Feilan woke up and found Freyja sitting by the bed, her stitching abandoned in her lap. She wore silver-threaded silk, and her braided hair was gathered at her nape. Her gaze was thoughtful, abstracted; it was a moment before she saw that his eyes had opened.
She smiled, fond and relieved. He smiled back, not yet moved to speak.
He looked about. It wasn’t the room he’d shared with Remy, though his trunk was here. Both bed and room were smaller. He didn’t think he was even in Third Hill East – but he must be in Seven Hills, because this room had the row of high window slits, and it had one of their thick mugs, which his mother picked up and offered to him.
Well. Not really an offer. She tried to hold it to his mouth when he didn’t immediately lift a hand to take it.
He pushed it away and checked the window slits. The light suggested mid-morning, if he was on the same side of a Seven Hills hallway as his previous room. ‘Have I slept late?’
‘Very,’ she said. ‘It’s the first day after the final night of the moon-gloam. I arrived two days ago.’ She held out the mug again.
Feilan was indignant, and tugged down the blankets covering him. ‘Has Remy been keeping me asleep?’ he demanded. ‘I wasn’t even as badly injured as poor Gytha.’ He caught his breath. ‘Is she…’
‘She’s fine – that witch of yours is a gem, and so’s the eunuch. You were poisoned, jolterhead. Its tongue, apparently.’
She touched her neck, and he mirrored the motion and discovered the line of a scab. It twinged under his fingers and he dropped his hand, remembering the heat spreading out, his confusion and dizziness, his weakness at the end. When Freyja offered the cup a third time, he took it, and, at a narrow-eyed look, sipped.
It was, of course, one of the witch’s brews.
He was wearing a new talisman, protective beads pretty about his wrist and clinking quietly against each other as he drank.
‘I’m going to apologise,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have interfered. You knew what you were about.’
‘Did I?’
She looked at him with her wry smile. ‘You must have, my boy. Queen Adeline sits the throne in her own right, beloved uncle her chief adviser, and we have a most generous offer of trade access to the Riverlands.’
‘Golden Freyja,’ he said. ‘You didn’t take advantage of a traumatised little girl, did you?’
‘They practically threw it at me.’ She grimaced to his frown. ‘They didn’t even want to take a tithe for passage past the riverport, let alone a cut of the profits. I had to insist on it. I… Thanks to you, I do still have a golden reputation for fair dealing to maintain.’
He nodded. After a few more sips, he asked, ‘Do I have an Imperial stepfather?’
A cloud passed over her face, and she held up her other hand, showing off extra rings. ‘Yes.’
‘You’re not staying in Siftar, then.’
‘I’ll be going south to Aldhelm. I have an Imperial crown waiting for me. It’s nothing I asked for, mind you, but once I take it up, I’ll need the Imperial protection that comes along with it.’
She’d always had a queenly bearing. She didn’t need to change one whit now she was an empress. But she couldn’t sit about in a little trading town, not even one she had founded herself. The influence and wealth she had quietly wielded across Enea had become far too public, far too political, for that.
Feilan asked the only important question. ‘Is he awful?’
‘He’s not,’ she said. ‘Not all Vaer men are like your father, Little Wolf. He is quite a bit older than me, however. And he has two sons. Do you understand what I’m telling you?’
Feilan thought of two beads, silver-caged amber and white-dashed jet. I am safe but do not come home. He swallowed. ‘I can’t go south with you.’
‘I dare not risk you,’ she said. ‘I simply won’t. Those two heirs to an empire will see you only as a rival. I must keep you tucked away so their thoughts don’t turn your way.’ She smiled suddenly. ‘They’re likely to kill each other, though. That might leave only one possible heir.’
The poison, or Remy’s remedies, had made him slow. It took five long beats before he said, ‘Don’t…don’t make that happen, though, Mother.’
She laughed outright. ‘But wouldn’t that be quite the kick in the balls for the men who exiled you? The second emperor of the new Vaer empire, the boy they cursed all those years ago?’
