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The Fifth Talon’s hand was heavy on the back of Ivy’s neck as he steered him down a corridor of the casino towards what Ivy knew must be a private room. Since he turned fifteen, Viago never corrected him in public.
“Should I be worried?” Neve had asked, perhaps out of understandable reluctance to be left friendless in a Crow den. Ivy’s stomach twinged with guilt but he trusted Teia. Teia’s arms were crossed and rather than the usual smirk, her expression was unreadable.
“Don't worry. He returns me in one piece. Usually,” he’d said.
Teia snorted. Neve said, “Hm.” Viago’s smooth leather glove clenched on the back of Ivy’s neck, sliding up into the short hair at the base of his skull, as if he was imagining throttling him.
“Now,” he’d said in brisk, upper-class Antivan. Palace Antivan, Ivy called it, though Viago had not grown up in the palace with his father or royal half-siblings.
So Ivy went. This walk and what happened after was familiar as breathing, maybe more so after his brief time away. Viago’s hand was warm and comforting even as it made Ivy’s skin prickle, as if nothing had changed after his mistake. As if Viago could forgive him.
Only once they were inside a lavish hotel room did Viago let go, in order to bolt the door and check the window.
A leather herbalist kit lay on a polished desk and a cane leaned against the bed. This was the room Viago stayed in, evidently. Ivy stood where Viago had left him and watched the man pace with the excuse of checking security. As if someone had snuck into the House Cantori’s headquarters while he stepped away and poisoned the bedsheets.
“Teia said you missed me,” he said in the Antivan he’d spoken as a child before coming to the Crows, the sort you heard in Antiva’s alienages. It felt like pulling on a costume after all this time. He’d belonged to the Crows for a decade now and had copied Viago’s accent ever since the man first told him what it was to be a Crow.
Viago turned to him finally. Ivy expected anger and reproach, but he saw none of that. Viago was cold. It was as if a stair-step had disappeared from under Ivy’s feet, the feeling so physical that he almost swayed.
Viago could leave him. That had always been a palpable threat. Even after he earned de Riva name, nothing entitled Ivy to Viago’s attentions. He knew he was close to the end of his leash—he knew he crossed the line with the Antaam. It wasn't even Viago but a messenger who told him of the new contract away from Antiva. But had he gone too far? Were his mistakes unforgivable? Should he sink to his knees and beg for—
Viago hit him.
Slapped him, really, open-palmed across the cheek.
Ivy stumbled and then returned to his position, cheek stinging. He said nothing. This was how Viago corrected him and it was a mark of favor, a leniency. The other recruits hated him for it, whispering about what Viago did to him behind closed doors that left no marks. Sometimes Viago switched him, if Ivy’s mistakes were egregious, but often it was just this. A slap, a lecture. Maybe if Viago wasn’t so gentle, Ivy would have turned out more obedient.
Whatever Viago saw in his face now, it lit a spark of anger in his eyes. He slapped Ivy again with a crack of leather against skin. He felt it from his throbbing nose to his ringing ear and blinked reflexive tears from his eyes, focusing them on Viago’s feet, making himself the picture of penance before talking back.
“I finished the job.”
He didn’t see or expect Viago to hit him a third time. It was softer and more humiliating for it, Ivy’s head not even turning with the blow.
“If you think this is about the Antaam,” Viago bit out. In private, his voice was rough and quiet. Ivy missed him. He’d missed him so much.
“Tell me what it’s about.”
Viago made a frustrated sound between his teeth and began to pace. Ivy resisted the urge to press his hands to his hurt cheek and instead grabbed for Viago’s sleeve when his pacing brought him closest. The gesture didn’t suit his age or his status as a Crow. It reminded him of his mother and his older sisters-or-cousins, he couldn’t remember, who were servant girls in the manor where his mother cooked. She scolded him for being too old to cling to her skirts when he was eight or so, and she was right, since the next year he was old enough to join the children who were taken into the city to be apprenticed, which (Ivy knew now) for an elf meant doing menial labor for little pay.
Ivy had been the youngest girl chosen; the other girls were teenaged, and the other kids his age were boys. This pleased him at the time, making him think that he was special, or (just as thrilling) that he was mistaken for a boy.
