Original -- The Night Serpent (Part II)
Title: The Night Serpent
Rating: R
Word Count: 23,410
Warnings: language; violence; mostly-mild gore; mostly-tactful sex; snark; insanity
Prompt: "The Night Serpent" for the Figure Skating Romance Challenge at pulped_fictions
Summary: It is a sad day when a threat against the Archduke's life, a string of murders, and the incomprehensible interplay of sex and status are the least of everyone's problems.
Author's Note: This is Part II. There is also a Part I.
THE NIGHT SERPENT
(PART II)
Aeratre was running his fingers through Skamett’s hair, because he knew it made Skamett want to kill him.
Want to kill him more, that was.
Skamett rolled over and tried to move out of Aeratre’s reach, curling up at the edge of the bed and pulling the blanket in around him as if it could make him disappear.
No such luck. Aeratre trailed a slow, cool finger down his spine, and Skamett shivered against his will.
He hated Aeratre. That was a fact. His body just didn’t give a shit-it was sex. It was good. That was that.
Well, that was that until the Archduke made various efforts to provoke Skamett into attacking him, which he always used as an excuse to press Skamett into the bed until the mattress creaked, his mouth tracing over the veins of his victim’s neck.
Skamett didn’t feel like provoking him tonight. He felt like dying to spare himself the rest of the night, tomorrow morning, and his uninspiring life.
“You should have kept the wreath on,” Aeratre remarked. “It looked good on you.”
Skamett rubbed gently at a red mark on his chest. “I’m sure Hallum can find you some eyeglasses,” he muttered. “Pity there’s not much to be done for the arrogance.”
Aeratre laughed sardonically, brushing damp hair off of the back of Skamett’s neck and kissing the place. “I should write down the things you say,” he decided. “Let’s see.” He started drawing loopy letters on Skamett’s bare back, his fingertip warm and smooth. “Aeratre, you’re a conceited son of a bitch.”
“If you say so,” Skamett responded mildly, resisting the urge to move away.
There was a knock at the door. Skamett’s spine went rigid without his consent-who the hell could want the Archduke at this hour?
Aeratre sighed, sat up, and tugged on the sheet. “Enter.”
The door opened, and Tyrus stepped in, looking haggard and grave. His gaze darted to Skamett for a fraction of a second, and in his dark, dark eyes, there was no judgment or disdain.
All of Aeratre’s playfulness had disappeared. If there was one thing Skamett admired about the Archduke-a very lonely, isolated thing-it was his ability to transition seamlessly from a self-centered bully to the most powerful person this side of the queen.
“What is it?” he asked sharply, and something in the set of his mouth made Skamett think he already knew.
“The sky,” Tyrus said. “It’s happening again.”
A fragment of a nod saw Tyrus slipping back out the door, and then Aeratre was on his feet beside the bed, throwing his clothing on and searching for his boots.
Skamett scrambled out of the tangle of blankets, caught up his shirt, and shouldered into it.
“Why?” he asked, fumbling to thread himself through the right trousers’ legs. “What did Hallum say? What does it want?”
“He hasn’t said anything,” Aeratre replied, and then he was buckling his belt and running for the door.
Tyrus was already on the wall when they arrived, his face upturned, his hand laid on the ridge of stone before him, scars gleaming silver in the light of the fading stars. The sky had begun to succumb to a wash of bloody red, and Skamett stared, with the deep horror that only anticipation taught, at the widening fissure in the nothingness.
There was no fanfare but the screams from the courtyard below; no warning but a few spitting crimson flames, and the Night Serpent ventured sinuously into the tainted sky.
It was the helplessness that made Skamett’s chest seize and his throat tighten-it was standing witness to the destruction of beauty and being unable to do a thing.
The Night Serpent bared curving fangs, its vast black bulk slithering through the torn and seething atmosphere, and swallowed the furthest and the fullest of the three remaining moons. The night dulled, darkening around them, and then the Serpent vanished the way it had arrived, the stain of redness following.
Silence reigned but for the distant sobbing of some citizen below. Aeratre raised a shaking hand and raked it through his hair.
“It’s coming closer,” Tyrus observed, his voice flat, his focus unchanged.
“What happens,” Skamett asked slowly, “when it runs out of moons?”
“I imagine,” Aeratre answered weakly, “that we all die. Here’s hoping I’m wrong.”
Skamett had never thought he’d hear that.
A door slammed, and they all jumped.
Captain Escevan bent double to catch his breath, and when he had, he panted, “Another murder, my Lord.”
Skamett thought he might throw up everything he’d eaten at the feast.
-
Tyrus crouched beside the body, keeping his boots beyond the swell of blood. A half-crushed Winter wreath lay stranded not far from his feet, wrecked and mocking, persistent at the corner of his eye as he examined the slashed throat and the matted coppery hair.
“We’ll have to buy new carpets, at this rate,” Aeratre said. His tone was light, and Escevan looked at him like he’d lost his mind, but Tyrus knew by the Archduke’s distance and his tightly-folded arms that Aeratre was building barriers against emotions now. He’d chatted with this lady for well over a quarter-hour at the feast, and here she was, sprawled on the floor where she’d fallen, and she wasn’t coming back.
Tyrus stood, striving to ignore the invasive scent of too much blood, clinging sharp and metallic to the back of his tongue.
“She’s a duchess,” Aeratre supplied. “I suppose we’ll have to contact her family. What the hell am I supposed to tell them? What do you say?”
Tyrus didn’t have an answer to that or anything.
“The pattern’s clear,” he pointed out instead. “Young noblewomen alone in the halls.”
“She must have just missed the guard patrols,” Escevan murmured, looking stricken.
“Is there anything else that connects them?” Tyrus asked. “Why ladies like these?”
“Jealousy,” Aeratre suggested, watching the candlelight play on the walls. “Either of their status, or perhaps of the conversation Talith had with me. They were both very pretty. Some people just enjoy cutting flowers while they’re blooming; you never have to watch them wilt.”
“Please don’t disrespect her with unsuccessful metaphor,” Skamett mumbled, mostly to himself. The boy was hugging himself a little ways down the corridor, looking intently at his feet.
“Escevan,” Aeratre said, “please have your men take care of this. I hate to say it, but I don’t think this is our most pressing problem now. I need to talk to Hallum first and foremost.” The captain saluted and strode off, and Aeratre massaged his temples before he spoke again. “Tyrus, stay to relieve him; we can’t have anyone seeing this. Skamett, wait up for me.”
With none of his usual poise, the Archduke turned and headed down the passage in the direction of the astronomer’s tower.
Skamett didn’t move for a long moment, and then he glanced fleetingly at Tyrus before he ghosted away.
Tyrus watched him go, and then he knelt next to the girl-next to Talith, the duchess with the lovely red hair, who had smiled like every happy moment was her last.
He reached out and closed her gray-blue eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
-
A servant had drawn the bath. Skamett had sat in it, his knees rising from the water, his arms wrapped around them, until it had gone cold.
There had been a beautiful breakfast laid out on the table when he’d come back to his room this morning-fruit and pastries and bread and cheeses, a tall mug of the cook’s mildest cider still gently steaming. There had been a note, too: Hope today is better than yesterday, and tomorrow is better still.
He’d picked it up, read it, reread it, and set it down. He wanted to appreciate the gesture, but he hadn’t been able to eat.
At least Tyrus was trying. At least someone was.
‘At least’ never offered him much comfort.
Skamett climbed out of the bathwater, soap trails spiraling across the surface, dried off, and dressed. He rubbed his gritty eyes and sought out the second-youngest child of the late Viscount Cavillor.
Dan flung both arms around him the moment he stepped through the door, a perfect demonstration of the rib-cracking hug he remembered.
“Look at you,” she said, stepping back and raising her hands to his face. “You look like shit.”
Skamett didn’t want to see the worry in her eyes dissolve into something so much worse. His voice filled in a smooth riposte. “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, Dan-I inherited the brains.”
She grinned, but the worry hadn’t packed up yet. “Really,” she insisted. “I’ve never seen you like this. Wait, yes, I have.” Her thumb skimmed his cheek, and her eyes searched his, for what exactly he didn’t know. “You were just like this that one time we explored the gatehouse, when we were kids-you thought it was haunted; I’ve never seen anyone that scared.” The last of the mirth was gone. “What’s wrong? What’s happened to you?”
“You have to go home,” he said.
“Skamett…” She was smiling again, softly and sadly now.
She thought he didn’t know why she was here. She thought he was naïve. He wanted to laugh, but the very idea made his lungs ache.
