by May Peterson
Do it. Speak now. In the sanctity of the next few breaths, I felt for it. My voice, hiding under its armor. It was all still there. I wanted him to hear it. For him to hear me.
I took a deep breath. “Rhodry.”
Two syllables, quiet on the breeze, and they rocked through me like a blast of wind. My throat jangled to life, hot silver sparks coiling under my skin. In that instant, I felt him, the subtle flavor of his anguish. He looked up at me, eyes wide. Deep, silver, defenseless. Afraid of what I was going to say.
And the silence fell over me like a sword.
I pitched back on the blanket, throat seizing. The next second slammed me under the oubliette again. Pain threw my voice down, strangled it back into hiding. I coughed, gasped, and promised I’d obey. I’d be good. No more.
Hands turned me over, brushed my face to clear my nose and mouth. “Mio. There. You’ll be all right. You’re safe.” Rhodry’s touch pulled me out of my flashback. I was on the blanket, under his trees. His autumny breath on me, brow wrinkled with concern.
I tried, slowly, to stop gasping. But my voice clearly wasn’t about to trust me again, even if I dared trust it. The silence made me harmless. It was better this way.
I signed. Aimlessly, grasping the innocuous new language Rhodry had brought me—I’m all right. I shouldn’t have done that. I apologize. Let me make it right. I’ll stay quiet.
“Mio.” Rhodry’s whisper was intimate, a shiver down my neck. The distance between us was gone. “How did you do that? You never mentioned these powers.”
He sounded vaguely impressed. I looked around. Done what—
At the edges of the blanket, blossoms were opening, as if a sudden surge of spring had struck. Tangles of soft yellow, white, and violet sprang into view as I watched. As if someone—
—as if I had sung them to life.
All my thoughts of safety died in my chest. No. My magic hadn’t retreated. It was growing.
My fingers kept up their litany. “I’m—forgive me. I didn’t intend that. I should have explained what I...it was untoward of me.”
He chuckled. “Mio.”
Damn it. I was signing too fast, words too big. He probably had no idea what I was saying. I slowed the figures, tried to control my trembling. “Yes. I am sorry. Let me... I’m going too fast.”
I looked to him to see if he understood. But the crooked amusement on his face wasn’t confused. A pale sheen of wonder lit his eyes.
Gingerly, as if he might break me, he stroked the back of my fingers. “No.” The shake of his head was awed. “You’re... I understand you. Your signs. All of them. How are you doing that?”
I frowned. The tang of my magic still stirred the air. Could it have—I fumbled for words I barely knew how to sign, and made up one out of nothing. “Decrescendo. Revolutionary. Banana.”
Rhodry snorted. “I don’t see what a revolutionary banana has to do with it.”
I stared down at my hands. Then he could interpret me. By magic. Had one word unlocked so much? Maybe the same power that linked me to the minds of others now made my meanings plain to him.
His palms stroked my arms. Oh. I hadn’t quite noticed that Rhodry was almost completely surrounding me. I was halfway on his lap. The dying light caught his grin. “You do beat all, lemon drop.”
We gazed into each other’s eyes for a few moments. He had to feel me shaking now. His breath tickled my ear, emphasized my flushed skin. He smelled like every inexpressible thing I had imagined a man like him to smell of. The cold and dust and dark wood of his house, sweet smoke and long untouched skin.
I acted without thought, leaned into his embrace. Tilted up to the downturn of his mouth. Heard his breath catch.
And kissed him.
The world narrowed to the sensation of his lips. The way his hand bunched at the back of my neck, the passing of breath into my mouth.
His lips parted as if to devour me. Claiming my first kiss.
His arms tightened. My shaking blended with his, strings attuning to each other. How big his hands were. I fell into the invitation, letting his tongue penetrate me.
In an instant, he was everywhere. The caress of the evening air was him, sweeping down my back. My will fell apart, collapsing so that he could hold it, wind it around his own. We were panting against each other, his tongue ravaging me. Tears—of need, happiness, fear—stung my eyes. The heat of his fingers prickled the small of my back.
