Realm of Dragons

“Now,” Aurelle said, “have you seen the entertainments yet?”

“I’ve made notes on some of the lutenists’ techniques, and listened to the playwrights run through their—”

“No,” Aurelle said, “that’s not what I mean. Have you been there, been a part of it?”

Greave shook his head. He hadn’t wanted to stand there in the middle of a crowd, the only one who still felt alone. He’d also guessed what his father would say if he showed too much of an interest in the players. He would have dismissed it as frivolity or unmanly, or both.

“I have always been more at the sides,” Greave said.

“Not today,” Aurelle declared. Her touch on his arm turned into a grip on his wrist, pulling him forward into the crowds of people there. Many of them turned to him and bowed. Some even smiled, and that wasn’t something that Greave was used to.

She led the way to a table filled with the lightest of pastries and the finest of wine. She held out a pastry to Greave, and he realized as she did it that he was expected to bite down on it. He did so, because the alternative seemed to be getting it smeared on his face. He swallowed, and was about to complain about the indignity of it when the taste hit him. It was bright, sharp, and sweet, and for once, Greave didn’t feel as though the food was about to turn to ash in his mouth.

“That’s…” Greave didn’t know what to say. “Amazing.”

“You have been denying yourself too many pleasures,” Aurelle guessed. “Or perhaps you just haven’t had someone to really appreciate them with you.”

She passed him wine, and Greave sipped it delicately. He wasn’t going to quaff it the way Vars might, wasn’t going to turn into something as debauched as him. Yet maybe, just maybe, there was a middle ground. Didn’t the philosopher van Greten write, “We can enjoy the world in moderation, without it becoming something to be avoided”?

It seemed that Aurelle wasn’t done with him, because she led the way over to a spot where players were putting on a raucous performance, in which it seemed that an explorer of the southern lands was stumbling into more and more laughable circumstances. Currently, a peasant character seemed to be trying to sell him a donkey, trying to convince him that it was a thoroughbred racehorse.

On another day, Greave might have stood there, examining all the ways that the playwright worked at his craft, all the subtle tricks used to make the language flow and the scenes contrast with one another. He would have felt like a man apart, understanding but not truly enjoying any of it.

Here, now, with Aurelle there, he laughed. He actually laughed, at stupid jokes about a man who couldn’t see the truth in front of him.

“And will it jump?” the noble asked the peasant. “I’ve a mind to race it over hedges and fences.”

“Aye, it will get past all those,” the peasant said, and then stage whispered to the audience, “if you get off to open the gates for it.”

Greave laughed along with the rest of them, and glanced over to find Aurelle looking at him with apparent joy at the sight of him like that. She seemed to be taking as much pleasure in his presence as he was in hers, and that seemed almost like a miracle. Greave was about to say how impossible it seemed that someone so perfect should appear in his life so suddenly, but he got no chance to do so, because Aurelle was already glancing in a different direction.

“Do you hear that?” she asked. “They’re starting a dance. Come on.”

She pulled at Greave and he went with her, because he didn’t want to break contact with her, didn’t want to break that slender connection to everything that seemed good, and right, and real. He watched Aurelle as they walked, and she was perfection itself in every movement, so that it was hard to imagine being anywhere but there with her.

Was this what love was like? Greave had no point of comparison except the things that had been written in plays and books. His brothers had always treated him as a kind of failed brother, who didn’t do the things they did. His sisters possibly loved him, but Queen Aethe had always emphasized their separateness and difference to him. His father… no, while his mother’s death had robbed Greave of even that love.

This was different. It was sudden and sharp, like lightning across his body.

“Will you dance with me?” Aurelle asked.

“I don’t dance,” Greave said.

“I find that hard to believe. You must be beauty itself when you move. Please, for me?”

Greave could have countered any other argument. He could have provided a dozen objections to dancing based on everything from the works of sword masters to philosophers, religious writers to poets. But he couldn’t simply say no to Aurelle in this, or anything else.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” he pointed out.

“That’s all right,” she said. “I’ll show you. Here, you hold me like this.”

She moved close to him, so close that there was no space between the two of them, and Greave felt sure he could feel her heartbeat against his. Or maybe it was his heartbeat, thrumming with the excitement of being there like this.

