Happily ever after doesn’t always come quietly. Sometimes it puts up a fight.
Kjartan’s family is royally dysfunctional. He’d prefer to ignore the lot of them, but
can’t since his father has set him and his brothers on a quest to win a throne Kjartan
doesn’t even want. Worse, his younger brother resorts to murder and forces Kjartan to
teleport—without looking where he’s going.
Art gallery worker Joel Wilson’s day has gone from hopeless, to hopeful, then
straight to hell. One minute he’s sure his boss has found a way to save the floundering
business, the next he’s scrambling to sell everything to pay off a loan shark. If anyone
needs a fairy godmother right now, it’s Joel. What he gets is a fugitive elven prince in a
trash bin.
They’ll both have to make the best of it, because fairy tales run roughshod over
reluctant heroes. Particularly when there aren’t enough happy endings to go around.
Warning: This sweet romance contains a starving artist trying to scrape together a
living, extreme sibling rivalry, royalty behaving outrageously, and elves being
unreasonably beautiful, grotesque or deadly.
eBooks are not transferable.
They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or
have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual
events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
11821 Mason Montgomery Road Suite 4B
Cincinnati OH 45249
Too Many Fairy Princes
Copyright © 2013 by Alex Beecroft
ISBN: 978-1-61921-742-3
Edited by Anne Scott
Cover by Lou Harper
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First
Too Many Fairy Princes
Alex Beecroft
Dedication
To everyone who has ever written me an email of support or left me a friendly
comment on any of my blogs. You make it all worthwhile. Thank you.
Chapter One
There once was a king who had three sons.
That was how the tale should have started, Volmar thought, as he eased his
disintegrating bones on a throne grown too hard. What kind of a tale starts with “There
once was a king who had five sons and tried to live forever so he could afford to kill them
all”?
King Volmar of Vagar withdrew his stormy gaze from the sea that curled in steel-
grey waves below the open balcony of his throne room, withdrew his hearing from the
cries of the gulls, and looked again on the three dutiful boys who stood below the dais, as
decked out, primped and prepared as their maid and manservants could make them. He
sighed and motioned to his chamberlain with a creaky wrist. “And the other one is…?”
“On his way, my lord. I sent a messenger only a heartbeat ago. He assures me the
prince will not be long now.”
“He’d better not be,” said the king, rubbing his fingers comfortingly over the sceptre
carved from the queen’s thighbone. This was all her fault. Everything was always her
fault. “Or we’ll strike him out and go with the traditional number after all.”
“My prince…”
Kjartan looked up from the pot of gold leaf he had been using to gild his nails and
found the chamberlain’s messenger still there, hovering in the doorway like an omen. He
raised an eyebrow in permission, and the elf ducked under the lintel and wrung his hands.
“You are to present yourself before the king. It is not a request, my prince, and your
father is not a patient man. For your own sake, go see what he commands.”
“He has called for his sons. He will forget I belong among them. He always does,
and I will hear of whatever it is later, sparing myself his company in the process.”
Too Many Fairy Princes
7
“For my sake then. He will punish me if I do not bring you.”
All ten fingers glittered now, the same red-gold as Kjartan’s robes, the same as
painted his eyelids and hung in softly chiming chains from the circlet that held back his
sweeping silver hair. When he looked in the mirror, he saw he had already achieved
perfection.
He had played every instrument in the citadel and read every book, interviewed
every ambassador and won every game. He had walked all the corridors and knew the
nests and names of the riding birds, had tried each one and learned their foibles. And he
looked as exquisite as it was possible to look. He sighed.
“Oh, very well. I have nothing better to do.”
His brothers were there before him—naturally. For all their own disregard of their
father’s wishes, they had none of them the guts to defy him. Not since Dagnar, the
favourite, had been disowned and thrown to the wolves.
Bjarti stood closest to the grey stone throne, on the step of silver beneath it reserved
for the crown prince. Though he was bright as a poppy with that red hair, he stood with
the calm patience of a stone. A pair of swords crossed in scabbards at his back, and a
morning star and an axe hung from either side of a belt otherwise decorated with the
shrunken heads of his enemies. Solid as a stone, content as a stone, and every bit as
clever as a stone.
Two steps down from him, on the stair of bronze, Tyrnir shot Kjartan a glance of
profound disgust that turned into courteous welcome the moment he knew himself
watched. Tyrnir wore blue like the sea at night and nothing reflective on him. Ornaments
of unpolished stone, and a black-hilted sword with a blued blade. After the austerity of
his dress, it was a shock to find him handsome as sunlight and topped with a fall of gold
curls almost the same colour as Kjartan’s fingernails.
The youngest, Gisli, stood on the lowest wooden step, one up from the ground. It
was a good thing—so said the king—that the queen had died when she had, for if there
had been another son, the whole ground level of the king’s cave would have had to be
lowered to fit.
Alex Beecroft
8
“At last you’re here!” said Gisli. He came running across the mosaic floor to throw
his arms around Kjartan’s waist and squeeze tight. He had Bjarti’s shade of polished
copper hair, but otherwise a nature that puzzled them all—that seemed to be sad when
others were sad, and to be happy when they were glad, instead of the other way around.
“Now we can start.”
“Thank you for that, youngest,” King Volmar of Vagar said in a dry voice, as
Kjartan slipped into his place below Bjarti, with a whisper of silk and a curling trace of
the scent of honeysuckle. “Since Kjartan has taken up all the time I had set aside in which
to do this gently, I shall do it harshly and blame him.”
No change there, Kjartan thought, watching a new-hatched moth make its way out of
his father’s mouth and fly towards the light of the sea.
“Today,” the king went on, stopping carefully between each phrase to reinflate his
lungs, “marks the hundredth anniversary of my execution by the sea-people, at the
instigation of your exiled brother Dagnar. I like to think that the intervening years have
rubbed their faces in the fact that they didn’t win that one.”
He paused to wipe a cobweb from his left eye. “However, it seems the magic
sustaining me can only do so much, and I have…” a court mage leaned down to whisper
in his ear, “…only a month or so left.”
“No!” cried Gisli, apparently quite genuinely. “Father!”
Kjartan and Tyrnir shook their heads, one fondly, one in irritation. Bjarti just waited
to find out what would happen next.
“So each of you has one month,” the king continued, unmoved, “to prove himself
worthy of inheriting the throne.” As he wiped more moth larvae from his lips, his eyelids
closed, apparently by themselves. He dragged them open wearily. “There was meant to
be more pomp and ceremony, but Kjartan spoiled that. So off you go. Do something
impressive, come back in a month and a day with proof, and I will decide between you.”
He waved them off with a testy gesture.
Too Many Fairy Princes
9
“I will conquer a dozen countries for Vagar’s honour!” Bjarti vowed, in a voice that
appropriately enough was like two stones being knocked together. He bowed and left for
the barracks.
“I’ll…go away and think of something.” Gisli darted up the stairs and squeezed his
father carefully enough that nothing emerged but a cloud of dust. “I’m just sorry that
you… But I’ll make you proud.”
“I will bring you a score of the souls of kings and queens, imprisoned in a jar, to
bury with you.” Tyrnir watched his father’s face for a sign of approval, but Kjartan could
not tell whether he got it or not.
When they had left, Volmar’s gaze turned jerkily to Kjartan. He felt it like a weight
all down his spine. “And you? Is there anything to you aside from the ornamental?”
That stung, but only a little—a place irritated too often became numb in defence. “It
all sounds like a lot of trouble, Father. I’m not sure I want to be king.”
“Oh?” A glint of interest, and he resented it for happening now, now he had grown
comfortable with his father’s contempt. “You would prefer to live under Bjarti’s rule—
permanently at war with all our neighbours? Or Tyrnir’s, who has all his mother’s
cruelty, and mine besides?”
“Gisli may yet surprise you,” said Kjartan in defiance, though he felt as though the
king had just emptied a chamber pot over his head. No, no, he would not prefer either. He
could not think of anything worse. “He is the youngest after all, and in matters like this
the youngest always wins. It is some kind of law.”
“Do you mind opening up today, Joel?” The boss’s voice on the end of the phone
was breezy as if with relief, and immediately Joel didn’t mind so much that his wet hair
was dripping onto his T-shirt and his porridge on the stove was slowly turning solid.
“No, that’s fine. Let me just see…” He opened the drawer of the telephone table and
rootled among takeaway menus and rolled-up bin bags. “Yes, got the keys. I’ll be along
in about half an hour. You sound cheerful this morning. Are you…?”
Alex Beecroft
10
“I think I’ve found the solution to all our money problems.” Mr. Ringle’s voice
shook a bit as he said it, with excitement, Joel thought. “But I’ll talk to you about it when
I get there. I’ve got to see a potential buyer first.”
Joel scrubbed at his hair with the towel slung around his neck and felt hope like a
long-lost cousin sidle back into his life. No wages last month, no prospect of wages this,
and the electricity bill had been on the table for two weeks, rebuking him every time he
came in or went out. “That’s brilliant news, Mr. R! Well done, you.”
Mr. Ringle gave a breathy laugh. “I’ll see you later, then,” and put the phone down,
leaving Joel to edge past his bike in the hall and return to the kitchen, where his breakfast
could now have done with a knife and fork to cut it out of the pan.
What did that matter, if the gallery was safe?
He ate up fast, flung on the leather jacket that had been a lucky find in the “Help the
Aged” shop, and wrestled his bike out of the door into another hopeful sign. After a long
winter, the weather had turned mild and sunny. Paddington’s long streets of tall Victorian
terraces were at their best under cool golden light, with crocuses coming up in the
window boxes and sparrows fighting on the pavements outside the train station.
The blast of diesel and oil smoke, warm dust and mud on the road, gave way to the
much rarer scent of trees as he cycled down Gloucester Terrace and across Kensington
Gardens. The Teasel Gallery occupied a prime corner spot between Kensington and
Brompton Road, its genteel bow windows facing both directions and shuttered fast with
iron blinds.
Joel loved the place. It had been his ambition since leaving university to find an
exclusive gallery to house his paintings, so that he and it could become famous and rich
together. He loved the way that, morning and afternoon alike, light flooded through those
big windows and stroked everything inside with white lines and intense blue shadows. As
he opened up and rolled the security blinds into their boxes, with the snick and jangle that
had become the start of the soundtrack of his day, he looked at the far wall first, where
morning spotlit his canvases. The oil-paint-and-thinner smell he associated with freedom
still clung to them, faint and fresh.
Too Many Fairy Princes
11
Percolator on, filling the airy white rooms with the scent of coffee. He grabbed a
mug for himself as he went into the small office to open the safe.
With as much reverence—perhaps a little more—than he would give to his own art,
for these things were the handmade works of the heart of other artists, he put the
jewellery out on display. He felt guilty as he always did at the thought that they weren’t
quite as unique as their makers hoped. Every artist seemed to think they were inventing
something new, and yet every gallery he passed seemed to have variations on the same
theme.
He worried sometimes—all the time—that there wasn’t enough originality in what
the Teasel Gallery sold to give it the edge it needed. As he picked up the bills from the
floor, three of them in red-topped envelopes, addressed in red ink, he was damn sure of it.
They’d played it safe, and safe had turned out to be like one of those James Bond villain
traps—like standing in a room that was being flooded, feeling the water slowly rise to
under your chin.
But apparently Mr. R had a solution to all of that. Joel couldn’t imagine what it was,
but he couldn’t wait to hear. In the meantime he indulged himself by moving the smallest
of his paintings—the two holly leaves that, when looked at in another way, were actually
two fighting dragons—into the window.
Oh, and there Mr. Ringle was, swinging round the roundabout in his reclining bike, a
plump, bespectacled man in luminous wet-weather overalls, with a blue flag riding high
behind him on a flexible flagstaff to alert sleepy drivers to the fact that he was there.
Joel threw open the door and went out to stand on the corner with a welcoming
smile, just as a black Mazda accelerated through the red traffic lights, burst out of Basil
Street and saw the flag too late. With a vain shriek of brakes, the driver swerved the car
sideways, hitting Mr. Ringle with the back wing, throwing him and the bike, tangled
together, into the middle of the busy junction. Revving hard, the Mazda mounted the
pavement, pedestrians scattering out of its way, cut the corner, gained speed and
disappeared up Knightsbridge.
Alex Beecroft
12
After a breathless, helpless moment when Joel had to restrain himself from running
out into the maelstrom of panicking cars, making everything worse, the junction ground
to a screeching halt, cars jackknifed and stalled with horns blaring, and furious drivers
yelled obscenities at one another out of lowered windows.
Picking as fast a way as he could between them, strangely clear of mind and numb of
feelings, Joel ran to his boss’s side. Blood on Mr. Ringle’s head, on the pavement,
streaking down his cheek. Blood on his collar and on his lips.
“Oh God!”
His eyes were closed; he lay limp as a sleeper, or as a dead man. Don’t move him!
said a dozen episodes of Casualty in Joel’s head as his mobile seemed to leap into his
hand of its own accord.
He dialled for an ambulance, waited—calm, calm—in the centre of the gathering
crowd, as drivers sorted themselves out around him, and passersby drifted up to stare for
a moment and then wander off in search of something more interesting.
“Next of kin?” asked the ambulance man when they came, briskly but kindly, as his
mates strapped the still-unconscious man onto a backboard and carried him into the
vehicle.
“I don’t… His wife. But she’s not…” The calm had grown quite thin by then. Joel
was shaking, and he felt strangely impatient at the thought that the ambulance man didn’t
know he’d been trying to get through to Mrs. Ringle for the past ten minutes. The guy
should know she went to Tesco on a Monday and didn’t carry a mobile phone. It should
be obvious to anyone. “Let me lock up the shop. I’ll come with him until I’m sure he’s
okay.”
He wondered, miserably, as he rolled down the shutters again and locked every lock,
how terrible a person it made him that in amongst the genuine horror and sympathy and
concern for his boss was a small, serpentine voice that wished fervently Mr. Ringle had
felt able to tell him how to save the gallery first.
Truly terrible, obviously. But though he felt sick with shame at himself as he hung
on for dear life around the inner-city bends, he couldn’t make the thought go away.
Chapter Two
After a morning spent being shuffled from one hospital desk to another, via long
corridors sporting socially aware but not terribly good artwork done by the local
community, Joel finally filled in his last form and was allowed to go to the hospital food
court to buy himself some lunch. Here, confronted with the usual array of coffee shops
and pizza places, he went gratefully into the small grocers and splashed out two pounds
on a loaf of bread and a pot of Nutella, which would not only make him sandwiches for
today, but breakfast and lunch for several days after, if he was careful.