“M-Mio.” My name on his voice was sharp as a burn. His kisses worked down my neck. Somehow my top few buttons had come loose, and he peeled back the collar of my shirt. There was a hungry, surprised sigh. I didn’t fight it. Didn’t fight the gasp pulled from me as his lips closed over my shoulder. I could only cinch my arms around his back and hold on.
My lord. I am yours. If you’ll take me.
Then his touch changed. He seized my arcing back, tilted us away from each other. “Mio. Wait. Please.” He was sagging against my shoulder, bruised by his mouth. “Stop.”
The gravity of what I’d done flattened me. Oh, God. He still brushed against my bare shoulder and neck. I sat, exposed, in his lap. But it wasn’t until he lifted his face that I signed. “I’m sorry. I—”
“No.” The ferocity of his tone silenced me. Hurriedly, he lifted me off him so we were facing each other. The air separating us felt suddenly too cold, too severe. But his hand had not left my shoulder. “No. I’m the one who’s sorry. That should never have happened. Can you ever forgive me, Mio?”
His words confused me. I only sat, small and uncovered, straining to think through it. Forgive him? That should never have happened.
He kept talking. “It won’t happen again. We should...are you all right?”
Won’t happen again. No. No, it wouldn’t. His shame was almost palpable, glowing. Shame I had inflicted on him. “I’ve taken advantage. Please, let me—” Let me what? I rose, backing away from him. The need for space was sudden and overwhelming. Let me keep it inside, with everything else that should never have gotten free.
Misery shone on his face. “Mio, only...please understand. I cannot do this. My house, my wife—it wouldn’t be right.”
No. It wouldn’t be. He’d just shown me the wounds his marriage had left. And still I had—I tried to bow. “This was the wrong way to repay you, my lord.”
I turned toward the house and escaped without looking back. I heard the tink of the wine bottle falling over. Rhodry called my name. I kept going. Kept my eyes on the house, on the evening-tinted horizon, its shape changing as my vision blurred with tears.
* * *
Our lessons stopped.
He didn’t appear at my door the following evening. Part of me feared to face him again. But I waited in the dining hall, ignoring the question on Cecilio’s face.
He never came. Rosemary announced he’d gone out on an errand. Her eyes narrowed on me, unreadable, and she said I was to stay indoors tonight.
I didn’t tell them about the new magic of my signs. It seemed like such a paltry victory now. Although if nothing else, it had taught me something about the silence. It had a will of its own, like a magical construct representing how little I trusted my own powers. I could risk speaking again, but the silence would punish me for it. Maybe it always would, until I figured out how to not need it in the first place. How not to be a threat for simply singing.
And yet this remained—the magic had found a way to serve him, in spite of my fear. That was something.
When I spied him returning from my window, he seemed harried and wild. He may have been roaming the hills of his land, gleaming with his bear’s grace.
He hadn’t asked me to leave. He hadn’t been harsh with me. Over the next night and day, I curled under the pool of my curtains and cried, at times unexpectedly. I didn’t know what I felt—if it was love or if it was sin. But Rhodry’d forgiven it
and permitted me to stay, in the comfort and warmth he gave, however distantly. I could thank God for that.
The next afternoon, I rose early to avoid the pain of his obvious absence. But there he was. At the table, where we used to eat. I all but dropped my glass. I wasn’t ready to be so near him again.
“Mio.” How gentle his voice was.
I was learning not to be the Mio buried under lies, self-deception. But honesty came with a certain brutality. It was plain now what I was as I looked at him. His robe slipped to expose hints of bare chest, torso, shoulder. His eyes shone soft with sleep, hair curling innocently. I devoured these sights with frightening intensity.
He filled his plate with the customary avalanche of meats. “We don’t have to avoid each other, Mio.” His voice scratched, halfway between man and bear. He must have been out running the night before. I had watched him at times from my window, in his beautiful, sloping bear shape. Catching moonlight on his obsidian fur, as fluid as a dream. “You did nothing wrong.”
