Duck! Read online

  Despite all the staring, everyone had given Raynard a wide berth, but now he sensed someone step up alongside him.

  “Mr Jones invites you to stay behind after the ceremony to speak with him in private, sir.”

  It took Raynard several seconds to connect Ori with his surname. He glanced at the servant. “You may give Mr Jones my apologies. I’ll be leaving the moment the welcoming ceremony ends.”

  The servant shuffled his feet. Raynard thought the little finch might take to his heels and flee, but he held his ground. “Mr Hamilton reminds you that Mr Jones’s rank enables him to order the attendance of any avian at any time.”

  The poor little bugger obviously thought he was going to get a back hander for being the unfortunate last link in the chain. Raynard offered the servant a brisk nod, forcing himself to keep any of the words he might be inclined to let fly safely tucked away inside his head until they could be unleashed upon those who really deserved to feel their sting.

  The finch scurried away. Raynard turned his attention back to the stage. The queue was shorter now. Those below a certain rank would have to wait for another time and another ceremony to pay their respects. They hadn’t even been allowed into the hall on this occasion.

  As the last few men approached Ori, Raynard felt someone take up a position directly to his left. He looked over his shoulder. At over six foot, he wasn’t used to other men being a great deal taller than him, but the hulking albatross towered over him.

  “Mr Hamilton asked me to show you to Mr Jones’s suite, sir.”

  Raynard bit back a curse. Unwilling to make a fool of himself by getting into a tussle with a man twice his size, he reluctantly nodded his acceptance.

  Ori had barely left the room, looking over his shoulder with every step he took, before Raynard found himself being led unceremoniously out of the hall, up the stairs and to a massively oversized set of double doors.

  The huge painted panels swung open to reveal a marble coated entrance hall. Every surface visible through the various doorways leading off the room glistened and gleamed.

  Ori must have worked his fingers to the bone putting it in that condition.

  Raynard hesitated just inside the door, mentally cursing himself for a fool. Ori wouldn’t have lifted a finger. He had an army of servants now—ready to cater to his every whim, and keep any room he wanted to use immaculate.

  A matching set of doors on the other side of the room swung open. Ori walked in, flanked by several bustling servants. His steps sped up as he caught sight of Raynard. He stumbled to a halt barely a step away from Raynard, his face still pale and his hands clenched tightly at his sides.

  “You came back, sir…” he whispered.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Raynard saw yet another servant walk through the room and carry a tea tray into one of the rooms to his right. Turning away from Ori, Raynard made his way into what appeared to be a formal drawing room and to the little group of seats where the servant set down the tray.

  Ori followed, hot on Raynard’s heels. When Raynard indicated a chair, Ori sat down, as obedient now as he had ever been when he thought he was a duckling. His new found maturity hadn’t yet transformed itself into grace. His movements were even jerkier than they had been when he lived with Raynard.

  The servant—a pigeon according to the tattoo on his wrist—reached for the teapot.

  Ori sprang forward onto the edge of his seat and snatched the handle away from him. Tea splashed from the spout, over the edge of the tray, and onto the table. “I’ll do it!”

  “Sire, that’s really not—” the pigeon began.

  “I know how Mr Raynard likes his tea,” Ori bit out. His grip on the pot tightened. His knuckles turned white.

  For a few seconds, it looked as if there would actually be a scrum over the pot. Then the servant dropped his gaze. “Just as you wish, sire.”

  “Can…can you make them leave, sir?” Ori whispered, not once glancing up from the pot.

  “Ori?”

  Ori closed his eyes. “Order them to leave, sir. Please?”

  Raynard looked up. Five different servants lurked around the edge of the room, none of them with any clear purpose. “Leave.”

  Only one hesitated to obey his command—the same pigeon who had tried to do battle for the teapot. “Mr Hamilton said—”

  “And I’m telling you that your master wishes our meeting to be conducted in private. What an eagle wants should be irrelevant to you while you’re fortunate enough to be in the service of a swan.”

  The pigeon dropped his gaze, backed out of the room, and no doubt rushed away to carry tales to Hamilton.

  They were finally alone.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Raynard studied Ori very carefully. “You’re allowed to give your own orders to the men who serve you,” he pointed out, as gently as he could. “You don’t need anyone to do that for you.”

  Ori gave the tea things his complete attention for a little while. A little of the hot liquid spilt onto the tray as he poured it, but when he handed the cup across the table, Raynard had to admit Ori had been right about one thing—Ori knew exactly how he liked his tea. He’d learned exactly how his master liked everything while he had been under his care.

  “Everyone here is treating you kindly?” Raynard asked, more bruskly than he intended.

  Ori wrapped his arms around his waist as if his grip on his body was the only thing holding him together. He nodded, but he didn’t raise his eyes.

  “Look at me.”

  Ori slowly did as he was told.

  “The whole truth.”

  Ori swallowed. “Everyone’s been very kind, sir.”

  “The whole truth,” Raynard repeated.

  “They won’t let me do anything, sir,” Ori whispered, pain creeping into his expression with the admission.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They won’t let me work, sir.”

  A bitter taste rose to the back of Raynard’s mouth. “It will take time for you to get used to your new life.”