He sniffed regretfully at the scents of chai latte and mocha Frappuccino wafting from
the coffee shops, found someone’s abandoned mug, washed and filled it with water from
the washroom. As he sat and put together a sandwich with the same obliging person’s
abandoned knife, hastily wiped on a free napkin, he told himself to be thankful he had no
mortgage, no house to repossess.
But that only brought home the very real prospect of defaulting on the rent, of his
landlady gently but firmly telling him that she was sorry, but she couldn’t afford to keep
on a tenant who couldn’t pay. No one to blame, but it didn’t stop the lead in his veins
from weighing him down. He wanted to eat all the Nutella at once with a dessert spoon,
then put his head on the table and sleep until everything got better without him.
Instead he got up, found the ward on which Mr. Ringle had finally been given a bed,
and trekked back up sunlit corridors that smelled of urinals and antiseptic, until he could
push open the final set of double doors and come quietly into the room.
Six hospital beds surrounded by green curtains, and patients on each. They looked at
him briefly, making sure he was none of their business, and then notional, social privacy
shields came down, and they pretended they could not see him. He pretended the only
person in the room was Mr. Ringle, asleep, in the bed nearest the window.
Alex Beecroft
14
A metal ladder down the side of the bed made it look like a cot, made the old man
inside it look helpless as a newborn child, a bruise like spilled red wine over his temple
and cheek. He had been admitted with only the clothes he had on him, so now he lay in a
blue spotted hospital gown, his arms exposed with all their yellowed skin and ropey
muscle, his hair like dandelion seed on the pillow.
Joel waited for him to wake up, telling himself he could possibly just give his
shoulder a gentle shake. That wouldn’t harm him, surely? And he needed advice. He
needed to know Mr. Ringle still had everything under control—that he would wake, tell
Joel how to save the gallery, and Joel would go away and do it, come back the next
morning with a great bunch of yellow flowers—marigolds and daffodils like a firework
of joy—to stand on the window ledge and cheer Mr. Ringle and all these sad invalids.
But the old man looked so frail he couldn’t bring himself to disturb his rest. An hour
later it occurred to him the shop had been closed all morning, and they would certainly
neither of them profit from that.
His railcard was good for another six months, thank God, so he hopped on the tube
to get back, and half past one saw him unlocking the gallery a second time, worried by
the strange tinted look to the windows. When he opened the door, a roil of brown smoke
billowed out, stinking of charred coffee grounds and melted electrical cable.
No, he thought, in a childish protest that this was too much, as he ran through black
fug into the little kitchen and found the percolator—which he had forgotten to switch
off—had boiled itself dry. The jug was smoked brown, spackled all over with cracks. He
could feel the heat from six feet away.
“The hand has to be empty,” Sensei Richard had said, only two nights ago, “the body
poised and the spirit at peace. If you’re angry when you fight, you will make mistakes.
You’ll be hasty and slapdash, you’ll go for openings that aren’t there, instead of making
them. You must be in control of yourself and your opponents. So, first centre yourself.”
It came back now because Joel wanted to scream, wanted to snatch up that mocking
pot and smash it on the ground, swearing all the while. Instead he breathed in carefully,
Too Many Fairy Princes
15
and out, settled his weight, tried to be aware of the chi moving through his body like
twined fibres of fine light.
Then he wedged the street door open and ran down into the cellar to turn off the
power before he risked unplugging the thing. This day did not need added third-degree
burns or electrocution.
When he returned to a shop made greyer by natural light, there were two men by the
till. He stopped on the second-to-last stair to watch them from behind the cellar door, and
all the unfairness of today, the pity, the pettiness and the anxiety, balled themselves up
and fell away. Suddenly he knew exactly what Sensei Richard meant by “empty”. On
another occasion it would have been a revelation. Right now it was a distraction that
turned into silence as soon as it formed.
A burly one and a thin one. On the burly one, the place of hair was taken up by
tattooed spiderwebs. Sovereign rings glinted on his fingers, and steel ones in his
eyebrows.
The thin man had blond cornrows, the colour of dirty white mice. His hands were in
his parka pockets, and there was something about the way he held himself—graceful,
relaxed—that made Joel’s back prickle between the shoulder blades.
Joel had no weapon to hand, but then he had specialised in fighting without a
weapon, so he pushed the door open and stepped out, feeling alert and quiet and ready.
“What can I do for you, gentlemen?”
“Gentlemen!” laughed the thin one and shared a mocking look with his friend.
“Yeah, we’re gents, we are. We come to deliver a message for Mr. Ringle. Is that you?”
“I work for him.”
“You get him out here for us.”
“I can’t…”
The big one cracked his knuckles, took a step forward, his hands held loosely by his
chest. Boxer, probably, Joel thought. So he would go for a kick to the knee first.
Alex Beecroft
16
“My boss was run over this morning. He’s in hospital, unconscious,” Joel said,
calmly, “and I just got back to find the gallery had almost burnt down in my absence. I’m
rattled enough already, if you’d like to go straight on to whatever it is that you want.”
Mouse-hair looked Joel over and shifted his weight in a way that said to Joel, I could
take you. “My boss,” he said, “ain’t happy with your boss. Specifically, he ain’t happy
that your boss owes him five grand in loan repayments and has had three extensions
already. My boss—well, he lives up to his name—he’s a patient man, but he’s cold. You
don’t want to get between him and his treasure, you get my meaning?”
“Five thousand pounds?” This was a little harder to be Zen about, but Joel
recognised it as an attack, let the anguish roll off, to be dealt with when it was safer. He
thought fast. “I don’t know anything about that. Was there a legal agreement?”
“Of course there was, all legal and countersigned and all. Drake insists on it.”
“Then I need time to go and find it.” Joel used his most reasonable tone, the one he
used on the rare occasions he could get a wealthy buyer into the shop long enough to
persuade him his life would not be complete without a signed Joel Wilson on his wall. “I
can’t just give you money without knowing you are who you say you are. First I need to
find out where Mr. Ringle keeps the contract. He really was run over this morning—right
outside the window there—and I… Give me until tomorrow, and if the paperwork turns
up all right, you’ll have your money then.”
Sovereign-ring’s fist came down on a delicate bowl of Roman glass. The bowl and
the shelf beneath it shattered. Joel winced as shards skidded and tinkled across the waxed
oak floor.
“We’re gonna have to tell the boss,” said Mouse-hair, with an intonation of vicious
delight as though this was his version of the same threat. “We’ll do what you ask, but
Drake’ll have to know. He’ll be interested in you personally after this.”
“He knows where to find me,” said Joel, because he couldn’t afford to show a
weakness to an enemy. But as they went out, kicking down the artificial tree whose white
branches dripped with necklaces, Mouse-hair laughed.
“Yeah, ain’t that a comfort.”
Too Many Fairy Princes
17
The reaction came when they had gone—safety cutting all of Joel’s strings.
Increasingly shuddering and shaky, he collapsed to his knees in the middle of the floor. A
splinter of glass dug him in the shin and another in his palm, making him let out a hoarse
laugh and cover his face with bloodied hands.
Joel thought he’d knelt, broken among the broken glass, for an unconscionably long
time, but when he pulled himself together again, went for the first-aid cabinet in the
gallery’s bathroom, the clock there told him only five minutes had passed. He dug flakes
of glass from his palms and his shins, washed and applied antiseptic cream. After which
he felt restored enough to find a broom and sweep up the destroyed artwork. He’d have to
refund the artist for that, he thought, looking down, but how could money ever make up
for the waste?
Once everything was neat, he closed up again and cycled to the bank, exercise and
fresh air making him a little more solid. There had been a couple of thousand pounds on
the statement when it came last Thursday. If he took all of it out, put on a sale, let some
of his larger canvases go at the price he charged for his vignettes…
“Mr. Wilson?” A tall man with half-moon spectacles and a hipster beard, looking
more like an artist than a banker, called him through to one of the private rooms, set apart
from the main lobby of the bank by walls of glass brick. “You’re the other signatory on
the account for the Teasel Gallery?”
“I am.”
“Um.” The banker wrapped his thin tie around his fingers, smoothed it out again. A
light film of sweat glimmered on his upper lip. “You are aware that a Mr. Howard Ringle
came in on Saturday and emptied the account?”
Oh this… Apparently the squashed feeling in Joel’s chest could get worse. Who’d
have thought it? But he stubbornly grasped at hope. This made some sense, in fact. He
forced the obstruction in his breathing to ease. Instinct be damned—Mr. Ringle must
have known the loan shark’s enforcers would come around today. Just as Joel was trying
to do, he’d taken the money out to give to them, and he’d either had it with him when he
was run over, or he’d put it in a safe place meaning to take them to it.
Alex Beecroft
18
“Oh,” he said. “No, I didn’t know. But that, yes. That sounds about right. I’m sorry
to have bothered you.”
Outside the bank, a bus stop had a row of blue plastic seats under a scrolling red
display of text. Joel sat down there and phoned the hospital. The ward sister told him that
Mr. Ringle still showed no signs of waking up, but otherwise seemed comfortable.
“I shouldn’t ask this, I know,” Joel said, picking at the little tears in the legs of his
jeans. “But I’ve just come back from his bank, and I need to know if he was carrying a
couple of thousand pounds in cash. He got it out to pay some creditors of the business,
and now I need to pay them, but I haven’t got the money.”
The ward sister gave a heavy sigh, and then her voice became louder and softer at the
same time, as though she was speaking quietly but pressing the phone closer to herself.
“Well, I shouldn’t tell you, but you seemed like such a nice man—not many employees
would sit so long and wait so uncomplainingly for their boss. I’m afraid that no, we
didn’t find anything like that on him. I opened his wallet myself to find his wife’s phone
number, and I noticed twenty pounds in it. He had nothing else with him.”
“His wife…” Joel was ashamed at the reminder; after he had failed to get through to
her that morning he’d completely forgotten to call again. “Does she know? Is she all
right?”
“She knows.” The tone of secrecy in the ward sister’s voice shaded into warmth.
“But as to whether she’s all right, I’m afraid that I can’t tell you.”
“I’ll go and see her now.” Joel got up and pressed himself back against the shelter’s
plastic wall to be out of the way of the crowd milling around the opened door of a waiting
bus. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”
“Joel!” Mrs. Ringle opened the black door of her Hendon flat and gave him a smile
like a shooting star—gone before he was sure it was there. “How kind of you to come.
Will you have some tea?”
Too Many Fairy Princes
19
“I’d love some, Mrs. R.” He followed her into the kitchen, where the pale oak tops
were freshly scrubbed, still smelling of artificial lemon and elbow grease. The walls were
panelled in strips of white wood, and the cabinets… He couldn’t quite put his finger on
what had been done to give the kitchen such a temporary, beach-hut look. The
atmosphere was so strongly that of holiday at the seaside that the sweet peas at the sash
window gave him a lurch of surprise. Sparrows’ wings whirred outside at the three bird
feeders in the postage stamp of a garden.
Mrs. Ringle smiled again when she put tea down in a china teacup in front of him
and cake from a tin. But it was the kind of smile he imagined women wearing during the
war, when their menfolk were off getting killed. The kind that said, I’m smiling, because
I want to cry. On impulse, he reached out, captured her hand as it set down cake forks
and gave it a friendly squeeze. The smile slipped for a moment and then pasted itself
back on.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “Are you all right?”
She watched the bird feeder as she answered. “Soldiering on.”
He attacked his cake and engulfed it, realizing how hungry he was, which brought a
hint of robustness to her smile.
“We have such separate lives.” She sighed. “My husband is very old-fashioned—
wouldn’t hear of me having a job. Never felt I needed to worry about the finances.” Her
mouth hardened. “Never felt I needed to hear about the affairs. Forgive me—I didn’t
mean to mention that. But of course I know that something has been wrong, recently. A
wife gets an instinct for these things, you know?”
No, Joel thought, I don’t know, but I hope one day to have the chance to find out.
“We’ve been having some money troubles, at the gallery,” he admitted. “Some
creditors who need paying urgently. On Saturday he took all the money out of the
gallery’s account to do that. Then he had his accident, and I don’t know where he put it.
And he doesn’t seem to be waking up, so I can’t ask him…”
“Funny that, isn’t it?” she said, her golden-hazel eyes going shrewd. “That he isn’t
waking up, I mean. The doctors think it’s odd, anyway. They can’t explain it.”
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Joel’s hands stung when he put his head into them and fought against the suspicion
in her voice. Perhaps he looked as weary as he felt, because it was her turn to reach out
and touch him briefly on the elbow.
“But he did come home with something wrapped in a carrier bag. He put it in the
strongbox in the living room. Perhaps…? Come with me.”
Reprieve, like someone had taken a giant stone off his chest and let him breathe
again. Dark thoughts be damned, of course the money would be in the safe. These
tattooed gangster-types had him jumping at shadows, but he’d known all his life that
people were basically decent, and he needed to show a bit more faith.
The strongbox was set in the wall behind an oil painting of a vase of flowers whose
sloppy, amateur technique should have jarred him, but somehow combined with the
scatter cushions and the distressed furnishings to give an impression of casual comfort—
of a place where you could unbutton your tight suits and snuggle in pink PJs far from the
world’s rebuke. It looked good.
“You redecorated, Mrs. R? It’s amazing.”
Mrs. Ringle ducked her head as though she expected the praise to slide right over it.
“Howard sold the paintings. Of course, you can’t put a child’s A Level project in the
place of a Lowry and expect it to fit. I had to rejig the room until it felt happy again. It
gives me something to do, you know?”
“I don’t think many people could make this painting look good.” Joel waited
patiently while Mrs. Ringle got a notebook out of the remote-control pocket of the sofa,
turned it to the page with the combination, found her glasses and carefully dialled it in.
“You’ve worked wonders.”
She pressed the handle down. It moved. The door swung slowly open. Anxiety
inserted its sharp point under Joel’s ribs and sawed slowly inside as small talk deserted
him. There was a will, the deeds of the house, two birth certificates and Mrs. Ringle’s
passport. Not a brass farthing of money, not even an IOU.
Chapter Three
“Is it true?”
Kjartan was kneeling over the pond set into the floor of his day chamber, with his
fingers in the water and his mind taken up by the small fishes who swam up from the sea,
or down from the moors, and met and courted here. He didn’t hear the footsteps until the
feet themselves came into view in the corner of his eye, clad in soft shoes of dark blue
leather without a shine.
The voice was similarly stealthy, pitched just low enough that it would carry to him
and leave all the servants, who stood in their niches by the doors, deaf to its words.
Kjartan smiled and looked up, his left hand, concealed by the skirts of his robe,
flicking through the motions it needed to strengthen his magical defences. “Tyrnir, have
you come to capture my soul? You might have more luck elsewhere. I’ve been told I
don’t have one.”
