Snare of the Blood Flower: A novella from A Poisoned Land Read online

  Copyright © 2016 Craig P. Roberts

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  All characters contained herein are completely fictional. Any resemblance to real life people is purely coincidental. It takes place in a fictional world with its own laws and moral codes and should not be compared in the same context of the laws and moral codes in the country and time in which it is being read.

  ISBN-13:

  978-1523382569

  ISBN-10:

  1523382562

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Wallace

  Cauly

  Wallace

  Lolita

  Cauly

  Wallace

  Cauly

  The Rat Known as Nate

  Cauly

  The Skip

  A Poisoned Land

  Author’s Note

  Hopefully you will have already read Book 1 of the main A Poisoned Land story. If not, don’t panic! I would highly recommend that you read A Poisoned Land (Book 1: Faith, Lies and Blue Eyes) before jumping into this prequel novella but if you’ve haven’t, it’s not a disaster.

  This short tale begins just over thirty years before the events of Faith, Lies and Blue Eyes and tells the backstory of Wallace Ryder, the Skip.

  It can be read as a standalone story; however I see it more as a little look into the background of one of the characters of the main saga, showing you what makes him tick. There are also some nice links in there to the main saga—more so in the last chapter—for true geeks!

  As with any A Poisoned Land story there will be controversial viewpoints but it’s important to remember that these are the characters’ points of view. Although it is written in the third person, it is very much the thoughts and viewpoints of specific characters. Therefore if you take issue with something that one of the characters has said, thought or expressed in the narrative, and you strongly disagree with their ideas or attitudes, you can feel free to dislike that particular character.

  One last warning: There are graphic scenes of a sexual nature throughout! Many of these scenes are not necessarily meant to come across as ‘sexy’. The aim is to shock, show abuses of power, and even repulse.

  Wallace

  This was the third female visitor today. Or was it the fourth? Wallace Ryder lost count some days of the number of desperate women that came to be fucked by his blue-eyed brother. That’s why he made sure that he noted everything in his logbook.

  At fourteen years old, Wallace shared a two-room mud-dwelling with his older brother. He sat by the wall of the curving room that they had made into their bedchamber, pretending to read. His eyes let him down though, involuntary causing him to peer over the top of his book to the tantalizing scene on the bed. Cauly, at seventeen being the older of the two brothers, knelt behind a woman hailing from Meltanespear. His muscular pale arms tensed as his hands grasped the curves of the sweating woman, who buried her head in the pillow.

  My pillow…

  Cauly’s body perfectly interlocked over the loud-voiced woman’s back and hips. He eventually changed positions. Pushing her chest down and lifting her arse up, he clambered to his feet and squatted, then started thrusting violently down into her.

  It looked clumsy, primitive and awkward but Wallace Ryder yearned to be in his brother’s position. The problem was, where they were now forced to live the fact that he had brown eyes meant that it was a difficult task for him to find a lover. If the brothers had remained in PickerNae in Arland then the situation would have been quite the opposite. In Arland, people feared those with blue-sight. They feared that the Great Poison which killed so many nearly one thousand years ago still remained within the bodies of those with blue-sight. Here in the Ten Kingdoms, however, people with blue eyes were regarded as royalty, high lords, believed to be descendants from the gods—or, in the case of Wallace’s brother, desirable males who could sell their fertile seed for coin.

  Lucky cunt, Wallace thought as he watched Cauly grimace as his butt cheeks clenched with one final thrust.

  “Awwwww,” Cauly Ryder groaned as he pulled his cock out. “Money well spent.”

  The woman flopped onto her side and reached into a cloth bag lying next to her on the bed.

  My bed…

  “I most certainly hope so,” she said, offering Cauly a hand that was full of coins.

  Wallace stood quickly, interrupting the exchange. He grabbed the coins and counted four gold Tallans and two silver Torrens. With a flick of a finger he slid one of the silvers down the sleeve of his black jacket. “You’re short by one silver,” he told the woman. “Are you trying to cheat us?” Wallace pulled the most astonished and bemused face he could muster. “She’s trying to cheat us, Cauly. And that was your best shot, wasn’t it? She’s bound to be with child now.”

  Cauly nodded, playing along with their usual double act that Wallace had taught him and that he had now mastered.

  “That was your first one of the day as well,” Wallace continued his performance. “A full load she got. And yet she still tries to cheat us.” He stared into the woman’s brown eyes, a coy smile appearing. Clearing his throat and pulling down on the bottom of his suit jacket to smooth out the wrinkles, Wallace pressed on, adding, “That was prime blue-eyed seed you just received. Where else are you going to get that for four-and-two? Nowhere, that’s where!”

  Cauly climbed off the bed and began to pull on his cottons and white armless tunic. The woman continued to stare at Wallace. Her eyes wandered to his thieving-sleeve. His heart thudded in his chest. She knows. They made eye contact again, her gaze piercing into his mind.

