Chapter 36
Thirty-Six
“Petunia, I swear!”
Cyrus huffs and tosses his wing out in surrender. Carrying a prized potato in her mouth, Petunia struts back toward her burrow.
“This is my garden, madam,” Cyrus calls after her. “Or do I simply till the land for you like a serf?”
Sweat darkens the back of his shirt. The wind tousles his bird’s-nest-mess of hair. With a huff, he turns back to his plants, and your heart aches to touch him. All you want is to step up behind him, wrap your arms around him, and squeeze him tight, damn the sweat and the dirt.
What you want, of course, is not possible.
But you want to remember this. Him, like this. Working with the earth. Never harming even his most deserving adversary. Kneeling into a slant of light. The trees leaning toward sleep. This is the moment before it all changes. This is the moment before you know, for certain, that you will lose him.
“Hi,” you say.
He whips his head around, startled by the sound of your voice.
And though it comes slowly, it does come: that smile.
“Hello stranger,” he says. “Come to defend my honor from the local vermin?”
“A battle I’m afraid I can’t win.” You step carefully through his garden, as you’ve done so many times before. He rises to his feet to meet you.
“Come to help, then?” he asks.
You run your tongue along your lower lip. His smile falters at your silence.
“I need to talk to you,” you say.
“Words I love to hear.” He reaches for his wing for comfort, then catches himself, and puts his hand on his hip instead. “Not about something nice, I suppose.”
“Yes, actually,” you say. “Maybe. I hope it’s nice. Private, though.”
Confusion pulls at his mouth, but hopefully nice seems better than whatever he expected. A little stiff, a little formal, he leads you into the cottage.
Inside, you don’t know where to begin.
You could begin in so many places.
“When I was little, I met a witch,” you say. “She wanted to eat me.”
“Hans,” says Cyrus, stepping toward you, ready to be whatever you need, but you shake your head. The pain isn’t the point of the story.
“The food was enchanted. The more I tasted, the more I wanted. It’s why I… struggle. And the Fair Queen held feasts every mealtime. It was a nightmare. I had to ask the apothecary for a medicine that would kill my sense of taste just so I could get through it feeling sensible.”
“Hans, I’m so sorry.”
“She wasn’t a witch,” you say, “though I think she was as close to being one without being one as anyone can get. That sort of medicine, it’s…”
“I understand,” he says. “Half-medicine, half-potion. A little bit science, a little bit spell.”
“I think,” you say, “she could give you what you want.”
Silence.
He stares at you for a moment that stretches into so many moments—into a future he never let himself imagine, into dreams that made him weep for hours upon waking.
“Hans,” he whispers.
“I don’t know for certain,” you say. “I can’t promise what she can do, but I think it’s worth trying. I had a friend once who told me I should do what I had to to make my life bearable. I’m wondering now, why stop at bearable.”
He’s still staring at you.
Staring at you as though you’ve changed your shape. As though he’s seeing something new.
“You’d do that for me?”
“When it comes to you,” you say, “there isn’t much I wouldn’t do.”
His lower lip wobbles. He looks away from you.
He steps away to begin pacing the floor, but he comes right back.
His hand snatches your chin, and his mouth crushes against yours, unyielding, years of yearning and grief folded between newfound hope.
When he pulls away, he’s wild, surprised by himself. Immediately contrite.
“Hans, forgive m—”
You tug him back in, one hand on the back of his neck, the other holding his hips flush against yours, your kiss just as bruising and desperate.
He whimpers into your mouth, melts his whole body against yours, wraps his wing around your broad shoulders.
Heat and hurry. Need and want. Two wishes colliding, bursting into stardust in your veins.
“I love you,” you say. You caress his cheek with your palm and tuck errant hair behind his ear. You cup his jaw and turn him so he’s looking at you, really looking at you. “I love you too much to let the rest of your days be spent in misery.”
“Hans,” he says. “Hans—”
Words dissolve. He clutches you tight and kisses you again, again, again, mouth open to yours, until you taste salt on his lips and pull away to find tear stains on his cheeks.
Your gaze softens; he tucks his head against your neck and weeps.
He clutches you the way oysters clutch their pearls, the way dragons clutch their hoard, the way tree roots clutch the soil.
Precious. Tethered. Rooted. And he is rooted to you, rooted in you, as you are to him.
“Hans,” he says, voice watery, but recovering, “When do we leave?”
“What?”
“Is tonight too soon?”
“Cyrus, wait, no,” you say, “I’ll go alone. It’s dangerous through the woods.”
“You can’t do this for me without taking me with you.”
“It’s not safe.”
“It’s not safe for you, either,” he argues. He lifts his head from his shoulder. Red-rimmed eyes, wet as glass, meet yours. “Nowhere in the Fair Queen’s lands will be safe for you.”
“If you’re with me, they’ll kill you too.”
“They can’t kill me without starting a war with my sister. If I’m with you, I can shield us both.”
“They’ll kill me and send you home.”
His forehead falls against yours. You kiss him, the dark hair above your lip pressed to the impossible softness of his skin. He exhales a long, slow breath.
“How long is the journey?”
“A few months, at least. Six if we’re swift.”
“A long time to spend among enemies.”
“And every moment well worth it, for your happiness.”
Another round of tears spills down his cheeks. With callused thumbs, you wipe them away. He catches your hand in his and kisses it.
Then sinks to one knee.
“Marry me,” he says.
“Cyrus?”
“Because I love you,” he says, “because we wished for each other, and because if we are to have only six months together, I would do it as your husband.”
“Cyrus.”
“And because—and this is sensible, you’ll like it—if we’re wed, you’ll have the protection of the royal house. Our seal, our name. No harm can come to you. Not for the rest of your days.”
In six months, Cyrus will be gone. Reunited with his True Loves.
And even in his absence, his love for you would keep you safe the rest of your life.
“You would give me that?”
“It is far less than what you are giving me, I assure you,” says Cyrus.
“What if the apothecary cannot help? What if—”
“Then we’ll have tried,” he says. “And I’ll have gotten a husband out of it.”
“If this fails, will you still want…?”
He laces his fingers through yours.
“When you were a boy, and I was a swan, you kissed me, once,” he says.
“I knew what you were trying to do. The transformative magic of True Love’s kiss.
It didn’t work.” He laughs, softly. “But for a moment… for just a moment, Hans, I wanted to be a boy again, in your arms.” He presses a kiss to your knuckles.
“I will want you whether I am a swan or a man. I will want you whether we succeed or fail. I will love you because I have always loved you, and I always will, even if the day comes when I am not near you.”
A knot swells in your throat. You go to your knees.
“If you feel so strongly about it,” you say, “who am I to refuse a prince?”
“Don’t say yes because of that.”
You laugh. “If I recall, you did not ask me.”
He laughs, too. “Very well. Will you marry me?”
“Yes.”
And you kiss him. You kiss him. You kiss him, and kiss him, and kiss him.
You’ll keep kissing him until you think, just maybe, you’ll have enough to keep you warm for the rest of your days once he’s gone.
You’ll keep kissing him until you think you have enough, and then you’ll keep kissing him beyond that.
You’ll keep kissing him until you can’t anymore.