Tyrnir’s expression was contemplative, and his stance, on his heels with his hands
clasped behind his back, was relaxed, unthreatening. For all he liked to play the assassin,
Kjartan thought, he was not much of a one for deception. There would have been more
tension, more casual friendliness, if he had been intending an attack.
Kjartan allowed himself to relax too, a little.
“I simply want to know if it’s true.” Tyrnir moved closer to the balcony, and the
sun—as it loved to do—caught and glimmered in his golden hair. His eyes were
shadowed, but granite grey. No matter how much light poured on him, they never lit.
Turning back to his fish, Kjartan stroked the tail of a brown trout from upstream,
coaxing it with wordless phrases to split in half, absorb its fins and turn them into toes.
“If what is true?”
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The forefins made adequate arms, though they were transparent and bent strangely at
the elbow. The head was much more difficult, so he was concentrating on that, rather
than on his brother, when Tyrnir said, “Is it true that the youngest always triumphs? On
quests of this sort.”
Kjartan opened his fingers and let the foot-long merman learn to swim with his
awkward new limbs and his even more awkward new brain. “It’s cruel,” his mother had
once said, seeing his little creations try to leave the pool and die at once at the hands of
predators they no longer knew how to avoid. But Kjartan had seen the newly awoken
look of sheer wonder on each tiny face and knew he was giving them something for
which it was worth dying.
Odd, that that was one of the only memories he had of his mother. Father had many
unpleasant things to say of her, but Kjartan only remembered an ambivalence. He had
nursemaids for such unavoidable cuddling as came with the scrapes and tears of
childhood—things too vulgar for a refined lady such as she. He had seen her at a
distance, a delicate, untouchable beauty, who often watched him but rarely spoke. When
she did try to converse with him, they had been so far apart that speech could not bridge
the distance—he never knew what she meant, why she had broken silence, what she
wanted of him.
Perhaps that was the cruelty of which his father accused her—the fact that she
neither knew how to come close or to let go altogether. Every moment in her presence
was full of a kind of dumb yearning for something, a deeper intimacy or a final
indifference, that ached inside and never came.
Not even her death, giving life to Gisli, had put a true end to it. It had simply made a
resolution impossible, left him wishing things had been different, but too late to change
anything, and no idea of how.
His relationship with Tyrnir was much easier to pin down. This brother was a goad
and a threat. He should not let his attention wander like this while Tyrnir was in the
room.
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“Yes,” he answered his brother’s question while stroking his new creature’s long,
brown hair. It felt like a leaf gone slimy-rotten underwater. “The youngest son always
wins. Do you not read?”
Tyrnir tossed a pebble over the balcony. There was a scrubby hawthorn tree directly
below, in which a magpie family was brooding a nest of eggs. Kjartan hoped the stone
had not damaged any of them, but it was of a piece with his brother’s character to have
aimed at them deliberately. Tyrnir was lucky Kjartan’s rooms did not face the sea. A
stone hurled in the nurseries of the riding gulls would have earned him a rebuking nip
from a beak the size of a crocodile’s jaw. Though luck did not come into it, in truth.
Tyrnir would have taken as much into consideration before he threw.
“We all leave the reading to you.” Tyrnir laughed. “You’d be a formidable force if
your body was as exercised as your mind. Fortunately for us both, you’re no rival to me,
and you know it.”
“Indeed,” Kjartan agreed. The barb stung all the more because it was true. He
averted his eyes from Tyrnir’s grin, concentrated instead on showing his merman how to
hold the spear he had made for him. One day, however long it took, one or two, five or
ten of them would live. There would be a new race in the world and he would be its god.
Why should he compete for anything as petty as a mere kingdom? “I have not a particle
of rivalry in me. But it isn’t me you need to worry about. I am not the youngest.”
In the morning, when the servants actually dared to shake him, and to stand around
his rooms exclaiming their anguish, he had cause to remember those words and regret
them.
He woke with a start to find hands like gnarled twigs tight on his shoulders,
Tuburrow, the master of his bedchamber, leaning over him and in his distress flickering
between the forms of elf and tree. “My lord? My lord, you must—”
“I ‘must’ do nothing. Get off me!”
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Indignant at the fact that lowly creatures who could barely control their own shapes
had touched him without permission, Kjartan threw all of them out but one, struggled into
a tunic and trousers with no aid from his body servant, and—unable to find where they
had put his jewelled combs—tied his hair back with a string of pearls. Barefoot, then, and
dishevelled, and too unsettled to care, he emerged to find Lob, Gisli’s slave, outside the
door.
He knew it then. He quieted. He felt as though a giant hand had taken him like a
specimen—lowered a glass jar over his head, fastened him inside. Following Lob, he
waited for the air to run out.
Inside Gisli’s room, it was as he’d thought. The youngest prince lay in his nest of
white gull feathers. His unbound hair pooled around him in a flood of red as though his
heart had been pierced. His lips were blue and bruised, his skin cold. He breathed not at
all, and his innocent, affectionate eyes, still open, had sunk a little in his face, as though
the skull was trying to suck them out from within.
Kjartan knew he should say something. He was a prince, and all of Gisli’s servants
surrounded him, and some of his own, who had followed him at a distance out of loyalty
or fear. He should speak and comfort them. They were all half-formed out of grief, as
empty eyed as the boy. He should rally them. He was a prince.
“I…” His eyes welled, as though he were in great pain, though he wasn’t. His voice
too was failing him. He could barely squeeze out the “ah” that wasn’t a word at all but a
mute cry of agony.
But you’re not in pain, he thought again, puzzled. He leaned over and touched the
boy’s eyelids. They were cold too, soft as the finest glove leather. He closed them. The
eyelashes, like half-moons of blood, blood on the childish curve of cheek, hurt his
fingertips and everything else in him, just by existing.
“My lord?” Tuburrow touched him again, on the forearm. Twigs for fingers, leaves
for nails. This time he didn’t care. “What…what do we…?”
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In Gisli’s right hand, something grey. Kjartan gently separated the fingers to see, and
then left it lying there, lawful prize and accusation in one. A granite pebble, pierced as a
button, torn from the coat of the prince who was now the youngest living son.
“You must call for the king,” he said, in a calm as stony as the relic. “Tyrnir has
murdered his brother, and justice must be done.”
In the throne room, the king had been dressed in gold, and a thin film of gold leaf
had been blown onto the exposed white, waxy skin of his face and hands. The great
cavern of a room faced due east, and as the sun came up, the king caught its light and
threw it back in a dazzle that lit the walls.
The night’s damp air was held back by a magical shield such as closed off Kjartan’s
rooms, and the scent was all dust and dryness, cracked and sifted as desert sand, spiced
with turpentine and frankincense and other preservative resins.
Volmar’s eyes were dry as they gazed on his dead son, dressed still in his white sleep
robe, but covered in a blanket of polar-bear fur, and with an emerald circlet in his fiery
hair.
The king’s eyes could not be other than dry, the moisture in his tear ducts having
evaporated a dozen years ago. They made a scratching noise when he blinked, and the
hall was so silent, Kjartan could hear it from where he stood at the foot of the dais, on the
circle of mother-of-pearl set into the floor that marked the traditional place for an
accuser.
On the circle of slate opposite, Tyrnir yawned and failed to raise a hand to cover it.
He could not, his hands being bound together behind him in three cords of marsh grass
and one of twisted seaweed.
They stood together, dark holes in the radiance of the morning, while the conches
blew harsh and mournful notes to welcome another dawn, and the silver trumpets echoed
them, in threat and warning to the sea-elves. We are still watching. We are still ready.
Our knives await you.
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Then the sun slipped a little higher into the heavens, and its beam slid off the golden
king onto the floor. The timelessness of the early-morning ritual lifted, and in the
suddenly dimmed light, the royal family took to recrimination as though they had stirred
back to life.
“So,” Volmar creaked, looking down at the bruises around Gisli’s mouth. “After an
age of stagnation, we move and strive again. Which one of you was it?”
“It was Tyrnir, my king.” The strange not-pain had given way to a kind of hollow
lightness beneath Kjartan’s breastbone. It gave his voice a tone like metal and made him
feel tall as thunderclouds. “Lob here, and Tuburrow will tell you I took this…” he held
out the button like a soul-stone in a palm that didn’t shake, “…from Gisli’s hand as they
brought him here.”
“They fall off all the time,” Tyrnir scoffed. “And he collects them. You know he
does—rooms and rooms of buttons and belt toggles, boot plaques and broken pendants.
You think this is enough to accuse your own brother of fratricide?”
“I have the coat you were wearing yesterday…”
Lob held it out in two of his six arms.
“Look where the material has been torn. That button didn’t fall off. It was grabbed,
wrenched, when our brother fought back against you.”
Tyrnir gave a sharp sigh and shifted his weight onto one foot, either deliberately or
genuinely nonchalant. “One of the riding birds tore it off when Gisli and I were at the
scrapes yesterday. It rolled to the boy’s feet and I told him he could keep it. For his
collection, you know? He was grateful.”
Avenging angel did not seem to be one of Kjartan’s talents. His lightness crumpled
in on itself. He ground his teeth. “You came to ask me, yesterday, if the youngest son
always won. I said yes. So you made it that you are the youngest son. You killed him,
brother. Don’t try and…”
“I agree.” The king sat straighter in his seat, hitching himself upright with slow,
deliberate toil. Already the gold foil had begun to flake off onto his collar, leaving him
particoloured in glory and decay. “Do not try to deny it if it’s true, Tyrnir.” He flicked his
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fingers towards the black-clad woman who stood behind the throne, her mother-of-pearl
skin gleaming beneath her deep hood. “Aud, does he lie?”
“He does, my king.”
“You see. Simpler then to tell me the truth. Did you kill Gisli, Tyrnir, or must we
look elsewhere for our prince slayer?”
Tyrnir cast Aud, the court’s archmage, a glance that promised retribution. She
smiled, and the smug invulnerability of it seemed to puncture his resistance. “Oh,” he
said, “very well. Yes, I killed him. I want to win. I will do what it takes.”
Kjartan thought his father coughed, at first—weevils lodged in his throat, perhaps.
But then that part of him, inside, where the not-pain was, flinched and contracted, as it
had learned to do very early in his life. Things became—if not more bearable—at least
more numb. For his father laughed, laughed so wildly he had to press his arms around his
middle to stop his stomach from bursting.
“Well, good. I’m glad to see one of you has some gumption. Surprised to see you’ve
stopped at one, though. Kjartan stayed awake all night, I suppose?”
Tyrnir laughed and raised his storm-grey eyes to regard his father fondly. “Kjartan is
no threat. Once I’ve killed Bjarti, Kjartan will give me the kingdom freely. All he wants
is to be left alone. He doesn’t care.”
That was true enough. He didn’t want any of this. If he had stopped to think, he
would have acknowledged it, stepped down, surrendered, glad to be spared the
unpleasantness. But somewhere inside, squeezed by pressure into a heat like that at the
earth’s core, Kjartan was angry, and his anger worked his mouth without going through
his mind.
“I do care now! Now I care. I won’t leave my home in the hands of a man who killed
his own brother. Don’t either of you hurt for him? He was your kin and he liked you both.
How can you stand there and look at his corpse and laugh? I will have this dung-grown
kingdom just to pay you both back for that.”
“Aha.” Volmar settled back with a sigh like a dying breath and gave his youngest a
patronising smile. “Lose one enemy, gain another, eh, Tyrnir? Stamp on the eggs before
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they hatch, for even a baby dragon can give you a nasty searing. I must say I haven’t had
this much fun since I died. My boys, you may just have been worthwhile after all.”
He motioned Aud forward, and with a touch of her finger, the cords that bound
Tyrnir fell away. Tyrnir rubbed his wrists one after another and looked at Kjartan
thoughtfully. Then he smiled like the curve of a scythe as it approached a field of long
grass.
“But Kjartan is no dragon, Father. And soon he will be nothing at all.”
Chapter Four
Of the royal family, only Kjartan and his father sailed on the funeral boat, though his
mother was present in the form of the bone sceptre. Tyrnir had the tact to stay behind on
shore. Bjarti had already been gone two days into the mountains with the seeds of an
army to sow.
All his father’s nobles sat on the rowing benches, save Aud who stood by the mast,
whispering a wind into the sail. Volmar, swathed in a cocoon of spells—for he could not
afford to let his well-preserved body grow damp—lolled amidships on a couch stuffed
with baking soda. Kjartan stood in the stern and watched the raft of paper and feathers
they towed behind them bob and weave in the turbulence of the wake. There, clad in all
his jewels and surrounded by as many of his stones as could be fitted on the bier without
sinking it, Gisli lay, looking neither sleepy nor peaceful, but only dead. A corpse was not
a person, Kjartan thought, whatever his father might do to be the exception to that rule.
The weight of a sword was awkward and unfamiliar on his hip. As the ship yawed
and tossed, a jangle came from beneath the rowing benches, where every other elf’s
weapon rolled, tucked out of sight from respect, but close to hand, just in case.
The dog’s nose of cliffs to the right of the bay now pointed at the tall white mast of
the stargazer’s tower to the left. They had reached the charnel waters, and under the
ship’s hull, under the long fall of clear water, the bones of Vagar’s kings lay encrusted
with coral.
Volmar gestured to Kjartan, rather than risk his own hands on the rope, and Kjartan
unhitched Gisli’s frail raft, left it to float. Already layers of paper had begun to peel
away. A trail of white feathers led back to the shore.
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Around them, bulging out like the heads of babies emerging from the womb, domes
of metal broke the sea from beneath. Kjartan held his breath, watched the scramble in the
waist of the ship as everyone reached for their weapons.
The foremost dome rose higher out of the water, showing shoulders beneath. A
faceplate gave glimpses of colourless skin, a lipless mouth moving under a green layer of
water. He braced himself for an attack, but the sea-elf only held up one metal-encased
limb and said, in a voice that emerged from grills in the top of its helmet, “We are here to
witness this funeral, not to interrupt. Keep to the treaty and we too will keep to it, lest this
first death lead to others.”
“Lord of the Sea People”—Volmar grinned, cracking all of the sheet silver that
overlaid his face—“we keep to the treaty. Today we are here to mourn, not to quarrel.”
“Then we graciously allow you the use of our sea.”
Even Kjartan, numb as he was, bristled at that. Gods damned fish freaks—to do
insult under the name of envoy? To claim ownership over Vagar’s sacred spaces? He
dropped his hand to the sword hilt. Unfamiliar or not, he thought it was not beyond him
to drive a length of metal through that faceplate and haul the creature out to drown in air.
