Then again, what use was an advantage you were too afraid to use?
“Things are going to change,” Kip said. “It’s already started. We’re going to grow, and we’re going to learn, and we’re going to fight. We’ll always have this.” He gestured to the circle of the Mighty. “It’s always going to be special, but it’s going to change, too. For good”—he nodded at Tisis and Sibéal—“but for ill, too. So tonight let’s tell stories about Trainer Fisk, and Ironfist, and Goss and Daelos and Teia, and the battle we just fought, and how Ferkudi totally cheated in our placement fights—”
“Yeah,” Ferkudi said. “Wait—what?”
“And tomorrow, we go back to war.”
So they swapped stories and embellished a few, and were called out half the time. And mostly Sibéal and Tisis were silent. They understood. It was a wake for the boys’ childhood, which had been dying for a long time.
Tisis told about Kip’s initiation and how she’d sabotaged him. Sibéal in particular looked stunned, though Ferkudi did, too. How he’d missed that story, Kip had no idea.
“That’s how you met? And yet here you sit, together? Married?” Sibéal asked. “I can’t believe he would forgive you such a thing.”
“Kip has a remarkable ability to see the difference between an adversary and an enemy,” Tisis said. She patted his arm, and her eyes were warm.
“Oh, gag me,” Ben-hadad said.
“With wine!” Cruxer called, tossing a sack at him.
Deadpan, Kip said, “After I saw her naked, I’d forgive her for anything.”
She smacked his arm, her face bright in the firelight.
“He does have a penchant for grabbing on to something and not letting go, doesn’t he?” Cruxer said.
“Tell me about it!” Kip said, showing off his burn-scarred left hand.
They laughed, and Cruxer said, “I was thinking about Aram, in our placement fights, and how you grabbed him until he nearly broke your neck!”
So they segued into those stories: who had been better than expected, how Teia had placed everyone before the fight, how Kip had bulled his way all the way to fifteenth place, and how Cruxer had crushed Aram’s knee to disqualify him and get Kip into the final fourteen.
And suddenly the fire was rainbows of color because of the tears swelling in Kip’s eyes. But he didn’t avert his face. He didn’t stand and go hide in the dark as he would have not so long ago.
“Wine making you maudlin?” Big Leo asked, trying to let him play it off.
“No,” Kip said, and the circle went silent, all of them looking at him. “I had no friends growing up. I was the addict’s boy. The fat boy. Made fun of, beat up, the butt of jokes. The best of the townsfolk merely pitied me. I was taken on, but not taken in. I steeled myself to that. Accepted that I would always be alone. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, not even my mother’s, who hated herself for her failures more than I ever could. I was lucky, really. In a city, I’d have been pressed into a gang or taken by slavers.
“It shouldn’t have been any better with you all. I was fat and awkward and only had a place because my father had demanded it for me. But you accepted me. For the first time in my life, you made me part of something.”
“Not just part of it,” Cruxer said. “You’re the Mighty’s heart.”
Kip grinned. For some reason, being called the Mighty’s heart was far more meaningful than if Cruxer had called him the head. “I would have called you the heart, Cruxer. Maybe you’re the spine or the guts of us, then.”
“Well, if neither of you is the head, I guess I must be,” Ben-hadad said.
“I’m obviously the left hand,” Winsen said. “I’ll come outta nowhere and slam ya.”
“That makes me the right,” Big Leo said. “You might be on the lookout for me, but that doesn’t mean you’re gonna stop me.”
“Well, what’s that make me?” Ferkudi said. “A foot?”
The Mighty looked around the circle at each other, and then they all answered in unison: “The ass.”
“The ass?!” Ferkudi said.
“So what’s Tisis?” Cruxer asked.
Oh shit. Kip remembered the nickname, apparently at the same moment a blushing Cruxer did. Teats Tisis. Cruxer opened his mouth to apologize.
“Well, obviously—” Winsen said.
“—she’s the charisma,” Kip interjected.
“And… Winsen gets to live,” Tisis said flatly.
They grinned. Crisis averted.
Maybe the wine had gone to Kip’s head, but he wanted to say this: “I came from all that. But now—” He choked up, but no one said a word. Tisis squeezed his thigh, being a support. Kip said, “Now I have this? I’m risking my life to do something that matters with people I love? This is the best night of my life.” He spoke through the tears, and looked at them each in turn. A few eyes glimmered with tears in return. “Thank you. I love you all.”
Then he shot a wink at Sibéal. “Except for you. I mean, I’m sure you’re nice, but I barely know you.”
They all laughed, and Kip looked down at his hands. “What the hell, why are my hands empty? Can’t any of you bastards share with a thirsty man?”
“Hear hear,” Ferkudi said, reaching out an empty hand enthusiastically, trying to grab a wineskin from Big Leo, who was pointedly guzzling it so as not to share. Ben-hadad grabbed it away from Big Leo and handed the skin across, ignoring Ferkudi, but Tisis intercepted the skin.
“Uh-uh,” she said. “You come with me. I’ve got something better for you than wine.”
There were cheers and hoots as she took him by the hand and led him into the woods.
He wasn’t drunk—he’d been enjoying the stories and the camaraderie too much to want to dull it—but the wine and fellowship and the good-natured teasing made all the world warm for the fifty paces it took for Tisis to lead him to where she’d set up their tent.
“You set up our tent away from the others on purpose?” Kip said.
“Uh-hmm. That was… one helluva kiss this morning,” she said.
And that snake in his guts was back.
Orholam knew he wanted her, but every time they tried, she ended up furious or crying or both and then apologizing and then offering to pleasure him. At the top of Kip’s list of things that filled him with erotic desire was not a weeping, furious, guilty mess of a woman.
Although if things went on this way much longer, it was going to have to do.
Pained, he said, “You want to try again?”
“I want you…”
It took Kip a few moments to realize that maybe that was a complete sentence. “Oh, well, yes, I want you, too—”
“… to shut up.”
“Oh, I thought that was a full—”
“And kiss me.”
“Ah. That. That I can do!” Kip said.
“Kip.”
“Yes?”
She stripped off her tunic and chemise together. “The lips?”
As she slid into his arms, her skin warm and the night cold, it took him a moment to process the words. “Yes?” Kip the Lips? No, it was Kip the Lip. What did she—
“Are not for talking.”
He had no idea what she meant, but found he didn’t mind much as their lips came together.
The moments blurred in the welcome haze of intertwined fingers and intertwined limbs and the cold night driving them into their tent, where they made their own warmth.
And damn, it was a small tent. He was giddy, laughing aloud as she struggled to strip off her trousers and belt and underclothes and nearly knocking over the tent poles—she hadn’t ever set up a tent before. Not that Kip was so dumb that he was going to criticize how she’d set up the tent.
And then with a flapping of her feet like a fish on the shore, she finally kicked her trousers off her feet. Her long blond hair had fallen over her face, but Kip’s giggle died in his throat as she rolled up on her side toward him and brushed her hair back.
She sidled into his arms, and he bifurcated: part of him kissing, caressing, enjoying—and another part pulling way, way back into fear and cognition.