12. Elric
12
ELRIC
T he cart stops and Inga walks around to the back of it. She takes something from a box wrapped in roughspun linen and holds it out to Lukas.
“Here,” she says. “Take yourself out of the way for the night and deal with your fucking issues. I will speak to Little Lamb. Rejoin us in the morning.”
Lukas takes the linen-wrapped parcel. “How is Red Wolf?” he says.
“I can take care of my brother,” says Inga tightly. “He will be well with a little rest.” Clearly, she blames Lukas for Red Wolf getting hurt, which is fair.
“Very well,” Lukas says. “But I’m not leaving Underlia with you.”
Inga looks exhaustedly at Lukas, “How unsurprising. Just keep it away from me.” She takes a breath. “And I mean it about what you did to Lamb. Try something like that again and I’ll let him take his axe to your neck.”
Lukas turns to Elric. “Come along, Underlia,” he says and leads Elric away from the party into the woods.
Elric can’t be sure why he raced into that fight. When Lukas dropped the rope he did consider fleeing into the trees. But only for a moment. What would fleeing now gain him, apart from days wandering in the wilderness if his outlaw captors didn’t manage to find him? Lunatum is the only city for miles. So for a moment, he had only stood and watched. Unsure what he ought to do.
He didn’t think Little Lamb would kill Lukas. Elric is certain that if Little Lamb had wanted Lukas dead, Lukas would be dead and there would be nothing anyone could do to stop it. Little Lamb must be bound by loyalty either to Abul or more likely Inga, enough that he wouldn’t simply end Lukas, much as he clearly wants to.
But Lukas was provoking Little Lamb to do just that. Starting a vicious fight deliberately. And as Elric watched he wondered if Lukas’s actions could be enough to break Little Lamb’s control. Or Little Lamb could decide not to kill Lukas, but still injure him seriously.
He had to stop it. And that was why he raced into the fight.
Thinking back on that, he can’t quite believe he did it. Raced into a fight with a man who was an unkillable monster. But his wrists are sore enough to remind him that it's true.
Elric sits on a fallen tree in a small clearing, watching as Lukas builds and lights a fire. The parcel Inga gave him turns out to contain a loaf of bread and a bottle of ale.
She didn’t even give me any of the fucking mushrooms,” Lukas mutters as he divides the bread into two.
“Why did you do that?” Elric says as he eats his share of the hard bread.
“What?” says Lukas, lighting his moonleaf pipe with a spill from the fire.
“Start a fight you couldn’t win.”
“Couldn’t win?” Lukas puts the pipe to his lips. “Not dead, am I?” he says on an exhale, words thick and smoky.
“Only because I intervened to save you,” says Elric, a little smugly.
Lukas takes a swig of ale and smiles, “Oh really?” He’s sitting close to Elric on the fallen tree by the fire. Elric can feel Lukas’s hard thigh almost touching his own. “Save my life, did you, Lordling? Do you expect some kind of reward?”
“You can reward me by answering my question. Why did you do it?”
Lukas shrugs. “Do I need a reason more than that I’m sick of Little Lamb’s shit. It’s hardly the first time the two of us have traded blows over what he likes to mutter about me.”
“I don’t think it was that. I don’t think it was about Little Lamb at all. I’ve seen Little Lamb provoke you and you do nothing. But today, he didn’t so much as look at you and you went for him.”
“And what do you think it was about, Lordling? If not Little Lamb?”
“Damon,” says Elric bluntly. “I think you grieve for your brother. The One Man Army. So you picked a fight with someone you knew would beat you senseless but not kill you. Or not be permitted to kill you.”
“Is that so?” Elric looks at Lukas. He has a livid bruise on his cheek and a tear on his lip where it was split, but it doesn’t mar his beauty, it only seems to enhance it.
Elric nods. “Sometimes pain is a better thing to feel than… other things.”
Lukas raises an eyebrow as he puffs on his pipe, ”Little Lamb would love to kill me.”
“Perhaps. But Inga has been charged with making sure he does not. If he truly intended to kill you he would have done so. Probably before today.”
Lukas laughs. The scab on his split lip cracks. “He’ll kill me one day, I am sure.”
“Not with me around to save you,” Elric says, picking up the bottle and taking his own swig of ale.
Lukas narrows his eyes. “I’m a lucky man,” he says. “Perhaps just an answer to a question is not enough of a reward for such a thing. Do you think, Lordling, that you deserve something further?” His voice is heavy, promising.
