Chapter Seven Cat
CHAPTER SEVEN
Cat
Elician is crowned on a bright, sunny day with a cool breeze sliding in from the west. They are married before that sun even reaches its zenith.
He is beautiful, radiant in the way a Sun King should be.
Gold glitters from every part of his ensemble.
White trousers, high stockings and carefully shined golden shoes make him a spectacle.
His brown skin takes on an almost luminescent quality, amplifying all the subtle yellow and orange accents of his regalia.
And when he walks, even his heels click charmingly against the smooth tile floors of the palace.
His ivory satin jacket hangs to his knees and it shimmers as he moves.
It is open and revealing, baring his chest and the sunburned patterns he has spent every spare moment he could trying to form.
A sun has been burned there, with all its rays reaching out in every direction, blessing him as chosen. Blessing him as king.
Cat cannot take his eyes off him. There is so very, very much to see.
The whole of the ceremony left his mouth watering, his eyes twitching this way and that.
To the patterns curling along Elician’s skin.
The way his crown – their crown – rests on his head.
It is the crown they designed together, a crown steeped in opposites and inversions.
Darkened steel makes up the band. A golden sun rests at the very centre of Elician’s crown, with the finest crescent of a white-gold moon peeking out along one edge.
Rays emerge from this sun, one gold then one white gold, then back again.
And Cat’s sigil is the exact opposite. A white-gold moon, a golden sun only just breaking free of the moon’s eclipse.
The rays, interchangeable – one after another, gold then white gold.
Balance and unity and difference combined.
Perfection, in the form of jewellery. Cat actually thinks he’ll want to wear it, instead of grudgingly putting it on to please Adalei and her judging eye.
A strange desire pools in Cat’s stomach when he looks to his husband.
Then builds. Climbs. Chokes. It fills his throat until he isn’t sure he can breathe around its presence.
He barely pays attention to Zinnitzia, serving once more as cleric of her order, master of Life’s domain, as she has Elician swear oaths to his country, then oaths to his spouse.
Cat speaks his own oaths when prompted, Soleben falling almost far too naturally from his tongue.
He cannot be choking if he can speak, and yet still that desire lies wrapped around each vowel and consonant that leaves his tempted lips.
Zinnitzia proclaims Elician king, announces Elician of Soleb and Alest of Alelune married.
Elician’s hand slips around Cat’s white-gloved palm as their people cheer.
He leans in but stops himself from kissing Cat as tradition would normally dictate, instead raising Cat’s hand to his lips to kiss his knuckles as musicians play something loud and celebratory.
He smiles at Cat, smooth and charming, before leading him back down the aisle to an open feast and all the celebrations to come.
They have only one moment to themselves, one moment where they duck into a guarded room to change out of their coronation attire into something more comfortable.
Elician’s chest is still bare for all the world to see, but his jacket gains sleeves.
His footwear turns soft and supple. Better for dancing.
Cat’s fingers fumble around his own clothing, far more restrictive (and far closer to his own preferences).
His skin cannot be so openly displayed. The danger of his potential contact with others is too high.
But Adalei commissioned him a jacket that shimmers like melted metal, eerily luminescent and bold.
Elician steps close, helping Cat’s trembling fingers work out the many buttons and ties.
His fingers are deft and capable, his familiarity with the style far more evident. ‘You did well,’ he praises, and Cat manages to thank him even as his eyes drift to Elician’s lips. His head dizzy with the realization that at every breath, Cat can feel sweet air dance across his cheeks.
Public displays of affection are frowned upon in Alelune.
Intimacy is for the privacy of one’s home and amongst one’s dearest companions only.
But there is one exception: weddings. It is a sign for all the world that the couple is a couple, and that there will be no changing that fact.
A wedding is only made valid with the sealing of a kiss, and Cat wants so very desperately now to lean forward and take his due.
‘Are you all right?’ Elician asks.
‘Yes,’ Cat replies. ‘And you?’
‘Just glad it’s over.’
Solebens used to have a similar tradition.
Cat still recalls reading that titbit in his history books as a child.
The scandalous is hard to forget, and the thought of copulating in public is so utterly repugnant that it turns Cat’s stomach into knots.
But the tradition is much subdued these days.
A kiss is all that’s publicly seen, but Elician cannot kiss Cat in public.
Cat is supposed to be able to kill him with such a thing.
Elician could only press his lips to Cat’s gloves and consider the ritual binding.
‘Marina was telling me about marital obligations,’ Cat says as he pulls off his jacket and replaces it with something else.
‘What obligations?’ Elician asks.
‘Physical ones.’
‘I don’t expect that from you.’
Of course not. This is a political arrangement.
Peace is what Elician wants. It is all he has said he wants.
They may share space together, but Elician wants nothing more.
And it would be better for Elician in the end if that were the case.
There is no fear that if Cat were to die for good it would break Elician’s heart in exactly the way he has feared since childhood.
Cat should be grateful. He can’t quite muster the energy to make it so. ‘I suppose all her advice was for naught,’ he tries to joke.
‘Yes. Don’t think about it.’
But he has thought about it. Just as he once dreamed of what his own wedding day might actually be like.
He never dared imagine someone as beautiful as his husband, but he wanted to know what it was like to breach that one barrier of intimacy.
To step forward beyond the realm of cultural impropriety and embrace that which can only be known once two souls are bound by both the law and the gods.