I bit my lip as he stepped closer, and all I could do was nod. Of course I had done something wrong. His willingness to forgive me was the problem. How could I explain that I no longer trusted myself in his presence? My thoughts, my heartbeat, all spoke of disease. I wondered if I disgusted him, both in my immoral desires and my queer body. He of all people must be above such things—but pain and disgust were not so far apart. And I was certain there were ways in which I had hurt him.
“I’m sorry,” I signed. I got up to go eat in my room.
“Wait!” His hand brushed my shoulder. “I wasn’t criticizing, I—” We both glanced at his hand briefly before he yanked it back.
I allowed that to sting for a full second. Had he ever been afraid to touch me before? But in the residue of that hurt was sympathy. Of course I felt for him. How could I not? Now, more than ever, he would have been entitled to ask me from his house. Instead, he was worrying about me. I smiled.
“That is. Couldn’t we—” He scratched his head. “Couldn’t we just forget this ever happened?”
I could understand why he’d want to forget. But that would cut both ways for me, either my tongue or my heart. It’d be lying to say I would forget, and starving myself to earnestly try. I would clasp to that memory for as long as it could hold me. There was shame, but also light and substance in it. That moment had been like sunrise.
But that moment belonged only in my memory. It would stay there.
“Listen to me.” He pulled over a chair. “When you’re around someone enough, you start to act as you think they’d wish you to. You’ve lost your family and your home. Everything is mine here, my house, my land. You can’t be blamed for...responding to something.”
Responding—Did he think he had groomed me somehow?
“No. The blame is mine.”
With that, I walked away.
How could I so passionately defend something I was this ashamed of? I was a boy in love with a man, and he’d lost his wife. And at the sight of that pain, I had seen fit to push myself onto it.
At my bedroom door, I sighed. I had forgotten my damn plate.
The night became a long, empty thing, like a hollowed-out bone. I didn’t even have sleep to bear me through it anymore. I stood by the window, leaving the ghosts of fingerprints. Rhodry’s supernatural chill seemed to throb in the walls. But with the drapes folded around me, it felt homelike. Like something I wanted back.
I may have fallen asleep, at last, standing like that with my cheek on the glass. Then a voice slipped through the fist of the night and crawled across my back.
“Mio.”
My eyes blew wide. Rhodry.
I whirled, breath already coming fast. He stood in the center of my room, and his shadow seemed to blacken the walls. Somehow, him seeing me like this—curtains around me like security blankets—made me feel tiny, foolish.
He seemed taller than before, like a trick of the darkness. His appearance was just like it’d been on the green—ruinously informal. Feet bare, chest gleaming under a parted shirt. The door was closed, as if he’d snuck in.
I stepped forward, bowing. “M-my lord.” I had to remember this wasn’t really my room. It was his. “Can I do something for you?”
His stare narrowed, eyes glowing like twin moons. “Oh, Mio. I couldn’t stay away any longer.”
His words triggered a rush of heat. Images slashed across my mind, images I tried to shut out—confessions, earnest touches, him taking me back onto his lap. “I hadn’t meant to hide from you, my lord.”
“But you are.” The tone implied a tsk, as if he were both endeared and disappointed. Strangely, the shadows left only his eyes visible. “Tell me what I have to do to set you at ease.”
It was a sweet, bitter question that tore through my skin. “I want...you to let me apologize.”
To stop saying I hadn’t done anything wrong. To just admit that I was wrong.
He sighed, eyes closing and withdrawing their airy light. “I understand why you did what you did. And I do forgive you.”
I reminded myself to breathe. “You do?”
“Of course.” His nod made his eyes resemble bobbing will-o’-wisps. “But I would like you to do something for me, if you can.”
“Anything.” The sign was in my fingers before I could think.
The pleased shifting of the light suggested a smile. “You’re such a sweet lemon drop. I knew you’d do it. All I want you to do...” A pause, as if he were gathering force. “Is speak again.”