“Truly, I do,” says Elric. It comes out a little breathless.
“And what reward does my slut of a captive crave?”
Elric feels his cock twitch at these words, but he manages to say, “Quite a few things. But first, I want to know more about the hook.”
Lukas lets his voice drop dark. “Do you want to ask about whether it hurt to have my hand cut off with an axe, or do you want this hook inside you?”
Elric laughs. “I like it when you flirt back.”
“Don’t get used to it,” Lukas says. “This is a reward, remember.”
“Oh, so after this you go back to being a sullen, angry bastard?”
Lukas’s mouth twitches. “Absolutely.”
“Then I should make the most of it.” Elric slides even closer, takes hold of Lukas’s braced wrist and lifts it, raising the hook and looking at the leather sleeve it’s attached to. “What holds the sleeve onto your arm?”
“Let me show you how it works, Lordling,” says Lukas in a playful, sultry tone that makes Elric shiver. “As you’ve earned it with your daring rescue.”
As Elric watches, barely able to breathe, Lukas removes his tattered roughspun shirt. Beneath it the leather sleeve that holds his hook extends almost to his elbow, there are three buckled leather straps at intervals that hold it tight to his forearm. But there’s much more to it than the sleeve. A leather pauldron covers his shoulder, with more leather straps running from it, along his upper arm, holding the sleeve. The pauldron is held in place with three much wider, thicker straps that cross Lukas’s body, wrapping around his chest, revealing strips of skin covered in a smattering of dark hair. Lukas runs a finger up the leather sleeve, then touches the pauldron on his right shoulder. “It has to be rigid,” Lukas says. “It would be no use as a weapon otherwise. And I cannot hold a sword anymore. But this doesn’t have the power of a sword. It is more useful for defence than an attack. As you saw.”
On top of the chest harness, Lukas wears a silver chain around his neck that supports a small disc no bigger than Elric’s palm. It glitters against the wide straps that cross Lukas’s body. Elric reaches out boldly and touches it. He turns it around. The other side is a polished silver mirror. “What’s this for? Elric says. “Idle vanity?”
Lukas shrugs, “Need to check I’m the most handsome outlaw in the mountains, Lordling.”
Elric moves his hand to one of the straps, then the skin of Lukas’s chest, which is warm. He shivers. “I never expected there to be so much of it,” he says.
Lukas laughs. “Truly, when Abul first suggested to me that I should get a hook, I never thought it to be such a complex piece of apparatus either. It was all made for me. Abul had a tanner and a blacksmith build all the pieces.”
“Abul, had it made for you?”
Lukas nods. “I could not have afforded it otherwise. I was penniless. I had been living in Lunatum as a beggar and a whore. When I returned to the Mortingales, I had nothing.”
“You really were a whore?” Elric looks at Lukas’s chest in the firelight. The thought makes his skin prickle all over. “There were rumours about that in Attar, but I don’t think many people believed them. There were many different rumours about you.”
Lukas grins. “Then some of them were the truth.”
“Is that safe? Whoring, I mean. In Attar, sly whoring is punished severely.”
“Lunatum is not Attar. Sins of the body are a crime against Zai, as they are in the whole of the Empire, but such things are not always punished in Lunatum the way they are in Attar. There is a luxoli house where such things are traded.”
Elric gasps. His fingers still on Lukas’s chest. “There’s a luxoli house in Lunatum? How do the enforcers allow that?”
Lukas shrugs. “There is. Just the one. And they have to be very careful. And pay a lot of bribes. And the Enforcers of Zai haven’t shut it down yet. But it’s Lunatum. Luxoli House makes money. In Lunatum the Golden Ram holds as much sway as Zai. For the right price, you can get anything you could wish for in that stinking city, Zai’s law or no.”
Elric stretches his sweet eyes, “Perhaps we can visit this luxoli house.”
“I’d stay away from that filthy pit if I were you, Lordling. It’s as vile in its own way as the Empire that would see it destroyed. It runs on foul corruption and the fact the poor souls that work there have no other option but dockside whoring. I should know.” Lukas sniffs. “I worked there myself.”
Elric shakes his head. “You sold your hole there? You?” Elric knows he must sound like a green boy, shocked by such a thing. But it’s not the idea of the luxoli house, or of sly whoring that has surprised him, but the idea of Lukas selling himself. Looking at him it seems impossible. His angrily aloof manner is about as far from that of a whore as it is possible to be.
