Master of Hounds: Book 3 (EBOOK, LGBT)

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ONE

CAIUS OPPITA, LATE of His Imperial Majesty’s armed forces, was certain there had once been a time when his life didn’t feel like a runaway goods wagon careening toward the edge of a cliff. He listened with a feeling of both sinking dread and painful inevitability as a breathless street urchin relayed the latest news from the capital, aware of the groans and winces of the people gathered around him.

He and his lover Decian were still sheltering in one of the pagan safehouses scattered throughout the city of Amarius. His lover… who also happened to be the bloody heir apparent to the Alyrion Empire.

God above, how had he ended up here?

The answer, of course, was that he had done something foolish because he’d thought it was the right thing to do. He’d saved one of the emperor’s bastard sons from being executed for no other reason than the circumstances of his birth. And that had all been well and good, right up until Decian revealed that his Kulawi mother possessed an imperial signet ring proving her lawful marriage to the Emperor Constanzus. A marriage, mind you, that predated his union to the current empress—the mother of Constanzus’ three so-called legitimate sons.

This would have been enough of a crisis to be going on with. Unfortunately, the revelation had occurred against the backdrop of an ecumenical council convened to determine the empire’s stance on pagan heretics. Decian, his mother, and two of Caius’ closest friends were pagans. Additionally, Decian was a shapeshifter—the worst possible kind of heretic in the eyes of the Deimonist Church. All of them would face the prospect of being burned at the stake if the radical wing of the church held sway.

“There’s been another attack on the council?” someone asked. “Seriously? Are they blaming this one on pagans as well?”

The urchin nodded rapidly, as though his slightly too-large head was on a swivel. “Yes, sir. They’re saying half a dozen churchmen died this time, including one of the head muckety-mucks. There’s talk of closing down the meetings for good!”

Caius resisted the urge to cover his face with his hand in utter dismay. Someone high up in the imperial hierarchy—and he had a good idea who it was—had already arranged an attack on the council chamber once, making it look like the work of pagan sympathizers. After a hiatus of several days, the council had reconvened, allegedly with tighter security.

But he’d seen the venue where the debates were taking place. The building was a security nightmare, and no amount of overworked Amarian guards stationed around it would be able to change that fact.

He cleared his throat. “If the Amarian Council disbands without making a formal decision,” he said, pitching his voice to be heard over the babble of voices, “radical deimonists will take that as an excuse to start hunting down pagans in the streets. If that happens, all of you need to be somewhere far away from here.”

Saleene, the owner of a brothel Caius had long frequented, added her voice to his. “He’s right. There’s already rioting every night. How much longer until organized mobs start dragging suspected pagans out of their homes and burning them in the public square? We need to think strategically.”

“How does one strategize against an angry mob?” Zuri, Saleene’s Kulawi partner, mused aloud.

The hubbub swelled again as everyone began talking at once. A warm shoulder pressed against Caius’, as Decian stretched over to speak in his ear.

“This is going to be bad, isn’t it?” said the younger man.
Even if Caius were inclined to offer meaningless platitudes in the face of this new disaster, he would have been hard-pressed to come up with any.

“Yes,” he replied quietly. “This is going to be bad.”

When it became clear that the urchin didn’t have any other news of import to relay, Saleene caught Caius’ eye and jerked her chin toward the door at the back of the large room.

“Come on,” Caius told Decian, and started pushing his way through the crush of bodies.

They’d been gathered with the other residents in a communal area of the tumbledown old safehouse—one used for cooking and dining as well as meetings. With Zuri at her heels, Saleene led the way deeper into the structure, to a terrifyingly rickety staircase that led to the second story. After several days here, it was becoming second nature to step over the missing and broken treads, although the sound of wood supports creaking with strain would never be anything other than disconcerting.

The room that the four of them had been using in shifts for sleeping was too small to hold all of them at once. Fortunately, with everyone else downstairs, the hallway was empty and quiet except for the sound of the building settling and groaning around them.