  “Do not time-fuck with me, little boy. You can stand there in your fancy little fitted-suit pretending to be a businessman all you like, but you’ve got a lot to learn about the real world.” She sat up and pushed Wallace in the chest. He fell backwards, banging his head against the hard dried-mud wall. After gathering up her clothes, the woman scurried naked from the room. Her footfalls padded through the other room—the sound stopped as she left, out into the surrounding desert in the direction of town.

  “Why do you always have to push for more?” Cauly asked with a laugh and a shake of his head.

  Wallace rubbed the back of his tender head. “You’d be getting nothing if it wasn’t for me keeping charge of the coin,” he said to his less intelligent older brother.

  “She gave us what we asked for and she got what she wanted,” Cauly replied, not properly understanding how business worked.

  “Look, you do what you’re good at,” Wallace pointed at the bed, “and I’ll do what I’m good at.” He pocketed the coins, then Cauly offered him a hand to stand up. He grabbed his big brother’s wrist, and he was pulled up to his feet with ease. Wallace walked over to the writing desk and wrote the transaction into his logbook. Well what do you know? That was the fourth one today, he thought, checking his notes from the day’s takings.

  “Cauly,” Wallace called to his brother. “Could you start supper? I need to check all the coin before I go in to bank it tomorrow morning in Meltanespear.”

  “I don’t know what to make though,” Cauly said, standing in the middle of the room, shaking his legs and stretching his arms after his hard day’s work. “You’re better at cooking than me.”
/>   “Then you’re the one that needs more practice,” Wallace replied, turning to face Cauly. “And I’m better than you at everything,” he said, tapping the side of his head to emphasize his intelligence to his dim-witted older brother.

  “Whatever, mate,” his brother said, grabbing a pillow and throwing it at him, laughing. Cauly went through to their little kitchen, the room that the woman had just run through to exit their home.

  “And close the door over,” Wallace told him. “It’ll be getting dark soon and I don’t want all the heat from the fire getting out.”

  The desert was a furnace during the day, but at night you’d pray for the baking sun to return.

  Cauly hauled down the sectioned metal doors until they locked into place at ground level. It felt safe and contained once those big heavy shutters were down. There was nothing but sand around the brothers’ home for three hundred footfalls in one direction, towards Meltanespear, and countless leagues to the other. The light from the fire bounced off the curving mud walls of their little dwelling—every inch of it earned by them and them alone.

  The Ten Kingdoms had allowed them to do this. If you had an idea to make money, you just went ahead and did it. Not like back in Arland, where their father had been compelled to apply to the local viceroy for every tiny little adaption he wanted to make to his business…his business! If their father had been allowed the freedom that his two sons had now, Wallace was convinced that their family would have been rich.

  The two brothers sat on the floor with their backs against the bed, eating the soup that Cauly had taken an age to make. The quality of the meal didn’t reflect the effort that he had put in to prepare it. “Did you even chop any of the it?” Wallace asked with a smirk, presenting a nearly whole carrot to his older brother.

  “I thought I did,” Cauly replied, with a concentrated look on his face as if he was actually trying to recall how he had prepared the meal.

  Wallace laughed. “Food is food,” he said and patted his big brother’s broad shoulder. “It all goes down the same way and still tastes good because we fucking earned it. The Ryder brothers!” He raised his wooden cup that was filled with water.

  “The Ryder brothers!” Cauly echoed.

  “One day, we won’t need to do our own cooking. We’re going to be rich you and me, Cauly.”

  “Rich,” Cauly agreed with a nod as he took a slug of water.

  “Listen, I heard people talking in the town the other day, saying that King Polus aims to anoint fifty new blue-eyed lords before this moon-turn is through.”

  “What the fuck is that?” Cauly asked, bypassing the need for a spoon to eat his soup, using the bowl as if it were a cup.

  “In the Ten Kingdoms the kings choose men of blue-sight to become lords in certain areas and it’s their job to ‘spread the seed of So’Chor’ or some shite that they believe.”

  “What’s the point though?” the older brother asked.

  “They’ve done it since the start of the Ten Kingdoms. The kings don’t want men with brown eyes trying to breed—some of them still say that they can’t breed…Fools!” Wallace shook his head at the thought of the tales spun in the Ten Kingdoms. “So they do it to control people…to control who gets to spread life. But it never works. They can’t stop people fucking—boys with brown eyes want to fuck as much as anybody else.”

  “Boys like you, you mean,” Cauly said, punching him playfully on the arm.

  Wallace forced a laugh. It would be different if we still lived in Arland, he wanted to say but held his tongue as he didn’t want to start another argument about that particular subject.

  Cauly must have worked out that his words had caused upset. “Sorry,” he said, looking down at his half empty bowl, swirling the contents around with his finger. “I know that you, Mum and Dad gave up everything for me.”

  They had! Their father had sacrificed their picker business and their mother had lost their home that she had worked so hard to build. Wallace lost his friends and his status but at least here in the Ten Kingdoms he could live. Cauly wouldn’t have been allowed to live if they’d stayed. He would have been cast out, alone—or worse, if they had tried to stay.

  “It’s not your fault,” Wallace forced himself to say. He knew it wasn’t Cauly’s fault to be born with blue-sight but it was still hard to say it. “And now we’re using it to our advantage. And if we could get you anointed as a lord by King Polus, we would get money directly from Deca’Herem for your services and I’m pretty sure that we could double what we charge because you’d have a proper title.”