He was saved from the folly by his father, who set the bone sceptre to his lips and
blew a shrill note over its hollow end. The far-off cliffs seemed to explode outwards,
boulders of white chalk being hurled into the sky. But these boulders did not fall, they
soared. They came closer, becoming visible as massive white gulls with golden beaks,
some still saddled for riding. They saw the bier, sagging now, circled by hungry fish.
They cried out to each other.
Then Gisli’s corpse vanished beneath a mass of flapping wings, of cawing,
quarrelling voices. A brief spray of dark blood and bits, a dozen angry fights in the air,
and the bier, torn apart, sank slowly, trailing scraps of cloth of silver and a clump of long
red hair.
Kjartan found himself making a noise, turning away. He knew that everyone was
watching him with disgust at his display, but couldn’t bring himself to care. Let them. In
fact he’d give them something to disapprove of! Unbuckling the clumsy belt, he lifted his
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sheathed sword and threw it in after his brother, and knew the gesture meant something
even though he couldn’t say what.
Of course he regretted it. Not because the courtiers spent the whole journey back
whispering to each other—“Is it because he does not care about the kingdom as his
brothers do, that he is still here? Or is it because he cared about his brother too much? Is
he too sentimental for the duties of a king?”
Those voices he had heard all his life. They rushed past him like a warm wind, and
he chose not to spread a sail to catch it. No, he regretted his sword when irritation and
melancholy made him take a less-trodden path up the cliffs from the harbour. When,
among saxifrage and spikes of orchids anchored on rock faces, he thought he saw the
shadow of a man where no man was.
Kjartan stopped, preoccupation and sadness blinking away. The day was half-done,
the sun directly above him. A man’s shadow should look like a spot beneath his feet, but
this stretched out across the path ahead of him, tall and dark, and when he halted, it
seemed to turn its head towards him. Though it had no eyes, he sensed it watch him.
His hand fell to his hip and closed on empty air—and that was when he regretted the
loss of his sword with a keen horror at his own stupidity that felt very much like being
stabbed.
A second dark shape oiled out from beneath a boulder behind him. Trapped between
wraiths, he could see his breath suddenly as the midday air chilled and thinned. The
shadow in front of him detached itself from the ground and slid upright, where it became
a hole in the world in the shape of a man. It stretched out a hand to him, beckoning,
begging—they were hungry creatures but not clever. It didn’t occur to them that he did
not want to be consumed, that he might, possibly, fight back.
A feeling of outrage went through Kjartan like a lightning bolt. How dare Tyrnir
attack him on the day of Gisli’s funeral? How dare he use such halfhearted methods as a
mere two wraiths? He’d always known Tyrnir did not respect him, but this?
He grabbed the outrage out of the air around him, compressed it and hurled it out of
his hands in a flood of blinding white light. For a moment, the wraith was starker for the
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contrast—he could see teeth—but then its edges smudged and streamed away. He felt the
second one approach—his back iced over—and he ran, hurtling up the goat track. Furze
caught at his long outer robe. He squirmed out of it as the second wraith disappeared
from its spot on the track below and began to slide out from the base of the bush.
Shadow creatures, they could travel from darkness to darkness in an instant. He
found anger again, blasted it while it was still forming itself, but the spell took longer this
time, drained him, made his nose bleed and his eyes feel like they were going to burst. A
high, squealing wail reverberated inside his skull and drove pain like spikes through his
cheekbones.
Trembling by the time the second was dealt with, he tugged at his coat fruitlessly,
chilled to the bone, left it there and scrambled up to the cliff top, desperate to get to his
chambers, where all darkness could be banished, where the wards would keep out magic
attacks and his books provide new defensive spells.
But at the top of the cliffs, there was a shadow under every boulder, under every
gnarled and kneeling oak, under every windswept ash. The path passed through an
infinity of them, and it seemed each one now blossomed into an enemy. Ice slicked the
path and the stones and the bark, grew in butterfly shapes of hoar frost along each twig,
as wraiths—a dozen, a score—stretched and separated themselves from the shade.
Kjartan backed away until he stood with his heels out over the edge of the cliff. The
wind from the sea felt hot by contrast with the blast of cold from the creatures all around
him. He smelled the ozone and old-carpet smell of them and shivered as the cold sank
below his bones and crystallized his blood.
Punch a hole in the encircling ring of them and run? No, he didn’t think he had the
strength, didn’t know how Tyrnir had conjured this many of the things up—bribed a
sorcerer, perhaps. A worry for a different time, if he still could.
Ice clogged his eyelashes. His breath turned to snow, and his mouth filled with it.
Spitting it out at their feet, he found himself laughing with a strange delight. So his
brother thought well of him after all? Good.
He still didn’t think well enough.
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The closest wraiths were almost touching him. Kjartan’s skin blistered and
blackened in the cold, and the pain speeded him up. He took two deep, glorious breaths,
spread his arms and fell backwards off the cliff, grabbing the universe with his mind as
he did so, and twisting it.
It was not a sheer fall; his shoulder smacked against a protruding rock, the branch of
a tree halfway down the cliff whipped across his flailing legs. The universe fought back,
and he throttled it harder, squeezing it between his mind and his will like a louse between
two fingernails.
It cracked, the light greyed, the scents turning acrid—meat and burning oil—and he
was in another world. Still falling, past blackened walls. He grasped for a lead pipe that
ran down the brickwork, got it, wrenched his injured shoulder in trying to hold on. Pain
slammed him flat, made sweat slick his palms and the muscles loosen. He let go, fell
again, bounced hard from the ridgepole of a little roof above a bricked-up door, punching
all the breath out of him, and landed at last facedown in a huddle of large metal cylinders
and a stench of rot.
Groaning, incautious, he reached out and grabbed one of the metal objects to pull
himself up by. Jaws of fire fastened on his undefended hand, an agony in comparison
with which the wraiths’ touch had been a balm. Iron! Iron…so he was on Earth, in the
world of Men, undefended and alone, and going to…
He managed to draw the hand back and curl tight around it. Then his own darkness
came down.
Chapter Five
Joel cycled home with his head down, legs pumping as fast as he could go and his
thoughts drowned in the race of blood through his body, the air burning in his lungs.
Manhandling the bike through the front door, he carried it up the shared stairs and into a
flat he’d begun to see as a luxury he couldn’t afford. He had a bedroom with an ensuite
bathroom too small to fit the handbasin. His tiny sink stood orphaned in one corner of his
bedroom. But he also had a kitchen, and a sitting room cum studio, where the bike
occupied the only space that wasn’t covered in reclining canvases.
Resisting the temptation to slump on his bed, pull the covers over his head and
pretend none of this was happening, he got a tenner out of the stash in his “I quit
smoking” jar and returned to the south-facing light and scent of oil paints of his studio.
The floorboards were bare, scuffed and paint blotched, only a little path showing
between the door and his easel. Ignoring the clench of his heart, he went through every
stacked piece, pulling out those which were finished enough to be framed.
His was not, he knew, fashionable art. His landscapes depicted worlds that had never
been, the bright colours of which might have looked good against an office wall or in the
minimalist white box of a high-class apartment at Canary Wharf. But the photorealism,
the intricacy of his work were off-putting—small figures in the distance catching the eye
and making the observer get close and press his nose to the canvas to guess at the stories,
architecture in the foreground with every nuance worked out. With their hyperreal
feeling, oversaturated, as though they were pictures taken under a different sun, Joel’s
paintings demanded too much of the observer and had never really sold. People found
them fascinating but disturbing. They looked closely for about half an hour and then
turned away to find something more peaceful.
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Joel stacked the landscapes along the left side of the wall. Along the right he placed
all his finished portraits. Old friends from school, who he had not met in the flesh for
years. Old lovers, immortalised even if the pain of losing them was visible in the paint
like a glisten of pearl.
He lifted his best. One of the smaller pieces where, on a background of smoky umber
and sable, Oscar’s face was limned in gold. The secrets of the universe shone in his
whiskey-brown eyes, and the smile of a trickster god played on his generous lips.
It was everything Joel remembered of him, if you knew how to look—the warmth,
the sensuality, soft as the dark feathering of his eyelashes on his cheek, his selfishness
soft as the fall of shadows beneath his cheekbones. Sometimes when the day had not hurt
him enough, Joel would come in here with the lights off—only the hall light shining
dimly through the angle of the door—and watch Oscar’s face as he had once watched it
in their room at night. Never quite defenceless, never entirely open, always with a smile.
Joel put the portrait with the bundle of other canvases portable enough to transport,
took a step back, forward again, picked it up and put it back on its easel. No, he couldn’t.
Not this picture. He couldn’t sell this.
His friends had told him Oscar was bad news. Of course, he had friends in those
days. But Joel was the son of nice suburban parents who went to church every week, gave
money to charity and tried to think the best of everyone. He didn’t really believe that
anyone could be “bad news”. If Oscar had vices, and the smoking and the drugs and the
gambling, well, yes, Joel had known about those. It wasn’t as though Oscar hadn’t
confessed them all. If Oscar had those problems, it was probably because no one had ever
devoted enough time to curing them. Joel would do that. It might take a little while, but
he was patient and strong. He would redeem this beautiful man, and all would be well.
The frame of the picture was dry and rough against his fingertips, but he could
imagine the living warmth of Oscar’s face, the laughter and the love—he still refused to
believe it hadn’t been love—in his eyes.
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36
Oscar had looked like that when he kissed Joel goodbye on the morning of a
“business trip to Toronto”. Just before he’d emptied their shared account and disappeared
forever, taking all Joel’s savings with him.
Joel sighed sharply. Moving as though the connection to his limbs was subject to
intermittent fault, he picked the painting up again and bundled it with the others,
wrapping the whole lot in plastic carrier bags to keep them dry.
There’d been something wild and romantic, despite everything, in the thought that
Oscar had been a free spirit. Bit of a pirate, a charming rogue—a Jack Sparrow of
Surbiton. In Joel’s head, it had made the betrayal sweeter to think of it as part of some
grand story of which Oscar was the hero.
But now? He wrestled bike and paintings back out into the daylight, told himself it
was the sudden sting of bright sunlight that made his eyes water. Now he’d had the same
trick pulled again by Mr. Ringle—who had nothing at all of the dashing pirate about him.
Now he just had to face the facts head-on.
He was a credulous idiot who kept trying to believe the best of people and ended up
being walked over and left to deal with the fallout while the unscrupulous bastards who
used him got away scot-free. Naively falling for the charm of a glamorous scoundrel was
something that might happen to anyone once. But God, what a doormat, what an idiot he
was to let it happen twice.
Time to move on. He would sell the portrait—it was good, it was beautiful, and
someone would want a wicked young Adonis to hang on the wall—and get something
better back from Oscar than just the memories. He would sell the rest of the stock at little
more than cost price, pay off the debt, close the gallery and sell it, and move on. And he
would never trust anyone ever again.
Joel borrowed a couple of “closing down sale, everything must go” signs from the
shoe shop next door to the station. They appeared to close down and reopen on a regular
basis every month, and had sale boards to spare.
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37
He put the signs out in the evening rush hour, when businesses and offices were
closing and the well-heeled sons and daughters of the city were passing on their way
home. Reckless with misery, he set one on an A-frame out in the pavement, so they
would have to stop or slow down, making a deliberate detour around it. It broke their
concentration enough to make them halt a moment, lift their solipsistic heads and see the
window full of iridescence and oil paintings glowing like an exotic basilica in the dirty
yellow light of a London sunset.
He had carefully priced everything that lay in the windows, so that those who came
inside knew they could afford to buy. The door jingled on and off from half four to ten
p.m., as the sleek folk came in, besuited, with their designer bags and their smartphones
in hand, and the diamond-studded earbuds of their iPods glinting in their ears.
“How much for this?” asked a woman whose copper hair was twisted into a tall up-
do held by jade combs. He knew without looking away from the till it was going to be the
picture of Oscar.
“A thousand pounds.” Catching the edge of the till to prevent himself from wringing
his hands, he blurted out the most ridiculous price he could think of, because he might
have taken only four hundred and thirty-two pounds all evening, he might need another
four and a half thousand, but still he couldn’t…he couldn’t think of charging so much for
something he had made. He believed he was good. He didn’t believe he was that good.
If he overcharged, she’d leave Oscar with him. If he overcharged, he wouldn’t really
have to give him away.
“It’s an original?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know the artist?” She alternated her gaze between the painting and her
phone. When he came closer, he could see her scrolling through websites, trying to
pinpoint the signature. Should have taken the time to build that website, he thought, with
a grudging stir of pride.
“Um… It’s me.”
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Now she actually looked at him, a piercing pale-blue glare from eyes the colour of
gas flames. “Really? And there are no prints available?”
Damn. He could have made prints? Of course he could. Cursing himself for his
terrible lack of business acumen, he admitted, “I’m afraid not. I could have some made
by tomorrow, if you’d like to order one.”
That made her smile, and for someone coloured so warmly, she had a smile like the
gleam of light from an open fridge door. “I’d rather you didn’t. I wanted to make sure I
had an exclusive. I’ll take it.”
Oh, God. A thousand pounds—he should have asked for two. “I…um. The card
machine’s on the blink, I can’t…”
She drew out a fine-tooled leather purse and took out a note of such high
denomination he didn’t even recognise it. “I can give you cash.”
After that, the rest of the evening passed in a strange, numb blur. He was interested
to find that at high enough levels, misery, like pain, became its own anodyne. Once the
maximum was reached, the human body could sustain no more.
He sold a dozen small pieces of jewellery and three of the vases, two more of his
portraits, priced less extravagantly, and when he finally acknowledged there would be no
more passersby and locked up at midnight, it was with two thousand three hundred
pounds carefully folded into his wallet and tucked into the zipped pocket inside his
jacket.
The city never slept, but it had begun to drowse as he cycled back across Kensington
Gardens. A faint, elusive scent of freshness clung around the trees and the long silver
sheet of water. The fountains had been turned off, and the sky had fallen in one black
piece onto the mirrored surface where strong stars glittered amid the overspill of orange
streetlights.
As Joel turned in to his road, he was all but asleep on his wheels. He registered a
pale blur to his left, a sense of movement. He shied away, but not fast enough as a
baseball bat came out of the darkness and whacked him in the side. Then he was falling
Too Many Fairy Princes
39
to the quiet residential road, his legs entangled with his bike, his shoulder coming down
hard against the lip of the pavement.
But the impact certainly woke him up. Without thought, he kicked the bike away,
bounded up to his feet just in time to evade the bat that swung at him again from his left.
