The Steel Remains полностью

Something shifted in Gingren’s face then, and the last hope in Ringil guttered out for good. His elder brother’s eyes flickered to meet his, skittered away again. He’d flushed with shame. When he spoke again, his voice was almost pleading.

“Mershist, he’s only—”

Mershist trod down the words. His voice rasped like steel coming out of the scabbard.

“He’s a little fucking pansy, is what he is, Ging. You know it, and so do I. So now he’s going to get what he probably secretly wanted all along, from all of us. And you will not fucking stop us. So unless you want to join in or watch, I suggest you fuck off back to practice.”

And Gingren went.

Just once, as he faltered and turned away, he looked at Ringil, and Ringil thought, later or at that moment, he could not recall which, that it was like meeting someone’s eyes across jail cell bars. Ging’s mouth worked again, but nothing came out.

Ringil stared back at him. He would not beg.

And Gingren went away, down the dark wood corridor, slowly, like a man carrying an injury, and the declining afternoon lit him coldly at each window he passed.

Ringil closed his eyes.

They dragged him back in.

NOW, IN THE RIVERSIDE LOUNGE, HE LOOKED AT GING OUT OF THE welter of memories, and he saw that his brother was pinned there, too.

Those memories, and all that came after.

The pain, and the bleeding that he kept thinking had stopped but then found hadn’t. He didn’t need the infirmary the way some initiates did; Mershist and his crew had known what they were about to that extent at least. He supposed he had that much to thank them for. But he had to bite back screams at his toilet for a week.

Then there was the sniggering. The whispered stories about the way Ringil’s body had reacted to the rape. No big surprise, it was a fairly common occurrence and cadets at the Academy were used to seeing it. But coupled with the gossip about Ringil’s preferences, it provoked an entirely predictable set of minor myths. Should have seen him, they would mutter as Ringil limped past on the other side of a courtyard. Came like a fucking fountain, man, all over everything. You could fucking see he was loving it, every minute of it. Didn’t even scream once.

That much was true. He hadn’t given up a single cry.

As they crammed brutally inside him, one after the other, as he was at first just scraped, and then torn, and then for what seemed like a long time, far too long, searingly raw at each stroke, and then finally just increasingly numb to it all, as they dragged clawed hands through his long dark hair and caught it up in savage fistfuls, as they grunted into their own climaxes and spat on him and whispered excited filth in his ears—through it all he gritted his teeth and ground his tongue against the tiny serrated gaps where they met, he fixed his eyes on the weave of the blanket under his face, and he remembered Jelim, and somehow he kept silent.

“I came to help,” Ging repeated. His voice sounded hollow, used up. Ringil just looked at him.

“Don’t underestimate Kaad,” Gingren rumbled. “That’d be a big mistake. Ringil, he may look like a fop on his father’s sinecure, but he took a silver medal at the Tervinala salons last year. They let imperial bodyguards compete in that one. It means something when you take a medal there.”

“All right.”

Brief pause. Ging and his father exchanged glances again.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Gingren asked.

“It means I won’t take any chances tomorrow, and I’ll make sure I kill him the first opening I get. Happy now?”

“You really expect me to second you in this duel?” Ging asked him.

“No.”

The monosyllable hung there. It silenced both father and brother for longer this time. They both stood there waiting for it to lead somewhere, to an explanation, Ringil supposed.

Fuck that.

Sometimes it seemed that his whole life had been that silent wait, that cold-eyed, staring demand from someone or other, from everyone, that he explain himself. Explain himself away.

The Scaled Folk, at least, had not wanted that much from him.

The tableau broke, to the sound of servant’s footsteps. A face peered diffidently around the door.

“My lord Ringil?”

Ringil sighed with relief. “Yes.”

“A messenger for you. From the Milacar residence.”

They got back into Yhelteth just as the lamps were coming on across the city. Archeth, saddle-sore and stuffed with questions she couldn’t answer, would have willingly gone straight to her apartments on the Boulevard of the Ineffable Divine, and to bed. But you didn’t do that kind of thing when you were about the Emperor’s business. She compromised, sent Shanta and the others on ahead to the palace, and stopped off at her apartments with Elith. She handed the old woman over to her major-domo, told him to put her up in the guest chambers.