Magician by K.L. Noone

Chapter 18

Later, with sunset coming on and lights aglow out in King’s Gate, Lorre slipped out the Great Hall’s side door and made his way down the slope of the hill. The sky flared rose and lemon and garnet above deep indigo mountain peaks, and the grass and earth lay quiescent under his feet.

He followed the time-worn path down to the lovingly tended stone house of the small Goddess-chapel, where he gave the door enough space for mutual wary respect, and went around the back, still barefoot, still bundled up in Gareth’s oversized Northern plaid.

He found the gravestones, and the memorial garden, also small and tidy but dotted with shade-giving trees and planted with mountain flowers, feathery white and blue and lavender blossoms that belonged here, native to their home. The kings and queens of the Marches did not go in for elaborate funeral statuary; the headstones were simple and straightforward, and the garden had benches for comfort, some covered against the rain and some left open. Anyone could come up here for solace, Lorre knew; that had always been the custom, and he couldn’t imagine Dan changing it.

He found Gareth sitting on one of the uncovered benches, a smooth graceful line of stone with curled edges.

One of the newer graves, among the carved headstones, sat nearby. Not the newest, but not yet a year old, with an inscription that spoke of being a father, and a husband, and a brother, and a king. On the bench, Gareth had pulled both legs up and wrapped his arms around them: uncharacteristically small for a moment, here in a cemetery with hair sneaking out of its tie and into his face.

He tucked it back behind an ear, and caught sight of Lorre. Lorre, at the edge of a swirl of blue and white petals, hesitated.

“You can come in.” Gareth made a little beckoning gesture at him. “It’s not private.”

“Isn’t it?”

“I knew you’d find me. How’s Hilda? And your shields? Should we have that talk about aqueducts versus reservoirs, and how your magic works?”

“Not now. It’s somewhere in between the two, anyway.” He made his way over. Each step might’ve landed on glass: fragile and poised to shatter. “Hilda’s got the basics of shield structure. She learns fast. I left her with Lily.”

“The Grand Sorceress. She seems nice.” Gareth rested his chin atop a knee. The bench was cool and pale as bone under ebbing but vivid streaks of light. “So, speaking of. You have a daughter.”

“I wish I had told you,” Lorre said. “I didn’t mean to not. I’m not a very good father, or I haven’t been. She’s Lily’s and Will’s, more than she is mine.”

“I wish you had told me, too, but it’s not about that. I like children.”

“You do? I mean…of course you do.”

Gareth let one leg swing free, brushing grass with a boot-tip. “I’ve wanted to be a father. To have a family. That is, someday. This’s a bit sudden. But I’m good with that. Really I am. I’d love to meet her.”

“Oh. Yes. Of course. I think I would, too. I’d like to know her. Not to interfere, just to…be there more often. If Lily and Will wouldn’t mind.” Healing, he thought again.

“Does she look like you? Or…” Gareth reconsidered his own phrasing. “Is that the wrong question again? I imagine it’s complicated. With your magic.”

“It’s not the wrong question, but I don’t know,” Lorre said. He didn’t. He’d promised not to check in. And he honestly wasn’t sure how that inheritance would’ve worked; he’d made himself look the way he wanted, and it was as real as any shapechange he ever did, but it wasn’t the face he’d been born with. “She isn’t magical at all, as far as we could tell. She did look like me, a little, when she was a baby…she has my eyes. The same shade of blue, and the shape. But we thought she’d have Lily’s chin, and hair, which is brown, by the way, when she’s not playing with color and sparkly gold stripes and all that. I wonder whether she likes storybooks. Merry, not Lily.”

“At eight? She’d probably love that children’s series Elsie’s reading, about the pirate queen. We could pick up a copy as a present.”

“Yes,” Lorre tried, cautiously. Grass stirred against his toes, as he waited beside the bench.

“You can sit down.” Gareth held out both hands to him. “You’re not interrupting.”

“I think I might be.”

