Chapter 50
The Great Hall blazed with music and motion. Garlands of roses and sunflowers wreathed the ceiling, and the musicians played splendidly.
Richard tried very hard to look as if he were enjoying himself, though he had not been granted a moment’s peace.
Noble after noble had requested his hand for a dance, and he’d had no choice but to accept.
Through the numerous waltzes, he saw with some amusement that Corwin had danced only with Dianara, turning the colour of a boiled lobster every time the Chief Mage’s hand cupped his waist. Elara was on the floor too, twirling Penelope around and wearing the look of a cat who had been handed a bowl of cream.
At the dais, Haldric and Aralynn beamed when Elara dipped Penelope into a deep kiss. The hall thundered with cheers.
Richard did not clap. Unease prickled the back of his neck. Penelope. This sweet young lady clearly besotted with his sister was—Richard was certain—no friend of Ardenia. But the ‘why’ refused to take form. Marius. Penelope’s father. There was something to do with Marius. Something about—
The music swelled, and Richard was swept into another dance—this time by Duke Quiggley, who simpered and made small talk. Bored, Richard searched for Kaelen.
He found the knight at the far end of the Great Hall, where the generals had drawn up a cluster of chairs around a decanter of brandy. Kaelen was in the midst of them, a boot hooked on the chair’s rail, his head tipped back in a laugh.
By the gods, was he a vision. The sun pendant gleamed at his neck.
He had a glass in one hand, and he was using the other to gesture broadly—telling some story, no doubt—and the generals were roaring with laughter.
Sir Joffrey was there too. He ruffled Kaelen’s hair with a thick hand and pinched Kaelen’s ear when the young knight batted him away.
Somehow aware of Richard’s stare, Kaelen turned. He took in the sight of Lord Quiggley nosing at Richard’s collar, and the line of his mouth went flat and unhappy.
Oh, he minds, sang a giddy voice in Richard’s mind. Look. He minds.
That was a good sign, surely.
After the next dance, Kaelen was nowhere to be seen, and Richard fled the hall.
It was not, he reflected as he slipped through the side door, an especially princely thing to do.
But the hallway beyond was cooler and quieter, the music having dulled to a muffled thrum through the stone.
Richard pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, and set off in the direction of the eastern stair. Perhaps Kaelen lingered there—
Footsteps came from further down the corridor.
“—the prince cannot have vanished. The point of this ball is to—”
“—saw him not a quarter of an hour past, by the dais—”
Richard spun on his heel and turned the corner briskly, only to hear, with a sinking horror, the unmistakable bray of Duke Quiggley’s voice.
“—the prince does this every year, but I shall find him this time, for I have already decided to grant him my undying affection—”
He was bracketed in. The two corridors bore two oncoming tides of courtly pursuers, with nothing between them but a small servants’ door—
A hand shot out of that door, closed about his wrist and yanked. Richard had no time to register what was happening before he was inside what appeared to be a broom closet, the door at his back, and a finger pressed against his mouth.
“Shh.”
Richard stilled. Enough light seeped in under the door to illuminate the dusty shelves of linen, the moths fluttering overhead, and—
Kaelen.
The knight was flushed from drink, his tunic’s laces undone, revealing his collarbones. Kaelen withdrew his finger, eyes bright, hair tousled where Sir Joffrey’s hand had been.
“Shh,” Kaelen whispered again, but he was fighting back giggles.
Richard’s own composure crumbled, and a snigger escaped him. From outside—
“—he must be somewhere, my lord. A prince does not simply evaporate—”
“—did you check the long gallery? Did anyone check the long gallery?”
“—I checked it twice, my lady, and he was not there—”
“—where, by all the gods, has he gone? Why, I have even introduced myself—”
Kaelen clapped a hand to his own mouth, shoulders quaking, and Richard bit his lip.
The voices and footsteps retreated, and the corridor outside fell silent once more. Richard released a slow breath, and Kaelen’s gaze flitted to his lips.
“My prince,” he murmured. “Your beauty stretches greater than the stars on this night.”
Richard snorted. “The stars, Kaelen? Truly?”
“It is a line from my poem,” Kaelen protested, his grin lopsided. “Well, Briony has advised me to find a more suitable metaphor, but I can think of nothing better. “
“Then I shall admit, Sir Knight, you appear quite handsome yourself on this night.” Richard lowered his voice and winked. “Perhaps greater even than the stars, too.”
Kaelen’s jaw slackened. He smoothed his hair and cleared his throat. “You—you ought not to do that, my prince.”
“Do what?” Richard leaned against the door with a smirk.
“Compliment a man in a broom closet. It is not fair sport.”
“Tell me, then,” Richard said, “how did you know I had need of rescuing?”
Kaelen’s grin turned sheepish. “Ah. Well. I—I generally am always watching you.”
Richard raised a brow.
