Chapter 29
They left in hooded cloaks through the Eastern Gate, their mounts plain. Within the hour, the city’s lights were swallowed by the dark.
The road unspooled before them, hedged on either side by wheat fields and the occasional cottage.
Kaelen led at a canter, occasionally turning in his saddle, and whenever their gazes met, Kaelen ducked his head and bit his lip.
The sixth time Kaelen turned, Richard gave him a tentative smile, and Kaelen almost steered his horse into a ditch.
By dawn, they’d reached the eastern forest. The road narrowed beneath towering oaks and beeches.
Ferns crowded the verges, moss twisted around the roots, and birds chittered loudly from their nests.
Shafts of sunlight filtered through the canopy, brightening the clusters of tulips and daffodils, and Richard found himself smiling.
Despite the sleepless night, he’d not felt so awake in days.
At noon, Kaelen drew them off the track to a clearing. Richard took his offered hand to dismount, thighs aching from the hours of riding, and hobbled to an oaken log with a wince.
After feeding and watering the horses, Kaelen joined him. They sat side by side, chewing on bread snatched from the kitchens. Once they’d eaten, Kaelen unrolled a map across his knees.
“Lord Vagor marked the circus’s route here.
” Kaelen tapped at the dotted line. “The Mirthwell Circus moves slowly, for they’ve a large group of wagons, beasts, and performers.
They’re due to perform in a small Estaran town called Hollowmere two days hence, and from there proceed towards the coast to Vexmara.
We’ll be crossing the border in an hour or so, and if we keep at our pace, we should meet them at Hollowmere. ”
Richard leaned in to study the map. Their shoulders brushed, and Kaelen stiffened.
“And what of disguises?” Richard asked.
“Dianara passed me a potion to turn my hair black.” Kaelen pulled a wry face.
“It’s unlikely many in Estara know of the Basilisk Slayer, but brown skin already attracts more attention than it is worth, let alone fair hair to go alongside it.
” He removed an apple from his inner pocket.
“Dianara gave me a potion to turn hair a chestnut shade, too. That might be fitting for you, my king. And perhaps we could buy more accessories in Hollowmere to alter you further.”
“It is a good thought,” Richard said. “Thankfully, aside from the Estaran court, I doubt many have ever set eyes on me. Now, as to names, I suggest we use our own.”
Kaelen bit into an apple. “Is that not the very opposite of disguise?”
Richard stood and stretched, lifting his arms. “Richard is a common enough name—half the boys in the realm born in the same year as I were named the same. No one is going to look at us and conclude the King of Ardenia and his Deputy Captain are attempting to infiltrate Estara. Do you not agree?” He frowned.
Kaelen was gawking at where his tunic had ridden up.
Why exactly, Richard could not fathom—all it had revealed was the tiniest sliver of his belly. “Kaelen?”
The knight jerked at his name, cheeks crimson. “Y-yes! You—you make a good point, my king.”
Richard pointed. “You cannot keep calling me that.”
Kaelen’s mouth opened, then closed. “Ah.”
“Indeed. You may call me by my name.”
“Your name.” Kaelen looked as though Richard had asked him to swallow a hot coal. “My king, how could I dare?”
Richard sat again and toyed with the apple Kaelen had laid out for him. It was strange. Now that he thought of it, none had ever addressed him as such. It was ‘Your Majesty’ from the court, ‘Boy’ from Dain and Selwyn, ‘Brother’ from his three. Even his parents had addressed him most times as ‘Son’.
“I suppose…” Warmth crept up his nape, and he cleared his throat. “I suppose it has been an age since another has called me by my given name, and I should like it if you would deign to do so.”
He did not look at Kaelen, choosing instead to slice off the apple’s peel. Was it an odd request? There was, Richard supposed, a measure of intimacy in allowing Kaelen to address him so. Not even his siblings had ever dared to.
“Richard.” It came out hoarse. “Richard.” A bashful smile spread across Kaelen’s face. “By the gods, this is going to take some getting used to.”
“It is only a name, Kaelen.” Richard took a bite of the apple, though it was a wonder he could swallow at all with his heart feeling as if it had pounded its way up to his throat. “You shall pick it up.”
* * *
Heavy clouds gathered as the light began to fail.