“I’m not wanted at home,” Daniera told him. “Certainly not needed, but I was never that. Maybe marriage prospects are easy enough for you-” Laughing, crying; they were the same except for the water on your face. “-but it’s hard for me to find men who don’t think it ridiculous that I should even try. Father’s property is all yours; that’s the law. I’ve got very little to bargain with.”
Her words blended together in his ears, and the gentle squeeze as she took his hands felt like motion from a memory.
“You have to leave,” he repeated. “I don’t care where you go; you can’t stay here.”
Daniera’s lips curled upward at the corners, and her eyes gleamed in a way that mirrors made familiar. “I promise not to embarrass you in front of your sophisticated friends.”
“Dan,” Skamett said, grasping her hands suddenly, “listen to me. You can’t-” The door was shut, and the room was empty. He leaned in closer; she was almost taller than him. “You shouldn’t talk about this, but if it’ll knock some sense into you-they’re trying to keep it quiet, but there is a murderer in the castle. In this castle. We don’t know anything, but two girls are dead. Whoever it is, they’re after pretty young ladies like you.”
She was startled, and then she was scared. Progress was a battle waged on a steep incline.
“That’s-” she began. She gave up and tried again. “Well, I-I’ll lock the door. It shouldn’t-”
“That’s not enough,” he cut in, wringing her hands, though he’d told himself he wouldn’t when he’d taken them. “It could be anyone. It could be a servant, or a guard, or another lady eliminating her competition-it’s probably someone you’d think you can trust. You have to leave.”
Of all his sisters, Daniera knew him the best. They’d been inseparable as children, and she could read him-she could read his sincerity, and she was wavering because of it.
“I can be careful-”
He took a deep breath. “Dan, did you see the sky last night?”
“What?” she asked. “No, I fell asleep the second I was dressed for-”
“How about the night before?”
“I-” She frowned, uncertainly, searching his features for the clues she had used to know. “Well-no, we were at an inn-”
“Get out of here, Dan,” he said again. “You have to. Please. You can come back another season if you must, but leave. If nothing else, do it to shut me up.”
After all those years, Skamett could read her, too. The subtlest shift of her jaw-an overture to shaking her head. “Skamett, I…” As she lowered her gaze, it caught on something just below his face. “What’s that?”
One of the phrases that most disgusted Skamett in literature was It landed like a physical blow. The first time he’d read it, he’d thought it a stroke of genius, but by the twentieth rendition of obvious synonyms, he wanted to hang all the authors who committed the crime against his readership.
Daniera’s question landed like a physical blow.
His heartbeat resounded in his ears, but it wasn’t yet loud enough to take away his reason. Dan was still confused and not yet accusatory-there was still time to turn this arrow from its target and slip away unscathed.
“What…?” he began, attempting to follow the trajectory of her glance, only then to ‘discover’ its object. “Oh,” he said. He rolled his eyes and then employed them to give her a pleading look, begging for her indulgence as he rubbed at the angry red mark on the side of his neck. “I was-this is insane-I was reaching for a book on the nightstand, and I got too close to the candle. It hurts like hell. And I know what it looks like-believe me, you aren’t the first to ask-but it’s not. I meant to wear a shirt with a collar, but I forgot it was there.”
Daniera raised an eyebrow, but the expression was amused instead of skeptical. “I guess some things,” she commented, “like clumsiness, will never change.”
Skamett produced a flawless bashful smile. The youngest Cavillor had learned more since joining the Archduke’s retinue than Daniera could conjure in an unpleasant dream.
“You know me,” he said.
-
Aeratre had long believed that assembling taxation registers was his least favorite part of his position, because he had a tendency to imagine peasant children starving no matter how badly the realm needed road repairs.
As it turned out, writing letters to dead girls’ families was by far the worst.
Four drafts and ten ink-stained fingers later, he passed two letters to Vern for a final proofreading. He searched his cousin’s expression for the post-Greval glow-the deep contentment engendered by an extraordinarily good night-but understanding Vern was like interpreting a stone wall.
Impassively the other young man skimmed the letters in turn, Aeratre tapping his quill against his chin.
“Your penmanship somehow gets worse every time I see it,” Vern remarked.
“I am a man of many talents,” Aeratre replied. “How do they sound?”
“Tactful,” Vern said. “Which is unexpected and rather a nice surprise.”
“Excellent.” Aeratre stood and straightened the old linen shirt he wore on days like this. “Send those immediately, will you? Browbeat some couriers.” He sought out and pulled on one of his looser coats. “I’m going to go browbeat Hallum, myself.”
“What do you expect him to do?” Vern asked, glancing up from folding the letters carefully. “Tell the sky in a stern voice that it shouldn’t admit any more monsters?”
Aeratre gave him a reprimanding look. “You never know, with Hallum,” he said. “The sky might listen.”
Vern raised his eyebrows but didn’t comment, and Aeratre clapped his shoulder on the way out. He was going to find Greval and ask a hundred questions the second he had a chance.
In the meantime, he had a lot of questions for Hallum, too. He posed the most important one with his first step into the tower room:
“Just how fucked are we?”
Hallum looked up from a mountain of books and papers, drawing his spectacles down on his nose.
“It’s hard to say,” he answered slowly. “This is entirely unprecedented, and most accounts of the Night Serpent legend speak of it in a fairy-tale context, like a story to scare children.”
“It’s scaring children, all right,” Aeratre muttered, pushing his hair out of his face as he automatically took up pacing the room. “It’s also scaring everyone else. Any news since last night? What the hell is that thing?”
Hallum pressed his lips together and folded his hands, his long fingers steepled over a massive old book.
“I don’t know,” he said. “We’ve been trying to make observations-” He turned to call over his shoulder towards the spiral stairs to the next story, which Aeratre knew was another floor of books and fascinating astronomical devices he wasn’t allowed to touch. “Menegh? Can you bring the charts?”
“Yes, sir!” came the echoing reply, shortly followed by the servant himself, bearing sheaves and rolls of parchment. The boy’s round face was smudged with pencil lead, and his hair was sticking up in the back, but his eyes were warm, and his expression was hopeful. Hallum selected one of the scrolls from the top of the pile and spread it on the table over the books.
“Here,” the astronomer said, sliding his hand over the huge web of marks, numbers, circles, letters, and lines to a strange open space. “I’ve been trying to fill this portion in for years,” he announced, brushing a few flecks of pencil residue from its blankness, “but there’s just nothing to fill in. None of our instruments can detect anything there-it’s like there’s a gap in the fabric of the sky.”
“Except that that’s impossible,” Menegh put in, chewing on his lip. “So we try to think of it more as a blind spot. There might very well be something there; it’s just not anything we can see.”
“Precisely,” Hallum remarked, motioning Menegh closer and selecting another paper from the heap in the boy’s arms. He laid it out on top of its predecessor, showing Aeratre a diagram of their four moons-of the four moons they had had until this nightmare began-with the ominous emptiness set high in the right corner. “The closest thing to an explanation that I can come up with is that perhaps the minerals in our moons are unique, and it needs them to survive.”
Aeratre ran a hand through his hair, which could have done with a wash. “They can’t all be made of the same thing-the Summer Moon is a different color than the others.”
“With all due respect, my Lord,” Menegh said quietly, “untrained observations are often misleading.”
Aeratre blinked at the servant boy, whose gaze dropped as he adjusted a slightly precarious star chart threatening to slip out of his arms.
“Did you just call me stupid?” he asked.
Menegh shifted another scroll and cleared his throat. “Certainly not, my Lord.”
Aeratre couldn’t help grinning. “I like you,” he decided.
Hallum coughed into his hand, and the diverted laughter glinted in his eyes. “In that case,” he noted, “I’ll send him to you if there are any developments. It could be that you’re right, my Lord, and it will retreat without attempting to take the Summer Moon.”
Menegh ducked too late to hide his doubt, and Aeratre shrugged. “With any luck, we won’t have to find out. Suggestions on how to quell the panic are welcome.”
“We’re working on it,” Menegh sighed. “I guess that’s all you can tell them.”
Aeratre managed a thin smile. “Couching things is half of politics.”
In Aeratre’s experience, the other half was bedding them.
-
Skamett hated his Festival tunic almost as much as he hated the wreath. The former was dark green with little curls of embroidery, which he gathered were supposed to invoke tendrils or vines or something of the like, and only looked decent when paired with a belt that tended to slide down past his hips; the latter looked ridiculous and itched. It was challenging to pick his least-favorite part of all of this.
He knew his favorite part, though-the food. The food was always exemplary, as the Archduke had tastes in cuisine as fine as his taste in men, but the quality of the Festival dinners was a tier above the usual.
