M.A. Ray's Blog, page 12

Excerpt from Live Free or Die

Sorry for all the updates in quick succession! Trying to get things up to date for you guys. :)

This is an excerpt from a short story directly in the Menyoral line. It’s the answer to the question: where was Evan during Oath Bound?

~*~

It’d been lovely seeing Mam and Pap again, and all his brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts and cousins, and Gram: all the clan. Still, Wallace couldn’t say he was sorry to see MacNair Hill shrink in the distance, either. It shrank until the other mountains blocked it from view and the North Wing faded into a purple shadow. Nothing had changed under Hill, and Wallace, in roaming the outside world for six years, had. He’d grown a foot, thereabouts, and even before he’d left he’d been ducking to get from room to room. His old bedchamber, which had been cramped when he’d left, was now too small to do much beyond get inside; and the touching fact that Pap had ordered it preserved exactly as he’d left it didn’t change the reality of his having to camp on the surface.

They’d all gushed over his beard, though, especially Pap. He rather thought they’d been more excited about that than about his leaf. It was short for a proper Bearded clansman, but that hadn’t stopped them. Sorcha, his sister, had done it up in two braids that hung down his neck. She was his elder sister. They all were older than he, really, but he’d out-aged them all except Sorcha, and even she was a little close for comfort. It was passing strange to have grown, well, older in his body than Alasdair, who’d always seemed so mature. And they all still thought of him as a bit of a baby, their human foundling.

Three rough-and-tumble, wrestling weeks with the MacNair clan had been more than enough. They were all sorry to see him and Evan go, but Mam had given him an extra-large box of lichen cookies, which he still had a taste for after all those years, and Pap a fine claymore forged just for him. And now, well, it was a nice time having Evan all to himself, without even Henry. Fine fellow he was, Henry, but he would make Wallace pluck and skin and dress every damned thing; he chewed mint and spat all the time, which was disgusting; knuckled Wallace’s head even when Wallace grew taller than he; and at least a hundred other irritating habits. Wallace missed him like mad.

Still, there was Evan. Everything seemed good with Evan about, and all to himself! Well—mostly. They’d joined up with a caravan about a fortnight out from the Hill, about three days out onto the vast plain called the Wastes: a wide expanse of short, browning grass, dotted with shrubs and every so often a wee, tough tree. Wallace had never been up here before. When he’d left MacNair Hill the first time, Evan and Henry had taken him straightaway over east to Knightsvalley. This time, like the first, they stopped at the great oak that had, so it was said, given the Lady Her beautiful staff.

This time they were off west rather than east, overland to Windish, for Evan didn’t like to sail. There, they were to meet with Vandis, Dingus, and Kessa. Wallace had never been to Windish, either, and the prospect of a place where everyone lived in massive trees excited him. He couldn’t wait to get there, but so far the journey had been all pleasure, and so mayhap he could wait a bit.

He and Evan walked together, even after they joined the caravan, swapping the new stories they’d picked up at Moot. There were a lot this year; Dingus had told plenty Wallace had never heard before, and he shared them all with Evan, sometimes smoking herb out of Evan’s pipe, which had been a gift from Santo, and which Evan had owned as long as Wallace could remember. It was shaped like a pelican’s head, smoother than silk, and inside the beak it was stained with black resin, and outside it was rubbed shiny by finger and thumb. He’d always wanted to smoke out of it with Evan, and now that he was a Junior, he had, and did. They shared with anyone who asked, except the kids, of course, and the stories they shared with everyone.

It was a wonderful day, though a bit hot and dry for Wallace’s taste. He had a mouth like cotton from the herb about an hour ago, and dust stuck to the sweat on the nape of his neck, but his new claymore bounced slightly on his back, sheathed and stowed in his baldric in case he should need it. Evan walked alongside, and for once they were quiet, enjoying the scenery and the way the late-afternoon sun flung their shadows out long on the short grass, behind and a little to the left.

The caravan pulled off the road in the gloaming. As night gathered and the stars began to wink in the indigo bowl of the sky, supper went on the smoldering fire of caribou chips: a big pot of oats and dried fruit, and a skillet the cooks kept sizzling with rashers of bacon.

Once the chores were done, the merchants and guards came together in the center of the circled wagons to talk and wait for the food. Wallace had been helping a few of the guards take the horses down a low rise to drink from a muddy streambed, nearly dry after two weeks with no rain, and now he led two back, reins caught up in each hand. He dropped them off where they were all being staked out to graze and headed for the fire himself.

Evan stood by one of the wagons, talking to Faisal, a merchant in the caravan. Wallace couldn’t quite hear them, but Evan turned when he came into the circle and returned the broad grin Wallace got at seeing him. When he turned back to Faisal, Wallace still grinned. Evan was little, so he was, short and slight with a sharp face, and it was a wonder he didn’t burst at the seams with greatness.

Wallace went to the fire. “Need any help?” he asked the women tending supper, Faisal’s wife and three daughters.

“Ah, no thank you, Wallace,” the wife said—he thought of her as Mrs. Faisal, to tell the truth. He couldn’t remember any of their names but the middle daughter’s. Zahira. He supposed he might be excused by anyone but Franny, since Zahira was about his age and so pretty his heart nearly stopped to look upon her. She usually wore a deep rose dress, very loose, with loose pants underneath, but when the wind blew it would tauten and silhouette her willowy shape, whether before or behind, and Wallace’s mouth would go dry. It might not have felt so bad, except there was Franny; and not only did he understand, now, about sex and how much fun it was, but he also couldn’t have any of it.

Well, he thought, when Zahira smiled at him with almond-pink lips, mayhap I could, but I oughtn’t. She had golden-olive skin that looked as soft as her mouth, and hair like shiny jet, and her eyes… black, black eyes. In the firelight she looked made of gold, and she ought to have been so far above his touch that not even in his wildest dreams could he have her, but she seemed to like him well enough.

“Hello, Wallace,” she said, tucking a thick lock of that hair behind her ear. The two thread-thin gold bangles she wore slipped down her wrist with her sleeve.

He gave her a slight bow; he didn’t trust his voice. His claymore shifted, and he straightened again, flushing, before it could knock him in the back of the head.

“Today I was listening to your story about the dragon with the head cold. How funny! I loved it.”

He kicked at a pebble. “I got it off my friend at Moot. You can be sure he told it better than I did.”

“I can’t imagine that,” she said, and then Mrs. Faisal scolded her to stir the porridge. Blushing, she wrapped a cloth around the handle of the pot’s lid. It took her two hands to lift it.

Wallace closed the distance between them in three steps, reaching for the thick, cast-iron lid. “Let me.” When he took it from her, their hands touched, and she blushed even more deeply, which made him blush. Stop it, he told himself, and thought firmly of Franny. While Zahira stirred the porridge with a long-handled spoon, he took a step back. Space ought to help. And he looked up, so as not to admire her bent over the pot. His vision adjusted slowly from bright fire to dark sky, and every time he blinked there were more stars shining above.

A thin shadow sailed down, blotting the stars. It looked to be coming toward him, and some instinct had Wallace raising the pot lid. Not half a heartbeat later, something pinged against it and fell to the ground at his feet. He stared down: an arrow. “Evan?” he called. “There’s an—Evan!” More arrows hissed down around him. He pulled himself in small, small as anyone his size could be, and still felt one graze him, just barely, shoulder to elbow, tearing his tunic but leaving his skin untouched. The rest thudded into the dirt around him, and one struck deeply into Faisal’s eldest daughter, sank into the juncture of neck and shoulder. She screamed, fell screaming, kept screaming into the sudden mayhem. She hardly bled.

Wallace lifted the lid over his head. The rest of the caravan scattered; more arrows rained down, bouncing off his makeshift shield, driving into Faisal’s daughter, and he swallowed a moan of fear. There, under the wagon that just a moment ago he’d been leaning on, was Evan, beckoning to him. He scuttled across the circle with the lid held high and slid underneath, just in time, an arrow thumping the earth where his hand had been not a blink before. He lay for a moment, gasping, looking at the shadowed bottom of the wagon. The claymore lay under him, uncomfortably hard in his back, and he turned to his stomach.

Evan turned, half upright, and looked out of the circle of wagons, a bare sliver of his sharp face visible in the dim firelight. The thunder of hooves came to Wallace’s ears, and the soft weeping of Faisal and his family. He followed Evan’s eyes, his breath snagging in his chest. Outside the circle he saw the shapes of horsemen: some few of the caravan’s outriders, the ones on shift, and more, huge, on great muscled steeds. Horses screamed, and men. One of the outriders was so close to the wagon when his horse took a blow that its blood ran underneath, wetting Wallace’s elbows before it soaked into the dry earth, and the rider thumped hard into the wagon overhead, shaking it.

Evan went to hands and knees, pulled a foot up, like a runner in competition.

~*~

This story was really a challenge to write. I hope you give the rest of it a look! It’s available here.

Vistridir

What I’m working on now is this. As each of the stories I have exclusively on Amazon comes to the end of its KDP Select enrollment period, I’m going to add them to this site for visitors to read free. If you want to buy them, they’ll still be available, with pretty covers and all, but they will also be here.

This one wasn’t published here, not in its entirety, but it does include the final edit of Eagle Eye and the Worm of Shirith, as well as its companion story, Brother Fox and the Worm’s Bane. I wrote both stories as a prelude to The Periapt of True Seeing, which was never finished; I got too interested in Eagle and Fox, and wanted to begin at the beginning.

There is some NSFW stuff here.

VISTRIDIR

two stories by M.A. Ray

 

EAGLE EYE AND THE WORM OF SHIRITH

Eagle Eye could scramble a squirrel’s brain with a flung stone before he was out of nappies. His mother—her ashes feeding Yriah’s children and her soul flown to Iunder, bless her—when he was born, Mother had pleaded with Falcon Eye, his father. “Don’t name him Eagle Eye,” she begged. “He won’t be able to hit the broad side of a house.” But it was Father’s-Father’s-Father’s name, and Eagle Eye it had to be, and Eagle Eye he grew into like nobody before or since would ever be Eagle Eye, and he passed into legend even while he lived.

Before all that, though, there was the Worm. Eagle—Father called him Vo, which is Eagle in the Traders’ tongue—met the old monster when he had hair down his breeches to prove he’d one day be a man, but not his man’s height, and fourscore and two years exactly. Father had gone out with some of the Court, being that he was the High King’s huntsman, and that left Eagle to himself, which he liked. That morning he’d gotten his bow and quiver in order, making sure the wood was sound and packing extra strings in his pockets. You never knew. He whetted his hunting knife, stashed a currycomb in another pocket, and set off opposite the way Father had taken the High King and all the tall perfect nobles of the Court, into the wild country southwest of Shirith Valley.

He didn’t know the name of the mountain he rambled on that day, but he knew it in the bare soles of his feet, in his nose, in his eyes, every last inch. There was a great cave mouth in the side, but Father had told him not to go spelunking alone, and most times he did what Father said, especially out in the wild. You never knew, and besides, enough dangerous things lurked in the wood itself that Eagle didn’t particularly want to be screwing around down in the dark. There were plenty of things to talk to out in the sunlight, even if most of them didn’t talk back to him.

That morning when Eagle splashed through the easternmost stream snaking near the bottom of the mountain, the fairies that clustered around it brushed him with glittery fingers as he passed. He skirted the place where the winged serpents gathered; for all they talked, what they said dripped poison in the ear. And he avoided going directly upstream to the falls where the naiads clustered to comb their hair and giggle. Young as he was, Eagle’d been man enough for them some little while now, and he had no desire to be pulled underwater and shagged until he drowned. Instead, after he laid a couple of snares for dinner, he climbed a ways to Vercingetorix’s meadow. Since he was untouched, Vercingetorix didn’t mind him. The big unicorn even let Eagle come close and stroke his silver-white sides, though his pearly wicked-sharp horn was off-limits to curious hands.

Eagle paid his respects. The currycomb he’d put in his pocket was for Vercingetorix. He liked it sometimes, and when Eagle asked this morning whether he wanted currying, he said yes. Eagle brushed him down until his coat almost blinded at a glance. He talked about all kinds of nothing. For all his great dignity he was still a frivolous fairy creature, and vain. When Eagle got through he always had the feeling he’d been talked at by six of the Court’s serving boys at once, but he liked Vercingetorix better. The chatter was more about what was going on in the forest than it was outrageous lies about sex.

After he’d finished, he said good-bye to the unicorn and took his empty belly off to check the snares. One of them had caught him a nice fat squirrel, which he killed quick and roasted slow on a spit, stuffed with young wild onion. He collected some little strawberries while he waited, and ate them after as a dessert, lounging on the flat rock in his favorite sunny clearing. The fairies came to the sweet and to Eagle, and he sure as hell wouldn’t have told anyone, but he sang to them, a made-up story about a slight, dark, suspiciously Eagle-like hero slaying wicked trolls. They loved it, and sang along in their tiny voices with the sounds of instruments, fife and fiddle both, and they touched his skin wherever it lay to the air. They frosted between his collarbones and all over his face, hands, and forearms, even his feet, with glittery fairy dust. It tickled, and the story got lost in his laughter. They kissed his long pointed ears and flittered away, as quick as they’d come, and then Eagle heard other voices speaking hituleti, the People’s Tongue, which he’d grown up speaking.

He rolled off the rock into a crouch and straightened, frantically swiping at the glitter. The voices were young men’s voices, and he didn’t want to be seen like this. It was a rare man the pretty little fairies loved. Mostly it was kids and women.

Eagle hadn’t needed to worry. The three speakers passed by in the trees below. They didn’t notice Eagle in the clearing above, but he saw them, the Duke of Madoc’s twin sons and the Crown Prince.

He heard them talking a little. “We won’t wake him!” said Prince Brother Fox, laughing. “We’ll just go in and strike at his heart. Think of it! Wormsbane, we’ll be.”

At first Eagle thought it was just a brag, but Swift Snake and Swift Cat went on about it, and he saw the direction they headed, and all of a sudden it felt terribly real. How stupid were they? He went cold all the way out to his fingertips. “Never go in there, Eagle, you mustn’t,” he remembered Father saying when they passed the cave mouth together, time and time again. “The Worm would eat Shirith whole if you wakened him.” And Eagle had believed it, believed every word of Father’s stories about the great red fire-breathing Worm that slept beneath the mountain. “The last time he woke, Eleazar burned down half the royal palace and swallowed the flocks,” Father had said. “He carried off Crown Princess Liria and sucked the marrow from her bones in his lair. Just ask that unicorn if you don’t believe me.”

Vercingetorix hadn’t wanted to talk about it. Eleazar, the Worm of Shirith, with his teeth like daggers and his claws like swords, and his wings that blotted the sun! What would Father do?

What would Father say if Eagle didn’t try to stop them? He shuddered to think; and so he snatched up his gear and dashed higher, around the side of the mountain, concealed in the trees and silent on his bare feet, still shedding fairy dust. And in the end he slid down the sharp drop in front of the cavern mouth and fell through brush and trees to land lightly right there, blocking the entrance as best it could be blocked, though that was hopeless. It gaped in the side of the mountain, and even though it was overgrown in spots, still plenty of space remained for the young men to pass. “Don’t,” he panted, straightening.

“What have we here?” sneered Swift Cat, at the same time Brother Fox cocked his head and smiled a little with his hair spilling all to one side. Eagle saw—at the same time—Brother Fox’s face beaten and bleeding, like it was when he came down to Father’s house every so often. When that happened, Father always sent Eagle on some jumped-up errand. As if he didn’t know.

“Eagle Eye?” Brother Fox asked now, smiling that smile, which put a tightness in Eagle’s belly that Eagle didn’t quite understand. “Is that you?”

“Yes, Your Highness,” Eagle said, and then, rushing, “you can’t go down there, Your Highness, the Worm—”

“Who is this, Fox?” demanded Swift Snake, the other twin.

“Faralt the huntsman’s son,” Brother Fox explained.

“So—not even nobody. Nobody’s little boy.” Swift Snake laughed and shoved Eagle onto the rocks just inside the cavern.

