Magician by K.L. Noone

Chapter 12

“I could be a raindrop,” Lorre said. He was looking at the puddles, and the morning storm, mournfully. The storm chattered back, merrily dismissive. “Then I wouldn’t have to walk anywhere.”

“You could, but wouldn’t you show up naked when we get where we’re going?” Gareth emerged from a wardrobe to hand over a large length of heavy plaid, blue and green. “Here, wrap yourself up.”

“I could make an actually fashionable coat out of this, you know. And…if I’m trying…I can bring clothing along.”

“Oh, can you.” Gareth paused to grin at him. “So you just wanted to be naked, on the boat.”

“Hoping to scandalize you. No, though…I can shapeshift with clothing, but it’s trickier on the other end. Disentangling. So I tend not to.” He hesitated, remembered other years of efforts to explain, hoped Gareth would magically understand. “I can ask the…the parts that aren’t me, that’re clothing, to come along, if we’re being an eagle or a hedgehog…but then we all end up being a hedgehog, and then when I’m pulling it all apart again, after asking…”

“It’s harder.” Gareth had been finding a boot; he turned it over in his hands, looking at good leather and a well-crafted sole; and then looked up at Lorre. “I get it, I think. Of course I don’t, not really, not being magic, but I think I see. You’ve asked it to be something, and got it tangled up with you, and then you have to un-ask it, and sort it out.”

“It’s possible. But annoying.”

“And you know you’re marvelous naked.”

Lorre, startled, laughed.

“Well, you are. And you do know it.” Gareth pulled the boot on. With tied-back hair and a clinging dark blue shirt and practical trousers, he was a well-muscled foothill of happiness, still grinning, and pleased about the laughter. “Is that why it’s harder bringing someone along? When you move us about.”

“Essentially. It’s easier to move myself fifty miles than an army five miles. Not that I couldn’t move the army—I have—but it’s more to keep track of. One other person isn’t bad, though, and you’re very distinctive.”

Gareth’s eyes danced. “Am I?”

Lorre had meant it as fact, a statement; looking at Gareth’s face, he realized the truth of it went deeper than that. He looped Gareth’s ridiculously oversized mountain plaid around himself, being willing. “You are. You feel like…well, you’re you. I’d never mistake you for anyone else.”

Gareth stared at him for a second, then bounded over and flung arms around him and kissed him. Thoroughly. In a tumult of plaid and auburn hair and delight. “That might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“The sex diamonds weren’t enough?”

“Goddess, I—” Gareth broke off, shook his head, laughed. “Lorre. Sex diamonds. No, it’s just…I really am ordinary. Just another person asking for your help. A prince from a tiny goat-farming kingdom in the mountains. I’m only the heir right now because Dan’s been too busy to think about getting married, but I know for a fact Rebecca’s not bringing over raspberry jam every week purely out of sympathy. I won’t be next in the line of succession, after that.”

Lorre put both arms around him, liking the feel of him. The rain pattered down, steady. “I’m still trying to work out why that was a compliment.”

“I’m not anyone in particular,” Gareth said. “I never have been. I never wanted to be, you know that. But then you tell me I’m a hero, you tell me I’m someone you can want, you tell me I’m someone unmistakable…and, you know, I almost feel like that, when you say it. Like it’s some sort of magic, and I can share in it, and I’m not any less me for that, but maybe…even more.”

His eyes were bright; his whole expression was bright, and he was beautiful. Lorre drew a lazy spiral over the muscles of his back, over clothing. “You’re all of that. More. You always were. It’s in the shape of you.” And not mine, he thought. Not anything I could ever deserve. I know.

“Did you draw something magic on me?”

“No. Only abstract art. I wouldn’t need to draw.” He caught flecks of lightning from the sky, calmed them down to tiny tingling crackles, drummed sparking fingertips over Gareth’s back. Gareth’s breath skipped, eyes darkening: apparently now conditioned to instant arousal at the touch of Lorre’s magic. Lorre kissed him for that, taking his mouth; Gareth yielded readily for plundering.

Pulling back, after, Lorre suggested, “We could stay here. In bed.” Gareth’s body seemed interested in that idea.

