Hardin had raised him for ten turnings, and now he was trying to kick him out. Gently, true, but that didn’t change that his mother’s husband wanted him gone so he wouldn’t threaten his half-brother.
Ten turnings before, Hardin had offered his childhood friend and her son a job and a place on his ranch. As Teer understood it, Hardin had competed with his father for his mother’s hand in marriage and lost. That was part of why he’d left to go east with the rest of the crazy and ambitious.
Teer’s mother Alana had been destitute when Hardin’s letter had arrived. Teer hadn’t understood then, but he knew now that the Unity had lost the paperwork for his father’s enlistment. Instead of a widow-and-orphan pension that should have let them keep their tiny house in a fishing village, they’d received nothing.
Living on the charity of their neighbors had been a struggle for Alana, so she’d taken Hardin’s offer. From what the hands had told him as he grew older, she’d tried to go to Hardin’s bed the very first night, thinking that was part of the payment—but he’d refused her.
His own conversations with his mother suggested that Hardin had been a gentleman about the whole situation for far longer than she would have preferred, but that initial refusal was part of why she loved him.
That had been hard enough for Teer to take, though he’d had seven turnings since the wedding to get used to it. But now, to be kicked out like this…
He still had enough attention and habit left to tie Star to the hitching post outside the combined hotel and bar that served as Alvid’s watering hole. He didn’t really register if his hands’ horses were there before he walked into the building and took a seat at the long wooden bar.
Unlike the crudely fashioned desk in the rental office, the bar was a labor of love. Several entire trees had been sacrificed to its construction, their only encounter with a sawmill being to flatten one side of them to create the surfaces needed for drinks.
“Whiskey,” he ordered as he leaned on the bar.
“Five chips,” the bartender replied a second later, eyeing him cautiously as she slid the drink across the table. “Tab?”
“No.” Teer fished several coins of out his pocket, glanced at them blearily, then slid several blue glass shards across the table. Enough for at least half a dozen drinks. He swallowed the entire glass of whiskey and slid it back to the woman.
“Keep ’em coming,” he requested.
She leaned over the bar, exposing an expanse of cleavage that probably increased her tips threefold and would have held his attention more solidly at a different time, and scooped the coins.
“Fair ’nough.”
Another glass of amber liquid appeared in front of him. This time, he sipped it more slowly, letting the spirits burn their way down his throat as he tried to find some semblance of thought or reason to what was going on.
Even on the wrong side of far too much liquor, he knew he needed to take time to think about Ohlman’s offer. Sober time, which right now definitely wasn’t. He was even aware enough to realize that he should probably stop drinking and get Coral and the others to help him get home.
He’d pay for this in a few ways. Not least because he buried that voice under the rest of the glass of whiskey and waved for another. The bartender obliged, but she was starting to eye him cautiously.
She knew Teer, after all. He couldn’t remember her name at this moment, but they’d met and chatted before. She’d occasionally—probably jokingly—threatened to make a deal with Hardin to marry him to her daughter.
He drained the third glass, considering the world and his newfound problems through the unclear filter of the bottom of an empty glass, then looked up as the door swung open to admit a stranger.
Something about the man held Teer’s gaze, a vague fuzziness around him that registered as wrong to him. He blinked, trying to clear away the alcohol blur, and then inhaled sharply as the stranger finally came into focus.
He was a big man, easily Teer’s height and without the gawky frame of the dark-skinned youth. He wore a long gray canvas duster that only drew attention to the pale tone of his skin. The stranger wasn’t dark enough to be a Zeeanan, let alone a Merik, and that left few options—and his ears left only one.
The man’s ears were long and narrow, rising out of his rough-cut black hair and pointing backward like sharp knives strapped to the stranger’s skull.
Only one race was that pale and had ears that long. The stranger was Spehari, one of the magic-wielding overlords of the Unity. One of the bastards who’d dragged Teer’s father off to war and then broken faith with him after he’d died.
No one else in the bar seemed to find the presence of a Spehari dressed like a long-distance rider odd. They gave the stranger the same once-over they’d give anyone and then turned back to their drinks.
Teer tried to do the same, despite the bubbling anger tearing through him, but the stranger leaned against the bar in the empty space next to him.
“Rum and water,” the stranger ordered. “Cheap rum, if you please.”
“What, you don’t want the finest in the house for nothing?” Teer snapped before he could stop himself. “Isn’t that what your kind do?”
The duster-clad rider turned to look at him with a strange look. He was fuzzy again now that he was close. It was like there was someone else superimposed over him, someone Teer couldn’t quite see.
“My kind? I don’t know what—”
“Your lying, filthy, knife-eared kind,” Teer snarled. “Who come from the sea and lie and betray? Why’s one of you stooping so low as to drink water?”
“Teer, what are you on about?” the bartender demanded. “Sir, I apologize for the kid; he’s had too—”
“Don’t apologize
