Dauntless Summer (Harmony of Seasons #2)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

C osmo never lingered in the temple.

Ever.

He didn’t linger the first summer he’d woken up after being cursed, and he didn’t wish to linger on the four hundredth summer, either. As soon as he felt blood moving in his veins, felt the heat of the sun on his skin, he climbed down from his plinth and fled the temple and its island without so much as looking at the statues of his brothers. He spent his precious time awake deep in the underbelly of Papia City, where it was easy to lose himself among the thousands of other people. None of them knew him, but they welcomed him. They embraced him. They respected him and, over the last several decades, had come to revere him a little bit.

When summer ended, he would return to the temple, only when he had to. Only when the pull in his chest, drawing him back to his cursed resting place, was too painful to ignore. Cosmo had no idea what all his brothers got up to, when they had their turns awake. He could honestly say he’d never given it much thought. He never allowed himself to give it much thought. Contemplating his brothers and what had happened between them…what had almost happened to Cosmo himself… It didn’t change things. It didn’t make anything better to dwell upon the past, so he did his best not to.

For four hundred somewhat happy summers Cosmo had worked, drunk, feasted, and fucked, only resting when he was ready to keel over where he stood. He didn’t think about the past, nor the future—except insofar as it affected his duties as the god of summer.

It was a good system. It had served Cosmo very well for four hundred years.

Until this year—until he’d woken from his cursed slumber to find his usually crypt-like temple awfully crowded. Crowded with more than the lichen covered statues of his brothers. There were three flesh and blood men here, only one of whom he recognized: Auro, his youngest brother. Sweet, gentle, Auro—who Cosmo had long since accepted he’d never see again.

Cosmo’s heart stopped at the sight of him, four hundred years of grief hitting him at once. Like a house falling on top of him, like an avalanche. The three men hadn’t noticed him yet—which was all to the good, because it gave Cosmo a moment to get a grip on himself, to decide if what he was seeing even made sense.

It didn’t, actually. This should not have been possible. Had Cosmo ever, in all of his cursed months encased in stone, dreamed, he would have assumed he was now. But he never had, so he wasn’t now. Even so, Cosmo found the flesh of his own thigh and gave it a hearty pinch. It hurt.

This was real.

Auro seated on the ground before him would have been strange enough, but the peculiar tableau of Auro naked in the arms of two beautiful men didn’t make any sense—no matter how long he stared. Cosmo swallowed around the lump in his throat, doing his best to fight the impulse to flee before they saw him.

“Can someone please tell me what the fuck is going on?” Cosmo asked them at last.

One of the men on the ground handed Auro his own cloak, and Auro sprang to his feet. He wrapped the deep crimson fabric around his waist, and before Cosmo could say something clever, or anything at all, Auro collided with his chest, wrapping his arms around Cosmo’s middle to squeeze the life out of him.

Cosmo allowed himself a five count to enjoy his brother’s warm hug before prying Auro’s arms off and taking a few steps back. It was all he could manage, before the questions and the prevailing sense of dread began to invade. He ruffled Auro’s hair, which Cosmo realized had faded from its natural vibrant pink to something far plainer, far duller, a pale ashy auburn that didn’t suit him. Cosmo’s pulse raced. What had Auro been saying right before Cosmo had announced his presence? Auro thought his grace was… gone? Cosmo did not think that was possible, either, but as he held Auro at arm’s length, inspecting his familiar face, he thought, Well, what the fuck do I know?

“What has happened to you, little brother? All the color has bled out of you.”

“I have so much to tell you,” said Auro breathlessly. “It’s difficult to know where to start.”

“Why not start with your two handsome companions,” said Cosmo, and at last he seemed able to summon a smile. That was good; it meant he was regaining some sort of sense.

Auro’s pale, round face flushed splotchy pink, so at least he hadn’t lost all his vigor.

Cosmo cocked his head to the side, squinting. He realized something was different about his brother.

“This…this is?—”

“Alexios,” finished the younger of the two men, stepping forward to stand at his brother’s elbow. He was tall and lanky, with pretty lips and soft doe’s eyes. “I’m Alexios.”

“Ah,” said Cosmo, understanding at once. He turned to Auro. “Well done.”

“What?” Alexios asked, looking between them.

“Nothing at all,” said Cosmo, but he winked at Auro.

Auro looked mortified.

Cosmo turned his attention to the other man, who was older, and even more striking than the youthful Alexios, despite the fierce scowl that tangled the sharp lines of his face. Cosmo swept his eyes over him from head to toe, from his shining dark hair to his long, slightly bowed legs. “And you are?”

The man didn’t answer, but if anything frowned even harder. Alexios spoke for him instead. “This is Leofric,” he said. “Captain of my personal guard.”

Cosmo pulled his glance back to Alexios, surprised. “You’re that Alexios?”