The wine was an especially nice touch-purportedly, the castle had a cellar full of wine this good, which would explain why the supply seemed to be inexhaustible.
When the dancing started, though, Skamett’s patience inevitably waned. It wasn’t the footwork that kept him as far as possible from the joined hands and the swirling skirts-it was the prospect of extremely unwelcome social contact.
It was really too bad Skamett had inherited a viscounty; he would have made an excellent hermit in a different life.
Aeratre pushed his chair back and strode unhesitatingly out into the midst of the courtiers, bowing and greeting, garnering laughs and smiles everywhere his winding path went. Some of them even looked sincere.
Skamett picked up his knife, polished it with his napkin, and started playing with it, turning it over in his hands and letting it catch the light. The handle was intricately engraved, and he traced along its contours with a fingernail, wondering if memorizing the design would occupy his mind.
He hadn’t seen Daniera, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t here. It would have been very much unlike her to decamp without wishing him goodbye; it was almost inconceivable that she would have heeded his insistences to the letter, and he would count himself extremely lucky if she headed out at dawn.
He hoped that his cynicism would make a fool of him for once.
It didn’t bear thinking about; unless she was in the room, he wasn’t in much of a position for further argument. Glancing up at the assembled company in case she was among them, he twirled the dinner knife once.
Once was enough for him to lose his grip, and it was enough for the blade to slice his right forefinger neatly just above the place it joined his hand.
“Shit-” He fumbled for his napkin, dropping the wet knife and wincing as it clattered against his plate. There was a blur of movement at the corner of his eye, and he turned enough to see Tyrus rise and then settle in Aeratre’s empty chair. Before Skamett could push a clever comment past his lips, Tyrus was looking down at himself, admiring his blue festival tunic for a single breath, and then ripping off the hem.
Speechless, Skamett ceded his bleeding hand when Tyrus motioned for it, and he watched mutely as Tyrus’s strong fingers, dark against his own, tied the shred of ruined finery into a makeshift bandage.
“Keep pressure on it,” Tyrus said as he sat back, wiping his palms on his shirt.
“I’m so sorry,” Skamett said faintly. He wasn’t sure whether it was worse to stare at the red smears on Tyrus’s chest or at the torn hem just below his waist, though it probably didn’t help that he did a bit of both.
“Don’t be,” Tyrus responded, closer to a grin than Skamett had ever seen him. “I’ve always wanted to desecrate this thing.”
Holding his right hand tightly in his left, Skamett mustered a shaky smile.
Tyrus looked at the knife on the table for a moment, and then he stood. “Watch the door,” he instructed, and then he navigated swiftly around the dancers and disappeared through it.
Mystified-and more than a little intrigued-Skamett did as he was told, putting the irritating wreath beside his plate. Time passed so bizarrely when he was alone in crowded rooms that he wasn’t sure whether it was ten minutes or more like twenty before Tyrus returned.
Coalescing from shadow to appear in the doorway, Tyrus had abandoned his festival regalia altogether, favoring plain linen and an expression that, on anyone else, would not have qualified as mischievous. He beckoned, and he smiled.
Skamett shoved his chair back, and it took most of his willpower not to run.
Tyrus started down the hall as soon as Skamett arrived, pushing a heavy wineskin at him and slinging an identical one over his own shoulder by its cord.
“Do you think Aeratre will notice that we’re gone?” Skamett hazarded, as yet completely oblivious as to where they were going to.
“What if he does?” Tyrus inquired. “We’re getting some air.”
That was a slightly cruel turn of phrase; Skamett was breathing a great deal lighter now. This was insane-he and Tyrus sneaking out of a Festival event, armed with their own supply of liquor, Skamett’s pulse beating wildly in his right hand, clenched around the strip of fabric with which the adventure had begun.
Strangely, quashing more than a few half-formed fantasies, Tyrus led them out into the courtyard. Two moons shone-the Autumn Moon broadly full, pale like an eye eclipsed by cataracts-and the conspicuous lack of the other pair seemed to have driven most of the Festival revelry indoors. Skamett understood that urge. Looking at a loss made it feel more pronounced.
Tyrus wasn’t looking at the sky, however; he was looking at the Spire.
At some point in the region’s clearly quite illustrious history, an enterprising Archduke had built the Spire, a monument no more elaborate than its name implied-it was a metal spike that towered a few feet higher than the castle walls. There were all sorts of specifications about it: it inhabited the precise center of the courtyard, equidistant from each of the walls; it stood unshaken by even the most violent of storms; it marked the most level patch of ground for miles in any direction. It was something of a strange landmark, and Skamett had looked at it askance when he had first arrived, but after some reflection, he had reasoned out its origin: one of Aeratre’s ancestors had been compensating for something that wasn’t as impressive as the Spire.
He had not shared his conclusion with the Archduke, because he wasn’t sure if that counted as treason.
Tyrus stopped as they reached the dais from which the Spire rose-it was a marvelous construction in and of itself, a vast cylinder of off-white stone, a full story tall and carved all over with twisting, curling designs not unlike the ones that ranged distractingly on Skamett’s tunic front.
Skamett was preparing a quip about souvenir replicas that might be used to stab people when Tyrus hooked a hand around one of the carvings and started to climb.
It was remarkable how the quietest man Skamett knew had an incredible talent for striking him dumb.
Halfway up, Tyrus glanced over his shoulder, and two moons were enough to illuminate a flash of a grin.
“Coming?” he called.
Not trusting himself to say anything more intelligent than “Uh,” Skamett simply nodded, looped the cord of the wineskin across his chest, drew a deep breath, and reached for a handhold that theoretically wouldn’t get him killed.
Once he was past the initial bewilderment, the morbid curiosity as to what would happen if someone saw them clambering all over a hallmark of the Mordax line, and the very pertinent fear that the next carving he grabbed would crumble and drop him to the cobblestones, the experience was exhilarating. His boots scraped on old stone as he tucked them into curves and crannies; he gripped carefully with his wounded hand, seeking out another, higher mark; the wineskin bounced against his back, sloshing softly, a reassuring weight; and there was something wild about all of it. When he made it to the top of the carvings, separated from the base of the Spire by a foot of blank marble, Tyrus grasped his forearm and hauled him up.
Skamett was panting as he scrambled over the edge. Tyrus released him, and even warm, dark eyes couldn’t bring Skamett to resist spinning on his heel, looking back at the way he’d come.
A nervous laugh jittered out of him before he could contain it. “How the hell are we going to get down?”
When he turned to Tyrus for consultation, the other man shrugged. “Jump, if you don’t mind breaking your legs.”
“Just that, then?” Skamett asked airily. “Why don’t you go first, and I’ll try to land on you?”
Tyrus smirked, folded his arms, and then chose a place to sit with his back against the dull metal of the Spire. He disentangled himself from his wineskin, and Skamett strangled bubbling reservations and settled close by. If he could abandon Festival to climb up a sculpted wall in the dark, he could get near to a man with beautiful hands and unassuming eyes.
Tyrus took a long drink of wine, and Skamett sensed in the miniscule distance between them that he had to start the conversation, but he wouldn’t have to carry it alone.
“Were you born here?” he asked, tilting his head back to look at the Summer Moon-his moon, yellow and small and generous tonight.
“In the capital,” Tyrus said. From Skamett’s place, the other young man was in profile, all angles and eyelashes and moonlit lines. “My father trained soldiers, so he trained me, too, when I was old enough. I met the Archduke when he was visiting, and he’d hired me before the week was out.”
Skamett speculated that this was probably more personal information than Tyrus revealed in the average year.
“What’s your home like?” Tyrus asked, leaving no interval for discussion. “I haven’t traveled much.”
Actually unintentionally this time, Skamett shifted and found himself slightly closer to Tyrus’s arm.
“Boring as hell,” he answered. “I just didn’t realize how much I liked boring until I got here. We’ve got a castle-well, we call it a castle; it’s really more of a keep-out in the middle of the plains, which is a stupid place for a castle anyway. You ought to build a castle on a hill-on a cliff, if you can find one-but I guess the Cavillors have always been pretty stupid, so I shouldn’t be surprised.” Tyrus was smiling, and Skamett’s cheeks were warming without any help from the wine. “Anyway, it’s mostly just farmland and fields. Lots of sheep. And cows-we must have thousands of cows.”
“Chickens?” Tyrus suggested.
“Underfoot,” Skamett told him. “And under-hoof, and under-wheel. You probably can’t walk a quarter-mile down the road without stepping on a chicken and having some yokel scream at you and chase you off his land.”
“Always the yokels,” Tyrus said.
