Chapter Two Cat #2
There was a Reaper couple in Kreuzfurt. Two men Cat eagerly avoided ever getting to know because the mere sight of them made his heart race and his cheeks burn.
They walked hand in hand, side by side, always leaning towards each other like flowers to the sun.
His mouth watered when he saw them. Elena always teased him when she caught him staring, yearning, imagining.
Scandalous notions of impropriety, of skin touching, hands ghosting across each precious limb.
They pulled the breath from his lungs and he wanted to know what it felt like as much as he was too terrified to even consider what it could mean.
‘It’s better to be content with what you have than yearn for what you will never get to see,’ Cat murmurs. ‘I’ll get to know him. And I will be content with whatever life gives me. And I hope…somehow…I can make him content as well.’
Marina’s troubled expression does not clear.
But she nods her head. Pats his cheek. She looks about the room, and asks if he needs help packing.
But he doesn’t. He tells her so, and she leaves, letting him sit there and try to come to terms with the weight of a decision that felt so right the night before.
It still feels right now, but it has gained more gravity.
He wraps his arms around his own body, holds himself close and breathes.
He never thought this path would be easy, but he hopes, truly, that when it is all over at least it will have been worth it.
It takes a week to travel from Crowen to Himmelsheim, and Cat is singularly sick and tired of constantly travelling from one city to the next. And of every journey so far, getting captured and marched to forced imprisonment was actually the most enjoyable experience.
Elena and Jonan Morsen stay behind in Crowen.
A carriage is supplied for Adalei, Fen and their belongings.
Some of Crowen’s city watch are even reallocated as a polite escort.
The extra eyes on their party seem to ensure that there are precious few moments to talk about anything important at all.
Lio still looks like a man who crawled from his own grave, and Elician’s ability to heal him is stymied by their onlookers.
He relinquishes the task to Zinnitzia with a kind of grudging acceptance that crackles through the air.
Lio has no wounds. There is nothing truly for Zinnitzia to piece back together, but she calls Fen over every evening of the journey and walks her through what it feels like to encourage muscle to reform, add excess fat where previously there was so little and help a body to simply go from a state of enfeeblement to strength.
Adalei hovers nearby, holding Lio’s hand as he lets the pair work.
Cat doesn’t think a single person in the party is especially pleased to be doing any of it at all.
‘He’ll be all right,’ Cat says to Elician anyway.
‘I know,’ Elician replies. But he watches over the proceedings with a fretful anxiety despite himself.
Night falls on their first day, and Elician refuses the carriage to sprawl instead by the fire.
Cat doesn’t mean to doze off before him, but he wakes some time later to the sound of Elician and Lio whispering to each other in the dark.
Cat can’t quite tell where their guards are; he knows they’re there, somewhere, just beyond their fire line, but they’re not hovering over their king or their king’s dearest friend.
It’s rather kind of them, all things considered.
Cat keeps his eyes shut. Wills himself to go back to sleep. But—
Lio hisses, a sound that is too familiar to Cat from the cells to fully ignore.
Instinct presses a response to his tongue but he swallows it back.
‘It’s not your fault,’ Lio says next, passionate and sincere.
Cat opens his eyes, squinting through the gloom.
Their backs are to him. They’re both upright, shoulder to shoulder by the fire, heads down and hands clasped.
Elician is not convinced by Lio’s comment; he shakes his head, shoulders stiff.
‘When we were in Kreuzfurt, you told me Cat couldn’t consent to a relationship with me.
’ Cat’s breath catches in his throat. He tries to remember when that could have been.
The answer is immediate. Elician hugged him, only once.
He had fallen asleep on Cat’s shoulder. They went for a walk after, all around the gardens of the enclave.
And then, just before they parted, Elician pulled Cat into his arms and it felt like coming home to a place he had forgotten could even exist. The following day, Elician all but ignored him.
He was gone not long afterwards. ‘You told me that,’ Elician grinds out, ‘and the first thing I did upon seeing him again was bind him in marriage.’
The fire cracks. Sap popping in a loud burst. Lio pokes at it with a stick. ‘If he came up to you in the morning, said he changed his mind – that Gillage is his king and he wants to return to Alelune and be with his Reapers in those cells – would you let him go?’
It’s a choice. In the quick rush of everything that happened, Cat never really thought of any alternatives after he spoke to Elician.
But…he could do it. He could go back to Alelune, walk himself into the cell where he spent his childhood.
Be with the people whom he loves most in this world.
He would not be their saviour, but he had never proven himself to be one in the past either.
They had loved him all the same. He had never dreamed of being king, and it is always so very dangerous to hope for something as necessary as freedom.
‘No,’ Elician says.
‘Do you expect me to judge you for that?’ Lio asks him.
‘Someone should. If it’s his choice and I stop him from doing it.’
‘I won’t.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I know what those cells are like,’ Lio spits out.
‘And no one should be there. Not him. Not Brielle. Not any of the others. And even if he said he wanted to go back, be a martyr because of duty – you wanting to keep someone safe from harm does not make you a bad person, little brother. It means you care.’