Backing off, he recognised the form holding the bat—dark parka with the hood drawn
down, ski mask over the face, the gorilla-like bulk. A flicker of movement from the other
side and he ducked instinctively as a long, wicked, gleaming something tore the air above
his head. Black skinny jeans, black T-shirt, matching mask. It was his friends from the
shop.
Okay. Okay, he’d never raised a hand in anger before, never fought for his life, but
he’d been in enough tournaments to know what to do now. Two of them, and he didn’t
want them both attacking at once.
He carried on backing away, hands loosely held in front of him, behind him the alley
between number 30 and number 32 that gave walking access to the block of garages.
“Guys, you were meant to give me until tomorrow.”
“Well, we put that proposition to our boss”—knife-guy did not sound amused—“and
he felt it was better to give you however long it took for us to find out where you lived.
Ain’t you glad we do house calls? Now hand it over and no one gets hurt.”
Joel stepped into the narrow snicket between the walls. It widened out again behind
him, but here it was only large enough for one man to pass. Knife-guy first, he hoped.
“I’m not dealing with you goons. Tell your boss I’ll meet him and give him the money
tomorrow. I’m not giving anything to you two. How do I know it would ever reach him?”
There was no way of reading their faces, but it was as though a light had come on,
the way their bodies shifted. “You calling us thieves?”
“And idiots.” Joel had a queasy, panicky moment to reflect that this was not practice,
this was not a tournament with rules and judges who would stop the fight if anyone got
too badly hurt—this was the real thing. Then knife-guy lunged, and years and years of
training took over Joel’s body like a possessing demon.
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40
Instead of twisting out of the way of the knife, he stepped towards it, crossing his
wrists and blocking the man’s arm upwards, so that the blade passed over his head.
Instantly, the knife-man tried to draw back for another strike, but Joel had seized his
wrist. Pulling him forward, off balance, Joel twisted below the man’s arm, and putting his
back to the man’s chest, he drove his shoulder up into the elbow while he pulled the
forearm down with all his weight.
With nowhere to go, stretched across the ridge of his shoulder, the man’s arm broke
at the elbow with a sucking, wet snap. The knife jangled on the ground as Joel’s assailant
screamed with a long banshee wail. When Joel let go, the slighter man reeled away, his
legs unable to hold him up, and sank to his knees under a streetlamp.
From across the road came the sound of a window being rolled up. A light came on
in number 30, and showed Joel the whites of baseball-bat-guy’s eyes, stretched wide,
shocked, uncertain of whether to attack or run away.
“Is that you, Mrs. Sullivan?” Joel yelled, loud as he could. He had no idea what the
neighbours’ names were, but the goons weren’t to know that. “It’s muggers. Call the
police!”
In the distance, and far too soon to be anything but coincidence, the sound of a siren
sawed into the night. Baseball-bat-guy gave him a glare that hit harder than anything else
he’d been subject to that night, dropped the bat, ran to his smaller comrade’s side and
hauled him up.
Joel watched them lurch away for three full seconds before he remembered to plunge
his hand into his pocket and grab his phone to actually call the police. It lit up pale grey-
green, and something behind him glittered in the light with ghostly rainbows.
The phone died—he hadn’t charged it today—but the gleam behind him simply
softened into colours he could scarcely see and had no names for. Something was there,
something that, like the reports of UFOs said, made his skin ruche all over with the
instinct of wrongness.
Still panting from the adrenaline of the fight, warring against his own instinct and
desire to run, Joel turned around and looked.
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41
The kitchen doors of both houses on either side opened into the alleyway, and a litter
of bins cluttered the pavements. From behind them, hard against the wall on the right-
hand side, spilled those colours that were neither light nor darkness.
Something had been at the bins. Two lay on their sides, rolled out into the footpath,
their lids off and their contents spilled stinking into the street. The others had once stood
packed together and now leaned randomly apart. A space had been opened in the centre
of them, and the source of the ultraviolet light lay there. Joel’s mind grasped for similes,
came up with the sight of the moon at its roundest, when its pale, lunatic light shone
bright enough to streak the clouds around it with dark peacock blue and spilled-petrol
greens. Not a bad comparison, actually—between the dark shapes of the bins, he could
see stripes of something that shone silver blue as the moon.
His battle clarity had fallen away as soon as the threat ran from him. Now a
compensating sickness clawed at his throat, made his arms shiver and sensitised the little
hairs of his back where they brushed against his shirt. The snap of that elbow seemed to
echo in his head, and he wanted to throw up, or perhaps to cry, or to drink until it all went
away.
Instead, he edged closer to the luminous thing on the ground. Some kind of student
prank? An experiment by the psychology department of London University? A piece of
uranium gone missing from a power plant or some gang of terrorists? If so, what the hell
was it doing here in the back alley of nowhere street, in a part of London known for faded
elegance and fine houses now converted to civil service hostels and infinitely subdivided
flats?
He reached out to the nearest bin and grabbed the handle, paused before lifting it.
There was still time to walk away. Hadn’t he got enough trouble of his own already?
Well yes, he did. A moment of sharp joy surprised him with its cutting edge. Did he
really have anything left to lose? No. That meant a certain freedom. Wherever he went
from here, it could hardly get worse. He grabbed the bin with the other hand too, lifted it
away, and stood for a long time looking down, sucker-punched into silence, even his
mind shutting down in the face of the impossible.
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42
Because he was far too much of a Tolkien fan not to recognise what he saw. He was
just not enough of a dreamer to believe it. Oh yes, he’d told himself, “You never know.”
The folklore had always been there, surprisingly consistent from country to country.
People in Iceland believed enough to still leave sacrifices for the creatures, but…
But Joel hadn’t realised how firmly he disbelieved until this moment, when he found
himself looking down on what was unmistakably an elf.
Of themselves, his hands came up to cover his nose and mouth. He rebreathed his
own air, warm and reassuring, for a while, as his already queasy stomach curled and
turned over.
It was white, the creature. Whiter than paper, its face and outstretched hands
gleaming like snow under moonlight, and its hair behind it like a comet’s trail, silver as a
falling star. The tunic and trousers it wore must once have been equally white—even now
they glimmered with threads of silver. Its moonstone belt and baldric gleamed and
flickered as it breathed.
But the knees of the trousers were torn out, and spatters of blood showed stark
around them. Rips and long scuffs of dark London dirt cratered the radiance of the tunic,
and everywhere it touched the ground it had soaked up the decomposed brown liquid
from the bottom of the bins, sticky and stinking and wrong.
“Nhn,” said Joel at last and lurched closer as if tugged. He bent down, caught—in
the middle of the reek—a faint scent like primroses after spring rain. Saw the long,
twisting burn, raised and livid on the skin of the creature’s hand and arm, and his face
with the brows still creased in pain and lashes like silver wire and lips as white as clouds.
“Oh…”
It didn’t require belief to reach down and carefully, carefully in case his skin stung it,
or his strength crushed its spun-glass delicacy, to brush his fingertips along its cheek. A
little colder than human skin, a little sleeker, but the firmness was the same, as though
bones and muscles still filled it out from within. He curved his hand around the half-open
mouth and felt its breath like a cool breeze against his palm.
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“All right, this is…this is officially not happening,” he told it as he knelt down and
got a hand under one of its shoulders. Oh, not good. Where he couldn’t see, his fingers
sunk into a wet mess of blood. He almost dropped it, shifted his grip clumsily, and hauled
the torso into his arms. “I want you to know I don’t believe any of this, but you’re hurt
and I guess I can’t take you to the hospital. And I can’t leave you here. So…”
With one arm around the creature’s back, he wormed the other under its long,
slender legs, firmly told his trembling body to shape up, and lurched to his feet. It
weighed more than he’d expected from something so ethereal—less than a healthy young
man, but about the same as a slender young woman. At the jerk of the lift, its brows
pinched in further. It gave a little musical gasp of protest or pain.
“Ssh,” Joel murmured, almost involuntarily protective. Something that beautiful
ought not to look so distressed. It violated the moral code of the universe. “It’s all right.
I’ve got you. You’re safe now.”
A few burdened steps to the archway, and he paused as he made sure no one was
around to watch him bridal-carry this white and alien thing into his home. Then out into
the street, a struggle and fumble with his keys as he tried to open the door without
dropping his burden. Another quick look around and he made it into his flat unobserved,
kicking the door to behind him, snapping on the lights with his chin.
“All right,” he said again, lowering the long form of his guest to lie sprawled and
filthy over his faded yellow duvet. “Everything’s going to be—”
The moment the wounded shoulder touched the bed, the creature gave a raw, gasping
whine of pain. Its eyes flew open, wide, gold—gold like the eyes of lions and just as
pitiless—and it shoved him hard in the chest with its uninjured hand. He flew across the
room as though a horse had kicked him, slamming into the sink and falling winded to the
floor, nothing but vacuum inside him for a moment until the paralysis of shock wore off
and he could whoop in a bitter, resentful breath.
A faint footfall and light on his downcast eyes. He looked up, found the creature
standing disdainfully over him, a knife of glass in its left hand, the right still cradled
against its chest. “You touched me! You touched me! You filthy, sacrilegious…”
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The knife glittered white shards of light into Joel’s aching head. He should force
himself up. He’d defeated one knife fighter today already. Why not another? He should…
Inexplicably, suicidally, and desperately badly for his badass image, he put his head
in his hands and started to cry.
Chapter Six
Kjartan’s knife whispered to him. Just there, where the ear stood above the jawbone,
there he could push in the point and a single curving cut would all but sever the impious
creature’s head from its backbone. The blade’s voice sang under his fingers with a sweet,
thin tone that rang around his aching head and seemed to boil his eyes in their sockets.
But for all the stories about humans, for all the warnings about their treacherous
nature, their uncanny abilities, not even he could persuade himself that this one—
crouched in a huddle on its knees before him with tears leaking out from behind its
sheltering fingers—was honestly a danger to him.
The knife whined with disappointment as he slid it back into the sheath strapped to
his arm, and that was hard enough. But when it fell silent, all his pains gave tongue, and
the knowledge of agony went over him like a sheet of lightning. He staggered backwards
and his knees collided with a soft sleeping platform. Sinking down to sit on it, he saw the
stains where he’d lain, and the stench of human on the bedding was the same stink as that
of the man before him.
He let you rest on his bed.
Kjartan groped for his knife again, fingers hard against the reassuring bump beneath
his sleeve. There were two explanations for that, and one of them he liked very little.
“What do you want from me, human? I warn you, I am a prince of my people. If you
touch me again, uninvited, I will skin you and write satirical verses on the leather.”
The man choked on his tears and coughed the water out. Then the cough became a
laugh, and the laugh became a spasm, his brown face flushing purple, his eyes shining out
with a kind of fear. It persisted so long Kjartan became afraid that he was under some sort
of paralytic spell. So painful to watch was it that he drew back his uninjured hand and
slapped the man hard on his cheek.
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Oh, how strange. He looked at his hand—the skin had felt rough as though it was
covered all over with fine bristles. The laughing fit having stopped, the human now knelt,
breathing hard, blinking its reddened eyes and watching him. Kjartan deemed it safe
enough to shuffle forward and indulge his curiosity by peering at its face. It did! It had
little black spikes all over its jaw that caught the light and glinted like jet. He reached out
and touched them with exploratory fingertips. They were not made of stone, but
apparently of coarse hair. They had a grain, like a dog’s hair, smooth if he stroked one
way, resisting him if he pulled the other.
The creature looked up at him with a new kind of fear in its muddy brown eyes and a
curiosity that matched his own. How strange to think that just as it was wondrous to him,
so he was wondrous to it. A delightful thought.
He smiled, and it echoed the expression. It had not yet tried to kill him, or imprison
him and put him on display, or overpower and ravish him, one of these three things
having been what he expected when he woke to find it leaning over him. Now he wanted
to know what it would do. If given its will and choice.
“Um…” it said, rubbing the heel of its hand across its eyes to dash away the tears.
“So you speak English. That’s going to make things easier.”
Kjartan frowned. The creature’s meaning had come as if floating on a great ocean of
context. He fished in it with the care of a mage, and understood that this world’s
inhabitants communicated in many languages and had to individually learn each one
before they could be understood. The thought of a language one could not understand—a
communication that did not communicate—took him aback. How would that work? Why
would anyone want it to… except possibly as a means of keeping secrets?
“I don’t…” he began, and then thought twice of admitting to such a great weakness
as incomprehension. “I do not ‘speak English’. I merely hear what you intend to tell me.
When I speak, it is my desire that you hear what I intend you to know. Your language
arranges itself around my desire, as it should.”
For a moment the creature looked struck by this concept and inclined to debate, but
then it sniffed, and all the philosophical problems of communication dissolved under
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47
Kjartan’s mortifying realisation that the terrible stench in the room was coming from
himself. “Argh!” he said instead. “Eggs of the old ones! I reek.”
This laugh came easier and departed, leaving the human’s face brightened. “You
were lying in the rubbish,” he said, and blowing his nose noisily on a square of paper
from his pocket, he got to his feet. “I guess I should ask how you got there. That is…I
mean…if you’re really real.”
A large chest of wood, subdivided into sliding compartments, stood next to the white
basin against which Kjartan had thrown the man. The human opened the topmost and
brought out coarse blue trousers and a short undertunic of an indigo colour, emblazoned
with swirls of yellow.
“I am real enough.” The beginnings of grief and exhaustion trickled back to Kjartan
now as safety gave him space to remember his fight, his flight, his brother’s death. “But it
was not my intention to come here. Someone was trying to kill me. To escape, I flung
myself between dimensions without knowing my destination.”
He cringed a little inside at the confession. What a fool he had been. What a fool this
human must think him. He could have ended up anywhere—in the centre of a star, in the
under-realms whose doors open onto nightmare, at the end of the universe, when the cold
comes. He shivered, and the man gave him a look probably intended to be reassuring,
though it was a little too awkward for that.
“Sounds like it’s not been either of our weeks.” He opened the door into a tiny room
whose walls and floor were the same ceramic white as the basin. A metal flower hung
from a tangle of pipes above head height, and when the man twisted something on a box
on the wall, water gushed from the rose like a fall of sweet rain. The scent and warmth of
steam wisped into the room, and Kjartan’s skin prickled and his scalp itched with the
desire to wash the filth off himself and be clean.
“Listen.” The man set out white cloths, presumably for drying, and then, puzzlingly,
he backed towards the other door as if to leave. “There’s some fresh clothes there. You
get clean. I’ll go and see what I’ve got in the way of bandages, and then—I mean, I’m
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48
assuming you don’t want to go to the hospital—then I’ll get you fixed up and we can
have a proper talk. All right? So, um, call me if you need anything.”
