Consciousness returned to Poe in disoriented fragments: cold under his cheek, the sour metal taste of blood in his mouth, and the ache in his arms where he’d spent himself dragging Harka to safety.

  He tried to lift his head and met resistance. A strip of cloth crossed his forehead and tied behind it, damp with sweat. His bound hands lay in front of him, wrists wrapped again, rope sunk into grooves it had already made. Someone had loosened the knot enough to stop it from biting.

  He blinked several times and the world rearranged itself.

  A watch post squatted against the hillside a short walk from the road, partially collapsed at the back where rockfall had chewed through the real wall. The roof still held over the front room. The door hung on one hinge and had been shoved into place, more a warning than a barricade. The air smelled of damp wood. Harka sat in the corner nearest the doorway, shoulders braced against a post, knife resting across his knee. His lion-tail swished back and forth across the floorboards with almost comical impatience. The damp had darkened his hair and mussed the soft velvet of his deer-like ears, which kept tilting, catching whatever noise the wind carried outside. Spray had left small beads of water on the pearled scales at his throat and cheekbone, and when he shifted his head those scales glittered like riverlight.

  Poe’s gaze dropped to Harka’s injured leg. He’d wrapped the wound with whatever bandages he must have brought with him on this journey; a difficult task when working around thick Kelthi wool. The binding sat high and firm. Blood had soaked through anyway, drying brown-black at the edges. He’d braced the leg straight, claw dug into the dirt floor where the boards had split. He was panting with pain, sweat high on his face, freckled cheeks blotchy. He’d lost a lot of blood before Poe could get to him; that much was clear by the color of his skin.

  Poe drew a slow breath. His head swam when he tried to take in too much at once, so he narrowed his focus to what mattered most: body position, distance to the doorway, the knife on Harka’s knee, the rope on his own wrists.

  “You’re awake,” Harka grunted.

  Poe tested his voice with a cough before he used it. “How long was I unconscious?”

  “Long enough for you to stop shaking.”

  Poe flexed his fingers and felt the rope move against his skin. He kept his face blank. “Mallow and Tanel?”

  Harka’s gaze flicked toward the broken rear wall, to the strip of sky beyond. The movement only took a breath, but it was enough. “Downstream, I think. Assuming they survived. I watched the bank for a while to see if they would return, but I saw no one. I dragged you. I couldn’t carry you far with this leg. This post was closer to the road.”

  Poe shifted, testing his limbs. His shoulders protested. His head threatened to tilt sideways again. He stayed upright, fighting through the feeling.

  “You should have tied me to a post,” Poe said.

  “But then I wouldn’t have a reason to stay awake.”

  Poe huffed humorlessly. He could see the line between Harka’s restraint and Harka’s violence. He could also see how close Harka kept himself to that line.

  Outside, the wind slid past the watch post and carried the river’s roar. Every so often, a higher gust of wind threw spray through the broken rear wall, and droplets scattered across the dirt floor. Poe tracked those gusts by the way Harka’s ears angled toward them, then away, refusing to be startled.

  Nausea rose when Poe shifted his weight. His forearms trembled with leftover exertion. The craft he’d used on Harka’s bleeding sat inside him like calcification, a hard, hollowed-out ache in his middle. He set his bound hands on his knees. The rope had been re-tied with a different knot than before, the kind meant for holding a struggling animal without injuring it. Poe knew that knot. He’d used it himself on lambs and goats and Kelthi.

  Harka followed his gaze. “You keep looking at those ropes like you plan to gnaw through them.”

  Poe lifted his eyes. “Do you prefer I look at your throat?”

  Harka’s knife shifted a finger’s breadth on his knee. “I suppose not,” he said.

  Poe smiled. “You don’t scare easily.”

  Harka shrugged. “Fear wastes time.”

  Poe absorbed that and filed it away. Harka’s ears kept tipping toward the door and back, tracking the road the way a dog tracked a footstep, sweat shining at his hairline. Fever, Poe thought. Harka’s hand went to the bandage, pressing the soaked edge as if he could argue the blood back into his body by will. The cloth stuck when he tried to lift it. He hissed once through his teeth, an involuntary sound that made his ears tilt back with annoyance at himself. When he let go, his glove came away smeared dark and wet.

  “You wrapped that like a man who’s never bled before.”

  Harka’s eyes cut to him. “At least my kind bleed.”