  “And I’d get to fuck more—something I’m actually good at,” Cauly said with a wink. “And you’d get to count coin more—something you’re good at.”

  Cauly

  Cauly sat on his bed, waiting for the first and only customer of the day. Wallace was talking to her in the kitchen. He could hear the mumbled voices through the wooden door separating the two rooms.

  Later that day they would be leaving for Deca’Herem to come before the King of Last Kingdom to request a lordship. He didn’t really understand the ins and outs of it all but his little brother did, so everything would be fine.

  The door to the room creaked open and Wallace’s face appeared, looking smug. Wallace put a finger over his lips and slid inside, closing the door behind him. Then, with excitement, he whispered, “You’ve not even become a lord and we’re already getting more business. I’ve spread it around Meltanespear that we’re leaving today to travel to the capital so that you can be anointed by King Polus and the women have been going fucking crazy. This one’s paid double what we normally charge.”

  Cauly wasn’t bothered. A fuck was a fuck, but if Wallace was happy, it made him happy. He turned his mind to the woman waiting in the kitchen. “Anything special that she wants?” Cauly asked, hoping it was nothing complicated. Some of the obscure things that their customers wanted were confusing. Sometimes he’d have to talk to them before they got into fucking, or they’d want him to wear certain things. Wallace kept him right in the complicated situations but Cauly still preferred a simple fuck.

  “She says that she wants her seed from a pure boy.”

  “What the fuck does that mean? Like it’s my first time fucking or something?”

  “No,” said Wallace, “it means she thinks you’re from a pure blue-sighted bloodline.”

  “But I do have blue eyes.”

  “No, I know,” Wallace snapped. “That’s not what I meant.”

  He’s getting frustrated with me again, Cauly thought, trying desperately to understand, wishing he could just get on with the simple task in hand.

  “It means she thinks that your mother and father had blue-sight and theirs before them,” Wallace tried to explain.

  “But Mum and Dad didn’t have blue-sight. They were like you.”

  “I know. But if she asks, you have to pretend that they did. She’ll never know the difference. So if it comes up, you need to lie and say that your mother was a cousin of Queen Vasani and that your father was a former lord of the Dead Cities, okay?” Wallace always spoke so quickly that Cauly didn’t pick everything up, no matter how hard he tried.

  “Yeah, got it,” he lied, desperate to please his little brother.

  “Repeat it back to me,” Wallace demanded.

  “Why do we always have to lie though? You’ve always got a plan and then I always fuck it up ’cause I can’t think proper.”

  “Master Ryder?” the customer called from outside the door. “Is my blue boy ready?”

  “Yes, miss. Just a moment,” Wallace said in his business voice, giving the front of his suit jacket a tug and checking the top button of his crisp white shirt was done up. He snapped his eyes back to Cauly, whispering, “Okay. Doesn’t matter. Just don’t speak much. I’ll fill in if it’s needed.” He turned to open the door. “Oh, one last thing,” he added, quickly spinning back around—the flurry of his long suit jacket nearly clipping Cauly in the face. “She wants yo
u to face her while you do it.”

  “And you’ll answer any questions she has?”

  “I’ve always got your back,” Wallace said, holding out two fingers, adding, “Ryder brothers.”

  Cauly copied and interlocked his two fingers with Wallace’s, repeating, “Ryder brothers.”

  Wallace went over to the door and pulled it open to reveal a woman with a comforting face. Not the sort of face that Cauly wanted to be looking at while he tried to cum but not a face that repulsed him. It was simply a nice face—a bit round. She had long black hair that fell on to a faded green dress that looked out of place on her rather round, podgy figure. As she stepped into the room she grabbed the skirt awkwardly to hold it off the ground as if she wasn’t used to wearing such clothing.

  “He is perfect, Master Ryder,” she said, with a slight shake to her voice and a beaming smile.

  “I thought you would be pleased, miss.”

  “Look at those eyes,” she said, studying Cauly. She walked towards him and reached out a hand to touch his chest. With a gasp she uttered, “His body is so firm. This is the first time I have ever seen a boy with blue-sight let alone felt their strength.” She ran a hand over Cauly’s chin, making him feel a little uncomfortable as he had some spots around his jawline. He had burst one earlier and was worried that her groping might make the small scab bleed. “And he is all mine?” the woman asked Wallace while continuing to stare at Cauly.

  “Of course, miss. You have paid for our service and he is yours. Like I was saying, he is of good breeding; direct bloodline with Last Kingdom royalty and lordship from the Kingdom of the Dead Cities. His father was one of King Rigard’s most trusted lords.”

  How does he make up all this shit? Cauly thought to himself as he tried to figure out how he was going to fuck this particularly large customer. Don’t think too much, he told himself. Just go for it. Wallace will cover for me if anything goes wrong. “You are very beautiful, miss,” Cauly said, never really knowing what to say. He was sure he could feel his little brother shaking his head behind him, mocking his shite bed-talk.