A Suitable Consort (For the King and His Husband)

by R. Cooper

  “Tasi Diirlylian is a cousin of yours, is he not?” Arden asked, clearly knowing the answer. Mattin wondered with faint possessiveness who else had been educating the king on the ancient houses, but he nodded. Arden still kept his expression blank, though his tone was polite. “But that house is not nearly as distinguished as yours.”

  “Well, yes.” Mattin frowned as he had frowned when putting Tasi’s name on the list. “A distant cousin. But most of my closer cousins are promised or in the midst of courtships, or too young, and it is the same with my siblings, although the children of an undistinguished youngest do not have much to offer but their name.”

  Arden raised his eyebrows. “I thought the name was half the point of this, Keeper Arlylian.”

  Mattin conceded that with a nod and a dusty little cough. “Tasi has an interest in horses and hawking or something similar. He’s the athletic type, and a few years older than me, if you want an idea of age. The Lylian branch is not known for taking chances.” Arden lifted his eyebrows. Mattin coughed again. “With a few exceptions,” he admitted, although being a Master Keeper for a troubled and dangerous king was hardly daring. “They also have a history of loyalty.”

  “Loyalty to a crown.” Arden dismissed this. “Crowns go on heads, and plenty of rulers lose those, one way or another.” He should have been blazing hot in all his layers in front of that fire. But, of course, he stayed there, letting the firelight glint off the silver in his hair and draw attention to the fine shape of him. He barely seemed to notice the heat. “You said you wanted ones I would grow fond of.”

  “Could, I believe I said.” Mattin croaked once more. He reached for the cup of tea that had been sitting on his desk all night and took a harsh, bitter sip. “That was also a consideration. Age. Preferences. Activities.” He rolled his wrist.

  For the first time, Arden looked away. “Active youths.” He turned to stare at the fire, then back to Mattin with the slightest pinch between his brows.

  “Problem?” Mattin wondered, confused.

  “I do not want… We have spent over half our lives with….” Arden stopped before measuring out his words. “Lessons with a sword or a bow are well enough, but….”

  “But you are already a warrior, and your husband, too.” Mattin thought he understood. “Oh, I see. I thought you might want that, to have something in common with them. I was mistaken?”

  There was another chair, small and simple and currently filled with books. Arden glanced to it but did not pull it closer. He stayed on his feet and clasped his hands behind his back. “We trust your taste and judgment,” he declared at last, and yet Mattin did not think this was what he had planned to say. “I am sure we would find ways to converse with men such as these. And it is only a formality, these initial meetings, so it hardly matters if they want to talk of fighting, or to challenge two supposed heroes.”

  “You are heroes to many, including your sister,” Mattin argued, then sighed down at his desk when he could not bear the warmth in Arden’s eyes. “Two of them are also scholars, of a sort,” he admitted quietly. “Hobbyists, but respected. Astronomy, and histories.” He paused. “But one of those is also related to the Tyrabalith. I included him for that reason.”

  Arden cocked his head in distracted interest. “Good scholars?”

  “I…” He had Mattin stumbling again. “What makes you think I’ve read their work?”

  He received one handsomely raised eyebrow for it. “Mattin Arlylian, you are nothing if not thorough once you’ve committed yourself.”

  If Mattin’s heart beat faster, he was the only one to know. “Well,” he said after too long of a pause, “the security of the country matters. And I would like His Highness and his husband to be happy.”

  Arden raised his head, regal and thoughtful, before lowering it to give Mattin a study that made Mattin skate his hands over his desk searching for something to hold to. Arden reached up to thumb the cuff at his ear. “Then you might reconsider your list, well thought out though it may be.”

  Mattin’s spine straightened in offense without his say-so, and he had to forcibly lower his chin. “I might?” he demanded, outraged and yet not as insulted as he ought to have been. “Who did I leave off?” Arden widened his eyes and looked caught, like a child trying to sneak some marzipan-covered almonds. Mattin’s anger slipped away. “Oh,” Mattin realized aloud, “do you already have your eye on someone?” He reached for the cup without looking and swallowed acid to keep down the lump in his throat. “Is that why the two of you were not as thrown by this request as I would have thought?”