  Poe leaned his head back against the wall behind him. “I’ve bled plenty. In fact, you might recall I’ve had people stand over me and decide whether it was worth stopping.”

  Harka’s nostrils flared. He shifted his weight against the post, trying to find an angle that didn’t set fire down his leg. The effort seemed to cost him. His velvet-dark antlers caught a stray bead of sweat and held it.

  Poe tipped his head, measuring Harka’s state. He tried to gauge how long it would be before the shaking turned to shivering, the shivering to slackness, and the slackness to death.

  “You used Veincraft on me,” Harka said. “I felt it.”

  Poe’s eyes narrowed. “You felt pain.”

  “I know pain,” Harka replied. “That wasn’t pain.”

  Poe flexed his hands. “Your leg’s still bleeding,” Poe said. “If you keep pretending it isn’t, you’ll fall asleep and you won’t wake up.”

  Harka stared at him as if offended by the bluntness. Then his gaze dropped to his own glove.

  “Can you fix it again?” Harka asked.

  Poe let out a short breath. “No.”

  Harka frowned. “You did it once.”

  “I slowed it,” Poe corrected. “I didn’t fix it. I’m not a Truevein like Lord Balthir. I’d need materials.”

  “What sorts of materials?”

  “Something alive. Something with blood.”

  Harka shook his head. “No.”

  “Well, there are other things I can try. But I need my hands.”

  Harka let out a dry laugh. “Absolutely not.”

  Poe’s gaze drifted to the doorway, the hanging slab of wood shoved into place. “Then bleed.”

  Harka looked at him for a long beat. His breathing stayed tight and fast, and the stubbornness in his posture began to look like he was trying to keep his body upright through spite.

  “You’re asking me to set you free,” Harka said.

  “I’m asking for my hand,” Poe replied. “Keep the rope on the other. Tie my ankle to your belt. Sit on my chest if it makes you feel better. You want to live? Stop acting like every hand offered is a trap.”

  Harka adjusted his injured leg again and paid for it with a flash of pain that drained color from his face.

  Poe suppressed a familiar contempt, aimed at the world more than Harka. Bodies always betrayed. Bodies always demanded their due.

  Harka swallowed. His hand went to the rope at Poe’s wrist, fingers quick and competent. He loosened it by a small measure, enough to let Poe’s free hand turn but not enough to let it slip. He kept the other wrist bound, fencing Poe’s choices.

  “There,” Harka said. “One hand. Don’t make me regret it.”

  Poe didn’t thank him. He lifted his free hand and reached for the bandage.

  Harka’s knife lifted an inch, reflex more than threat.

  Poe paused, eyes on the blade. “If I wanted you dead, you’d be downriver by now,” he said, irritated.

  Harka’s ears flicked back. “Why are you acting so offended?”

  Poe’s fingers found the knot at the bandage. “I’m not acting.”

  He tugged, careful with the stuck cloth, and peeled it back enough to see the wound under the wool. The river had opened Harka’s leg in an ugly gash, deep enough that bone flashed pale under the red. Poe’s stomach lurched with hunger at the smell of it, then settled as he wrestled it down. He’d seen worse. He’d done worse. He hated that his mind made the inventory without his permission: depth, angle, where the torn muscle would pull if Harka tried to stand too soon, how the glistening liquid would taste.

  Harka’s breath came in hard pulls. He braced his palm against the wall, fingers digging into damp wood. His shoulders trembled, tail giving short, involuntary lashings to the floor.

  Poe tightened the wrap higher, using the part of the cloth that was still clean, the edge that could take a knot without flexing in the moisture. He cinched it with a jerk that made Harka curse under his breath.

  Poe’s fingers kept working, efficient and unsentimental. He pressed one finger into the wound to find the vessel that kept refilling the cloth.

  Harka howled, nearly jerked back.

  “No,” Poe said, gripping fast to Harka’s ankle. “Hold still.”

  Harka’s voice came out ragged. “I am holding, you bastard!”

  Poe laughed. “Hold like you mean it, scaleback.”

  Harka blinked with surprise at the term, just long enough that Poe could focus on the vein his fingernail was pressed against. He took a deep breath and mumbled a nonsense phrase, gathering all the strength still uncalcified within him. Spots appeared immediately behind his eyelids but he kept going, until he felt the heat of his fingertip meet the pumping vein and held it and held it until it sealed.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Harka gasped and drew himself straighter. Poe sat back, freed hand slick, shivering with cold and exhaustion. He felt so drained he nearly vomited, as if he were the one losing blood. Before it could drop him he brought his fingers to his mouth, drawing out as much of the blood’s life-giving warmth as he could.