“Snake,” Brother Fox said, reproving, and he was maybe about to say more, but Eagle picked himself up lickety-split, before they could get past him.

“My father’d tell you the same!” He blocked as best he could, squaring his shoulders and feeling small. “He always tells me to stay away from here. Don’t wake the Worm, he says. It could kill us all!”

When Brother Fox grinned that way, Eagle for one moment almost believed him. “It’ll be dead before it can rise. You wait. I’ll bring you a scale, little Eagle.”

Eagle’s nostrils flared. “You’re being stupid!” he blurted, and Swift Cat and Swift Snake narrowed their eyes at him, same time, same gesture, same face. “It’s not a brave deed like you were saying! It’s just stupid!”

“Little nothing boy with fairy dust in his hair,” said Swift Cat. “Maybe he should go first. Sparkly Worm bait.” And he and Swift Snake both laughed, nasty and rough.

“Cat,” said Brother Fox, sharper. “Cut it out. He’s a good kid. Let’s go in and slay the Worm, and then—”

“Don’t do it!” Eagle cried, his voice cracking, now, when he least wanted it to. His accidental squeak echoed in the chamber behind him, and he flushed.

Brother Fox laid a hand on his shoulder and squeezed lightly, moving him aside while the twins walked right past. “Don’t worry. I’ll bring you that scale at home.” And then the dark covered him up, his left boot heel the last thing to disappear into the cave. In a moment one of the twins lifted a red blob of mage-light; that disappeared too, and Eagle turned back toward the valley, thinking he should run and fetch Father. But Father was clear on the opposite side. He’d gone the other way, and the High King too, and the God only knew how long it’d take to fetch either one of them back, if they even believed him anyways.

He looked out over waves of green, highlighted in golden summer sun, and the seams of little creeks and falls, the dangerous sweep of the wash directly below. Eagle bit his lip, then turned and padded into the swallowing dark of the Worm’s cave. It didn’t take him long to catch up with the little, bobbing red light; but he stayed a ways off, down and down through the twisting corridors, so they wouldn’t catch him following.

Even here the Worm’s chemical reptile stink reached his nose. They were in a chamber with a ceiling so high not even the mage-light could illuminate it, and the dark seemed to press on what light there was, so the three walked close together, whispering a susurrus of regret. Behind came Eagle with his heart jacking inside his chest so hard he thought it might explode.

What was he going to do about an ancient Worm anyway? A little nothing boy with fairy dust in his hair. What could any of them do? He wished they’d listened to him. Maybe they didn’t see how the mage-light played crimson over hanging rock formations, staining them bloody, but Eagle did. He crept along, bare feet whispering on the stone, and kept his distance, no matter how much he felt like running up and squeezing himself next to Brother Fox.

The caverns opened vaster now, and Eagle could feel the wide emptiness on either side of him, almost as if it pressed on his skin. Rather than growing cooler as they went farther underground, like every cave in Eagle’s memory, this one grew warmer and then baking hot, sending sweat rolling down his back. He was terribly thirsty, and he drank from the small waterskin on his belt, but not much. He didn’t want to risk being heard. Up ahead, the older boys glistened ruby, and more than one wiped a sleeve across his brow. The stench of the Worm overpowered Eagle’s sense of smell, and then Brother Fox and the Swifts disappeared around a bend. Eagle scuttled after.

They had come into the chamber where the Worm lay sleeping. A draft of fiery air blew at intervals: Eleazar’s thunder snores. Eagle felt it, even though the mage-light had only just begun to unveil the massive evil head, big enough to climb. He could’ve fit in one of those nostrils up until a few years ago, and the black horns that curled back from that massive forehead gleamed like obsidian. The Worm’s breath was ancient meat and brimstone and one of his forefeet could have flattened six of Eagle at once. He slept on a mound of gold and jewels and bones.

And Brother Fox and his friends walked right by like it was nothing. Eagle could hardly breathe for fear. He kept along behind, but hunched in small. The closer he got, the more he wanted to turn and run; by the time he walked past the terrible mouth, he wasn’t breathing at all.

Up ahead there was a sharp crack and a jingle of coin, so loud in the chamber Eagle jumped out of his skin and barely managed to swallow a childish scream. And he froze in place, trembling and hugging himself, ’til he could recover a little.

A strange slithering sound made him look to his right, and what he saw—he so near shat himself—he let out a toot of wind and a little whimper, gazing into a glowing yellow eye taller than he was. The slither came again, and Eagle’s breath snagged watching the thinnest membrane flick across that slit-pupil snake eye, and back again. Eleazar lifted his head slightly. “I smell Vercingetorix on you, rodent.”

“He’s—he’s my friend,” Eagle stammered.

“Eagle Eye!” That was Brother Fox, horror in his voice, but the Worm ignored him, snuffling at Eagle’s tunic with a snout at least as big as a cow.

“Unicorns and fairies. Child, they won’t help you here.” Eleazar ran out a tongue black in the red mage-light and tasted Eagle soles-to-scalp in one sloppy lick, closing his massive eyes with pleasure. “Too bad there isn’t more of you. You’re delicious.” He smacked his chops together, and Eagle didn’t think. He bolted, feet slewing on the treasure as he skidded for one of the rock formations nearby. Eleazar’s great head rose on his neck, up, up, when Eagle glanced back.

“Leave him alone!” Brother Fox yelled. “I came for you, Eleazar, you disgusting old earthworm!” And the Worm of Shirith cocked his head to look at the Crown Prince. Eagle’s blood ran chilly. The Swifts cowered behind Brother Fox, like stone, and Eagle tried to wave them over behind the pile he’d found, but they didn’t even look his way; fascinated, they were, by the wicked magnificence of Eleazar, the sheer size of him. The red mage-light flickered out. Eagle clutched at the rocks in front of him. It was so dark, blacker than night, and the Worm’s laughter shook the mountain.

A sound like a drawing bellows on a terrific scale—and fire, blinding, blue at the heart, a blaze no Longnight bonfire could equal, belched from Eleazar’s mouth. The Swifts’ skin blackened under it. Their screams echoed through the roar of the flames. Brother Fox fell to his knees, head down, arms crossed in front of him, and the flames bowed around his shield of magic, a shimmery half-sphere.

Blackness again. Eagle trembled, and then came a whisper and golden mage-light shone out from Brother Fox’s hand. In the other hand he held his long slim blade, and smoke curled up from the bodies of Swift Snake and Swift Cat behind him. The Worm lunged, and Brother Fox dashed aside, but the serpent tongue slithered out for one of the twins. Fast as a lash, the body was in the Worm’s jaws, and the huge scaly throat worked, swallowing.

Eagle touched his bow, and he still wasn’t thinking, at least at the top of his mind. He started to climb the high tower of rocks he’d hidden behind. The other twin disappeared down the Worm’s pale-red throat.

“Come on, you filthy beast!” Brother Fox screamed. Eagle didn’t dare look at anything but his climbing. He reached up to the next hold, set his foot, went to the next and the next. His bare feet carried him up soft. His leather bracer hugged around his arm, reassuring. One shot. He knew what he had to do. He couldn’t listen to what was going on below, the snapping jaws, the roaring, the insults Brother Fox shouted at Eleazar, the Worm of Shirith.

At last, Eagle reached the end of his climb. His balance didn’t fail him. He stood at the very top of the rock tower, higher than all the rest, as high as the Worm’s head when he reared back to lunge at Brother Fox again. It wasn’t quite a man’s bow Eagle had, since he didn’t quite have his man’s height, but it was stout and flexible, and made just to his size, with as much pull as he could possibly manage. He needed both hands to string it.

He nocked his arrow as Brother Fox flung his glob of golden light straight into Eleazar’s face and conjured another. Eleazar slashed out with a claw, snagging Brother Fox’s shirt and tearing cloth, but not flesh.

Eagle couldn’t watch. He let the world collapse to his eye and the eye of the Worm. If he could sink an arrow into that great glowing orb, they might have a chance. He drew full. His foot shifted and the Worm, enraged now, whirled on him. But Eagle had already loosed.

Eleazar batted the arrow away, or so Eagle thought, but his heart didn’t have time to sink before the claw hit the ground and the fletching of the arrow disappeared into the black slice of a pupil. The Worm let out a shattering roar: “You dare?” And he came after Eagle on top of the rock tower. There was no other choice. Eagle flung himself down, tucking and rolling, as loose as he could. His bones shook and he felt himself cracking every time he bounced. At last he lay curled on the floor. Silence now, but for his own hammering heartbeat.

“Hey-la-hey!” Brother Fox shouted, unflattering surprise in his voice. “Eagle, brave Eagle, you’ve done it!”

Eagle tried to stand, but his leg erupted in pain, and he cried out and fell again. He lay back on the cavern floor, staring up at the Worm of Shirith with his mouth cracked wide over the rock tower, gold-red in Brother Fox’s mage-light. Eagle floated into oblivion.

When he woke, it was in a white bed and morning streamed in the window. Brother Fox slept in a chair on one side of the bed and Father snored in one on the other side. On the nightstand was a perfect ruby scale, as large as his hand. His leg was only a little sore, and the room had the green, nose-pricking scent of all-heal salve.

From the door, the High King said, “Well done, Eagle Eye Wormsbane.”

 

BROTHER FOX AND THE WORM’S BANE

The scents of honeysuckle and jacaranda mingled on a sweet breeze; the stars sparkled down between blooming magnolia boughs. Fairies skimmed the surface of an ornamental pond, and the black water reflected their twinkling trails of colorful sparks. Overhead, clouds drifted lazily across the white face of the moon.

Fox lurched through the dark garden, cradling his left elbow, trying not to cry. He couldn’t be gentle enough with his arm, see out of one eye, or breathe too deeply. He staggered across a delicate white bridge curved over a decoratively-snaking stream. His goal lay just around the bend in the cobbled path, on the other side of the yellow rose hedge: Falcon Eye’s cottage.

He couldn’t remember the first time he’d come here. This probably wouldn’t be the last. The huntsman had gentle hands for his injuries, and kind words for his deeper hurts. He never felt as if Falcon Eye might be disappointed in him. He hobbled past the yellow rose hedge and up the path. The cottage was cloaked in deep shadow and silver light: the moss and flowers growing wild on the roof, the rough-looking boards on the outside with bark still on them, spoke of safety. There was no smoke from the chimney on a warm night like this, but the pale glow of a mage-lantern shone from every window.

His eyes burned so fierce with relief that he couldn’t see out of the good one, and he nearly tripped over the stool by the front door and the unassuming figure that sat on it.

Voalt Vistridir.

Fox didn’t know what to think of Eagle Eye just now. He could hear Father again, saying coldly that he’d never be anything more than a disappointment if he let a little boy snatch the Wormsbane title from right beneath his nose—but Eagle Eye wasn’t a child, not for much longer. And he’d saved Fox’s life in that cave.

“Your Highness!” Eagle Eye said now, surprised, overturning the stool in his haste to rise and bow.

“Please don’t.” He didn’t deserve to be bowed to, let alone by Wormsbane. “Is your father here?”

Eagle Eye bit his lip. Fox didn’t wonder why. What he must look like! “No, Your Highness. Come in.”

Fox stepped into the huntsman’s little cottage. He managed to kick the door shut behind him. It wouldn’t do to have Snake or Cat— But the twins were dead, burned to a crisp in the Worm’s fire. “Where’s Falcon Eye?” he asked, his voice coming out strained.

“I’m sorry, Your Highness,” Eagle Eye said, very softly, like he said almost everything, kneeling in front of a chest. “He went out this afternoon. Hunting. He hasn’t come home yet.”

“I thought he always took you with him.” The God, his arm! It felt like a backfired spell had struck through it—worse.

“Your Highness?”

“What?”

“I can help you, if you want. My father taught me. But it’d probably be better if you sat down.”

Fox nodded, but didn’t sit. Sitting sounded painful. Everything sounded painful—even the air on his face hurt like hell.

“Your Highness,” Eagle Eye repeated, setting things on the window seat now: a pot of all-heal, a bowl of steaming water, a stack of cloths. “Please—”

“Fox.”

The boy reached up and pressed on Fox’s shoulders. “Sit down, Your Highness.”

“Call me Fox.” He let his knees buckle, and moaned when his ass hit the window seat, jolting everything. “If you’re—if you’re familiar enough to help me after—this—you’re familiar enough to call me Fox.”

“All right. Fox.”

Fox mustered a smile for the huntsman’s son. He was in a good place, with the redolent breeze cooling his back through the cracked-open window and the plain brown carpet, with its border of green leaves, plush under his boots. A spare place, but nicely done-up for all that, clean, not overblown like the palace. A small kitchen lay off to the front, and a bathing-room to the side, and in the back corner a dark wood cupboard containing bed and wardrobe together. A good place, and Eagle Eye belonged here. Bitterness mingled with the copper taste of blood on his tongue.

“Father calls me Eagle.”

“How old are you, Eagle?”

“Fourscore years and two. Hold still now.” The press of Eagle’s fingertips on his arm drew a loud moan of pain from his lips. “This is broken.”

“I know.”

Eagle wasn’t, as it happened, a lot younger than Fox, but he seemed younger than he was. Maybe it was his compact body: small, lithe, tough. Maybe it was that Fox couldn’t remember ever seeing him wear shoes or boots. Or maybe it was the innocence. Fox couldn’t recall being innocent. Ever.

“Wait here.” Eagle went back to the chest and brought out a leather strap covered with little dents. “To bite on,” Eagle explained.

“I know.” Fox had left some of those marks. “Talk to me. What’s it like being Wormsbane?” When he’d been about Eagle’s age, Father had locked him in a room with Stooping Falcon of Long Knife and Brother Elk of Green Glaciers. They hadn’t hurt him. Not physically. He couldn’t imagine having slain a dragon when he hadn’t been able to keep their hands off him. With a sigh, Fox fit the strap between his teeth.

“Oh, well…” Eagle rubbed the nape of his neck. “I’m not really sure yet. It’s only today. I was talking to Vercingetorix, and he said—”

“Vercingetorix?” Fox asked, taking the strap out. “The unicorn?”

“Bite down.”

Shaking his head, he obeyed. Without warning, Eagle set the break, and Fox screamed around the leather. He would’ve thought he’d be used to it by now. While Eagle scooped a dollop of all-heal from the pot, he took the strap out again and laid it aside, gasping. “You—can still talk—to Vercingetorix?” At his age?

Eagle flushed. The all-heal sank into Fox’s skin under slim, hard fingers rough with calluses and flecked with tiny scars. Fox’s own hands were soft and smooth and perfect. The salve began to work, itching like a demon down to the bone.

“It’s nothing to be embarrassed over,” Fox said.

“Well, it’s just… nobody notices me. Only Father.” Eagle leaned close, intent, with a wet cloth in those fascinating hands and his lower lip caught between white teeth. He wore no scent, only his own smell, a faint dark petrichor, greenery, earth. Desire bloomed red-poppy bright in the pit of Fox’s belly, and the touch of the cloth on his mouth and chin woke every nerve.

He managed another smile. “You’re sort of small.”

“And quiet,” Eagle said, without rancor.

“I see you.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“I do. I see you around. Working with Falcon Eye.” Fox paused. “He loves you.”

“He does.” Something that was almost a smile twitched at Eagle’s lips.

“Why are you so serious? I never see you smile. But your father loves you and teaches you. You get to talk to unicorns. If anybody has a reason to smile, you do.”

“I guess I just don’t need to.” He rinsed the cloth and wrung it out, then stroked it gently over Fox’s neck. If Fox were Eagle, the smile would never leave his face. “Why do you smile all the time, when your father does this to you?”

“I—I’ve never thought about it.”

Clear hazel eyes cut right to his core.

“I suppose… I need to, because if I don’t, I’ll cry.”

Silence stretched between them. The only sounds in the cottage were the dribble and plink as Eagle rinsed and wrung out the cloth again, the flap of wet fabric, and the hush-hush friction when it passed over Fox’s skin. He didn’t want to think about this, definitely shouldn’t think about kissing Eagle.