Lukas traces the point of his hook on the ground and says, “I was destitute in Lunatum for many years. There were times when I sold everything I had.”
Elric gives Lukas an impudent smile. “Were you expensive?”
Lukas lifts an eyebrow. “Was I? Oh, very.” He laughs. “I was the bastard son of a Prince of Azuria. You think the thought of having a whore of such breeding on his knees didn’t open those coin purses?”
Elric suspects this must be a lie. There may have been rumours of what Lukas was doing in Lunatum, but a whore actually trading on being a Bastard Prince would have been the talk of the Rose Palace. “You traded on your name?” he says, sounding as incredulous as he feels.
Lukas shakes his head. “No. I did not. I never revealed who I was when I lived in Lunatum. Even when…” He pauses. Elric wonders what he was going to say. “I was just a common whore like any other. Just a whore called Lucky from Attar. But it kept me fed.”
“I would like to have seen it,” Elric says. “You, as a whore.”
Lukas laughs. “I bet you would, you little slut. Shame you never left Attar. If you’d turned up in Lunatum a few years ago, you could have had what you’re craving right now for a handful of copper pennies.”
“What about for the price of saving your life?”
“Did I not pay you for that with my sad story?”
Elric smirks. He strokes Lukas’s bare chest. “Is that all your life’s worth, bastard?”
“I thought you warned me that I should resist this,” Lukas says, sounding like he has no intention of resisting anything. “That your mouth was so fine that if I sampled its delights I would never be able to trade you.”
Elric sighs. He had said that. And he had told himself he shouldn’t do this. For so many reasons. But that had been when he simply wanted to be able to say he had bedded Lukas Darekul. What he wants now, isn’t that. What he wants now is something far deeper. Something he doesn’t think he can so easily resist. Sweetly he says, “That seems like a problem for another time.”
Lukas laughs. “Well, then, as you’ll never quiet down otherwise,” he says, and as he speaks, he leans closer. He catches the rope at Elric’s wrists with his hook, pulling them down into his lap. The pressure of the rope stings Elric’s sore skin, but he doesn’t complain. He likes having his hands pinned down as much as Lukas clearly loves to pin them.
Lukas slides his hand up behind Elric’s head and darts forward, their mouths move together in a sharp and sweet kiss, this one urgent and greedy, Lukas doesn’t tease but quickly presses his tongue deep into Elric’s mouth with a low groan of desire. His face is scratchy with the dark hair that has grown there in the last few days, the rough scrape of it is delicious. Elric’s cock is hard. It all feels frantic and fast. As if they both know they need to do this before they come to their senses.
Lukas pulls Elric towards him and slides them both off the fallen tree onto the ground, spreading Elric out beneath him, barely breaking the kiss. He lies on top of Elric, pressing the length of their bodies together and moves his hook, taking Elric’s bound wrists with it as he pins them up above Elric’s head, stretching him out on the ground like a caught insect. Elric moans. Lukas kisses then bites Elric’s neck. His hand is at the fastenings of Elric’s shirt. Elric squirms. His wrists are trapped — with that and the way his body is pinned between Lukas and the ground beneath him — he can’t move at all, can’t do anything. And there is something he burns to do.
“Please,” he says, breathless with desire. “Bastard Prince, let me suck you.”
Lukas brushes his lips along Elric’s jawline. “You wish to take me with that foul mouth?”
“Yes,” Elric hisses. “Out here in the woods like an animal.”
Elric feels certain he needs to move fast. This could end any moment with Lukas saying something cruel or cutting, turning his fire into fickle rejection. But he wants . He wants Lukas. He wants to see Lukas break with pleasure more than he has any man before. He wants to use all the skills he has to wipe that teasing grin off Lukas's face and make him moan and burn. The sound he’d made when he kissed Elric is one Elric wants to hear again.
Needs to hear again.
When he gets to Lunatum and flees his captors for a future of his own making, he will no doubt end up taking many men on his knees. But none of them, he is certain, will feel as good to suck as his Bastard Prince.
“Let me show you what I can do for you, please,” Elric murmurs. “Let me show you, Sire. You need to know everything this mouth can do.”
Lukas chuckles at the honourific. “It has been a long time since anyone has called me Sire,” he says. “Let alone a son of a noble.”
