The One Who Eats Monsters (Wind and Shadow Book 1)

by Casey Matthews

  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.

  ~*~

  If you liked this excerpt and want to find out what happened next, you can find The High King’s Will on Amazon. In addition, M.A. Ray invites you to visit http://menyoral.com for free stories, a map of Rothganar, and a blog that doesn’t get updated as often as it should.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Casey Matthews is a tall hobbit from a farm in the Rust Belt, preferring the intimacy of small gatherings and the fortifying effects of being surrounded by tall trees and familiar old rocks to sit on while thinking. Casey lives near Washington, D.C. now, where they could use more thinking rocks.

  If you liked this book, the best way to help Casey do more is to leave an earnest review and tell your friends. Find more stories at www.caseymatthews.org, or look Casey up on social media.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thank you, those who were my first readers, the people who cheered for Ryn when she was still hard to make out in the roughhewn words: Katie, Emily, Will, Amanda, all the folks at the Scriptorium and the Dragon’s Rocketship crowd. A fandom of a dozen is all any author really needs, but I did need you.

  And let’s also thank the finishers, the ones who applied spit and polish to a filthy manuscript: my cover artist, Natasha Snow, who made me look as pretty as I feel; Rachel Bostwick, a friend and formatting guru; Emily again, for reading snippets at 2 a.m. and convincing me not to burn them to ash; and John Hart, for hours of work perfecting the language.

  There were the background people, too, the influencers and the emotional support: parents, family, friends. This book only stands because of a foundation you provide.

  The poem in Chapter XVIII is from Emily Dickinson’s “A Bird came down the Walk.”