Legends of Eastgate: Chapter 1

THE SAVAGE

Twenty-seven Years Before The Escape

---

She stood bold before the window in the moonlight overlooking the street with a thin roll of aromatic tobacco in her hand and a black veil on her face. Her body was not lean. It was full and soft and tan, oiled to a shine and inviting. Her long blonde hair gleamed like liquid gold in the dim light of the oil lamps from the room behind her. She was the very image of all that was womanly, the very heart of his desire, and as Daniel Chalk looked at the woman he loved, sorrow beat a thready rhythm through his body. She turned and looked at him. He could not move from the intensity of that stare.

“When do you leave?” she asked. The left side of her face was lit by the unpredictable rays of the many moons outside her room, the right side warm and glowing in the soft light of the lamps. She looked like two women; one perfect and bright, one dark and clashing.

“He said we are leaving in the morning. We are taking the Redfist, his Clay, Sallon, and Whelter.” Daniel was not done talking but she cut him off quick.

“Is she going?” Her voice was a whip crack, her eyes glowing with anger.

“She is his wife. She is Betten’s mother. She will of course be going with us,” Daniel said.

“Well, good luck then.” She turned away, looking back out at the nightlife below her.

Daniel heard a drunk yell up at her and gritted his teeth. He picked up her multicolored silk robe and crossed the room to her, draped it across her shoulders, and kissed her. She had a way of kissing him, a way that made him feel like the only man in the world. She told him once she was a woman with a thousand kisses, her greatest talent to grant every man she kissed a unique kiss for him and only him. Daniel knew this was ridiculous, but let himself believe it. He took her gently by the hands and led her away from the window. He walked her to the pub chair he had carried up to the room and sat.

She looked down at him and grinned. Her lips moved in a way that made her look sassy and intelligent and shook her head, her hair bouncing around her face. “No,” she said. “You need to go to a barber.”

“I don’t want a barber. I want you,” Daniel said. “You are much better than Butap with the shears, and I would rather look at your breasts than his while you work.”

She shook her head.

He took her hands in his and kissed the fingertips. “Please.”

She huffed and stalked to the vanity, grabbed her shears, and came back. She turned his face up to her and ran her long fingers through his hair. She sighed and began to cut.

There was a fierce beating on the door. “Turn the man and get him out of there!” the masculine voice on the other side of the door yelled. The door was thick and the voice muffled, but the words were clear and hurt Daniel’s heart. “Open this door now, whore, or I will—”

Daniel was already up.

“Don’t hurt him. You will get me in trouble,” she said.

Daniel unlocked the door and opened it to stare at the man before him. He was portly and bald, with a black shirt with no sleeves and a pair of suede pants. He snarled when the door opened, but his eyes widened and his mouth fell open when he saw Daniel. With fear in his eyes, the man held his hands up.

“I want no trouble, Chalk,” the man said. “I did not know she was with you. She has just been up here for a long time and I have a business to run and—”

Daniel tossed the man a few gold pieces, delighting in the fact they dropped to the floor. The man hit his knees, grabbing up the coins, and Daniel shut the door. He locked it and took his seat again.

“I know you hate him, but he is my boss and—”

“And he doesn’t have to be,” Daniel said. “He can just be a nightmare from your past if you will agree to it.”

Fingers brushed and trembled through his hair as she fell quiet. She snipped at the hair and kept working.

“And what will you do? Walk your prostitute lover into the Stonefist ghetto and set me up a bed there to work?”

Daniel winced at the words. He took her hands in his and pulled her around in front of him. “No bed but ours. Not my prostitute lover. Just my wife.”

She stared at him, her tears on the verge of falling. She pulled back, walking around him to cut the back of his hair. “And what would she say to that?”

“Ellen is a good woman. She will embrace you as a sister and—”

“Ellen Stonefist wants me dead.”

“She does not want you dead. She wanted to know if I was being taken advantage of. She heard that—” Daniel fought for the words but no matter which ones he used, they would come out wrong. “She just worries about me.”

An angry snip and the shears cut into the back of his neck just a bit. He knew she had not done it on purpose, and let it go without a flinch.

“She is a horrible woman and you are better off without her.”

“You two would get along,” Daniel said with a chuckle.

“She thinks you are too good for me.”

“That is because she doesn’t know you,” he said. “Let me take you to the ghetto and introduce you to her properly and—”

“I am not proper,” she snapped. She stepped around before him and stabbed the shears at his face. “Look around you,” she said, waving her arms around in the air. “I am a high-priced whore, nothing more. I can’t be the woman you want me to be. You can fuck me. You can shove your cock in my mouth. You can slap me and debase me, Daniel. You can do anything you want to me, but you can’t make a lady out of me. You can’t take me back to your frost brother and marry me. You can’t bring me before Yenna and have me bow to him and take me in as a progetten. That is not what I am. If you want me to, I can go suck Yenna’s royal dick for you, but I won’t beg to enter his nation. I know what his response would be.” She was crying now, but he needed to let her do it. He looked at her, his mind rolling as he let her rage. Rolling over everything he wished he could say to her. Rolling over the denials he would make and the promises he could pledge, but in the end he knew they would all be lies.

He was a Chalk. A man from a noble line, frost brother to the mighty Stonefist line. Tulbo was his life. And to bring a woman like this into Tulbo’s house would be an insult to that line. The way of life he had always known would fall to pieces. Daniel was the last of his line. The wife he chose needed to be a woman of class and culture, a woman ready to dedicate her life to Ellen and the Stonefist name, but this could never be that woman.

He made no promises. He just stood. He wrapped his arms around her as she thrashed and punched. He gripped her wrists and held them to his chest and when she was done struggling and weeping, he kissed her.

“I want you to leave this place and never come back, Daniel. Never come back to my brothel. Never come back to my bed. Take it all with you when you go,” she said.

“Take all of what?”

“Your love for me. Your face, your heart. The hope I feel when I look at you and the warmth I feel when you are inside me. Take it all and never come back,” she said.

He nodded but knew he would come back. He found a home here for a part of him that had been lost for so long. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her in close. He kissed the top of her perfumed head, delighting in the way her silky hair felt against his lips and chin. Before he met her, he had worn a beard since he could grow one. Now he kept it smoothly shaved. When he kissed her, he wanted nothing but to feel her against his face.

She finished cutting his hair and dressed him. She took the red silk scarf off her vanity and wrapped it around his neck. He relit her small roll of tobacco and took a deep drag, then blew the smoke into his scarf. He needed the smells of her when he left this place, knowing he could not come back for a long while. He needed to at least play at obeying her.

He folded the length of the scarf down his chest and she strapped his breastplate on above it. She combed his hair back and slipped his boots on his feet. She kissed both sides of his hands, the backs and the palms, before she slid his gloves on and strapped the baton case on his hip.

“There you are,” she said, stepping back. “Their brave man once again.”

But he didn’t feel brave. He looked out her window at the world beyond and knew he was not brave enough to face the world without her. He kissed her again. When he was done tasting her unique kiss, he leapt out the window and dropped three stories before landing on his feet, then strode down the street. He looked back at her when he had gotten a short distance away. She stood at her window, hugging herself and clenching her robe about her.

He never saw her again alive.

---