“It’s wrong, you know,” Eagle said suddenly. “What he does to you. It’s evil.”

“If I were a better—”

“No. Shut up.” He took a deep breath. “It’s not about you. He’d do it if you were perfect, because it’s all and only about him. You think I never make my father angry? Difference is, I don’t look like this after he punishes me.”

Fox found himself at a loss for words. He stared at the cabinet bed simply because it was in the way. His eyes stung again.

“Why don’t you just leave?” Eagle said after a breath or two.

“Where would I go?”

“Where wouldn’t you go?” Eagle stepped back, and his eyes gleamed with excitement; now a wide grin cracked his reserve. Fox found his face utterly enchanting: lovely, with the long straight nose and lean architecture beneath the last vestiges of childish roundness. “Anywhere. Everywhere. You could have adventures, all kinds. Save beautiful princesses, and find buried treasure, and slay dragons and—and—why are you looking at me like that?”

“Because,” Fox said, “I just figured out why you don’t smile. You don’t want to be here any more than I do.”

He blushed, so Fox knew he was right. Having adventures didn’t hold as much appeal as the idea of leaving and having an excuse to be gone. But when it kindled Eagle like that… it sounded exciting.

“I want to see where the round-eared sailors come from,” Eagle said, softly and serious again, fidgeting with his hands. He stepped close again and dipped his fingers into the pot of all-heal.

“Which ones?”

He dabbed a little salve under Fox’s eye. It tingled and itched. “All of them.”

Longing hit Fox like a fist, knocking out his air. He wanted to see, too. More—he could hardly bring himself to admit—he wanted Eagle Eye with him, wanted all that gravity and dignity, wanted more than anything to see all the light that could come into the serious face, again and again. “What if I went?” he heard himself say. “If I went away and had adventures, would you come with me?”

“Sure I would.” Whether he said it to humor Fox, or whether he meant it, that didn’t matter.

All he had to do was convince Father. He didn’t seek company that night, but went to his bed in the hall alone, closing himself into the dark. There he lay, in his pillows and furs and cashmere blankets, staring into the pitchy depths above him. His own scent permeated the bed with spice and fucking. He’d said only “good-bye” and “thank you” to Eagle Eye before he hurried away.

He’d wanted to rob Eagle of Vercingetorix forever, right there on the plain brown carpet. He was no better than Brother Elk after all. The thought set him to tossing and turning, that or the fascinating speculations on how Eagle would look with Fox’s hands on his bare skin, and what he’d sound like when Fox kissed him there, or there… Finally Fox took himself in one hand and stroked lazily, thinking of slight, spare Eagle Eye. Slow didn’t last long, not when he remembered the forest-floor smell, and he came with that not-quite smile on his mind.

 

***

 

“All right,” said Father. Fox stood before the High King in the morning, in his very best clothes, in his very neatest parade rest, prepared to beg, and Father said, “All right,” just like that. It was almost a letdown. “Let me arrange your guard.”

“Sire, I thought—what about Eagle Eye?”

“The little boy?”

“Wormsbane,” Fox reminded him, though that certainly wasn’t necessary—given the look Father sent him from hard, pale eyes.

“I know it, Bearach,” said Father, and then again: “All right.”

It took some time to find Falcon Eye and his son, and to summon them before the throne. Fox waited on a bench carved from mahogany in the likeness of a dog-fox, drumming his fingers on its perfectly-shaped head and shifting his legs every half-minute. When at last the doors opened to admit the huntsman and Eagle, he put his feet flat and sat forward.

Falcon Eye went to one knee on the plush scarlet runner before the mountain throne, and Eagle copied the genuflection, a perfect mirror—but he glanced at Fox under cover of his brow. Fox grinned hugely.

The High King gazed down at them as if he were the bird of prey, and they little mice. “Falcon Eye, have I yet offered my congratulations to you?”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” said Falcon Eye, lifting his eyes at the address, “and I thank you again for your kindness in allowing Eagle Eye to take the title of Wormsbane.”

“Merely an acknowledgment of Eagle Eye’s brave deed. It’s no more than his due. Child, rise and approach.”

Eagle stood, graceful as any lord in spite of his youth and his small peasant’s body, and stepped closer to the throne. The High King motioned him closer yet, within arm’s reach, and Fox went cold from the inside out. He felt like a block of ice when Father’s fingers cradled Eagle’s face. Even sitting, he was taller than Eagle.

But Father wasn’t Wormsbane. Fox reminded himself of that again and again, fighting his urge to vomit, to dash across the throne room and slap Father’s hand away, to scream Don’t touch him.

“You’ve done well, little one,” Father said kindly—falsely.

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Eagle said, in his so-soft voice.

“Now I’ll ask another service of you. I expect you may find it onerous,” and that was with a darting look at Fox, “but I also expect you’ll do as well now as you did preserving my line not three days past.”

“I’ll do my best, Your Majesty. What—” He bit his lip and flicked his gaze to his own father, who inclined his head. “What will you have of me?”

Father sat back, letting his hand slide from Eagle’s chin as though enjoying the feeling, and that predatory stare churned Fox’s stomach again.

“You will accompany my son on his travels,” the King said, and Fox swallowed. He knew what he’d halfway expected to hear, and the relief when it didn’t come brought tears to sting behind his shut lids. “You will protect his life with yours, and serve him as if he were me in very fact. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Eagle said, softer than soft.

“Very good. Falcon Eye.”

“Yes, Your Majesty?” Falcon Eye remained on bended knee. It was impossible to mistake the thickness in his voice for anything but sorrow.

“In this you serve me better than you ever have—that you don’t withhold from me even your only son. I praise your devotion.”

“High praise indeed, Your Majesty,” Falcon Eye said, and Fox could swear he heard an edge on the words.

“Tomorrow, with the early tide,” said Father, and Fox’s heart took wing. So soon! “Go and prepare yourself.”

Eagle bowed his head and walked quickly down from the dais, backing out of the High King’s presence, but when Falcon Eye rose to leave, Father beckoned him to stay, and he approached the throne.

Fox rushed out through the palace and caught the huntsman’s son on the oak lane outside the main gate. “Well?”

“I didn’t think you were serious.” Eagle Eye rubbed the back of his neck, looking at the lane beneath his bare feet, and Fox’s shoulders dropped.

“You don’t want to come.”

“I never said that.” When Eagle looked up again, he wore that not-quite-a-smile Fox couldn’t get out of his head. “I’m kind of surprised, is all. I don’t know why you’d want me along.”

“Because I do,” Fox said. “I like you.”

“Your Highness—”

“Fox.”

“I’m your servant. It’s not proper.”

“Damn propriety!” Fox shouted, throwing up his hands. “I don’t want a servant. I want you to be my friend!” He didn’t mean to say it, but it popped out anyway.

“Fox, then. I don’t understand.”

“I don’t have any friends,” he said, a little desperately.

Eagle put his hands in his pockets, shrugging. “Nor do I. Just Vercingetorix when he feels like talking.”

“And the fairies.”

“They don’t really count.” Even as he said so, a blush-pink fairy landed on his shoulder and cuddled up to his neck, piping with delight. “What about His Grace’s sons?”

“The dead ones?”

He grimaced. “Sorry.”

“I’m not. Not very. I mean, I was fucking Snake, but…”

“Could you tell the difference between them?”

Fox couldn’t work out whether he was serious or not. “Yes. Cat had a piercing. I didn’t like it.” At Eagle’s curious look—he read that well enough—he added, “In his prick.”

Eagle started. His eyes went as big as china plates. “Who would do that?”

“Lots of people. Anyway, it wasn’t so much the piercing. That can be fun. It was that he didn’t know how to use the damned thing, and he always—ah—” Fox cut himself off. Eagle was rather pale. “Maybe you don’t need to hear all that.”

“Do—do you have—?”

His face was a perfect study. Fox laughed. “I’ve done a lot of things with it, but sticking a needle through it is a little much, don’t you think?”

Eagle gave a delicate shudder.

“So, no. I haven’t got any nether jewelry. You must have heard a lot about me.” That last came with a bitterness that surprised him.

“I wouldn’t say a lot. I don’t have any friends. Remember?”

“I won’t hurt you,” he blurted, and he didn’t know why he’d even thought it. Probably because he was also thinking of things that might hurt Eagle.

“Father wouldn’t treat you the way he does if you would.” Eagle lifted a shoulder. It was that easy for him. “I’ve got to get ready. See you in the morning. Fox.” His not-quite smile flickered again, and he left Fox envious and aching, even though he hadn’t meant to.

Father didn’t issue a summons that evening. After he’d said good-bye to his little brother—Stag wept—Fox got drunk and thought about Eagle’s hard slender hands, and the straight lines of his lithe body. “Who are you with, Brother Fox?” said Pink Petunia, Countess of Tiennengarm, from her position astride. “I know it isn’t me.”

“Nobody,” Fox said, giving his best, most winning grin. “Don’t stop, Petunia.”

She giggled and flopped on his chest. “Give! Who is it?”

“Nobody,” he insisted, and rolled her under him.

Father didn’t come down to the harbor to say good-bye, either. When Fox got out of his cupboard early that morning, there was a purse on his nightstand, and an envelope containing two tickets of passage on a caravel bound for Rodansk. He was tempted to tear the tickets up and go somewhere completely different, but—he’d ask Eagle.

Down on the beach, just to the south of the piers and offices, Falcon Eye waited with his son. Fox’s feet crunched on the gravel; Eagle, he saw, wore high boots today, brown leather laced to his knees. They looked brand-new; the battered pack on his shoulders looked ancient. As Fox approached, Falcon Eye pressed Eagle into a tight hug.

Fox hung back. It was like watching the natives of some strange land.

“Be careful, son,” Falcon Eye said.

The smile that had disturbed Fox’s fun last night brushed Eagle’s face. “I probably won’t,” he said, and Falcon Eye laughed. His hand came up, and Fox went cold, at least until Falcon Eye ruffled his son’s hair.

“Love you, Eagle.”

“Love you, Father.”

They stood, looking awkward, and then Falcon Eye turned away. His eyes were wet, but instead of simply passing, he squeezed Fox in an unexpected hug. “I’m trusting you,” he said.

“Of course,” Fox said, backing off, grinning. “He’ll be fine. I promise.”

“Fox. Be good to my boy.”

“I will! I will.”

“I love you, Brother Fox,” Falcon Eye said. “Behave yourself.”

Fox froze. “I—”

“I know. Don’t keep him waiting.” The huntsman looked over Fox’s shoulder at Eagle, who, when Fox turned, was already watching the ships lying at anchor in the clear bay. Sailors and porters bustled around the four piers, and people waited in line at the port office.

“Good-bye,” Fox said.

Falcon Eye said, “Good-bye,” and left.

The worst part of Fox rubbed its hands together. Eagle all to himself. He crunched over. “What do you think about Rodansk?”

“Maybe we’ll meet a troll.”

“That’ll be nothing for Wormsbane. Come on.”

Eagle followed him across the beach to the pier where their ship waited. His feet made little sound on the pebbles, even in the new boots, and none at all on the boards of the pier, but Fox was painfully aware of him all the same.

“I’ll get us settled,” Fox offered once they were aboard, seeing that Eagle passed hungry eyes over every last detail of the ship. “Why don’t you have a look about? Give me your things.”

“Thank you,” Eagle said gravely, and handed everything over: pack, quiver, and bow. It didn’t seem like much. Eagle was gone in a blink, and Fox went off to find directions to their berths, only to discover they were sharing a tiny cabin under the stairs to the forecastle, probably the mate’s. His legs buckled, and he sat on the single, narrow bed with its faded coverlet, hearing the shouts of the crew as the ship got underway, feeling the deck shiver and toss under his feet.

One room. One bed. He should have counted on Father’s knowing every damned thought that crossed his mind.

Eighteen years until Eagle came of age. If he waited until then, he’d be able to show Eagle exactly what he wanted. He rose from the bed and stowed their belongings, trying not to daydream. Eighteen years. He hoped he could find enough distraction. He hoped Eagle would initiate something—then it would be all right—but that seemed very faint hope indeed. Vercingetorix!

When he went back out, Fox heard sweet singing: “Eagle Eye… Eagle Eye…”

At first he thought it was in his head—it certainly wouldn’t have surprised him—but there was Eagle on the quarterdeck, backing up from the rail into a neat, courtly bow, backing away from a mermaid with a sheeny silver tail. She had already slithered over the railing, and she bellied, slippery and graceful, toward Eagle. “Eagle Eye, won’t you come down?” Fox’s heart staggered with horror. Eighteen years would never happen at this rate.

Sailors scattered away from her. Nobody moved to help Eagle. The mermaid rolled to sit up in front of him. Her skin shimmered like oil on water. “Come down with me, come down…” trilled through full, dark-blue lips, and she showed her pointed little teeth in a smile. She took his hands in hers.

If Eagle was afraid, he didn’t show it. His lips flicked ever so slightly up at the corners. “My lady, you’re beautiful as anything I’ve ever seen, but I can’t breathe in your house.”

She pressed his hands over rainbow-gleam breasts; held them there. He blushed faintly, but didn’t otherwise react. “You’ll love it,” she sang, “I promise. Come down, pretty Eagle Eye, come down with me…”

“I don’t think so, my lady, but—”

Fox leapt forward and snatched Eagle under the arms, trying to drag him back. “Leave off!” he shouted, and, when she wouldn’t let go of Eagle’s wrists, summoned a fire orb to his palm.

“Is he yours, lovely Prince, is he yours?” she sang, laughing, and released her grip so suddenly that Fox lurched back, slipped in her puddle of water and slime, and fell in a heap with Eagle. His orb winked out along with his focus. The mermaid lunged over them both and gave Eagle a smart little bite where neck met shoulder.

Eagle cried out, and Fox kicked at her. She raised her head, licking Eagle’s blood from her lips.

“Good-bye, Eagle Eye, good-bye,” she sang, slithering toward the rail.

“You told her your name,” Fox groaned, as she pulled herself up. “How stupid are you?”

“I didn’t,” Eagle said, and the mermaid perched her shapely, scaly bottom on the railing, strong hands on the wood.

“The fairies sing his name under the moon,” she said musically, smiling like an old killing thing—like Father—and was gone in a flash of tail.

Fox lay back on the deck, breathing hard. He didn’t let go of Eagle, wiry and warm against him, if passing strange. “What did you think you were doing?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Eagle insisted. He pulled away and stood, reaching down to help Fox. “She came to me. And you should be more worried about the man who followed us onto the ship.”

“There was a man? Where is he now?”

“Don’t look around like that.” Eagle fished a tiny jar of all-heal from his pocket and spread salve on the bite, grimacing. He went back to the rail and leaned his forearms on it, watching Shirith Valley blur into a smudge on the horizon. The wind played with his dark hair, and Fox joined him, liking the look of it. “Where do we land in Rodansk?”

“A place called Whalehame. Why?”

“Is it a city?”

“Sort of. It’s a port town.”

“We’ll slip him there, then,” Eagle said, and when Fox glanced over he wore a grin wicked enough to rival the mermaid’s.

It was going to be a long eighteen years.

 

~*~

The story continues in Steel for the Prince: The High King’s Will, which is available now.

A Good-Faith Excerpt

I know some of you have been waiting on me, really patiently, for news of Menyoral book 4. All I can say is that Hard Time is a huge book with tons of threads, and it’s taking me a long time to get it right for you. I will give you what I can today: a chapter from the manuscript, in which I gather some of the players. This piece has new friends and old ones, and I hope you like it. The Dingus stuff is not ready to show you, and for that I am sorry. Without further ado:

The News

two weeks ago

Thundering Hills, Wealaia

“Was that the post?” Voalt asked, poking his head out of the bedroom.

“Sure was,” said Rhialle, smiling at her husband’s messy hair. He wouldn’t comb it; he hardly ever did. She went on dishing up breakfast for him, humming to herself. Her apron was already floury. She’d been up before dawn, down in the bakery, and she had some nice fluffy biscuits piping hot. Before he left, Dingus would’ve had care of the storefront at this hour, but she’d hired a little help since, and Halden would have things well in hand below.