The blood had come to the man’s skin again, hot and dark in his cheeks. It wasn’t an
unpleasant face—rugged, certainly, by Kjartan’s standards, heavy boned, but the heat and
the life in that blood, he could feel it against his lips from ten ells away. How hot it would
blaze if he was touching! “Where are you going?” he demanded. “I am not some sand-
worm commoner to dress and undress by myself, or bathe alone. Come here and attend
me.”
“Ah.” His smile seemed a multipurpose thing. Kjartan was almost certain this meant
something different from the last. Less reassurance and more fear? “We don’t, um, do… I
mean I’m not your servant.” He backed another step towards the door, and Kjartan
decided outrage would only drive him all the way through, make him slam it and not
come back.
So instead of insisting on his rights as a prince, he let himself slump, let some of the
pain and weariness show, and with a sigh dropped his head into his hands. “I didn’t
mean… But the wound on my shoulder is… I don’t think I can manage any of this on my
own. Would you help me, please?”
It was like reeling in one of his little fish. He wasn’t quite sure what to make out of
this one yet, but when the human relented, came back to help him peel the heavy, soaked
silk away from his flesh, touches hot and nervous and short, he allowed himself to soften
with relief. This was not anywhere he had meant to be, but it was a long way, a very long
way away from Tyrnir’s tricks, and it might have its compensations yet.
Chapter Seven
“Argh! Ah! Spineless sea-spawn!” The elf’s good hand smacked Joel on the ear
again. There wasn’t a lot of power to the blow, but it still stung, and he dropped the
sleeve he’d been trying to tug off its arm and stepped away, reminding himself firmly not
to get angry at the guy for being hurt and in pain.
“Listen,” he said, mildly as he could, “I’ve never trained as a valet, and I especially
don’t know how to get injured elves out of their clothes without hurting them.” He
rummaged in the top drawer of his bedside table for scissors, before coming back to
finger the heavy slubbed silk of the creature’s silvery tunic with an artist’s regret.
“You’re too wounded to raise your arms high enough to get this off over your head. So
I’m going to have to cut you out of it.”
The creature—and really, with it braced against the wall in his bedroom while he cut
it out of its clothes, he should have asked for a name before now—pressed its white lips
together and nodded. “Very well.”
“What’s your name?” Joel asked, head down and eyes fixed on the fabric as he
carefully snipped along the seam, where it could be resewn, good as new.
It startled a strange laugh out of the creature, as though he had said something
obscene. A measuring look, sly and sideways out of those golden eyes that should have
seemed cold, metallic, but actually looked warm as a candle flame. “You can call me
Kai.”
Joel’s mum had read him the usual fairy stories in his childhood. He knew enough so
that as he eased the cut garment away from the wound, he could smile and reply with
some confidence, “Which is not actually your name.”
“Indeed.” This time, Kai did not look away when Joel examined his face. Their gazes
caught, and—even though it was Kai who now stood bared to the waist, slim and defined
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like a dancer, with a moonset of purple and green bruises splashed across his colourless
skin—at the curious humour, the alien regard of those lion’s eyes, Joel was sure he could
not feel more naked.
He swallowed, looked away, carrying the tunic into the tiny kitchen of his flat and
stuffing it into the washing machine, taking the chance to hang up his jacket on the back
of a chair before he returned to the doorway. “Kai” watched him go, watched him come
back, as though he was the most fascinating and peculiar thing the elf had ever seen. It
made a low, familiar heat seethe in Joel’s belly, and his breath come fast, and it was not
good, not good at all to be hoping his visitor liked what he saw, or noticing just how lithe
and otherworldly and perfect Kai seemed, battered and bruised as he was.
You may have fallen for Oscar because he looked like a Michelangelo catamite
turned pirate, but learn your lesson from that. You do not go for men of other species that
you know you cannot trust, just because they stand there like an abused angel, watching
you with a smile. “So,” he said, swallowing to clear his throat, “I presume you can deal
with the trousers on your own. There’s soap hanging up on the wall there, and towels…”
“I cannot reach the wound to be sure it is clean. You will have to wash it for me.”
No no no no, that rush of tingling delight and eagerness was not an appropriate
reaction at all. “Um, I…” No, nor was that note of breathlessness. But Kai was right, as
Joel came reluctantly back into the room to circle behind him and see the long gash just
below his right shoulder blade—caked with mud and bin juices, with small flakes of
stone and bark poking from the skin—this was necessary. Not a come-on, nor an
invitation to inappropriate thoughts, but only a reasonable request from a wounded man.
It was kind of nice that he didn’t try to disguise his arrogance. Oscar had been all
charm and rotten underneath. So far Kai had been the opposite, violent and demanding
and perfectly honest about it. He soothed some part of Joel’s bruised trust.
“Yes, of course.” Joel stood on his own foot, pressing down hard to try to clear his
mind with pain as Kai loosened the soft tie around his trousers and slipped them off.
Shaped like a human everywhere, Joel was helpless not to notice, but more beautiful, and
everywhere smooth and pale as though carved from marble.
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“Ah…” Kai stepped under the water with a sound of breathy bliss that twisted Joel’s
stomach. He tilted his head back and let the spray hit him in the face, silver droplets
pooling on his silver lashes and trickling over his pale lips. Dirt began to sluice from his
long hair. Weighed down and straightened by the wet, it reached the backs of his knees,
flickering and gleaming like a second waterfall down his back.
Joel possessed three changes of clothing. One on the bed, waiting for Kai to put it on
when he came out of the shower, one in the laundry basket, waiting to be washed, and
one he was wearing and would need for another long day of disasters tomorrow.
Squeezing a little harder down on his toes, he tried again to master his thoughts even as—
fingers not working quite right—he stripped off his T-shirt and jeans, left his boxers
determinedly on, and stepped into the shower behind his guest.
Exactly like someone used to being waited on by body servants, Kai simply stood in
the water, his hands at his sides, his face turned up into the flow. He had not removed any
of his jewellery, and heavy bracelets of silver wound like ivy up his arms. His fingers
flashed with gems, there were pearls at his ears, moonstones around his ankles.
Biting the inside of his cheek to distract himself, Joel leaned forward until he could
lift the shower gel off its hook on the wall.
His chest brushed the long sweep of silver hair that poured down Kai’s back—it felt
as it looked, intense as lightning. A shock went through him from the throat to the balls.
He felt sure he must be burned, but when he looked down there was no mark on him.
Holy…
“Huh…hold out your hands.”
The elf turned his head slightly, gave him a sceptical smile over his shoulder, as
though he was humouring the incredible rudeness of Joel giving him commands, and
after a pointed pause, he held out his uninjured hand to be filled with liquid soap. The
little pile of it, glistening orange, seemed to fascinate him. He prodded it, frowning,
sniffed and winced at the strong orange and ginger scent.
“You do the front.” Joel cautiously raised both hands and took a hold of the comet-
trail of hair, wary of being stung again. But like nettles, it yielded to a firm grasp and
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only felt warm, smooth. He had a strange certainty that if he brushed it with his lips he
would feel again the undercurrent of power in it, but to the hands it was quiescent, soft
and heavy as the silk of Kai’s tunic. Joel lifted it over the elf’s shoulder, baring his back.
A long chain of stones Joel thought at first were diamonds stirred and glittered down the
length of Kai’s spine, the final spray of jewels resting just between his buttocks.
He bit his lip and tried to block everything out but the wound that needed his
attention. Blood mingled with the water and streaked the pale flesh with a dimmer colour
than human gore. “Let me concentrate on this.”
He put a tiny amount of shower gel into his hand and worked it into a thin lather.
“This is probably going to hurt, so brace yourself.” He smoothed it with the lightest touch
he could manage over the undamaged skin just above the wound, letting the water carry it
over the cut and torn muscles. Kai went rigid as a statue but made no noise at all. He
bowed his head and let the curtain of water conceal his face.
“Okay.” The sight of Kai’s pain did a better job than anything so far to cut off Joel’s
inconvenient arousal. He felt as he did on the morning of a hangover, when the aspirin
finally kicks in—as though he was coming back to himself. “Wait here a moment.”
Padding, dripping, across the bathroom, he found the tweezers and the flannel he
should have fetched before he got in, leaned close so he could grab each individual flake
of bark and speck of gravel and ease them out. Kai bore it all with motionless patience—
even when Joel’s shaking hands slipped and jabbed him—and Joel felt again something
deeper than lust, something closer to respect. A very gentle swipe with the cloth to take
off the last bit of dirt. He squeezed Kai’s other shoulder gently in reassurance and said
with worrying fondness, “There, that’s done.”
Clean, the creature smelled less like a man and more like stars and sea salt, water and
sap. A faint, alluring scent that seemed to hook Joel by the nose and force him to lean
closer. His chest brushed the elf’s bare, wet back, his lips lowered towards the nape of its
neck. It breathed in, a low, smooth inhalation that spoke of bracing itself for something,
and Joel’s imagination, or his conscience, flashed on a quick picture of what they must
look like. Him so much broader than the creature, crowding it into the little stall while,
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naked, it curled protectively over its burnt hand, the seeping blood still trickling down its
back, its head bent, its eyes shut.
With a strangled gasp, Joel took command of those few neurons that still obeyed his
commands, switched off the shower and hurled himself out, away. Seriously, what was
wrong with him? He wouldn’t do this with a human unless he’d had a night of
conversation and heavy drinking first and some kind of obvious invitation. There hadn’t
been anyone he’d wanted to do it with, not with this kind of drugged compulsion, not
since Oscar. And Oscar, whatever else you wanted to say about him, had at least been of
the same species, from the same world, as Joel.
“Okay.” He towelled himself off at record speed and crammed his still-damp limbs
into his pyjamas, watching with a kind of despair as Kai paced gracefully out into the
room and stood, waiting to be dried. “Oh, damn. You are going to be the death of me.”
Kai gave a quizzical little jerk of the chin, as though the words had stung him as they
passed. His eternal small smile faltered. “That is not my intention. What is your name,
human?”
Joel twisted the long hair into a towel and dabbed at the elf’s wet skin with another,
as though he were placing careful strokes on a canvas at that critical stage when every
move is make-or-break. “I’m Joel.” Should have given an alias. Damn.
“Then, Joel, I am aware I could have fallen anywhere, into anyone’s hands. That you
have received me with kindness is…not what I was taught to expect of your people. I
am…” He swallowed. It looked a struggle to say this, as though he was saying something
intensely personal, borderline taboo. “I am grateful. If you sense death approaching, I do
not believe it will be at my hand. I will protect your life, if I can.”
“Well, that’s not quite what I meant.” Joel fetched the first aid box. He’d replenished
it thoroughly the last time he’d managed to staple his thigh with the staple gun he used
for mounting canvases, and there was a dressing in there large enough to tape across the
shoulder wound. “But it’s good to know. Thank you.”
He took the burned hand into his own as he contemplated what to do for it. Kai had
long, narrow hands, delicately boned, the ring finger much longer than the index finger
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on both hands. Even fresh out of the shower, they were still slightly cooler than human
body temperature, odd and alien. That shouldn’t be, Joel thought, quite such a turn-on as
it was.
Over the last half an hour, the burn seemed to have faded, the angry, suppurating red
welts smoothing down, paling into pink. He decided it would do well enough if he just
left it alone, and after helping Kai into the Van Gogh T-shirt, he left him to figure out the
sweatpants on his own and went to stuff the bloodied towels and his wet boxers in the
washing machine with the tunic and set it to run.
The clock on the kitchen wall said half one in the morning, and at the sight he
lowered himself to a seat by the kitchen table and let the rest of his suddenly bizarre life
catch up with him. No, there was nothing left in the tank at all—he couldn’t think,
couldn’t even worry, too tired and wrung out for any of it. He dragged himself to his feet
and poked his head back into the bedroom, to find Kai sitting on the edge of the bed
looking oddly and incongruously lost and human. Joel didn’t care any more that he was
sharing his space with something mythical, something dangerous and alien. He’d care in
the morning. “You have the bed, okay? I’m going to…”
Grabbing the spare duvet from the airing cupboard as he passed it, Joel switched off
the lights, fumbled his way into the living room cum studio and collapsed facedown on
the couch. A moment’s kicking managed to get the duvet settled properly on top of him,
and then he let go and knew nothing more until the neighbour’s car alarm went off at half
six, setting off the Chihuahua that lived in the flat above Joel’s into a dawn chorus of
sirens and high yapping barks.
Joel shoved the duvet off himself and rolled off the sofa, lurching towards the
kitchen and the life-giving hope of coffee. The fresh sunlight of an early spring morning
streamed through the window, reflected from the houses across the street, and the kitchen
smelled—he choked a little—of burnt black bread and charcoal smoke. The air was thick
and blue.
Joel opened a window with one hand, filled the kettle with another. Nothing was
getting in the way of his coffee. His coffee formed the difference between a world in
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which he was the mild-mannered proprietor of an art gallery, and the world in which he
was the rampaging destroyer of cities. He owed it to the universe to deal with coffee first.
But still, as he spooned instant coffee grounds into his mug and added an inch of
milk, he couldn’t help but notice Kai, with his long hair scraped up into a high ponytail,
tied with a strip of material torn from one of the net curtains. The elf had a slice of bread
on the end of a plastic fork and was trying to toast it on one of the gas rings of the cooker.
Not an hallucination then.
Joel poured water on his coffee and sipped, feeling all the little cells of his body sigh
with relief. With global ruin averted, he could afford to smile at the haphazard disarray of
his guest. Groggy as he was, not yet awake, the chemistry he still felt between them had
been banked down into a warm pleasure, less sharp or urgent than last night. Today he
could be delighted simply by looking at the creature, admiring its…oh, he’d seen the man
nude, who was he kidding…his good-humoured attempts to make sense of Joel’s world.
“So, you’re royalty, right? What with the jewels and the assassination attempt, and
the ‘I’m too important to take off my own clothes’?”
Kai looked up from the mess of charcoal on the end of his fork. A note of pain or
fear had gone from his face, leaving it younger-seeming, unlined except for curiosity and
vivid interest. “It is an old story,” he said. “My brothers and I are princes of Vagar, sent
out to prove our worthiness for the crown. But there we part company with the tales, for
the eldest is a thug, I am not interested, and the youngest seems to have decided it is
easier to kill his rivals than to outquest them. Your fire is too hot. I wanted only to brown
this, but now it is burned.”
“Have you ever seen a gas stove before?” Joel found himself charmed all over again
by the creature’s combination of arrogance and innocent helplessness.