Skamett took a long swig of wine, hoping that the heat dribbling down his throat and filling his stomach might outweigh the one rising in his face. Tyrus’s elbow brushed his arm as the other man went to drink as well, and Skamett demonstrated that Cavillors were very stupid indeed.
“Do you like me, Tyrus?” he blurted out.
He hadn’t said that. It just hadn’t happened. If he believed with enough conviction that he hadn’t uttered such an unbelievably insipid phrase, it would be as if he never had.
The silence was significantly shorter than he had expected it to be.
“Yes,” Tyrus said, his voice low and calm. Skamett took that as a good sign, but his knees were still much safer to consider than Tyrus’s face. “You don’t deserve all this shit.”
Skamett looked up at that. Tyrus met his gaze levelly and then turned his attention to the sky.
“I suppose I’m the closest thing Aeratre has to a friend,” he remarked, “but even I know he’s a bastard. I don’t think it’s really that he enjoys hurting people, not for its own sake-it’s more that he doesn’t even realize that other people can get hurt. All of his life, everyone has treated him like he’s the only worthy man in the world, and I guess he’s come to believe it.”
Skamett took a very, very long drink of the wine.
“That doesn’t justify it,” Tyrus mused just as he lowered the skin again. “I mean, that doesn’t make any of it all right. You’re still a human being.”
Skamett hoped he’d had more wine than he remembered, because the next thing he knew, he had a fistful of the simple linen shirt, and he was crying into Tyrus’s chest.
Tyrus just held onto him until he’d gotten the worst under control. Skamett pulled away, scrubbing at his eyes with the heel of his hand, and managed enough of a stuttering breath to speak.
“Fuck,” he said.
Delving one scar-striped hand into his pocket, Tyrus produced a swatch of dark fabric, and Skamett accepted it, wiping trails off his cheeks. He couldn’t be sure in the dim light, but the improvised handkerchief felt like another piece of the ill-fated Festival tunic. He almost mustered a laugh.
“I probably shouldn’t drink any more,” he pointed out unnecessarily, sniffling as he folded the damp scrap of cloth. “I should probably get down before getting down would kill me. I should probably sleep this off.”
“Probably,” Tyrus conceded neutrally. He gathered the wineskins, stood, gave Skamett a hand up, and started for the edge.
Between the wine and the headache that the tears had left behind, the return to the castle’s halls was a jumble of images-bumps and protrusions of the dais carvings; a detailed perusal of cobblestones and carpet; Tyrus’s hair just barely brushing his collar as he turned his head. Skamett wanted nothing more than for tonight to be over, for the whole Festival week to be over, for the month, the year, the lifetime… Unless you were an extraordinarily accomplished masochist, there didn’t seem to be much of a point.
Tyrus looked to him as they came within a few sharp corners’ distance of the hall that held his room.
“You’ll leave someday,” he noted, “won’t you?”
Officially, he would. Officially, when he was sufficiently cultured, sufficiently ingratiated, connected to the right people and branded with approval, they would let him go.
“Yeah,” Skamett said. “Someday.”
Racing footsteps cut off Tyrus’s prospective reply.
Skamett’s heart leapt as the sound deepened and intensified, the maker moving straight towards them, the candlelight flickering, and there was a short dagger in Tyrus’s hand even though his belt was empty.
Almost imperceptibly, Tyrus angled his body to shield Skamett. The stone walls echoed with someone’s labored breathing, and the footsteps pattered nearer, and Skamett’s fingers clenched so tightly that the injured one reluctantly took up bleeding again.
Daniera Cavillor flew around the corner and barreled straight into them, throwing herself at Skamett so hard he stumbled back into the wall. Tyrus, he saw around her disheveled hair, had raised the dagger, likely in the split-second before she’d impaled herself on it, but Dan was far too distressed to have noticed a thing.
Part of Skamett was prepared to be amused at some crazy explanation, but that part died suddenly when she gasped out, “You were right!”
His heart rattled his ribcage; he knew exactly what she meant. Carefully, mindful of her arms around his neck and her fingers curled in his hair, he stroked her back and eased the both of them to the floor. Relief had filled the space vacated by adrenaline, and Dan was sobbing now.
“I was trying to find you,” she told him, “because I stayed inside like you said, and we were going to leave in the morning, and I wanted to see you before we did, and I asked a guard, and I went to your room, but you weren’t there, and then someone was after me-”
He hugged her tighter, tucking her hair behind her ears, and looked up at Tyrus.
“I’ll find Escevan,” Tyrus said.
Half an hour later, Daniera was asleep, her door barred, a grim-faced guard outside of it, but something told Skamett that the night wasn’t over.
A tentative knock on Tyrus’s door confirmed his suspicions.
The Archduke’s fencing tutor didn’t smile while admitting him, but Skamett was accustomed to that. The glint of recognition was welcome enough, and he wasn’t too proud to take the invitation to settle in the only chair.
Skamett had never been in Tyrus’s room before, and he indexed it in a series of short, surreptitious glances. There were books-lots of books-and a whole rack of sabers and foils, each sharper and shinier than the last. A wardrobe huddled in the corner, brass drawer handles gleaming, and the wineskins rested atop it beside a trio of tall candles spilling wax. The desktop was empty except for a pair of novels, an opened letter, an inkwell, and two pens, and the bed was narrower than Aeratre’s or the one in Skamett’s room, sturdy and unadorned.
Tyrus sat down on the edge of it to address his visitor, clasping his hands.
“Looking for the murderer,” he said, “they found another body.”
Skamett had known that he was going to hear those words.
Tyrus’s hair slid into his eyes, and he swept it off of his forehead again. “This one was a lord.”
All of Skamett’s half-developed theories tumbled to the carpet and broke, and Tyrus must have seen it-he stood, crossed to the wardrobe, and returned with a short knife in a black sheath, which he proffered to Skamett. “Carogan. A marquis. Second-cousin of one of the guards. A friend of the Duchess Talith’s.”
Skamett lifted his hand and closed it around the leather casing, his fingers against Tyrus’s until the other man let go.
“And we still have no idea who’s doing this?” Skamett prompted, looking at the weapon in his lap. “We’re just wandering around in the dark, waiting to see if we’re next?”
Tyrus folded his arms and said nothing, looking at the rug.
Skamett put the knife down on the desk and gripped the corner of his seat with his right hand, blue fabric almost black in the weak light.
“Tyrus,” he said, his throat tightening, “do you like me?”
Tyrus looked at him for a long, long moment, and his faint smile was answer enough.
“I thought you were trying to prove that Cavillors aren’t stupid,” he said.
It was too easy, and perhaps that was the nicest thing about it.
Skamett moved first, floating out of the chair as if it was a sudden breeze to blame; he gathered a fistful of linen in his left hand and raised his right, his thumb drifting over Tyrus’s mouth, his own lips quick to follow. Tyrus’s warm hand settled first at his hip, then his waist, then worked beneath his tunic and traced the grooves between his ribs. The buckle of Skamett’s belt jingled as it tumbled to the floor, but he wasn’t listening; both his hands were under trusty white linen, spreading over Tyrus’s back, sliding around to his stomach, smoothing up his chest. The tunic was gone, though he didn’t know how; he was mouthing at Tyrus’s rough-stubbled jaw, hardly tall enough to reach it; he was kissing at a reddening throat, nipping softly at the neck, exploring a strangely delicate ear with his teeth and his tongue. There were warm hands at his hipbones, then lower; then the bed and the sheets and a curtain of silky dark hair whispering over his collarbones as Tyrus sucked gently at his skin. There was more wine, somehow; too much but not, because he barely remembered where he was, but he knew very well that he never wanted to leave.
Tyrus didn’t know where to put his fingers, but that meant he didn’t think to tease. He was careful but not meticulous, pushing, working, his other hand knitted with Skamett’s, pressed it into the pillow above his head. Skamett’s free fingers were twined in Tyrus’s hair, and he was fighting for breath already, and when Tyrus’s fingertips hit the right spot by sheer coincidence, it was so sudden a jolt of pleasure that Skamett actually moaned before he could stop himself.
It was all Skamett could do to hold himself in until they put it all together, their sweat mixing and running stickily, and Tyrus shuddered violently, and buried his flushed face in Skamett’s neck, and came. Skamett had been clinging to the precipice almost since they’d started, and he just wanted-he just felt-
Stupid, stupid, stupid, and beautiful.
He must have seemed small in Tyrus’s arms, the way they folded around him, the way the blankets muffled the coldness of the stone wall at his back. It was a small bed, and he was a small boy, and he had this small moment, and no one in the universe could take it away.