‘I don’t think I care,’ Feilan said. ‘I haven’t given a buggering fuck what men like that think of me for years.’
She touched his cheek. ‘That’s my boy.’
‘It’s thanks to you,’ he said. She looked, momentarily, taken aback, laying her hand fully against the side of his face. He picked at a thread in the blanket. ‘Will you charge me with Siftar, then?’
Freyja raised her brows, his own manner. ‘Do you know,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘I have had a long and generally happy life.’
‘Ah, where is this going, because I’m the one languishing in the sickbed.’
He said it lightly, but he also put the cup aside and began to push himself up the pillows to a more upright position, watching her face. It was not like Freyja to be this sombre this long; he couldn’t help suspect more bad news.
‘I’m hale and hearty, my boy, and looking to continue so for as long as Njorda grants me. But I do have one small regret from my time in this world.’
‘Ulfr,’ said Feilan flatly.
Freyja set her hands in her lap, discovered her neglected embroidery, and gathered it up. Quietly, straightening the cloth, she said, ‘Aleifr, if I hadn’t had him, I wouldn’t have you. So, no, I do not regret him for a single moment.’
Feilan blinked. He started to jest that he must be dying to receive such an emotional outburst from her, and then considered how uncharacteristically grim she was, and that she was in the very middle of empire-building and had still dropped it all and rushed to his bedside, and that Remy had felt obliged to keep him in deep sleep, the same way he’d treated Torben to increase his chances of survival.
He didn’t much think his mother would appreciate the joke.
‘My regret,’ she said, ‘is departing Ysthera when we did.’
This was even more unexpected than her last remark. ‘Ysthera?’ he said. ‘But we made the connections we needed. We still have an excellent trade relationship even though they’re on the other side of the city-state coalition. What’s to regret?’
‘We made trade connections there, yes, but you were making a real connection. A personal connection. And I didn’t pay nearly enough attention, and I took you away from him.’
‘We both knew our liaison would be temporary.’
Freyja ignored him. ‘Remind me of his name.’
‘Helios,’ Feilan said after a moment. ‘Look, I liked him well enough, but we did both know—’
She cut him off with a raised hand as she slowly sat back. ‘Name one other man, in all these years, who you think of as fondly as Helios.’ He opened his mouth. ‘Except Tryggvi.’
He shut his mouth, fighting not to smile. Freyja’s patience was not as legendary as her reputation; she shortly said, ‘Go on. Do I have to spell it out as if you’ve seen but five summers?’
Surrendering to the badgering with good grace, he admitted, ‘Prince Renart of Seven Hills.’
‘Remy. Your husband.’
‘Who isn’t waiting by my bedside,’ he pointed out. ‘Who exiled me from Seven Hills, and double-crossed me to make a deal with his uncle. Who isn’t my husband, actually, as it turns out.’
‘And?’
Feilan gave in. ‘And I suppose I’d like to stay in the general vicinity.’
‘Why not stay right here? Njorda knows these fools need someone hard-nosed behind the throne.’
With some force, almost snarling it out of deep reflex, he said, ‘They need no one behind the throne.’
It was Freyja’s turn to concede. She soothed him with a hand to his shoulder. ‘Fair. Duly appointed adviser, then.’
‘There’s a reason it’s my mother waiting for me by my sickbed, not my husband.’
Freyja gave him another fond look. ‘You do have people waiting to see you, actually.’
She stood, and looked down at him. He could see behind her pale eyes the grief of their incipient parting, and the deep love that made it inevitable.
‘I’ll come say goodbye before I go,’ she told him. ‘But do have a think. You have been by my side for twenty-five years, the most loyal and steadfast aide I could have asked for – the best son I could ever have desired.’
‘Tell me the truth,’ Feilan said earnestly. ‘One of us is dying, right?’
