Held carefully picked his way down the steps and crouched on the gravel path by the side of the white and gold coral stripes. He glanced up at Janez, who made no move, and then carefully reached out to touch. The colour was thick and soft, smooth and full, under his fingertips. It felt as wonderful as it looked, nothing like the trickery of coral. He brushed the soft yellow fern in its centre, and his nails were coated in a furry smear. He wiped it off on another—
What were they? They were not coral. No coral felt like that.
He looked questioningly back at Janez, who seemed to read his expression, and came down the steps. He said something with a questioning lilt, and Held pointed at the corals.
Janez looked blank.
For the first time, a deep frustration welled up in Held’s chest. How the very basest of questions escaped him—he didn’t even know how to ask what? in Janez’s tongue. Knew nothing. Barely understood his name, and perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps Janez was a title. Perhaps Doktor was a position. He knew nothing.
But he knew how they had asked for his own.
Pointing at Janez—and sensing, without knowing why, that it was an oddly rude gesture—Held said, “Janez,” clearly. Then tapped his own chest and said, “Held.” Then pointed at the corals and waited.
“Ah,” Janez said and smiled. “Blumen.”
“Blooming.”
“Blu-men,” came the patient repeat.
“Blooming,” Held said uncertainly. What was different between what he said, and what Janez did?
Janez seemed to think it was close enough. He chuckled and stooped down to touch the colour.
Then pulled it right off the plant.
Just—tore it off. Tore it! Held’s jaw sagged open at the careless gesture. Coral took years to grow so bright and beautiful. Did these blooms grow faster than that, or were skymen so powerful that it didn’t matter to them if the blooms were all torn away and died? Or could only Janez do that, as the ruler of this palace?
“Eine Blume,” Janez said.
Held picked apart the two words, thanks to the speed. Janez ripped another off and held them both out.
“Zwei Blumen.”
Oh. One bloom, two bloomings. All right. That seemed easy enough. He took one of the offered blooms and pressed his nose into the silken softness.
The perfume. The scent. That gentle sweetness was coming from the blooms. Held inhaled it deeply until he fancied its peaceable beauty was filling his very veins, and when he finally breathed out, it was as though his soul escaped for a moment and hung in the air, stretching out in every direction and absorbing all of this wonderful world.
Janez cleared his throat and then rose to his feet. Held blinked, brought back into himself, and stared up at him. The man’s face was flushed faintly pink, and he seemed suddenly uncomfortable, shifting on his feet uneasily.
Held knew that look.
The way his eyes had darted away, when before they’d been trained with such gentle amusement, such kind fascination. The way he’d moved as though too aware of himself. The glance around them as though there could be others watching—and the simple fact that he cared for anyone watching at all.
Held knew this. Oh, not from personal experience—but from Meri’s suitors and Balta’s innocent little flirtations.
Janez—
Held’s heart sped up inside his chest. His palms were damp. He wanted to—to touch. He didn’t know how to touch a man, but he wanted to find out. He wanted to kiss him and feel that infectious burn, like salt in a wound, exquisite pain and inescapable sensation. Like that very first time when Janez had kissed him and tried to make him stay.
Held reached, without quite realising he was even moving. Their skin brushed. Grazed.
Held closed his eyes as their hands kissed. As Janez’s fingers tightened on his. As a great wash of heat rushed from hand to heart, a wave, a current. As his chest tightened, and his heart burned. As he—he always should have been. He—and never she—caught the devastating power of a skyman and held it harmless in his hand. Kissed it, caressed it, like lovers.
He could never go back.
He could never go back.
Chapter Sixteen
HE COULDN’T.
The decision had circled in Janez’s mind from the moment Held had touched his hand. It hadn’t been a friendly touch. Rather, it had carried the heat and intent of a carnal wish, a lustful desire, the want to travel from simple hand to other complexities, and Janez had wished equally to allow it.
But he couldn’t.