And Lio cares too. Cat has barely exchanged more than a few words with the man since they returned; he was not kind to him when they first met either. And still, he cares. He cares enough to put Cat to shame. He should have treated Lio so much better.
‘I promised him his freedom,’ Elician argues. ‘Forbidding him from going home is denying him freedom.’
Lio shrugs. ‘Fine then, what about this? If he wished to never return to Alelune, and equally wished to have nothing more to do with you or your reign, what would you do?’
‘Let him go. Give him anything he needed and just…let him go.’
Cat couldn’t do it. He couldn’t be granted such a thing and not need to do something. He couldn’t live each day and refrain from wanting to go back – Brielle and all the others are waiting for him. He will either return to Alelune a prisoner or go to set them free.
‘There you go then. Freedom to live, not freedom to walk into torture. That’s enough in my book. As for Cat…he deserves the chance to choose. And it seems he has. Did you force him to accept your offer?’
‘No.’
‘Did you force him to marry you this quickly?’
‘No. I…There’s no stability or certainty without it. The last time a Soleben monarch swore an oath to an Alelunen – their queen was murdered.’
‘That wasn’t your fault either,’ Lio murmurs.
‘I should have stopped it. I was too late, too slow…but I should have stopped it. Cat deserves proof that I won’t break my vow. And I won’t let my government find a way to put it off until that’s exactly what it will mean.’
Cat pushes himself up. Lio and Elician turn towards him, twin expressions of guilt on their faces.
He rubs the sleep from his eyes and says, ‘It’s not your fault,’ as he joins them by the fire.
‘I don’t blame you. And I’m not a child.
Neither when we met nor now. I knew who you were before you knew who I was.
Don’t apologize for what happened then…and don’t apologize for giving me a chance to save my people now. ’
‘See,’ Lio says, nudging Elician’s shoulder. ‘This is why communication is important. We’d hate to spend the next few years second-guessing ourselves every few minutes, wouldn’t we?’
But for once, Elician doesn’t pay Lio any mind. His attention is solely on Cat at his side. ‘Are you sure?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ Cat replies. ‘Are you?’
And there is no doubt, no hesitation, as Elician nods and once more swears the same.
The day they are due to reach the capital, Adalei tells them both to change into more presentable garments.
She reveals a circlet she had adjusted from the precious jewels she brought with her.
She orders it on Cat’s head. ‘You’ll be riding in as Stello Alest,’ she tells him.
‘And soon announced as his betrothed. First impressions matter.’
‘It won’t be a first impression; people have seen me in the city.’
‘Do you truly believe that anyone remembers your face? Or were they too busy desperately trying to turn away?’ She doesn’t say it to be cruel, but the truth is a bitter thing. He places the circlet on, and Elician makes a noise of discontent.
‘May I?’ he asks, already reaching towards Cat’s head.
Cat drops his hands to his side and submits himself to Elician’s attention.
The band shifts this way and that. It is ever so slightly too big, and it needs to be angled just right.
But once Elician is satisfied, he steps away and his head tilts to one side. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he says.
‘And you,’ Cat offers in turn. Adalei insisted on a matching set of clothes for them both, exchanging Cat’s Reaper uniform and Elician’s borrowed wares for dark trousers and leather boots, offset by a smooth purple velvet tunic embroidered with silver stars.
The rich vibrancy of the fabric draws out the darker hues of Elician’s skin.
His beard has been trimmed into a careful neatness, his too-short hair arranged to something approaching respectability even if it is still startling to see his curls so diminished.
‘I look like death,’ Elician huffs, turning away.
‘Death has always been beautiful,’ Cat replies, nonplussed. Elician pauses at that, lips quirking ever so subtly before he nods and offers Cat a hand in climbing up on his horse once more.
They reach Himmelsheim by midday. Zinnitzia and Lio have ridden ahead to inform the guards at the gate they are coming.
Cat half wonders what she could possibly have said to make them believe that their crown prince has returned, but Elician’s mother is still in residence at Himmelsheim.
She will have the authority to corroborate the truth of Elician’s existence, and when they approach the walls of the great city and the start of the long winding road up to the peak of a dizzying spiral, they receive no resistance.
Instead, Lio greets them when they arrive.
Elician sees him first, and it’s the first time since he’s returned that he looks genuinely pleased.
Someone gave Lio a uniform, and he is dressed just as he was the day Cat met him.
He is still too thin, cheekbones far too evident and hair too short (same as Elician), but for once: he looks like himself.
‘He looks good,’ Cat offers, and Elician smiles as bright as the sun.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘He does.’ They draw near and Lio has everything prepared for them.
The city guard form a circle around their group, bracketing them in on all sides.
Elician thanks those who catch his eye, a few unable to hold their silence and welcoming him back with looks of awestruck befuddlement. ‘Was there any trouble?’ he asks Lio.
‘No,’ Lio replies. ‘Honestly? I think everyone’s been hoping for some good news for a long time.
And finally? They have it.’ He leans in close to his king, familiar and comfortable.
Whispering, ‘Let’s go home, little brother,’ as the city’s trumpets sound their arrival and the people of Soleb turn to watch their Sun Blessed Prince guide his horse through its city gates.