‘I’m glad to see you still find yourself funny,’ Freyja said. ‘I know I don’t say it often enough – old Vaer women are just as bad as Vaer men for dancing around the softer things.’ She bestowed upon him her rarest of smiles, an openly doting one. ‘My boy. I’ll charge you with Siftar if you want it. But trading was never your true forte. Information-gathering is. You can go back and do that in Siftar, but there’s a riverport right here that now has just as much access to traders and their gossip as Siftar ever did, and an easy route to send it south. Think about what you really want.’
He knew what he wanted.
But his next visitor was Torben, bandaged up and covered in bee sting welts, though substantially faded, as if the witch of Seven Hills had cooked up a salve. He was otherwise as bluffly hale as usual.
‘Nice work, Thunder Bear,’ Feilan told him, after he’d kissed Feilan’s forehead like Freyja had.
‘We did it the hard way,’ Torben complained. He was awkward with sickness, and fidgeted by the bedside.
Feilan took pity. ‘When are you heading south to join your raiding party?’
‘Tomorrow,’ Torben said, looking relieved to seize on logistics chat. Then he said, ‘I’ll be telling them to head to Aldhelm.’
‘You’re signing on with Olvar the Bold?’ Feilan asked in surprise.
‘I’ve been talking too much to Noura.’
‘She’s not gone?’
‘She’s going south to Aldhelm, too, with Aminah. Freyja wants her talking to the emperor the way she’s been talking to me.’
Enlightened, Feilan said, ‘About those disciplined easterners heading this way?’
He had to smile: Freyja didn’t want him in the Riverlands as her old spymaster, or not only that. She wanted him here so he could help Queen Adeline prod the rest of the council of Riverland rulers into helping the new Vaer empire stand against the eastern invaders. The wealthy, safe Riverlands owed Enea a tithe of service. It would mean change, but the whole world was changing: it always was.
Torben nodded. After a long pause, he said, ‘Micah’s going south, too. I’m escorting him and Afzal home before I find my boys.’
Feilan found he had to look away before he could say, ‘That should be an interesting interlude.’
‘One hundred and eleven interesting interludes,’ Torben said. He paused. ‘Might not see you again.’
‘Don’t be—’
‘Might not see you again,’ Torben repeated. ‘Don’t need one hundred and eleven when it only takes one, and those city-state soldiers know how to do it.’ He looked Feilan in the eye and said gruffly, ‘Love you, Aleifr. You.’ He stopped and then rolled his eyes and said, ‘You might as well know: you’ve always had part of my heart.’
‘No, really. Am I dying?’ Torben snorted, and Feilan grabbed his wrist, where he still sported Freyja’s talisman. ‘Love you too, jolterhead, always will.’
Torben kissed him, properly this time. He stood over Feilan, one hand still clasped around the side of his face, gazing down at him in silence for what felt like a full thumb’s measure before he shook his head and stepped away.
He departed without a backwards look, already anticipating his next adventure.
Both Noura and Micah, bearing faded stings and clean bandages much as Torben had, came in separately to say their own farewells; they were part of the general exodus leaving Seven Hills for southern climes on the morrow. Noura embraced him, or at least locked an elbow roughly about his neck with genuine fondness, stinging the inflamed graze; Micah merely lowered his long eyelashes and wished him well in his coolest tones.
Feilan sulked at the feeling that everyone was leaving him. Visits from a reassuringly lively Gytha, and then from Adeline, Rosmunda and Conrad, helped. He managed to be gracious about the fact that they were not who he wanted to come through his door, especially because he could plainly see that, though they were appropriately grateful, they were also only just beginning the full reckoning of the harm Bertrand had inflicted on them, cuts small and large across many years, all suddenly bleeding.
But he was finally alone, only to discover that trying to get out of bed made him as sick and dizzy as when he’d had to drink with the traders back in the early days of Freyja’s empire. He fought through it, struggled into trousers and a shirt, and made his way from the room, which turned out to be practically where he’d fallen, in Fourth Hill East. There’d been a bed right there, he supposed, and it was close to Remy’s remedies.