  Ori shook his head.

  “But you will get used to it,” Raynard pushed on. “Over time, you’ll see how well suited to it you are.” Then Ori would realise just how wrong Raynard had been about anything and everything he’d offered him while he was under his protection.

  But Ori obviously wasn’t ready to see that just yet and Raynard found himself scrambling for anything he could say that might make it easier for his fledgling. “There are some things you like about your new life, aren’t there?” He wasn’t sure who he was more desperate to convince of that.

  Ori stubbornly shook his head.

  “You have free run of the libraries here, don’t you?” Raynard said, grasping at straws. Ori had loved the library in his house, and that had been miniscule compared to all those at the nest combined. “Isn’t that something you like?”

  Ori frowned, never lifting his gaze above the top button on Raynard’s shirt.

  “And there are plenty of people to look after you, to make sure you’re taken good care of.”

  “You could punish me, sir.”

  Every thought in Raynard’s head scattered in a different direction.

  Ori’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed rapidly. “If you punished me for lying to you about what species I am and—”

  “Ori—”

  “And, for all the things I did wrong—the things that you didn’t punish me for at the time because you thought it would be cruel to expect more from a duck—you could punish me for them too.” He lifted his gaze to meet Raynard’s eyes for a moment. “You could expect more from me now, you wouldn’t have to put up with my stupidity, or my clumsiness. I’ll—”

  “You will stay at the nest and get used to your new place in the world,” Raynard cut in. Damn it—it sounded far too much like an order, as if he still believed he had the right to order him about.

  Raynard clo
sed his eyes for a moment. While Ori sat opposite him seeming so scared and lost, it was almost impossible to believe he wasn’t that ugly little duckling the elders had thought they’d seen the first time he’d tried to shift in front of them.

  “You can do anything you want,” Raynard told him. “There’s not a single man in this nest who can disobey you. Anything you want, your slightest whim, it will all be catered to. Don’t you see you have everything now?”

  “Back in the attic, you said that I was suited to service, sir, and—”

  “And I was wrong,” Raynard snapped. “I told you about what role ducks enjoy. You’re a swan! The elders must have spoken to you about what that means. Swans are revered for good reason. Having a swan on the council of elders mitigates the harshness of the birds of prey. Swans are the only species who can do that—who have the strength and the compassion to do it. It’s why avian laws protect you so thoroughly.”

  Ori didn’t move a muscle.

  “You’re a swan, Ori. Can’t you see that changes everything?”

  “I know it changes the way you feel about me, sir,” Ori whispered.

  The other half of the sentence might have remained unspoken, but it still reached Raynard loud and clear—the discovery hadn’t changed the way Ori felt about him in the least.

  Raynard turned his face away, afraid of what Ori might see in his eyes if he held his gaze for too long.

  “I wouldn’t expect you to continue to be so kind to me, sir.”

  Helpless in the face of Ori’s pain, Raynard looked back to him.

  “I could move back down to the servants’ quarters. I wouldn’t bother you or take up any of your time. I’d stay out of your way and…”

  “Ori,” Raynard began.

  “I could take care of my upstairs duties when you were out of the house. You wouldn’t even have to set eyes on me and—” Each word was more desperate than the last.

  “That’s not what—”

  “And what you said about having more servants, you could do that, sir. You could have someone else who would be what I was to you. I wouldn’t fuss about that. I could serve you both, if that was what you wanted, and—”

  “Enough!” Raynard snapped.

  Ori fell silent, his eyes closed very tight, his teeth cutting into his bottom lip as he bit down harshly upon the sensitive skin.

  Raynard’s presence in the nest wasn’t helping Ori. Raynard saw that now. He’d hurt his fledgling too badly by taking him under his care and teaching him how to be someone he was never intended to become. Every extra second he spent with him, was only going to make everything worse. It would just make it harder for Ori to fight his way out of all the training Raynard had pushed on him and emerge into the man he was truly destined to be.

  It was far too soon. Raynard should never have come to the nest.

  He stood up.

  Ori opened his eyes. He began to rise to his feet too, but Raynard put his hand on his shoulder to keep him where he was.

  “Sir?” Ori asked.

  “I’m sorry,” Raynard whispered. It didn’t fix anything, there weren’t any words that could, but he said it anyway. Then he turned, and walked away from Ori before his will to do so gave out and he became a bigger bastard than ever.

  He didn’t look over his shoulder as he strode from the room. He quickened his pace as he walked down the corridor, heading out of the nest as quickly as he could without shifting.

  He wasn’t running away. In his own mind, he was very clear about that fact. He wasn’t running away. He was simply putting himself as far away from Ori as he could, before he ended up doing even more damage to his gentle soul than he already had.

  * * * * *

  Ori stared down at the tea tray for a long time, not really seeing it, but not able to look away either.

  He was vaguely aware of a door opening and closing behind him, of someone walking across the room toward him, but it wasn’t his master. Ori knew Raynard’s footsteps. He knew the way the atmosphere in a room changed when Raynard entered it.

  It wasn’t Raynard, and Ori couldn’t bring himself to believe that anyone else mattered.

