Rey rolled his eyes. “I didn’t abduct her. I helped her escape. And she wasn’t a princess, she was a princess’ half sister. It’s all in the details, Eli. Sabre, did you hear about the pirate queen who used to live in the palace?”
“What?” Sabre blinked quickly. “Is this relevant?”
“To us?” Eli gestured between them. “No.”
It was relevant if it made Eli laugh, but Rey didn’t say that. He broke into a slightly exaggerated rendition of his role in helping Queen Solange’s half-sister flee the palace, his voice carrying over the empty fields. By the time he was done, Eli had almost laughed once, and even Sabre was smiling. The gulfbetween them was still there, yawning and painful, but Rey could feel the tension in the air start to relax as he spoke.
When they settled in for the night under an oak at the edge of a field, Eli wrapped an arm around Rey’s waist and pressed his mouth to his neck.
“I know what you were doing,” he said, voice vibrating against Rey’s skin.
“Do you? Clever of you.”
Eli trailed a kiss up to the line of Rey’s jaw and drew away. “It’s a little like submission, I think. People talk a lot about dominance being more powerful because you can use it to make a person kneel or send them under, but a submissive can enchant a ballroom with a few words if they’re not careful.”
“I never thought about it that way.” Rey snaked his arm around Eli’s shoulder. What would his magic have been like if he’d been a dominant king, and not a submissive one? Perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered. The neighboring warrior kings had seen Rey’s farmlands as easy pickings, because no one in Staria took submissive kings seriously. If Rey were a dominant, he might never have surrendered. He might have become something else entirely, something like King Tristan, diving into battle until it warped his mind like a poison.
“Mother always thought submission belonged to small, weak-willed people,” Eli said. “I wasn’t supposed to like weak, small things. Submissives were just tools to use and discard, like pearls or gowns. I was supposed to focus on the throne, the palace, what my reign would be like. But I prefer the small things now. A quiet morning, fireflies in the summer, people playing music in their houses at night—you know you can hear it sometimes, from the outside.”
“I know.” Rey thought of young Eli, half starved for any measure of happiness, listening to someone play the fiddle in awarm house while he huddled for shelter on his own. “I wish you’d stayed on my cart. Maybe it would have been easier.”
“Maybe. But it wasn’t all bad.” Eli sighed. “You talk about how you’re just a small creature compared to the rest of the spirits in Staria, but I don’t think that’s a terrible thing. Sometimes Staria needs a king, like Adrien de Guillory, and sometimes it needs a fox.”
“Or a knight,” Rey said, thinking of what the Harvest Mother had said as she’d wheeled Rey around the festival field. “For the sake of the people who seem too small to be worth saving.”
Eli looked to Sabre, who was asleep a few paces away, long hair spilling over the grass. “I’m glad I fox-napped you.”
“So am I,” Rey admitted. “Just use less rope next time.”
Eli patted Rey’s cheek before curling up at his side, and Rey sat with his back against the tree, watching the last two de Valois sons drift off under a cloudy, starless sky.
Just beyond a distant village, where smoke obscured the rooftops and dimly lit windows, Whet’s Forest was a hulking shadow. It loomed over the horizon, and as Eli and Sabre slept, the wind shifted, rolling over the woods and sweeping the fields around Duciel with the scent of earth and beech leaves rotting on the forest floor.
Eli steppedunder the boughs of Whet’s Forest, shivering in the chill that lingered in the shade beneath the thick canopy.
“Doesn’t this look cozy?” Sabre said. He stopped next to Eli, looking fresh-faced and a little too eager. He didn’t seem like someone who’d spent the night sleeping on the grass. His clothes weren’t mud-stained or sweat-soaked. His reddish-brown hair was tied back loosely so that strands of copper drifted about hisface, and with one hand on the hilt of his sword, he looked like the kind of man who belonged in tales about magic swords and hosts of the dead in need of saving. He flashed a nervous smile at Eli, and Eli looked down at his messy clothes and tugged at his tangled curls.
They barely had time to talk during the short time it took to reach Whet’s Forest and secure Unicorn at a safe distance, not that either of them could manage half a sentence without falling into awkward, painful silence. Rey filled it with chatter, clearly sensing Eli’s distress, but Eli couldn’t help but feel like the distance of their early lives was coming back, stretching between them until they were left trying to shout into the dark. What had he thought would happen? They’d never been close, even before the gallows. All they had was a yearning for what could have been, grief for what they’d lost, and a sudden void opening up in the road before them, terrible and vast.
“It isn’t far,” Rey said, when Eli didn’t respond to him. “You’re sure you want to do this?”
No,Eli thought.I don’t want any of this. All I ever wanted was this. I don’t know, I don’t know.
“Yes,” he said, and strode through the trees.
“You know.” Sabre hurried to keep up. Rey kept an even pace with him, not quite touching, but close enough that Eli could reach out for him if he wanted, and Eli felt a sudden surge of relief. He moved a little closer, and Rey bumped his shoulder. “When this is done, you can always move into the House of Onyx.”
“What?” Eli almost stumbled over a dip in the ground. Sabre cleared his throat and looked aside, a blush on his cheeks.
“I mean, if you want to. We have the space.”
Eli blinked at him, trying to understand what Sabre had just said. “Your husband hates me.”
Sabre blushed deeper. “Oh, no. No, he didn’t know who you were.”
Neither had Sabre, but Eli couldn’t say that. “I don’t want to disrupt your life more than I already have.”
“You haven’t. It’s not—but I want to. You’re my brother.”
