The Traitor’s Mercy by Iris Foxglove

Chapter 11

Sabre didn’t often dream of his father, before his mother and sister died, but when he did, he was always in the woods.

His father loved the wild country beyond the city. He would take the queen and Adrien out with him, sometimes, when she and the king remembered they weren’t alone in the world. The queen would sit on her horse and laugh as Sabre and Adrien faced off with strips of willowy tree branches, Sabre’s father in the middle with his sword flashing in his hand.

In his dream, the queen’s arms were red with blood, but she was still smiling.

“Arthur,” she said. “Don’t torment the boys.”

“They need to learn how to defend themselves in close quarters, Your Majesty,” Sabre’s father had said. “We don’t all come from idyllic farmlands.”

“Neither do I,” the queen said, leaning forward on her horse. “We pressed grapes on my lands. Mislian, the kind you have to freeze before they go sweet.”

“Not at all idyllic, a vineyard,” Sabre’s father said. “Swords up, boys.”

“No. I don’t want to,” Adrien said. “Sabre shouldn’t fight.”

“I like it, Asa,” Sabre said.

“I don’t.” Adrien shuddered. “I don’t like seeing you with a sword.”

“You never have, goose. I’m not allowed to hold a real one yet.”

Adrien stared at him, just as he had that day out in the woods. “I do,” he said. “And it’s always bad.”

“Adrien,” the queen said. Blood was starting to splash on the grass. “We don’t speak of that, here.”

Sabre turned. The woods melted away, and he was lying on his bed in the House of Onyx, looking up at Laurent. Laurent, who seemed to come from a dream himself, honorable in a way nobles couldn’t afford to be, someone who would look down at a naked, sobbing wretch in the street and see something of value.

“You’re new,” Sabre said. “Haven’t dreamed of you before.”

“You haven’t?” Laurent’s mouth quirked. “I’m almost disappointed.”

“They’re all so full of death, usually,” Sabre said. He reached for Laurent, hooked his fingers in his belt. “I’m tired of death. That’s what the queen said, you know. Adrien told me. Tired of death. I understand why she did it, I think.”

Laurent took Sabre’s hands, and Sabre sighed, trying to pull him onto the bed.

“I don’t think you’re fully awake, yet,” Laurent said.

“Of course not,” Sabre said, smiling. He guided Laurent’s hands to his hips. “You’re here, so I’m dreaming, but it’s terrible because you aren’t, oh, fucking me, or taking off this damn collar. You should give me a black one, with violet lining. Yes. I’d like that.”

Laurent’s gaze went dark, and Sabre shivered deliciously.

“What else would you like, pet?”

“Everything, I suppose.” Sabre ran his hands up Laurent’s arms. “Say I belong to you. I like it when you say that. When I feel it, your hands on me…”

He stopped, horrified, as he felt the soft sheets move beneath him, the cool air of the House at night, the touch of Laurent’s hands on his hips.

“Oh,” he said.

“There you are,” Laurent said, and leaned down to kiss him. “Black and violet, mm?”

“If you would give me a spade,” Sabre said, “so I may dig a hole, here, and crawl into it?”

“You’ll end up digging through Yves’ ceiling,” Laurent said. He took Sabre by the back of the neck, guiding him up off the bed. “You want to dream of me fucking you, do you?”

“Shouldn’t I?” Sabre asked, and Laurent smacked him across the face before he kissed him again, hard and possessive. “Yes, you see, you make a good point.”

“It wasn’t enough to be fucked by Lord Chastain?” Laurent asked.

Sabre stared at him for a second. “Oh.”

“You didn’t forget about him?” Laurent asked, digging his nails into the back of Sabre’s neck.

Sabre searched Laurent’s face. “Do you want me to?”

“You mean that,” Laurent said. He pulled at Sabre’s hair, and ah, if that wasn’t what he wanted, for Laurent’s hand on him, his eyes arresting him, drowning him.

“Yes, my lord.”

“Come with me,” Laurent said, gripping Sabre’s hair tight and practically dragging him across the room.

“Shouldn’t I clean up, first?”

“You’ll do as I tell you,” Laurent said, and Sabre would have nodded if he weren’t being pulled along by the hair, tripping up the steps. He desperately, painfully wanted Laurent to stop, to take him there on the stairway for any client to see, to drag him down to the common room and have him ride him on one of the plush chairs, to choke on his cock in front of the nobles with their useless masks.