Eagle disappeared for a moment and came out scratching his belly through a plain tunic. It was never this way Before—he would’ve been up before she was—but it didn’t strike her anymore how much he slept. “This looks good,” he said, eyeing the breakfast with relish. “Anything for me?”

“Yeah, there was.” She reached into her apron pocket and dropped a thin letter by his place while he fetched himself tea, or, well, milk and sugar with a tiny bit of tea as far as Rose was concerned.

He kissed her cheek when their paths crossed, and sat at the table to demolish his breakfast. She’d fixed him a dozen eggs, a dozen biscuits dripping butter and honey, and a ridiculous heap of sausages besides, plus a hefty wedge of cheese. He would eat it all—but she didn’t think he’d put on more than a few pounds since they met, centuries ago, and every ounce of it was muscle. If anything, since the magic went, he’d lost weight, and she was in the habit of noticing that. Watching him close, every day, to see he wasn’t losing more.

Fretting over Eagle took a lot of her time. Maybe her life’d be easier if he gave in, like Owl, but she’d rather have him. She leaned against the butcher block—she’d already eaten this morning.

He stuffed a second biscuit into his mouth and broke the seal on the letter.

“That’s a weird frank,” she offered.

“Wiffif,” he said, then swallowed. “Excuse me. Windish. It’s from Dingus.”

“Oh yeah. He said he was going out there.”

“To stay alone with the girl,” Eagle muttered.

“Like you wanted him going to Dreamport anyway.”

“It’s probably one of Vail’s smarter moves. That doesn’t mean I have to like the idea of his being out there alone.”

“True,” Rose said. She wasn’t crazy about it either, to tell the truth. “He isn’t alone, though, is he?”

Eagle shot her a deadly look.

She rolled her eyes and sipped her own tea, sugar only, no milk to mess it up. “How’s he doing?”

But Eagle was gone from the table. The letter, a single sheet, drifted toward the floor. Rose caught it before it fell.

“Eagle?”

“Yes, my heart?”

She looked from the letter to her husband, already kitted up and slinging a knapsack over his shoulder. “Be careful.”

“I probably won’t. But I’ll try to come back in one piece.” He kissed her on the mouth like he used to. Then he went out. She didn’t hear him go down the steps outside.

*

Dreamport

the Lucky Strike

Haakon blew into the club with a snowstorm at his back. Flakes clung to his blond beard, and he tracked slush over the clean floorboards on his way to the bar. Angharadh hadn’t been expecting him. It was early evening—the house fighters were just beginning to filter down from their apartments to fetch a little supper—and even though the Strike had opened for business an hour before, as yet only the heaviest of the heavy drinkers had ventured past the double doors.

He stopped in front of her and opened his mouth.

“Half a moment,” she said, taking a clean mug from one of the shelves that ran around underneath the top. “Tostig, clear that up and get the mats, or we’ll be mopping all night. How did it go, then?”

“Is it my boss doing the asking? Or Vandis’s friend?”

She pulled a pint; long practice meant she could time filling without the use of her eyes, and so she gave Haakon a level gaze while she did it. “Leave the interpretation to me.”

“Right.” He took the drink she slid across the scarred top and turned it in his hands. “Wynn—Boss—Yatan is dead.”

Her hand stilled as she reached for another mug. “What?”

“Yatan’s dead.” Before she could ask whatever that had to do with Vandis’s children, he went on. “The young Knight. Dingus. He killed Yatan.”

“Why, exactly, was he allowed to involve himself with Yatan?”

“I did what you asked of me. Yatan was already involved when I got there. Dingus, he did a stupid thing. He took pickpockets from the market, little Ishlings.” Haakon scrubbed at his face with a gloved hand. “They weren’t earning for him.”

“I would have covered it.”

“I know. I offered the coin.” He shook his head and drank nearly the whole pint at one go. A tiny rivulet of stout escaped the corner of his mouth and slipped through the neat beard, down his throat; he licked foamy head from his upper lip. “He wouldn’t. It wasn’t right to kick up, he said. Now he’s in Culoo.”

“And Yatan is dead.”

“Yes.” He let out a mirthful snort. “I haven’t seen anything like it in a while. If he was tied up with anyone else besides Sir Vandis, you’d scout Dingus for sure. Sliced the head right off someone less than half his size. I don’t think he shaved even a hair off the little one Yatan had hostage.”

“Impressive.” Angharadh drummed her fingers on the bar. “How would you like to visit Kuo again?”

“That is not a real question,” Haakon said, smiling vaguely. “What about my sons?”

“I’ll send someone. They’ll be taken care of.”

“What will I look at in Kuo?”

“Silk,” she said. “I want to trade in bolts, rather than the finished goods they send us now. First ship out, Haakon.”

“All right. Sure, but nobody’s going out now, with the storm.”

“Why not go down to the spring?” she suggested.

“That sounds good.” He smiled again, more broadly. “I’ll wash off the ship.”

She patted his forearm and went down into the cellar, a natural cavern system found when she’d repurposed the place. Eamon Baird worked busily down here, counting kegs and making sure no one had been skimming beer. He pressed his ear flat to a keg now, and he knocked on it to assure himself it wasn’t any emptier than it had been the last time he took inventory.

“Get all the lads together,” she said when he straightened. “We need to meet. Tonight. And send a message to Maldemer—he’ll be at the Dead Gull by now, if I’m not mistaken—that I have a run for him. When he leaves, I’ll be aboard.”

“Where to, Boss?”

“Windish.” And it’s going to make me First. The thought pleased her beyond telling. If she might get her fingers into the silk trade—into the gambling racket that had for so long kept Yatan earning more than she—into the poppy trade that whispered from the street corners of Windish—just one of them would be enough to solidify her as Second. First, though, she’d liefer that. The more she earned, the less he touched her. In the fifteen years since she’d broken into the Top Ten, only twice had she been made to suffer him.

If she were First, she felt certain he would never insult her pride in that way again, and now First lay so close she could nearly grasp it.

“How long?” Eamon wanted to know.

“Undetermined.”

He shifted in place, a bare flicker of movement—enough that she read his discomfort, but no more. “All right, Boss.”

With a nod of thanks, she left him to the kegs and went out into the club. It was quiet enough yet, she decided, thinking of the sea serpent tattooed in woad on Haakon’s chest. When he flexed, he could make it seem to swim. She turned her steps down the passage toward the hot spring, pinning up her hair as she went.

*

one week after that

Dreamport

Knights HQ

Vandis dripped all over the spanking-clean floor of the hospital. He hadn’t gotten wet en route, of course, but he’d had trouble seeing where he was landing through the storm, and in consequence had gotten covered in snow walking over from War Lord Kradon’s temple. He wished there were a way to check the weather before he left Windish—he definitely wouldn’t have come tonight if he’d known about this damned snowstorm. He’d have liked to curl up on his cot and sleep the next twenty years, but it wouldn’t be fair.

At least Reed was off just now. Vandis would much sooner not deal with him. Bad enough he was reduced to begging. “Kirsten, I need you over there. It’s important.”

“And this isn’t?” she demanded, gesturing behind her at the full beds, the cots that were catching the overflow, and at Lukas, who pushed the bedpan cart, exchanging full and disgusting for empty and clean. “Look at all this. It’s coming on winter. Someone’s got to deal with—”

“I’ve got seventeen little kids coming off a life of starvation and abuse. I need your help, Kirsten. I need you to help me make sure they’re healthy and keep them that way. Please.”

“Ask Ambrogio,” she said, supremely unfeeling. She leaned back against the desk, folding her arms under her breasts: no way.

“Ambrogio,” he said, supremely frustrated, “is a man.”

“Very observant, Vandis. No wonder you’re a ranger.”

He scraped his hands back through his hair, breathing through his temper. “Look. This is Windish. I might as well be wearing manacles. We are staying in tents, Kirsten. Me, Kessa, and seventeen little kids! I need somewhere to put them.” He looked into her ocean-cold eyes and saw not a mite of sympathy. “I need a woman!”

She snickered. “You can say that again.”

“Kirsten—!”

“All right,” she said, wearing a shit-eating grin. “I’ll come. Just because you said that, I’ll come. Gives me a good story.”

“Thank you. Thank you. You don’t know how much I—”

“Yeah, yeah.” She waved a hand in dismissal. “I’ll come as soon as I can. Lukas, too—hear that, Lukas?”

“I’m going as fast as I can,” Lukas said, gingerly placing a brimming bedpan on the cart.

“We’re going to Windish.”

“What’s in Windish?” Adeon asked from behind, making Vandis jump.

“Short answer? I’m fucked. I’ve got seventeen ex-pickpockets living in tents under a Treehopper’s house, a Squire trying to help me keep up with them, and a Junior sitting in prison, who I cannot even visit because his ass is in disciplinary confinement every time I try. I’ve got committee meetings I need to be at, I’ve got High Priestess Meep fluttering around interfering without actually bothering to help, and I’ve got Hops checking on me at all hours. Conclave is coming up in two and a half months and I cannot leave Kessa alone, but I have to be there to see that Lech Valitchka gets half an ounce of what’s coming to him!”

“Er,” Adeon said, “I see. Would this be a bad time to point out that you seem to have shit on your jerkin?”

Vandis seized a double fistful of his hair. “Dammit—Reeb! And he’s the least of my problems! At least he’s not that clever about messing with me! Tai—fuck my entire life!”

“Hmm.” Adeon tapped his index finger on his lips. “I think you ought to start from the beginning, Vandis, and by ‘the beginning’ I mean why, by our Lady, is Dingus in prison?”

“Yatan. You know who that is?”

Adeon didn’t. Vandis filled him in from the beginning. By the middle, he’d started to smile, and at the end, he cut an excited caper in front of the desk. “But that’s wonderful! My congratulations to you!”

“Uh,” Vandis said. “On what, exactly?”

“Why, on your teaching, of course! Lady fair! I’ve had something in the neighborhood of a hundred Squires, and still I can count on the fingers of one hand the number who have taken the Oath so very seriously.” He spread the hand, beaming. “Besides, my friend, think in the long term. How utterly fantastic for the Knights!”

Vandis scowled. “I haven’t had time to think of anything beyond keeping shit off my face.”

“It’s so exciting!” Adeon said, actually clapping his hands. “I’ll be there as soon as I can, Vandis!” He rushed for the door, but when he reached it, turned back. “Oh, ah, Kirsten, before I go, might I get a little more valerian root? My poor Guthlaf is so restless.”

“Sure,” she said, and walked off toward the apothecary at the back of the hospital. Adeon cocked his head slightly, watching her go, with a slight smile: I like what I see. Vandis rolled his eyes.

“Vandis, is he really in prison over a bunch of little Ishlings?” Lukas said from Vandis’s right elbow. “Dingus, I mean?”

“Yes.”

Lukas drew a deep breath and let it out as a long, wondering sigh, shaking his head. “That’s—that’s really amazing,” he said. “Like, just, an amazing thing to do. Taking care of them and everything? For over a month?”

“That’s what Kessa said.”

“Wow.” Lukas looked away, at the bedpan cart, which he’d pushed over to listen to the Masters talk. His mouth set into a grim line. “I guess I have work to do. See you in Windish.”

“See you there,” Vandis agreed.

Lukas went back to exchanging clean for dirty, working his way up the row. After a couple of minutes, Kirsten came back with a little cloth bag, and he said to her, “I’ll never complain about bedpans again.”

“I’ll believe that when I don’t hear it.”

“I could be doing a lot worse for my Lady.”

She patted his shoulder and came back down to Adeon. “Not too much now,” she said. “Careful with the dose. That should be enough for three or four nights.”

He dazzled at her. When he reached to take the bag, he caught her arm with the free hand, raising the inside of her wrist to his lips. Vandis left, but not in time to avoid hearing Adeon say, “Am I to understand you’ll be joining us in Windish? What a pleasure.”

“See you there,” Kirsten said significantly, and Adeon came out with a goofy smile on his face.

Vandis dribbled a trail of melted snow behind him. When he passed through the dimmed, off-hours mess hall, he paused to snag a slab of cold ham and a hunk of johnnycake from the table of food set out for late-night comers. He ate the johnnycake first, adding crumbs to his trail, all the way up the stairs to his office. When he got up to the door, he stuck the ham between his teeth to free his hands and pulled his keys out of his pocket.

A minute or so spent messing with the lock, cursing around the ham, saw him in. He pulled the meat out, leaving a bite behind, and chewed while his eyes grew accustomed enough to the darkness that he could find a taper and light it off the banked stove. He let himself into his tiny office, dodged stacks of paper, and put the candle on his desk, right on top of Dingus’s letter—the one that had sent him on a manic flight to Windish just a week before.

A jolt of pain caught Vandis off-guard. “Some shit happened,” in his Junior’s chicken scratch. Even the untidiness of it hurt. He’d been over to Culoo four times in the last week, and every single time, he’d met with the news that Dingus was in disciplinary confinement and couldn’t have visitors. Was it retaliation from the Hoppers? Were they just… keeping him there? What could Dingus have possibly done inside of a week? I’m going to have to start bribing people if this doesn’t clear up in a hurry.

I think you had better start.

He smiled faintly. Is that sanction?

Absolutely.

Vandis slumped into his desk chair and eased the letter out from under the taper. Is it that bad?

My own… She trailed off, and he dropped his head into his hands, still holding the letter. He’s faring as well as ever he can, far better than anyone can expect him to be faring. But…

But it’s prison, and he’s Dingus.

Just so.

With a sigh, Vandis laid the letter on the desktop. He picked up his ham and took another bite, chewing without tasting.

I know you’re missing him.

He scowled. Yeah, well. My own fault. I should’ve brought them here instead of leaving them.

I can think of seventeen little ones who are gladder than glad for your mistake.

The fact remains: I fucked up, and he’s paying for it.

She let a little sigh into his mind, and he tried to push his melancholy away while he searched through his stacks for the things that most urgently needed his attention. Don’t forget the supply reports, She told him, while he packed three bladders of ink and a handful of quills into his writing case.

Right. Vandis swore foully as he knocked three piles into a cascade of paper. It just figured that one of the piles, if he recalled right, held the reports he needed to review. He bent his aching knees and started to pick up. Having to look at each item, in some cases each sheet, made the work slow going. He’d gotten about a third of the way through when he saw the candlelight out of the corner of his eye.

Someone was in the outer office. Vandis straightened, suppressing a groan when his right knee popped. “Who’s there?”

“Oh. It’s you.” Reed appeared at the door, holding his candle high.

“What are you doing up here?”

“I heard someone moving about. I thought you’d gone to Windish.” His tone implied, ‘no such luck.’

“Don’t worry,” Vandis snapped. “I’ll be gone again soon enough.”

“Back to the road. Where you belong.”

He gnashed his teeth.

“You seem stressed, Vandis. The Headship is such a demanding position, and to pile a Master’s duties atop it must be quite the challenge. Perhaps you ought to—”

“Perhaps you ought to shut the fuck up.” Vandis laid hands, finally, on the sheaf of supply reports. Jimmy had punched them onto a bit of wire and twisted the wire into a loop, like he often did with things that went together.

“A holiday would do you a world of good. Or perhaps a little delegation. I’d be glad to pick up a little of your slack.”

With a snort, he jammed the reports into his pack, along with a thick stack of expensive vellum, and another of the cheapest paper. He needed to write a ridiculous number of formal letters, at least some of which he hoped got past the secretaries and assistants of the Matriarchs of Windish; he also needed to start composing a leaflet to distribute to the people there, outlining Dingus’s cause. If he couldn’t convince the Matriarchs to drop the charges outright—

“How are you faring over west?” Reed pressed. “I’ve heard a strange thing, but of course it can’t possibly be true.”

Vandis buckled his pack, trying to make a shield of ignoring-you between himself and Reed.

“I mean, honestly. That a Junior should go to prison! What rot!” Reed paused, and Vandis felt the eyes, picking him over like a raven’s beak. “I can’t imagine what for.”

