His leg had him up in the early morning, tight all the way to the bone. The first weight he put on it went straight back off. The whole day would have to go carefully. Shift the load, lean to the good side, carry a crate so the bad leg takes less of it. He took stock of what hurt and by how much, and started the day on it.
Frerin had the ovens going before Salt reached the tavern. They passed each other twice without a word, Frerin carrying bread out, Salt carrying glasses in, and the second time Frerin shifted the kindling crate a foot to the left so Salt wouldn’t have to step around it.
“Did you sleep?” Frerin said on the third pass.
“Some of it. Not much once the leg went tight.”
He lit both fires and got them drawing. A woman off the early boats walked in with her hair still wet and asked for something hot. Two porters split a loaf at the near table and argued about whose turn it was to pay.
He took the weight of a crate on the wrong side, and the leg buckled.
He caught himself on the bar. One hand, quiet. He stayed a breath longer, weight on his arm, breathing.
He looked up. Neither porter had reached for a coin.
He set the crate down and kept moving.
Bread, eggs, and bacon came out as the morning ran on. The bar cleared and filled and cleared again, and the kitchen smell turned over from yeast and bacon to onions and hot fat. Behind the building, the bathhouse had a few visitors, voices carrying over the roofline from the pools, somebody laughing down at the far end of it where Salt hadn’t been yet.
The delivery cart came late morning. He was crossing the courtyard with the last of it when the light went thin and strange.
He set the crate on the porch steps. White sky with no depth in it, the air gone still and heavy against his face, the smell of wet stone coming over the wall before a drop had fallen.
He crossed the tavern and pushed out the garden door and found Durnar on the deck.
“It’s coming,” Salt said.
Durnar glanced up. “How long?”
“Not long.”
It arrived while Salt was still dragging the oiled canvas out of the deck alcove.
The garden paths emptied in a rush, men off the benches and up the stairs, hands over their heads doing nothing against it. Salt worked the open stretch between the medium pools and the steps, running guests up two and three at a time under the canvas. Elian took the far path with a second sheet of it, hair plastered dark to his skull, steering a big grizzled human who kept stopping to look at the sky. Under the shade structures over the communal pool, nobody budged. Two dwarves and an elf, chest-deep, faces turned up, the rain going white where it struck the surface. One of them shouted something about what a roof costs these days.
Salt was last in, the wet canvas bundled under his arm, and he left it dripping in the alcove.
The tavern had taken them all in, wet. Frerin already had ale going down the bar.
“On the house,” he said. “For the inconvenience of pleasant weather.”
Salt worked the room with a rag over his shoulder. At the bar, a merchant in a soaked green coat told anyone within reach that he had known, that he’d had it three days out, and he set a small brass compass down on the bar to prove it.
Salt slowed on his way past.
He knew the thing. On his first day up from the docks, he had come upon an elven woman standing out in front of a shop with one of these held flat on her hand for a merchant to look at.
Under the glass, the sky had already moved on. Clear all the way to the rim, and a sun the size of a lentil sitting in the middle of it.
“That’s enchanter’s work out of the main street,” Frerin said, following where Salt was looking. “She’s never once been wrong about it. It’s insufferable.”
“Three days of sun,” the merchant said, one finger down on the glass. “Mark it.”
“And you’re soaked through,” Frerin said, and filled his cup.
The garden dripped. Steam came off the pools thicker than it had all day where chilly rain had landed on hot water, and the paths held puddles the color of the earth beneath them. The morning’s split wood had been left stacked in the open, so Salt moved it under the deck an armload at a time and built it up dry. Durnar came to the garden door with a towel over one shoulder while he was still at it.
“You haven’t been in the water yet,” he said. “Properly.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“I know.” Durnar shifted the towel. “Rain sent the whole afternoon home wet. Nobody’s paid at the counter in two hours.” He tipped his head toward the ferns on the far side. “Small pool at the back has had nobody in it all day.” He moved across the deck. “Your choice.”