“My lord,” Sabre asked, “can we pretend I was charming and subtle about wanting you to fuck me against the window?” Laurent stared. “Or the floor, but the steps are a little narrow, and what if we fall?”

Laurent looked like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to give in to Sabre’s ridiculous demands or laugh. “You’re honestly considering the logistics of sex on the stairs.”

“I think I could manage.” Sabre let out a muffled sound into Laurent’s mouth as he was pressed up against the wall, Laurent’s thigh slotted between his legs, Sabre groping over the dark paneling behind him for purchase.

Laurent gazed down at him as he pulled away. “Impatient, aren’t we? I might leave you kneeling in the baths while I tend to myself, now.”

Sabre wasn’t sure he didn’t want that, too. “As my lord commands.”

Laurent cursed under his breath and grabbed Sabre by the collar, pulling him up the stairs. He had such a lovely voice, when he was edging into topspace, that slight accent giving his words an almost musical quality. But that’s how it was with love, his father used to say, everything about the other person took a different shape—

Sabre stumbled on the steps, and Laurent paused, brows lowering in concern.

“You’ll get there eventually,” Laurent said, softly chiding.

“I am, yes,” Sabre said. His tongue felt locked in his mouth. “You know…what I said before. It would be nice, to dream of you.”

Laurent met his gaze for a long moment. Sabre stared at him, feeling oddly breathless, weightless, pained. His mother would have done more than just starve Sabre if she’d known this would happen, one day. Laurent was a noble, but to Sabre’s mother, he would always be lower class, someone to pity and befriend but never love. She’d been wrong about so many things, in the end. Wrong about their line’s “stewardship” over the poor, who couldn’t be bothered to remember their names half the time, wrong about her plans against the king...wrong about Sabre.

And while Sabre was off riding horses through the streets with noble children who despised him, Laurent had been there, just out of reach, pulling together enough coin to run his own House, to fund his sister’s acting career. If they’d met on the street, Sabre probably would have blushed and looked away, ashamed to be so close to the pleasure houses in the first place.

Sabre never would have thought this possible, if he hadn’t been picked up by Laurent on the street that day. Wrapped in his coat, wretched and miserable, unknowing.

Sabre fell through Laurent’s doorway, catching himself on the frame, and Laurent pulled him the rest of the way through.

* * *

It seemed,really, rather stupid to fight this.

Laurent knew it, and still he thought maybe I shouldn’t be doing this, and it would be better for everyone if he just went back to his room. But it was too late for that, and he knew it, Sabre knew it, hell, everyone in the house knew it by now. Laurent had guarded his heart like an iron fortress, and of course it took a disgraced noble with no artifice, a tragic story and a sweet smile to undo all his defenses and storm the gates like a conquering army.

“I watched him with you,” Laurent said, pushing Sabre down on the bed, graceless, not a practiced whore anymore but a man, eager and wanting, kissing Sabre hotly and tugging uselessly on the collar that wasn’t right, wasn’t his. “And I wanted to drag him out of there and.” He could barely finish the sentence.

“Are you angry when I, if I, they make me, sometimes, I can’t—”

“No, sweet thing, it’s not you.” Laurent kissed him again, hands moving over his body, feeling the curve and muscles beneath his fingers as he pressed him into the bed. “I want you to like it, I—ah.” He stopped talking, kissing Sabre instead, shifting on top of him. “You’ll like it, when I take you,” he informed Sabre, voice brimming with dominance.

“Yes, my lord,” Sabre gasped, arching up, arms sliding around Laurent’s neck to pull him closer.

Laurent hesitated only a moment before he said, against Sabre’s mouth, “Not my lord, not tonight. My name. Use my name.”

“Laurent,” Sabre begged, perfect and lovely. “Please.”

He didn’t need to say anything else—Laurent knew what he wanted. He pinned Sabre’s hands above his head on the bed, held them there not with chains or cuffs or a rope, but just a press of his fingers and a husky, don’t move those until I tell you that you may. Sabre shifted beneath him, gorgeous and splayed out on the silk sheets, staring hungrily with his bright copper eyes as Laurent touched him, kissed him, left marks from his teeth on Sabre’s chest, the sensitive area of his inner upper arms, his inner thighs. Sucked his cock with less skill and more enthusiasm than he had since he was new, until Sabre was almost sobbing, back arched like a bowstring, begging to come.

Laurent didn’t let him, but he brought him to the edge three times before he fumbled like a novice for the oil, slicking up his cock and saying, “You can move your arms now, touch me, go ahead.”