“No. I was just…” Gareth shrugged a shoulder. In gleaming twilight, hair loose, he looked younger and older simultaneously: a boy sitting by his father’s memorial, tired happiness around his eyes. “Talking to Da. Asking for some advice. There’s a lot to catch up on.”

Lorre sat down beside him; their legs touched. The stone felt hard, but not unfriendly. The trees waved leafy branches encouragingly above. He did not know how to answer; he was not used to not knowing what to do, how to react.

He held Gareth’s hands in his. He said, “I’m guessing your father wouldn’t approve.”

“Oh, I’m thinking he would.” Sudden conspiratorial pleasure sparked in Gareth’s smile. “Who do you think gave me my first storybooks? He always liked fantastic heroic tales and poems. The grander and the more epic the better. He could recite his favorites word for word. And now we’re in one.”

“And you’ve saved the Marches.”

“You have.” Gareth’s gaze drifted back to unassuming grey stone, and the name carved there. “Maybe I helped, a bit.”

“I couldn’t’ve done any of this,” Lorre said, knowing it to be true, “without you.”

“I love you,” Gareth said, now looking down at the toe of his boot, and the grass, and a tiny sprig of wayward flowers. “So much. You’re trying to help.”

“You do it so well. I thought I’d make an attempt. Tell me. Please.”

“It’s just sort of everything.”

“I can be stubborn too.”

“You’ve changed the course of history,” Gareth said. “You’re practically immortal. You’ve been a dragon. Your former lover is the Grand Sorceress. And you’re going to go out and protect the whole world, now. What am I, next to all that?”

“You,” Lorre said, “are the person who convinced me to leave my island.”

Gareth looked up from the grass and the flowers, and looked at him.

“The only person,” Lorre said, “who ever did that.”

“Because you decided to. Not because of me.”

“You’re the person I wanted to know more about. The person who reminded me that other people are important. And also goats. And repairs to village fences. All of those.”

“You just like a good goat’s cheese,” Gareth retorted, but the corner of his mouth twitched.

“I don’t know if this is the appropriate time or place,” Lorre told him, “but I would very much like to kiss you.”

“The appropriate—” Gareth stopped, laughed, shook his head, laughed again. Then flung himself Lorre’s direction.

This kiss wasn’t the same sort of declaration as their kiss outside the Great Hall. It was a vow: deep, heart-true, shared between them. Gareth practically climbed into Lorre’s lap, broad hands sliding through Lorre’s hair, cradling his face. Lorre held onto him, tasted him, found Gareth’s tongue to tease with his: breathless and hot and private.

Hushed grass and gravestones and history lay around them in glimmering sunset light. The stones and earth and stories did not mind being witnesses, Lorre thought: kissing Gareth was all about life and joy and hope, and nothing in this peaceful place begrudged them that. Maybe, maybe, Gareth’s father even approved.

“I love you,” he breathed against the curl of Gareth’s ear, tasting bonfire hair and mountain air. “You found me.”

“I want that. Us finding each other.” Gareth sat back, straddling Lorre’s lap. His hair stood up in giddy auburn loops. Lorre’s fingers had done that. “I like the idea of travel. Seeing places I’ve only read about. Helping people. I’d also like to come home again, in between.”

“I know.” Lorre traced a heart over his back, silly and lopsided and only magical because it felt that way. “We can do that. I like it here.”

“Do you?” Gareth’s eyes brightened. “I don’t mind being away for weeks, or even months, as long as we do come back—if you want to spend the winters being warm on a tropical island—”

“I entirely want that. But we can drop in here whenever you want.” He drew a second heart. “I told you, you’re not hard to move around the world. So distinctive.”

Gareth wriggled a little in his lap. “Is that distinctive enough?”

“Delicious. I’ll toss us into bed in a minute.” Lorre took a breath, felt the jump of his own pulse, wrapped both arms around his prince. “I can’t make you immortal. I’m not. I’m not even invulnerable. You could kill me. You’d have to surprise me, and you’d have to make it instant, so I couldn’t heal. But you could find a way. It’s possible.”

