Petrus draws his fingers over and over the wood of Ludovico’s door, feeling the bump and scrape of the grain. He arrived here after leaving the clotted air of his own chamber, where his wife lies, finally sleeping.
At last he curls his knuckles to knock, and after a bit of shuffling from the other side of it the door twitches open. Ludovico looks out at him, hair a dark cloud around his head, face sleep-creased, and steps wordlessly aside; Petrus shoves past anyway, hard, as hard as if Ludovico had not made way for him, had tried to bar him from the room by force—the bump of bone and muscle, Ludovico’s grunt when his spine thuds against the wall, his skull. And then Petrus is upon him, before he knows what he means to do—hands on his friend’s arms, fingers biting hard as teeth, sinking deep into flesh, seeking the pressure that would bring bruises blooming red and purple to the surface of Ludovico’s skin. He has never fought another man except through swordplay, and that is only sparring. But he wishes now that he did not clip his nails so short, that they might be long enough, sharp enough, to act as the claws people expect him to have.
“Why?” he says. “Why?”
Ludovico is taller than he, and broader of shoulder, but he does not push back, does not use his strength against Petrus. He only puts up his hands, as if to ward off blows that have not come, and says, “I have done nothing, friend.”
Petrus pulls back but does not release him, his fingers tight as shackles around Ludovico’s arms. His friend looks at him, tense, near enough that even in the dimness of fire and candlelight, Petrus can see all the individual hairs that make up his curving brows, the rougher skin at the end of his nose, the chapped lower lip. He is struck, as if by a physical force, a blow, by a sudden memory, and almost he reels away; but he holds on, though their posture—bodies close, hands clasping Ludovico’s arms—is a mirror of his and his wife’s in the feasting hall, a strange, dizzy simulacrum.
“You have done nothing—but dance, but flirt,” he says. His friend watches him, for once silent. “But you could have—you would have—”
“Never,” says Ludovico; and his teeth crush the word like sparrows’ bones. Petrus startles back, releases his arms, flexes his own fingers, suddenly cramped. Ludovico moves past him; lights another candle from the fire; pours wine for each of them. Petrus finds himself seated across from his friend, the fire warm to one side, the bed, rumpled, the bedclothes askew, to the other. The crunching of hollow bones, Petrus thinks; all the ferocity he never sees in his friend, all the ferocity that must exist, must be reserved for the battlefield, for diplomacy, for all the places Petrus knows his hair will not allow him to go; all that ferocity focused now within that single, bitten-off word.
They sit together, cradling their cups before the fire, and despite it the air is night-chilled, all the curling dark hairs on Ludovico’s legs shoved to attention by the stippling of his skin. After they have spent a few moments sipping and sitting—minutes in which Ludovico casts little prickling glances at Petrus from under the mad curls of his hair, puts a hand to the back of his head, rubbing where it hit the wall—he finally says again, “Never.”
Petrus glances up at him. There is a strange calm pool inside of him where the fire existed earlier tonight, dampening it. “No?” he says.
Ludovico shakes his head, the corners of his mouth arching down. They are silent again, long minutes, longer than Ludovico is usually capable of silence, of stillness. And then he breaks it.
“So,” he says. “Left your wife’s warm embrace so soon? I thought you’d be there all night, after that display.”
He says it without really looking at Petrus; says it and then gulps the last wine from his cup, a sloppy patter of droplets staining his white shirt purple-red. Immediately he rises and goes to the jug, pouring himself more. Then he returns to his chair, stretches his legs, long and thick, before him until his toes are near enough that Petrus could brush their tips with his own shod feet if he only unkinked his legs a little at the knees. Ludovico’s feet are bare and pale, hairy at the toe knuckles and near the ankle, the bones long and standing out as the toes flex, showing pockets of shadow between.
Petrus fixes his eyes upon Ludovico until his friend looks up at last. “The display would not have happened had you not been—been—”
“I had no intention,” Ludovico says, “of making a spectacle of her. Or you.” A moment; a breath. “Of you, least of all.”
His eyes are dark, with lashes that curl and brows that arch and jump more expressively than any Petrus has ever seen. He can convey any feeling with a single lift of one of those slim brows; he can pinion a man with a glance. He pinions Petrus now, so that Petrus feels held fast to his chair, helplessly stuck there by Ludovico, who knows his moods, his wishes, as no one else does.
Then Ludovico’s eyes slide closed; he speaks without opening them. “She seemed very . . . Standing all on her own, day after day. And when I offered her a smile, a word, she was . . . ah, Pierre, she was so desperate for any kindness. If I did not know you, I’d have assumed cruelty was the cause.”
Petrus stares into his glass.
“But then—she sought my company. It seemed . . . unkind to be cold to her. I know you, old friend, I know your . . . tendencies. And I have seen you with her—and you are as uncommunicative as a—as a silence-vowed monk. And then tonight—she said she longed to dance, that she had danced a great deal at the parties given by her parents, their friends, but had not had the opportunity at court.” He opens his eyes now, raises a single, eloquent brow. Petrus grunts.