He raised his head, putting the most deadly perch-eye he possessed square on Reed. “Murder,” he bit off, and shouldered past the tall doctor on his way out of the office. He pulled the door shut behind him so that it backed Reed up and slammed in his face.

“My, my.” Reed clucked his tongue. “I wonder what His Grace thinks of that.”

Shit. Vandis’s heart sank. He knew he’d forgotten something. Shaking his head, he forged onward, leaving the extinguished taper on Jimmy’s desk.

Softly, Reed said, “Oh, I see…”

“Before I come back next, I think you should move downstairs. You’re too far from the hospital up here—and besides, I think it’ll help you focus on your duties.” Vandis left. It was high time he got back to Windish anyway. Will You guide me? he asked Her while he rushed down the stairs, trying not to appear as if he were rushing.

I won’t let you fall, She promised. But My own, perhaps you ought to let Lord Marcus know what’s happening.

Or crash into a mountain? he teased, ignoring the reference to Marcus. He didn’t want to think about it, or talk about it.

You know very well you’ll be fine as soon as you get above the clouds. Vandis, you’ll have to tell him at some point.

I know that. Right now, Kessa’s waiting for me. It’s not fair to leave her for this long. He pulled on his flying cap and pushed out the door. He hadn’t gotten down to the incense burner before his cloak was gray with snow.

How virtuous, She said dryly. Don’t you think he has the right to know?

Of course he does. Safest, he decided, would be straight up. He couldn’t really see where he was walking anyhow. His knees creaked another protest when he prepared to jump, and he grimaced. The wind howled around him. I may not want to talk to Marcus, but that has nothing to do with it. He’s just lower on the priority list than Kessa. Which is entirely proper.

She snorted indelicately. Whatever you’re needing to tell yourself, then.

Vandis scowled and leapt skyward.

*

just outside Windish

the next morning

In the depths of the ancient forest, Evan Grady fought a desperate battle with his clothes. He hadn’t mastered quite yet the trick of dressing himself one-armed. His breeches were crooked. These fasteners were bad as Oda Himself! He swore quietly at the hooks up the front of his jerkin.

For what must be the twentieth time, Wally glanced up at him from near the fire. “D’ye want a bit of help, then, Evan?” he ventured at last.

“I don’t want it, no I don’t!” Evan snapped. “But I need it.”

Wally rose and crossed to where he sat on a nurse log, then took one knee in front. “I don’t mind giving it, ye ken.”

“Aye. That I know.” It was a trim, hard Wally kneeling before him. The last couple of months had carved away the last of Wally’s belly, thickened the arms, and put a shadow in his Junior’s eyes. “It’s so much you’ve taken on in my stead,” he said softly.

“I don’t mind it,” Wally insisted.

“I ought to be helping you grow, and instead here you are playing nursemaid.”

“Evan,” he said, finishing with the fasteners, “we’ve had this discussion before, have we nae? Must we have it again and again? I’m where I want to be.”

“I can’t—”

“Yesterday I heard a strange thing,” Wally said, a little too loudly. He sat back on his heels. “About a young Knight in Windish. I think it can only be Dingus, but I can’t think it the truth, or mayhap I only don’t want to think it so.”

Evan’s ears pricked up. No Knight worth his salt could resist a bit of gossip or a lovely little rumor, no matter how foolish or false. “Go on, then. What have you heard?”

“I heard that a young Knight with red hair was to go to the gallows for murder, but instead was sent to prison. That he’d killed ten with his bare hands.” Wally laughed. “It must be Dingus they mean, but I can’t think it true. Dingus would nae harm a fly.”

“You never know what a man will do,” said Evan, thinking uncomfortably of what Vandis had told him about Dingus and a gang of bandits that past spring, “or do ye not understand that by now?”

“I do.” Wally frowned, looking a bit subdued.

“Whether truth or falsehood, we’re late, my lad.”

“That we are.”

This time, Evan kept his sigh within. “Help me with my boots, then. We’d best be going.”

New Release from Cathy L. Hird

Today I’m welcoming Cathy Hird with her new release, Before the New Moon Rises.

Cathy Hird is a minister and a mother, a weaver and a shepherd living in rural Ontario. She is a story teller who weaves ancient threads into tales that touch modern questions.  Before the New Moon Rises is Cathy’s second novel. She also writes a weekly column for an on-line news magazine, short stories and some poetry.

Cathy sent an excerpt for us to read. It’s really good! Check it out.

In a story, there are always people off stage. We follow the main characters into the action, but what are those left behind thinking and doing? Late in my new book Before the New Moon Rises a priestess of the God of Healing looks for a sign of what transpires beyond her reach.

Leaning on her cane, Echidna slowly climbed the path through the ancient oak trees to the pass above the shrine. The way the shrine sheltered at the base of the mountain, she could not see the new moon rise without this climb. One of the young girls accompanied her with a torch to light her way back once darkness descended.

When the last crescent of the old moon had been stained blood red two mornings earlier, she told those who served under her that the goddess spoke of hope as well as warning. She still believed that was the message, but with Poseidon plotting in so many places, she worried.

She stepped on a loose rock and the pain in her hip made her gasp. She laid a hand on the shoulder of the girl to reassure her. Aging joints did not have the flexibility or the sturdiness they once had.

Where are you now Panacea? she wondered. The younger priestess had rushed to Mycenae the day the crescent moon rose red trying to ascertain what disasters Poseidon sparked. Echidna feared it was an attack on the city Tiryns, but she could not be sure.

A little further, and the two stepped out from the enclosing forest onto a rocky ledge. The path continued north to skirt the city of Corinth, but this was the spot she sought. The sky slowly darkened to the colour of tarnished bronze. A single star shone in the north east. As the rim of the sun fell beneath the horizon, a flash of red light shot upward revealing the tiny horn of the new moon, red as rich wine.

A sharp intake of breath from her companion was the only sound. A birthing moon, she thought. Something new is beginning. She sighed. She had no idea what the goddess was up to. And birthing was the most dangerous of moments for a woman and the baby. Still, she felt that this was a promise from the goddess.

News would come. Until then, she could only wait. Echidna looked down at the young girl who looked relieved but also a little nervous. “Come let us light that torch you carry, and we will descend. I am sure you are more than ready for your evening meal.”

Did that grab you? Buy Before the New Moon Rises by clicking the cover!

You can also visit Cathy online at her blog (http://openonemore.com/), follow her on Twitter (@cathyhirdwriter), like her page on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/cathyhirdwriter/), or hang out with her on Goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7391335.Cathy_Hird).

If you’re interested in her Greek-inspired series, I also invite you to check out her first book, Moon of the Goddess.

Excerpt from The High King’s Will

 So here, finally, is a real excerpt from Steel for the Prince: The High King’s Will. It’s set in Rothganar over 600 years before the fall of magic. I’ve written you a fantasy romance with an evil High King, magic and monsters, buckets of blood, heaps of fairy creatures, a wild adventure, and some seriously bad candy. Take a look, if that sounds good to you (I hope it does!).
 
ONE

Eagle Eye lay broken and reeling on the floor of the cavern. The dark hulk of the great red Worm loomed over him, tail backlit by the gold that shimmered in heaps on the floor. Huge wings hung limp, casting strange shadows. The last dead twitches passed through Eleazar.

Eagle’s head ached. His vision swam, and distantly he heard the Crown Prince call out, “Hey-la-hey!” Brother Fox struggled over the thick tail with a blob of golden mage-light hovering just above his head. He called out again: “Eagle, brave Eagle, you’ve done it!”

He didn’t feel brave. He hurt so badly. The cruel black horns on Eleazar’s head, the knife teeth, and the massive eye, which had only a few minutes ago fallen upon him with hungry menace, sent a trembling to his soul.

Brother Fox blocked his view, partially, and he was glad of that. Light wreathed the Prince, making a glowing spirit of a flesh-and-blood youth, and Eagle understood why his stomach clenched when Brother Fox smiled. Gold threads gleamed in his dark hair, and his face sent Eagle’s heart staggering. Impossibly beautiful.

The perfect mouth moved, but Eagle couldn’t hear. Blackness teased at the edges of his awareness. When the Prince bent over him, shadows swallowed amber eyes, like the bruises that so often marred the face. Eagle had preserved Brother Fox’s life, but he wondered if he had done the Prince a service.

Then—nothing.

Eagle had done for the Worm with a single, lucky arrow, but the Worm had nearly done for Eagle, too. More properly, Eagle had nearly done for Eagle. He’d dashed himself to pieces on the rocks. Broken bones, cracked skull. Two days he’d been deeply unconscious, in the care of the healers, but this morning, when he woke, the High King had tacked Vistridir onto his name. Wormsbane. Father had hustled him home straightaway, after Brother Fox had given him a scale from the Worm’s own hide. “You ought to have it,” the Prince had said. “You earned it. And after all, I did promise you one.”

He’d felt Rothganar’s biggest fraud when the High King called him Wormsbane. All his dreams of great deeds had fallen to ashes before the terror he’d felt in the Worm’s cave, and a numbness had come over his heart since, which he distantly feared would never go away. Even all the loveliness of the flowers and the sweet songs of the frogs had lost their power to move Voalt Vistridir. Nothing seemed quite real after Eleazar, and Eagle himself the least real of all.

The royal gardens showed spectacular on a summer’s night, especially a night like this, scented and breezy and clear. All the mage-lanterns shone in the cottage behind Eagle, who sat on a stool just outside the front door, gazing into his own shadow. In his hands he held the Worm’s ruby scale, the size of his palm. He rubbed at it unconsciously with a small, callused thumb, over and over.

He was alone. Father had gone on a hunt that afternoon, to stock the High King’s larder. He always took Eagle along, and today was no exception, but Eagle had asked to turn back. His leg, the site of the worst break, pained him. Normally there would have been no excuses accepted, but Father allowed it today, on the condition that he stayed inside.

He’d meant to obey, but the cottage stifled. Here he sat, with the achy leg stretched out in front of him, turning the scale over and over. Remembering, though he would sooner not: images cloaked in darkness, lit by flashes of red mage-light and gold, by a blast of flame bright as day. His memory tainted the sweet-smelling night with Worm stench. The world was half unremarkable dream, half nightmare, and Eagle wandered in it, lost, feeling only enough to realize, from a distance, that he hurt. So lost that when a figure stumbled around the yellow rose hedge, it surprised him. Ordinarily he would have heard someone coming, particularly someone so very drunk.

Brother Fox. The Crown Prince’s bruised face dripped tears and blood, and he shuffled toward the cottage, cradling a swollen arm that surely must be broken. Not drunk. Beaten. Father would have sent Eagle away to do some chore right off, but he stared, rooted to the spot, so much that the Prince nearly tripped over him. He popped up, overturning the stool, and remembered to bow. “Your Highness,” he rushed out, slipping the scale into his pocket.

“Please don’t,” Brother Fox rasped. He swayed on his feet. “Is your father here?”

“No, Your Highness.” Eagle bit his lip. Father would have sent him away, but Father wasn’t here, and one of Brother Fox’s eyes was so badly swollen he couldn’t open it, though tears still leaked from between the lids, a slow trickle. He couldn’t think how the Prince had managed to get through the gardens to the cottage. Had he used the tunnel? In any case, sending him back up to the Palace would be a cruelty not even Eagle’s numb heart could stand. “Come in.”

The door slammed behind Brother Fox. Eagle knelt by Father’s trunk, which he shouldn’t have gone into, but he felt this warranted the intrusion. His fingers brushed one of the shiny wood boxes Father brought down sometimes after he’d answered a summons, but he didn’t feel the least temptation to open it—not now, anyway. He found the little glass jar of all-heal.

“Where’s Falcon Eye?” Brother Fox pleaded.

“I’m sorry, Your Highness. He went out this afternoon. Hunting. He hasn’t come home yet.” Probably wouldn’t until late tomorrow morning.

“I thought he always took you with him.”

Eagle said simply, “Not today.” The agony in the Prince’s voice made him rush. He went into the washroom and fetched a bowl of hot water, and a pile of clean rags. Brother Fox stood in the spot he’d occupied when Eagle left him, rocking slightly and staring into the distance, hunched with pain and—if Eagle read him right—shame. “Your Highness?”

“What?”

“I can help you, if you want. My father taught me. But it’d probably be better if you sat down.”

The Prince nodded vaguely.

Eagle arranged the supplies on the window seat. “Your Highness. Please—”

“Bey.” Fox.

Eagle shook his head and carefully guided the Prince a few steps, to the window seat. Brother Fox didn’t sit, and he was the taller by more than a head. Eagle couldn’t work on this mess reaching up. He screwed up his courage, laid his hands on the royal shoulders, and pushed. “Sit down, Your Highness,” he said.

“Call me Fox.” The Prince sat down hard. He probably jarred every injury at once. A pained little sound pressed between his teeth.

For a moment Eagle clenched his hands, angry. So he could feel, after all; not entirely numb.

“If you’re—if you’re familiar enough to help me after—this—you’re familiar enough to call me Fox.”

“All right. Fox.” He pushed the long glory of hair behind Brother Fox’s shoulders. It whispered over the backs of his fingers. “Father calls me Eagle,” he offered. The most serious injury, the arm, he’d treat first, no matter how badly he wanted to fix the Prince’s face. He remembered it swimming over him in the cave, all the lovelier against his horror.

“How old are you, Eagle?”

“Fourscore years and two. Hold still now.” Carefully, he examined Fox’s arm.

“Ah!”

“This is broken.” He could feel it just there.

“I know,” Fox wrenched, sweat standing out on his forehead.

“Wait here.” Eagle went and fetched the leather strap from Father’s chest. “To bite on,” he said, giving it over.

“I know. Talk to me,” the Prince said suddenly. “What’s it like being Wormsbane?” And he put the strap in his mouth.

“Oh, well…” Eagle didn’t know how to answer that for himself, let alone Fox. He rubbed the nape of his neck. “I’m not really sure yet,” he decided. “It’s only today, you know? I was talking to Vercingetorix, and he said—”

“Vercingetorix?” Fox interrupted. He had the strap in his hand now. “The unicorn?”

“Bite down.” That was none of anyone’s business, though why anyone should be surprised Eagle didn’t know. He wasn’t anything special. The Prince obeyed, and he snapped the bone into place before he could lose his nerve. Fox’s scream through the strap rattled his eardrums. He reached for the jar of all-heal. When he opened it, the scent drifted up to prickle green, herbal magic into his nose.

“You—can still talk—to Vercingetorix?” Fox panted.

Eagle’s face heated. What a thing to ask about, while he stroked all-heal over the living silk of the Prince’s skin.

“It’s nothing to be embarrassed over.”

“Well, it’s just…” He wet a cloth in warm water and began to clean blood from the Prince’s face. He’d always been apart, and when the others around his age had started stealing kisses and touching each other, he’d been outside of that, too. He’d been outside of everything for so long, kids younger than he was were starting it. “Nobody notices me,” he blurted. And if they did, it was only to call him odd or stuck-up, or witch-boy because he talked to fairy creatures. “Only Father.”

Under the cloth, Fox’s split mouth curved into a smile Eagle could feel. “You’re sort of small.”

That was true. He was small and slight, even for his age. “And quiet,” he admitted.

“I see you,” Fox said, with a husky note in his voice and a gleam in his amber eye. The open one.

Eagle’s stomach jumped. “Mm-hmm.” It was all he trusted himself to say.

“I do. I see you around, working with Falcon Eye.” Fox dragged in a breath and added, “He loves you.”

“He does.” If there was anything real left in Eagle’s world, it was Father.

“Why are you so serious? I never see you smile. But your father loves you and teaches you. You get to talk to unicorns. If anybody has a reason to smile, you do.”

Eagle raised Fox’s chin to clean his neck. It felt intimate, trading secrets. If he leaned in six inches, he could steal a kiss, and what would happen then? He longed to find out, but—no. He contented himself with sponging blood from golden skin, leaving it damp and gleaming. “Guess I just don’t need to. Why do you smile all the time, when your father does this to you?”