“We can’t.” Gareth sighed. Hunted for his hair tie, which Lorre had pulled out. “Not that I don’t want to. I do, believe me. But we’ve got things to do. People to visit.”

“Such a responsible prince.”

“I try. Come on, we’ve got to make a stop in the kitchens and pick up some of Dan’s baking to deliver.”

“Kitchens,” Lorre said. “And visiting people. In the rain.”

“You can be a raindrop if you’d like.”

“Don’t tempt me.”

“You could sit on my shoulder. Keep me company. Where is my—”

Lorre held up the hair tie. Gareth grinned at him, and took it. Raindrops twirled and spun and made streamers along the window, finding friends.

They spent the morning out in the town, stopping by various places. Gareth knew everyone, and everyone knew him; he wandered around saying hello to the blacksmith, the cooper, the candlemaker, the brewmistress, Rebecca the apothecary, who asked bashfully how Dan was today, whether he was working too hard or finding time to try new recipes, and whether he’d like some fresh lavender for baking purposes. Gareth handed over a basket containing a luscious loaf of rosemary bread woven into the shape of the apothecary’s symbol above her shop; Rebecca sighed mistily. Lorre concluded that Gareth’s brother, despite being overworked and apparently having once fallen off a cow, had good instincts about romantic gestures.

Through all these visits, Gareth was working, Lorre understood: asking how his people were, checking in on livelihoods threatened by killing cold, making sure everyone had enough to eat, wanting to know what everyone thought of the proposed new road going eastward to Yarrow, wondering whether they thought buying a new mechanical reaper would be worth the expense, if the royal purse paid for it. He knew the names of all their goats and chickens.

Lorre, watching him deliver a basket of Dan’s scones and listen with unfeigned interest to the shopkeeper’s complaints about merchants who were too afraid to travel North at the moment, thought about how good a prince Gareth was. How at home he was: here in a local village, caring for others.

Lorre himself stayed quiet, lingering in the background. He did not want to disrupt Gareth’s work; he did not want to frighten anyone.

He listened to the web of his senses, and the shimmer of the cold; he silently put some more of his own body heat into the morning, to keep rambling goats warm up on the mountain pastures. The Marches needed cheese to sell.

A few people grinned at him, or winked, or even offered him tea or gingerbread. Lorre, surprised at being spoken to, accepted every time. Gareth looked thrilled about this turn of events.

They’d handed diamonds over to Gareth’s brother at breakfast. Dan had looked at the newly presented handful—not too many, and none too large, but significant for a country whose wealth lay in goats and cheese and stone—and had said, “Should I ask?”

Gareth had blushed an impressive amount. Lorre had thought about finances and economic destabilizations and the problem of himself, and had offered, “I can try to not let it happen again?”

Gareth had promptly started, “But it was so—” and then stopped, dismayed either at what he’d nearly said in front of his brother or at the idea of magical sex never happening again. Lorre wasn’t sure which. Potentially both.

“Now I definitely don’t want to know,” Dan had said, folding precious stones back up in their napkin. “But thank you. We could use it. It’s been hard, these last months.”

Going out, descending the Great Hall’s steps in wind-whipped morning air, Gareth had said quietly to Lorre, “Dan’s been worried about money. It’s not bad yet, and it won’t be, now. But after all the raids, and the loss of food, grain, crops…he’s been spending what we had in the treasury, and it wasn’t that much, to bring enough in from Averene and Penth and Kiersk. He won’t let anyone starve.”

“Was it that close?”

“Not yet. Da left our finances in good shape, and we’d spend every last penny before we’d let someone go hungry. But we were never wealthy. And the land hadn’t recovered at all, until you. Dan’s better with numbers than I am, and he was looking more than concerned. So thank you.”

“It’s not as if it was on purpose,” Lorre had said, and then felt guilty, for no clear reason. “If you want me to pull that copper out of the hills for you, I can do that.”

“You can do so much.” Gareth’s smile had been real but sad, in a way, around the edges. “Thank you again.”

