Chapter 10
Ash
Despite what had happened on the road and Ash’s resulting fit, the afternoon passed, to his surprise, very pleasantly.
Ash had never been overly invested in his father’s keep, but showing Agnes around made it feel more real – the great hall, the chapel, the kitchens, out into the yard where the horses stamped in the stables and the marshal trained his men.
He pointed out where the ancient building had been rebuilt and made new: windows glazed, roofing made sturdier.
She seemed genuinely interested, asking questions that often he could not answer, but neither seeming dissatisfied when he could not answer them.
He formally introduced her to the staff, along with Raff and Penn, who found the whole farce rather funny.
He even showed her, briefly, the lands surrounding the castle: the valley below, the river, the managed woodlands – a royal gift given to Ash’s ancestors.
The weather was clear enough for him to point out the blurred shape of Skeldale on the horizon.
The prisoner could wait. He wanted to deal with the man himself, but he had no desire for his presence to ruin the scraps of the day he had managed to salvage. Let him rot, he thought bitterly. He’d been placed in one of the towers: let him sit up there and wait for the gallows.
They shared supper with Agnes’s upper staff, Sara, Raff and Penn.
Ash had become used to the quieter meals in la Cleve Castle and had not realised how much he had missed Raff’s presence or Penn’s constant witty remarks.
He began to relax, becoming more like himself.
Joan the cook had put on a veritable feast with courses of boar and venison, early spring fruits, tiny little tarts and glistening fritters.
Paired with the fine wine brought up from the basements and the roaring fire, it was a merry evening: light and laughter and sustenance.
Agnes seemed to be enjoying herself, too.
Ash had feared that she would feel nervous in the huge keep, trapped amongst Ash’s family.
But she smiled widely, spoke kindly to the servants, and laughed along even with Penn’s bawdiest jokes.
A sort of relief settled in his heart: she would be good for Dunlyn.
She would be good for the family, when he was gone.
She glanced at Ash over the table, her eyes sparkling, her hair falling in gold strands around her face and her lips sticky with honey.
Ash could not help but smile back. Something was different. Something he could not name. One truth he knew: he was glad she was there.
When Agnes retired to bed, he watched her leave, bidding her a quiet goodnight as she rose from the table. She placed a hand to his shoulder for just a moment – the touch soft yet blindingly hot.
As she disappeared up the stairs, there was a laugh from Ash’s other side. He snapped around to face Penn, who quickly set his expression into contrite innocence.
‘She seems very nice.’
Ash looked across at Raff, whose expression, while less cheeky than Penn’s, was also set into a knowing smile.
‘What?’ Ash snapped.
‘I am merely surprised that you are getting on so well,’ Penn said. ‘Considering how you were determined not to befriend your potential bride.’
‘She handled the situation on the road deftly,’ Raff put in. ‘You explained what happened?’
‘I did,’ Ash said. ‘She was very understanding. Lord knows why.’
‘Because she is fond of you, you bastard,’ Penn said. ‘She has dreadful taste.’
Ash gave him a shove with his shoulder.
‘And,’ Penn continued, undeterred, ‘I would wager that you are fond of her, too. Fonder than you had expected to be.’
‘Shut your mouth.’ Ash scowled. ‘She is a good choice – that is all.’
He looked at Raff, hoping for support. But Raff’s eyebrows were raised, his expression also one of disbelief.
‘Not you too.’
Raff merely shrugged. ‘I did not say a word.’
Ash retired to his own chambers shortly after, determined not to let himself dwell on Raff and Penn’s teasing words or conspiratorial looks.
Whatever it was they were imagining they were seeing was just that: imagined.
It was no more real than Olly’s ghost. He knew what it was to be in love.
How could they imagine that this, was that?
Yet as he lay abed, Litillwitte at his feet, he could not shake the image of Agnes’s face, the firelight playing on her high cheekbones, the dance of the mark below her eye. Her fox-like features, the halo of hair around her head.
