“You were fantastic,” Rey said.
Eli stared at him. Rey could understand his confusion—Rey had been warning him to keep a low profile since this started. “Sometimes, reasonable measures don’t count any longer, and you need to tip over the boat. You did the right thing. That Olivier fellow was odious--a few minutes of polite conversation, and he was fantasizing about abusing the most powerful noble at the party. If you hadn’t done something, I was going to arrange for him to fall into that ornamental creek later. What you pulled was the kind of trick I live for. If I embellished things a little, or made you slightly unreal to them, that was to make them see you in a different light.”
“But it puts us in danger.”
Rey shrugged. “I did still want to ship you to Lukos, but we can work with this. We just have to work quickly. No one will suspect you’re a de Valois when you’re a country hero. And I must admit, it was nice to say who you were without you constantly trying to contradict me.”
“But you didn’t. I thought you might, at first…”
Rey sighed and turned Eli’s face toward him. “You’re the knight they’ve been telling stories about all over Staria.”
“But it’s a ruse! You were enchanting them somehow.”
“What you said to Sabre was real.” Eli fell silent, his mouth still open in wordless protest, and Rey tapped his chin to close it. “You’re as much a knight as Sir Emeric, though he still managedto shine up his armor a bit, and he didn’t go around eating grass. You care about people. You care when others have given up.”
Eli closed his eyes for a few breaths, standing in the dark hallway with Rey’s hands on his face. “Sometimes I think I don’t deserve to be good.”
“Well, that’s just nonsense,” Rey said, and gently leaned in to kiss him. Eli’s breath caught in surprise, and Rey drew back, letting his hands fall. “I hope you can remember that, when this is over.”
He left Eli standing alone in the hall and climbed up the steps.
Rey’s handswere shaking as he turned the taps on the big porcelain tub in the bathroom. He was getting too close. His feelings were starting to tangle—the job was personal now, not just a silly trick he could pull off and dance away from when tensions broke. It mattered if Eli survived it, if Sabre liked Eli, if Eli felt better about his new life.Elimattered. If Rey were sensible, he would run off and leave Eli to it.
Then he thought of Eli forcing Olivier to his knees, and the girl holding Eli’s old cap like a good luck charm as she slept. Eli was the kind of person who protected small, overlooked creatures who slipped through the cracks, and all Rey wanted to do was go downstairs and see if Eli wouldn’t mind kissing him again.
But then he would have to watch Eli die, or he would put the beads around his neck and spare him, all for Eli to spend the rest of his life resenting Rey for saving him from Sir Emeric’s fate.
“He’s still a mortal,” Rey told himself, letting the bathroom fill with steam. “And you’re just a coward.”
He’d always been a coward. Emeric should never have trusted him. He was too slippery and sly to be trusted. He was a being of story. In the end, he would always return to his nature.
He scratched the back of his neck. He needed to be a fox for a while, to let the tumult of the evening fade away as he disappeared in the threads of his fox self, tethered more to stories than to living mortals.
He’d just stepped out of his clothes when he heard movement at the door. Eli was there, still in his rumpled evening clothes, copper curls starting to stick to his forehead in the steam.
“You kissed me,” Eli said.
Rey was silent, one hand on the edge of the bath.
“Did it mean anything?”
Rey was starting to think that it might have meant more than he realized. Eli pushed away from the door, and Rey felt the old instincts of his body start to stir, the submission he’d buried away in the depths of his trickster heart rising to the surface.
“I noticed you reacted to my dominance earlier.” Eli reached out, and Rey shivered as Eli touched the heavy fall of his hair. “I thought you didn’t have submission or dominance.”
“I can…” Rey swallowed another shiver. “I can usually hide it.”
Eli moved forward, and Rey braced himself on the tub, leaning back. He was a good foot taller than Eli at least, but Eli was still managing to exert his dominance in a way that made Rey feel like he was on his knees. “Did youwantto kiss me?”
“I…I…” Rey’s hips jerked slightly as Eli gripped them, holding him to the side of the tub. He thought of the beads hidden in his coin box, but at the last second, his tongue tripped over the words. “It’s my fault.”
“What?” Eli didn’t sound like he was properly listening. He moved closer, and Rey’s hardening cock slid along the folds of Eli’s clothes.
“When Emeric asked me to steal the sword,” Rey said, babbling slightly as Eli’s fingers dug into the side of his hips. This truth was easier—gentler. Maybe Eli would only hate him a little for this. “I was supposed to bring it to him so he could kill the king, but I was afraid Emeric would die, so I hid it, and when Emeric faced the king anyway, he failed.”
He’d always been afraid of war. He’d wept in the safety of the underbrush as soldiers tore through bodies in the fields of Staria, dreamt of the crunch of bone as swords cracked ribcages and severed spines. Ever the wars for Staria continued, gaining and losing the same trampled farms a dozen times over. Then it became too much, the blood and the viscera and the soldiers gasping in the dirt.
He’d run before it happened to Emeric.
