They Counted Me Like Cargo, So I Took the War novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: A Witness at the Tent

Seren fakes the wedding night for the envoy's witness until it stops being fake, Corvus stops at the edge of a kiss, and a blade cuts through the canvas behind the cot.

The chamberlain dined in the general's tent that evening because the treaty said he could.

He ate Corvus's bread and drank Corvus's wine and talked only to Seren.

"Your brother sends his love," he said. "He says you'll lie there like a carp on a slab."

Corvus cut his meat and said nothing.

"And you, General." The chamberlain dabbed his mouth. "A farrier's boy with a prince to shoe. How your mother would have wept."

The knife in Corvus's hand stopped.

Then it went on cutting.

"My mother starved in your regent's levy winter," he said. "She didn't have the strength to weep."

The chamberlain smiled.

At full dark he had two stools set outside the tent flap, one for him and one for a clerk with a writing board.

His second clerk stood behind them with a lantern.

"Take your time," he called through the canvas. "I have all night. The regent was very particular."

Inside, Corvus sat on the end of the cot and pulled his boots off.

"Go to sleep," he said to Seren.

"If I go to sleep, my brother has me back by morning."

"And?"

"And then I'm not your consort, I'm Aldric's prisoner. He'll try me for those letters in your chest."

Seren kept his voice low. The canvas was thin.

"Treason hangs in Caerwen, General."

Corvus looked at him for a long time.

"So what do you want?"

"I want to give him something to hear."

The corner of Corvus's mouth moved, the side with the scar.

"I don't fake anything," he said.

"Then lie still and let me."

Seren climbed onto the cot.

It was a soldier's cot, narrow, with a frame of ash wood and a canvas sling, and it groaned under both of them.

He put his knee on the frame and shoved it, hard, so it knocked against the tent pole.

Thump.

Outside, the clerk's pencil scratched.

Seren did it again.

Thump. Thump.

Then he made a noise.

He had heard men make that noise through the walls of his father's guest wing.

He had never made it himself, and it came out like a goose being stepped on.

Corvus put his whole face in his hand.

His shoulders were shaking.

"Stop laughing," Seren hissed. "Help."

"You're terrible at this," Corvus said into his palm.

"I'm a scholar."

"I can tell."

"Then you do it, since you know so much."

Corvus took his hand away from his face.

He wasn't laughing anymore.

He reached out, took Seren by the hips and turned him under him on the cot in one movement.

The ash frame cracked against the pole so hard the lantern outside swung.

Corvus's weight came down on him.

All of it, his chest on Seren's, his thigh between Seren's legs, his forearms either side of Seren's head.

The noise Seren made then wasn't a goose.

It came out of him before he could stop it, low and rough, and he heard the pencil outside stop scratching.

Corvus went very still above him.

He was hard against Seren's hip, through two layers of wool.

So was Seren, and Corvus could feel it, and he knew Seren knew.

"That one sounded real," Corvus said quietly.

"It was for the witness."

"Was it."

Corvus rocked his hips once, slowly.

The cot creaked, long and low.

Seren's hands had found Corvus's shirt at the back. He didn't remember putting them there.

He pulled it out of the belt and got his palms on bare skin.

Corvus was hot, all muscle and old scars, and he shuddered under Seren's hands.

"Seren," he said.

It was the first time he had used the prince's name.

He said it.

Their faces were so close that Seren could feel the scar on his lip when he breathed.

Seren lifted his chin.

One more inch.

Corvus stopped.

His whole body stopped, every muscle locked, and he pressed his forehead hard against Seren's instead of his mouth.

"Not while you're counted," he said. His voice was wrecked.

"What?"

"You're still a line in a tally book. Your brother sold you to me with the salt."

He breathed out through his teeth.

"I'm not having you like that. Not even once. Not even when you ask."

"I didn't ask," Seren said, which was a lie, and they both heard it.

Corvus laughed, a short, painful sound.

Then he lifted his head and shouted through the canvas without looking away from Seren.

"Are you getting all this?"

Outside, the chamberlain coughed.

"Every word, General."

"Good. Write that he's loud."

"I am not loud."

"You are very loud," Corvus said in his ear, and bit his earlobe, and Seren proved him right.

The cot frame cracked one last time.

Behind Seren's head, on the back wall of the tent, something tore.

It was a long, quiet sound.

He turned his head on the blanket.

A blade was coming through the canvas a foot from his face, cutting down.

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