Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

“Right,” she whispered back, and then stepped between Ro and Manto, pointing a finger at Ro when he tried to protest. She said pleasantly, “We came here to be guards, not baby-minders. You want us to teach, fine, we’ll teach other guards. Until then, I think we’ll just go get a beer.” She turned and started for the gate, hooking a thumb into Ro’s belt to pull him along. Brax sighed and reached for her gear. I gave Manto a cheerful smile and a goodbye salute.

“All right, children,” Manto said, pitching her voice to halt Lucky and Ro. “Report to Andavista tomorrow at the palace. Take all your toys, you’ll draw quarters up there.”

Even Lucky was momentarily speechless.

Manto grinned again. “The orders have been in for a couple of weeks. I just wanted to see how much more time I could get out of you.” She slapped me on the arm so hard I almost fell over. “Welcome to the army.”

“Where the hell have you people been?” Sergeant Andavista snarled at us the next morning. “Been waiting for you for two weeks.” There seemed to be no good answer to that, so we didn’t even try. “Your rooms are at the end of the southwest gallery. Unpack and report back here to me in ten minutes. Move!”

The rooms had individual beds, for which I was grateful. The double-wide bunks at the training camp had made us all more tense with one another as time went on, and I was tired of sleeping on the floor—particularly after a good day’s work, when my body felt hollowed out by the thousand moments of desire roused and sated and born again, every time we grappled, when I only wanted to sleep close to one of my unknowing lovers and drink in the smell of our sweat on their skin.

Andavista handed us off to the watch commander, who gave us new gear with the palace insignia and a brain-numbing recital of guard schedules. Then she found a man just coming off watch and drafted him to show us around. The soldier looked bone-tired, but he nodded agreeably enough and tried to hide his yawns as he led us up and down seemingly endless hallways. He pointed out the usual watch stations: main gate, trade entrances, public rooms, armory, the three floors of rooms where the bureaucrats lived and worked, and the fourteen floors of nobles’ chambers, which he waved at dismissively. I remembered my mother saying ticks on a dog.

He brought us to a massive set of wooden doors strapped with iron. “Royal suite,” he said economically. “Last stop on the tour. Can you find your own way back?”

We did, although it took the better part of an hour and made us all grumpy. “Not bad,” the watch commander commented when we returned. “Last week’s set had to be fetched out.”

And so we settled. It wasn’t much different from living in my village, except that I belonged. We learned soldiery and taught stormfighting and found time to practice by ourselves, to reinforce old ideas, to invent new ones. It was an easy routine to settle to, but I’d had my lessons too well from Tom to ever relax completely, and the rest of the quad had learned to trust my edge. And it helped in a turned-around way that news of us had spread up from the training ground, and there were soldiers we’d never met who resented us for being different and were contemptuous of what they’d heard about stormfighting. Being the occasional target of pointed remarks or pointed elbows was new for Brax and Lucky and Ro; it kept them aware in a way that all my warnings never could. So on the day we found swords at our throats, we were ready.

They came for the king and prince during the midnight watch when we were stationed outside the royal wing. Ro thought he might have seen the king once, at the far end of the audience room, but these doors were the closest we had ever been to the people we were sworn to protect. And it was our first posting to this most private area of the palace. Perhaps that’s why they chose our watch to try it. Or perhaps because they had dismissed the purposely slow practice drills of storm art as nothing more than fancy-fighting; it was a common enough belief among our detractors.

The first sign we had that anything was amiss was when two of the day watch quads came up the hall. Brax stepped forward; it was her night to be in charge. “We’re relieving you,” their leader said. “Andavista wants you down at the gates.”

“What’s up?” Brax asked neutrally, but I could see the way her shoulders tensed.

The other shrugged. “Dunno. Some kind of commotion at the gates, security’s being tightened inside. Andavista says jump, I reckon it’s our job to ask which cliff he had in mind.”

Brax stood silent for a moment, thinking. “Ro, go find Andavista or Saree and get it in person. No offense,” she added to the two quads in front of her.