To earn a kiss from an intimate and know they care enough to defy all norms and conventions to prove to the world: he is theirs.
Elician smiles at him when he finishes changing into his less formal wear.
He offers Cat his right elbow and leads him back into the hall, where cheers erupt and the music is too deafening to be good.
Cat sees none of it. None of the dancing.
None of the banners fluttering. None of the food that is displayed on a hundred different tables.
People come up to speak with them, but really, it’s to speak with Elician, and that is fine because Cat has nothing at all to say.
Empty platitudes are easy to manifest when pressed, and he offers them when he feels eyes slipping his way.
‘Are you all right?’ Elician asks again, just before they’re pressured into dancing for the crowd. Marina taught Cat the steps in advance, and he doesn’t even look down at his feet as he’s swirled this way and that.
‘You’re beautiful,’ Cat confesses. The corners of Elician’s eyes crinkle as he smiles.
He’s my husband, Cat thinks, dizzy suddenly at the thought of it.
We made it official. Then, ‘I wish my father was here.’ Elician’s fingers spasm against his.
His eyes stop crinkling; his smile fades away.
The back of Cat’s throat nearly closes up entirely.
He swallows every other thought and shoves them straight back down to the depths of embarrassment.
Elician doesn’t respond to Cat’s words. Cat knows he should be ashamed for having brought up the topic of fathers when it’s an issue Elician will likely never overcome, but the unspoken desire does not disappear.
Even when the dance is done and Elician kisses his hands once more before stepping away to speak with well-wishers, leaving Cat to sit quietly at the head of the table with no one but Marina at his side, the thought doesn’t vanish.
He watches Fen dancing with that foolish Rodans boy.
Watches her flush and titter and laugh too hard.
They have been spending so much time together lately.
They almost look sweet, side by side. But then he sees Lio and Adalei, and it is something entirely different.
Theirs is, perhaps, the only true love in the whole of the palace, and all of Himmelsheim knows it.
He hears onlookers whispering about when the next royal wedding will be, but Elician says nothing about the timeline.
Cat half wonders how long Elician intends to put it off, and if, without any permission at all, Adalei and Lio will have a field wedding of their own.
Cat’s eyes wander. He imagines his father by the punch bowl, Captain Partho at his side.
Laughing. Smiling. He imagines his mother fussing over his jacket, a fine royal blue with golden accents in honour of his husband, silver stars subtly sewn onto his collar.
He doesn’t think of her as the Queen. His queen.
Not here, not now. But as his mother, and his father, and their life from before. He wishes they could be here.
Queen Mother Calissia is in attendance, of course.
She approaches her son, and Elician permits her to say some words to him.
He even dances with her; it is short and perfunctory, but respectful.
Cat wonders what it would have been like to dance with his own mother. If he would ever have had the chance.
‘Alest?’ Marina murmurs. ‘You look like you’re about to cry.’
A bad look for a wedding. He squeezes his eyes shut, swallowing back his grief.
He opens his eyes and looks back at his husband.
Gorgeous. More gorgeous than any other time before.
He wishes he knew what his father would have told him before he got married.
Before he signed himself away. He wishes he had someone to give him some kind of advice.
Someone motivated only by affection for him, rather than power or politics.
Alelunens don’t show great displays of intimacy outside their families. Weddings are supposed to be the great moment of acceptance, of crossing the threshold into the next step of a relationship. Cat wonders what Brielle would say if she could see him. What any of his Reapers would say.
‘Can we have another wedding?’ Cat asks, not really sure who he wants to answer, or even if he wants a response at all. ‘After I get my throne in Alelune?’ Can he have one more chance to make it right?
‘You can do anything you want when you are king,’ Marina replies.
‘If I become king,’ he mumbles.
‘Yes…if. But those are dour thoughts for a day meant to be filled with joy.’ She places one hand at his cheek, wipes tears from under his left eye with her thumb. ‘May I give you something?’ His eyes slide to a far-too-wide table stacked high with gifts he doubts he will ever remember receiving.
‘I have too much already.’
‘This is not like that.’ She removes a small leather-bound journal from the inside of her jacket.
She forwent wearing any kind of dress, preferring men’s formal attire, black and restrictive all the same.
She gives it to him and he goes to open it, but she stops him.
‘I have been working on this for some time, especially in the past few weeks. Read it later,’ she requests.
‘But do read it.’ He hesitates, then nods, tucking it into his own jacket so it sits nestled against his chest. ‘For now, though, dance with me.’ And he does, for it is expected and it is his wedding.
And his heart aches, wishing she were someone else all the same.
When the night is over, he and Elician walk from the dwindling lights of the party down the long halls to the King’s suite.
No eyes follow them. The hall is quiet, still, and so far removed from all parts of life.
There are no echoing voices, no laughs or cheers.
He wants to say, Kiss me. Make it official.
Make this feel right, but when they enter the room, Elician keeps his back to him.
Elician takes off his clothes. He puts on a nightshirt Cat has never seen before and crawls into bed like a man preparing for his own funeral.
Cat takes off his own layers. He sets Marina’s book to the side, not to be opened, and he lies down beside his husband.
Back to back. It is uncomfortable. Painful even.
They do not speak, and they do not sleep.
Sometime in the night, Elician moves to the floor. Cat joins him. Elician’s arms wrap around his body, and that alone is better than the bed. And Cat is so tired of pretending otherwise.