  Mr Hamilton sat down opposite him, in the chair Raynard had so recently vacated. “The meeting went well, sire?”

  Ori shook his head as he dragged his gaze away from the teapot. “He hates me…”

  Mr Hamilton’s expression was as hard to read as always. He seemed to study Ori for a long time. “What did you hope would be the outcome?”

  Ori stared down at Raynard’s teacup. He’d barely taken a sip of it.

  Ori sighed. What had he hoped for…? That Raynard might somehow agree to take him back. That all of this was some horrible mistake and he might wake up from the nightmare of the last month to find everything had gone back to being as it used to be between them?

  “Sire?” Mr Hamilton prompted.

  “I thought I might be able to convince him to change his mind, sir,” Ori confessed.

  “About what?”

  Ori closed his eyes. “Before he found out what I really am, Mr Raynard said that…”

  Mr Hamilton waited with apparent patience while Ori fought against his own mind, looking for the words that might make some sort of sense of everything.

  “He said that after the ceremony, he’d give me a permanent collar—I’d have a permanent place in his house.”

  “As his servant?” Mr Hamilton prompted.

  “As his submissive, sir,” Ori whispered. “He…we…”

  “You’re in love with him,” Mr Hamilton finished for him.

  Ori didn’t deny it. The strength to lie about it wasn’t in him anymore.

  The silence stretched out. The tea grew cold on the tray between them and neither of them said a word.

  “Perhaps Raynard merely needs to be reminded how good a submissive you were, sire,” Mr Hamilton suddenly suggested, his words sounding loud and harsh after the extended hush.

  Ori couldn’t meet Mr Hamilton’s eyes. As much as he wished that was the problem, it seemed far more likely that Raynard had actually had time to remember that he wasn’t a very good submissive at all. “I made lots of mistakes, sir.”

  “If Raynard wasn’t satisfied with your progress, he would never have spoken to you about a permanent collar.”

  Silence reigned once more. As much as Ori wanted to cling to hope, there had been a finality in his master’s leaving that was impossible to wipe from his mind.

  “Tell me about the time you spent with him, sire.”

  Ori hesitated. “I don’t know what you want me to say, sir.”

  “There’s no wrong answer,” Mr Hamilton said, with the kind of patience that seemed to come so easily to him, now that he knew he was speaking to a swan rather than an ugly little duckling. “Just tell me how things were between you and Raynard.”

  Part of Ori wasn’t sure if he should be talking about his master with a man he still found it hard to trust, even if they had spent a great deal of time in each other’s company since that disastrous shifting ceremony.

  A much larger part of Ori, the section of his mind that had been replaying all the time he’d spent with his master over and over inside his brain, couldn’t resist the invitation to get some of those memories out of his head and into the real world.

  They were real memories, not the idle fantasies of a submissive. Things had been that way between him and Raynard—not just for an hour or two, but for months. It was the truth, and he couldn’t lose his faith in that as well as everything else.

  “He was a fantastic master, sir.”

  Hamilton nodded for him to continue.

  Still not quite sure what to say, Ori simply let whatever words came into his head pass his lips without trying to edit them en route.

  “He was so kind to me, sir. Patient, and strong, and he taught me about…” He closed his eyes.

  “Go on,” Hamilton pushed.

 
“He taught me that who I was wasn’t anything to be ashamed of. Submission is something a man can take pride in—it takes strength to commit to following another man that way. Loyalty is as important as leadership and…” Ori sighed. “That was before, sir…when he thought I was a duckling.”

  He forced himself to lift his gaze and try to get some sense of what Mr Hamilton might think of him and his rambling recollections.

  “Did he ever punish you, sire?” The question was asked very carefully.

  Ori answered it honestly. He recounted the story of the china cabinet, and a dozen other memories of occasions large and small. Mr Hamilton didn’t seem to be bored. He listened vigilantly to every word, as if it were the most important conversation he had ever had with another man.

  Finally, Mr Hamilton seemed to run out of questions.

  With his head swirling with all the memories the conversation had dredged up, Ori took a deep breath and tried to find the kind of mental balance that submitting to Raynard had inspired in him.

  Another minute passed, and Mr Hamilton found another question for him. “You’re aware that your station in the nest means that you can summon any member of the avian community to attend you, at any time, and for any reason?”

  Ori nodded. The facts of the matter had been explained to him several times, even if he still couldn’t bring himself to like any of them. If a bird of prey didn’t have to heed a swan, a swan would be no use on the council of elders. That’s why no one could disobey him. It was the one line in the avian sand that could never risk being blurred.

  “You could summon Raynard here, if you were inclined to remind him just how well you suited each other.”

  Ori frowned, trying to see where the joke was leading and failing.

  “Do you think that’s something you’d like to do, sire?” Mr Hamilton pushed, not sounding the least bit like he was heading for a punch line.

  “I don’t think Mr Raynard would be pleased with me if I did that, sir.”

  “Perhaps not,” Mr Hamilton allowed. “But perhaps it would be worth him being temporarily displeased with you, if it meant you’d be able to see more of him in the future? Maybe even come to some sort of an arrangement with him…”