Anyway, it was a sunny day, he’d finally gotten a good night’s sleep in a real bed after a lovely hot bath, not to mention being thoroughly and filthily wrecked by the handsomest, wickedest man in the kingdom, and he had nothing to do but seduce Corin again and see if he could get a demonstration of that licking thing. Even thinking about it made Aster’s face flame hot and his heart skip a beat, but that only meant it’d probably beamazing.
Despite the lingering soreness between his legs and the sweet aches in every single muscle—God, fucking like that left a body sore in such different and better ways than riding or fencing did—he dressed swiftly, not bothering with looking particularly proper. He’d spent the night in his not-quite-lover’s bed after a day of being fucked into oblivion, and if he wanted to let a rumpled shirt billow loose over his trousers, then he damn well would.
He went rather gingerly down the stairs, stopped at the garderobe, and made his way to the hall. He’d heard someone moving around while coming down the stairs, so he knew Corin was in there, and he walked through the doorway with a cheery, “Good morning! It’s a beautiful day!”
And then he stopped a foot inside the hall, snapping his mouth shut on anything else he might have said. Because Corin sat slumped by the hearth, elbow on the arm of his chair and head propped in his hand, even more ferociously unshaven than he’d been the day before and wearing a wrinkled shirt and trousers with holes in them. He had dark circles beneath his eyes, which gleamed moodily at Aster from under a deeply furrowed brow.
Corin had opened the shutters over the high windows, at least, but the brilliant morning sunlight only made the hall—and its occupant—look all the dustier and gloomier for the contrast.
“What’s wrong?” Aster stammered, that cold knot in his stomach forming again as if it’d never been melted away. “You look—did I—”
“No, fuck,” Corin said, shoving up off his elbow to sit straight in his chair. He scrubbed his hands over his face and then met Aster’s eyes with his own bleak gaze. “No, you didn’t do a fucking thing except the thing we already knew you did, that being run away from a marriage to a prominent nobleman and embarrass his family and yours in the process.”
Oh, God. Aster didn’t want to know. He didn’t. But he had to.
He swallowed to try to get a little moisture into his suddenly arid throat. “What happened?”
“This.” Corin leaned forward and picked up a piece of heavy parchment from the bench in front of him. Aster hadn’t even noticed it in his focus on Corin. “Read it.”
“Where did you—”
“I flew down to the village last night. And I wasn’t the only one there who didn’t belong.” Corin shook the paper at him impatiently. “Just read it, would you?”
Crossing the room to take it from Corin’s hand felt like walking to the scaffold. When he took it he saw the broken wax bearing the mark of the king’s chancellery.
How the hell had the king gotten involved? He’d approved the marriage, and Marellus might have appealed to him to command Aster to return…his head went so light he nearly staggered. Even if his parents hadn’t wanted to wring his neck before this, being publicly humiliated by the king’s involvement in this affair would drive them to new heights of rage.
He skimmed through the opening nonsense and reached the part of it that mattered. And then he wondered if, rather than getting in hot water with the king, he might instead simply be going mad.His Majesty King Theobert the Fourth…any unmarried man of noble arms…Lord Aster’s hand in marriage…
“What is—the hell is this?” he demanded, looking up from the decree. “What the hell is the king thinking? What the fuck does ‘the value of the aforementioned perquisite’ mean?”
“I’m assuming it means that they’re calculating your marriage portion from what you’re considered to be wor—”
“I fucking know what ‘perquisite’ and ‘value’ in gold mean, Corin! For fuck’s sake,” he snapped, and Corin shut up, raising his eyebrows. “I’m a little upset about having been classified as being one and having the other! It was a rhetorical fucking question!”
Corin grimaced and leaned back in his chair again, shoving his hands in his pockets and frowning. Despite his anger, Aster wanted nothing more than to crawl into his lap. His chest vibrated horribly with the force of his racing heart and his lungs labored and it was making him all shaky. Corin would soothe that away if Aster could only have his arms around him.
“If it makes you feel any better, Sir Gustave didn’t give me a precise amount, because I got the impression that would be determined more on the basis of who was asking, but it did sound like you were calculated to be worth quite a lot.”
“No, it does not make me feel better, Corin! Because that makes me a whore—or no, no, it doesn’t, a whore gets paid, but they’re paying whoever marries me to take me! I’m so bloody undesirable that they have to pay someone to marry me.”
“At least that makes the other fellow the whore—”
“You aren’t helping,” Aster gritted out.
Silence. Thank God, because Aster needed to think this through, which he couldn’t do while Corin kept making it worse with every word out of his mouth. He’d gotten hung up on being called a perquisite and hadn’t quite…
“Wait just a bloody second. They know I’m here with you?” Corin nodded. “Yes, obviously, I’m sorry, I’m an idiot. They must have traced me with magic, I’d think. Dammit.” Another nod. “And they’ve sent this proclamation all over the kingdom?” This time, he only got a sigh in answer. “Which means that any minute now, every fortune-hunting asshole with a sword and shield to his name will be showing up on the doorstep challenging me to a duel, which when I fight and lose, will mean he gets to drag me back to court and get paid by the king to marry me.”
Corin looked grimmer than ever. “I’d say that sums up what’s in the proclamation fairly well, yes.”
Aster couldn’t read much from his tone. Gravelly and deep, as always, maybe even a little more than usual. But a sleepless night spent flying all over the place and arguing with the likes of Sir Gustave, whom Aster knew to be a first-class pompous prick, would leave one a bit hoarse and grouchy.
He wished it were more than that: concern, anger on his behalf. But Corin really wasn’t making it easy to tell.
“So what do we do?” he faltered. “I mean—when they start arriving.” Corin stayed silent, and a dreadful thought occurred to him. He’d spoken without thinking. They might not be a “we” at all. “That is, if you’re going to let me stay.”
He had a sudden vision of Corin ushering him out the gate, all grim and silent the way he was now, and then slamming it behind him. Aster would ride down to the fork in the road and then face a choice: go back the way he’d come, almost certainly meeting some adventurer along the way who’d disarm and humiliate him and then take him home to—God, he shied away from that, unable to stomach the thought of being presented that way to the king, with snickering crowds of courtiers watching from behind their fans, his father’s face red with rage and his mother’s pale with a horrible mix of anger and grief. Having his value in gold announced to the world, a figure that would be bandied about and turned into every possible kind of prurient joke. And then he’d be forced to marry the bastard. And…everything that came with marriage.
