Far From Home: The Tribal Chief's Mate- a M/M fantasy romance

2- The Cliff

SRINY'ETE—

Escaping slavery should have been the end of my happily-ever-after. I should have been able to return to my home land Akar, meet a man I loved, and settle down with him and maybe another mate. I didn't care, as long as each time they touched me, fucked me, put their lips and tongues to my skin, I wanted it. As long as each time we mated, it was because I wanted their hands on my skin and their cocks inside me. I knew that love and physical pleasure were things to be desired— I'd seen my mamas and papas together, and I'd seen Jacob with Menya. It was something the Monster hadn't been able to dirty for me. What he'd done to me wasn't sex, it was an abomination and it was torture. Real love, real sex even, was something to celebrated. A way to physically express love or emotion.

As long as it wasn't forced on me, I would've settled for any kind of love.

Little did I know, it was my people who wouldn't settle for me.

They recognized me immediately. Of course they did— even I knew how much I looked like Mama Lillian, though I hadn't seen her in so long, and I was but a child when I did. They recognized me in the border tribes— in the Starwind Tribe and Deercat Tribe. Recognized me, and reviled me for what I had become.

As I travelled through, head down and cloak hood pulled up to cover my face, I could hear their whispers.

"Whore," they called me.

"Slut."

"El'kahrian pet."

I knew then, any hope the boy prince had prayed for me was for naught. I dared not even show my face to my beloved Jacob, for how could he think differently? Yes, he had loved the little boy who followed at his heels and worshiped him. Had laughed at the antics of a child who swore to mate him. Who hugged him and held him and called him my own.

He would revile and despise the dirty sex slave that little boy had become. He would be disgusted by the things that boy had done to survive.

Why even bring myself that pain, when I knew without a doubt that he would feel the same as so many of our people? I knew the Akarans hated El'kahrians and their culture. They hated even the mention of El'kahr, so to have a man who had survived their slavery pressed into their faces? Of course they thought I was tainted and dirty. I had survived in El'kahr for over a decade, so they could only imagine the things I'd been forced, but had nonetheless done, to survive. Akaran honor demanded death before submission to a master not of our own choosing, death before the soul was too dirty to return to the homeland.

So now there I was, on the seaside border of my family tribe, staring down at the churning water that would take my breath— finally. Gods, finally I would be able to just let. go.

Maybe it would be alright. Maybe it wouldn't hurt so much. Though even if it did— I had survived worse. So if it took great pain to finally end it, I was alright with that.

I accepted that.

"Srin!" a voice called, making me flinch and jerk my head back and up. A man, tall and broad, with black hair tinged with gray, mostly around his temples, jumped from the horse who pranced excitedly, nervous to be so close to the edge of the cliff. "Srin, don't!"

The voice was deep and yet soft, and I wanted to let the tears that pooled in my eyes fall at the sound, but I didn't. I held on, my fingers gripping the stones beneath me as I glared up at the warily approaching man.

JACOB—

Dear gods, it's him.

I wanted to sob, to scream, to give a great cry of jubilation at the sight of the young man whose legs hung dangerously over the edge of the cliff.

I'd been told of Srin passing through outside my tribe by one of my mate's sisters, who told me with great trepidation. Her mate hadn't wanted her to tell me, but she'd refused to stay silent, and I would be forever grateful.

There were puritans in Akar who believed any Akaran who was taken as a slave had somehow done something wrong by subjugating themselves to their slavery. So not only did many Akarans have to deal with the evils of slavery, but then they finally escaped or were freed, or however they came home, and they were ostracized as traitors.

It was a great evil I had been trying to quell since I first took the Chief mantle from my mother, but I had been fairly unsuccessful. The puritans hated the El'kahrians so much they believed their slaves had some of the El'kahrian evil rubbed off on them and were no longer pure Akaran.

Now I stared at the beautiful man who sat at the edge of a cliff, the boy I had assumed dead for so long, and wanted nothing more than to take on every man and woman who called that man dirty. Less.

My Sriny'ete, I wanted to cry, staring at his slim but leanly muscled back, the long dark hair falling in thick, straight lines to curl in the dirt around his ass.

Then he turned when I called him and I almost tripped over my own feet and bowled him over. Gods above and below, he was beautiful. Thick, heavy brows hung above piercing eyes a deep green so dark it was nearly indecipherable from black. Full lips, a cleft and yet delicate chin, and a strong, angular jaw.

He wore a shirt and tunic a size too small for him, so they clung to him like a second skin, emphasizing his angular, bony body. His arms and legs long and lean— his legs so disproportionately long I wasn't sure which of us would be taller if he stood. His breeches, on the other hand, were a couple of sizes too big, and were held on only by a thin rope belt.

"Ja..." he began, coughed, and then said, "Chief Jacob," his tone solemn, respectful, and full of terror.

"Srin," I whispered, kneeling far enough away I wouldn't spook him, but close enough we could talk without having to yell over the crashing of the waves beneath us.

Srin's eyes flicked back to the tribe mates I had brought, only six warriors and the hedge witch Yalsa. I wasn't sure what state I would find him in, so I had come prepared. When his eyes next met mine, they were guarded, unsure.

"I thought you were..." I began, completely floundering as to how to talk a severely abused man off a ledge. For if he had been alive this entire time, taken as a boy of only five, I dared not even think of the horrors he had been forced to endure. The horror stories abounded— of children used in the mines, sent into spaces so small an adult couldn't fit, but then never seen again. Of child slaves used as pets by rich El'kahrian children, as if they were toys.

And the worst stories abounded of the Monster, a man who used children sexually when they were so young they had not even a chance of fighting back.

I prayed to the gods my Srin had somehow been lucky enough to have a kind master. One who kept him in the kitchens, or maybe even as a house slave, but never as those other horrible options.

From the haunted look in his eyes, the scars I could see where his skin was uncovered by his clothes, bondage scars around both his wrists and his ankles, and the stories told by the tribesmen who had seen him, I knew I prayed for naught.

"We thought you were dead, little one," I finished, closing my eyes and taking a deep breath to brace myself.

"Not dead," he replied, and his voice sent a shiver down my spine. It was not the high pitched, excitable voice of the boy he had been. It was the deep, almost mournful in its somber tone voice of a man fully grown. "In hell."