“ Sire ,” Elric says again, breathy with want. “Use me, please. I am your captive after all. My mouth is yours, Bastard.”
Lukas lifts his hook to Elric’s neck. “That what you want? The dastardly Rebel Prince? Forcing you to suck at the point of a hook?” He traces the metal along Elric’s throat with just enough pressure to leave a fine white line.
Elric gasps and squirms at the feel of the hook at his throat, “ Bastard ,” Elric says overwhelmed with it, “You keep that sharp.”
“I do,” Lukas drawls back playfully. “For my victims. And for the twisted pleasure of little luxorites like you.” He slides his hand inside Elric’s breeches and curls it around his hard cock. Elric groans, arching into the touch. “I am yours, my Bastard Prince,” he says, voice breaking with pleasure.
“Very well, Lordling. Let me see the skills of this mouth that you have been so boastful about.”
Lukas’s eyes are dark. It makes the silver speckles in them even more prominent. Elric bites his lip. “I want to please you,” he says.
“About time,” Lukas says, voice heavy. “Then please me, Lordling.”
Elric looks up at Lukas and offers his bound wrists. Lukas snags the rope with his hook. “I’m not untying you, Underlia. If your plan is to run while I am incapable from spending in your incomparable mouth, put it from your mind.”
“I’d never run from this,” Elric says. “I want you to rope my wrists behind me.”
Lukas lifts an eyebrow. “You like such treatment?” he says in a dark tone that suggests he likes delivering it. “But if I deny you your hands, how will you open my breeches? You expect me to do it myself? A royal prince?”
Elric smiles sweetly. “I thought you were so world-weary you’d seen it all,” he says. “Bind my wrists and let me show you what my mouth can do to serve a prince.”
“Very well,” Lukas says, bending his head and unhitching Elric’s wrists using his hand and his hook. When they’re freed Lukas says in a rough whisper, “Turn around.”
Elric does, enjoying the feeling of metal on his skin as Lukas ropes his wrists behind him. Elric has always had a taste for being bound. It feels good to be held this way, to be helpless. He tests the ropes and they hold him firm. Elric’s cock is roused, straining, aching in his breeches as he shuffles around to look at Lukas. “Perhaps you would like to lie back further against the tree, Silverhand. You may find you need it when I take your cock down my throat.”
At this, Lukas chuckles darkly. “You know, Lordling, I’ve been in the world a while. I think I can deal with a slut on his knees. I’ve felt a mouth around my cock before.”
“Not mine,” Elric says, nodding to the ground beside him. “Please, lie back to receive my pleasure.”
“Very well. If you are so certain you have the ability to destroy me,” Lukas says, doing as Elric suggests and positioning himself so he is reclined against the fallen tree. “I am still keen to know how you will open my breeches.”
Elric moves into place and straddles Lukas’s knees. The ground is a little damp and carpeted with small broken twigs. He feels a cool prickling through his breeches. He shifts and gives Lukas a hungry look. Lukas nods and Elric leans down, taking the tie fastening at Lukas’s waist in his teeth.
He plucks the cord elegantly. It only takes a couple of tugs and Lukas’s breeches are half open. His cock blatantly roused and only a breath away.
“Zai’s holy teats,” Lukas murmurs above him.
When Lukas’s breeches are only held in place by one last twist of the cord, Elric looks up again, “I want it, Sire,” he says, thick and breathy. “You can see it, can’t you? How desperately I want to suck you.”
“Then take it, Underlia,” Lukas says, voice rough, betraying easily that he is equally aroused, hips moving with their own needy rhythm.
Elric pulls the cord loose with his teeth and the placket of Lukas’s breeches falls open. His cock springs free, thick and with a tangle of deliciously musky dark hair at its base. Elric nudges Lukas’s breeches down a little further, just to see more of his body. His legs are well-muscled, covered in some of the same dark hair. His bare skin looks pale in the moonlight through the trees. But all of Elric’s focus is on that cock. Well-roused and beading moisture at the tip.
“Suck it, Lordling,” Lukas growls.
The playful command makes Elric moan. He leans forward and takes the salty tip into his mouth. The taste of Lukas makes him shiver. The taste, the scent, the feel of it shooting straight to Elric’s own roused cock.
Lukas puts his hand on Elric’s shoulder. His palm feels warm and the pressure is firm. He holds Elric in place.