[PART I] [PART III]
Rating: R
Word Count: 23,410
Warnings: language; violence; mostly-mild gore; mostly-tactful sex; snark; insanity
Prompt: "The Night Serpent" for the Figure Skating Romance Challenge at pulped_fictions
Summary: It is a sad day when a threat against the Archduke's life, a string of murders, and the incomprehensible interplay of sex and status are the least of everyone's problems.
Author's Note: This is Part II. There is also a Part I.
THE NIGHT SERPENT
(PART II)
Aeratre was running his fingers through Skamett’s hair, because he knew it made Skamett want to kill him.
Want to kill him more, that was.
Skamett rolled over and tried to move out of Aeratre’s reach, curling up at the edge of the bed and pulling the blanket in around him as if it could make him disappear.
No such luck. Aeratre trailed a slow, cool finger down his spine, and Skamett shivered against his will.
He hated Aeratre. That was a fact. His body just didn’t give a shit-it was sex. It was good. That was that.
Well, that was that until the Archduke made various efforts to provoke Skamett into attacking him, which he always used as an excuse to press Skamett into the bed until the mattress creaked, his mouth tracing over the veins of his victim’s neck.
Skamett didn’t feel like provoking him tonight. He felt like dying to spare himself the rest of the night, tomorrow morning, and his uninspiring life.
“You should have kept the wreath on,” Aeratre remarked. “It looked good on you.”
Skamett rubbed gently at a red mark on his chest. “I’m sure Hallum can find you some eyeglasses,” he muttered. “Pity there’s not much to be done for the arrogance.”
Aeratre laughed sardonically, brushing damp hair off of the back of Skamett’s neck and kissing the place. “I should write down the things you say,” he decided. “Let’s see.” He started drawing loopy letters on Skamett’s bare back, his fingertip warm and smooth. “Aeratre, you’re a conceited son of a bitch.”
“If you say so,” Skamett responded mildly, resisting the urge to move away.
There was a knock at the door. Skamett’s spine went rigid without his consent-who the hell could want the Archduke at this hour?
Aeratre sighed, sat up, and tugged on the sheet. “Enter.”
The door opened, and Tyrus stepped in, looking haggard and grave. His gaze darted to Skamett for a fraction of a second, and in his dark, dark eyes, there was no judgment or disdain.
All of Aeratre’s playfulness had disappeared. If there was one thing Skamett admired about the Archduke-a very lonely, isolated thing-it was his ability to transition seamlessly from a self-centered bully to the most powerful person this side of the queen.
“What is it?” he asked sharply, and something in the set of his mouth made Skamett think he already knew.
“The sky,” Tyrus said. “It’s happening again.”
A fragment of a nod saw Tyrus slipping back out the door, and then Aeratre was on his feet beside the bed, throwing his clothing on and searching for his boots.
Skamett scrambled out of the tangle of blankets, caught up his shirt, and shouldered into it.
“Why?” he asked, fumbling to thread himself through the right trousers’ legs. “What did Hallum say? What does it want?”
“He hasn’t said anything,” Aeratre replied, and then he was buckling his belt and running for the door.
Tyrus was already on the wall when they arrived, his face upturned, his hand laid on the ridge of stone before him, scars gleaming silver in the light of the fading stars. The sky had begun to succumb to a wash of bloody red, and Skamett stared, with the deep horror that only anticipation taught, at the widening fissure in the nothingness.
There was no fanfare but the screams from the courtyard below; no warning but a few spitting crimson flames, and the Night Serpent ventured sinuously into the tainted sky.
It was the helplessness that made Skamett’s chest seize and his throat tighten-it was standing witness to the destruction of beauty and being unable to do a thing.
The Night Serpent bared curving fangs, its vast black bulk slithering through the torn and seething atmosphere, and swallowed the furthest and the fullest of the three remaining moons. The night dulled, darkening around them, and then the Serpent vanished the way it had arrived, the stain of redness following.
Silence reigned but for the distant sobbing of some citizen below. Aeratre raised a shaking hand and raked it through his hair.
“It’s coming closer,” Tyrus observed, his voice flat, his focus unchanged.
“What happens,” Skamett asked slowly, “when it runs out of moons?”
“I imagine,” Aeratre answered weakly, “that we all die. Here’s hoping I’m wrong.”
Skamett had never thought he’d hear that.
A door slammed, and they all jumped.
Captain Escevan bent double to catch his breath, and when he had, he panted, “Another murder, my Lord.”
Skamett thought he might throw up everything he’d eaten at the feast.
-
Tyrus crouched beside the body, keeping his boots beyond the swell of blood. A half-crushed Winter wreath lay stranded not far from his feet, wrecked and mocking, persistent at the corner of his eye as he examined the slashed throat and the matted coppery hair.
“We’ll have to buy new carpets, at this rate,” Aeratre said. His tone was light, and Escevan looked at him like he’d lost his mind, but Tyrus knew by the Archduke’s distance and his tightly-folded arms that Aeratre was building barriers against emotions now. He’d chatted with this lady for well over a quarter-hour at the feast, and here she was, sprawled on the floor where she’d fallen, and she wasn’t coming back.
Tyrus stood, striving to ignore the invasive scent of too much blood, clinging sharp and metallic to the back of his tongue.
“She’s a duchess,” Aeratre supplied. “I suppose we’ll have to contact her family. What the hell am I supposed to tell them? What do you say?”
Tyrus didn’t have an answer to that or anything.
“The pattern’s clear,” he pointed out instead. “Young noblewomen alone in the halls.”
“She must have just missed the guard patrols,” Escevan murmured, looking stricken.
“Is there anything else that connects them?” Tyrus asked. “Why ladies like these?”
“Jealousy,” Aeratre suggested, watching the candlelight play on the walls. “Either of their status, or perhaps of the conversation Talith had with me. They were both very pretty. Some people just enjoy cutting flowers while they’re blooming; you never have to watch them wilt.”
“Please don’t disrespect her with unsuccessful metaphor,” Skamett mumbled, mostly to himself. The boy was hugging himself a little ways down the corridor, looking intently at his feet.
“Escevan,” Aeratre said, “please have your men take care of this. I hate to say it, but I don’t think this is our most pressing problem now. I need to talk to Hallum first and foremost.” The captain saluted and strode off, and Aeratre massaged his temples before he spoke again. “Tyrus, stay to relieve him; we can’t have anyone seeing this. Skamett, wait up for me.”
With none of his usual poise, the Archduke turned and headed down the passage in the direction of the astronomer’s tower.
Skamett didn’t move for a long moment, and then he glanced fleetingly at Tyrus before he ghosted away.
Tyrus watched him go, and then he knelt next to the girl-next to Talith, the duchess with the lovely red hair, who had smiled like every happy moment was her last.
He reached out and closed her gray-blue eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
-
A servant had drawn the bath. Skamett had sat in it, his knees rising from the water, his arms wrapped around them, until it had gone cold.
There had been a beautiful breakfast laid out on the table when he’d come back to his room this morning-fruit and pastries and bread and cheeses, a tall mug of the cook’s mildest cider still gently steaming. There had been a note, too: Hope today is better than yesterday, and tomorrow is better still.
He’d picked it up, read it, reread it, and set it down. He wanted to appreciate the gesture, but he hadn’t been able to eat.
At least Tyrus was trying. At least someone was.
‘At least’ never offered him much comfort.
Skamett climbed out of the bathwater, soap trails spiraling across the surface, dried off, and dressed. He rubbed his gritty eyes and sought out the second-youngest child of the late Viscount Cavillor.
Dan flung both arms around him the moment he stepped through the door, a perfect demonstration of the rib-cracking hug he remembered.
“Look at you,” she said, stepping back and raising her hands to his face. “You look like shit.”
Skamett didn’t want to see the worry in her eyes dissolve into something so much worse. His voice filled in a smooth riposte. “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, Dan-I inherited the brains.”
She grinned, but the worry hadn’t packed up yet. “Really,” she insisted. “I’ve never seen you like this. Wait, yes, I have.” Her thumb skimmed his cheek, and her eyes searched his, for what exactly he didn’t know. “You were just like this that one time we explored the gatehouse, when we were kids-you thought it was haunted; I’ve never seen anyone that scared.” The last of the mirth was gone. “What’s wrong? What’s happened to you?”
“You have to go home,” he said.
“Skamett…” She was smiling again, softly and sadly now.
She thought he didn’t know why she was here. She thought he was naïve. He wanted to laugh, but the very idea made his lungs ache.