  And the taste.

  Gods, the taste of Harka.

  He nearly pitched over anyway, because that had been true Veincraft and the sampling of Harka on his hand was not nearly enough. But then Harka took his glove, wiped down the bleeding wound, and slipped it from his fingers to hold it before Poe’s face.

  Poe stared at the glove, then at Harka, and the world spun in his vision before he allowed himself to take the glove and suckle the lifeblood from each finger of it. And there was sweat there, too, salt and Kelthi lanolin, and if he weren’t so near death’s door he would have moaned with ecstasy at the pleasure of it.

  Harka re-tied the bandage himself. The blood still seeped, slow and stubborn, but it had stopped pouring.

  “You’re shaking,” Harka said.

  “I’m alive,” Poe answered. “It requires the same skills.”

  Harka spoke softly. “I know that wasn’t easy for you. You know what you’re doing.”

  Poe smiled. “Careful.”

  Harka’s brow knit. “What?”

  “You start handing out compliments and I’ll start wondering what else you might want with me.”

  Harka laughed, sudden and vibrant, then winced immediately after. “Stop acting like every hand offered is a trap,” Harka said, doing his best Poe impersonation. “Isn’t that what you said?”

  Poe’s gaze went flat again. “Every hand offered to me has been a trap.”

  Harka held his stare. The youth fell away for a moment, leaving the Warden shape behind it, dignified. “I am not the Dagorlind. I don’t take what I want just because I can.”

  Poe’s throat worked. He didn’t like hearing his own history in another person’s mouth. It made it real in a way he preferred to avoid.

  Harka’s hand went to the bandage again, his fingers trembling on the cloth. “You used craft on me,” he said. “And you spent yourself. I watched you after, at the bank. I could’ve left you to die if I wanted.”

  Poe’s eyes narrowed. “You watched me?”

  Harka’s ears angled forward, stubborn. “Yes.” His eyes flicked toward the doorway, then back. “I want you to tell me why you didn’t let me drown. On the bridge. You could’ve run, after I cut you free. You didn’t.”

  Poe’s lips pressed together. He wanted to tell a sharp-edged lie, but everything that came to mind sounded feeble and useless in his own head.

  Harka stared at him, waiting.

  He didn’t have to give him an answer at all.

  “You already know why,” Poe said.

  “Say it.”

  “Because you cut me free first.”

  Harka looked away. His breath still ran rough from the pain, but it no longer carried the frantic edge of blood loss. His ears kept tipping toward the doorway and back, tracking the road out of habit, though the world outside had gone quieter as the afternoon slid toward evening.

  His gaze returned to Poe’s mouth.

  To Poe’s hand, where the last smear of him still darkened the skin at the knuckles.

  Harka’s voice came out low, controlled. “When you… did that.” His eyes didn’t leave Poe’s fingers. “Is it always like that for you?”

  Poe looked away, slipping his hands into his lap. The cold of using Veincraft again so soon was setting in; it was only Harka’s blood keeping him conscious now. “Like what?”

  Harka’s nostrils flared; he didn’t take the evasion. “The blood,” he said. “The way you –” he stopped. His ears tilted back with irritation at himself, the same expression he’d worn when pain betrayed him. “You didn’t drink because you were starving.”

  Poe’s mouth curled. “You sure?”

  Harka’s stare sharpened. “Answer.”

  Poe shifted his weight and paid for it with a slow roll of nausea. The river’s damp breath found every crack in the watch post and moved in. His skin prickled. His shoulders began to shake, small at first, then harder as his body tried to make heat out of nothing. He considered the irony of it, the way he and Harka were trading life back and forth as if they were trying to equalize the amount of liquid between two cups.

  Harka noticed immediately. His eyes flicked to Poe’s hands, the tremor in his forearms. “You’re cold,” Harka said.

  “I’m fine,” Poe replied, the lie coming out thin.

  Harka stared at him a beat, then moved. He shifted closer on the floor, dragging his injured leg with a tight inhale, and braced himself against the wall beside Poe. The space between them closed until Harka’s shoulder sat beside Poe’s, close enough that warmth bled through their damp clothes. His tail curled in, a heavy coil that blocked some of the draft at their backs. The scent of him filled Poe’s lungs again, the salt and warm hide and wool, the wild clean note that Kelthi carried like a birthright. Poe’s stomach turned over in a way that had nothing to do with exhaustion.