Elric groans and slides right down, lips slipping wetly over Lukas’s cock. He takes Lukas to the root, letting his cock press so deep it makes Elric’s eyes prickle. Elric sucks gently, applying a smooth amount of pressure. Above him, Lukas makes a deep sound of pure need. His words tumble out, broken. “Zai’s piss, your mouth is sweet, Lordling.”
Elric moans around Lukas’s cock in response. He slips his mouth up and down again, moving fast, getting Lukas’s cock as wet as he can and taking it all the way into his throat each time he sinks down. If he had the use of his hands he’d move Lukas’s palm from his shoulder to the back of his head and have Lukas hold it so he’s forced to take it as deep as Lukas wishes. But as he has no way of freeing his hands and no easy way of speaking, he satisfies himself with taking Lukas so deep he has to hold his breath, until he feels lightheaded with it, gloriously used — sucking on the full length of his Bastard Prince.
Lukas is moaning above him. Lukas’s hand on his shoulder is gripping tight. The moans become sharper, stuttering sounds.
Elric realises with a little surprise and much delight that Lukas is not going to last long. Elric doesn’t think that is a bad thing at all. Far from it. He likes the idea of that. There’s something so satisfying about the idea of making Silverhand, the Bastard Prince, so weak he spends within a few moments of Elric taking him deep into his throat. Elric’s cock pulses at the thought.
Elric sucks hard again and Lukas cries out wildly. He’s already there. Spending hard with his body spasming. Elric swallows the thick splash of seed that jolts up into his mouth. Lukas is boneless under him. Elric draws back slowly, taking his time to lick and suck as he drags his mouth over Lukas’s softening cock. He catches everything, every little drop of spend, his own cock burning between his legs as he does so.
Lukas is still panting. Elric waits for him, planting little kisses on the skin at the tops of Lukas’s bare thighs.
Eventually, Elric feels a hand stroke over his hair. He looks up.
Lukas’s eyes are dark and hooded. And his voice is a rasp as he says, “Truly you are all you promised,” Lukas gasps. “You will be a difficult prize to trade away.” Elric watches Lukas as he regains himself. It’s a few moments before Lukas says, “And now, Lordling, what can I do to please you?”
“You have already pleased me, Silverhand. Very much.”
Elric watches the silver fluttering in Lukas’s dark eyes. “Do you not need pleasuring in return, Underlia?” Lukas says gravely. “I promise you my mouth or my remaining palm can return your favour. Just name what you would have from me.”
Elric swallows, wondering if he dare ask for what he’d truly like. He might never get this chance again. “Please,” he begins, summoning all his courage. “Not your mouth or your hand. Do it with the hook, Silverhand.” He’s barely able to do more than whisper it. “Stroke me to spend with the hook.” Elric gasps aloud at the idea of what he’s just asked for. He feels like every hair on his body seems to stand up.
“You want that,” Lukas says thickly. “You would use my shame for pleasure? Are you sure?”
“I am so sure, Silverhand. I’ve been dreaming of you stroking my cock with that hook ever since I first saw it.”
Lukas moves closer. Elric cannot move at all. He feels as if he is rooted to the ground from sheer arousal. Lukas lifts his hook. He trails the curved back of it between Elric’s legs. Elric’s cock is still hard. Elric gasps at the feel of Lukas’s personal deadly weapon right where it could do the most damage, moving, smooth and cool between Elric’s legs. Lukas leans over and opens Elric’s breeches with his hand. Elric’s cock springs out, roused and eager. Lukas makes a low, throaty noise of approval.
“You want this?” Lukas says as he drags the smooth inner curve of the hook up and down Elric’s cock. Elric makes a hopelessly aroused chattering sound. Lukas’s hand finds Elric’s cock too. He rubs his palm over the head, slippery with the liquid desire that leaks from it.
With his palm slicked, Lukas slides it down, curling it around Elric’s straining cock. He keeps the hook close, so Elric can feel the touch of metal as Lukas strokes him, fist a tight well, hot and good. Elric is panting and close when Lukas slows his movements to a tease. Elric squirms. He twists his wrists in the ropes that hold his hands behind him. He cannot struggle free. He cannot do anything except let Lukas stroke him however he wishes.
“Bastard,” Elric gasps as Lukas’s touch grows feather-light. “Don’t stop. Please.”