“Now we move together. Feel the music. Move in time to it,” she said.

Greave did his best, listening to the music not for the technical components of meter and scale for once, but just for the flow of it. He felt himself falling into that flow, and Aurelle’s presence made it easy. He felt as though he could feel every moment she was going to make and respond to it automatically, as if she lent him her grace in some indefinable way.

In the moment when she kissed him, even that felt like the most natural thing in the world to do. Her lips met his, and in that moment, Greave couldn’t work out which of them was leading the kiss, which of them was kissing the other.

“I… haven’t done that before,” Greave breathed when they pulled back from one another.

“You haven’t kissed someone?” Aurelle asked.

Greave shook his head.

“Then you’re a very fast learner,” she said with a smile.

In that moment, there was no doubt left for Greave; he knew he was in love. It made no sense that he should be in love so quickly, but he knew he was.

“It makes me wonder what else I might teach you,” Aurelle said. Her finger hooked into Greave’s shirt, gently drawing him with her.

“Where are we going?” Greave asked.

“To my rooms,” Aurelle said. She hesitated for a moment, looking suddenly as shy as Greave felt. “That is… if you want to?”

That hint of shyness was the thing that clinched it for Greave. It said to him that this was as strange an experience for her as it was for him, and that some part of her felt all the strange, impossible things that were running through him. Greave stared at her, seeing yet another side to her: this vulnerable, gentle need to be loved as much as he needed it. Slowly, carefully, Greave nodded.

“I want that more than anything,” he said.

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

Renard watched Lord Carrick’s castle home the way he might have stared at a musical score, or perhaps at Yselle when she was in one of her more unfathomable moods: looking for understanding, for the chink of light that would show the way in. He stared at it from the fields beyond, dressed in peasant garb so that none would think twice about his presence there, memorizing all he could of the movements of the guards and the hidden spots around the walls.

“Patience,” he told himself, and in truth, this was the one thing in life where he had patience. Tell him to work a farmer’s tasks, and he’d be gone in a day. Leave him to work as a chandler or a merchant’s runner… he’d tried it once, and had lasted a full week before the itch got to him, the pressing, weighty feeling that this wasn’t all there was, that there had to be more. He’d run off with half the man’s takings and drunk most of it the week after to try to forget the sheer boredom of it.

Give him a locked place to look at, though, and he could wait all day. Had been waiting all day, just to make sure that everything he’d gotten from the former guard was right. Renard smiled to himself at that; Lord Carrick should pay his guards better if he didn’t want them betraying him. Apparently, he’d spent enough on locks for his doors to make up for it.

Behind him, his horse whinnied where Renard had left it tied to a tree. It was obviously as impatient as he was, but then, it was a flighty horse. After all, the man he’d stolen it from had sworn it was finest southern thoroughbred.

“Now,” Renard decided as the light started to fail. Changing quickly in a stand of bushes, he threw on darker clothing, complete with a hood to hide his features, and leathers that might at least do something to protect him if this all went wrong. He hurried forward, in the direction of a spot the guard had told him about, and which seemed obvious now that Renard knew it was there.

In that spot, the wall was crumbling slightly with age and disrepair; apparently, Lord Carrick didn’t see the point in spending money on stone when he could spend it on gilt and silver for the inside. That was good, because it meant that a man like Renard could climb without the need to throw a grapnel, trusting to knowing hands and feet to raise him up a little at a time. He would drop a rope on the way back, but for now, it was better not to have the noise.

“No harder than climbing a tree,” Renard tried to tell himself, although in truth, it was plenty harder than that. Even with the handholds, the wall was a thing of nearly sheer stone, and Renard had to press himself to it like a lover, one limb and then the next searching for the way up. He was almost at the top when he heard the sound of approaching footsteps.

He froze in place, willing himself to be just another part of the wall, a shadow as natural as any cast in the evening light. His muscles complained at the effort of hanging there like that, but he ordered them to be quiet. What did they want him to do? Drop off and see if he could fly?

The shadow of a guard passed above, standing there for far too long for Renard’s liking. Every second spent there felt like an agony of immobility, but Renard forced himself to patience until the man passed. Better not to attract attention just yet.