Just out of sight of the manor the carriage stopped and Ivy and three other elves his age and older were called off the carriage by name. They were told that this strange man in dark clothes had spoken to their parents, and that they were to go with him. Special indeed.
So they went, first on foot and then by boat. Ivy remembered the name painted on the side: The Vigilance. On board they were given separate tiny, windowless rooms and forbidden to leave them for the interminable length of the trip, so that when Ivy was let out onto the top deck at their destination, he was grateful and willing to follow the first face he saw. That face had been Master Livia’s. He later learned that she was called master torturer among recruits, and she was joined by a host of other teachers. Master poisoner, master trap maker, masters of arms, Master Dario, the elvhen dancer whose hatred of Ivy began on the first day.
And finally, the most powerful of them all, the Fifth Talon, the head of the House that Ivy had been promised to. He met Viago in the fifth year of his training. Of the four elf-children that were sold to House de Riva’s training-rooms from the carriage, Ivy was the only one left. Clara, the oldest of them and the other girl, had not been present when they left the boat in Antiva City. Whether she died on the trip or was taken elsewhere for another purpose, Ivy did not know. Andri, the youngest, tried to run in their first year. He never fully recovered from the whipping he received then; the injuries caused him to make mistakes in lessons and earned him punishment after punishment, re-opening old wounds and gouging new ones, until finally he tried to run again and was killed. The last, Gavriel, died of illness.
The lines of de Riva recruits thinned this way each year. By their fifth year the handful of remaining elves stuck together out of self-preservation rather than any real sense of camaraderie. While Viago addressed the trainees, Ivy noticed his eyes wander towards where he and the other elves stood. Viago was a well-dressed human man, his facial hair neatly groomed in a handsome manner, and his two-headed cane was a threat and a fascination. This man is why you were taken from your family, he thought. This is the man who will make you a Crow. It was the first time he wanted to be a Crow, rather than wanting not to die. Viago’s very presence pulled it from him.
Feeling like a child, Ivy grabbed Viago’s shirt and forced him to stop his pacing. “I’ll finish this job too. I swear.”
Viago yanked his arm away and adjusted his sleeve, eyes down. “First Talon called me to meet tonight,” he said. “‘Rook is alive,’ she told me, ‘he’s come to Treviso to report.’”
Ivy flinched at the name, which was not quite his name.
“The First Talon is the first authority, yes, that I understand. But who did she hear this from?” Viago’s voice became quieter, angrier. “Teia. Seventh fucking Talon. Is it her fault? She has no obligation to share information with me. But you. Look at me.”
Ivy’s head snapped up.
“Ivy of House de Riva. Yet I hear about your movements third fucking hand.” Viago raised his hand for a blow. Ivy shut his eyes so he was unprepared when instead of hitting him, Viago spit in his face. A moment of silence. Then Viago said, “Without my name that is what you are worth. Remember it.”
Ivy wiped his face with the inside collar of his tunic. When he opened his eyes again Viago stood with his back to him, his hands resting on his desk. Ivy walked forward, moving into his space, until even a deep breath would make their shoulders touch, and put a hand on his. Viago’s eyes were shut: good. He worked slowly at first, then when Viago twitched, quickly so that before Viago knew to stop him, he had the leather strap unbuckled. He yanked off one of Viago’s precious gloves.
Ivy had done and undone these buckles hundreds of times in the past five years. He could do it by touch alone, he could do it in his sleep, he could probably do it with his teeth rather than his hands. He knew these gloves better than he knew his mother’s face. So it was simple enough to grab hold of Viago’s bare hand in both of his before the man could react.
But very stupid. When Viago realized what he had done, his still-gloved fist crashed into the side of Ivy’s head. The force of it slammed Ivy against the table, pushing the air out of his lungs and bringing him to a knee. He kept hold of Viago’s hand as if it was his lifeline in a roaring current of the Fade.
Viago’s strength outmatched Ivy’s without question, but Ivy hung all his weight on his arm—his knees left the ground—and he stretched up to put his face against Viago’s clenched fingers.
“You made me leave,” he said.
Viago’s arm went slack and Ivy’s knees thudded to the floor.
When Viago spoke again it was with a sigh. “You are still a child. Stop and think.”
Indignation rose in Ivy’s belly. He was a de Riva, a Crow, not an elf-child vomiting off the side of a boat and crying for its mother. Viago knew all he had learned, knew he was strong enough—he had watched Ivy’s initiation, as he watched and judged all of his House. He knew how many contracts Ivy had completed, because he had ordered all of them.