Durnar went down the deck stairs, to the path, and the ferns at the far side closed over him.
Salt stayed put with the last of the wood against his chest. The bamboo in the corner let go of its water, one heavy drop at a time. Past the wall a cart rolled down the alley, and the sound of it dropped away into the afternoon. He set the last pieces square and took the path back through the ferns.
The small pool off the side of the medium ones lay behind taller plants, ferns and broad wet leaves closing it off on three sides. Open to the sky. The sky sat low and grey, letting down a rain too fine to hear. Steam stood off the surface, thick enough to hide the far side of the pool.
Durnar was already in, down to the shoulders with his elbows hooked back over the coping. He didn’t turn when Salt pushed through the ferns.
Salt took him in first, before undressing.
The breadth of Durnar’s shoulders standing clear of the water. The short, dark-red beard, his jaw slack where the steam reached it. Dark chest hair pressed against bronze skin, a trail running down the center of his belly and going under. The crystalline horns took what grey light there was and gave a little of it back, hard along the edges. Wet gleamed in the hollow of his collarbones. The cock resting soft against his thigh, plain under the steam-covered surface.
Salt undressed. Coat, shirt, boots, and he sat on the bench to work them off. Trousers after that.
He lifted the chain over his head. The globe rested in his palm for a moment, and he did not want to set it down beside water. He set it down anyway, on the folded shirt, with the chain clear of the wet.
The headband last. The scar beneath it ran from his temple back through his hair, thick and pale. Left ear notched at the top. A rope mark ringing one wrist, a burn across the shoulder, the shoulder itself riding wrong. Faded blue ink over both forearms and up one biceps, a compass rose gone soft at the lines, a woman’s name he had been nineteen for. Hauling had built him thick across the back and let him go soft below it, dark-gold hair over his chest and down his belly, gray coming in at the sternum. His cock hung heavy in the warm air. He put his weight down onto the bad leg and let it hold him.
Durnar took his time. His eyes traveled down Salt and back up and settled on his chest, and did not leave.
The steam coming off Durnar’s shoulders thickened.
“Come in,” he said.
Salt’s face went hot.
He put a foot on the first step, and the water met him at mid-calf. The second step brought it over his knees.
He stopped there.
Cool air above and hot water below. His breath went short and high in the top of his chest. Both hands lifted off his thighs and hung there.
Durnar didn’t move and didn’t speak.
Then a current came up out of nowhere and ran warm along Salt’s shins, and warmer, and went on past him. The pool was one temperature again.
Salt let out most of the breath he had.
He went down.
The water reached his hips and no further, and his leg gave up its grip, the deep stiffness letting go last. His eyes closed. The breath that went out of him shook once at the end.
The stone was cut smooth under the surface, a ledge running the whole inside wall, and he found it with the backs of his knees and sat down on it. The water came up over his chest.
Durnar hadn’t moved.
“That current,” Salt said. “That was you.”
“Nobody taught me how.” Durnar turned his hand over on the surface. “My father brought me down to where the springs come through the limestone and told me to listen. Everything here is what they already wanted to do.”
They sat there a while, one on either side of the water.
“Dwarf and spirit,” Salt said. “How does that sit?”
Durnar was quiet long enough that Salt wanted to take the question back. “It used to sit badly. I kept waiting to decide which one I was.” His eyes lifted to where the rain came down through the steam. “Frerin was the first to tell me I didn’t have to.”
Salt turned that over. “What did Frerin say?”
Durnar’s mouth curved. “‘You’re the strangest, most beautiful thing I’ve ever met, and I intend to keep you.’” He glanced across at Salt. “He’s not subtle.”
Salt laughed.
Durnar crossed the pool and drew up in front of him, standing where Salt sat, the water at his own chest and Salt’s knees on either side of him. He lifted his hands.
“May I?”
“Yes.”