They checked in at the small grammar school, and Gareth chatted with the petite amber-eyed schoolteacher, a young woman barely out of school herself, with ink-dark hair and matching skin and a polished accent that wouldn’t’ve been out of place at King Henry’s royal table down in Averene. Her name was Miss Kaya, and Gareth asked about money for slates and supplies, and promised to come in and talk to the youngest children about books and maps sometime. Miss Kaya regarded him with the expression of someone who’d very much like to ask a prince to dance at the next rustic harvest fair, but also with a hint of newfound awe. She eyed Lorre with the wariness of someone who’d heard stories.

She was a schoolteacher, and human. Lorre should not, and did not, care what she thought of him. Or how she looked at Gareth.

He poked at a smudge of dust near a desk, on the schoolhouse floor. Made some chalk wobble around the front board.

And then he felt guilty about that too, and asked all the dust to unobtrusively gather itself up, and got the desks to line up neatly, and talked the floors and walls and windows into remembering how they’d shone when bright and brand new.

“You know,” Gareth said, after that visit, “you don’t have to worry.” The wind tugged at his hair, teasing it out and up.

“About what?”

“She’s a lovely person, but she’s much younger than I am, we pay her salary, and I’m sharing a bed with you.”

“I’m three hundred years older than you.”

“Oh,” Gareth said, utterly deadpan, “only two hundred and seventy-three years, that’s not that bad…” and then grinned at him.

They made their way through the scattered sprawl of King’s Gate, and the cool rain-splashed day. Gareth shifted the last few baskets of Dan’s baking into one arm, and used his free hand to lace Lorre’s fingers into his own.

Young Elsie’s aunt turned out to be the local midwife, who had a small but well cared-for cottage on the outskirts of the village. She welcomed them in, and poured more ubiquitous hearty Mountain Marches shepherd’s tea. Lorre, being polite to the best of his ability, sighed internally and took it.

Gareth said, to Elsie, “Of course you know I’m saving the best of Dan’s cream cakes for you,” and pulled out a lovely vanilla and lavender cake, with a flourish. “Mind if I share, though? Just a bit? He wouldn’t let me have any. So cruel, my brother. Heartless.”

She giggled, just a little, and promptly gave him a piece. Thin and pretty, with big brown eyes, she was clearly adored by her aunt, though Lorre guessed she would be missing and mourning her father. If Gareth had been young to lose his, this girl was even more so: only a child of ten.

Gareth, he thought, would think that wasn’t fair. That life shouldn’t happen that way. Gareth would try to fix it. With cream cakes.

Gareth put most of the slice into his mouth, and a dramatic hand over his heart. “Restored by your generosity. And forever in your debt. Shall I bring you a book in repayment? Anything you might be needing, that your humble prince can provide?” He threw a look at her aunt, and then mock-whispered, loudly, “Tell me if Aunt Eleanor eats all your cream cakes, and I’ll bring you more. She looks hungry to me.”

Aunt Eleanor rolled her eyes, but her smile was fond. Elsie giggled more, and asked whether he knew if the latest storybook about Jane the Pirate Queen was in the shop yet. Gareth vowed to find out and bring it over if so.

Lorre eyed the ominous dark swirls of his tea. Shifted weight, leaning against the wall in the cottage’s snug kitchen.

Eleanor said to him, “Honey?” and took his cup away and brought it back. “Here you are, then.”

“Thank you.”

“He’s a strong one, our Gareth.” She watched Lorre’s face as she said it. “More than he knows. Trying hard to be here for us all.”

“And good with children and small animals.”

“He is, yes.” They both looked at Gareth, for a moment. She went on, “His heart’s made for loving people. A family. A home. Deep roots, even when they’re hurting.”

“I know,” Lorre said to his tea. “I know.” His borrowed Northern plaids had not felt so out of place, earlier, though they remained warm.

“And you care for him.”

“Do I?”

“Why else would you be here?” Her smile quirked. The silver in her black hair caught the lamplight, burning against the grey of the rain. “The world’s greatest magician, up here in the mountains, drinking tea in my kitchen. Don’t tell me you’re not here for him.”

“He asked for help. And I…” He studied the delicate painted teacup in his hands. “I wanted to help.”

Looking up, he discovered the softening in her gaze; this woman had seen loss and life, births and deaths, and the cares that came with her profession. She looked at him now, and said only, “Then you will. And thank you.”

