Chapter Fifteen
It was evening by the time a knock sounded at the door to his lair. Fire crackled in the grate, shadows dancing on the walls.
Cyrus had bathed and redressed, damp hair tied back off his face. He’d draped black silk like armour, unable to bear the thought
of Maximillian finding him in his pyjamas. It felt too vulnerable, like baring his throat.
Maximillian was massaging his temples outside, visibly weary. He had changed too, his sage shirt turned juniper in the faded
light of dusk.
“They’re my travelling clothes,” he said in lieu of greeting, catching Cyrus’s look. “I had them in Lysander’s saddlebag.”
Cyrus didn’t answer. For a second he wondered if Maximillian had spent the rest of the afternoon being fussed over by the
people of Ranragh, frustration and despair stirring at the thought. The next, he wondered if Maximillian had packed a change
of clothes in anticipation of staying over at Cyrus’s lair.
He moved aside wordlessly. Maximillian looked at him carefully, then stepped inside.
Neither spoke. With the door closed behind them, Cyrus moved towards the kitchen. A drink might help ease whatever conversation was headed their way, and he knew Maximillian’s preferences.
“Ah,” Maximillian said, as Cyrus garnished the goblet of Bloody Wrongdoer with a sprig of rosemary.
Cyrus glanced up. The champion was looking at his new makeshift dart board, tacked to the wall opposite his brooding chair.
He’d fashioned the missiles himself out of sharp little twigs. Stretched over the central target was the cartoon of Maximillian’s
face he’d found on the Hoopsy Daisy box, a beaming caricature now featuring cross-eyes and a lolling tongue courtesy of Cyrus’s
quill.
Maximillian turned to stare at him.
Cyrus stared back. “Got bored,” he said.
Maximillian winced. Taking his drink, he sank onto the couch. Cyrus sat too, leaving more distance than usual.
Silence, again. Evening was drawing in, the light from the rough-hewn window growing dim. Shadows thrown out by the fire twisted
across Maximillian’s features as he tapped his fingers against the side of his goblet.
“So,” he said, at long last. “That happened.”
Cyrus sipped his cocktail and suppressed a cough. Stronger than intended. But perhaps that wasn’t a bad thing. He had the
terrible, doom-laden feeling that he might have to talk about emotions tonight. Frankly, he’d rather stick his own darts in
his eyeballs.
He threw Maximillian a sidelong look. There were bags under his eyes, and his mouth twisted down as he stared into his drink. Cyrus wondered what the champion had been filling his time with whilst he’d been taking his temper out on pastry.
He cleared his throat awkwardly. To say that emotions were not his thing was akin to suggesting that Maximillian grimly endured
outpourings of adoration or that Cyrus only tolerated the mayhem he caused. But. Perhaps he could try.
“You said you wanted to talk in person,” he said haltingly. “What did you want to talk to me about?”
Maximillian lifted his gaze. “To ask why you left. I thought I must have done something, or that you—” He stopped, swallowed.
There was something else there, but Cyrus didn’t know how to dig into it. “I had to be seen in Heliarth that morning, putting
on an outraged act, making sure my council knew I was intent on finding you. Journalists were sniffing around, and of course
they wanted to speak to me.” The glance he threw Cyrus was frank, and slightly challenging. “I’m not sorry for what I said.
I didn’t mean a word of it, but I was trying to do some damage control after the brewery disaster. We both have reputations
to look after.”
Cyrus processed that, trying to work out how he felt. There was an undeniable trickle of relief that Maximillian didn’t truly
doubt his magic, yes. He hadn’t read the interview, so he wasn’t to know how the journalist had conveyed those comments to
the masses, but he’d more than solidified Ranragh’s fear of him today.
Less of a relief: If this fight wasn’t about his magic, then it was about them. What had changed between them, the line they’d
blurred and crossed. Where they went from here.
“I got rid of the journalist and went upstairs to find you, and you were gone,” Maximillian said quietly. “No note, nothing to say you’d be back, or that you wanted to hear from me again. Just a load of ripped-up pillows and a dagger thrown on the bed, and I thought—”
There it was again, a splinter lurking under the facade of Maximillian’s confidence. Cyrus sensed that dragging it free would
bring a rush of emotion alongside.
Anybody else, any other situation, and Cyrus would have fled his own lair rather than face up to that. But not here. Not with
Maximillian.
He made himself ask the question, clumsy as it felt in his mouth. “What did you think?”