He’d twitched away with a soft smile and urged Held to come deeper into the gardens to see the willow trees and the buds of the winter roses. But Held had stolen little looks from that moment on, and Janez had wanted, with every fibre of his being, to turn them into the shadows of the trees, uncover the pale form he’d carried from the cells in his own overcoat, and kiss every inch of it. Rouse that bright excitement into something darker and hungrier and allow it to take him.
But. He. Couldn’t.
Janez had always been careful with his liaisons, ever since Greta. The brothel in the harbour stood more to lose by loosened tongues than it stood to gain by gossip. They guarded their customers jealously, and Janez was certain, though had nothing set in stone, that he was not the only lord to visit, nor perhaps even the only royal. He’d never yielded even to the most beautiful temptations at royal functions and diplomatic balls—despite the suggestions of one such princess some years ago during the longest and most difficult waltz of Janez’s life. He’d never so much as slept with his servants, certain of their predilection for gossip, and led a staunchly chaste life, almost saintly, when at sea.
And to risk a scandal now, when he was to be married off to secure this alliance… Sigurd would jump at the chance to secure a prince for one of his daughters rather than some ambitious lord, but he was not a desperate man. Janez couldn’t possibly risk the match by a dalliance with a—
A what, exactly?
After all, despite his assurances to his brother and the doctor, what did Janez know? Held was as foreign as they came. He was clearly from some poverty-stricken family—who else would find such joy and wonder in curtains, of all things—and didn’t even have the sensibilities of a servant. It was likely he’d been a ship’s boy his whole life, and how long had that been? Held was a man, true, but Janez had known sixteen-year-olds as tall and gruff-voiced, and forty-year-olds as smooth-skinned and wide-eyed. He knew nothing about Held, and so, the risk was far too great.
But he hadn’t wanted like this since—
Well. Since the very first one.
The first had been a girl, and Janez but fifteen and quite hopelessly in love. A man now, he knew it to be infatuation, passion, lust, and little more—but at the time, it had been love, his first love, his only. Greta had been the woman he would marry, the mother of his thousand sons, and they would all have those beautiful dark curls that had driven him wild.
She’d been a scullery maid.
She’d also been hypnotic by lamplight, with the sweat on her sweet skin, her little moans like music to his ears, her kisses the very air he breathed. Nothing short of captivating—he’d have sacrificed all for her, every drop of blood, every breath in his lungs. He’d utterly loved her, and she him, and the world had been—in her embrace—completely perfect.
She’d borne him a child—or at least, Janez supposed she had. Father had sent her from the palace, to serve some other lord. Had told Janez, stern and imposing, that one liaison as a barely grown man was excusable, perhaps even beneficial for when the time came to find him a true wife, but it would be the only time.
He’d never seen Greta again, never mind the child she must have birthed that autumn, and now nearly fifteen years on, Janez rarely thought of it. Secrecy was second nature now. He could ruin his family, his very kingdom, by indiscretion and infidelity. And so, as negotiations would surely commence the moment Sigurd received Alarik’s messenger, he couldn’t possibly take
what Held’s grasp had offered, however much he wanted to.
Janez had long since learned, fifteen years since, that his life had no room for the things he wanted.
It was about duty. And duty made him pull away, smile, and continue as though he’d never noticed the offer. Duty made him show off the gardens as though to a visiting princess. Duty made him leash his want, leash even the very thoughts that escaped, now and then, about how wonderfully enchanted Held was by the simplest things, how his mouth begged to be kissed, how euphoric he’d look in the grip of pure ecstasy—
Janez clamped down on them all, one by one, but they came regardless.
And they had enough grip that, while he stuck to duty and kept his hands to himself, he shirked the other parts of it. He ought to have been at his king’s side, or at the harbour assisting his captain with the restocking of the ship. Instead, he kept following this stranger, showing him gardens and trees and greenhouses, showing him the great ballroom and the portraits of his forefathers in the hall that led towards the south wing and the library.