“I do not like to dance unless I am required to,” he says.
Ludovico shakes his head. “And yet you do not want your wife to dance with anyone else.”
Petrus merely looks at him, and at last Ludovico puts up his free hand, palm outward. “Very well. I am truly—truly—sorry to have distressed you.”
Petrus nods, the movement slow and heavy, the weight of his head suddenly too much for his neck to hold. “Marriage,” he says, “is not what I hoped it would be.”
A snort. “When is marriage ever what we hope?” he says. “I know of no man who had much hope at all for marriage, beyond that it bring him sons. Or,” he says, smiling a little, “do you speak of more . . . private things?”
Petrus huffs a laugh; rolls his eyes to the ceiling. A rosy warmth draws its way up from his chest. “I am not going to discuss this with you.”
“Hmm. And here I thought my own years of matrimony might at last be of some use to someone.”
Petrus could say something of the difference in their marriages—each one political in its own way, yes, but there the similarities end. Ludovico has a powerful family at home in Mantua to whom he might return with his wife and children, should the French court turn against him. Ludovico, who glories in all the things that Petrus tries to keep away from—skirmishes of words and swords between the powerful. Ludovico, who can slip away to court whenever he wishes; who needn’t care overmuch whether he can converse with his wife. Who seems entirely capable of forgetting she exists at all, from one moment to the next.
But he does not say any of this. “The last advice I took from you, if I recall correctly,” he says instead, “ended with my being consumed by flea bites, and God knows what else, contracted in a certain tavern, in the arms of a certain woman to whom you brought me. There is a reason”—with a studied sip from his cup—“that I have not taken advice from you in many years.”
Ludovico’s laughter drifts warm and lazy through the space between them. “If you remember,” he says, “my first advice was that you take one of the courtisanes’ offers. You’d have had a more comfortable experience.” He tips his head to one side, mouth twisted. “But if I am not mistaken, you said it was a wonderful time; and so perhaps it is as well you did not take my advice. Fleas and other crawling things be damned.”
Ludovico keeps those eyes upon him, staring over the rim of his cup; and they are the eyes of the boy who approached a werewolf and chose to keep him company. “I suppose,” he says, scratching his curling beard and his chest through the open neck of his shirt, “I should be honored that you chose my companionship over hers at this time of night.” And before Petrus can think of anything to say, Ludovico raises his cup. “To friendship.”
The night that Petrus lay with the purple-stained woman and carried fleas home with him to the palace, he half-carried Ludovico home as well. He had descended the tavern stairs, returning to the smoky common room, to find Ludovico slouched at his table, looking up at him with so bleary an expression that Petrus, with a sigh, knew his friend to be very drunk. The tabletop was sticky with the sloshed wine and beer of countless drinkers; Ludovico’s cup was empty, and Petrus wondered how many times he’d emptied it while Petrus was upstairs. As he watched, Ludovico settled his cheek upon his fist, lids drawing half-down, eyes settling, unfocused, upon the guttering flame of the candle stub at the center of the table. The candle’s wax slid and folded like the flesh of a very old man; Petrus turned his own eyes away from it, seeing instead the woman upstairs, the dark purple stain upon her pale skin, which he could not feel at all when he traced it.
“Are you going to tell me how it was?” Ludovico said, and Petrus looked back at him. Ludovico raised his eyelids all the way, eyes rolling upward, too, so that they fixed upon Petrus with what seemed to be tremendous effort. Petrus smiled a little.
“No,” he said, and rose from the table. “Or at least, not here.” He held out a hand to lever Ludovico from his chair, and after a moment his friend grasped it and allowed himself to be levered, giving over much of his weight to Petrus’s keeping. Ludovico was the taller by a head, and as they moved in a sideways stagger toward the door, he leaned his cheek upon the top of Petrus’s head, the same cheek that, moments before, had rested upon his own knuckles.
Outside, stars had flung themselves through the darkness over Paris, and the streets were mostly deserted but for women like the one he left at the tavern, and beggars sleeping curled against the night air, and other men like Ludovico and himself, tottering from tavern to tavern or reeling hurriedly for home. Petrus gave a theatrical groan under Ludovico’s weight, acting out again one of their boyhood games, when they would weave like wine-soaked courtiers through the halls of the palace, their arms about each other’s shoulders, their voices raised in song and shattering with laughter.
Ludovico snorted into his hair; Petrus felt the hot huff of it, and the odd turn of his friend’s head until the pointed tip of his nose was pressed to Petrus’s head, too. “Now will you tell me?” he murmured, mouth so sunk in Petrus’s hair that he lipped at the strands.
“It was,” Petrus said, and paused, remembering the woman’s vacant eyes; the decay he smelled inside her mouth. Her hands upon his shoulders, his back, his neck, everywhere touching him, her fingers buried in his hair like mice in tall grass. “Wonderful.”