“This is turning into a clusterfuck,” Saleene said bluntly. “We need to begin thinking about exit strategies.”

Zuri scowled. “So… what, then? Are we to flee and leave the rest of Amarius’ pagan population to the wolves?”

Saleene crossed her arms. “Unless you’d prefer to stay here and burn at the stake with them, I’m not certain there’s much of a choice. What would be the benefit of our continued presence here? How would us staying in Amarius help?”

Zuri opened her mouth as though she might reply, only to close it again a moment later and shake her head angrily.

Caius took a breath, feeling as though a heavy weight was pressing down on his shoulders from above. “There might be one more thing to try.”

Immediately, Decian’s brown gaze landed on him with enough force to bore a hole through his skull. “No,” he said.

“You haven’t even heard what I was about to suggest,” Caius pointed out tiredly.

“I don’t have to,” Decian shot back. “Because whatever it is, it’s going to be reckless, poorly thought out, prone to unforeseen complications—and you’re going to tell us that you have to do it alone.”

“I’ll definitely have to do it alone,” Caius agreed. “So that means you won’t need to worry about the rest of it, will you?”

Decian stared at him. Saleene and Zuri wisely didn’t comment.

“You… bastard,” Decian said, at length. “Godsdamn you, will you just listen to yourself for once?”

“My parents were lawfully wed,” Caius told him in an even tone. “Same as yours, apparently.”

Saleene held up a hand. “Could we not drag that part up right now? Caius, what exactly are you proposing?”

Caius leaned back against the wall, covering a wince as his bad shoulder twinged in protest. “There is still one thing that could head off open pagan persecution in the city.”

“What’s that?” Zuri asked with clear skepticism.
“An imperial decree.”

They were all looking at him like he was mad now—not just Decian.

“Keep talking,” Saleene said, after an uncomfortable beat.

“As a first step, I need to get a message to the tribuni of the palace guard,” he replied.

“You mean Tribuni Aelio?” Decian asked. “Is that wise, since he knows about—” He waved a hand at himself, presumably indicating his shapeshifting abilities.

Aelio had surmised Decian’s secret after accompanying them on a recent mission to rescue two girls taken hostage by whoever was pulling the strings of this political plot. Decian had started the mission in animal form, but unexpectedly shifted back to human form after attacking the guards holding the girls prisoner. Aelio had seen him wearing the ridiculous leather dog collar that Zuri had given him to make his giant black hellhound alter ego seem less threatening.

By rights, Aelio should have arrested both of them on the spot—and honestly, no one would have questioned it if he’d struck Decian down with his sword in the middle of the street. But Aelio had always been a man of honor—as well as one who apparently thought for himself, rather than blindly following dogma.

“I don’t propose to parade you around in front of him,” Caius said. “Mostly, though, I imagine if he were going to raise a fuss, he would have done it before now.”

“How would one even go about getting a message to someone inside the palace, under the circumstances?” Zuri asked. She was still frowning, but she hadn’t dismissed Caius’ tentative plan out of hand.

“And why do you need to get him a message?” Decian pressed. “What does that have to do with getting a mad emperor to issue a decree telling people to be nice to pagans?”

“I need to meet with Aelio in person,” Caius said. “He still has freedom to come and go from the imperial quarter. I don’t.”

Decian narrowed his eyes. “That doesn’t answer my question. If Aelio could secretly control the emperor from behind the scenes, we’d know about it, wouldn’t we?”

“If Aelio could secretly control Constanzus from behind the scenes, it’s doubtful we’d be in this mess in the first place,” Caius replied dryly. “I don’t need him to put a word in the emperor’s ear. I need him to put a word in a particular pageboy’s ear. That, at least, should be well within his purview.”