“That is to say,” Kaelen hurried on, his flush deepening, “I—I keep an eye out for you. Not—not in an, um, unnerving manner. At least, I do not think it bad-intentioned, though Corwin often calls me a creep—”
“Kaelen.”
“—merely in the way that one notices, in a general sense, where a particular person tends to be at every given moment—” Kaelen dragged a hand down his face. “I am making this worse, am I not?”
“You seem in high spirits today,” Richard teased as Kaelen’s ears turned scarlet.
“It has been a lovely day,” Kaelen admitted. “Most of the afternoon was spent helping Dianara ask Corwin to the ball. And after, I had a turn at the training yard with Jeya. She is coming along nicely. Her footwork has improved tenfold.”
Richard frowned. Jeya. A squire. Kaelen had a squire? When had Kaelen taken on a squire?
“—and the generals,” Kaelen was saying, “they have been kind to me of late. Tonight, General Sarn told me they mean to nominate me for the Greensward Tourney next month.”
“The Greensward? Kaelen, that is—that is no small thing. The finest blades of the realm enter the Greensward. You shall acquit yourself splendidly. I have no doubt of it.”
“My prince.” Kaelen pushed off from the shelves and loomed over Richard, smelling of brandy and sword polish. He reached for Richard’s hand and turned it upward in his own. “If I were to win the tourney…there is a question I should very much like to ask you.”
Richard’s breath hitched. He had a speech prepared. He had rehearsed it ten times that day, and yet every word of it now leached straight out of his head, leaving him with only the warmth of Kaelen’s hand around his own and the awareness that they were standing absurdly close.
“Kaelen—”
“Let me,” Kaelen murmured. “Let me first, if I may, for I—I have been carrying this a long while, and I find the brandy has made me brave, and this broom closet has made me bold, and I should like to lay it down before I lose my nerve.” He drew in a deep breath.
“There was once a boy of seven, with a best friend. They were taken by Velari outlaws on the road home from a market fair they’d sneaked into.
They were brought to a cave, where the Velari meant to ransom them or suck their blood. ”
Richard stared. He knew this tale.
“And when the Velari grew hungry,” Kaelen went on, “the boy stood in front of his friend with his arms spread, because he had decided that if only one of them was to walk out of that cave alive, it ought not to be him.
And he was quite at peace with this, for he was a simple creature, and he had made up his mind.
And then”—Kaelen’s eyes lifted—“and then suddenly, a prince of seventeen was also in the cave. Brandishing a torch and a sword, and with eyes of thunder, he slaughtered the Velari in fire and blood. The boy thought, in that moment, that the gods had taken pity and sent the sun itself down from the sky to save him, and when the prince offered the boy his hand, the boy could have wept from the beauty of him.”
“Kaelen,” Richard whispered.
“The prince did not know the boy.” Kaelen shrugged.
“Boys are small and easily overlooked in a kingdom so large. But the boy—the boy could not stop looking. He turned from a boy into a stripling, and from a stripling into a youth, and what had begun as the worship one offers a hero became, by slow degrees, an infatuation. He watched every kindness the prince offered a stranger. He watched others ridicule the prince’s meticulousness and saw that the prince was only so because he could not bear his people being failed by his inattention.
He watched the prince’s siblings mistake the prince’s worry for sternness, and the prince’s discipline for dullness, and he wanted to shake them and tell them how much was being given to them. ”
Kaelen’s thumb stroked along the underside of Richard’s wrist.
“In part, it was a humiliating affair.” He snorted.
“For the youth could not even meet his prince’s eyes without becoming feverish.
The youth could not go a single night without dreaming of the prince’s smile.
” His eyes softened. “When the youth grew into a man, the infatuation deepened. It put down roots. It became something the man could no longer have removed from himself, for it had grown into the shape of his ribs. And in these last months, through their shared adventures, the man discovered something he did not allow himself to see before. That the prince, for all his beauty, was not without thorns. That the prince was stubborn past the point of reason. He was often furious when he ought to apologise. He did not deign to ask for help, for his pride was a foolish thing, and perhaps, too, because he could not trust those around him more than he trusted himself.”
Richard swallowed hard. “Surely then…then the man must, with such knowledge, find his adoration cooling. Surely such flaws must be a cure of sorts.”
Kaelen stepped closer. His forehead came to rest against Richard’s, and his breath was warm on Richard’s lips.
“No,” he whispered. “In truth, the man has never been more wholly taken. Never more lost to the keeping of his prince, in every chamber of his heart.”
The tears that sprang to Richard’s eyes came at the same time as the lump in his throat. He blinked fast, for they threatened to spill. His hand turned within Kaelen’s, and slowly, he laced their fingers together.
A pale glow bloomed at the far corner of his vision, and Richard stiffened.
In the back of the closet, half-buried behind a stack of linens, stood a tall mirror in a tarnished frame. Its glass had gone a milky white, and it rippled with luminous currents.
The door again.
A tear trailed down Richard’s cheek, and he made no move to wipe it.
It was time.