Sabre did, but only to grab at his shoulders and dig his fingers into Laurent’s muscles, tight, little, gasping sounds of pleasure spilling from his mouth as Laurent fucked him. He was so tight, so perfect, and Laurent had to bite him again before he said something he shouldn’t.

“Please, Laurent, I’m so—so close, please let me come for you,” Sabre panted, legs up and tight around his hips.

“Yes,” was all Laurent managed, before Sabre cried out and came between them.

Laurent watched him, trembling and breathless himself, and he lost it when Sabre smiled up at him, stretched like a satisfied cat—all without being under, without Laurent hurting or choking or terrifying him—and said, “Come inside me, Laurent, let me feel you.”

There were very few things that Laurent hadn’t heard in bed, at this point, given how many years he’d spent as a whore. He’d had clients ask him to do that before, come inside them, but somehow it seemed like this was the first time he’d ever heard it, and maybe it was because none of them had ever used his name, before.

Just some pretty nickname, or whore, even if they meant it sweetly, that wasn’t his name. Just him, just his body.

But Sabre stared at him and asked him, Laurent, and Laurent was helpless to do anything else; he kissed Sabre until he could barely breathe, and the last thought he had before he tipped over the edge was, I want him to call me by my real name, and puzzled at what that meant for only a second before the pleasure dragged him away from thought, away from anything that wasn’t Sabre, beneath him, murmuring encouragements against his mouth.

He had no idea why he’d thought that, about his name. He’d given it when he’d woken up in the sun-dappled parlor of the House of Gold. But suddenly he had a memory—black curtains in the breeze, the sound of the sea, and singing—

He sat up, blinking, and pushed his hair out of his face. Sabre wasn’t asleep, but he was watching him, quiet and calm. Under, but not much. Just...content, there, with him.

“The king wanted you,” Laurent said, pushing aside his strange memory, which was probably some kind of dream—he’d always wanted to see the ocean, but whores from the pleasure district didn’t travel much farther than the country estates of the wealthiest nobles.

“What,” Sabre said, blinking. “That’s not right. He hasn’t before.”

“He requested you attend him during a country house party. I assume it’s the same one Chastain spoke to me about, earlier, when he informed me that he’d be switching all his visits to you.”

“Oh. Are you angry?”

Laurent sighed, slipped gently out of Sabre’s body and rolled to his back next to him, an arm behind his head. “Yes, but only because I know what’s going to happen. He’s starting to see you as a person, not a whore.”

“And that makes you angry?” Sabre asked, and there was something like a hint of teasing there, under his concern.

Laurent turned and fixed him with a stare. “Men who are as important and wealthy as Chastain, they sometimes sponsor courtesans. They take them, put them up in luxury and keep them there until they tire of them. It doesn’t add to their debt, since the expectation is that the nobles will incur the costs of it, so it’s mostly...paused. But it’s never a good thing, because when you come back as you always do, no one remembers you and your debt is always sold somewhere else. To a lesser house, then a lesser one, until there’s only the whorehouses and the quarries left to take it.”

“This system is terrible,” Sabre said.

“This system saved you from the gallows,” Laurent reminded him, though he did not disagree.

“Yes. I understand...loans. That you incur them, when you live in a house and eat their food and need to constantly launder the clothes that are torn off you—”

“That might just be you, pet,” Laurent said, tugging his hair, amused despite himself. “A special incurrence.”

“But if someone wants you, it shouldn’t make it worse. And a courtesan can’t...why would they not just let you pay it back some other way?”

“Because no one trusts anyone, Sabre. Not even a little.”

Sabre smiled at him. “I trust you.”

“Men tie ropes around your neck to remind you how you almost hanged, and it’s my fault, and you still trust me?”

“You didn’t choose to put me on the gallows, Laurent. You didn’t make my mother choose—what she did. You gave me a choice when I didn’t have one.”

“This was no choice, Sabre,” Laurent said, softly, while Sabre’s hair fell like a curtain around them. “It was me seeing an opportunity, and taking it.”

“And you want me to hate you for it, and I won’t. That’s my choice.” Sabre was propped up on one hand. “You think Chastain is going to do that, take me away?” He did look a little worried about that. “He’s never as angry as the others.”