Somehow, hearing that twisted my guts. I stepped back instinctively. “You want me to...use my voice?”
“Of course.” He moved toward me, the space between us rapidly heating with possibilities. Moonlight striped his face, revealing an animal grin. “Your voice is beautiful. I only want to hear it again.”
My fingers had curled instinctively over my throat. It was as if someone had melted together shards of my fantasies, my damp half dreams of what His Lordship might say to me, only the edges where the pieces joined were ragged. Sharp. The strange slowing down of a nightmare thickened the shadows around me.
Rhodry leaned over, height appearing to expand. “You don’t have to be afraid. I heard you say my name, and nothing bad happened to me. Just say it one more time.” His grin seemed to lose definition, become an eye-blink full of fangs. “Though I’d prefer you to sing.”
The last syllable cracked the fantasy, shattered the edges into knives. Finish what you started. SING!
Breathless, I leapt forward. Into Rhodry. If he caught me again, if he was real—
I stumbled through him as though he were a ghost himself.
As I turned, my blood became cold metal. Rhodry twisted, the luminaries of his eyes stretching beyond their human shapes. A put-upon sigh fumed ice into the air. “Ah, Mio. You poor, poor little thing. Always doing everything the way that will hurt you most.”
My vision went gray. I pounced at the door and fled.
“Mio—” His voice took on a nightmare tenor. “Don’t. You don’t understand.”
I dashed down the hall. Tears clouded my eyes. What was happening? A ghost?
My lungs were burning. I hadn’t seen any ghosts here other than Cecilio and Rosemary. I skidded into the wall at the end of the corridor, gasping for breath. The windowpane under my fingers was ice cold.
My breath.
I could see it.
In my alarm, I hadn’t noticed the vapor rising from my nostrils. And the glass around my hand—it looked like a miniature frost sculpture taking shape.
The enemy in this house was the frost. Her Ladyship. She was coming.
She will kill you.
“Don’t run, Mio.” The voice swelled behind me like a marsh flood. It didn’t sound like him anymore. The illusion broken, the voice and image stalking after me seemed to expand, lose di
mension. All that retained shape was that feral grin. “You. Don’t. Understand. I am real. If you just give me one word, I can show you. One word!”
Panic was quickly gnawing apart my nerves. I stumbled, slipped across the carpet. Everything rattled as my head hit the wall. Breathe. I had to breathe. Rosemary. She was still here somewhere. She could—
I had no idea. But, taking hold of what little clarity remained, I pushed up to my feet and ran.
I went for the kitchen. Rhodry—not Rhodry—seemed to fill every space I left behind, a mold effortlessly spreading. “I can hear you!” The voice shrilled, multiplied as if spoken through a countless array of throats. “You didn’t think I could, but I can. And I know what you are.”
Ice shimmered along the windows as I ran. Even the carpet under my bare feet was becoming crunchy, hard. I lost my footing on the stairwell, tumbled headfirst and had to plunge for the railing. My palms scraped raw on the freezing wood.
Limping, I made it to the servants’ door. The kitchen air all but slapped me in the face with cold.
A shape materialized to greet me, and I reflexively threw up my hands in defense. But it gelled into Rosemary. She clutched her apron, eyes shining. “Mio? I heard commotion. What’s—”
I tried to sign, miserably, but my fingers were too numb to respond. But she must have seen the scrapes, the frost gathering on my pajamas. Her expression became one of abject fear.
“Oh no. No. You must run.” She scanned the room. Ice was already crystallizing heavily on the windowsills. “If you can do anything, escape the house. I cannot stay Her Ladyship’s hand, but past the gate she will not venture.” She held my gaze, took my hand. I recognized the motions, distantly, as her calming me. “I will do all in my power to summon His Lordship. But your best hope is flight. Go!”
She flung me at the opposite door, and my body obeyed mechanically. I couldn’t breathe. Air kept streaking mercilessly into my lungs, burning everything on the way down, but it felt like I was drowning.
