Far From Home Two: The Monster's Heir-- a M/M/M fantasy romance

9-- A Bit of a Tale

SAGE—

I had no idea what either Ember or the boy had been talking about, but the way Ember's sudden frustration made the boy curl into himself set off my rarely lit temper. Ember had been almost teasing the boy, playful, amused, until he had confirmed Ember's words— whatever they had meant— and then his mood turned as if possessed by a sudden angry thought he couldn't fight.

I had no chance to defend the boy, because Ember stomped out of the tent without another word, half naked and fuming. I was left with a distraught, confused, hurt young man who looked up at me like I had the answers to Ember's sudden mood shift.

"I don't know, sweetheart," I whispered as he whimpered and pressed his face against my chest. I held him for a moment, comforting him, before pulling back and smiling crookedly. "I'm near starved. You want to see what we can scrounge for breakfast?"

The young man nodded, his eyes lit with reluctant amusement at my tone, and followed me out of the tent. We were immediately met with a dozen pairs of dark Akaran eyes, watching us with curiosity and just a bit of amusement.

My eyes were drawn back to what they stared at, and my heart clenched like a vice in my chest. The boy was flinching in the low light of the sun, barely risen above the horizon for a few minutes at most. At its weakest point, he still flinched and jerked back, his eyes having trouble adjusting to the light. After a moment, despite his obvious discomfort, he froze and closed his eyes, tilting his head up to face the sun. His hands came up slowly, as if to embrace the day, and a tiny smile lit his scarred face. There were two holes in the middle of his cheeks from where the jaw bindings had cut through him. Now that the metal was gone, and he was smiling, it looked as if he had two deep dimples.

"You hungry?" a voice asked in Akari, from a little to my left. The voice broke the spell I had been under, staring the boy down as he basked in the sunlight. I turned and met Count's eyes. I knew some Akari, having grown up in a town near the border with Akar, so I knew the gist of what he had asked us. I nodded and replied with some of the only Akari words I knew how to speak. For the most part, I could understand more than I could articulate.

"Yes. Hungry."

The man huffed out a laugh, probably at my terrible pronunciation, before waving a hand at us to follow him. The boy opened his eyes, still squinting a bit in the light, and then stuck to my side as I took a step to follow Count, shivering a bit as a gentle wind ate at our skin. I was fully dressed, but the boy wore a shirt of Ember's and nothing else. I held my hand up to Count, gesturing for him to wait, before ducking back into Ember's tent and grabbing a cloak from near the pallet. The boy followed me like a lost puppy, but I was pushing him back before he had even passed the tent threshold.

I threw the cloak over his shoulders, and he met my eyes and ducked his head in a motion of gratitude before following as Count led us past a few tents and to the center of their camp. The men around us moved to break camp with practiced efficiency, but slowly. As if they knew they needed to be ready, but that they wouldn't actually be leaving any time soon.

A large fire was set out, with a pot of what looked like cooked grains nearby. I could see a few of my men among the Akarans, but not many. I gestured to one of the lieutenants, Sanders, who ran over to me from where he had been eating with a handful of Akarans.

After saluting me, Sanders stood at attention, his eyes never straying from mine, not even to stare down at the boy plastered to my waist.

"Find Aron and bring him to me," I ordered. The man saluted again before sprinting back towards our camp. When he was out of sight, I turned back to the boy, who was smiling gently at the sky again, staring up at where the faded moon was just beginning to lower below the eastern mountains.