Decian subsided—still obviously unhappy, but no longer openly rebellious. “A pageboy. Right. You’re scheming something crazy, but I don’t suppose a simple meeting is likely to devolve into total chaos. So, you need to get a message to someone inside the palace? Someone who can, in turn, get a message to Aelio without it being traced back to a pagan safehouse?”

“Ideally, yes.”

Decian’s lips twisted into something that wasn’t a smile. “Fine. I can do that for you.”

Caius regarded him suspiciously. “How?”

Decian ignored him, turning to the others. “Saleene, do you know if I could borrow that boy from the meeting for a private errand?”

Saleene, too, seemed dubious. “Probably, though I expect it depends on the nature of the errand.”

“Message delivery,” Decian said, his gaze returning to Caius. “It’s market day today. Pip will visit his mother and little sister in the city tomorrow evening. He goes there every week, and I know where they live.”

Pip was the apprentice who’d inherited Decian’s short-lived—and shamelessly fraudulent—position as the royal master of hounds. Caius stared at Decian in bewilderment. “How in sanity’s name could you know such a thing?”

Decian stared back. “How do you think I know it? He told me about them.”

Caius shook off his momentary bafflement at the idea of people who’d worked together sharing such personal details, apparently for no other reason than the sheer hell of it. “Fine. Yes. That could work. He’d need to get a return message to us somehow, detailing a time and place for the meeting. I imagine Aelio is stretched a bit thin at the moment, what with everything else that’s been going on.”

“I certainly wouldn’t want to trade places with the man,” Saleene muttered. “And I say that as an out-of-work brothel owner huddling in an overcrowded tenement.”

“I don’t think anyone in the empire is lining up for the tribuni’s job right now, no,” Caius agreed.

“Someone will need to give me a few coins to hire the boy to take the message,” Decian said. “And Caius, you should know that I’m only doing this because if I don’t, I know you’ll come up with an even worse plan.”

Caius raised an eyebrow. “I fail to understand your continuing lack of faith in my tactical planning abilities. We’re both still alive, aren’t we?”

Decian let out a harsh bark of a sound. It might have been ironic laughter. “Yes, with the exception of you being shot twice with crossbows, poisoned, and both of us currently being in hiding in a city tearing itself apart at the seams, I’d say everything has gone swimmingly.”

“It could be worse,” Caius told him.

“It can always be worse,” Saleene said, with the air of someone who had extensive personal experience in the matter. “Come on, let’s go catch the boy before he leaves. At this point, I’ll take even a bad plan over no plan at all.”

Caius bit back the sarcastic retort that wanted to escape. “Fine. We’re agreed, then. After you.”

* * *

Later that night, he and Decian lay on the lumpy mattress in the cramped, closet-like space that they’d been assigned for sleeping. With so many pagans in hiding as conditions in Amarius worsened, the old house was bursting at the seams with refugees. Decian and Caius had use of this room from dusk till dawn, while Saleene and Zuri attended late-night planning sessions. Then they returned to take possession of the straw-stuffed bedding from dawn until dusk.

It made sense, given that brothel owners were used to late hours. And it was far from the worst place Caius had slept. Unfortunately, it also included the presence of the shapeshifter who’d somehow wormed his way past Caius’ hardened defenses, and who wouldn’t stop slamming him in the face with unwanted revelations.
After an initial period of gilded happiness where Caius had wandered around like a callow youth obsessed by his first romantic crush, Decian had revealed his unnatural gift in the course of saving Caius’ worthless skin during an assassination attempt.

When Caius was a boy of eight, his father had been gored to death by a pagan shapeshifter who took the form of a giant stag. Early in his career as a soldier, Caius himself had nearly been killed by an army of wolves under the control of a shapeshifting pagan priest on the island of Eburos. So, when Decian had unexpectedly turned into a massive, jet-black hellhound with the rather disconcerting ability to rip out men’s souls and fling them into the void, Caius… hadn’t taken it well.