It took him a long time to fall asleep, the fire spluttering into embers, and then into ash.
The morning came bright, and cold, and terrible.
Ash knew that today he would need to be the earl. He put it off for as long as he could, and it was not until late that evening that he at last saw fit to attend to his final pressing duty as the earl of the keep. He needed to see to their prisoner.
With Raff at his side, he made his way to the narrow staircase that led to the easternmost tower, up towards the single room at the very top.
‘I do not believe he is too great a threat,’ Ash said, as they approached the locked door. ‘But he may attempt to run. Be ready.’
Raff nodded. Ash unlocked the door and pushed it open.
A small fire had been lit at the side of the room. It was full of fading yellow light. A figure stood in the gloom.
‘Step forward, man. Let me see the one who attacked me.’
There was silence. Then the man stepped into the sparse light.
Ash’s skin went cold. His heart cracked in his chest.
‘Oliver?’
He stood in the centre of the room like a ghost. Ash expected him to vanish like he had done so many times before.
Firelight from the tiny hearth played on his face. His hair was tangled where it had been bundled beneath his cap. His clothes were ragged, gambeson worn, boots thinning. He looked tired. He looked old.
The memory of him never looked old.
‘Ash?’
Ash turned to Raff. He was staring at him, not at the ghost.
‘Can you … can you see him?’
Raff nodded, face a mask of shock. ‘I can. Ash … is that—’
‘Oliver?’ Ash could barely make his tongue move around the word. It came out like a cough.
Oliver stared at him. His expression was shattered, familiar yet so, so different.
‘Is it you?’ Ash’s voice did not belong to him anymore. ‘Is it … is it you?’
He stepped closer. He’d been taking tiny steps without ever realising, without tracking his own movement across the room. The space between them had dwindled to nearly nothing.
He reached out, brushing the backs of his fingers down Olly’s jaw. Olly puffed out a hard sigh, like it pained him to release the air from his lungs.
Ash half-expected Olly to dissolve under his touch and prove that this was yet another piece of his fragmented mind made real to torture him.
He would allow the torture – he would embrace this wild madness – if it meant getting to feel Olly beneath his hands once more, even if he wasn’t truly there.
But his shape did not dissolve. He did not vanish, as he had done so many times before. Ash could feel the stubble across Olly’s jaw, the heat of his skin. He was real. He was alive.
Ash couldn’t take it any longer. His whole body hurt, from his fingertips against Olly’s skin to his ribs around his thundering heart. He was alive. He was solid beneath Ash’s hands – not the ephemeral ghost that had followed him around for all these years.
He pulled him into a crushing embrace, taking in the smell of him, tangling his fingers in his hair.
His eyes flooded with hot tears, stinging and unstoppable.
Ash felt Olly breathing against his neck, the rise and fall of his chest where he was pressed so tight against Ash’s own.
Ash could almost feel the beat of his heart: or was that Ash’s heart, finally whole, finally able to beat as it should be beating?
Olly’s hands moved, slowly, to come to rest upon Ash’s shoulders. Ash clung to him, desperately, like a man swinging from a cliff edge, grasping at the one thing stopping him from tumbling. Olly’s hands shook against him, fingers twitching.
When he pulled back – painfully, reluctantly – Olly was staring at him. His eyes were sparkling with tears, slowly trailing streaks down his cheeks. He looked lost, mouth slightly open, as if he were about to speak—
Then whatever it was, swallowed down.
Ash couldn’t look away. On the road, he’d only got a glimpse of him – the flash of his blue eyes above his scarf, the noise of surprise he had made when the guards had pulled him away. Yet he’d known. He’d known, somehow, that it was him.
‘You—’ he said, his voice awkward and heavy. ‘That was you? Who attacked me?’
Olly nodded, eyes huge, lips tight.
‘Why?’