Gareth’s expression lay somewhere between incredulous and exasperated and in love. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Someday you might find me unbearably annoying?”

“Lorre,” Gareth said, and kissed him, with a tiny scolding bite at the end.

“What I mean,” Lorre said, adjusting his arms around Gareth, “is that it’s always possible that I could die tomorrow. I have a lot of enemies.”

“I’m not sure I’m enjoying this conversation.”

“I’m trying to make a point. You could die tomorrow, or I could.”

“All right,” Gareth said. “I see. It’s not as uneven as it sounds.”

“Yes. And…I think…” He hadn’t worked out how best to explain this part, but he was relatively sure about it. “I think I can give you…more. Obviously my wards, shields, healing, all that. But I think, if you want…if you spend enough time with me, around me, my magic…and if I want it enough, if we both want it enough…you’ll pick some of it up. Not doing magic, but…being. In some ways.”

“Longer life,” Gareth said. His expression was complicated again, and extremely human.

“Something like that. Being part of the light between everything, the connections, the rightness.” He ran a hand over Gareth’s back. “You existing feels right. And I want you with me, and what I want tends to happen, and…I think it’ll spill over. Onto you. Ah. Magic, not a terribly timed sex joke. I told you I’d say the wrong thing.”

Gareth glanced down at the bench for a second, regarding tree-shadowed dry stone. “Would I live as long as you? Starting from now, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” Lorre said honestly. “I want to think so. But I really don’t know. And I don’t know what happens to me, eventually. Not soon. Centuries away, probably. But I told you once…I think sometimes that I’ll be something else, in the end. Sometimes when it all feels like magic, inside, and I can’t only be one thing anymore, because I’m everything…”

“Maybe you’d be the land itself,” Gareth said, softly; and then met Lorre’s eyes. “Caring for the whole world. Could I stay with you? Even then?”

Lorre had no words, for a moment. “Yes. I think—I think so. Yes.”

“Well.” Gareth bit his lip, looked thoughtful, then grinned. “Yes, then.”

“You…what?”

“I’m your anchor,” Gareth told him. Truthful, certain, as committed to a course as he’d been the day he’d jumped ashore on an island beach. “I’m not leaving you. You need me. And this feels right. You know how much I like helping people.”

“Yes, but—just like that—you just said yes—”

“This’s only a bigger scale of helping. We’ll do what we can, here and now, and then next week, and wherever we go after that, and then we’ll worry about someday when we get there.”

“Your family—”

“We’ll still see them. It’s not as if we’re going anywhere.” Gareth reached out, brushed a strand of gold away from Lorre’s right cheekbone. “We’ll get to see all of them. Your Merry as she grows up, and Dan’s children—if he ever gets around to asking Rebecca to dance—and grandchildren, and their children and grandchildren. We’ll get to keep the world safe and happy for all of them. And we’ll have time to read every new novel that’s ever published, and play with every tiny new barn-kitten that’s born, and watch every wildflower bloom. That’s not sounding so bad.”

“Hero,” Lorre said, very quiet because he was in awe.

“Everything’s beautiful, I told you once.” Gareth twirled the strand of Lorre’s hair around his finger, tugging. “And we’re here for a purpose. So let’s be here. Also I get to be with you. Which will never get boring, all full of magic and sometimes sex diamonds. And turning the cheese in my pack into cream.”

“We’re not talking about that one.”

“I’m not saying I minded. Feel free to cover me in cream, if you’d like. As often as you’d like. Forever.”

“I like your plan.” Lorre leaned in for another kiss. “It’ll make a good ending for the legendary Gareth ballad cycle. Or not an ending. A continuation. More verses to come.”

Gareth only winced a little at the teasing, but answered seriously. “I think it’s a very old ending. And a true one. Happily, for ever after.”

“It’s what heroes get,” Lorre said. “It’s what you deserve.”

“So do you,” Gareth told him. “My magician.”