Maximillian closed his eyes. “I thought maybe you’d planned it.” His voice came out small. “All of it. The longer I spent
on my own, the more I started to second-guess everything. You’re a wrongdoer. What better way to get one up on a champion
than to make him . . .” His mouth pursed with frustration, a hand rising to wave inarticulately in the air. “Make him fall
for you, as a joke. Mess with his head. Then laugh like hell after. I came to Ranragh because I couldn’t bear wondering. I
had to know.”
And there it was, out in the open.
Fall for you.
Another piece slipping into place, like the never-ending swoop in his stomach. The truth of Maximillian’s feelings laid bare.
Cyrus’s own still felt unwieldly and unfamiliar, frightening in their vulnerability.
But less so, now that Maximillian had voiced his own. A huge step to take, but not a terrifying cliff edge.
Cyrus swallowed. “Maximillian,” he started, then stopped. Memory nudged him—a moment of pleasure, another word rolling from his tongue. He amended: “Max.”
Max opened his eyes. His chest tightened at the honest emotion there.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Cyrus said softly. Those words carried more sincerity than anything he’d ever said, but as he voiced
them, he realised that another amendment was needed. “I couldn’t do that. Not to you.”
Maximillian’s shoulders slumped with the drain of the last vestige of doubt. He breathed out. Cyrus breathed with him, exhaling
the weight he’d carried for the past two weeks, the dregs of rage and resentment and hot, stinging hurt.
Into the silence, Max ventured, “So if I didn’t mean anything I said to the journalist, and you didn’t leave because you were
playing me all along, then . . .”
Then this wasn’t a game at all. This wasn’t part of any ploy, champion or wrongdoer. It was something that had built between
them in the quiet moments. Something honest, and completely unexpected, and true.
That knowledge felt terrifying, too enormous to comprehend. Cyrus wasn’t sure what to do with it. The fight was over, but
they were both left shell-shocked in its wake. He wanted the playfulness back, the very thing which had drawn him so unexpectedly
to Max in the first place.
Cyrus hummed under his breath, deadpan when he spoke. “Suppose I might have to apologise to the sprites. I’ve been mean to
them the last two weeks, pretending they were you.”
“You’re always mean to them.”
“Meaner than usual.”
“And you never apologise.”
“Sorry,” said Cyrus, just to be contrary. “Anyway, they weren’t around when I got back—”
“That’s because I’d just visited. I don’t think they like me.” Cyrus squinted at him, thrown, but Max only shrugged. “Really.
I saw one earlier. It beheaded one of your pansies and threw it at me. I think it was a threat.”
Interesting. Perhaps the sprites had the potential to be moulded into a malevolent army after all. “Well, you probably scared
them if you turned up at my lair earlier like you did in town.” He deepened his voice, angling an elbow towards Max’s ribs.
“Face me, Earthshaker.”
“Shut up,” Max groused, but he was laughing. “I’ll have you know I took lessons on voice projection under the Federation.
Got to make sure you wrongdoers are quivering in your boots, after all.”
“Yeah? Well, I took a workshop on how to mock posturing champions at the Guild,” Cyrus returned. “I excelled, as I do in most
things.”
Max eyed him, rueful. “I suppose we’re both the villain in each other’s story.”
“Yeah. I suppose we are.”
They glanced at each other in the flickering light of the fire. There was so much running through Cyrus’s mind, so much he
felt barely equipped to handle. All he could do, for now, was focus on the immediate: Max, here on his couch, turning towards
him.
Max leaned in. Cyrus turned his head. The champion kissed him, tentative at first, a brush of warm lips and the scratch of his beard. It turned into something deeper when Cyrus’s hand came up to tangle fingers into salt-swept coppery hair.
Max gave a soft sigh against his lips. “This is what I wanted to do, that morning,” he murmured. “I was imagining it as I
came upstairs. Kept thinking of how you looked, in my bed.”
Cyrus shivered. Two weeks was hardly anything in a lifetime, and yet it still felt like a terrible waste of time, if he could
have been enjoying this. In lieu of an answer he kissed Max again, and again, tasting his lips and jaw and throat. His body
felt simultaneously on edge with a prickling heat and floaty with pleasure. What Max did to him.
They stilled, face-to-face. Their breath was quiet and off-kilter, soft against the backdrop of crackling flames. He had Max,
here under his hands, and he did not want to lose him.
“I can’t promise it’ll be easy,” Cyrus whispered against Max’s lips. The intimacy of it was almost unbearable and yet it felt
like the only way he could get the words out. Whispering secrets against Max’s mouth, like a confessional of old. “With me.
I’m not used to any of this.”
“I know,” Max murmured. “For what it’s worth, I can’t promise it’ll be easy with me either. I’ve never—there’s never been
anyone I actually cared about. Not like this.”