  Harka’s voice stayed steady. “Tell me what it is,” he said. “What it does to you.”

  Poe’s laugh came out soft. “You’re asking like you want a lesson.”

  “I’m asking because you put your mouth to my glove like it was cake.”

  Poe’s eyes snapped to him. Harka held the stare without flinching, pupils wide from pain and adrenaline and whatever else he refused to name. The look on his face unsettled Poe more than a blade would have. It held revulsion, certainly. It also held a kind of stunned attention, as if he’d caught Poe undressing to bathe by a spring.

  Poe swallowed. His shivering worsened, then steadied as Harka’s bodyheat seeped into him.

  “For Veinwrights,” Poe said, “blood isn’t just fuel. It’s a story.”

  Harka’s ears angled forward.

  Poe kept his gaze on the floorboards. “You taste the life in it. You taste the fear when the body’s afraid. You taste fight. You taste how long someone has been running. You taste what they’re built for.” He tongued the wound inside his lip. “Sometimes you taste what they want.”

  Harka’s hand went to his bandage, pressing at it as if to remind himself he still owned his body. “And when you taste it –”

  “I want more,” Poe said, blunt enough to cut. “It’s not romantic. It’s just hunger.”

  Harka stared at his bandage again. “Hunger for blood.”

  “Hunger for what blood carries,” Poe corrected. That distinction mattered to him, even while exhausted. “It’s warmth, strength. You saw what it did when I sealed you. The craft asks for payment. If I don’t have materials, it takes me.”

  Harka stared at him. “Was my blood enough?”

  Poe’s mouth curled, sharp with resentment he didn’t fully aim at Harka. “Enough to keep you here. Enough to keep me on my feet long enough to finish the bind.” He looked into Harka’s face, then away again. “Enough to make me stupid for a minute.”

  Harka’s ears flicked back. “Stupid?”

  Poe’s hand twitched, and he suppressed a sudden desire to place his palm on Harka’s thigh, just next to his own. To bury his fingers gently into the wool under his slacks. To feel the softness and the warmth of Harka in his hands again.

  Instead, he shrugged. “Stupid enough to forget you could kill me.”

  “I’m not going to kill you.”

  Poe prodded the wound in his mouth again out of habit. He could have pushed back or baited Harka into a fight. He didn’t have the strength for it. And anyway, he didn’t trust what else might rise if he kept prodding. Instead, he said simply: “I know.”

  Harka watched him for a moment, then said, quieter, “It frightened me.” Harka didn’t look away when Poe’s eyes cut to him. His ears stayed angled forward, alert, listening past the river noise, but his gaze stayed on Poe’s mouth, his hand, the smear that had been his blood and the way Poe wanted it.

  “It was… wrong,” Harka said. “And it was –” he stopped, then forced it out anyway. “It made me want to let you do it again.”

  Poe went very still.

  Heat rose up his neck, vibrant and humiliating. He hated his body for responding and hated even more the Veinwright in him for waking at the suggestion. His free hand curled against his knee until his nails bit through fabric.

  “You shouldn’t,” Poe said.

  “I know.”

  Poe shivered as the temperature outside dropped further, wind shifting with the pull of the river. He pressed his shoulder closer, and Harka met him, sharing warmth like a fact rather than a favor.

  “Why do you stay with the Dagorlind?” Harka asked. “If you hate them.”

  The question found the space where his oldest wounding lay hidden. Poe kept his face blank, the only armor he had.

  “I don’t stay,” Poe said. “I’m kept.”

  “What keeps you?”

  Poe stared at the floorboards until the grain blurred. His exhaustion crept up on him like tidewater, slow and cold and inevitable. It made his tongue heavy and the edges of his anger dull.

  “The punishment for desertion is death,” he said.

  “You could run.”

  Poe’s mouth curled. “I’m a Tracker. I know what we are capable of. There is nowhere that would free me from the boot upon my neck.”

  Harka’s eyes flashed. “You seem like a fighter. Why quit fighting when it’s your own freedom on the line?”

  Poe stared at him. The fever had put a strange brightness in Harka’s eyes, a hard shine that made him look carved and alive at once. His face paled under the freckles. His bandage had darkened again at the edges. He should have looked fragile, but he didn’t. He looked like a young man who had been shaped into obligation but still believed he had a choice.