“You don’t consider the world outside of your own eyes, and you must. Not just the Antaam. There are the other Houses, the merchants. Caterina’s whims. The king and his squabbling heirs.” Viago spat the last sentence. “You faced an ancient god. Do you still think I control the world?”
Only my world, Ivy thought, though he knew it was his wish instead of the truth. There was a strange feeling in his chest, like a shell cracking. Viago’s fingers had relaxed and Ivy held them to him, the palm cool against the heat in his slapped cheek.
Perhaps Viago had not wanted to send him away, but he had still done it. Ivy felt like a child learning his mother couldn’t protect him and it galled him. He was not a child and he burned to prove it.
When the recruits were far enough into their training to specialize, Ivy went to Master Dario with the elvhen girls and some of the elvhen boys. There they learned to dance and seduce, and yes, he wore skirts at the time, but the basics were not so different between the boys and girls. Any human wanted a pretty, willing elf. Viago had never wanted Ivy as a girl—which had made the whispers of Talon whore hurt worse somehow—but maybe a boy was more to his tastes. What Crow didn’t want to put an elvhen boy in his place?
Ivy turned his head and slowly pressed his lips to the center of Viago’s palm. He froze there, hardly daring to breathe, waiting. There was trust here, trust that Viago still trusted him not to betray him, to have access to bare skin and not press poison into it.
He braced for Viago to punch him again.
Viago let out a breath. “Ivy.”
His name. The one thing he had left of his mother and that he wouldn’t change. Nobody ever said it like Viago did.
“Yes?” Ivy breathed against his palm and cradled it to his cheek with a hand, turning his eyes up to capture Viago’s. He had finished entire contracts with only a look from his knees.
“You have always been this creature.” Viago’s hand tightened on Ivy’s cheek.
“Your creature,” Ivy said. You made me it, he accused in his mind. As if he’d heard, Viago looked away and his hand dropped to his side. But he didn’t turn away.
Viago was not tall for a human but Ivy still had to reach up to undo his belt. Viago watched him do it, his expression showing reluctance even as his body gave away his desire. Ivy didn’t bother struggling to yank the leather pants down his thighs, focusing instead on the goal.
He had seen Viago’s cock before: in bathhouses or Viago’s private bathing room. But never from this vantage point, never in his own hand, hardening for him. It was beautiful, large, and pinkish at the tip.
Viago hissed when Ivy stroked him.
Ivy hesitated, overcome. His frantically racing heart told him to throw himself in and take what he could before the opportunity passed. But all of his training told him to take his time, build it up, make it sweet. That was how he fucked contracts. No matter whether he played a virgin, slut, or victim, they all wanted a good long fuck.
He thought of Viago preparing him for this just as he did for other contracts. He has a history with elves, so you should do well, he’d say. Primarily men, but female elves as well. And…
And what? He’s a Talon, he wants a fight and submission. He’s softer in private, so be sweet and willing. You wronged him, he’ll want to punish you; show contrition, but not too soon. An older man who prefers elves, be a virgin for him—
Ivy couldn’t do that. Viago would know it for the lie and manipulation it was. He had given Ivy skirts and watched him smile and simper at a human merchant who called him things in Rivaini that he thought Ivy didn’t understand, and be convincing enough to get invited to the man’s room. His first contract, barely a year ago, and he had finished it.
Viago wasn’t a contract and Ivy was frozen up.
He could see in Viago’s eyes when he realized. Like any other Crow master, he sensed fear and hesitation like a wolf smelling blood. His expression softened and Ivy looked down at his boots, feeling wretched. To come as far as to be face to face with Viago’s hardening cock and then falter… How would Viago ever see him as anything but an insolent child who didn’t know what he wanted?
Viago’s fingers slid into Ivy’s hair. His thumb brushed Ivy's ear, increasing the pressure until Ivy shuddered. He pulled Ivy up onto his feet.
Ivy hooked a finger into Viago's belt, unwilling to be pushed away. But Viago didn't push him away. He held him close, bare hand in Ivy’s hair, fingers stroking the shell of his ear, and when Ivy fell into him, his cheek against Viago’s shoulder, Viago raised his other arm to hold him.