“Don’t,” Lorre said. “It’s not enough. Me, I mean. Whatever I do.”

“It’s a start.” She sipped her own tea. “And that’s enough to begin. We do what we can, every day.”

“You know who I am. You all know.”

“Yes, and you’re here in my kitchen, pretending that’s enough honey for you, staring at our Gareth like he’s the first sunshine you’ve ever seen, and also you were making sure neither of you had muddy boots when you came in.” She took his tea away and added more sweetness, and gave it back. “Which was nice of you.”

“I’m not nice,” Lorre grumbled. The extra honey helped.

Gareth came over, having been thoroughly hugged by Elsie and also reminded about the book-promise. “Sorry, Aunt Ellie, we should be going, I said I’d look at the Widow Thatcher’s fence where that tree came down, and also some of the frostbitten land around those barns, to see what we could do.”

“Go on.” She patted his shoulder. “You say hello to your mother for me. And your brother. Tell him to ask Rebecca to dance at the next fair.”

“He’ll trip over his own feet,” Gareth said contentedly, “which means we’ll all get to watch. Thanks for the tea, and for, well. Being here.” He glanced at Elsie as he said it, and nodded to Eleanor, who smiled back.

They followed a path, and found a fence, in the rain, under a spinning coil of magical umbrella. Gareth said, “What did she want to talk to you about?” He was looking at the large fallen tree-trunk and the broken fence-boards, and his tone was carefully light. “I heard my name.”

“She adores you. Everyone does. I think I’ve been warned in very courteous terms not to hurt you. I can move that tree.”

“I’d rather we save you for the areas around the barns and storehouses and pastures, if you don’t mind—” He stopped, because Lorre had held out an invisible hand and asked the fallen trunk if it would be all right with being lifted, shifted, set down. “Oh. Well. Thank you.”

“Thank it, not me.” He petted the trunk with ghostly fingers; even fallen, the tree fit into the universe. It occupied a place, the way everything did: a small stitch in the tapestry of light. He trailed his touch through rings and knotholes and time, acknowledging its existence. He promised that it would be of use, one more time: a table, a new beam for a roof, a fire to keep someone warm. “Have someone make something with it.”

Gareth looked at him, and said, “Yes, of course,” and touched his shoulder briefly. “I’ll do the fence, though. That’s not hard, and I want you to look at the earth, after, and the magic.”

“Fine. Would you like any help? Less mud to stand in?”

“Well…maybe. Nothing big.” Gareth had picked up a few boards and nails from behind the house—dropped off by a neighbor, he’d said—and started examining the fence. He was elemental, vital, practical: a prince who’d readily turn his hand to anything someone needed. With rippling muscles. “Ellie, my brother, Matthias…why does everyone think I need protecting?”

Lorre sat down on an intact fence-post. Called water and wetness up out of the mud, until Gareth stood in a small dry patch. Turned the drops into a small lazy school of fish: made of water, swimming and circling mid-air. “It’s not that. Not exactly.”

“I’m not six years old.”

“No. But…” He made the fish leap upward. “You’re very nice. And you like heroic tales. And they love you. They don’t want you to be hurt, because they love you.” He watched Gareth’s arms, shoulders, biceps. He knew what he’d meant, answering.

“They could say it to me.” Gareth found a satisfactory board, and nails, and a hammer. “Not to you. That’s not fair.”

“Hero. They all know I’m dangerous. It’s just you who keeps trusting me. No, look, it’s not about you. Or it is, but…” He waved a hand. Droplet-fish eddied and spun. “People are people. And they’ve been scared—they’ve lost both food and family lately, you know that—and they don’t want to lose their prince. That’s very…well. Very human.”

“You say it as if you’re not.” Gareth finished with a fence-rail, examined it, nodded in approval. If he’d flinched at the reminder of losing people—a father, or an uncle off riding with bandits—he hadn’t shown it. “We’ll just make this strong enough so her pigs can’t get out…You’re human, too.”

“Mostly not.”

“Half, you said. But I didn’t mean all that.” Gareth waved a hand in illustration: the fish, dry ground, his own boots not slipping in mud. “You understand what people need. More than you think you do.”