‘I—’ Olly’s mouth moved silently. ‘I did not know it was you.’
There was more, Ash knew. There had to be more. But a single look at him – his skinniness, his worn clothes, his tired expression – made it clear that whatever Olly had been doing had been an act of desperation, not malice.
There were so many questions. He needed answers. He needed to know why Olly had been gone so long and what had kept him away.
Why didn’t you come back to me?
He could not say it out loud. Not now. Not like this, when his heart was still thundering and Olly looked so horribly vacant.
His hands were still held loose against Olly’s chest. Olly watched him, his expression so unfamiliar that it sent renewed pain through Ash’s chest, a fresh wave of stinging tears to his eyes.
Then he realised what Olly was looking at, what his gaze had locked to. The scar. Of course. Olly had only ever known him with his face unblemished, his skin still whole.
He wondered what Olly thought of him, now, as ruined as he was. The scar twisted the outside, but it felt as if it went deeper, as if it was inside him, too, tearing through his heart, around his guts, a crack through his head from ear to ear.
He’d earned it by not being able to save Olly when he had the chance. He’d deserved the scar; he’d deserved more, to even begin to atone for failing to save him. Olly’s blood had been on his hands as much as it had been on the hands of the French soldier who had felled him.
And now Olly was alive. The skin around the scar prickled. Ash found himself reaching to it instinctively. Olly’s eyes tracked that movement as well.
Olly had known him young and perfect and – or at least Olly had always said – handsome. And now he was none of those things.
But he did not look horrified. He didn’t look sad, either. Just blank.
‘Olly …’
Olly’s eyes snapped up. Their gazes met.
The force of years of grief powered Ash forwards. He kissed Olly with a hunger that he had buried, that he hadn’t known in years. Behind him, as if from miles away, he heard the door shut as Raff left.
It was like coming home, like the first waking moment after a bad dream. Olly’s lips were the same – the shape of his mouth, the tilt of his head. It was like Ash was a youth again, that wild boy stood on the edge of a battlefield with his heart aglow.
Olly hesitated for just a moment – a single second, stretched to a lifetime – before responding. Ash held him tighter, his lips opening, his tongue—
It was the same. It was all the same, even his taste, marred by however long of living rough but still him, beneath that.
Ash’s hands were moving more urgently, now, his kisses more desperate, his lips yearning.
He was clinging, touching all the places he could.
Olly kissed him back with a kind of starving fervour, and Ash gripped him tighter, grabbing at his thin, worn tunic and shoving it aside so he could touch him properly.
The brush of Olly’s skin against Ash’s palms made him gasp – made them both gasp, Olly’s caught and breathy, Ash’s halfway to a cry. He was real. He was so warm and his skin was just as soft as Ash had remembered, as soft as it was in his dreams.
‘Olly …’ he breathed into his mouth. ‘Oliver …’
There was nothing in the world but Olly, and the feel of his skin, and the huff of his breath hot against Ash’s neck. It was just them, locked away in this tiny space, the rest of the world outside nothing but a—
But a dream.
Ash hesitated. Olly stiffened in his arms.
He realised that he needed to talk to Agnes. That he needed to tell her … not all, but enough. If Agnes took offence and left, that would ruin them both. But Olly was alive. Ash could feel the heat radiating from him.
He would apologise to Agnes. He would give her anything she wanted, if it was in his power to give. He would embrace his own ruin, if she demanded it.
But not now. Tonight, he had Olly. Tonight he was no longer Earl Ashwy Barden, he was Ash – just Ashel, before war had forced him into the walking death he’d been living in for so many years.
He kissed Olly again, pulling him backwards onto the tiny pallet bed.
He folded Olly into his arms, bundling him close, listening to the sound of his breathing; the irrevocable proof that he was alive.
He had returned. The dreams and the wild visions couldn’t harm him anymore.
Ash gripped tight to Olly’s shoulders, face buried into his neck, and vowed to never let him go again.