Ivy’s breath came shakily. “Vi,” he said.
“It's all right,” Viago said. Ivy shut his eyes, holding Viago's waist. The last time Viago embraced him Ivy had been fifteen or sixteen and he was sick. The healer gave him elfroot to chew and sent him back to the dorms but he was throwing up blood and all he could see was Gavriel in the last horrid hours of his life, voiding dark fluids from every orifice and moaning in pain until he was too weak to do anything but reach out in front of him as if any one of the recruits—all children like him—would or could help him.
He dragged himself to the workroom Viago kept in the training house. He was denied entry, of course, until Viago stuck his head out at the commotion and told the guard to let him through. Ivy had collapsed against him almost like this except he was shorter then and his head only reached Viago’s chest. Door shut behind them, Viago laid Ivy on a couch and examined him, pinching the sensitive skin of his wrists and ears to wake him enough to answer questions about his symptoms.
“You have been poisoned,” he concluded, and made Ivy drink an evil-tasting vial. When Ivy spit it up onto Viago’s lap, he made him drink another. He nursed Ivy in his own quarters while he expelled the poison. Before he let Ivy out to the dorms once more, he told him, “You have an enemy. One with access to your food or drink. Think, Ivy. Think, and then act.”
Ivy found and killed the recruit who had poisoned him, an elvhen boy who was Master Dario’s favorite. He was not caught, though the grandmasters suspected enough that Viago had to tie him in the yard and whip him until he bled. Then Viago nursed him in his own quarters again, wiping sweat from Ivy’s forehead with cool rags.
Viago didn’t help him kill that boy, but it hardly mattered. Afterwards, the whispers of the Fifth Talon’s elvhen whore followed Ivy everywhere he went. And the worst part was that they weren't true.
Ivy ached for it. Even in Viago’s arms, his breath on Viago’s shoulder, he wanted to be closer, deeper inside. He was as selfish and wanton as the Master Dario ever said he was.
Viago reached between them, tucking his still hard cock away, and Ivy’s eyes burned with humiliated tears.
“I can—”
“Quiet,” Viago said gently.
Ivy was far from untouched. The masters did nothing so distasteful as fuck the fledgelings during training, but the recruits, left to themselves, mostly gained the necessary experience before they took their first contracts. Ivy had no friends amongst the recruits but he had Viago, who escorted him to brothels for better tutelage than his peers could imagine. It wasn’t inexperience that made Ivy gasp and grip the back of Viago’s shirt when Viago pushed his other hand down the front of his pants.
The texture of Viago’s glove was made new against the sensitive skin of his inner thighs and his cunt. He tried to spread his legs and almost stumbled, but Viago caught him.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“Shh.”
“I am.”
Viago shushed him yet again. Ivy gritted his teeth and pressed his mouth to the line of Viago’s shoulder. Viago touched him hesitantly, full of restraint. Ivy wanted to rut against his leg like a dog.
Soon after Ivy’s initiation, there had been the jeweler in Antiva City who was in possession of letters that the Crows needed access to. Viago had put Ivy in skirts—the jeweler was a human man, predictable. He hadn’t been able to wait to get Ivy to his rooms, where Ivy could knock him out and bring Viago the letters, so Viago could read them and decide if it was the jeweler or another party who needed killing.
Not a memorable target. Ivy could hardly remember now if the jeweler was still alive. The night was memorable only because when the man had pulled Ivy into the back alley to fuck him, Viago had ducked out a few minutes after. He leaned against the wall in the squalor, looking like a noble slumming it, not even reacting to the sight and sound of a gasping elf squashed underneath a human a few paces away.
It was horrifying and exhilarating. Viago had never watched before. At the brothels he acted like a prudish chaperone, dropping Ivy off and picking him up again in the small hours of the morning. That night Viago took up his attention like a bright burning sun just steps away, Viago, his Talon, watching. Listening.
Ivy still didn’t know why Viago did it. He never had the courage to ask, and now he wondered if Viago even remembered. From the gentle way he explored Ivy’s cunt, it seemed like he didn’t remember watching how violently it could be used.
Ivy felt it like an itch. The slaps to his face were familiar, the switch across his back was familiar: Viago hurt him and forgave him. This didn't hurt at all.
“Please,” he said.