“I’m not wanted at home,” Daniera told him. “Certainly not needed, but I was never that. Maybe marriage prospects are easy enough for you-” Laughing, crying; they were the same except for the water on your face. “-but it’s hard for me to find men who don’t think it ridiculous that I should even try. Father’s property is all yours; that’s the law. I’ve got very little to bargain with.”
Her words blended together in his ears, and the gentle squeeze as she took his hands felt like motion from a memory.
“You have to leave,” he repeated. “I don’t care where you go; you can’t stay here.”
Daniera’s lips curled upward at the corners, and her eyes gleamed in a way that mirrors made familiar. “I promise not to embarrass you in front of your sophisticated friends.”
“Dan,” Skamett said, grasping her hands suddenly, “listen to me. You can’t-” The door was shut, and the room was empty. He leaned in closer; she was almost taller than him. “You shouldn’t talk about this, but if it’ll knock some sense into you-they’re trying to keep it quiet, but there is a murderer in the castle. In this castle. We don’t know anything, but two girls are dead. Whoever it is, they’re after pretty young ladies like you.”
She was startled, and then she was scared. Progress was a battle waged on a steep incline.
“That’s-” she began. She gave up and tried again. “Well, I-I’ll lock the door. It shouldn’t-”
“That’s not enough,” he cut in, wringing her hands, though he’d told himself he wouldn’t when he’d taken them. “It could be anyone. It could be a servant, or a guard, or another lady eliminating her competition-it’s probably someone you’d think you can trust. You have to leave.”
Of all his sisters, Daniera knew him the best. They’d been inseparable as children, and she could read him-she could read his sincerity, and she was wavering because of it.
“I can be careful-”
He took a deep breath. “Dan, did you see the sky last night?”
“What?” she asked. “No, I fell asleep the second I was dressed for-”
“How about the night before?”
“I-” She frowned, uncertainly, searching his features for the clues she had used to know. “Well-no, we were at an inn-”
“Get out of here, Dan,” he said again. “You have to. Please. You can come back another season if you must, but leave. If nothing else, do it to shut me up.”
After all those years, Skamett could read her, too. The subtlest shift of her jaw-an overture to shaking her head. “Skamett, I…” As she lowered her gaze, it caught on something just below his face. “What’s that?”
One of the phrases that most disgusted Skamett in literature was It landed like a physical blow. The first time he’d read it, he’d thought it a stroke of genius, but by the twentieth rendition of obvious synonyms, he wanted to hang all the authors who committed the crime against his readership.
Daniera’s question landed like a physical blow.
His heartbeat resounded in his ears, but it wasn’t yet loud enough to take away his reason. Dan was still confused and not yet accusatory-there was still time to turn this arrow from its target and slip away unscathed.
“What…?” he began, attempting to follow the trajectory of her glance, only then to ‘discover’ its object. “Oh,” he said. He rolled his eyes and then employed them to give her a pleading look, begging for her indulgence as he rubbed at the angry red mark on the side of his neck. “I was-this is insane-I was reaching for a book on the nightstand, and I got too close to the candle. It hurts like hell. And I know what it looks like-believe me, you aren’t the first to ask-but it’s not. I meant to wear a shirt with a collar, but I forgot it was there.”
Daniera raised an eyebrow, but the expression was amused instead of skeptical. “I guess some things,” she commented, “like clumsiness, will never change.”
Skamett produced a flawless bashful smile. The youngest Cavillor had learned more since joining the Archduke’s retinue than Daniera could conjure in an unpleasant dream.
“You know me,” he said.
-
Aeratre had long believed that assembling taxation registers was his least favorite part of his position, because he had a tendency to imagine peasant children starving no matter how badly the realm needed road repairs.
As it turned out, writing letters to dead girls’ families was by far the worst.
Four drafts and ten ink-stained fingers later, he passed two letters to Vern for a final proofreading. He searched his cousin’s expression for the post-Greval glow-the deep contentment engendered by an extraordinarily good night-but understanding Vern was like interpreting a stone wall.
Impassively the other young man skimmed the letters in turn, Aeratre tapping his quill against his chin.
“Your penmanship somehow gets worse every time I see it,” Vern remarked.
“I am a man of many talents,” Aeratre replied. “How do they sound?”
“Tactful,” Vern said. “Which is unexpected and rather a nice surprise.”
“Excellent.” Aeratre stood and straightened the old linen shirt he wore on days like this. “Send those immediately, will you? Browbeat some couriers.” He sought out and pulled on one of his looser coats. “I’m going to go browbeat Hallum, myself.”
“What do you expect him to do?” Vern asked, glancing up from folding the letters carefully. “Tell the sky in a stern voice that it shouldn’t admit any more monsters?”
Aeratre gave him a reprimanding look. “You never know, with Hallum,” he said. “The sky might listen.”
Vern raised his eyebrows but didn’t comment, and Aeratre clapped his shoulder on the way out. He was going to find Greval and ask a hundred questions the second he had a chance.
In the meantime, he had a lot of questions for Hallum, too. He posed the most important one with his first step into the tower room:
“Just how fucked are we?”
Hallum looked up from a mountain of books and papers, drawing his spectacles down on his nose.
“It’s hard to say,” he answered slowly. “This is entirely unprecedented, and most accounts of the Night Serpent legend speak of it in a fairy-tale context, like a story to scare children.”
“It’s scaring children, all right,” Aeratre muttered, pushing his hair out of his face as he automatically took up pacing the room. “It’s also scaring everyone else. Any news since last night? What the hell is that thing?”
Hallum pressed his lips together and folded his hands, his long fingers steepled over a massive old book.
“I don’t know,” he said. “We’ve been trying to make observations-” He turned to call over his shoulder towards the spiral stairs to the next story, which Aeratre knew was another floor of books and fascinating astronomical devices he wasn’t allowed to touch. “Menegh? Can you bring the charts?”
“Yes, sir!” came the echoing reply, shortly followed by the servant himself, bearing sheaves and rolls of parchment. The boy’s round face was smudged with pencil lead, and his hair was sticking up in the back, but his eyes were warm, and his expression was hopeful. Hallum selected one of the scrolls from the top of the pile and spread it on the table over the books.
“Here,” the astronomer said, sliding his hand over the huge web of marks, numbers, circles, letters, and lines to a strange open space. “I’ve been trying to fill this portion in for years,” he announced, brushing a few flecks of pencil residue from its blankness, “but there’s just nothing to fill in. None of our instruments can detect anything there-it’s like there’s a gap in the fabric of the sky.”
“Except that that’s impossible,” Menegh put in, chewing on his lip. “So we try to think of it more as a blind spot. There might very well be something there; it’s just not anything we can see.”
“Precisely,” Hallum remarked, motioning Menegh closer and selecting another paper from the heap in the boy’s arms. He laid it out on top of its predecessor, showing Aeratre a diagram of their four moons-of the four moons they had had until this nightmare began-with the ominous emptiness set high in the right corner. “The closest thing to an explanation that I can come up with is that perhaps the minerals in our moons are unique, and it needs them to survive.”
Aeratre ran a hand through his hair, which could have done with a wash. “They can’t all be made of the same thing-the Summer Moon is a different color than the others.”
“With all due respect, my Lord,” Menegh said quietly, “untrained observations are often misleading.”
Aeratre blinked at the servant boy, whose gaze dropped as he adjusted a slightly precarious star chart threatening to slip out of his arms.
“Did you just call me stupid?” he asked.
Menegh shifted another scroll and cleared his throat. “Certainly not, my Lord.”
Aeratre couldn’t help grinning. “I like you,” he decided.
Hallum coughed into his hand, and the diverted laughter glinted in his eyes. “In that case,” he noted, “I’ll send him to you if there are any developments. It could be that you’re right, my Lord, and it will retreat without attempting to take the Summer Moon.”
Menegh ducked too late to hide his doubt, and Aeratre shrugged. “With any luck, we won’t have to find out. Suggestions on how to quell the panic are welcome.”
“We’re working on it,” Menegh sighed. “I guess that’s all you can tell them.”
Aeratre managed a thin smile. “Couching things is half of politics.”
In Aeratre’s experience, the other half was bedding them.
-
Skamett hated his Festival tunic almost as much as he hated the wreath. The former was dark green with little curls of embroidery, which he gathered were supposed to invoke tendrils or vines or something of the like, and only looked decent when paired with a belt that tended to slide down past his hips; the latter looked ridiculous and itched. It was challenging to pick his least-favorite part of all of this.
He knew his favorite part, though-the food. The food was always exemplary, as the Archduke had tastes in cuisine as fine as his taste in men, but the quality of the Festival dinners was a tier above the usual.