He walked slowly along the arcade to Remy’s grotto. All the patches of blood between his room and the pavilion had already been scrubbed away.
A last handful of clients was still waiting. Feilan sat down at the end of the queue, closing his eyes in the warm sunshine. The bees downslope had recovered their million-body equanimity after last night’s travails, though the broken skeps scattered about the flattened and dying patch of grass where the monster had met its end made for busy traffic as the residents of the other skeps scavenged. The hum was soothing, the lingering smell of broken honeycomb pale amber behind his closed eyelids. It was soon counterpointed by the purr of Breone, who came to curl up in his lap and accept his stroking, a far cry from her first hissing flight from his outstretched hand.
When he opened his eyes again, everyone else was gone but Remy was standing in front of him, injured arm bandaged from wrist to elbow, face and hands lightly marred with a few telltale swellings from those angry bees. His carnelian hair fell loose to his shoulders. He was beautiful.
‘Why are you here?’ he demanded the moment Feilan met his eye.
‘Oh, am I still exiled from Seven Hills?’ Feilan asked with lifted brows.
This produced the instant contrition he’d been hoping for. Remy dropped to his knees before him, startling shy Breone from his lap. ‘I meant, why are you out of bed?’
‘Because my husband wasn’t in it,’ Feilan said, then further informed him, ‘Freyja says you’re a shit negotiator.’
He surprised a laugh out of Remy, and won a longing look, enough to risk opening his arms. Remy shuffled into them, nestling between Feilan’s spread thighs.
‘How’s your arm?’ he asked, gently lifting the offended limb. ‘When I said you could use blood as a beacon, it wasn’t an instruction.’
‘It wasn’t quite on purpose,’ Remy said.
‘What happened?’
‘I suppose you’ve gathered Bertrand was sticking close to Darya’s bodyguards for fear of the monster? He might have been dismayed they were heading right for it, but he must have seen us flee into the grotto, and I suppose he understood he had his last chance to hold onto power. He dragged Adeline out while Gytha was busy fighting. He was trying to take her to First Hill, I think, to force the regency, if not outright abdication. I broke her away from him and he chased us towards Fourth Hill East. He caught us at the walkway and went for my throat.’ Remy looked down at his arm, taking a moment before he could speak again. ‘He had a knife. I suppose he’d already decided how far he’d be willing to go. I used my forearm to block him. I should have known he’s stronger than he looks. We tried to barricade ourselves in that room but he forced himself in. We were terrified.’
His fingers were running up and down the rough linen of his bandaged arm in compulsive strokes. Feilan caught his hand, and then drew him in, holding his slight frame tight against his body, feeling his warmth and his slight quiver.
‘I know you kept trying to point out the games he was playing, but I don’t think I could comprehend just how much of a mask he was wearing until he shoved his way in with that knife in his hand. I got between him and Adeline and smashed that vial of monster poison in his face. It didn’t matter. He thought he had us. And then you were there.’ He caught at Feilan’s shirt. ‘Swarf, I didn’t think I could be more scared than I was when he came at us, and then you collapsed!’
He vaguely remembered it. He remembered making sure he fell away from the headless body with the blood still spraying from the stump of the neck. ‘I was fairly sick, then?’
‘You were poisoned, Faro. You had such a strong dose of poison from its tongue that you needed about five different medicinals and purgatives and still almost died.’
‘Worried about me?’ Remy merely sighed in exasperation to that, so Feilan said, ‘Guess we can be grateful it was only its saliva and not its blood or claws or more of us would be laid up. Why didn’t you come to me? Feeling guilty?’
Remy sucked in air and drew back. ‘I tried very hard to sabotage you.’
‘You thought I’d made a deal with Bertrand, didn’t you?’
‘No,’ Remy said, surprising him. ‘I knew you hadn’t had a chance to, yet. But I knew you were planning on it. So I tried very hard to keep you from talking to him.’
‘By throwing me off the premises.’