“Noticed that, did you? He doesn’t care, or he’s not going to care, about your mother for long, Sabre. He’s more interested in you being an actual masochist, and how, because he’s a noble, his pleasure outweighs anyone else’s. I don’t know anymore if the king was trying to punish you or save you, if I’m honest. But if he wants you to suffer, he won’t let Chastain spirit you away to his estate where the others can’t have their turn hurting you. Unless he knows how bored you’d be, with just Chastain and his hounds and all those pines.”

“I wouldn’t be happy there,” Sabre said, and they both knew why.

Laurent shook his head, once, and pressed his fingers to Sabre’s mouth to keep him from actually saying it out loud. “I think he’d need dispensation from the king, and he wouldn’t, if the king asked for your company at this same country party.”

“They didn’t invite you?” Sabre tilted his head, sucked on Laurent’s fingers.

“Just my wares,” Laurent answered, pulling his fingers free.

“Don’t you mean whores, my lord,” Sabre quipped, and Laurent snorted and smacked him lightly on the side of the face.

“Why would the king—do you think he means to kill me,” Sabre asked, after a moment.

“Honestly, I don’t know, Sabre. Emile’s always seemed a shade past sane, but again, I don’t know anymore if that’s true or what he wants everyone to think. But no, I think if he wanted to kill you, he would have let you hang.”

“He could let them all hunt me,” Sabre said, shuddering a little, and Laurent knew him well enough to see the flare of heat, the interest in the idea that he couldn’t quite hide.

“Oh, they do that, obviously, but it’s for...a different kind of sport.”

“You can just say fucking, my lord.” Sabre laughed softly as Laurent pulled his hair again. “I have no desire to serve the king, who it’s said...since his wife, he doesn’t...is it true you…?”

“Finish your sentences, brat, if you’re going to ask me impertinent questions.” Laurent sat up, swung his feet over the bed and stood up to get some water. “He didn’t fuck me. He made me pleasure myself and he watched.” Laurent would not forget that night anytime soon. All that work getting him prepared, the white carriage, the horses...and Emile de Guillory had done the equivalent of hiring him to grind on a pillow on the royal bed while he sat on a chair and watched him.

“I wouldn’t mind that,” Sabre said, from the bed, a tangle of warm limbs and soft hair and silk sheets.

“Yes, well, I’ve done that before, but usually with another courtesan or...some instructions, perhaps, other than the obvious. If you want the truth, I think de Mortain paid for that and thought it might help him but it...did not, or I can’t imagine how staring blankly and staying silent while a courtesan humps a pillow is—are you laughing?”

“I might be a little, ah.” Sabre clapped a hand over his mouth, eyes bright with mirth. “This evening, it’s been quite a lot.”

“That’s the noble in you,” said Laurent, returning with the water. He held up a hand. “One joke about that and you’re going back to your room.”

Sabre ducked his head, but he was smiling as he reached for the goblet. “Did they ask just for me, for the hunt, or…?”

“Others, too, and I’ll allow that, it’s happened before. It’s sex, Sabre, not—” Laurent went still, as something flashed, deep and dark like a dream, at the back of his mind.

The—skulls of the dead gods—run, the smoke will clear, the hunt, the snow—

“My lord?”

Laurent shook his head, the images like cobwebs slipping through his fingers. “I’m fine. But you, I think it best you stay here this year. If you want, I shall chase you about the empty house. Besides, this time of year, you’d be obliged to go out in the snow.”

—the smoke the old gods the hunt we run—

Sabre smiled a little sadly. “I think I’ll go anyway,” he said, and drew Laurent down for a kiss. “I want to tell you something, a secret. Because I do trust you, more than anyone. May I?”

Laurent sighed, and nodded. “I have a feeling it would be impossible to stop you. Is this about what Chastain said, about your mother hating your father?”

“Ah, no, it’s...not that. It’s about Adrien’s mother. The queen.”

Laurent would have preferred it be about people who were not dead, honestly, but he nodded his head and settled back to let Sabre talk. Because the queen might no longer be alive, but the ghost of her still haunted the kingdom, their mad king and their son, who no one really believed would live to inherit the throne of Staria.

* * *

Sabre triedto say the words twice, lying there on Laurent’s bed, but they wouldn’t come. He’d made vows to his father, to the king, and they burned his throat as he rolled off the bed, running a hand through his messy hair.

“My lord,” he said. “Laurent. Can I attend you, in the bath?”

“Will it make it easier?” Laurent asked.

“I think so.”

