“It’s my job to be watchful,” Tahlen insisted, truly scowling now, although Zelli didn’t call attention to it. “You’d have to ask Esrin about how I used to be.” He was still holding the apple, although he was no longer spinning it. He inhaled and exhaled and made his scowl vanish, only for a fraction of it to sneak back onto his face anyway. “I was not a fighter, not seriously. Not beyond the usual lessons.”
That veered dangerously close to their conversation last night.
Zelli nonetheless considered the information he had been given, and Tahlen at age fifteen. Tahlen certainly did not seem to have problems charming people now when he wanted to. But Zelli didn’t want to think of him as a young flirt chasing after potential bed partners. “Were you more into hunting and the like? Or were you a scholar perhaps?”
Tahlen’s eyebrows flitted up. His answer was slow, like someone dredging up a distant memory. “I did favor the histories, a little.”
That was more to consider, and more reason for Tahlen to despair of Zelli, who bothered with the histories only when forced. “Is that how you know to advise Grandmother?”
Tahlen had the gall to dismiss his contributions. “It’s only advice.”
“Goodadvice.” Zelli huffed before realizing that Grandmother had likely also consulted Tahlen about her plans for Zelli’s future, possibly even before she’d brought it up to Zelli. “Did you…? Do you have thoughts on my impending alliance?”
“I have thoughts,” Tahlen told the apple before shoving it back into the pack, uneaten, “but not your grandmother’s ear. Not on that. You still don’t eat. You don’t like the biscuits?”
Zelli dutifully had another biscuit, although the one felt like more than enough. He forced himself to swallow, then tried to convince himself to eat more. His mouth was too dry. So was his skin. He twitched with a thousand little itches that vanished before he could scratch them, not that scratching would ease anything.
Hemustbe getting sick, though he didn’t recognize the illness. With the long night and then the stinging in his blood, it almost felt like the early stages of his….
Zelli quickly dropped his gaze to his lap so Tahlen wouldn’t read panic in his expression. He tried to remember experiencing any other symptoms of his lust-fever or his changing problem. But other than some intimate thoughts brought on by Tahlen’s proximity, Zelli didn’t think he was feeling more aroused than usual. He wasn’t restless and craving something he couldn’t identify. And the changing problem usually began while Zelli was asleep.
But if it wasn’t those, then what was it? Normal illness, or some new fae complication?
Tahlen came closer, scarcely making a sound, and bent down to take a biscuit, which he stood up to eat. “They taste fine to me,” he mumbled, then bent again to hand one to Zelli before gently taking the bundle from him.
His fingers brushed Zelli’s, an accidental touch almost certainly.
Yet it was the fire in Zelli’s bedroom fireplace in the depths of wintertime, and a cup of lavender and lemon drink cooled by ice from the mountains in the summer. It was honey in his tea and sweet-smelling balm to soothe the stinging nettles scraping across his flesh.
Zelli snatched his hand to his chest and gazed up, panting, into Tahlen’s frozen look of concern.
“What’s wrong?”
“I would rather you had the biscuit,” Zelli pronounced carefully, then held out the biscuit in question. He did not tremble when their hands touched again, or melt at Tahlen’s feet, or curl against him in grateful relief. He did not, but it was a near thing.
Zelli bit his tongue so he would not moan, then closed his eyes.
The wrongness went away when Tahlen touched him. That was… that was not a good sign. If this was a new fae complication, or a development in one of his existing ones, he really wished his fae relations would have bothered to warn him of it.
He wished….
Zelli had made a wish last night.
“I didn’t realize anyone was listening!” he complained fretfully.
“What?” Tahlen asked.
Zelli’s eyes flew open. “Oh, no.” He had only just gotten Tahlen to not actively dislike him and now he’d done something to make the fae dothisto him.
“Are you feeling all right?” Tahlen looked as if he might check Zelli for fever that very moment.
Zelli wanted the touch of Tahlen’s hand more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. Beneath his clothes, he burned.
He jumped to his feet. “We should get going!” he announced while moving toward Lemon Blossom and frantically trying to think of ways to escape the help from the fae that he had not asked for. This was not what he’d meant.
But the fae answered how they would and there was little Zelli could do about it now. He had to think of something to offer the fae that would make them understand this sort of assistance would only make Tahlen more distant, not bring them closer.
Zelli just hoped he could bear it until that happened or they returned home and he could ask Grandmother what he ought to do.