He moved around to Salt’s back and set both hands on his shoulders. Broad hands, working by feel, going after the places that had knotted years ago and never let out. The bad shoulder had ridden wrong so long that Salt had quit counting it. Durnar’s thumbs went into it. They pressed and drew and pressed again. Each place they found lit and released, and Salt’s attention narrowed to the exact points of contact and nothing else.
“You’ve done rope work.”
“Twenty-odd years of it.”
“Anybody can haul.” A thumb went up under the shoulder blade, and the entire arm woke. “You’ve done the kind where you’re holding something that wants to go. This side is built for it. The other one isn’t.”
“Starboard watch.”
“There it is.”
Salt let his head go forward.
“What else?”
“People ask me that and then don’t want the answer.”
“Try me.”
Durnar worked down along the spine, taking his time over the last of it. “You sleep on your good side and you’ve stopped noticing you do. You carry with the left because the right won’t take it, and the left has started charging you for the favor.” The hands went out along the shoulder and came back in. “And you hold your breath when somebody’s behind you.”
Salt breathed out.
Durnar worked his thumbs up into the back of Salt’s neck and stayed.
“There,” Durnar said.
The light had shifted.
Salt turned on the ledge to look at him. Durnar came around in front and stood close, and sitting down like that put them eye to eye. His eyes were a deep orange, banded and shot through with paler orange, the patterns inside them moving the slow way steam moves. He didn’t look off Salt’s face.
“Frerin,” Salt said.
“Yes.”
“Is he okay with this?”
Durnar’s hands went still on him. “Frerin knows where I am.” His eyes stayed on him and didn’t waver. “He’ll ask you what you thought of me. He always does.”
“What do you tell him? About other people?”
“The truth. He tells me his.” Durnar dragged a thumb the length of Salt’s collarbone and left it at the end. “Neither of us has ever come home with something the other had to find out.”
“And what do you say about me?”
“That I met someone worth knowing.”
Salt closed the distance.
The kiss was soft at first, and then it wasn’t, and didn’t need to be soft again for a while. Durnar’s hand pushed up into Salt’s hair. Salt leaned down into him. The drag of his beard against Durnar’s short one, resistance and then give. Durnar tasted of minerals and something belonging to the springs themselves. His skin was as hot as the pool water. The steam off his shoulders came up thick enough to breathe.
Chest hair against chest hair, wet and pressing between them, deep-red and dark-gold. Salt’s shoulders dropped. His hands opened.
Then he stood up from the ledge.
Durnar’s mouth arrived level with Salt’s sternum. Both broad palms flattened onto Salt’s back and pulled him closer. Salt put a hand on one of Durnar’s shoulders to keep his feet.
Durnar was hard against his hip. Salt reached down and found him, thick in his palm. Durnar’s breath went ragged. When Durnar’s hand closed around him, Salt’s hips went before he had any say in it.
The water turned with them, currents running where no current had been, a shimmer lifting off the stone bottom.
Then Durnar’s forehead came down against Salt’s breastbone and rested there. Both of them were breathing hard. Neither hand let go.
“Out of the water,” Durnar said into his chest.
Durnar climbed out first. He pulled the towels off the peg and spread them over the wide, flat stone at the pool’s edge. Salt came up after him. A light mist fell from the sky and the steam grew thicker. Then the warm stone came through the towels under his hands.
They lay down on it together.
Durnar’s beard on his throat. A mouth working up under his jaw, stopping in the hollow beneath it. Salt’s chin lifted out of the way. Wet hair under his palm. One horn against his wrist, smooth and faintly warm, closer to stone than to bone.
He got a hand down the muscle of Durnar’s back, to where it went soft over the hip. Durnar came on top of him.
All that weight at once. Nothing had lain on Salt for years. It ran through him the way the heat had, out from the chest to the ends of him.
A foot and a half difference between them standing up. None lying down. Durnar fit along his entire front, chest to chest, mouth at the base of Salt’s throat, and everywhere their hair met it dragged and caught.
