“Lan,” Fen carefully rested his hands on Lan’s chest, “only if they meant you harm.” But his face must have told Lan the rest, so he added, “I don’t believe I like the idea of your rope on someone else. Not as you use it on me. No.” That was firmer as Fen thought more on it. “No, I do not like it.”
“And that is why I suspect no one else would do as well for me.” Lan bent to place another kiss on Fen’s furrowed brow. “For I do not like the idea of you captured by any other, whether in battle or in bed. But I didn’t mean to speak of this yet. Or at all, if fate didn’t give me a chance to. Not until you’d experienced more of the world than one holding and a long trek through the woods. Then you came to me with a handful of blue powder and a very loose robe.”
Fen tried to keep his hands still. “But, Lan, though I am an Earl’s son, you can probably do better. If I’m diligent, I can get a more respectable family interested in you. I would… you seem to think I wouldn’t like you having many alliances, and you’ll say that is because of The… because of my father, but I could. Icouldlike it.”
Lan’s silence should have told him something. It mostly made Fen anxious. Perhaps Lan was giving him the assessing stare.
He tried to determine what Lan meant. “You’d like me to understand that you want me for more than the reasons I said?” He was about to ask what the other reasons might be, but if an alliance was not enough and Lan sought marriage, that meant some kind of affection. At least, in songs and stories, it did. To Lan and Race, and Heni and Maril it did. Fen looked up from his hands, no longer caring if they trembled because that didn’t matter. “Dol says it is plainly obvious what I feel. That you stir more than my body. That I….” Lan’s gaze made him swallow and take his bound hands from Lan’s chest to pat his own. “There is a sore, sweet feeling here. Do you have that too?”
“Yes.” Lan’s gaze said Fen had done well. “And heat, when I think of things I shouldn’t. Then you offer them to me and…. Mine. Is what you are—what I’d like you to be.” Lan put Fen’s hands back on him and covered them with his. “When this is over, if you agree, I will try to make you happy, cub.” A strange expression crossed his face. “Not something I’d ever thought to say. Once I started this, I never thought I’d live long enough, and yet now…. Now, I’m starting to believe many things.” He gave Fen’s brow another kiss.
Fen enjoyed the kisses, even if he was still confused and unhappily contemplating Lan putting braided leather on anyone else’s wrist. “Now we celebrate in the traditional way?”
Lan’s smile left Fen warm and aching. “Yes, although you might like me clean first. Two nights I’ve been out.”
If Lan left the tent, others would find him with questions or news, which might have been what he wanted. He might have been willing to wait until tonight. Fen was the one who had hurried to the tent with Lan trailing after him.
His forehead got another kiss. “With the Flower tied up in his bed, what man wouldn’t return as quickly as he could?”
Fen didn’t want another man. He looked up.
Lan took a deep, steadying breath. “From sea to sea. All of it.” Despite what he’d said about needing to clean, he hadn’t moved. “Cub.”
Fen shivered. “Do you remember when you first found me?” A small scoff from Lan was his answer. Fen nodded. “You tied my wrists,” though not as tightly as they were bound together now, “and put a blindfold on me.”
He had been thinking of it since Dol had asked.
One of Lan’s hands closed around Fen’s wrists. “And you wondered if I was going to kill you like that.”
Fen bit his lip before answering. “When I spoke of that to Dol, he was troubled that I was not afraid as I should have been.”
“He’s not the only one.”
Fen met Lan’s dark stare, then nodded before dropping his head. “I will think on that.”
Lan broke the silence between them. “Do you want to know if I would have?”
“You would have.” Fen could not gesture his confidence in that with the rope so blessedly tight, with Lan holding him so firmly and carefully. “If I were a danger to your people. You said it and I believed you. I believe it now.”
Lan’s voice grew rough. “I wouldn’t now.”
“If I turned out to be still be on the side of The Acana?” Fen raised his head to express his doubt. Lan stared back until Fen’s heart beat faster and he finally looked down again. Lan did not seem pleased. “It would pain you to do it now?” Fen was tentative. “You could order someone else to do it.”
“Fenwit.” Lan’s strange growl returned, the one Fen had heard with Lan atop him in a pile of furs and when Fen had told Lan that he could keep Fen in his bed and Fen wouldn’t mind because he didn’t expect anything else.
Fen darted a glance upward. “I am not on the side of The Acana.”
“I know.” The growl remained. “You can go still and quiet, and you can make your voice sound even and sweet, but your hands shake. Terror that you ignore but we can see. You were not on his side then, either. You were frightened, no matter what you thought showed.”
“Oh.” Fen’s hands didn’t shake now. But Lan held them, Lan and Lan’s rope, and Fen was his.
Lan exhaled, the growl leaving him at last. “They shook when I first tied them, although your voice was steady.”
Fen brought his gaze up once again. “Then you blindfolded me.”
“Yes?” Lan agreed, but with a question.
“It was different then. But now, when I think of it, and you, I get warm.” That was what Fen had wanted to tell him when he’d mentioned the memory.