‘Of course,’ Remy said primly. ‘It was the most straightforward method I could think of. I regret being so nasty about it, though. I didn’t need to act how I did with the guards.’
Feilan shrugged. ‘I was not pleasant on the roof. Well played, Uncle Remy.’
Remy made a noise under his breath which suggested that if he was anyone else, he’d have been muttering Vaer! like it was a curse word.
‘Right. But when I set him up with destroying what he thought was evidence of the harm he did your mother? You must have realised then I didn’t want to work with him.’
‘Consider it from my point of view,’ Remy said. ‘I hadn’t made a deal with Bertrand, and I thought you were trying to. So confronted with this new, horrible information…’ His face crumpled as his attempt to remain factual faltered in the face of what Bertrand had committed against Queen Leonore. In a small voice, he said, ‘What could I do? He was already my enemy. It just made him more so, still without any way of proving it to Hughard and the rest.’
‘I don’t know if he found the evidence, after,’ Feilan said, ‘but if not, I’ll hand it over to the Nivardus family. But don’t read it until you’re ready, and don’t read it alone, svasa.’
Remy began to weep then, face pressed to Feilan’s chest. Feilan held him tight, letting the grief wash through him. All those bleeding cuts Bertrand had left behind him. He’d never been so savagely glad to have killed someone.
‘Thank you,’ Remy said at last, stirring and wiping his reddened eyes. ‘Not least for making sure no one doubts the judgement Adeline passed that night, and that she need never regret it herself.’
‘Starting her reign right,’ Feilan said, in Freyja’s dry tones.
He earned a huff of faint, pained, amusement. ‘Anyway. I thought you had to work with him, whether you wanted to or not. So I assumed you’d waved the proof about to force him to talk to you privately, at least so he could see what you had. Or that you were hoping I’d want to know more, and invite you back in. Either way, you could get to him and make the offer your mother wanted you to make.’
Feilan nodded, satisfied to have his suspicions confirmed. ‘You heard me talking to Gytha.’
‘I heard you talking to Gytha. I didn’t mean to,’ Remy hastened to add. ‘I remembered we’d been overheard talking about the goat in my room, so I went down to the backroom, to make sure the servants weren’t lingering, somehow eavesdropping. And the bells at the ends of the rooms’ bellpulls are there, of course.’
‘You can’t listen along rope,’ Feilan said, even as he remembered the unusual gilt braid woven into the bellpulls.
‘The pipe the rope runs along is a conductor, perhaps. The bell was a sort of amplifying cup. I think…’ He began to blush. ‘…they were probably listening to us having sex, and listening in on Torben in the expectation of the same.’
In lieu of anything too mouthy, Feilan merely said, ‘Good thing our surfeit covered his lack, then.’
Remy coughed lightly, still flushed. ‘Your and Gytha’s voices came through clear as – well, clear as a bell. I wasn’t sure what I was hearing, until you swore about it. That’s when I realised what Freyja expected of you.’ Remy shifted back to look him in the eye. ‘I’m so sorry I assumed you were going to betray me. I know how you feel about that sort of thing. I should have known you wouldn’t.’
‘Ah,’ Feilan said, and paused long enough for Remy’s dark, still-damp eyes to transform from soulfully guilty to indignant. ‘I did have to think hard about it before I decided not to.’
Remy flopped against him, face pressed to his shoulder again. Feilan let him think, enjoying the feel of him in his arms, and the warm sunshine. At least he wasn’t storming off.
Eventually Remy said, ‘I suppose that’s better.’
‘I would love to hear the theory on this one,’ Feilan said with a grin.
‘It was an order from Freyja,’ Remy explained. ‘You’ve been hers for twenty-five years. It would have been strange if you hadn’t had to think about it. That might have just been whim, or pride, or…’ He frowned. ‘Sex, I suppose. But this way, you…’
‘This way, I chose you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Remy, I chose you all the way back when I realised I could get out of the fake marriage with a word, when I still thought you were just a little shit who desperately needed help.’