  Poe’s chest tightened in a way he didn’t like. He remembered, very briefly, a Brighthand boy pulling him aside after a hot day of training to kiss him behind the barracks.

  He hadn’t thought of that moment in such a long time.

  “I stay,” Poe said, “because everything has a price. And I never seem to have enough coin to pay it. I didn’t choose this.”

  A surprising swell of tears hit the corner of his eyes and he blinked them away before they could fall, shocked they would arrive with so little warning in the first place.

  Harka watched him, then finally said, “I didn’t choose this either.”

  Poe stared at Harka’s bandage instead of his face. “No,” he said, the agreement coming in a breath of surrender.

  “Poe,” Harka asked, after a time. “When you took my blood. Did you want to hurt me?”

  Poe shook his head. “No.”

  Harka’s breath eased out. He nodded. He believed.

  Harka shifted closer by a fraction, careful of his leg, and Poe’s shoulder pressed into his.

  The watch post’s doorway framed the last slice of gray daylight and the edge of the patrol road beyond.

  Suddenly Hark leaned toward the door, knife sliding from his knee into his hand. His tail curled along the floorboards. His ears angled forward, then to the side, tracking distance.

  Wind brought a new sound from the road: a faint clink of harness, the soft thud of horse hooves on packed earth, a low murmur of male voices, then: swordbells.

  Poe kept his breath steady in spite of his racing pulse. He pictured them for an instant: Brighthand cloaks drawn up against the air with their iron badges under the wool and faces set into duty. He pictured the relief that came with handing a problem back to the machine. He pictured being useful again, rewarded again, used again.

  Harka’s blade flew to Poe’s throat.

  Poe caught his wrist, the blade less than an inch from his skin.

  They stared into each other’s eyes.

  Neither man said anything. Poe could not describe the feeling in him, exactly. It was strange, how it sat in his chest like betrayal. But this wasn’t a betrayal. Poe would have done exactly this, if he were Harka. And Harka would fight the blade down, if he were Poe.

  Poe’s grip tightened on Harka’s wrist.

  Harka kept very quiet, afraid to alert whoever was outside.

  “If you call for them, I’ll kill you,” Harka whispered.

  Poe met his gaze. “No, you won’t.”

  Harka’s eyes flashed to the door, then back to him. “Then why don’t you test it?”

  Poe eased Harka’s knife hand to the side, a little at a time, turning his body with what little strength he had, mustering up the last of his reserves until he was nearly pressed against Harka’s chest, the knife still perilously close to his throat.

  “Because you cut me free first,” Poe said again, this time in a whisper, smelling the blood on Harka’s leg, and beneath that the sweetness of him, the thing Harka was made for.

  He brought Harka’s wrist up, leaned toward his face, and kissed his mouth, the knife suspended over both of their heads.

  Harka was so surprised he nearly gave them away himself with his bleat. He pulled back, but Poe moved insistantly forward, and kissed him again, and then Harka acquiesced, kissing Poe back, making quiet needy sounds, so soft, so careful. He brought his hand to his wounded leg and then brought his wet fingers to Poe’s mouth and Poe thought he might drown in the taste, in the fact of it, in the way Harka’s fingers carried his own blood to Poe’s lips like an offering.

  The men outside drew closer and they both kept very quiet. Harka pulled back enough to hear, his ears following the sound of the guard, swiveling slowly as the men on horseback passed just outside, the last shadow crossing over the cracks in the boards. Poe could have shouted for help, and been freed in an instant, except that Harka’s mouth was so close to his own, and Harka’s blood was on his tongue, and Harka had gifted his lifeblood this way not once, but twice now.

  The men outside moved away until they were out of Poe’s hearing, then later out of Harka’s, and still they kept very quiet, even as Poe moved to kiss Harka’s cheek, to nuzzle his nose into his soft ear, to smell the sweetness at his hairline.

  Harka panted beside him. “Why are you still here?”

  The answer rose up from somewhere unbearably simple.

  “Because you’re still here,” he said.

  Harka dropped the blade and unbound Poe’s other wrist as Poe gasped into his neck. When Poe was finally free, he brought both hands up, and held Harka’s face, and brought his mouth to the Kelthi’s, and for the length of those ecstatic moments he knew no other lands but these.