“It’s all right.” Viago’s breath touched Ivy’s ear. “My fledgling. When you finish your contract you will return to Antiva City. To me.”
Ivy nodded, burrowed into Viago’s chest.
“Say it to me.” He stilled his hand, a torture so unlike the Crow’s favorites.
“I'll come back.”
Viago rested a cheek on the top of Ivy’s head. “Good.”
Then he untangled himself from Ivy entirely and stepped back, leaving Ivy cold all over, his heart pounding in his chest.
“Viago.”
Viago pulled off his other glove and dropped it to the floor with the first. He refastened his belt and ran his hands lightly over the rest of his clothes as if to make sure there were no wrinkles.
“Do you want me to beg? I will.” And Ivy would, if he had to. He would get on his knees and make himself dirt.
Viago turned away, still fixing his clothes, touching them over and over to check.
“Vi. I’m not a child. You can’t send me away—”
Ivy started forward and Viago stopped him with two hands against his chest.
“Enough,” he said, eyes blazing. “It’s enough, Ivy.”
Ivy knew— Viago could send him away. He had before and he was doing it again.
Viago’s face fell at whatever he saw in Ivy’s eyes. Ivy knew he wanted to turn around and hide himself from that look, but if he stopped holding Ivy back then Ivy would keep coming, touch him and move all his clothes out of place again, and Viago knew he would. So he was stuck and Ivy was stuck.
Suddenly Viago gripped the back of Ivy’s neck and kissed him on the mouth.
“You are a de Riva. Finish your contract.”
Ivy earned his name: hours or days shivering naked in a dark basement room in the training house, pulled out only for another torture—amazing how creative his tormentors could be with a simple tool. Like a bucket of water tied between his arms and neck so he had to hold its weight for hours or strangle, drowning him with a stream of freezing water poured over cloth, drowning him with his face shoved in. He didn’t have to be naked, they said, but how could they resist it when they had their hands on the royal bastard’s elf whore?
Ivy had twitched then, thinking Viago would have to kill this man, but Viago only continued to watch, arms crossed, until they were finished.
When he was nine, ten, eleven, Ivy had no confidence he would live to become a de Riva. He watched them kill Andri and he watched Gavriel die and thought, Now no one will be able to tell my mother what became of me. It was only luck that got him through the first years; luck and a certain doll-like beauty that he was sure to outgrow, as Master Dario often reminded him.
He had outgrown it surely by the fifth year of training but for some reason Viago saw him anyway and picked him out to invite into his workroom. Ivy went, followed by whispering, half-jealousy and half-ridicule from the others, himself half-proud and half-giddy, sending out one of his infrequent prayers: Maker, at least let his cock be small.
Ivy saw not an inch of Viago’s skin for years. It was all buckled and hidden away behind leather; a high collar, those gloves. When Viago let Ivy start helping him out of the gloves, Ivy thought of the Maker again, in thanks.
“They will want to keep you slender, so you must learn to be quick with a knife,” Viago told him in the sunny workroom. Ivy, used to the crowded dorms, squinted towards the windows. “Have you any affinity for poisons?”
“I’m not bad with brewing,” Ivy said. His Antivan then was from the alienage and he wondered if this clean, posh man would even understand him. “But I’m not allowed a knife.”
A small boot-dagger was Viago’s first gift to him. He lost it in a contract, stuck in a qunari’s side and sunk to the bottom of the bay, but he remembered what it looked like. There was a blue stone in the hilt, and Viago taught him the name for it. He taught Ivy to care for good Antivan leather, to appreciate Antivan vintage.
When he gave Ivy too much or when Ivy snuck in extra gulps, he discovered what it was to be wine-drunk, warm and floating. Viago barred Ivy from leaving his rooms while he was drunk, as if he needed a chaperone, as if the fledgelings didn’t smuggle in ale and liquor and try to fuck and kill each other every other night. Being confined to Viago’s rooms was of course Ivy’s plan.
“Master. Talon,” he would say, a drunk teenaged elf-girl then, reaching for Viago’s arm. Viago was younger then too, slender and buttoned up to the collar. He was stronger than Ivy, a grown human man, and held his wandering hands down and said his name with a frantic, pleading emotion Ivy couldn't place, or didn't expect to hear directed at him from someone as powerful as the Fifth Talon.
Ivy.