Laurent kissed him, then, which Sabre took as a yes, and Sabre eased himself into the now familiar routine of service, running the bath, fetching the oils for Laurent’s hair, the comb and subtly scented soaps. He kissed Laurent as he washed his hair, his back, ducked under the warm water to run his hands over Laurent’s thighs. He wasn’t under, when he set aside the washcloth and climbed into Laurent’s lap, but he was calmer, his nerves dulled at the edges as they lounged in the heat.

“I asked the queen if I would fall in love once, you know,” Sabre said, at last. “When I was young. Adrien and I, we used to read these horrible books together, about pirate princes who were, oh, half siren or something. We had notions of sailing off to find some, I think.”

“And the queen would know,” Laurent said, almost smiling again. “Because of royal divinity, I suppose.”

“We don’t have that here. It’s something else.” Sabre sighed. “She cut her thumb with a knife, looked at me, and laughed herself hoarse. She said she wasn’t sure, but she did see me in the snow. Which is, so far, about as useless as you can imagine, because I’ve seen snow plenty of times by now and it’s never been particularly amusing.”

Laurent frowned at him, his gaze darting over Sabre’s face. “You’ve skipped something, I think. She cut herself?”

Sabre took a lock of Laurent’s hair, twisting it in his fingers. “Do you know anything of the Mislians?”

“Oh, who knows,” Laurent said. “They’re either recluses on their little island or they’re setting up shop in Diabolos, pretending to be mysterious under their robes.”

“And they can sing magic,” Sabre said. Laurent raised his brows. “Some of them can. Some can see the future. Glimpses. Bits and pieces, in ink, or through cards.”

“Or blood,” Laurent said, slowly.

Sabre let out a harsh sigh. “The queen had their blood in her family. Ages back. Sometimes, her family will throw up someone with magic. Sometimes it’s so diluted that they...can’t make sense of what they see, and they’re locked away. Her aunt was like that. Kept in a cellar for half her life. Adrien visited once, said he heard her, crying about…” He closed his eyes tight, just for a moment. “A baby, I think. Maybe hers. I don’t know. But the queen could only see it in blood, or red wine, sometimes, so she was safe. People don’t really bleed around queens, you know.”

“And the prince,” Laurent said, in a soft voice.

“When it rains,” Sabre said. “When he bathes. In his water glass.”

“Gods.”

“He never sees himself, though,” Sabre said. “He says he’s seen me, a few times. But it’s only flashes, you understand.”

“He saw you with Isiodore,” said Laurent.

“Yes. And he saw me fall off my horse. He saw me in the woods, with a sword, and there was…something terrible. He wouldn’t say.”

“They aren’t always true, though,” Laurent said. “The world would be a frightening place if people could tell the future with any accuracy.”

Sabre laughed, but it came out ragged. “He was right about the queen, though,” he said, and Laurent went still. “It was raining, you see, on the night she died.”

Sabre shouldn’t have been awake, at the time. He was in his family’s suites in the palace, playing a makeshift game with his father and a bag of candied nuts, up well past his bedtime. His mother was with Elise in their manor down the hill, and Sabre’s father had even let him try coffee, which tasted foul but was made tolerable if Sabre drained it through a mouthful of sugar.

When Adrien came to them, it sounded like the palace guard was trying to beat down the door.

“Stay put, Sabre,” his father had said, and rose to take his sword off the mantle before he opened the door. Adrien fell through it as it opened, a gangly mess of sobbing thirteen-year-old, his hair damp with the rain. Which was strange, Sabre thought at the time, because he shouldn’t have been outside.

“Arthur,” he said. “Uncle Arthur, it’s Mother. It’s Mother, she—”

“Show me where she is,” Sabre’s father said. Adrien bobbed his head like it was broken, and reached desperately for Sabre’s hand. When Sabre took it, Adrien’s palm was clammy and his skin feverish, and Sabre swallowed a tight knot of fear in his throat.

“She’s been strange all week,” Adrien said, shaking, as he trotted down the hall, Sabre’s father holding a naked blade at his side. “When she pricked her thumb, and she kept saying she had to do something. Had to change it. For, for Father.”

“What did she see,” Sabre’s father said.

“I don’t know,” Adrien wailed. “But I saw her in the window, with the rain, and there was blood all down her hands, and I went to her room and she wasn’t there, and Father’s gone to the stables to check but she wasn’t in the stables, I saw her in the rain and she was in the throne room—”

Sabre looked at his father, hand gripped tight in Adrien’s. “Dad.”

His father’s face was drawn, strangely cold. “Sabre. You need to take Adrien to Isiodore de Mortain’s suites, and wait there.”