“Understanding doesn’t mean I like them.”

Gareth laughed. And went back to the fence. Whistling. Off-key.

Lorre sighed, and wondered whether he could accidentally drop some watery enchanted fish on his prince’s head, and whether Gareth would mind being attractively wet all over, and then—after some thorough appreciation—magically dried off.

After the fence, Gareth took him out to the fields and communal barns and storehouses, the sites of the latest raids. Lorre took one step into the dead flat expanse of ground and winced.

Gareth said, “You can feel it?” His expression was both hopeful and concerned.

“I’m surprised you can’t. Even with human senses.” Ice seared through the ground, his boots, his skin. Winter gnawed at roots, hungry even now, in the aftermath. The wood of the barn was grey and dull. “It’s all wrong.”

It was. Twisted, out of season, crying. The bandits had taken stores of preserved meat, apples, cheese, bread; they’d taken oats, hay and grasses, food for their horses, as well. What hadn’t vanished remained frost-white and ice-bitten.

The land, the barn, the apples and cheese all knew this wasn’t right. They’d been hurt. They wanted to feed their people, their goats, their shaggy cows; they knew they could not, now. They did not know how to fix it.

“Is there anything you can do?”

“Yes. Give me a minute.” Lorre wandered further into the desolation, paused, started rolling up trouser-legs. And kicked off his boots and socks, despite cold and mud and crunchy ice-crystals underfoot.

Gareth opened his mouth, chose not to interrupt, and shut it again.

Oh, that was better: feeling, touching, drinking in the sensations. Lorre wiggled bare toes and let the anguish and the presence rise up: broken grass, rhythms as off as Gareth’s ability to carry a tune, but blooming with hope. Someone had heard; someone was here; the land knew and rejoiced at him.

He sat down amid grey-brown desiccated grass-clumps, near a barn. Flattened one hand over the ground. Promised it voicelessly: I’m here, I did hear you, you’re not alone, I’m you and you’re me, let’s see what we can solve.

Gareth came over and sat down with him, but did not touch him. Some earlier awe had returned: reverence creeping in like dawn over the hills. Admiration. Fascination.

Ballads and legends and hero-worship, Lorre thought. The thought cut deep, but he did not have the time to worry about it now; he was busy.

He shut his eyes and fell into wounded fractured dimming light. The threads of the world lay frayed and frightened, here. The once-golden thrumming beat, the weaving of time and place and seasons and tastes, the ripe bursting of a plum, the buzzing of bees, the swaying of grasses in wind and rain and clear Northern sun…

Those felt thinner, now. Bruised. Health stolen away.

I’m sorry, he told it all wordlessly. It was hurting, so he was hurting, because he was it, and it was himself: the same lacy swirls of amber and sapphire and silver and indigo ran through his own being. Healing the world meant healing himself; it always had.

He touched the wound of it, the cold. Hunger blinded him for a moment: starvation, privation, a snowstorm. He became need: desperate, craving, coming down from the high passes earlier this year, because nothing was left, nothing but stones and snow and ice, and the people of the Marches would have food, and if there was food it could be taken…with ice and dark and cold, it could be taken, a fear and a pain become a weapon, and if anyone stood guard the cold would sweep across them too…

The world cried, in distress.

I know, he answered. I know. It hurts. It’s wrong. But it won’t come again. I’m the river and the sunlight and the rocks and the trees, I am the roots down in the soil and the sweetness of summer strawberries, and I will not let us be hurt again. Here—

He put a hand into the well of himself, the spot where so many threads of light gathered—he’d always imagined it lived somewhere behind his heart, a knot inside his chest, though he knew it wasn’t physical in that sense—and poured magic and life and being out across the tapestry that was them. The land and the crops and the barn knew who they were, and who they ought to be; Lorre, who was also them, held the shapes gently and flowed into each one and filled them up, while his current physical body sat motionless on muddy ground with a prince gazing wide-eyed at him.

The world changed, almost soundlessly. A rustle of motion. An exhaled breath. A leap of green, a quickening.

Lorre felt rather than saw the change. He let the pulse of it tug at his bones, at his blood.