  He splashed tea onto a stack of papers when he set the cup down, so he focused on blotting it with some of the preliminary lists he’d abandoned. “Someone should have told me.” He did not think there was anything in his voice, although Arden said, “Mattin,” very softly, as if there was. “You have intentions?” Mattin looked up. Well, he looked toward the fire. “Tell me, and I will help you construct a plan to woo them.”

  After several moments, Arden moved, reaching for the chair and dragging it to the desk before gently restacking the books on the floor. Then he sat and stared heavily at Mattin as if he was more exhausted than he seemed, as he likely was.

  “Your devotion to your duty is admirable,” Arden said first, perhaps unhappily, before he ran one hand over his head and tried again, this time curious. “Do you… have much experience in wooing, then? You have never spoken of any interest, or lack of interest, in such matters.”

  Mattin scowled for no reason. “I had a youth.”

  “You are a youth,” Arden returned immediately, “if one also possessing the spirit of an old fusspot.”

  Mattin kept his objection to a wrinkled nose and restrained himself from smoothing down his sleeves. “I’ve had a flirtation or two, yes,” he said on the subject of wooing, sounding quite old. “They came to nothing, and they were years ago.”

  “Ah.” With that, Arden went silent once more. Mattin had nearly decided to offer more information when Arden finally went on. “Mil and I grew up together, left the capital together, served together. I have always known joy around him, and he married me when I was just an outguard with no prospects or ambitions for anything else.” Mattin somehow doubted that Arden had ever been just a simple outguard, no matter what he told himself. He was a Canamorra. The Canamorra, even as a boy. He had a presence that Mattin had felt when Arden had only been king for a handful of weeks. But he had been disgraced with no prospects, that much was true, and Mil had married him anyway. Arden exhaled. “I have never….”

  Mattin made the smallest sound in his throat, a stifled cry. He did not mean to meet Arden’s gaze and yet he did, his skin prickling with warmth. “You have never wooed in this way,” he said, so Arden would not have to. “And this is no time to be making mistakes. I see.” Beyond that, Mattin had no thoughts fit to speak. He floundered for several moments, feeling a disgrace himself, then remembered he sat at the desk of a Master and should act like one. “Well, it is always a show. Courtship, I mean. Usually a show for one, or perhaps for the families as well. This will be a show for all. With roles to play, if that helps. It does not have to be… that is… courtship would come later. First, you have only to meet them. That is all you have agreed to with this. Meet them and converse a little. Maybe have tea?” He floundered again.

  “Tea?” Arden repeated in a strange tone. Possibly he was thinking of Mil and how Mil handled Mattin’s fragile cup with the obvious fear that he would crush it. Of course, a suitable spouse shouldn’t mind that, or the use of large, plain mugs instead.

  “A meal?” Mattin reconsidered, then shook his head. “No.” Tea and an array of small pastries were better. Things to busy one’s hands with, sweets to lift the spirits. “Just a friendly cup of tea and some talk. Everyone will know what is going on, naturally, but they are unlikely to say so directly, as is the way of social functions with the old families. It will be potentially embarrassing for them as well, you know. All
of you measuring each other with the entire court watching.” That was perhaps less soothing than Mattin had intended it to be. “They will want to impress you… or should, if they say yes to the invitation. Please don’t be worried. You have done braver things in your life…. some of them when I was barely more than a child,” he added that part in an attempt to lift the mood, although his tone was more dismayed than anything.

  The king, always the king, even as he was Arden, too, put one hand on the edge of the desk and Mattin’s gaze fell to it. Arden’s voice made him shiver.

  “Offering my heart, and the heart of my husband, is not something I do lightly.”

  “Your heart?” Mattin forced his eyes up. “You said it would be a formality only.”

  There was something in Arden’s manner, his stillness when he should have been drumming his fingers, that made Mattin’s pulse as wild as a trapped rabbit’s. Arden’s eyes were dark yet like the fire. “Did you not say I should be happy?”

  “Yes.” It emerged from Mattin weakly. “Both of your hearts?”