There, Held took great interest in Janez’s portrait—painted just shy of Alarik’s coronation, when Janez had become the crown prince for two mercifully short years, and thus depicting that thrice-damned crown and grotesque fur cloak. The damn thing reeked; the stench was so bad Janez swore it was the same as worn by the first-ever king north of the mountains in all of history. But Held seemed to like it, staring in fascination for a long time, and finally gesturing at the crown and mumbling something Janez didn’t even recognise as language.
“My crown?” he asked. “I was the heir to the throne. Now I am second in line, so I don’t have to wear it.”
Held stared blankly, and Janez thought on it. Finally, he pointed to Alarik’s portrait—not from the coronation itself, not in this hall, but from Ingrid’s first painting. It was a simple family portrait: king, queen, and tiny princess, her golden curls a mess even in this respectful depiction.
“My brother,” Janez said clearly, tapping Alarik’s oiled face. “Brother.”
Nothing. Damn.
“Come with me,” Janez said and led Held to the library. It was gloomy and dusty, undisturbed likely for days now that Doktor Hauser was buried in his vile experiments, and Janez shook open a heavy set of curtains before finding some parchment and an ink bottle in a desk. The quill was wilting and feeble in his hand; the nib was crooked, and the ink therefore blotchy, but it serviced well enough that he was able to scratch his stick figures and a brief family tree. The line joining himself to his brother went above; the line between Alarik and Sofia went below, and from it sprouted Ingrid. The baby, yet too young to be named, would not appear in the history of the world for nearly a year yet, in case it drew fate’s foul attentions and he was damned to die in his crib as so many babies did.
“Me,” Janez said, gesturing to his little depiction. When Held stared blankly, Janez sighed and tapped it again, saying his name instead.
A spark of recognition. Aha.
“Alarik,” he continued, tapping his brother. “King Alarik.”
Slowly, Held reached out and took the quill. It shifted clumsily in his fingers, the ink staining them at once. He examined it as if it were some strange new invention, and then pressed nib to parchment—too hard, but no matter—and scratched, very carefully, a crown above Alarik’s round head.
Janez beamed. “Yes!”
Held smiled, a white flash of brilliance that had the breath catching in Janez’s chest for a split second before he forced his gaze away.
Hand’s finger tapped the tiny Ingrid, then, with her inky corkscrew curls. “Ingrid?”
“Yes.”
Held stroked the lines, smearing the still-wet ink. Stroked from Ingrid to Alarik, and then Alarik to Janez. Stroked back again. Murmured something to himself.
And then smiled.
It was the brightest smile Janez had ever seen, and he gaped like a stupid landsman as Held turned it to him. It was transformative. That sombre, ethereal face was suddenly oh-so-human and impossibly beautiful. It lit him up, as if the sun were behind his very skin, and Janez leaned in, reaching up—
He curled his fingers into fists and drew back. No. Good Lord, no. He returned his hands to the table instead, licking his lips nervously.
And jumped, quite violently, when Held’s fingers slid into his.
Time stopped.
The dust motes hanging in the air froze in place, tiny sparkles in the dark. Held’s skin was dry and cool against his. Fingers filled the spaces between his and tightened. And Janez could barely breathe.
He ought to have pulled away. Ought to have instructed Held on the inappropriate—perfection—of holding his hand in such a manner. Ought to have snuffed out the tension in the room, and his longing to close the space and take advantage of the solitude. To fill the silence with sound other than speech.
He ought to have done a lot of things.
And he did. But—it was the longest time before he could.
Chapter Seventeen
HELD WAS…CONFUSED.
He’d kissed the prince twice. Both times, Janez had gone very still for long moments of pure silence before he’d pulled away.
Yet there was no reluctance in his eyes. No withdrawal. He returned to a bright and easy manner at once, and those little shifts in his stance, those glances, did not abate. And it left Held confused. He was sure, so sure, he wasn’t misreading Janez’s attraction to him, yet kissing him resulted in nothing.