He could sink down into the soil and dissolve into its drum-beats. He could shed his joints and ligaments in a leaping flying gust of drops amid the trees and streams and grasses. He could stop being human altogether, and run with the storm and the crackling life and the renewed singing of fluttering leaves, and not look back.

He could vanish into clouds and light, untethered—

A hand rested over his. He had a hand, then: it could be touched.

The swirl of magic that was Lorre felt the touch with some surprise, and came back, curious.

The presence beside him shone like polished wood, like bronze and gold, like the treasure of fresh-baked bread and much-adored books and a well-gathered harvest. It was made of steady hearthlight and an inability to whistle on-key, plus a bright quirk of love for stories about heroes and other worlds, and the sort of determined compassion that’d reach out to be an anchor for a magician lost mid-spell.

Gareth was real. The touch was real. Lorre had never felt anything so real as that.

He opened both eyes. He’d lost his rain-shield at some point, and the sky dripped like a weary pipe above them, splashes hitting his shoulder. “Didn’t I tell you once that touching a magician could be dangerous?”

“You did.” Gareth was kneeling in new green grass beside him. His hair was rumpled, as if he’d raked a hand through it, and his grip on Lorre’s hand was tight. “And I told you I can’t do nothing. You were—fading away. Disappearing. I couldn’t watch—I’ll apologize for interrupting if you want, but I didn’t think you’d leave me without saying so, and I thought, if you needed a reminder…”

“You were right.” Lorre shut his eyes again for a second, felt the air in his lungs, tried to tell himself he did not have branches for hair and raindrops in his veins. “Thank you. But it was still dangerous.”

“I know,” Gareth said. “But I’d do it again. I can’t lose you, Lorre, I—I can’t.”

“No, you need me.” His other hand lay loosely against the ground; he petted the earth absently. “Your land’s happier now. And everything left in your stores should be as good as it was before the last raid.”

Gareth was looking at him with an indecipherable expression: fondness, exasperation, concern, so many complicated human languages of emotion. “You didn’t hear me, did you? Or maybe—never mind.” He shook his head, sighed, ran his thumb over the back of Lorre’s hand. “Do you need to be something else, for a while? A hawk, or an oak, or the river? I didn’t mean to bring you back. If you’re needing that.”

“I want to feel this,” Lorre said. He was looking at Gareth’s hand, caressing his. His body felt more like his own—more like something he’d chosen, wanted, come back to—than it had for quite some time. He felt almost new: as if he’d shaped himself all over again and then gazed at the mirror, seeing that self for the first time. “Do we need to do anything? Tell your people the stores are back? Well, some of them. Only what was left, not what was stolen. Though I might be able to do that too.”

“Can you?”

“Maybe. That’s me being honest, not modest. I’m good at finding things when I know what they are. But I haven’t met your missing grain and cheeses and everything. I don’t know them. And of course if all the food’s been eaten that’s nearly impossible to get back. You wouldn’t want me to try.”

“I really wouldn’t. This’ll be enough, I think—with the restored pastures, and everything you’ve already done…”

“It’s not enough. Someone’ll have to deal with your bandits.”

“Yes, but not now. You can rest.”

“I don’t need to,” Lorre said, and then discovered, getting up, that his legs disagreed.

Gareth caught him. “Sit down. Right here. This’s a nice wheelbarrow. What can I do? Tell me.”

“No, it’s not that…it’s just. I have legs. This shape. They work in this particular way. Or they’re supposed to.”

“I’m not not worrying.” Gareth crouched in front of him, gathered Lorre’s hands, rubbed them. “Look at me? Feeling things helps, you said?”

“Yes.” He closed his hands around Gareth’s. “You’re an anchor.”

“I can be that. I can be good at that.” Gareth squeezed their hands. Rain slid through his hair like crystals and pearls, light against smoky red. “Here, you’re feeling this, right? You’re here and I’m here.”

“I can stand up.” He could, and did, pulling Gareth up: face to face under fluttering rain, himself still barefoot, Gareth’s fingers callused and strong. Lorre had never been so aware of each breath, the texture of damp ground against the soles of his feet, the singing of his skin where they were touching, the hammering of his heart. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I wouldn’t leave you. Not without telling you.”