  He thought Arden smiled, but could not look away from his eyes to make sure.

  “If I were to give my love to someone else, do you not think it would be someone he could also love?” At last, Arden tapped his fingertips over the scattered papers. “Should I ask someone to bring you fresh tea, Keeper Arlylian?”

  He was pleased with himself, for no reason Mattin could determine.

  Mattin closed his mouth, which had regretfully been open, then shook his head, only to nod a moment later.

  Still visibly pleased, Arden got up and went to the door to politely ask someone to bring Master Keeper Arlylian a pot of tea.

  Mattin recovered his voice as Arden sat back down. “It’s what I’d expect from two such as you, if I allowed myself to think on it.”

  That gave Arden pause. “Two such as us?”

  Mattin waved a hand to avoid having to explain that, then cleared his throat. “I merely wanted someone for you to be happy with. I did not and would not imagine anyone you might love on the same level as Mil.” Arden’s faint air of smugness disappeared. Mattin thought it wise to shift the discussion. “Your intended, if you choose one… or win the one you have already chosen… would have to know that. I wouldn’t want anyone getting their heart bruised.” He tried a smile. “If Mil was here, he’d call me soft for that.”

  “Aye,” Arden agreed, just like his husband. “But perhaps not in the way you seem to think.”

  He sounded fond. Mattin twisted his lips, but had to ask, melancholy and tormenting himself. “You’ve really never… played the game? With intent? Either of you? Not with anyone else?”

  “Not for more than a night or two’s dalliance, which I do not think is the game you are thinking of.” Arden dropped into formal speech, which was strange when Mattin had no doubt that he had spoken much rougher during his years in the wilderness and the countryside. Perhaps that was why it took Mattin a moment to follow his meaning.

  “You mean a fuck,” he blurted, then winced at saying it so bluntly. The moment following that, the rest of what Arden had told him sank in and Mattin nearly lost himself the images that sprang to mind. He wanted to whimper. “You mean together?” How many nameless, faceless strangers Arden and Mil had met while outguards who had been charmed and won over by both of them? Mattin didn’t want to think of what his voice sounded like. “Often?”

  Arden watched him for another moment before destroying Mattin’s ability to think of anything else. “Often, when we were quite young—younger than you now. Less often since then. Not at all in the past six or seven years.” He elaborated needlessly, without being prompted, to haunt Mattin’s nights. “Sometimes together and sometimes on our own, with encouragement, if we found someone not to the other’s taste.”

  Mattin was a little lightheaded, and also not sure he could rise from his chair. He swallowed dryly. He was not going to ask. Not one more question. “Encouragement?”

  Arden took a deep breath and let it out before continuing. “We were young, and had only known each other. It seemed foolish not to sample what the world had to offer. And we shared the details and kept no secrets.”

  “Well.” Mattin stared blankly as the door opened and an assistant brought in a tray and set it on the desk before leaving. “Well,” he said again, while thinking of some blessed soul between Arden and Mil like a roast on a spit. “That is…” Mil’s hand at the back of someone’s head while Arden watched, his gaze just like it was now.

  Arden handed Mattin a cup that was hot to the touch and Mattin accepted it, blinking. His cheeks stung. He swallowed a scalding sip and found the tea had milk in it. Arden must have poured it while Mattin had been imagining Arden fucking deep into someone while enjoying Mil’s kisses.

  “Have I embarrassed you, Keeper Arlylian?” The formality of his title on Arden’s tongue, at that moment, made Mattin even hotter. He blinked again. Arden’s eyes were bright. “You’re rather red in the face. You said you’d had your flirtations.”

  Mattin had been talking about courtship. He gulped more tea. “I’m the youngest of a youngest. I work closed up in here, and there was unrest for so long, I never…. If you meant fucking, you should have said, I—I was speaking of wooing, Arden Canamorra!” He took another drink that was not calming. “I’ve only had two flirtations that were remotely close to approaching serious. Everything else was just friendly….” He coughed, then put the cup down.

  “Not at all the same thing as picking up someone in a tavern, is that it?” Arden asked gently.