“No. I turned everything that could be turned, and the flames happened of
themselves.” Kai looked delighted. He waved a hand at the radio. “Also a voice came out
of this box and began to sing. When I opened that chest to see what was within, there was
ice inside, and strange bread. I wanted to try it, but…” He tossed the burned bread down
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on the countertop and shrugged. “I have not been accustomed to cook my own food. As
you see.”
“Well, the cooker isn’t for making toast.” Joel set a couple of slices in the toaster
and, finishing his first cup of coffee, made two more, one for himself and one for Kai. By
the time he’d passed that over to his guest, the toast had popped—the sound of it making
Kai jump and laugh—and he spread it with a carefully rationed amount of his Nutella, put
it on a plate and held it out. Kai took it with his right hand, the once horrible burn
reduced this morning to a long silvery scar. “That’s what the toaster is for. I just wish… I
mean, if I’d known I was having a prince come to stay, and if I’d had more money, I’d
have given you a better breakfast. If ours is a story about a prince and a pauper, then I’m
kind of the pauper at the moment.”
But after taking a wide-eyed, cautious nibble of the toast, as if it might bite him back,
Kai’s jaw dropped. He made a squeaky noise of surprise and bliss, closed his eyes and
crammed half the slice in at once, sat with bulging cheeks and head back like a gerbil that
has just discovered God.
Joel had enough sense not to laugh—laughing at princes of any sort was probably
bad news, no matter how much you tried to explain afterwards that it was a laugh of joy.
But he did smile and apply himself to his own breakfast with more pleasure for knowing
it had blown the socks off an honest-to-goodness mythological creature.
“This is…” Kai looked at him as though he’d been concealing the secret of life in a
shoebox under his bed all the many centuries the wise men of a dozen worlds had been
looking for it. “What is this? It’s…”
“They don’t have chocolate where you come from?”
“We don’t have this.” Kai took an exploratory sip of his coffee and put it down again
with a grimace. “I came here but three hundred of your years ago, and you didn’t have it
either. Nor these enchanted lights.” He waved an elegant hand at the fluorescent tube
above them, which Joel had wanted to replace with spots but had never had the money to.
“Nor fires that burned without coal or wood. Nor cascades of water whose warmth could
be changed with the twist of a finger. What has happened to your world?”
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“Um.” Three hundred years? And he still acts like a child. “We…invented things.”
Joel shrugged. “You know? We wanted things to be better, so we figured out ways of
making them better.”
Kai pushed away the full coffee cup and started more slowly on the second half of
his toast. His brow was furrowed as if in deep thought, and his golden eyes looked
incongruously fierce against the expression—the eyes of a raptor, not of a man. But his
voice was gentle when he said, “We tell warning stories about your people. It is a world
full of cruel-hearted monsters, we say, clever monsters who find a dozen different ways
to torment their foes between one breath and the next…”
Joel poured the coffee into his own mug—three and he would be ready to face the
day—and put a glass of water in front of his guest instead. He did it quietly, though,
because it had suddenly occurred to him how terrified he would be if he’d woken up in
another world, surrounded by people he didn’t understand and couldn’t trust. People he’d
been taught all his life would only be out to hurt him.
Kai was putting an awful lot of faith in him. It made that part of him bruised by
Oscar hurt again. A good hurt, as though it were a long-disused muscle being exercised
for the first time after an injury. Because Kai was the innocent in this room. Joel was the
one in Oscar’s place, with all the knowledge and the power. The one who could choose to
deserve Kai’s trust or to betray it.
Right there was where his understanding of Oscar failed, because he didn’t see, even
now he simply couldn’t comprehend, how someone could be offered the honour of such
trust and choose to spurn it. Kai trusted him, and he answered that trust with a desire to
be worthy of it. It felt right—like something about the universe which had been out of
kilter had finally slotted into place.
Kai looked at the water, astonished, then back up at Joel, as if bemused that his
preferences had been noted and acted on. He seemed much more touched than Joel
thought the gesture warranted. Was observing another person’s behaviour and trying to
deduce their thoughts from it not an elvish thing? Or was it just that they wouldn’t
normally go beyond observation into offering unasked-for help?
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“You are cunning savages—that is what my people say of yours. But we, we who
congratulate ourselves on maintaining the old ways, on retaining the traditions unsullied,
we have no such things as your hot waterfall and your box of music. You say you are a
pauper, but you live better than any king.”
All this time, Kai had been regarding his cup of water with a sort of anguish—as
though Joel had saved his life or his self-respect—but now that raw look faded into
humour. “Better than our king at least, for he is dead.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Joel guessed that if Kai was a prince, the king he spoke of must be
his dad. He reached out and almost touched the creature on his arm—remembered at the
last moment, when Kai flinched, that he had not asked for permission. He let the
reassuring hand fall to the tabletop.
“Indeed.” Kai smiled brightly. “It did terrible things to his temper and filled the
palace with the scent of embalming fluid. I’m sure it is uncomfortable, but that’s no
reason for him to take it out on us.”
Oookay. Joel looked at the clock—time to go if he was to get the shop open in time
to catch the morning influx of office workers on their way to work. Certainly not time
enough to grapple with that one. He grabbed his coat off the back of the door and relented
as a thought struck him. “So when you say your brother was trying to kill you, you don’t
mean that in a kind of permanent way? He’d just be, like, making your life a bit
difficult?”
He regretted the words at once. The faint moonlit radiance of Kai’s skin faltered and
faded, left him looking frail as paper, the only desaturated thing in a world full of colour.
He lowered his head into his unburned hand. “No. My father was prepared for his death.
Three months of gathering power, two months of workings, and a voluntary sacrifice of
strength from all his subjects. Voluntary, I say, though the alternative was exile. My
brother, Gisli, whom Tyrnir slew…he was taken in his sleep, dreaming innocent dreams.
Too young to be afraid. The fish eat him now, on the bottom of the sea.”
Joel’s own problems fell into perspective. He sat back down again with a soft gasp of
sympathy. “I…”
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“Me he attacked on the way back from the funeral, when I was blinded by tears.”
“Oh my God, Kai, I’m…”
Kai looked up at him with pain and grief and utter confusion in his face, his soft
silver hair slithering out of its tie to fall around the elegant bones and shadows of his
cheeks. Joel felt something clench hard in his chest as though a hand had reached in and
squeezed his heart. He still didn’t honestly believe any of this was really happening—
thought perhaps one of the goons had got in a blow to the head that had left him
hallucinating Tolkien dreams. But his body was not listening to his mind’s scepticism,
and it was saying things about yearning and protection and vengeance that he didn’t want
to hear.
“I do not understand,” Kai said, with tears in his voice, “why I feel like this. He was
not me. I am still safe. I am safe here. I have performed the necessary rites. So why won’t
his death let me go? Why do I still choke on it every time I breathe, as though I’ve
swallowed a stone?”
“You wouldn’t be expected to mourn your brother’s death?” Joel didn’t like the
sound of that any more than he liked the sound of Kai’s zombie father.
“I would be expected to show a dignified amount of grief. But not to feel it. Such ties
are below the nobility. Shameful things born out of weakness and flesh. I don’t…I
don’t—”
Joel couldn’t stop himself—he reached out and gave Kai’s shoulder a comforting
squeeze, and though it made him tense up and freeze, pick his face out of his hands and
look at Joel the way a stray cat regards an outstretched hand, there was no more of the
instant cry of protest, the fury. “What you don’t need is to feel guilty because you loved
your brother. I don’t care what your people say. There’d be something wrong with you if
your brother died and you hadn’t been sad. Now listen, I can’t go to work and leave you
here alone and upset. How about you come with me? I think I’ve got…”
He went into the bedroom and rummaged right at the back of the wardrobe, where
Oscar’s old melodramatic opera cape still nestled among the mothballs. Bringing it back,
deep blue lining shimmering and the silver clasps at the throat winking in morning
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sunlight, the long fall of the outside of it black as night, he had to acknowledge that this
might not be the brilliant idea he’d originally thought. “Oh, I thought I could disguise you
in this, but if we go on the tube with you wearing this and looking like the grim reaper,
you’d possibly even get more attention. Maybe I’ve got a hoodie—”
“You want me disguised?” Kai’s expression of tragedy mutated instantly into
enjoyment, and Joel thought again how young he seemed, to be cheered up by the
prospect of an outing, like a five-year-old with a grazed knee. But he didn’t have long to
spend feeling superior before Kai raised his left hand above his head and drew it, palm
open, down himself, like a magician’s assistant lowering a concealing curtain.
It was a subtle change. Before he had been stark white, white lipped, silver haired,
golden of eye. After, his skin had the pallor of someone who never went out of doors, his
hair was platinum blond, and his eyes were the amber-brown Joel had only seen before in
men from the Middle East, a rare and beautiful colour, but not an inhuman one. The
edges of his beauty had coarsened a little, the bones of his face no longer looking delicate
as eggshell, but he was still an exotic thing, supermodel slender and elegant and tall.
Somehow—Joel’s body gave a warm flush of approval—he was much more
approachable in this form. Much more like a thing that would not be sullied by touch.
“Well.” Joel wetted his lips with his tongue and forced a laugh. “Yes, that works.
You’ll still turn heads, but no one’s likely to call the police. Come on then.”
Joel would never have imagined that his journey to work this morning could be so
free from anxiety, but he had no time to worry about money while he was having to
restrain Kai from trying to make a pet of the tube train in the mistaken belief that it was a
giant worm. Everything Kai saw was new to him and marvellous, and watching him
experience Joel’s world for the first time made it seem new and marvellous to him too.
To go to work light-hearted, in hope and enjoyment, was such a gift after such a long
time of unrelenting anxiety, of being ground down small by one misery after another.
When they arrived at the shop and Joel opened up, Kai drifted from piece to piece,
picking up the glass and turning it so that all the patterns displayed for him. Putting it
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down with a wrinkle of the nose, as though it smelled, he moved on to the jewellery—
none of which he even deigned to pick up—and then to the paintings.
Joel held his breath as those long fingers flicked through his canvases—still mostly
stacked in a pile below the till. He had not had time yesterday to display them to
advantage. He didn’t dare ask, but he badly wanted to know.
“These are yours?” Kai looked up at him, glint of blue light at the angle of his jaw as
steely as his gaze.
Have I done something wrong? “Yes.”
“There are depths to you,” said Kai, and smiled a fond, approving smile. “I thought
you were all sweetness, but there is complex and bitter in this too.”
And that wasn’t even one of his many pictures of Oscar. Joel wasn’t sure how
anyone could see complex and bitter in an autumn rainbow. “Is that a good thing?”
“Of course. Is not this chocolate of yours both sweet and bitter at the same time? It
would be lesser if it were simpler.”
Oh, hell. The way to a man’s heart was supposed to be through his stomach, but for
Joel it had always been through his art. He blushed so hard he thought his ears would
scorch. “Maybe we can put a few of them out.” He took down the unimaginative still life
with lilies, the artist of which paid a fiver a week to have it displayed in pride of place. It
would do her no good to pay for space in a closed shop. “Pick the ones you think will sell
and we’ll make a display.”
Kai had been drifting with aimless curiosity towards the office when he said this.
Now he turned sharply and favoured Joel with what Joel imagined was an “oh, dear God,
we’ve stooped to trade” look. “You sell the creations of your soul? Pieces of your own
mind and talent?”
From the blend of horror and pity, he might just as well have called Joel a whore and
have done with it.
“Yes, I do,” Joel began, needled into anger. He wasn’t quite sure when Kai’s good
opinion had become important to him, but he didn’t like the thought of losing it. “Where
do you think the money comes from that pays for my flat and my food, and this place?
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People pay a lot of money for it, I might add.” I’m not a cheap whore, at least. “Only
yesterday I sold several of my canvases for nearly two thousand pounds and—”
“Oh, is that so?” A silky smooth voice came from the doorway. Joel turned to face it,
hearing the threat and the challenge underneath the urbane amusement. The man seemed
to block out the sun at his back, filling the doorway with darkness and a faint impression
of teeth. “How very interesting, considering my boys came home last night telling me
you had nothing. We need to talk, Mr. Wilson. Sit down.”
Joel’s other problems came rushing back with a vengeance. It seemed he hadn’t
forgiven the assault outside his house—the anger he hadn’t wanted to feel towards Kai
transmuted gratefully into a more justified rage against his attackers. “I’m not taking
orders from—”
The shadow by the door partially withdrew his hand from his pocket—turned into
the light just enough for Joel to see close-fitting leather gloves, fingers curled casually
around the blue-black steel of some kind of revolver. He didn’t brandish it, he didn’t
seem that type, just gave a little sigh of laughter and said again, “Sit down.”
Joel cast a quick look behind him, hoping to warn Kai by glare to get out of sight,
keep out of this mess. But Kai had obviously got there before him—there was no sign of
the creature, no sight, no sound from the offices or cellar to say someone was hiding in
there, breathing. Glad as he was of it, Joel felt suddenly very alone.
He dragged the swivel chair out from behind the payment desk and sat on it,
lowering it so both his feet were firmly on the ground. Whether he could really spring up,
launch himself across the shop and disarm the man in the time it took to aim and fire, he
didn’t want to test, but having the option made him feel a little better. “Mr. Drake, I
presume.”
The loan shark was still smiling as he strolled out of the brilliance of the doorway,
out of his own shadow. Revealed, he was scarcely less menacing than he’d been when he
was a shade with teeth, though it was hard to put a finger on why. The man was
impeccably dressed in a sharp grey suit and a faux-military greatcoat, silver cufflinks
glinting at his wrists and incongruous pearl stud earrings peeking out from the black
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tangle of his hair. He was as slender and as tall as Kai, but had none of the elf’s
childishness. He walked like a predator—grace and wariness and strength held in reserve
for a sudden strike.
Joel, who had once been in a room with Yasuhisa Shioda, recognised at once, just
from the man’s poise, that he didn’t stand a chance of taking this one down.
Drake removed one of the lustrous bowls from its plinth and placed it carefully on
the floor beside him. Then he dusted his gloved hands together and hitched himself up on
the display stand like a seat. Another long, wordless moment went by as he studied Joel
as though Joel were a part of the stock, and he was wondering how best to get value for
money from him. “You presume rightly. And you are my dear Mr. Ringle’s stooge,
whom he has betrayed and left holding the baby.”
Despite everything, Joel wouldn’t stand for having his boss talked about like that.
“He was bringing you your damn money! He didn’t mean to get run over on the way.”
“No?” That voiceless laugh again, humourless and mocking. “Then where is my
cash? Did you get it from him when you visited the hospital? When you went to his
house?”
Joel’s blood chilled at the thought that this man had been watching him all along,
observing, thinking, toying with him and deciding when to strike. It became all too
obvious why even his own men thought of him as a dragon—something reptilian and
cold. “I didn’t… He didn’t have it.”