Steam came off his back in the cooling air. Salt breathed it in as Durnar sat up and straddled him.
Slow at first. Then not. The weight coming down onto him again and again, Durnar’s breath going short, Salt’s hands grabbing his hips and holding him down into it. Salt heard the sound he made and let it go.
Durnar lay against Salt, and his hand slid under Salt’s head and took hold of his hair.
“Yes,” Salt said, to nothing in particular.
The rhythm broke on Durnar’s side first. He pressed down and stayed there, shaking through the shoulders, the breath stopped somewhere in his chest. Salt held him through all of it with both arms. The heat of him climbed to the edge of too much on the skin, steam coming off him in a rush, and then it dropped away and went on dropping.
Salt went over with his heels braced on warm stone and his eyes shut and the rain coming down fine on his face.
For a while, neither of them was anywhere.
Salt lay under Durnar’s weight, his hand moving to no plan in the wet hair at the back of his neck.
“Your leg,” Durnar said eventually, into his collarbone.
“Haven’t thought about it since I got in.”
Durnar huffed against his skin and didn’t move.
The misty rain had stopped. They dressed slowly and out of order. Durnar found Salt’s trousers under the ferns where neither of them had put them. Salt got the chain back over his head first, before the shirt. Then the headband, thumb running its length to seat the knot the way he liked it.
Durnar watched him do that, too.
Wood smoke, roasting meat and onions, and a full room. Frerin stepped out from behind the bar, took the two of them in with one pass of his eyes, and returned to his work without a word. Two stools open near the end, the clutter already cleared off the bar in front of them.
Two glasses of the Respite came down in front of them and a plate landed between, the heel of the afternoon’s bread, cold ham, a wedge of sharp cheddar cut thick. He hadn’t been asked whether he wanted any of it.
“Good soak?” Frerin said, his eyes going to Salt.
“Best I’ve had.”
Frerin nodded once and moved off down the bar to pour for a man who had been waiting to be noticed.
Salt ate standing at the stool, drank half the ale and set it down. He put his weight onto the bad side and it took it. Three days in this house and he had quit sitting where he could see the door.
He moved off after a while and made himself useful. Glasses collected, a spill wiped down, a floating lantern pushed back over the corner table where the draft off the door kept shifting it. Elian came through for something out of the kitchen, halted in the middle of the room, looked at him, and carried on with what he was carrying. Durnar got up and helped Frerin in the kitchen and behind the bar. Once he looked up and found Salt watching him. He left him to it. Then the work had them both through the rest of the night.
Durnar kissed Frerin and said goodnight. Frerin held him for a while before he let him go.
Then he crossed to where Salt was stacking the last of the glasses. The room had gone down to two men at the corner table pulling their coats on. Durnar stood there, saying nothing.
“Goodnight, Salt.”
“Goodnight.”
Durnar’s hand settled on his hip, on the bad side, and stayed there long enough that Salt quit stacking. Salt turned toward Durnar, got a hand to the back of Durnar’s neck, and kissed him. Durnar walked back to the hallway and disappeared out the back door.
“I can finish this up,” Frerin said.
Salt banked the coals. “Goodnight, Frerin.”
“Goodnight, Salt.”
The corner lantern had drifted again. Salt pushed it back over the table, and it stayed, and he went out.
The courtyard was cold by then, and the rain had given out an hour before. Clouds still hung low, so there were no stars to speak of, and the night came down close. The fountain beside his door ran on, and the city past the wall was going quiet. He took the chair outside his door and got the driftwood and the knife out of his coat. There was a shape at the bottom of it now, wide and then split in two, that could have been a fish’s tail if a man wanted it to be.
Twice since sitting down, he had looked towards the gate.
The air changed.
No sound with it, the way there had been no sound the night before. He stopped the knife.
The gate had its light. Behind the guardhouse, where none of that light reached, the dark sat heavier.
He waited.
Two eyes opened in it, wide and pale.
Salt put his thumb against the flat of the blade. The eyes remained open.