Fox’s larynx bobbed under the cloth. “I’ve never thought about it.”

Not for one moment did Eagle believe that. He paused in his cleaning and looked Fox in the eye.

“I suppose… I need to, because if I don’t, I’ll cry.”

He nodded slowly. He wanted to throttle the High King, even knowing he’d die for it. “It’s wrong, you know. What he does to you.”

“If I were a better—”

“Shut up.” Oh God. He’d just told the Crown Prince to shut up. “It’s not about you. He’d do it if you were perfect, because it’s all and only about him. You think I never make my father angry?” He was always making Father angry and having things taken away from him, or being given extra chores. But this. This was fists and no holding back. “Difference is, I don’t look like this after he punishes me.”

Fox didn’t answer. He looked ready to cry again.

“Why don’t you just leave?”

“Where would I go?” Fox said, so small and sad that Eagle wanted to take him away this very minute, into the wood and the wild, and keep him safe.

“Where wouldn’t you go?” Eagle stepped back, holding the cloth, reaching for words. Where wouldn’t he go? “Anywhere,” he said. “Everywhere!” He threw his arms wide, and his face broke into a smile for the first time in days. “You could have adventures, all kinds. See the world! Save beautiful princesses, and find buried treasure, and slay dragons and—and—”

Oh, the look on Fox’s bruised face. That gleam in his eye, hotter now, hot as the lava sprites when they got too close. You are something extraordinary, the look said, and he couldn’t understand it.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked.

“Because,” Fox said, “I just figured out why you don’t smile. You don’t want to be here any more than I do.”

The Prince really did see him. He had let someone see him—the insane, secret part of him that wanted to run and never look back. “I want to see where the round-eared sailors come from,” he said, feeling stupid, and went quickly back to patching up Fox.

He had his fingers under Fox’s eye when the Prince asked, “Which ones?”

“All of them.”

“What if I went?” Fox’s voice: hushed now, murmuring. “If I went away and had adventures, would you come with me?”

In a heartbeat. “Sure I would.” No doubt Fox would forget by morning, but Eagle would never forget. He wished it could be a true thing.

He pulled up the Prince’s stained shirt to spread all-heal on his ribs. The bruises there took longer to fade than they should have. “You should go,” he said quietly. “Before he kills you.” He glanced up from where he knelt and found Fox’s eyes on him, both of them now, those hot amber eyes. He couldn’t look away if he tried.

“You’re probably right,” Fox said. His look held Eagle’s for a long moment, unreadable.

Eagle slid his hands out of Fox’s shirt.

The Prince leaned forward, near and nearer, until Eagle could feel air stir against his mouth. Fox lifted his chin with soft fingertips, whispering, “Eagle… I want to—thank you.” The moment shattered. Fox withdrew his hand and rose. “Good-bye,” he said at the door, and whipped out in a flurry of hair, leaving Eagle sitting on his heels with forgotten manners and fierce longing.

“I would’ve let you,” he said, to the empty space the Prince had left behind. He would’ve let Fox do a lot of things, if Fox had wanted to bother. Sometimes the haylofts in Shirith overflowed with naked flesh, and Eagle was never in any of them. It was a lonely feeling, he thought, to have nobody want you. It would have been nice to know what it felt like when somebody did.

With a sigh, he stood and went about cleaning. He stuffed the rags into the incinerator, rinsed the bowl, and scrubbed blood from the carpet where Fox had stood. He tried to turn his mind away from what had just happened, but in the cedar-paneled shower, surrounded by steam and scent, he propped his forearm on the wall and stroked his prick with a soapy fist. Whether it had meant what he thought it did or something else entirely, the memory of Fox’s fiery gaze brought a moan out of him. Fingers of hot water coursed down his back. He came on his hand with a ragged little sound like a sob, and afterward leaned there trembling in the billows of hot vapor.

It felt like disrespect. Fox had spoken to him. Listened to him. Seen right into him. Whatever was there, the Prince had found it pleasing. And he was so used to the eyes skidding right over him, the mouths that called him spooky and strange where they thought he couldn’t hear. He’d welcomed their thinking he was odd, and hardened his heart. Or thought he had. One look from Fox had been enough to crack him open to the soft meat inside. He was as weak and stupid as the rest of them.

He shut off the water and dried himself with a towel so old it was ivory rather than white. What he wanted, he realized, was for somebody to want to touch him, and most of all, Crown Prince Bearach of Shirith, who had seen Eagle’s real, wild self, and liked it.

Eagle put on his nightshirt. He climbed into the sleeping cupboard and slept hard on top of the blankets with all the lights blazing and the windows and bed-door open.

When he woke, there was an emerald fairy perched on his nose. It took forever to get the glitter off.

TWO

By the time Eagle had washed most of the sparkles from his face, Father still hadn’t returned. He ate a cold breakfast off a napkin: some hard-cooked eggs left over from last night, with brown bread. Instead of making tea, he sneaked a fizzy out of the cold-box. He wasn’t allowed to drink them at breakfast, technically, but who’d know? It saved him the washing-up, since he could throw the napkin in the hamper and stick the fizzy bottle into the trash outside on his way to start chores.

The hounds needed tending first. Early-morning dark covered the gardens; the night flowers were closing, and the daytime flowers hadn’t opened for the sun. The Palace loomed high in front of him, and Fimberevell, the great fire mountain, even higher to his left. The ashy ring around its basin came visible by the time he reached his destination.

Ivy draped the east wall of the Palace top to bottom, except for a few windows, and at the center, where white marble steps led to arched double doors. Those doors weren’t for the likes of Eagle, Movanar that he was. Servants used the tunnel. There was a sunken staircase at the back corner of the Palace, up against the mountain’s root, which led to another set of double doors. These were of ordinary size, though highly decorated, like everything else associated with the High Ones.

He bounded down the steps, cracked open one of the doors, and slipped onto the landing just inside. More stairs drove deep into the earth, three flights together. Down here, mage-lanterns blazed around the clock, bathing the tunnel in white radiance. He didn’t bother with the railing carved into the stone, instead sauntering down with his hands in his pockets.

Nobody passed him on the stairs, but once he walked under the arch that led to the tunnel itself, there was plenty of bustle. The ceiling here made him feel even smaller than usual. It rose nearly back to ground level, to accommodate ways into the rest of the Palace, plus servants’ quarters all up and down the south wall, wherever there might be space. He and Father were the only ones who lived aboveground. Eagle felt lucky for it. He couldn’t imagine being stuck under here.

He kept to the north wall as he passed laundresses and seamstresses and cooks, chambermaids and grooms and stable boys. Most didn’t notice Eagle, which was fine by him. Savory Thyme, the head chef, ruffled his hair as she went by on her way to the kitchens. Father visited her sometimes, and she thought it made her familiar with Eagle, too. She always spoke to him as if he were a little bitty boy, if she spoke to him at all. He disliked her on principle.

About halfway down he met with Otter and Bat, on their way to work in the gardens. They disliked him on principle, principle being he was smaller than they, and they thought he was weird. “Hey, Wormsbane,” said Bat, thrusting out a palm to stiff-arm Eagle into the wall. Eagle saw it coming and checked himself, just enough that Bat didn’t strike him.

He caught Bat’s arm instead, pulling along with the other boy’s momentum to send him face-first into the wall. Hadn’t they figured out yet not to mess with him? Bat bounced right into a kidney punch, howled, and slid down the wall to the floor. When Otter came to avenge his idiot friend, Eagle tripped him, sent him flying, and walked on with his hands back in his pockets.

“Fighting again, Eagle Eye?” said Feathery Fern, coming down one of the staircases with a basket of dirty silks. She scowled at him, showing the lines in her face. “Stop right there.”

He obeyed, suppressing a sigh. “They started it.”

“We’ll see what your father has to say. You can’t go thrashing everyone because you’re Wormsbane now.”

“I thrashed them before,” he said, and then winced. The wrong thing, judging from her face. Quick, before she could shout, he asked, “How do you know about the Worm?”

“You’re all the High Ones can talk about. ‘Who’s Eagle Eye?’ they’re all asking each other.” She shook her head. “The Worm of Shirith. Did you really, Eagle?”

“We ought to tell them,” Bat said savagely from a little down the way, picking himself up. “Then maybe he’d get what’s coming to him.”

“Seen but not heard, Hunting Bat!” Fern snapped.

“They’d thank us, wouldn’t they? They’d be happy we gave them someone new to play with!” Bat had, all of a sudden, a mad light on his dark-olive face. Otter tried to interrupt him, but he wrenched free and blasted on. “He’d probably like it anyway, damn spooky witch-boy! Keep them busy, that’s what he’d do!” His voice echoed off the walls, clear up to the ceiling, and people turned their heads to stare.

“Bat—” Otter began again, but Bat was too far gone.

“Special, aren’t you? So special! Pretty little witch-boy, all the fucking fairies love him, he’s got glitter on him now, look at his face!”

Eagle shoved his hands deeper and walked away.

“I’m going to tell them!” Bat screamed at his back. “I’ll tell them all right where to find you, Eagle Eye! See how you like it!”

There was a lot more, but he put on a little speed, enough to carry him out of clear earshot, until all he heard was Bat’s voice and not the sense of it. He took his left hand out of his pocket and stroked fingertips along the wall as he walked. Ancient sigils were carved clear to the ceiling to aid the High King in the exercise of the Fimbetamur and to keep the mountain in check while he slept. The Movanar—the Little Ones—were meant to be grateful to the High King for controlling Fimberevell, and Eagle supposed he was, come to that, but he did wonder why they all had to live in the shadow of a massive, angry volcano. It seemed to him, well, a bit suicidal.

Nobody questioned it. That bothered him most of all. Didn’t anybody wonder the why of things? Didn’t anybody ask what for? He had so many questions, and Father wouldn’t answer a one of them. “That’s the way it is, Eagle.” “Don’t draw attention, Eagle.” “Keep your mouth shut, Eagle.” Eventually he’d stopped asking, but sometimes he felt like he’d explode, holding all his questions in. Why was he thinking this way? Fox, so broken. Bat, so angry.

He sidestepped Hedgehog coming the other way. “All right?” popped out of his mouth before he could stop it; Hedgehog looked awful, all sweaty and bruised, and he clung to the wall for support. He was only half dressed, and the sight of his body would’ve been pleasant if he hadn’t been hurt.

“The hell do you care, witch-boy?” Hedgehog snapped.

“Well—” Eagle shook his head. Hedgehog was the worst of them. He was a little older, and he’d always been nice to Eagle in a distant sort of way, until he’d seen Eagle talking to the mermaids down at the coast. “Never mind.”

“You wouldn’t know anything about it, the way Falcon Eye hides you.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t. But are you all right?”

Hedgehog rubbed his shoulder, covering a mark Eagle was sure came from teeth. “Just—watch yourself. His Majesty’s got guests.”

“What do you mean?” Eagle asked, but Hedgehog pushed past and hobbled away, legs wide, as if he’d gotten a kick to the stones. It disturbed Eagle in a way he didn’t quite grasp, and he thought about it until he climbed the steps at the other end of the tunnel and came out into dawn.

He crossed behind the stables, hugging the mountain’s root, until he reached the kennels. The dog run sat right along the great bulk of Fimberevell. Eagle crossed the invisible barrier around the run—keyed to let anything but the hounds pass freely—and went to the plain stone wall at the back to slide up the panel that would let the dogs out into fresh air. They surged past him, rubbing sleek black bodies against his legs and snuffling sharp muzzles at his hands, looking for scratches behind their pointed ears. He gave them a few, then let himself in through the door.

After he’d swept and mopped the kennel, he cleaned the water trough and filled it again from the tap. The last chore here was to feed the hounds, and he walked over to the big cold-box set into the back wall, rolling up his sleeves for the messy job. He was to use the carcass hung in front; an old horse today, it looked like, already dressed. He took the apron from the peg, stepped into the cold-box, and took the biggest of the knives from the strip on the wall to break down the horse. He cut it into pieces he could manage and took it to the prep table.

While he trimmed the meat for the dogs, he pushed aside scraps for the butcher fairies, with their hair that ran fine carnage runnels over skin the color of bone. They fell on the pile with ragged wings gleefully opening and shutting, and licked blood off his fingers with their raspy little tongues. He sang quietly to them, a death song, a killing song, like the eagle would sing to the rabbit or the wolf to the deer. It was their favorite, and they sang along with animal screams.

He washed up after, humming the same song, and went out past the stables again, but around the front. He didn’t really feel like going through the tunnel again; Hedgehog still hovered at the edges of his mind.

Osprey pushed a barrow of muck to the midden. “Going to play with your fairies, witch-boy?” he shot at Eagle, nasty, sniggering.

Eagle made a rude gesture and ducked the foul-smelling clump Osprey flung at his head. Of all of them, Osprey was the stupidest. If Eagle’d been the one throwing, he wouldn’t have missed. Even now he was tempted to go back and impart a lesson. He was smaller, but he’d been in trouble plenty of times for blacking Osprey’s eyes, and he’d rather not deal with it today. He’d get in trouble for walking along the front, too, if anyone saw him, but he couldn’t bring himself to care about that as much.

Ivy grew on the walls here, as on the east side, covering the more utilitarian portions of the Palace with curtains of green. Toward its spectacular heart, where the royal family lived, the walls were clean of foliage and lichens, a marvel of living wood and white stone inlaid with gleaming obsidian and many colors of granite. There was a pattern to the inlay, Eagle had been taught at lessons, which reinforced the Fimbetamur in the same way as the sigils in the tunnel.

At his left were the outer walls, hidden behind a bank of ancient oaks. He’d been back there plenty of times to lay his hand on the mossy stones. The walls didn’t really keep them in—not Eagle and Father, at any rate—but there were some who’d never been beyond, even in centuries of life. Some of the High Ones had only been as far as Father took them on hunts.

Eagle was tied to this place. Not as much as Bearach, who’d inherit the Fimbetamur if the High King died, but bound to it all the same, by his father and his father’s father and the God knew how many fathers before that, back into forever ago. If he had children—what a laugh that was!—they’d be just as bound, on and on into always, and Eagle would disappear among their ranks and be forgotten. Swallowed by the Palace walls, and if he should bleed on the stones of the courtyard, who’d mark it?

He passed the main gate, seven oaks trained together across a wide lane. They would uproot themselves and swing aside to allow access. The grand front entrance to the Palace wasn’t for the likes of Eagle either, and he’d never been through there, but he crossed the silvery granite path that led up to the tall, peaked doors, shielded by lines of oaks slanting away on either side. The stones lay in an elaborate design, and to his bare soles they felt smooth, satiny with ages gone by. To either side of the drive, plush grass bent under his feet.

When he passed between the oaks and the corner of the Palace, it was almost as if he’d stepped into another world. The gardens rolled out along the mountainside, an organized riot of flowerbeds and blooming trees, hedgerows and roses as far as the eye could see.

The gardeners had all gone, probably to some other part of the complex, but the bees were at work in the bright morning. Fairies buzzed and glittered among the flowers, greeting Eagle as he walked by. He didn’t rush. A few more chores waited for him at home, but what a day! A breeze ambled by, so heavy with rose scent it made his head spin, and when he tilted his face up the light spilled over it, down his throat and chest, warming him until he thought his skin must be glowing gold. He could taste the roses. A fairy settled on his face and ran tiny hands over his parted lips. He smiled, letting out a slow sigh.

“Eagle Eye,” the fairy sang, and wings brushed his cheeks as it fluttered away. He licked the fairy dust from his mouth: lightly sweet and perfumed. A rose fairy, it must have been, though he hadn’t opened his eyes to see it. He stood there for a long time, flower-drugged and sun-dazed, with his toes in emerald grass and his head in the clouds.

At last he pulled himself free of the reverie, blinking, to see Fleet Stag making his way along a path. Alone. Eagle went to intercept, trying to appear unhurried. Maybe it was none of his business, but what if Ceridwen should fall again? And the fits the younger prince suffered—who was meant to be with him? Anger punched through his mood.

