ve no urge to assault you. I’m not going to beat you in your sleep, or even bother you, unless I should snore . . . and I can’t help the latter, in case you haven’t noticed by the size of my rather tall nose. But either way, nothing is going to happen between us but a bit of snoring . . . and maybe an elbowing if one of us snores.
“Have I harmed you?” he added tartly when she didn’t move and didn’t speak. “Aside from the shoulder thing? Have I done anything cruel or savage or utterly lacking in self-control? Or even just slightly lacking?”
“No,” she admitted reluctantly. Her shoulders were still a little tense, but her arms had relaxed slightly.
Alonnen took that for the positive sign it was, and he flipped a hand at her again. “Well, there you go. You’ll be as safe in my bed as my mum would be.” Oddly enough, that caused her to wince and tense again. “Or your own mum,” he added.
That made her blanch and stare at him. Or rather, through him. Alonnen had the disturbing notion she was seeing very bad memories. Before he could question her, she tightened her arms across her flat chest and mumbled, “She’s . . . She was taken. By a priest. She’d be long dead by now. He . . . He . . .”
She didn’t finish the sentence, but Alonnen was not ignorant. He could fill in the blanks.
“Taken” had only one meaning in the Mages Guild. It meant her mother was a mage, and if she was female, then she was undoubtedly raped. New priests had to come from somewhere, and that meant boys with magic, which often ran in family bloodlines for a handful of generations or more.
Orphaned girls were dumped on the other guilds all the time once past the weaning stage, and sometimes boys, though the latter usually were raised among the priests until old enough to manifest powers. If they had no magic, they were pushed out of the temples. Often, they made their way to the militia, where they were usually considered arrogant and coldhearted enough to be assigned to the Hunter Squads.