In retrospect, he wasn’t proud of his reaction, which had included holding a sword to his lover’s throat and threatening to kill him if he ever so much as entered Caius’ presence again. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, Decian wouldn’t know a grudge if he tripped over one. Days later, when Caius had ended up at Saleene’s door, poisoned and weak to the point of helplessness, Decian had foregone the very sensible reaction of bashing Caius over the head in favor of giving him a second chance.

They’d reconciled in this very room, on the first night after they’d sought shelter here. And by ‘reconciled,’ Caius meant that he’d invited Decian to pound his arse until neither of them could remember their own names. Then, the following day, Caius had discovered that he’d just been buggered by the presumptive heir to the Alyrion Empire.

If he could somehow travel back to the hours before that revelation…

But perhaps that was shortsighted of him. Hadn’t he been lamenting the empire’s future under the rule of any of Constanzus’ three sons by the Empress Stasia? The oldest, Proclus, was a drunken fool. The middle son, Kaeto, was a sadistic viper clad in human flesh. The youngest, Bruccias, was so slippery and backstabbing it was a wonder someone hadn’t put a knife through his ribs long before now.

And here was Decian—a genuinely kind and good man. The eldest son of the emperor, by his lawfully married Kulawi wife. Not to mention, a pagan shapeshifter with royal Alyrion blood running in his veins.

God. The imperial court would eat him alive and pick their teeth with his bones.

The aforementioned heir presumptive was currently curled against Caius’ left side. Caius was painfully aware that he was lying on the ancient palliasse like a plank of wood, stiff and unbending in Decian’s loose embrace. He was also painfully aware that he himself hadn’t made any sort of move toward physical intimacy since the most recent revelation, and that the atmosphere in the cramped space was growing heavy with unspoken words.

Eventually, Decian sighed and rolled onto his back. “Right. I’ll be the one to say something, shall I?”
Caius only grunted, already dreading the next few moments.

Decian rolled up on an elbow, looking down at him even though he would barely be able to see a thing in the darkness of the stuffy little room. Or perhaps Decian could see in the dark, as a shapeshifter. Caius had never thought to ask.

His lover sighed. “I can’t tell if you’re angry at me, or if you’re assuming you’re going to die in whatever mad plan you’re going to concoct with Aelio, or if I’m completely misreading this and you’ve simply got a bad case of indigestion. Would you care to enlighten me?”

In point of fact, Caius would have been perfectly content to remain in the stifling darkness, both unenlightened and unenlightening. However, that wouldn’t be fair to the man next to him, and he knew it. He’d known it all along—he was simply a coward. He cleared his throat, which seemed to do very little to ease its tightness.

“Decian. Think. You’re the heir to the Alyrion Empire. You can’t keep fucking a used-up soldier twice your age.” He’d been right. The words hurt to say aloud.

There was another heavy pause.

Finally, Decian spoke. “First, I’m not the heir of anything. I’m the same fugitive prisoner I was yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. Secondly, I think we’ve established that I can fuck a used-up soldier twice my age very effectively if I want to.” He hesitated. “Also, I have to say this—I weep for all your previous opponents on the battlefield if your current state is one of relative ineptitude. Because I’m sorry, but you’re a bloody menace with a sword.”

Caius huffed. “I used to be far more of one, believe me. My point still stands, though. You are the heir, whether you want to be or not. The last thing you need is to court the kind of scandal that could be used against you by your enemies in the future.”

Decian placed a hand flat on Caius’ chest, warmth radiating outward from the contact. “The only thing I want between me and my enemies is distance, Caius.”

Caius closed his eyes against the darker gray silhouette looming over him. It didn’t help. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse. “I don’t think it’s going to be that simple, Decian.”

The fingers splayed over his heart twitched. “Then maybe this will be simple enough for you.” There was a degree of unsteadiness hiding beneath the words. “Damn you, Caius—I’m terrified. And—” His voice broke. “I don’t think I can do this alone.”