Ludovico was silent for a while; Petrus could feel the hard bump of his jaw, full of teeth, against his head with every jarring step along the unevenly cobbled street. It was just cool enough that their breath preceded them, except it was only his own breath he saw, gusting white and private, as if leading them back through the night to the palace; Ludovico breathed into the top of his head like a witch breathing life into spells.
Eventually, Ludovico said, “I am glad. I would not want to have wasted my coin.”
At the Château du Louvre, they made their weaving way back to Ludovico’s chamber. Petrus ducked out from under Ludovico’s heavy arm when they opened his door, muffling his laughter against the back of his hand when Ludovico tipped with an oath against the wall. He righted himself with the careful dignity of the very drunk, and looked down at Petrus, frowning. A fire had been laid for him by one of his servants, and its light cast half of him in darkness; the frown looked strange and severe, for Ludovico was so often smiling. Petrus blinked, seeing in the sudden severity the part of Ludovico that he rarely saw, the part that had been to war for France, that had wielded his sword for its intended purpose, and not merely for sparring. Almost, he stepped back, away from the shadows that lay so heavily across Ludovico’s face.
But then his friend’s frown tipped upward, tugging with it his cheeks and eyebrows and his small, round ears, and Petrus found himself smiling in return. And then Ludovico sighed and bent, neck curving down and down in a graceful swoop like a hunting bird’s; and he caught Petrus’s lips against his own before Petrus knew what was happening. Petrus’s eyes drifted closed, pressed so by the weight of an astonishment that was not entirely genuine; he leaned, just for a moment, into a warm dry mouth and felt the whisper of a long exhalation against his cheek; felt, too, the sudden heat of Ludovico’s tongue against his own and the press of Ludovico’s lust against his belly, startling in its firmness, making Petrus jerk back a little, wild-eyed.
When they parted, Ludovico smiled again, a little sadly, hand cupping Petrus’s cheek, fingers tucked into the hair there with a casualness that loosened something at the nape of Petrus’s neck, a wood-burl that had been there so long he had ceased to notice it until it was gone. And then Ludovico leaned his brow against Petrus’s, bone to bone, a little too quickly so that it almost hurt, might bruise, leave a mark, a proof of what just happened; and he murmured, “I am glad that tonight was wonderful for you.”
It is nearly dawn when Petrus rises to leave. Ludovico brought out dice, and they tossed them for hours, a conversation of perfect nothings eddying between them as they gambled. Petrus rises, grinning, with a good deal more coin than he had when he arrived. He stretches, back arching, spine crackling; Ludovico watches, half-smiling, yawning, and gets up to walk with Petrus across the room to the door.
“Good night, my friend,” he says. “Only for you would I willingly rise from so sound a sleep.” A pause and then, “Listen to her,” he adds abruptly. And when Petrus raises his brows, he smiles, wry and twisted. “I am glad enough that Henriette has little to say to me; but when she does speak, I know enough to listen. Your little wife is hungry for that. Feed her. That’s my last marital advice.”
He catches Petrus’s wrist in the cradle of his palm; plays with the cuff of Petrus’s shirt. His face is soft with tiredness, with wine, with wakening to a tapping at his door to find a friend there, with something else Petrus cannot decipher.
They have never spoken of what passed between them, so many years ago now that Petrus sometimes wonders whether he imagined it, whether the catch of the dry skin of his friend’s mouth against his own was some strange dream from which he never entirely wakened. Soon after that night, Ludovico was gone again to war; and soon after that, married. And if their eyes catch against each other sometimes, just as perhaps their mouths did twenty years ago, nothing is ever said in words; and perhaps even the nonwords are entirely of Petrus’s imagination.
It is a dangerous thing, to want the things that Ludovico seems to want—women, yes, but men, too. Or are the women merely a screen, held between the world and Ludovico’s true, his only, desires? Do his flirtations with them never progress further than words, strolls in the moonlight, clasped hands?
Petrus has never had the courage to ask, though he has wondered. Has wondered, when he’s seen Ludovico speaking with, dicing with, laughing with other men of the court. Has wondered, all the times that Ludovico has seemed so disinclined to return to his wife. But Ludovico would speak if he wished to; and after pulling away, after making it clear that his desires did not match his friend’s, Petrus has not been able to bring himself to satisfy his wonderings, not when Ludovico has never trusted him with the words spoken aloud, has perhaps used his own drunkenness on that long-ago night as yet another screen. Not when speaking of such dangerous wantings, even softly, privately, feels almost like exposing his friend’s tenderest places to peril.
Ludovico opens the door now, leans against it as Petrus takes his candle and steps into the darkened corridor beyond, watches as Petrus walks away, until Petrus looks over his own shoulder, raising a hand in farewell; and then Ludovico steps backward, closing the door behind him.