He and Stag were of a height, or nearly so, but Stag was much younger, maybe twoscore and ten. Still a little boy, really. And the taller he grew, the more apparent it became that something was very wrong in Stag’s head, so he was even littler a boy on the inside than he appeared. The taller he grew, the more strongly his unsteady, baby walk contrasted with the Revanar beauty blooming in his limbs.

Already Stag could stop a heart cold. Huge eyes like clear amber stones gleamed out of a fair face, and his hair waved like wheat to his shoulders. But his hands shook much of the time, and he would get a look of confusion on his lovely features, painful as broken glass to the chest. Now, though, he smiled broadly when he saw Eagle. Why didn’t anybody get him a cane at least?

“Good morning,” he said, with great care. He always spoke a little too slowly.

“Good morning, Your Highness,” Eagle said, bowing from the waist. “Are you all by yourself?”

“Mm-hmm. I’m allowed now. Do you want to walk with me?”

“May I?”

“I’d like it if you did,” Fleet Stag said, gazing at the path in front of him and setting his feet so, so carefully. “I’m sort of scared.”

Eagle stepped onto the path. “Do you want me to take you home?”

“Do you have to? I really want to walk.”

“No. I don’t have to.” He extended his arm for Stag to take.

The young prince beamed like a miniature sun. He linked his arm, trembling under the drape of fine fawn velvet, through Eagle’s. “I feel better now.” They walked down the path at a snail’s pace. Eagle didn’t mind it; this day was made for meandering. But he remembered playing games with Stag, a long time ago. The prince had lived up to his name then.

After a while, Stag said, “Eagle? What did you do?”

“What do you mean, Your Highness?”

“Mm. Well…” He frowned. A little furrow appeared between blond brows. “Last night, Daddy, he was yelling at Fox again, and Fox yelled at him back. For a little bit.” He bit his lip. “They yelled about you.”

Eagle felt chilled in spite of the sunshine. “Did they?”

“Yes… and Daddy said why didn’t Fox just leave you and say he’d killed the, um, Worm. Did you really kill it?”

“Lucky shot,” he said wryly. “But I guess so. Yes.”

“Fox told me all about it. But he makes up stories sometimes. I can’t always tell if he’s being serious.”

His chest went tight at the mention of Fox. He wanted to ask what the Crown Prince had said about him, but it wasn’t as if it mattered. Eagle would lay money Father would keep sending him away whenever Fox came to the cottage. Nothing would come of it, and he wished he’d kissed Fox last night when he had the chance. It was a might-have-been now, dreadful and delicious at once.

“But I think he did mean it,” Stag was saying. “You looked terrible when he brought you back. He was very upset. Didn’t you know?” he added, when Eagle shot him a curious look.

“He brought me himself?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Oh,” Eagle said, suppressing a ridiculous grin, or most of it. He hoped.

“It made Daddy mad. He said Fox was soft, and shamed him, and Fox got so angry. He said you saved him and it wasn’t right to kill you for it. And then…”

“What?” It came out hardly louder than breath.

“Fox fell down.”

What could he say to that? He had nothing. Fox “fell down” a damned lot.

“I’m not stupid,” Stag whispered, bowing his head as if under a millstone’s weight. “Fox doesn’t really fall down. I know that. But it’s easier to say.”

Eagle rested his hand on Stag’s forearm. He wanted to change the subject, but didn’t know how. They walked silent among tall rosebushes with deep leaves shining, bending under the weight of big white blooms. When they passed a cleverly worked stone bench, Stag said, “I think I want to sit.”

“All right.” Eagle helped the young prince onto the bench, where he leaned against the backrest, looking lost.

“He ignores me mostly. But not Fox.”

“No,” Eagle said. “Not Fox.” He looked at the roses. Clean and white, but voluptuously curled and curved and scented; he put out his hand and caressed the petals of one, softer than any velvet could hope to be. And he thought again of the Crown Prince.

“I asked him if he wanted to come,” Stag went on, startling Eagle badly enough that he cut his finger on a thorn, “but he said he had to do something.”

“Mm,” he mumbled, sucking at the wound, which bled persistently. He would not ask what Fox was doing.

“Mother wouldn’t, either. She threw a pillow at me. It’s too early, I suppose, but I like the morning, and this one is so nice. I had to come out.”

“You weren’t really meant to on your own, were you?”

Stag gave a telling grimace. “They would have let me before. They used to let me. Nobody thinks I remember, but I do. I get so confused—but not about that. I remember everything.” The prince banged on his knee with a clumsy fist, rocking back and forth.

“Calm down,” Eagle said, alarmed. He didn’t want Stag to have a fit, not here, not now. “It’s all right, Your Highness. You—”

“It’s not all right. Nothing’s ever all right.”

If things ought to be all right for anyone in the world, oughtn’t they to be for a harmless, damaged little prince? Again, he said nothing. If he spoke, it would be treason. The God, this place. Of all the places to be bound to. They didn’t speak for so long that when he looked at Stag he thought the prince had fallen asleep, with his closed eyes and peaceful expression.

Eagle’s thoughts tumbled over themselves, pebbles caught up in a wave. If Stag remembered right—

He hoped it hadn’t really happened that way. Maybe Stag had misheard, or his brain had made something up—anything else, please—because if Stag was right, Fox had taken a brutal thrashing from his own father on Eagle’s account. Maybe the High King had had some other reason, but what reason was there for what he’d done to Fox last night?

Eagle didn’t want to be Beagar’s excuse. His heart hurt so much then that he wondered how he could ever have imagined he was numb. What must Fox have been thinking last night, while Eagle gave what little help there was to give? The cause and the cure at once, and what had he been thinking of? How Fox had made him feel, stupid things, little-boy hungers for acceptance and adventure, kissing Fox’s perfect mouth.Bitter guilt coated his tongue when he remembered touching himself afterward, some part of him wishing to feel Fox’s hand there instead of his own, when he remembered coming so hard his toes had grasped the tile beneath his feet.

Sun and shade played across the grass. He had hurt Prince Bearach, who saw the inside of him, and the cold sick slime in his vitals felt like less than his due. He had judged Fox silly and arrogant, going down into the earth to find the Worm, but if Father had treated him the way the High King treated Fox, he might have taken death over more of it.

The shadows under the trees seemed blacker now. He wished like mad Fox would leave this place. He wished he could go along.

Maybe he could make it happen. He was positive he could get a message to Fox. Hadn’t Father always said he was too clever by half? He could do it, and there was no shortage of places to meet secretly, whether in the gardens or outside the Palace. They hardly knew each other, but he thought he could convince Fox—

“Eagle?”

He jumped and turned to face Stag, sitting there on the bench. “Yes, Your Highness?”

“Can we go back now? My head hurts.”

“Of course, Your Highness.” Eagle went to help Stag, easing the little prince to his feet. They left the white roses behind.

~*~*~*~

That’s it for now. Look out for The High King’s Will , which you can preorder at the link, on November 19, 2015.

If you don’t want to wait to read more about Eagle and Fox, click the cover for the prequel shorts.

Things That Are Happening

So here’s what’s going on.

Getting ready for The High King’s Will ebook to release on Thursday, November 19.

Saga of Menyoral: Hard Luck is coming to paperback. Details on that soon. I’ll be running a free promotion on that 11/26-11/29.

When The High King’s Will comes to paperback, it’ll have some small illustrations, done by the wonderful Tiana Clawson (follow her on Instagram). Here’s a sample of the artwork: Mr. Love Interest, Crown Prince Bearach of Shirith, mostly known as Fox.

The Redwood Rebel: An Interview with the Author

Hello! My good friend Lorna George has a wonderful book out on the 9th of this month. It’s a fun, feminist fantasy romance called The Redwood Rebel, and I can recommend it to you with confidence, as I read it!

Here’s my interview with Lorna herself. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did chatting with her, and I hope you give The Redwood Rebel a look too.

~*~

What were you reading at the time you started thinking about Naomi? What need did you see that you wanted to fill?

She sort of popped into being while I was daydreaming after reading “Not My Best Side” which is a poem by U.A. Fanthorpe. It’s a re-telling of St George and The Dragon, but with a slightly skewed perspective. Reading it made me laugh, because it was one of my favourite stories growing up, and reading it from such a warped angle was really wonderful. Before I knew what had happened, Naomi was wandering about my mind and looking for something to do.

Once the idea to take a classic story and play about with expected roles had struck me, I knew she had to be both the knight and the virgin sacrifice. From there she grew into less of the expected white knight in shining armour, and more into the morally grey character she is now. I wanted to write a woman who didn’t fit neatly into any little box, because so few of us actually do. Personally I love when I read about flawed characters, because it makes them feel more realistic, and women in particular seem to almost always be categorised as perfect or evil. It was fun to challenge that.

So did that thinking, your desire to challenge tropes, lead to your choice of such a classic romance-novel device? By which I mean, the forced contact sorry of thing you set up between Naomi and Arun.

Very much so. I love a good romance, the trashier the better, but the older and more experienced I’ve become, the more I noticed how men tend to grab at women and it’s idealised as something romantic. I happen to think it’s a pretty toxic thought-process to encourage, especially in young women, who most romance is geared towards. The idea that a man should grab or touch a woman to get her attention is pretty creepy when you really stop and think about it. I just felt it was high time someone who doesn’t look down on the genre pointed it out at being problematic, I suppose.

You seem to have set up Arun’s dragon as a symbol of his very traditional masculinity. Is that a good reading? Is there something else you’d like readers to know about that choice?

Originally, Naomi was going to be the dragon. I really like the idea of dragons being symbolic of femininity, and for a long time she was going to be the one who had the ability to shift forms. In the end though I realised Arun was basically useless without that power, and the story worked much better with her as the knight and him as the dragon, playing traditionally opposing roles.

Of course it would have been a lot of fun to have Naomi as the dragon and Arun as the “princess” but I may yet tinker with the idea again in the future.

What kind of research went into The Redwood Rebel?

Mostly weapons, combat styles, and injuries. I spent hours on youtube watching tutorials on swordplay and hand to hand combat, and even braved the great outdoors to take archery lessons so that I could write with confidence. I had to read a lot about festering wounds, too. Oh, the things I’ve seen…

Cultural cues were important, as well. Obviously it’s a fantasy book, so to a degree I get to make things up for world-building purposes, but since I took a lot of inspiration from real cultures, people, and history, I did my fair share of swatting. I’d like to think I did a good job with that, as media representation is important, but I’m always learning. Most importantly, I’m always willing to learn, too.

What’s the one thing you’d like readers to take away from your book?

If I can make someone re-think their perspective, even just a tiny bit, then I’ll be happy. I always think the most important and memorable books I’ve read have been those that altered my perception in some way or another. I don’t want to force my opinions on anyone, of course, and in many ways that’s why I gave Arun and Naomi such differing world views; they can argue out the two sides and in a lot of areas there won’t ever be any clear right or wrong answer. There never is in real life, after all. The best we can do is look at a thing from all angles, and keep an open mind. I’d like for readers to take that from the book.

Can you recommend five books you read while you were writing The Redwood Rebel?

Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett

Sins of the Past, by JD Franx

The Penelopiad, by Margaret Atwood

Hard Luck, by M.A. Ray

Taming Shadows, by Fiona Skye

Thanks so much for letting me pepper you. I can’t wait for The Royal Sentinel.

Thank you for peppering me. It was fun!

~*~

Get the book here:

Or visit her lovely blog by clicking on her lovely face!

Until next time!

P.A.W.S Reboot!

Today I’m celebrating, with Debbie Manber Kupfer, the release of a new edition of her book P.A.W.S. This exciting story chronicles the adventures of Miri Katz, a girl with a fascinating family heritage and a necklace that’s more than it seems.

I sat down with Debbie to ask her a few questions about the book.

What books were you reading that gave you the idea for P.A.W.S.? What lack did you see in the book world that you wanted to fill?

Great question.

I’m a huge Harry Potter fan and my favorite book has always been book 3 when the idea of the animagus was first introduced, but I felt it didn’t go far enough. I wanted to know how – what did Professor McGonagal and Sirius and James and the others actually do to learn to turn themselves into animals. What was the process like? Did you choose your form or was it something inside you that needed to come out? All these thoughts and more were the seeds that led to P.A.W.S.

One thing that stood out to me was Miri’s varied and complex relationships with the women in her life, from her loving grandmother to her antagonistic roommate to the mysterious headmistress  — even her absent mother. Can you say a little bit about what that means to you? And was it a conscious choice?

Well the relationship with her omama (grandmother) definitely was. I was very close with my own omama who died when I was 10 years old and I was with her when she died. I remembered feeling like Miri – I cried and cried for about two days straight, but if anyone asked me why I couldn’t put words to it.

The other conscious choice was Miri’s childhood friend Jenny. Jenny’s based on my first best friend who lived across the street and moved away when I was 11. I never saw her again and don’t even know her second name, so couldn’t find her on FB.

But that first friendship has stuck with me over the years – and yes we used to play “fairies” on the steps in my house in Barking.

Werewolves were an obvious choice for an enemy, but I love how you used the folklore from around the area the Katz family came from to add to the flavor of your mythos. Is there anything else you want readers to know about the research that went into this book?

Honestly for P.A.W.S. there wasn’t a huge amount of research involved. My father came from Vienna and grew up on Grosse Spielgasse – so I used that as the location for Celia’s family’s home. I’ve been there with my father – and actually there’s a scene in Argentum that is based on the rather weird experience I had with my parents when we tried to go back to his family home.

For Argentum – the second book in the series I did a lot more research, particularly when it came to the parts set in Wales and Ireland. I went on virtual vacation for weeks exploring ireland to find the perfect spot for Jessamyn’s ancestral home – and studied the abilities of certain birds to fly distances, so that I could the right forms.

Well, now I’m even more ready for Argentum!

Miri’s Jewish heritage, and the effect it has on the story, is something I’ve never seen before in a magic-school book. Was it just a natural choice, given your own heritage? Was there something more behind it?

I think it was a natural choice for me. I’m an agnostic Jew as is Miri and grew up in a household that kept traditions, but weren’t real strict about it. My dad came to London at age 6 on the Kindertransport in 1939 – and the stories he told me in his early years have stuck with him and find their way into my writing. I wish he was still around today to read P.A.W.S. – I think he would have enjoyed it.

Is there anything I haven’t addressed that you’d like people to know about your work?

I have a whole world in my head – I know where the series is going, but as a discovery writer I’m not at all sure yet how we’ll get there, but hope folk will stick around for the ride. Also I absolutely love hearing for readers so please send me a note and you’ll make my day!

Okay, last question. You’re a puzzle writer! How did that figure in to the writing of a novel? Did it help you? Hurt you? Or both?

I think it helps quite a bit – as a puzzle writer I need to make sure that everything logically fits together – I think the same applies to my stories. It annoys me when I find plot holes in stuff I read and annoys me even more when I find them in my own work. That’s one of the reasons I was very happy to have the chance to reedit and rerelease P.A.W.S. – there are some finicky little things that bothered me in the first edition that now I’ve been able to fix.

Thanks for all your hard work writing P.A.W.S., Debbie. It really stuck with me and made me think about it long after I’d finished. And it was great talking with you about it.

Now, please enjoy this excerpt from the new P.A.W.S.!

Vienna, October 2, 1941.

Today was Celia’s tenth birthday. This was not how she imagined celebrating it. She was with her family – her mama, Miriam; her papa, David; her elder brother, Issel; and her baby sister, Sara. They were huddled together in the back room of their tiny two-room apartment in Grosse Spielgasse, in the dark, barely breathing.

Outside the building, the boot steps got nearer and nearer. Celia heard shouting, screaming, gunshots. She crouched down even closer to the ground, wishing that somehow they could all melt away into the shadows. Celia clutched her cat, Max, tightly in her arms, feeling his warmth, his soft tabby fur close to her skin, willing him to stay quiet.

Her mama cradled little Sara at her breast, nursing her so she would not cry out. Outside, the pounding footsteps were getting closer, closer: “Juden, Juden, Heraus, Heraus, Schnell, Schnell!” Now they were at the door of the neighbors – the Wassersteins. She heard crying and a single gunshot.