  Mattin firmly shook his head. “Courtship,” he began, moving things along to spare himself more humiliation, “will have much more… ado. More rules. More care. And I am not… I am the youngest of a youngest,” he said again. “Of no one special. Far from The Arlylian. There is nothing particularly interesting about me, so I cannot tell you how it would be to be courted—but you grew up here. You had to have witnessed at least some proper flirtations.”

  Arden gave a shrug. “It was not my interest then. And whatever childish things I did to please Mil, I no longer remember well, and what I do recall would not be fit for court.” He grinned suddenly, rakishly, and Mattin grabbed desperately for his tea. “Will you tell me, then, how it goes? Instruct me in the art of courtly wooing?”

  Mattin froze with the cup in his hands and lowered his gaze quickly to the floral pattern painted beneath the glaze. Nasturtium, he thought they were. A pretty flower, loved by the fae.

  Arden could not ask him to do this. Mattin was a Record Keeper, a librarian, a minor noble, if of an old family. Arden could not ask it of him.

  That was an odd thought, a misplaced one. Arden was his king, as other rulers had not been. Arden was his, and he had trusted Mattin with this. Mattin could not say no.

  “There would be better teachers,” Mattin said at last, on a sigh. “I am, as you said, a youth. And when I told you ‘one or two,’ I meant that. And never a… never a courtship. I am not someone who would be courted with much circumstance.” He relaxed his tight grip on the cup, then lifted it lightly. “If it was flirtation you were after, then I cannot imagine the rules are much different than an encounter with a stranger. Only perhaps less direct.” He threw back the tea and grimaced as it went down.

  “And if it is not flirtation?” Arden pressed softly. “If it is meant in earnest, as this must be? A courtship in truth.”

  Mattin was surrounded by tradition and knowledge. He could summon it now.

  He looked up. “There are rules for that, guidelines and accepted practices. Like steps in a dance, or how each kind of ballad has its own devices.” He paused to breathe. This was his job. “You will get to know them slowly. The first meeting can stay one meeting, if you don’t want more. A short conversation, if you like. And if you do—want more, that is—you could invite them to another meeting—they won’t offer. Not the first time. Maybe not even the second. Not with someone of your… you’re the king, Arde
n.”

  He said it as if Arden had forgotten, and Arden inclined his head, as if perhaps he had. He was still listening, so Mattin went on, not certain of what he was saying, except that it sounded right.

  “But if they want to, they will refuse your offers, king or not. They will all understand the purpose of these meetings now that the council has been talking. If they are not interested, they will politely decline. If they are, you have only to determine why they are interested, and if it is for the same reasons you are.” Arden’s attentive stare was making Mattin dizzy again. “Once you have established your interest, and their interest, you would also need to spend time together in public, and eventually in private, to discover if you would want them in your home, at your table. In your bed.” Mattin had to move his gaze to the fire to say it, but say it he did. “But, in your case, the public part will be more of a show, since there will be attention on you. You might have them sit near you or Mil at feasts or other events. Take them riding or walking with you, if they like that sort of thing. Get to know their attitudes toward the work they would be doing as your other consort, I suppose. If you are not dotingly in love by then….” Mattin lost his thought and trailed to momentary silence. “Although even if you were, you would still need to attend to your duty so… so….” He could not think of the rest of what he had been going to say.

  “And if I am dotingly in love by then?” Arden was merciless, but carefully so.

  “How does anyone show affection?” Mattin wanted to snap out the question like a snarling cat and suspected some of his helpless displeasure was obvious, although Arden would never say. “Gift them things, things they like, or would want, but because it is you, these gifts cannot be private. Or, not all of them can be. Spend more time with your… your chosen. Let them know you think of them when they are not near, the way one shows favor to anyone, friend or lover.” He did not know where his hands were, then realized they were pressed flat to his desk. He slipped them out of sight. “But you will only be meeting people, at first. Only that, if you want. Then you may do what you did with Mil, if at a grander scale. No! I mean—” He raised his head, alarmed, and found Arden with a subtle curve to his lips “—don’t nearly die trying to reach his side! Please do not do that.”