But it was too late, because Adrien whimpered and tugged on Sabre’s hand, and Sabre heard it—the queen’s light, musical voice, humming the lullaby she used to sing while she sewed, but higher, faster, almost frantic. Adrien released Sabre and broke into a run, and Sabre’s father chased after him, grabbed him round the middle just as they reached the doors to the throne room—

Where the queen knelt, a knife at her side, her arms red with blood.

There was a circle at her knees, crossed with a symbol Sabre didn’t recognize, and the queen looked up, raised a hand to her mouth, and streaked blood across her cheek.

“Lianne,” Sabre’s father said. His voice was low, and Sabre could see it in his eyes, a heartbreak he didn’t recognize until he saw it in his own face when his father didn’t return from his hunt a year later. “What have you done?”

“They said it would save him.” The queen swayed, caught herself on the floor, and Sabre’s father threw Adrien at Sabre and ran to her side. Sabre and Adrien went tumbling onto the marble, and Sabre locked his arms around Adrien, grappling him, holding him close.

“They said it would save him,” the queen said again, as Sabre’s father knelt beside her, tearing strips of her own dress to bind her arms. “But all it’s done is show me, show me a boy. Not mine, not my Adrien. Just a boy, one of theirs, worthless—”

“Lianne, who said this? Who did you go to?”

“They swore,” the queen said. She looked over Sabre’s father’s shoulder, her gaze drifting strangely, slowly, like a doll in a theater. “No. No, he shouldn’t be here, he shouldn’t see—”

“Sabre, remove the prince from this room immediately,” his father snapped.

“No.” Adrien fought like a cat as Sabre tried to drag him up, scratching at him, struggling to break free. “No, she’ll die, Sabre, she’ll die.”

There was no holding him. Sabre hissed in pain as Adrien punched him feebly in the eye, and Adrien stammered out an apology as he stumbled across the floor towards his mother, who was slumped on Sabre’s father’s shoulder, whispering in his ear.

Then the doors slammed open, and the king appeared like a spirit of the storm, just in time to hold his wife as she died at the foot of his throne.

* * *

“Adrien wouldn’t speak for weeks,”Sabre said, pressing his lips to Laurent’s shoulder. “My father swore us to secrecy, and I swore a vow to the king, but there was no need, with Adrien. Something broke in him, I think. He went into himself, after. And the king…ah, well. That was when the executions started.”

Laurent was strangely still, his hands flat on Sabre’s lower back under the water. “She was trying to change the future.”

“That’s what we think.” Sabre sighed. “But all she saw was a boy. The Mislian who gave her the spell—Isiodore found him. Father disapproved of what they did. Said any confession he gave was worthless, under the knife. I didn’t ask what he meant.”

“No one spoke of a Mislian when they spoke of it to me,” Laurent said, again in that strange, quiet voice.

“They wouldn’t have. Father said he was looking for someone. To kill them. But he couldn’t find them, so when the queen asked for a spell…”

“Was it the boy?”

“That’s what Adrien believes.” Sabre wrapped his arms around Laurent’s neck. “He’s tried looking for him himself, you know, in bowls of water. Nothing. It doesn’t come on command, I guess, unless you have the spell for it. And Adrien never could sing. But the king thought the Mislian was after the queen, and him, and Adrien. He never learned what the queen saw that made her so desperate, and he’s been jumping at shadows ever since.”

“And you knew this,” Laurent said. “You knew this all along, and your mother and sister—”

“Never even asked,” Sabre said. “Not once.” He ran his hands down Laurent’s chest. “I do wonder about him. The boy she saw. I hope he survived just to spite them.”

“Stranger things do happen, apparently.” Laurent sounded a little like he was in shock, distant and hollow, and Sabre kissed his neck.

“Sorry. It’s a horrible story. Most of them are, in that family. Our family. My mother killed my father, Laurent. We’re all just circling disaster, and the only thing I can figure is I’ll probably find snow to be enlightening five minutes before I’m ambushed by rabid deer in the woods.”

“Remind me never to have you read my fortune,” Laurent said, and Sabre smiled into his shoulder.

“You know,” Sabre said. “I actually forgot. There was one thing the queen told me, when I asked her who I’d marry, but I figured she was probably just having a bit of fun at my expense.”

“Let me guess,” Laurent said. “They’d be wealthy beyond your wildest dreams.”

Sabre sat up to kiss him properly, slow and lingering. “Oh, no,” he said. “Not remotely. She said I’d marry the sun.”