They had crossed a river by a stone bridge sometime in the late afternoon, and though no fence or marker proclaimed it, Richard knew they were now in Estaran soil.
The trees held none of the Ardenian charm of low-lying branches or trunks curling into horizontal loops.
No, they loomed like soldiers standing straight in formation, frigid and watchful, and the hairs on Richard’s arms stood up.
As the sun dipped, Richard felt the first cold splatter. Within minutes, it was pelting down in great sheets that turned the track to soup.
“Should we build a shelter?” Richard shouted, swiping water from his eyes. His hood had given up its purpose and hung limp and bedraggled around his neck.
“No!” Kaelen’s voice cut through the downpour’s din. “It is too wet to pitch anything in the open, my king! We’d be frozen by morn! Keep on until we find something with a proper roof!”
Richard nodded. The reins were slick in his palms, his knuckles white, and rainwater had seeped under his collar to slither down his spine. He dug his heels into his horse’s flanks, and the mare lurched forward.
For the next while, the horses laboured, mud gripping at their hooves. The cold settled into Richard’s bones, numbing his hands and making his teeth chatter.
“There!” Kaelen flung his arm up at a dark gash in the hillside, half-curtained by ivy.
A cave.
They led the horses from the track and dismounted. Kaelen went in first, sword raised. A heartbeat later, he called out that it was clear. Richard led the horses as far as the cave mouth, then ducked inside and yelped when a low-hanging rock clipped the crown of his head.
“Pray, mind the roof, my king.”
“Yes, thank you, Kaelen.”
Inside, the cave ran only a few paces deep, and water had already puddled across the uneven floor. Still, the walls were dry, and the rain’s roar dulled to a muffled drumming against the rock outside.
Kaelen tied both horses at the mouth of the cave, rubbing their noses in apology when they snorted their displeasure. After rummaging in his pack, he pulled out a blanket rubbed with beeswax and tallow, and spread it across the driest patch of stone.
“No fire,” Kaelen said. “The wood’s all drowned, and in any case, we’d choke ourselves on the smoke in a space this size.” He set up two tin lanterns and coaxed the wicks alight. The flames sputtered in the draught, shadows lurching wildly across the walls.
“Cosy,” Richard remarked.
Kaelen sighed and thrust Richard’s pack at him. “Get changed, my king.”
Richard stripped. His tunic made a wet slap against the floor. His breeches followed, clinging to his thighs until he had to sit and peel them off. Through it all, he noted with some amusement that Kaelen had turned his back, gaze fixed on the horses.
“I am decent,” Richard said, pulling on a fresh cloak.
Kaelen grunted a reply and began his own change. Richard slipped past him to tend to the horses. By the time he returned, Kaelen had settled on the blanket with his sword across his knees and was drying his hair with a spare shirt. Richard sat close beside, trembling from the chill.
“Your hands are pale.”
Richard curled them in his lap, wincing at the throb. “They do so when I am cold. The blood rushes away from the fingers—oh.”
Richard gaped as Kaelen took his hands between his own. Kaelen brought the hands towards his mouth and blew slowly on the knuckles. Warm air unfurled, and Richard hid a shiver.
“How are you still so warm?” he croaked.
“The cold does not touch me as easily.” Kaelen kneaded Richard’s fingers. “Mother always said it was the god-damned stubborn Haramont blood.”
His thumbs traced slow circles into the hollow of Richard’s palm. As he began massaging each knuckle in turn, he heaved a sigh. “This is not how I’d have chosen the day to go.”
Richard blinked. “What do you mean?”
“Your first day of adventure.” Kaelen gestured at the cave and the rain. “I had thought we might be in time to reach a village inn with a hearth, a bath drawn hot. A comfortable bed for your back.” He scowled and shook his head. “Not this. Soaked through and huddled in a hole. You deserve better.”
His lower lip jutted out in a slight pout, and Richard chuckled.
“Kaelen, I am not unused to discomfort. I have slept in worse holes than this on campaign, and besides—” He tilted his head and smiled. “It was very good of you to spot this cave. I should have ridden straight past it. And thinking to bring a waterproof blanket was also well done of you.”
Kaelen froze for a beat, then puffed his chest and rolled his shoulders.
“Well,” he said. “Yes, my king. It is a matter of training the eye, you see. Most would have missed the cave altogether, for the ivy was thick over the entrance, but I’ve always had a knack—an instinct, truly—for spotting suitable shelter.