He’d never kissed someone before—not by choice, anyhow. There’d been mermen, too forward and brusque, who’d seized his hands and kissed without permission. But Held had pushed them away, and that had been that. He’d never reached out first. He’d never done it on purpose.
Was he doing it wrong, then?
It had occurred to him, after that second time in the dark room, that maybe skymen didn’t kiss like mermen kissed. But if they didn’t, why had Janez responded to the touch? If it meant nothing to touch hands, then why would he react?
Held was left to dine with Doktor, and he churned the problem over in silence as he ate his…whatever it happened to be. Either Janez wasn’t interested, and Held was misreading the signs, or Held hadn’t kissed him properly, and Janez didn’t know what Held was trying to do.
And stuck, alone and without tongue, how could Held convey it?
It would help if he could witness skymen kiss—but they seemed so very reserved, so distant from one another. Perhaps it was simply this regal setting, or perhaps that was their way, but Held struggled to imagine Doktor in a passion and kissing someone. Only Janez seemed to have that fire, and he had reacted so oddly both times…
Held squeezed his fingers more tightly around his fork and resolved to let it be for today, and try again in the morning. Perhaps that was all it was: reservation. After all, he’d only been turned at dawn, and dusk had only just descended. Maybe skymen moved more slowly in these things.
Janez returned not long after dark in new clothes: tighter, stiffer, and more formal. Held watched those powerful legs roam the room as he talked animatedly to Doktor. The fabric was sheer enough to skin that Held could see the muscles move, and the soft weight of his masculinity under the buttons. The itch to undo those buttons—
Held curled his fingers into fists, mortified.
And then Janez turned to him and clutched his elbow, near-lifting him from his chair.
“Komm!” he cried, eyes ablaze.
It must mean come with me, or something of that ilk, for Held was swept from Doktor’s rooms and hustled along corridors and passageways, until they burst past those great paintings again. And then ducked into the dark room where he’d been given hope, in the form of a crude diagram and a faint understanding that Ingrid was not Janez’s skyling, but that of the man with the hat upon his head. (The relation between Janez and the hat-man still escaped him, but Held cared far less for that.)
But they did not stop at the table—he was dr
agged past it, to the great windows furthest from the door, and the coverings drawn back. The windows were opened—and sound rushed in.
Music.
The flash of intense hatred was immense. Held curled his lip, his body tensing at the crescendo. He knew nothing of the instruments, nor the piece they played. He’d never heard of music being played in a garden before, nor admired from a balcony above—but it didn’t matter. Music meant singing. Music meant he’d be expected to screech and squawk in that shrill, hated voice. Disgust prickled along his skin, rose up under his hair, burned—
And died.
Died when Janez turned to him and clasped him in a hug.
Held stiffened—and slowly, so very slowly, relaxed. Drew up his arms around Janez’s neck…and laughed in dizzy delight when Janez began to turn them.
Dancing.
Oh, they were dancing.
It was clumsy and messy. Janez, by the glee on his face and lively energy, liked music. Or at least this music. And his energy was—infectious. Held had no idea how to dance with legs, but he clutched and tried, as much as possible, to follow Janez’s haphazard lead. Their feet collided several times; finally, Janez pushed off the hard covers he wore at the ends of his legs, and then there was bare skin and those small, strange little fingerlings, and the energy slowed until Held could copy.
And then—
After that, as they fell into sync, Held found that sky and mer danced much alike. He was twirled, and the fan of his shorter hair was a hypnotic blur when his ribbon came loose. Janez seemed to like it too, as the twirl was performed again and again, both out and reeled back in—under Janez’s arm, close and intimate, until Held laughed breathlessly, and that beautiful smile was trained unerringly on his own.
The music was strange. It squeaked and warbled, nothing like the shuddering drums of the palace below. It didn’t rattle in the bones and shake in the blood, but rather caressed the skin and kissed the ears with delicate fingers. It felt odd to dance to, something too shallow to its depth and too thin to its energy, yet it invigorated Janez as though he could feel something Held could not.
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