Auro frowned. “You know him?”

“Not personally,” said Cosmo, taking a step toward Alexios. The silent Leofric tightened his stance, but did not move. “But everyone in Papia City knows the crown prince.” He gave Alexios a small, graceful bow. “Your Royal Highness.”

Auro’s frown deepened, too. Cosmo tended to have that effect on people. “You’re familiar with the city?”

“Of course,” said Cosmo. Puzzled, he asked, “Where do you spend the spring, when you’re awake?”

Auro looked down at his feet and mumbled, “Here.”

“You mean here, here? You stay in the forest? All by yourself?” This couldn’t be true—his heart ached at the thought of Auro being so isolated.

Auro nodded. “Where do you spend your time?”

Cosmo buried his concern for his brother’s loneliness, for now, and summoned his most enigmatic smile. “Oh, you know…around.”

Cosmo let his gaze flit from face to face, and all at once, he knew they were here to ask something of him. He narrowed his eyes. “Why— how are you here, little brother?” Cosmo found it difficult to say Auro’s name aloud after so many years.

At first, Cosmo thought Auro wouldn’t answer. He was silent so long, like he hadn’t planned out what he needed to say. Then, he blurted, “We found a way to break the curse.”

“Impossible,” said Cosmo at once. With a roll of his eyes, he turned away. He should have known better than to entertain whatever mad notion had Auro waiting here for him. It should not have surprised him, to find Auro changed from the boy Cosmo had known. They’d been separated four hundred years. Cosmo and his brothers had been strangers far longer than they’d ever been a family. Despite the fact that it was only Auro standing here before him, it was as if Cosmo could feel the judgmental gaze of Cedras and Kryos, too, the cold marble statues glaring at him from their plinths. “Even if what you say is possible, I’m afraid I must decline.”

“What? How could?—”

“I’m not interested.”

“You’re not—Cosmo, be serious. It has to be all of us.”

Cosmo was already backing away, rocking up onto the balls of his feet. “All of us?” He laughed, while his eyes desperately searched for an escape. “Well, then, I’m afraid your plan is doomed from the start, little brother.”

As he turned on his tail to flee the temple, the statues, and Auro’s desperate face, a large hand shot out and wrapped its fingers around Cosmo’s wrist. He’d almost forgotten about Leofric, who’d stood by as silent and still as if he were a statue himself. Before Cosmo could even open his mouth to protest, his grace burst from him like a comet, searing through his veins to explode out of his skin. He hadn’t even meant to summon it—and usually he couldn’t, not this soon after waking, not that much power. But somehow, it responded so readily to the boorish grab of this presumptuous stranger.

The man cried out, clutching his hand, which smoked and blistered, scorched by Cosmo’s fury, and fear. Their eyes met, and the searing disgust reflecting back at him stole his breath. Pulse hammering, Cosmo shaped his face into a scornful mask, winked at Leofric, and left the temple. Seeing the irate, stricken expression on the man’s face had felt good. He felt like himself again, thinking of it, as he made his way through, the forest without looking back.

Almost.

The posting was supposed to be a simple one. A soft service with outrageous wages, playing nursemaid to a spoiled, pampered prince. Prowling the grounds of a royal villa and trailing after a princeling could not be more different from Leofric’s life with the Sokolian army. And that was the point.

Leofric had never known another life, besides the life of a soldier. He and Hamalcar had played at war since they’d been old enough to grip a stick in one hand, and they’d enlisted in the legion of Sokol together on their sixteenth birthday. For fourteen years they’d marched, slept, ate, breathed, and lived that life, and they’d done it side by side, as they had done everything since their mother brought them into the world. If you’d asked Leofric then, he would have assumed he and Hamalcar would die one day side by side as well.

But they hadn’t.

Hamalcar was gone, and Leofric remained. It had been three years, and still he felt his brother’s loss, daily, like someone ripping a rib from his skeleton, only for him to regrow it each night and start the whole thing again the next morning. His guilt, the responsibility for his brother’s death, it was all he had left of Hamalcar now. That, and the vow they’d made each other, one drunken night when they’d first enlisted. It felt like a thousand years ago.

Leofric had fought his way to Hamalcar’s side when he saw him fall, and held him as he died, the two of them a small calm eye in the center of the storm of the raid upon their army’s camp. His brother’s face, so like his own, had twisted, grotesque in its agony, until Leofric had promised he remembered the vow they’d made so many years before. He promised Hamalcar he’d honor the oath they’d sworn, and all the tension had melted from his brother’s face. He died at peace.

For that, Leofric was grateful. And for the family he now had, because of his vow. The people he’d sworn to protect, and cherish, and care for. Laela, Hamalcar’s widow, and Sorex, their son, were his responsibility now.