Sir Joffrey used to drag me into the woods and set me exercises when I was a boy.
‘Find me a place for twenty men to sleep’, he’d say, and if I failed, he’d string me upside down from a tree. ”
“Not many could endure such discipline,” Richard said gravely.
Kaelen preened. “I tell no lie, my king, when I say there was no squire of the Seven Realms who had to endure more. Any other boy or girl would have fled from the terrors the brute—sorry—the terrors Sir Joffrey inflicted. Did you know when I was twelve, I accidentally slashed off his beard?” He grimaced.
“T’was only an accident, mind, but I’d never seen him so furious.
Threatened to shave my head, he did, and chased me through the whole castle until I hid in the cellars for a week. ”
“A terrible display,” Richard tutted.
“Precisely!” Kaelen faltered, catching himself. “I—I only mean, I was taught a valuable lesson.”
“Yes.”
“Right. Yes.”
Richard beamed down at his hands still cradled in Kaelen’s. The nearest lantern flame spluttered.
It was a foolish question, and he ought not to ask it. And yet—
“You must be missing Ravi.”
Kaelen’s brows rose. “Ravi?”
“The two of you have grown close. I saw—that is, Lord Gregory spoke of—of the farewell in the courtyard.” He hesitated. “A kiss, Lord Gregory said. It is clear you saw each other fondly. I am sorry that you had to part so soon.”
A voice at the back of his mind snorted its disbelief. Richard ignored it.
“Ravi is a good friend,” Kaelen said. “I hope to see him again.”
“Is he…Is he not your lover?”
Kaelen barked a laugh. “Lover? Of course not. I’d only known him a few days.
Besides which, Ravi is not looking for lovers.
He enjoys kissing, enjoys theatricality and spectacle.
He flirts the way some people hunt—for the pleasure of the chase, and none of the keeping.
In truth, he is absent from—” Kaelen stopped himself.
“I mean, that is Ravi’s to tell, and not mine.
But you may trust there is nothing of that sort between us. ”
Richard bit the inside of his cheek, but his tongue wagged anyway. “You were seen leaving his chambers at dawn.”
Kaelen mulled over the statement, rubbing gently into the meat of Richard’s thumbs.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “I had tried to…enjoy his company for a night. I’d had much on my mind, and he offered a keen distraction. It…It had felt nice to be wanted.”
“I—I see.” Richard swallowed, batting down the ugly curl of possessiveness in his gut.
“And I was wrong—before—to have—to have been ill-tempered about it. I know you have bedded others, and it was never my place to—to cast judgement upon it. You are entitled to whatever relations you should like to experience.”
“I know.” Kaelen hummed. “But that night, when I tried with him, and we entangled, I—I could not proceed. We spent the rest of the night talking, just exchanging stories.”
Richard’s eyes widened.
“These past months, it has come to me that—that certain things have changed,” Kaelen murmured, staring at Richard’s hands.
“Within me and also, in…the people around me in some way. I find I cannot any longer take my pleasure in that form of casual company, however willing or kind. It does not fit the shape of me now.” He stroked his thumb across a scar on Richard’s wrist. “I do not know how else to say it.”
The cave seemed to narrow, and the lantern-light illuminated all manner of small things in Kaelen’s face Richard had not properly noticed before. A scar slashed across the end of his left eyebrow. A single freckle, high on his right cheekbone. The long dark sweep of his lashes.
Relief crashed through Richard, like the unwinding of some great knot he had not known he’d been carrying. Soon after came the sting of guilt.
He had wanted Kaelen to find someone, had he not?
He had prayed to Emberlain to bring Kaelen a lover.
He had been clear in his rejection of Kaelen’s confession.
For Kaelen had pined after him for all these years, wasting away his youth and perhaps also his chances to find one to love him as he deserved.
That could never be Richard, not when he was absent from human desire. He was not built to love.
Yet here Richard sat with his hands in another man’s, terribly pleased his knight remained unclaimed.
What a crooked, selfish thing his heart had become.
“We ought to sleep,” Richard said quietly.
“Yes, my king.” Kaelen released him and reclined against the wall. “I shall take the first watch.”
Richard lay against the same wall, his hands now warm.
But he wished Kaelen would hold them once more.