The wine was an especially nice touch-purportedly, the castle had a cellar full of wine this good, which would explain why the supply seemed to be inexhaustible.
When the dancing started, though, Skamett’s patience inevitably waned. It wasn’t the footwork that kept him as far as possible from the joined hands and the swirling skirts-it was the prospect of extremely unwelcome social contact.
It was really too bad Skamett had inherited a viscounty; he would have made an excellent hermit in a different life.
Aeratre pushed his chair back and strode unhesitatingly out into the midst of the courtiers, bowing and greeting, garnering laughs and smiles everywhere his winding path went. Some of them even looked sincere.
Skamett picked up his knife, polished it with his napkin, and started playing with it, turning it over in his hands and letting it catch the light. The handle was intricately engraved, and he traced along its contours with a fingernail, wondering if memorizing the design would occupy his mind.
He hadn’t seen Daniera, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t here. It would have been very much unlike her to decamp without wishing him goodbye; it was almost inconceivable that she would have heeded his insistences to the letter, and he would count himself extremely lucky if she headed out at dawn.
He hoped that his cynicism would make a fool of him for once.
It didn’t bear thinking about; unless she was in the room, he wasn’t in much of a position for further argument. Glancing up at the assembled company in case she was among them, he twirled the dinner knife once.
Once was enough for him to lose his grip, and it was enough for the blade to slice his right forefinger neatly just above the place it joined his hand.
“Shit-” He fumbled for his napkin, dropping the wet knife and wincing as it clattered against his plate. There was a blur of movement at the corner of his eye, and he turned enough to see Tyrus rise and then settle in Aeratre’s empty chair. Before Skamett could push a clever comment past his lips, Tyrus was looking down at himself, admiring his blue festival tunic for a single breath, and then ripping off the hem.
Speechless, Skamett ceded his bleeding hand when Tyrus motioned for it, and he watched mutely as Tyrus’s strong fingers, dark against his own, tied the shred of ruined finery into a makeshift bandage.
“Keep pressure on it,” Tyrus said as he sat back, wiping his palms on his shirt.
“I’m so sorry,” Skamett said faintly. He wasn’t sure whether it was worse to stare at the red smears on Tyrus’s chest or at the torn hem just below his waist, though it probably didn’t help that he did a bit of both.
“Don’t be,” Tyrus responded, closer to a grin than Skamett had ever seen him. “I’ve always wanted to desecrate this thing.”
Holding his right hand tightly in his left, Skamett mustered a shaky smile.
Tyrus looked at the knife on the table for a moment, and then he stood. “Watch the door,” he instructed, and then he navigated swiftly around the dancers and disappeared through it.
Mystified-and more than a little intrigued-Skamett did as he was told, putting the irritating wreath beside his plate. Time passed so bizarrely when he was alone in crowded rooms that he wasn’t sure whether it was ten minutes or more like twenty before Tyrus returned.
Coalescing from shadow to appear in the doorway, Tyrus had abandoned his festival regalia altogether, favoring plain linen and an expression that, on anyone else, would not have qualified as mischievous. He beckoned, and he smiled.
Skamett shoved his chair back, and it took most of his willpower not to run.
Tyrus started down the hall as soon as Skamett arrived, pushing a heavy wineskin at him and slinging an identical one over his own shoulder by its cord.
“Do you think Aeratre will notice that we’re gone?” Skamett hazarded, as yet completely oblivious as to where they were going to.
“What if he does?” Tyrus inquired. “We’re getting some air.”
That was a slightly cruel turn of phrase; Skamett was breathing a great deal lighter now. This was insane-he and Tyrus sneaking out of a Festival event, armed with their own supply of liquor, Skamett’s pulse beating wildly in his right hand, clenched around the strip of fabric with which the adventure had begun.
Strangely, quashing more than a few half-formed fantasies, Tyrus led them out into the courtyard. Two moons shone-the Autumn Moon broadly full, pale like an eye eclipsed by cataracts-and the conspicuous lack of the other pair seemed to have driven most of the Festival revelry indoors. Skamett understood that urge. Looking at a loss made it feel more pronounced.
Tyrus wasn’t looking at the sky, however; he was looking at the Spire.
At some point in the region’s clearly quite illustrious history, an enterprising Archduke had built the Spire, a monument no more elaborate than its name implied-it was a metal spike that towered a few feet higher than the castle walls. There were all sorts of specifications about it: it inhabited the precise center of the courtyard, equidistant from each of the walls; it stood unshaken by even the most violent of storms; it marked the most level patch of ground for miles in any direction. It was something of a strange landmark, and Skamett had looked at it askance when he had first arrived, but after some reflection, he had reasoned out its origin: one of Aeratre’s ancestors had been compensating for something that wasn’t as impressive as the Spire.
He had not shared his conclusion with the Archduke, because he wasn’t sure if that counted as treason.
Tyrus stopped as they reached the dais from which the Spire rose-it was a marvelous construction in and of itself, a vast cylinder of off-white stone, a full story tall and carved all over with twisting, curling designs not unlike the ones that ranged distractingly on Skamett’s tunic front.
Skamett was preparing a quip about souvenir replicas that might be used to stab people when Tyrus hooked a hand around one of the carvings and started to climb.
It was remarkable how the quietest man Skamett knew had an incredible talent for striking him dumb.
Halfway up, Tyrus glanced over his shoulder, and two moons were enough to illuminate a flash of a grin.
“Coming?” he called.
Not trusting himself to say anything more intelligent than “Uh,” Skamett simply nodded, looped the cord of the wineskin across his chest, drew a deep breath, and reached for a handhold that theoretically wouldn’t get him killed.
Once he was past the initial bewilderment, the morbid curiosity as to what would happen if someone saw them clambering all over a hallmark of the Mordax line, and the very pertinent fear that the next carving he grabbed would crumble and drop him to the cobblestones, the experience was exhilarating. His boots scraped on old stone as he tucked them into curves and crannies; he gripped carefully with his wounded hand, seeking out another, higher mark; the wineskin bounced against his back, sloshing softly, a reassuring weight; and there was something wild about all of it. When he made it to the top of the carvings, separated from the base of the Spire by a foot of blank marble, Tyrus grasped his forearm and hauled him up.
Skamett was panting as he scrambled over the edge. Tyrus released him, and even warm, dark eyes couldn’t bring Skamett to resist spinning on his heel, looking back at the way he’d come.
A nervous laugh jittered out of him before he could contain it. “How the hell are we going to get down?”
When he turned to Tyrus for consultation, the other man shrugged. “Jump, if you don’t mind breaking your legs.”
“Just that, then?” Skamett asked airily. “Why don’t you go first, and I’ll try to land on you?”
Tyrus smirked, folded his arms, and then chose a place to sit with his back against the dull metal of the Spire. He disentangled himself from his wineskin, and Skamett strangled bubbling reservations and settled close by. If he could abandon Festival to climb up a sculpted wall in the dark, he could get near to a man with beautiful hands and unassuming eyes.
Tyrus took a long drink of wine, and Skamett sensed in the miniscule distance between them that he had to start the conversation, but he wouldn’t have to carry it alone.
“Were you born here?” he asked, tilting his head back to look at the Summer Moon-his moon, yellow and small and generous tonight.
“In the capital,” Tyrus said. From Skamett’s place, the other young man was in profile, all angles and eyelashes and moonlit lines. “My father trained soldiers, so he trained me, too, when I was old enough. I met the Archduke when he was visiting, and he’d hired me before the week was out.”
Skamett speculated that this was probably more personal information than Tyrus revealed in the average year.
“What’s your home like?” Tyrus asked, leaving no interval for discussion. “I haven’t traveled much.”
Actually unintentionally this time, Skamett shifted and found himself slightly closer to Tyrus’s arm.
“Boring as hell,” he answered. “I just didn’t realize how much I liked boring until I got here. We’ve got a castle-well, we call it a castle; it’s really more of a keep-out in the middle of the plains, which is a stupid place for a castle anyway. You ought to build a castle on a hill-on a cliff, if you can find one-but I guess the Cavillors have always been pretty stupid, so I shouldn’t be surprised.” Tyrus was smiling, and Skamett’s cheeks were warming without any help from the wine. “Anyway, it’s mostly just farmland and fields. Lots of sheep. And cows-we must have thousands of cows.”
“Chickens?” Tyrus suggested.
“Underfoot,” Skamett told him. “And under-hoof, and under-wheel. You probably can’t walk a quarter-mile down the road without stepping on a chicken and having some yokel scream at you and chase you off his land.”
“Always the yokels,” Tyrus said.