It was them he thought of, in difficult moments. When his grief threatened to overwhelm him, or when he had to follow the unruly prince Alexios around the villa to head off his many varied escape attempts.

And now.

Because, while he had selected this posting for the promise of its relative safety and high wages, Leofric had already found himself in several life-threatening situations, and he’d only been here in Papia for a single season. It seemed every single day brought some new, unprecedented disruption, from assassination attempts to the discovery that his charge’s lover was a literal god.

And that was only the beginning, apparently, because here he stood, witnessing the reunion between Auro, god of spring, and his own brother, god of summer. He couldn’t help but feel a surge of envy. Auro had thought, for four hundred years, that his brothers were lost to him. He had grieved their loss, mourned them, resigned himself that he’d never again lay eyes upon their faces. And here, now, beyond all logic, Auro and one of said brothers embraced, reunited.

Leofric hadn’t known what to expect from Auro’s brothers. Through his time guarding the crown prince, he’d come to know the boy’s paramour fairly well. He was gentle, soft spoken, and kind. Perhaps a bit dangerous—he was a god, after all—but it was only a deeply protective nature that ever roused his anger.

This brother of his though. This… Cosmo , was about as different from Auro as it was possible for two men to be. He was thin and angular where Auro was soft, loud and brazen where Auro was timid. Freckled and tanned where Auro was milk-pale.

Leofric didn’t think he’d ever seen a person with quite so many freckles before—it was as if there were more spots than unspotted skin on Cosmo, and so much of that skin was on display. He dressed in a thin linen wrap about the hips and little else, though he bedecked himself in more jewelry than the queen. With his fiery head of hair, every part of him screamed for attention.

Leofric didn’t like it. He did not like the way that the freckles and the fiery hair drew his eyes, drew his focus. It was as if he could not look away.

He also didn’t like the flippant way Cosmo had dismissed his brother’s anguish, his pleas for help ending their shared curse. And, of course, he didn’t like how Cosmo had lashed out and attempted to burn off his hand.

“Apologies,” said Auro, for the hundredth time.

“It’s fine,” Leofric gritted out. But it wasn’t. His right hand was his sword hand. Without it, how he could he perform his duties? How could he protect his charge, the prince? Leofric trained with his off-hand from time to time, of course, but it was the right hand that thought for him, protected him in battle. He flexed his fingers, pain searing up his arm as the silk bandages scraped against the broken, cooked skin. Leofric exhaled through his nose and did it again. And again. He had to know and expect the pain, in order to be able to fight through it. To work with it, he had to embrace it. By the fourth time he made a fist, he felt better, though the agony had not lessened.

“Stop that,” said Auro, watching as the wounds began to weep through the thin fabric. “You need to rest it for it to heal.”

Auro might have lost his…magic—his grace, he called it—but he was still gifted with healer’s hands. He’d slathered Leofric’s palm with a thick, cool ointment before wrapping it in silk bandages. “I didn’t think he’d do something like that,” said Auro, adjusting the bandage. He fussed over Leofric’s hand for a few more minutes before tucking the edge of the bandage neatly out of sight.

Leofric shifted his weight a bit on the stool, looking down at his hand “Perhaps I should have thought before I grabbed him.”

“Still,” said Auro.

His Royal Highness, Prince Alexios, paced back and forth beside them. “Hello?” Said Alexios. “Not to minimize your injury, Leofric, but there are far more peculiar things to discuss.”

“Such as?”

Alexios stalked over and gripped Auro’s shoulder, giving him a little shake. “How— how are you still here?”

Leofric had been curious about this as well. Less than half a year ago, he would have said the entire notion of Gods and curses was pure nonsense. Now, here he sat, curious as to why the prince’s pink haired lover had not transformed into a marble statue before their very eyes. How things had changed.

To hear Auro tell it, he and his brothers, gods of the four seasons, had been cursed to turn to stone, with only one awake at a time. Each brother only walked free during the season he ruled. Auro and Alexios had been working to break the curse, to free Auro and his brothers their eternal imprisonment.

Alexios had expected to carry on with that mission when Auro turned to stone at spring’s end. Both he and Leofric had not planned on seeing Auro again until spring the following year. But here he stood, flesh and blood, before them.

Auro twisted his fingers over each other, studying them intensely—and thereby avoiding looking at Alexios. “I’m not certain. When I was unconscious, I had…well?—”

“Had what?”

“A vision, perhaps? A dream? I don’t know. I’ve never felt anything like it.”

“A vision of what?”

Auro hesitated. “I think…I know it’s something I need to talk to Cosmo about, first.”

Alexios cupped Auro’s cheeks and kissed the tip of his nose. “Then we’d better go find him, right?”

Leofric sighed, staring down at his burned hand, wondering how fast he’d regain the ability to grip a sword.