Miriam beckoned to her. “Celia, mein Katzerl, come here,” she whispered. “I have something for you, for your birthday.”

Celia approached Miriam cautiously, still clutching Max to her. “What is it, Mama?” she asked, gazing into Miriam’s blue, blue eyes. She studied her prematurely wrinkled face, memorizing every crease. Mama, my mama, she thought.

Still holding baby Sara with her left hand, Miriam reached around the back of her neck with her right and unclasped the chain that she always wore beneath her clothes, close to her heart. It was a silver chain with a cat charm on it. “Take this, Celia, mein Katzerl. Wear it always, and remember I love you. Ich liebe dich.”

“I love you, Mama,” Celia whispered as she fastened the chain around her neck just as the doors burst open. Six Gestapo soldiers rushed into their home – “Juden, Heraus, Heraus, Schnell, Schnell…” Celia watched as her family was herded out of the door.

If you liked this excerpt, please consider entering Debbie’s giveaway on Goodreads.

If you don’t want to take a chance, grab your copies of both books in the series!

P.A.W.S. Cover Reveal

Despite all the stories I shared with you,

there is so much I never told you, Miri,

so much you’ll have to

discover for yourself.

Be brave, mein Katzerl.

And now what you’ve all been waiting for. The brand new cover of P.A.W.S. designed by the multi-talented Rachel Bostwick.

When Miri receives a silver cat charm from her omama, Celia, on the night before she dies, she has no idea that the charm holds a family secret, a magic that saved Celia’s life and is about to make Miri’s a whole lot more interesting.

Book on sale on Amazon, September 1 ….

Experience the Magic of P.A.W.S.
Preorder Today

Excerpt from The High King’s Will

This may be considered NSFW, so fair warning for those of you at a desk.

Here is the first chapter of Steel for the Prince: The High King’s Will, the product of many months of sweat and tears. It’s the first in a serial telling the story of Dingus’s grandfather, Eagle Eye, as a very young man. If pretty hitul boys falling in love is not your bag, feel free to give this one a pass, but fear not. I’ll have another, more Menyoral-connected release pretty quickly after this hits Amazon. Let me show you what I’ve been doing.

~*~

ONE

Eagle Eye lay broken and reeling on the floor of the cavern. The dark hulk of the great red Worm towered over him, the tail backlit by the gold that shimmered in heaps on the floor. Monstrously huge wings hung limp, casting strange shadows. The last dead twitches passed through Eleazar.

Eagle’s head ached. His vision swam, and distantly he heard the Crown Prince call out, “Hey-la-hey!” Brother Fox struggled over the thick tail with a blob of golden mage-light hovering just above his head. He called out again: “Eagle, brave Eagle, you’ve done it!”

He didn’t feel brave. He hurt so badly. The cruel black horns on Eleazar’s head, the knife teeth, and the massive eye, which had only a few minutes ago fallen upon him with hungry menace, sent a trembling to his soul.

Brother Fox blocked his view, partially, and he was glad of that. Light wreathed the Prince, making a glowing spirit of a flesh-and-blood youth, and Eagle understood why his stomach clenched when Brother Fox smiled. Precious metal gleamed in the gold threads that ran through his hair, and his face sent Eagle’s heart staggering. Impossibly beautiful.

The perfect mouth moved, but Eagle couldn’t hear. Blackness teased at the edges of his awareness. When the Prince bent over him, shadows swallowed amber eyes, like the bruises that so often marred the face. Eagle had preserved Brother Fox’s life, but he wondered if he had done the Prince a service.

Then—nothing.

Eagle had done for the Worm with a single, lucky arrow, but the Worm had nearly done for Eagle, too. More properly, Eagle had nearly done for Eagle. He’d dashed himself to pieces on the rocks. Broken bones, cracked skull. Two days he’d been deeply unconscious, in the care of the healers, but this morning, when he woke, the High King had tacked Vistridir onto his name. Wormsbane. Father had hustled him home straightaway, after Brother Fox had given him a scale from the Worm’s own hide. “You ought to have it,” the Prince had said. “You earned it. And after all, I did promise you one.”

He’d felt Rothganar’s biggest fraud when the High King called him Wormsbane. All his dreams of great deeds had fallen to ashes before the terror he’d felt in the Worm’s cave, and a numbness had come over his heart since, which he distantly feared would never go away. Even all the loveliness of the flowers and the sweet songs of the frogs had lost their power to move Voalt Vistridir. Nothing seemed quite real after Eleazar, and Eagle himself the least real of all.

The royal gardens showed spectacular on a summer’s night, especially a night like this, scented and breezy and clear. All the mage-lanterns shone in the cottage behind Eagle, who sat on a stool just outside the front door, gazing into his own shadow. In his hands he held the Worm’s ruby scale, the size of his palm. He rubbed at it unconsciously with a small, callused thumb, over and over.

He was alone. Father had gone on a hunt that afternoon, to stock the High King’s larder. He always took Eagle along, and today was no exception, but Eagle had asked to turn back. His leg, the site of the worst break, pained him. Normally there would have been no excuses accepted, but Father allowed it today, on the condition that he stayed inside.

He’d meant to obey, but the cottage stifled. Here he sat, with the achy leg stretched out in front of him, turning the scale over and over. Remembering, though he would sooner not: images cloaked in darkness, lit by flashes of red mage-light and gold, by a blast of flame bright as day. His memory tainted the sweet-smelling night with Worm stench. The world was half unremarkable dream, half nightmare, and Eagle wandered in it, lost, feeling only enough to realize, from a distance, that he hurt. So lost that when a figure stumbled around the yellow rose hedge, it surprised him. Ordinarily he would have heard someone coming, particularly someone so very drunk.

Brother Fox. The Crown Prince’s bruised face dripped tears and blood, and he shuffled toward the cottage, cradling a swollen arm that surely must be broken. Not drunk. Beaten. Father would have sent Eagle away to do some chore right off, but he stared, rooted to the spot, so much that the Prince nearly tripped over him. He popped up, overturning the stool, and remembered to bow. “Your Highness,” he rushed out, slipping the scale into his pocket.

“Please don’t,” Brother Fox rasped. He swayed on his feet. “Is your father here?”

“No, Your Highness.” Eagle bit his lip. Father would have sent him away, but Father wasn’t here, and one of Brother Fox’s eyes was so badly bruised he couldn’t open it, though tears still leaked from between the lids, a slow trickle. He couldn’t think how the Prince had managed to get through the gardens to the cottage. Had he used the tunnel? In any case, sending him back up to the Palace would be a cruelty not even Eagle’s numb heart could stand. “Come in.”

The door slammed behind Brother Fox. Eagle knelt by Father’s trunk, which he shouldn’t have gone into, but he felt this warranted the intrusion. His fingers brushed one of the shiny wood boxes Father brought down sometimes after he’d answered a summons, but he didn’t feel the least temptation to open it. He found the little glass jar of all-heal salve.

“Where’s Falcon Eye?” Brother Fox pleaded.

“I’m sorry, Your Highness. He went out this afternoon. Hunting. He hasn’t come home yet.” Probably wouldn’t until late tomorrow morning.

“I thought he always took you with him.”

Eagle said simply, “Not today.” The agony in the Prince’s voice made him rush. He went into the washroom and fetched a bowl of hot water, and a pile of clean rags. Brother Fox stood in the spot he’d occupied when Eagle left him, rocking slightly and staring into the distance, hunched with pain and—if Eagle read him right—shame. “Your Highness?”

“What?”

“I can help you, if you want. My father taught me. But it’d probably be better if you sat down.”

The Prince nodded vaguely.

Eagle arranged the supplies on the window seat. “Your Highness. Please—”

“Bey.” Fox.

Eagle shook his head and carefully guided the Prince a few steps, to the window seat. Brother Fox didn’t sit, and he was the taller by more than a head. Eagle couldn’t work on this mess reaching up. He screwed up his courage, laid his hands on the royal shoulders, and pushed. “Sit down, Your Highness,” he said.

“Call me Fox.” The Prince sat down hard. He probably jarred every injury at once. A pained little sound pressed between his teeth.

For a moment Eagle clenched his hands, angry. So he could feel, after all; not entirely numb.

“If you’re—if you’re familiar enough to help me after—this—you’re familiar enough to call me Fox.”

“All right. Fox.” He pushed the long glory of hair behind Brother Fox’s shoulders. It whispered over the backs of his fingers. “Father calls me Eagle,” he offered. The most serious injury, the arm, he’d treat first, no matter how badly he wanted to fix the Prince’s face. He remembered it swimming over him in the cave, all the lovelier against his horror.

“How old are you, Eagle?”

“Fourscore years and two. Hold still now.” Carefully, he examined Fox’s arm.

“Ah!”

“This is broken.” He could feel it just there.

“I know,” Fox wrenched, sweat standing out on his forehead.

“Wait here.” Eagle went and fetched the leather strap from Father’s chest. “To bite on,” he said, giving it over.

“I know. Talk to me,” the Prince said suddenly. “What’s it like being Wormsbane?” And he put the strap in his mouth.

“Oh, well…” Eagle didn’t know how to answer that for himself, let alone Fox. He rubbed the nape of his neck. “I’m not really sure yet,” he decided. “It’s only today, you know? I was talking to Vercingetorix, and he said—”

“Vercingetorix?” Fox interrupted. He had the strap in his hand now. “The unicorn?”

“Bite down.” That was none of anyone’s business, though why anyone should be surprised Eagle didn’t know. He wasn’t anything special. The Prince obeyed, and he snapped the bone into place before he could lose his nerve. Fox’s scream, even with the strap, rattled his eardrums. He reached for the jar of all-heal. When he opened it, the scent drifted up to prickle green, herbal magic into his nose.

“You—can still talk—to Vercingetorix?” Fox panted.

Eagle’s face heated. What a thing to ask about, while his fingers stroked all-heal over the living silk of the Prince’s skin.

“It’s nothing to be embarrassed over.”

“Well, it’s just…” He wet a cloth in warm water and began to clean blood from the Prince’s face. He’d always been apart, and when the others around his age had started stealing kisses and touching each other, he’d been outside of that, too. He’d been outside of everything for so long, kids younger than he was were starting it. “Nobody notices me,” he blurted. And if they did, it was only to call him odd or stuck-up. “Only Father.”

Under the cloth, Fox’s split mouth curved into a smile Eagle could feel. “You’re sort of small.”

That was true. He was small and slight, even for his age. “And quiet,” he admitted.

“I see you,” Fox said, with a husky note in his voice and a gleam in his amber eye. The open one.

Eagle’s stomach jumped. And something else. “Mm-hmm.” It was all he trusted himself to say.

“I do. I see you around, working with Falcon Eye.” Fox dragged in a breath and added, “He loves you.”

“He does.” If there was anything real left in Eagle’s world, it was Father.

“Why are you so serious? I never see you smile. But your father loves you and teaches you. You get to talk to unicorns. If anybody has a reason to smile, you do.”

Eagle raised Fox’s chin to clean his neck. It felt intimate, trading secrets. If he leaned in six inches, he could steal a kiss, and what would happen then? He longed to find out, but—no. He contented himself with sponging blood from golden skin, leaving it damp and gleaming. “Guess I just don’t need to. Why do you smile all the time, when your father does this to you?”

Fox’s larynx bobbed under the cloth. “I’ve never thought about it.”

Not for one moment did Eagle believe it. He paused in his cleaning and looked Fox in the eye.

“I suppose… I need to, because if I don’t, I’ll cry.”

He nodded slowly. Seething. He wanted to do something. He wanted to throttle the High King, even knowing he’d die for it. “It’s wrong, you know,” he blurted. “What he does to you. It’s evil.”

“If I were a better—”

“Shut up.” Oh God. He’d just told the Crown Prince to shut up. “It’s not about you. He’d do it if you were perfect, because it’s all and only about him. You think I never make my father angry?” He was always making Father angry and having things taken away from him, or being given extra chores. But this. This was fists and no holding back. “Difference is, I don’t look like this after he punishes me.”

Fox didn’t answer. He looked ready to cry again.

“Why don’t you just leave?”

“Where would I go?” Fox said, so small and sad that Eagle wanted to take him away this very minute, into the wood and the wild, and keep him safe.

“Where wouldn’t you go?” Eagle stepped back, holding the cloth, reaching for words. Where wouldn’t he go? “Anywhere,” he said. “Everywhere!” He threw his arms wide, and his face broke into a smile for the first time in days. “You could have adventures, all kinds. Save beautiful princesses, and find buried treasure, and slay dragons and—and—”

God, the look on Fox’s bruised face. That gleam in his eye, hotter now, hot as the lava sprites when they got too close. There was a savage pulse in Eagle’s groin. You are something extraordinary, the look said, and he couldn’t understand it.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked.

“Because,” Fox said, “I just figured out why you don’t smile. You don’t want to be here any more than I do.”

The Prince really did see him. Unnerving. He had let someone see him—the insane, secret part of him that wanted to run, and run, and never look back. “I want to see where the round-eared sailors come from,” he said, feeling stupid, and went quickly back to patching up Fox.

He had his fingers under Fox’s eye when the Prince asked, “Which ones?”

“All of them.”

“What if I went?” Fox sounded hushed now. “If I went away and had adventures, would you come with me?”

In a heartbeat. “Sure I would.” No doubt Fox would forget by morning, but Eagle would never forget. He wished it could be a true thing.

He pulled up Fox’s stained shirt to spread all-heal on the Prince’s ribs. The bruises there took longer to fade than they should have. “You should go,” he said, very quietly. “Go, Fox. Before he kills you.” He glanced up from where he knelt and found Fox’s eyes on him, both of them now, those hot amber eyes. He couldn’t have looked away if he’d tried.

“You’re probably right,” Fox said. His look held Eagle’s for a long moment, unreadably.

Eagle slid his hands out of Fox’s shirt.

The Prince leaned forward, near and nearer, until Eagle could feel air stir against his mouth. Fox lifted his chin with soft fingertips, whispering, “Eagle… I want—to thank you.” The moment shattered. Fox snatched his hand back and rose. “Good-bye,” he said at the door, and whipped out in a flurry of hair, leaving Eagle sitting on his heels with forgotten manners and fierce arousal.

“I would’ve let you,” he said, to the empty space the Prince had left behind. He would’ve let Fox do a lot of things, if Fox had wanted to bother. Sometimes the haylofts in Shirith overflowed with naked flesh, and Eagle was never in any of them. It was a lonely feeling, he thought, to have nobody want you. And it would have been nice to know what it felt like when somebody did.

Sighing, he stood and went about cleaning. He stuffed the rags into the incinerator, rinsed the bowl of bloody water, and scrubbed blood from the carpet where Fox had stood. He tried to turn his mind away from what had just happened, but in the cedar-paneled shower, surrounded by steam and scent, he propped his forearm on the wall and stroked his prick with a soapy fist. Whether it meant what he thought it had or something else entirely, the memory of Fox’s fiery gaze brought a moan out of him. Fingers of hot water coursed down his back. He came on his hand with a ragged little sound like a sob, and afterward leaned there trembling in the billows of hot vapor.

Fox had spoken to him. Listened to him. Seen right into him. Whatever was there, the Prince had found it pleasing. And he was so used to the eyes skidding right over him, the mouths that called him spooky and strange where they thought he couldn’t hear. He’d welcomed their thinking he was odd, and hardened his heart. Or thought he had. One look from Fox had been enough to crack him open to the soft meat inside. He was as weak and stupid as the rest of them.

He shut off the water and dried himself with a towel so old it was ivory rather than white. What he wanted, he realized, was for somebody to want to touch him, and most of all, Crown Prince Bearach of Shirith, who had seen Eagle’s real self, and liked it.

Eagle put on his nightshirt. He climbed into the sleeping cupboard and slept hard on top of the blankets with all the lights blazing and the windows and bed-door open.

When he woke, there was an emerald fairy perched on his nose. It took forever to get the glitter off.

~*~

That’s all for now! The book should be ready within a month — and I hope you stick around for it. :)