“I didn’t think you would.”

“I promise,” Lorre said, “I promise, Gareth, I won’t.”

“And you don’t lie to me.” Gareth’s eyes met Lorre’s, and stayed there. A drop landed over his left cheekbone.

“I felt you,” Lorre said, “and I came back. My hero.” And he kissed Gareth, then, in that moment: because he had to, because he could do nothing else, because if he didn’t he’d whisper I think I love you or get on both knees and swear to be better, to do better, to be whatever his prince wanted, if he could just have that anchor, that compass, that touch, again.

Gareth tasted like rain and strong unsweetened tea, and Lorre drank him in, licked up the flavors of him, pulled him closer. Gareth kissed him back, unhesitating, matching his need. The scents of wet grass and happy soil rose around them; Gareth murmured Lorre’s name, one hand gripping borrowed heavy plaid, bunching fabric against Lorre’s skin. His body was firm and excited and eager, and Lorre kissed the line of his throat, tasted his skin, left a pink heated mark.

Gareth moaned at that. Lorre did it again, lower, with a hand finding and pressing against the bulge in Gareth’s trousers. Gareth arched against him, but whispered, “Are you sure—Lorre, you couldn’t stand, a moment ago…”

“That has nothing to do with this.” He rubbed hard; Gareth groaned again, the length of him jutting up and begging for attention. “Or everything. In a way. I’m here and you’re here and I want to feel you—I want to feel you when you spend yourself, all your pleasure—so real—please let me—”

He hadn’t meant to say that. To beg.

Gareth’s lips parted, but then he breathed, “Yes—Lorre, yes, all of it,” and his cock jumped and pulsed, as Lorre stroked him through his trousers.

“I want,” Lorre told him, “I want to feel you, all over my hand—” and undid Gareth’s trousers with a thought, and gripped him, worked him, pumped the slick dripping length. He had a hand on Gareth’s hip, and a sizzle of need and magic under his skin; he pushed a flare of it, a sparkling pulsing tendril, back behind Gareth’s taut balls, and up: caressing and teasing and pushing into his hole.

Gareth cried out, stiffening in his arms; he began to come, shuddering and ecstatic, spilling himself all over Lorre’s hand and his own undone clothing, spurt after spurt. The sensation spread over Lorre’s fingers, skin, everywhere: sticky and hot and male and real and present.

Gareth gazed at him, panting, still trembling from climax; and then slid to his knees, right there in the mud behind the barn, and tugged at Lorre’s clothing with frantic hands. “Can I—?”

Lorre, wordless—that sight, Gareth profoundly lost to bliss because of him, had nearly pushed him over the edge—only managed to nod. Gareth fumbled for his cock, drew him out. Took him into that sweet kiss-pinkened mouth.

Gareth was enthusiastic and devoted, and Lorre was on the brink already. Each sight, his length plunging into Gareth’s wet mouth, Gareth’s trousers undone and the stickiness of him still on Lorre’s hand—

That was it; that was enough. He was abruptly there, and the radiance crested and broke and burst, and he poured himself out into Gareth’s happy mouth, swept away in release.

The storm erupted. Thunder. Lightning. Dazzling and drenching.

Gareth swallowed, sat back, and started laughing: bright and glorious, hair plastered to his face, messy and wonderful.

Lorre tugged him up and batted water and release away from soaked clothing, hair, skin; they ran for the barn, hand in hand. The refuge welcomed them.

Gareth, still laughing, peeked out at the storm. “You do like water, don’t you? We should go up to the Hall, Dan’ll want to know about this—the food stores, the pastures, I mean, not what we were doing—”

I like you, Lorre thought. You’re too kind and too good at heart and I like seeing you smile. You make me wish I believed in heroes, and also, by the way, I’m in love with you. I don’t want to disappear, to leave you, to go someplace you aren’t—

He knew Gareth loved the Marches. Home. Family.

He knew his own presence only ever brought trouble. A disruption. A power. Politics. The Grand Sorceress riding North.

A bushel of revived apples watched him silently from a corner. It did not comment; it did not need to.

“Yes,” he said to Gareth. “I’ll take us back.”