Under the Rushes by Lane Amy

Author:Lane, Amy [Lane, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2012-12-19T16:00:00+00:00

BESIDES being liberating, there was something almost… mystical about that run together through the back alleys of the city. They both wore stocking caps on their heads, and although the caps didn’t hide their faces, the black clothes, caps, and silent boots made them feel almost invisible.

People dodged them and walked around them, certainly, but nobody ever called out to them and nobody threatened them. There were plenty of thugs walking around with blood dripping down their arms from their latest tattoos or their latest rips, but none of them snarled at Taern, for instance, when he went rebounding off the side of a building to avoid a vendor’s cart and then leapt over a Hieter’s bald head. Nobody called out to Dorjan when he brought Taern up and over the tin-roofed shotgun apartments that made up the spaces of the alleyway, and nobody tried to stop them from scaling the smaller buildings and running along roofs to save time. Dorjan took a different route through the stews every day. He should have been as strange to the people on the streets of Thenis as they were to him, but in the same way he recognized which shopkeepers were still in business and saw the ebb and flow of families moving in, moving out, being pressed to service, disappearing, resurfacing in worse circumstances still, somehow the people of Thenis came to recognize that the young master and now his friend, were simply part of the ebb and flow of the streets.

It comforted him as he and Taern leapt, ran, and dodged the crowded thoroughfares that were now too crammed with people and detritus to let the monorails run. As far as he knew, nobody had put together the idea of the Forum Master who was too stupid to abuse his job and the darkly dressed young man who pattered through the city streets nearly every day. He liked it that way. The fewer people who put that together, the less likely anyone would ever look at him and see the Nyx.

And that run through the city was… exhilarating. Leap, dodge, spin, flip—every step, every turn was an adventure in finding the quickest, most efficient way through a landscape that refused to sit still. Although Dorjan hadn’t thought of it before Taern accompanied him, this time in the morning or afternoon, when he wasn’t wearing his armor but was allowed to run—that was the time he felt most free.

That didn’t change with Taern at his side. It was, instead, intensified: every moment Taern spent leaping into the air or running up the side of a building was a moment Dorjan was unfettered by gravity as well. Watching the boy was a pleasure, and running with him, knowing that when Dorjan vaulted the gaping hole in the sidewalk, Taern was behind him, finding his own way over or around—it was better than having wings.

It occurred to Dorjan that having the boy there while they were both masked, both of them moving without

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