‘And you chose to be kind, as much as you hate to admit it.’ He eased out of Feilan’s arms, looking very earnest. ‘I expect you will head south with the others?’
‘Do you,’ Feilan said.
‘I’m happy for you,’ Remy said. ‘I know I was in quite the temper that morning and I can’t claim none of it was because of Torben, but—’
‘Right, yes,’ Feilan broke in. He rather thought Remy had had far too long to think, on this occasion, and was very much trying to get out a speech he did not need to make. ‘You saw me arguing with Torben—’
‘I most certainly did not see you arguing with Torben,’ Remy said, wearing the merest ghost of a smile.
Feilan raised a corrective finger, smiling back, surging with relief because it wasn’t much of a smile, but it was a smile. ‘You saw the end of an argument with Torben. It was… I feel a lot lighter now. I was holding on to something I didn’t need to hold on to anymore, and it was good to let it go.’
‘Good,’ Remy said. ‘I really am pleased for you.’ Then he leapt right into the speech Feilan had suspected he’d lined up. ‘Listen, I know you don’t want me telling you I love you.’
Feilan opened his mouth, but Remy was already rushing on, even rising so he could better deliver his oration. Feilan, mentally shrugging, leaned back on the little ledge and let him.
‘So I won’t. But I do have to say something. You have been wonderful. I cannot tell you how relieved I was when I saw you in the doorway that night. I knew right then that everything was going to turn out. I could not have chosen better, when I chose you. Thank you for making me feel loved. I know you don’t!’ he added in haste. ‘But, just – thank you for making me feel like you do. I needed it. I didn’t know how much I needed it. To feel…to feel chosen by someone. I just wanted you to know that, before you leave.’
Feilan looked down the grassy slope to the humming bees, the browning patch of grass, and beyond, to the sun-drenched view. He said, ‘That’s the third time you’ve told me you know I don’t do something, and the third time you’ve been dead wrong.’
‘What?’ Remy said, sounding satisfyingly dazed.
Feilan smiled. He repeated, ‘Every time you tell me you know I don’t do something, you’re wrong. I do kiss, I do want to hear that you love me, I do love you.’ He held out his hand. ‘I know exactly how special it is, to feel chosen by someone, Remy.’
Remy made no move to take his outstretched hand. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I see.’
‘Right.’ He dropped his hand and considered Remy with his head on one side. ‘Why does it make you frown like that? Are you angry? Could you do me a favour and go think it over for a while? As long as you need.’
‘I’m not angry,’ Remy said. ‘I love you, too. But you did know that, I think.’
‘Still frowning. I expected more enthusiasm than this.’
Remy flashed him a darkling look. ‘I’m not sure I can give you what you need.’
‘Enlighten me, what do I need?’ He raised his brows. ‘Is this about Torben?’
‘It’s not…not about Torben,’ Remy admitted. ‘But more than that, it’s an entire life and lovers who aren’t in Seven Hills. You can’t stay here, and I can’t leave, Feilan!’ The words were suddenly falling out of him, urgent and agonised, and he paced the grass. ‘Adeline needs me, and the townsfolk need me, and I need to be with my family while we come to terms with what Bertrand did to us, and I can’t be selfish now, I just can’t.’
Feilan half-closed his eyes. It was, in a way, a conversation he might have had years ago, with another man who couldn’t leave somewhere Feilan couldn’t stay. But it was different now. He was different now.
‘Hoi!’ he said, interrupting what appeared to be approaching a right state. ‘Rufran. You know how you’re at my every whim?’
‘That doesn’t apply anymore!’ Remy said, still agitated. Then, with an endearing mix of reluctance and curiosity, ‘Yes?’
‘My whim, then, which isn’t really a whim: I want to stay here, with you, for as long as you want me.’
‘Oh.’ Remy was smiling helplessly back at him, making his heart swell painfully in his chest. ‘Forever, then?’
‘Come here and kiss me, minn svasa,’ Feilan said, ‘and remind us both that we’re no longer exiled.’