The Commander's Collar

CHAPTER 6-- THREE COMMANDERS

LYRA ARDEN

I discovered on the first day that a fortress had its own smells.

Damp stone in the lower corridors. Grease and roasted meat near the kitchens. Leather, metal, and sweat in the soldiers' wings. Perfumes too sweet when you approached the chambers reserved for females.

And blood.

Always a little blood somewhere.

Malric, the human administrator, lined six of us up before dawn. He was a thin man, gray hair tied at the nape, and a scar crossing his upper lip. He did not wear a collar.

I noticed immediately.

"Eyes down when you enter the command room," he said. "Don't touch weapons. Don't answer unless someone asks you a question. And, for the love of everything that hasn't died in this world yet, don't get clever around Varek."

I was looking down when my eyes widened at that name... Varek? One of the Beasts from the inn.

A boy beside me swallowed hard.

"Which one is Varek?"

Malric looked at him.

"You'll know."

He was not wrong.

The first time I saw the three commanders together was in the strategy hall.

And to my misfortune, they were the same beasts from that day.

Cassian Drayke was the first. He was sitting on the edge of a table that clearly had not been built to sit on. He had a goblet in one hand and a woman between his legs at seven in the morning.

She was an adult, beautiful, naked from the waist up, and seemed perfectly accustomed to occupying that space. Her full breasts pressed against the dark fabric of his clothes when she leaned in to kiss his neck. A thin gold collar circled her throat; from it hung Drayke's symbol.

Another woman lay on a divan at the back, covered only by translucent fabric over her hips. A very handsome human boy was adjusting Cassian's boots.

He truly had no standards.

"Is this the new shipment?" Cassian asked.

Malric inclined his head.

"Part of it, sir."

The commander's eyes moved down the line and stopped on me.

The smile appeared slowly.

"Ah..."

My stomach knotted.

"What?" I asked before I could stop myself.

Malric closed his eyes as if asking the gods for patience.

Cassian laughed.

"I remember you..."

"That one is not for personal selection," said a voice from the other side of the table.

Severin Vaelor.

He looked the most human at first glance. Light hair pulled back, immaculate clothing, no visible tail, no animal ears. Only his eyes betrayed him: too silver, pupils too narrow when the light changed.

There was no one in his lap and no goblet in his hand.

Maybe that was why he seemed safer.

I had not yet learned to distrust exactly that.

"Everything is for personal selection if someone has enough authority," Cassian replied.

"Which is why you lose fortunes gambling."

"And win others."

Looking around the strategy hall, I realized the place seemed even more indecent because war maps shared the same table with goblets, weapons, and naked bodies.

Cassian was the most obvious center of that contradiction. The woman between his legs seemed drugged somehow, though that did not make the scene any less disturbing; and every time he spoke, one of his hands slid over her belly, beneath the thin fabric, where he deliberately caressed her. The gesture seemed as automatic to him as breathing.

At the back, a dark-skinned beast with four arms and low horns spoke to two officers while a naked female sat in his lap. For one instant too quick to pretend I had not seen it, I realized his anatomy was not human: he had two p*****s outlined beneath the loose fabric between his legs.

I blinked and forced my eyes away, trying to erase the image from my mind. I felt my face heat.

Cassian noticed and smiled.

The worst part was realizing no one else reacted. Soldiers discussed supply routes only a few steps away from a woman moaning softly against a beast's neck. This was not a party. It seemed more like an ordinary morning at work.

The woman between Cassian's legs ran her fingers over his neck. Then he caught her hand and kissed her knuckles without taking his eyes off Severin.

The intimacy seemed real.

So did the collar.

The two things could exist together in that world, I realized uneasily.

Then the other commander entered.

The hall changed without anyone giving an order. Conversations stopped. A soldier straightened, and Malric stepped half a pace back.

Kael Varek was not the easiest kind of handsome among the three. Cassian drew attention. Severin was elegant. Kael looked dangerous before he looked like anything else.

Tall, broad-shouldered, dark hair still damp from a bath or rain, a thin scar near his left eyebrow. His beast ears were discreet, almost hidden in his hair, but the horns and dark tail behind him left no doubt about what he was.

He did not look at Cassian's women when he entered, nor did he look at us.

He went straight to the map.

"How many escaped the city?"

"Few," Severin answered.

My attention caught on the word city.

"And the women?" Kael asked.

"All cataloged."

My mouth went dry.

Cassian took a drink from his goblet.

"Your enthusiasm is contagious, Vaelor."

"I do not need to be enthusiastic about logistics."

"You get enthusiastic about ledgers. It's almost the same perversion."

Kael braced both hands on the table.

"The lords of the other Neutral Lands will complain."

"Let them," Severin said. "They do not have enough of an army to uphold the treaty anyway."

The coldness of the answer hit me.

So that was it.

The invasion had been planned. It had not been an attack gone out of control.

They had decided to do it.

Kael raised his face, and then he saw me.

I recognized the same look from the inn, except this time there was no smoke between us.

His eyes traveled over my face, neck, shoulders. Stopped at the iron collar. Then returned to my eyes.

I looked away first.

My heart had sped up from fear, and that irritated me.

"Well then, little one? I don't think we finished our conversation that day. What's your name?" Cassian asked.

My jaw tightened. I kept my eyes lowered.

Malric answered:

"Lyr Arden, sir. Human... Internal service."

Severin lifted his gaze from the map.

"Arden?"

It was only my surname, but even so the back of my neck prickled.

"Yes, sir," Malric said.

Severin watched me for two seconds.

"From the south... right, boy?"

"Yes, sir... Farmland near the neutral border."

"Which village?"

Cassian sighed.

"Severin, for the love of the gods, are you going to interrogate the slaves before breakfast?"

Severin smiled.

Kael was still looking at me. And I had the uncomfortable feeling that while Severin listened to my words, Kael was watching everything else.

The way I breathed.

My hand near the side of my body.

The smell of the herbs...

He frowned slightly.

And I felt my heart miss a beat.

Malric tapped two fingers on the table.

"Come on. You have work."

I turned too quickly, and behind me I heard Cassian say:

"Varek?"

"What?"

"Were you looking at that boy?"

Silence.

"I wasn't."

Cassian laughed.

And I walked faster.

When I looked over my shoulder and Kael looked at me again, it was not my face he studied. It was my nostrils, my neck, the air between us. And for the first time, I was almost certain something in the herbs had failed.