Skamett took a long swig of wine, hoping that the heat dribbling down his throat and filling his stomach might outweigh the one rising in his face. Tyrus’s elbow brushed his arm as the other man went to drink as well, and Skamett demonstrated that Cavillors were very stupid indeed.
“Do you like me, Tyrus?” he blurted out.
He hadn’t said that. It just hadn’t happened. If he believed with enough conviction that he hadn’t uttered such an unbelievably insipid phrase, it would be as if he never had.
The silence was significantly shorter than he had expected it to be.
“Yes,” Tyrus said, his voice low and calm. Skamett took that as a good sign, but his knees were still much safer to consider than Tyrus’s face. “You don’t deserve all this shit.”
Skamett looked up at that. Tyrus met his gaze levelly and then turned his attention to the sky.
“I suppose I’m the closest thing Aeratre has to a friend,” he remarked, “but even I know he’s a bastard. I don’t think it’s really that he enjoys hurting people, not for its own sake-it’s more that he doesn’t even realize that other people can get hurt. All of his life, everyone has treated him like he’s the only worthy man in the world, and I guess he’s come to believe it.”
Skamett took a very, very long drink of the wine.
“That doesn’t justify it,” Tyrus mused just as he lowered the skin again. “I mean, that doesn’t make any of it all right. You’re still a human being.”
Skamett hoped he’d had more wine than he remembered, because the next thing he knew, he had a fistful of the simple linen shirt, and he was crying into Tyrus’s chest.
Tyrus just held onto him until he’d gotten the worst under control. Skamett pulled away, scrubbing at his eyes with the heel of his hand, and managed enough of a stuttering breath to speak.
“Fuck,” he said.
Delving one scar-striped hand into his pocket, Tyrus produced a swatch of dark fabric, and Skamett accepted it, wiping trails off his cheeks. He couldn’t be sure in the dim light, but the improvised handkerchief felt like another piece of the ill-fated Festival tunic. He almost mustered a laugh.
“I probably shouldn’t drink any more,” he pointed out unnecessarily, sniffling as he folded the damp scrap of cloth. “I should probably get down before getting down would kill me. I should probably sleep this off.”
“Probably,” Tyrus conceded neutrally. He gathered the wineskins, stood, gave Skamett a hand up, and started for the edge.
Between the wine and the headache that the tears had left behind, the return to the castle’s halls was a jumble of images-bumps and protrusions of the dais carvings; a detailed perusal of cobblestones and carpet; Tyrus’s hair just barely brushing his collar as he turned his head. Skamett wanted nothing more than for tonight to be over, for the whole Festival week to be over, for the month, the year, the lifetime… Unless you were an extraordinarily accomplished masochist, there didn’t seem to be much of a point.
Tyrus looked to him as they came within a few sharp corners’ distance of the hall that held his room.
“You’ll leave someday,” he noted, “won’t you?”
Officially, he would. Officially, when he was sufficiently cultured, sufficiently ingratiated, connected to the right people and branded with approval, they would let him go.
“Yeah,” Skamett said. “Someday.”
Racing footsteps cut off Tyrus’s prospective reply.
Skamett’s heart leapt as the sound deepened and intensified, the maker moving straight towards them, the candlelight flickering, and there was a short dagger in Tyrus’s hand even though his belt was empty.
Almost imperceptibly, Tyrus angled his body to shield Skamett. The stone walls echoed with someone’s labored breathing, and the footsteps pattered nearer, and Skamett’s fingers clenched so tightly that the injured one reluctantly took up bleeding again.
Daniera Cavillor flew around the corner and barreled straight into them, throwing herself at Skamett so hard he stumbled back into the wall. Tyrus, he saw around her disheveled hair, had raised the dagger, likely in the split-second before she’d impaled herself on it, but Dan was far too distressed to have noticed a thing.
Part of Skamett was prepared to be amused at some crazy explanation, but that part died suddenly when she gasped out, “You were right!”
His heart rattled his ribcage; he knew exactly what she meant. Carefully, mindful of her arms around his neck and her fingers curled in his hair, he stroked her back and eased the both of them to the floor. Relief had filled the space vacated by adrenaline, and Dan was sobbing now.
“I was trying to find you,” she told him, “because I stayed inside like you said, and we were going to leave in the morning, and I wanted to see you before we did, and I asked a guard, and I went to your room, but you weren’t there, and then someone was after me-”
He hugged her tighter, tucking her hair behind her ears, and looked up at Tyrus.
“I’ll find Escevan,” Tyrus said.
Half an hour later, Daniera was asleep, her door barred, a grim-faced guard outside of it, but something told Skamett that the night wasn’t over.
A tentative knock on Tyrus’s door confirmed his suspicions.
The Archduke’s fencing tutor didn’t smile while admitting him, but Skamett was accustomed to that. The glint of recognition was welcome enough, and he wasn’t too proud to take the invitation to settle in the only chair.
Skamett had never been in Tyrus’s room before, and he indexed it in a series of short, surreptitious glances. There were books-lots of books-and a whole rack of sabers and foils, each sharper and shinier than the last. A wardrobe huddled in the corner, brass drawer handles gleaming, and the wineskins rested atop it beside a trio of tall candles spilling wax. The desktop was empty except for a pair of novels, an opened letter, an inkwell, and two pens, and the bed was narrower than Aeratre’s or the one in Skamett’s room, sturdy and unadorned.
Tyrus sat down on the edge of it to address his visitor, clasping his hands.
“Looking for the murderer,” he said, “they found another body.”
Skamett had known that he was going to hear those words.
Tyrus’s hair slid into his eyes, and he swept it off of his forehead again. “This one was a lord.”
All of Skamett’s half-developed theories tumbled to the carpet and broke, and Tyrus must have seen it-he stood, crossed to the wardrobe, and returned with a short knife in a black sheath, which he proffered to Skamett. “Carogan. A marquis. Second-cousin of one of the guards. A friend of the Duchess Talith’s.”
Skamett lifted his hand and closed it around the leather casing, his fingers against Tyrus’s until the other man let go.
“And we still have no idea who’s doing this?” Skamett prompted, looking at the weapon in his lap. “We’re just wandering around in the dark, waiting to see if we’re next?”
Tyrus folded his arms and said nothing, looking at the rug.
Skamett put the knife down on the desk and gripped the corner of his seat with his right hand, blue fabric almost black in the weak light.
“Tyrus,” he said, his throat tightening, “do you like me?”
Tyrus looked at him for a long, long moment, and his faint smile was answer enough.
“I thought you were trying to prove that Cavillors aren’t stupid,” he said.
It was too easy, and perhaps that was the nicest thing about it.
Skamett moved first, floating out of the chair as if it was a sudden breeze to blame; he gathered a fistful of linen in his left hand and raised his right, his thumb drifting over Tyrus’s mouth, his own lips quick to follow. Tyrus’s warm hand settled first at his hip, then his waist, then worked beneath his tunic and traced the grooves between his ribs. The buckle of Skamett’s belt jingled as it tumbled to the floor, but he wasn’t listening; both his hands were under trusty white linen, spreading over Tyrus’s back, sliding around to his stomach, smoothing up his chest. The tunic was gone, though he didn’t know how; he was mouthing at Tyrus’s rough-stubbled jaw, hardly tall enough to reach it; he was kissing at a reddening throat, nipping softly at the neck, exploring a strangely delicate ear with his teeth and his tongue. There were warm hands at his hipbones, then lower; then the bed and the sheets and a curtain of silky dark hair whispering over his collarbones as Tyrus sucked gently at his skin. There was more wine, somehow; too much but not, because he barely remembered where he was, but he knew very well that he never wanted to leave.
Tyrus didn’t know where to put his fingers, but that meant he didn’t think to tease. He was careful but not meticulous, pushing, working, his other hand knitted with Skamett’s, pressed it into the pillow above his head. Skamett’s free fingers were twined in Tyrus’s hair, and he was fighting for breath already, and when Tyrus’s fingertips hit the right spot by sheer coincidence, it was so sudden a jolt of pleasure that Skamett actually moaned before he could stop himself.
It was all Skamett could do to hold himself in until they put it all together, their sweat mixing and running stickily, and Tyrus shuddered violently, and buried his flushed face in Skamett’s neck, and came. Skamett had been clinging to the precipice almost since they’d started, and he just wanted-he just felt-
Stupid, stupid, stupid, and beautiful.
He must have seemed small in Tyrus’s arms, the way they folded around him, the way the blankets muffled the coldness of the stone wall at his back. It was a small bed, and he was a small boy, and he had this small moment, and no one in the universe could take it away.
[PART I] [PART III]