Lukas puts his lips on Elric’s ear. “I thought I had already pleased you very much by spending in your filthy mouth,” he says. “And yet you demand to spend too?”
“Sire, you did, but please—” Elric’s voice breaks into a moan as Lukas tightens his grip a little, making desperate pleasure shoot through him. He gasps. But Lukas immediately loosens his grip again making Elric whine.
Lukas laughs. “So greedy, sweet little Lordling,” he says.
His fist tightens again. Elric makes another deep long moan of pleasure. Lukas strokes him close to his edge. Then pauses, just for a moment and kisses Elric on the jaw, a savage kiss with a touch of his teeth.
Elric moans out, “Please,” again, feeling close to losing his mind if Lukas doesn’t take him to spend now.
Lukas moves his hook. He brings the metal to Elric’s cock again and strokes the length of it with the inner arch. Elric throws his head back. The hook is warm now and it slips through the slickness that coats his cock.
As it reaches the head, Elric cries out, losing himself to his spend and wave after wave of pleasure.
Elric isn’t sure how much time has passed when he hears Lukas murmur, “Let me deal with those ropes.”
Elric nods, still dazed, and shuffles around. Lukas unties Elric’s wrists in silence, broken only by Elric’s still-ragged breath.
Elric turns back and presents his wrists for Lukas to tie in front of his body, but Lukas only looks at him. After a moment’s pause, Lukas traces his hook up the front of Elric’s body. He brings it back to Elric’s throat.
“It’s not just pillow talk, is it? You are also a whore. You and I, we have both sold ourselves. Those skills you have with your mouth, that trick you used to open my breeches, you didn’t learn that as a sly Lordling who has earned himself a handful of secret encounters in the Rose Palace. I could see it in you when I told my story of depravity in Lunatum. You understood. You knew exactly what I did and what that meant.”
Elric takes a breath. He feels soft, “You think me a whore?” he says, still dazed. “You think I lie about who I am?”
“No. I think you have told the truth. Your father is Warden of Pluma-Ferris. But the Underlia’s aren’t a powerful family. I don’t even remember the name. So they weren’t notable twenty years ago and things rarely move that fast in Azuria. So what did the Underlia’s used to be? Merchants perhaps. Because I think your father knew a few things about buying and selling, didn’t he? Your ambitious merchant father. How did Lord Harwin Underlia climb so high, so fast? I’ve been wondering about that, along with the way you are. The way you act. What you think makes you valuable. He sold you, didn’t he? He traded your body to powerful men to get what he wanted?” Lukas strokes Elric’s neck with the curve of his hook.
Elric looks at Lukas cautiously. His body has gone rigid. All the soft pliability has drained from him. He’s like stone on the ground beside Lukas. He doesn’t like other people knowing his secrets. He prefers to be the one who knows things. Not the one who is known. “Oh really?” he says. “Is that what you think?”
“It is,” says Lukas darkly. “You’re a pretty thing, aren’t you? And probably even prettier at, what? Nineteen? Twenty? How many powerful men have had you in their beds? How many of the denizens of the Rose Palace have you lain with to get favours for your father? To raise him so high?”
“You think you’re so clever with your Prince’s education and your rebel heart, don’t you?”
“I’m clever enough.”
”You think you know all about me. You really think that’s how it went? That my father made a whore of me?”
“Yes, I do.”
“And I suppose you think that’s what I’m running away from?”
“I had considered it.”
“Well, you’re wrong. I was no copper penny whore. I was the finest male concubine in the Rose Palace. I was good at it and I enjoyed what I did. I didn’t give my body away with a broody sneer about how I was too good for such things. I was a delight. I enjoyed it. I was given a fine life in the beds of powerful men. That has nothing to do with why I wanted to escape my family.” His voice comes out thick with emotion.
Lukas touches Elric’s face with his finger. Elric feels shaky, but Lukas’s touch is soothing. “I did not mean to hurt you, Lordling,” he says in a soft voice. “Nor shame you for what you did in the past. If it was a sweet life then I am glad of it.”
Elric nods. “I do not need to be pitied for what I was.”
“Then I will not pity you,” says Lukas. “Come, lie with me now. Let us sleep.”
Elric lies down beside Lukas, mind clattering. But Lukas’s arms around him are strong and he feels safe. And despite the way Lukas has so easily undone him, he feels more content sleeping in Lukas’s arms than he has anywhere, for a long, long time.