“Strange, isn’t it, if he was being honest?”
No, he didn’t want to talk about this. Especially not to this cynical stranger whose
presence in his shop was making all the little hairs on the back of his neck stand up and
shiver.
“One can, of course, arrange a gentle accident as a good excuse not to pay one’s
dues.” Drake went on quietly as though talking to himself. “It’s a tactic with which
gentlemen in my business have become familiar.” He gave Joel a sudden companionable
smile, though the dark blue eyes remained cold. “Like ‘the dog ate my homework’ or
‘honestly, Officer, it’s not a blunt weapon. I was on my way to play baseball’.”
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Joel opened his mouth to say something—he wasn’t sure what—and Drake cut off
his words with a sharp gesture. “But I’m not here to teach you the tricks of the trade. I’m
here to receive the money you owe me. I hear you made nearly two thousand pounds
yesterday. Good for you.” He held out a hand—his left hand, the right still jammed in his
pocket, curled around the gun.
“I asked to see the paperwork.” Joel’s words came out in a breathy rush from having
to be forced.
Drake smiled again, more shallowly, with a hint of irritation in the corner of his
mouth. He reached into the inside pocket of his big coat and drew out a contract, folded
lengthways, legal style. Joel took it with the feeling that he was being played with, read it
and despaired.
Fishing his wallet out of his jacket, he counted the two thousand, three hundred
pounds out into the loan shark’s kid-gloved palm. Opening the till, he brought out the
float he had left in it overnight, another six hundred and sixty-seven pounds. Two
thousand, nine hundred and sixty-seven pounds in total. He turned to the small change,
and Drake gestured again with that brusque wave that cut through everything he did and
made it stop.
“You will need the change”—Drake handed back fifty pounds, folded the remainder
of the notes and tucked them into his top pocket—“if you are to continue to trade.”
“That’s…” the generosity, or perhaps the mere practicality, startled Joel, “…kind of
you.”
It was a very small smile this time, but there was genuine humour in it. Black
humour. “How else are you to raise the seven thousand and thirty-three pounds more you
owe me?”
“What?” Okay, okay, he’d be lying if he said he hadn’t exactly expected this, but
he’d expected it the way—when he was a child—he’d expected the monster to come out
from under the bed. He’d expected it without actually believing it would happen.
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Evidently his horrified look was hilarious, for Drake’s smile expanded into a
delighted grin. “I’m sure you’ve read the fine print—it’s my right to change the interest
as I please, as long as I inform you of it and give you a reasonable chance to pay up.”
“But I…” I’ll starve. I’ll get thrown out of my flat. I’ll—
Drake dropped the smile as though it was no longer of use to him. He leaned
forward, elbows on knees, and speared Joel with a look. “You sent one of my boys back
to me broken, Mr. Wilson. You sent them both back humiliated. Now admittedly, they’re
not my best boys, because this was a trivial little debt in which I took no personal
interest. I do have…” He made a gesture that would have read as examining his
fingernails, if he had not been wearing gloves, flexed his fingers to make the leather
creak across the knuckles.
“I do have something of a business empire to run. But you courted my attention, Mr.
Wilson, and now you have it. You must pay for it, one way or another.”
Joel hated the break of hope in his voice when he asked “Another?”, if only because
it made Drake smile like that—smile like a cat when the mouse is trapped beneath its
paw.
“Seven thousand by the end of the week, or I could waive the debt and you could do
me a favour.”
“What kind of—”
“He wasn’t my best boy, but he wasn’t my worst. I find it impressive that you
wrecked him so easily. I could use a man with such a talent.”
Another glorious spring morning was flooding the gallery with light. The glassware
and the glass shelves around them sparkled, smearing the pale oak floor with rainbows of
colour. Joel was offended, actually offended that Drake could sit there in the centre of
such radiance and try to cast his shadow over all of that.
“I’ll get you the money.” He rose to his feet, despite the gun, defiantly angry. “All of
it. Now get out of my shop. You disgust me.”
Drake stepped down from his pedestal like a statue come to life, eyes as stony as
lapis lazuli. He pushed his face right up into Joel’s, until their noses were almost
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touching, until Joel could smell the Givenchy and salt scent of him. Then he laughed and
gave an odd, precise shrug of his left shoulder.
He stepped back, his left arm lashing out simultaneously. Joel registered the razor
gleam, hurled himself backwards. Must have lost his grip on reality because suddenly
something silver was sliding along all the reflective surfaces of the room like a snake in
water. A whisper of pressure along his cheekbone, and then Kai was there in the centre of
the room, lips drawn back into a snarl and a spear of light bursting from his palm straight
into Drake’s face.
Joel had time to register Drake’s unguarded look of shock before the white light hit
something an inch away from Drake’s skin. He recoiled, driven back to the door, his face
twisting, making to speak. Kai screamed on a note of fury and frustration, drew back his
hand to launch another fiery spear, and Drake closed his mouth with a snap, retreated
through the door and slammed it shut behind him.
His footsteps drew away outside. Joel turned back to find Kai looking at his hands as
though they’d betrayed him. Joel took in a great breath to try and smother the whoop of
victory, the half-hysterical laughter he could feel bubbling under his breastbone, and a
bone-deep ache of agony bloomed out of nowhere on his face. Trying to lick his lips, he
got a mouthful of blood.
Kai was in front of him at once. Cold fingertips pushed at his cheek. He leaned in
and breathed crackling ice along the side of Joel’s face, and the hot, deep throb of it eased
into numbness.
“What?” Joel asked, laughter dying away into a sick, shaky cold. “What…?” He
remembered suddenly the razor in Drake’s hand, the featherlike touch, painless and
fleeting, he had felt before Kai charged in like the white knight he was. “Let me s… Let
me see.”
He pushed forward, trying to get to the staff bathroom, to wash away the blood he
could feel trickling warm over his collar and splashing onto the floor.
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“There’s no need.” Kai still had one hand on his face, was watching it intently as
though the fingers—which seemed motionless to Joel—were performing some kind of
intricate task. “Stop moving!”
Joel had edged into line with the display of crystal in its mirrored cabinet, caught
sight of himself and stopped as if he’d run into a wall. It looked as though half of his face
had fallen off—a long, precise cut over the cheekbone and then a tear on either side, so
deep he could see the glint of teeth inside. “Oh my…oh my God!”
Hand out, he fumbled for the chair, collapsed into it, and Kai had to bat away the
hand he raised to poke at the ruin, give him a vicious little shake and repeat, “Keep still!”
before he lapsed into quiet despair.
“It’s all going to hell,” he said at last, and was pleased to find that at least his mouth
worked. “He’ll be back and how can I raise…? And he knows about you now. What is he
going to…?”
Phantom pressure and coolness as Kai covered one hand with the other, pressed his
face back together. Joel shied away from the thought of it. “Fucking maniac! I thought
we were having a civil conversation. I thought…”
“He is a great man, of sorts,” Kai whispered, leaning in. “A man full of surprises.
Perhaps next time you should be more wary in how you handle him. He is not
accustomed to clients”—he said the word as though it meant slaves—“treating him with
contempt. In truth, if you had spoken so to me, I might have done the same.”
“Good to know,” Joel said, discomfited. In his opinion, usurers were scum on about
the same level as pimps. He didn’t like Kai’s tone of respect, or the fact he found it so
easy to sympathise with everything that was bad in humankind.
Slowly, as Kai pressed, the numbness began to wear away. A wave of pins and
needles went over him, so intense he almost forgot everything and scratched. Then he
could feel the individual shapes of fingers against his skin, warm and firm and painless.
“Good.” Kai took his hands away, frowned at the crimson mess of them. “So I am
not powerless here after all. Then why…? Is there water for washing? This is a little too
intimate for me.”
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Not understanding any of that, Joel wobbled out to the bathroom, ran a sink of water
and peeked at the mess of his face. Then he looked again, longer. He was still covered in
a layer of gore that made him look peeled, but there was no longer any sign of where it
had come from. He poked curiously at the skin—it was as firm as it ever was, and when
he washed the blood off there wasn’t even a scar to show where the cut had been.
He refilled the sink for Kai, watched him clean fastidiously around every cuticle,
under each nail.
“Another bowl, please.”
“You can’t do it yourself?”
“The controls for the water appear to be metal. I do not know how much iron is in
them. Nor do I not wish to find out by burning myself again. Have I not earned your aid
today?”
“Oh.” Joel cleared and rinsed the basin, filled it up again. “Yes, of course you have.
We’re… I guess we’re even now. Wound-wise, I mean. Thank you.”
“If my magic had not somehow failed me, he would have been blown apart into
motes no larger than dust before e’er he touched you.” Kai’s mouth was grim as he
scrubbed at his hands again with an OCD intensity. “So do not thank me until I have
worked out what went wrong and disposed of the blackguard’s miserable corpse.”
“I thought you said he was a great man?” Joel recoiled from the idea of killing
Drake, even while part of him acknowledged how very many problems that would solve.
“He is. But he is still just a man, and the thought that he somehow foiled me—
walked away from me—it is intolerable. I will see him slain or defeated if it’s the last
thing I do.”
Joel plunged his own hand into the water, caught Kai’s fingers and squeezed them,
feeling suddenly very much less alone. How nice it was to have a champion! Though,
intellectually, he didn’t quite approve of Kai’s ruthlessness, there was no denying that a
part of him found it seriously hot.
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“Well, killing him… I wouldn’t be happy with that, but if there’s anything you can
do to help me raise the money in time, get him off my back that way, that’s the kind of
defeat I could get behind. Do you think you can?”
Kai had bent his head and was staring at their clasped hands with the puzzled furrow
to his forehead he had worn when talking about his murdered brother. He brought them
out of the water but did not attempt to unclasp them, holding on while he raised a brief,
startled glance to Joel’s eyes and away again.
Then he reached behind his neck, undoing some sort of clasp, and pulled up the long
chain of gems that hung down his back. Not diamonds. Though they were clear as water,
the lights that flashed and glittered around their facets were cooler. Smudges of indigo
and peacock-feather green and blue, sapphire and ice white and turquoise—oceanic
colours—swirled and danced with every movement of every gem, and the chain itself
flicked and flickered like a wave. “Will this serve as a start?”
Joel took it in cupped, reverent hands out to the window, swept out half of the other
jewellery as junk and displayed it like a galaxy of blue-hot stars in a swirl on a black
velvet background. The whole room lit up from its refractions as if it floated above a
shining sea.
“You…” Joel said, and tears prickled at his eyes. “Oh, you are…” A lifesaver, while
undoubtedly true, was just not big enough. “My hero. This’ll earn the whole thing on its
own, wait and see.”
After more than a dozen different people came in and drooled over it throughout the
afternoon, it actually sold, at three fifteen, to an Arab businessman for eight thousand five
hundred pounds. Joel put the seven thousand and thirty-three pounds in the safe and took
the rest home with him. He hadn’t been paid for months, so he took everything to which
he was entitled and folded it under the mattress. Rent for next month and utilities
covered, he splashed out on a takeaway curry and a bottle of wine, and watched Kai pick
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daintily at the lumps of chicken korma with a pair of wooden chopsticks, rather than
risking touching Joel’s cutlery.
Chicken korma also brought an expression of near awe to Kai’s face and—though he
had dropped his human disguise as soon as the flat door was shut behind him—a trace of
palest coral along his cheeks that only deepened with a couple of glasses of wine.
They’d shut up shop early, Joel not wanting to risk anything happening that would
sour this moment of utter relief and happiness. Now he leaned back against his kitchen
chair, replete with good food, pleasantly mellow for a glass or two of—actually quite
terrible—wine, and saw that the sun had not yet set. He’d broken his shackles; he had a
breathing space in which to earn next month’s rent. The next time Drake came around,
Joel was going to get a receipt, cancel the contract and tell him politely where to get off.
Freedom and reprieve and he felt fine.
On top of that he had the most beautiful creature in the whole universe sitting across
the small kitchen table from him, with a flush on its aristocratic face and its eyes closed
in bliss. He contemplated the fall of golden evening light through that long silver hair and
felt as though he too was tasting something he had never encountered before, being gifted
with marvels.
Just above Kai’s ear, between ear and hairline, a smudge of russet caught Joel’s eye.
The elf must have pushed his hair back behind his ear with bloody hands, left a streak to
dry. It made Joel even more aware of how much he owed Kai. In the triumph of having
solid good fortune in his pocket, he had all but forgotten the horror of that wound.
With a prickling rush, the dormant thing that drowsed snakelike in his head stirred
and sat up. He was seeing a picture, visualising it—that white perfect face in the
foreground, and behind it his own as he’d glimpsed it in that terrifying reflection. Not
something he’d forget in a hurry. His fingers itched and a fine, creative flush swept over
his skin.
“Would you… Would you mind if I painted you?” It never got easier to ask—it
sounded as intimate as it was. “I have this idea. I just… The light in the study would
be…” …as though you were gilded. As though you were rubbed in oil and shimmering.
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His breath caught, and at the same time Kai looked up from his plate, startled as though
he’d felt the coil of unwary lust in his own stomach.
“Now?” It passed and he looked curious again. “What would be involved?”
Joel rose and gestured him through to the studio, fussed with the cushions on the
sofa. Red? White? None at all? He swept them all off and tugged a dustsheet over to stop
the blue-and-white duvet from distracting him. “For you, just sitting here and keeping as
still as you can. Then I would…”
No canvas, damn it. Never mind. He picked his least favourite landscape, flipped it
over and set it back on the easel, cracking open his box of charcoal. There should be
patter—professional talk to reassure his model—but as his fingers closed on a rough and
fragile black stick and Kai settled back into the sofa, his face raised to the last of the sun,
his eyes half-lidded and his mouth half-slack, Joel couldn’t think of a thing to say.
It was as though he hadn’t even looked before. Now that he had, his whole body
seemed charged with it, and an electricity of awareness moved under his skin. The
charcoal slipped in his damp grip. By contrast, his mouth went dry.
Chapter Eight
Kjartan shifted on the padded bench as a wave of curling pleasure washed from his
toes to the crown of his head. Bemused, he watched the human narrowly. Joel was a
curious, fascinating creature. Kjartan liked the rawness of him—something unrefined and
honest about him. A drum in a symphony of strings, compelling with its simplicity. A
voice that reached deep down, underneath courtly subtleties, into the bedrock of the
mind, and the body too.
But that was unfair. Kjartan had let him get close in the shower, no longer entirely
sure what he would do if the human tried to take him, as he was sure it wanted to. He was
marooned, he had believed, among a people enslaved to their lusts, controlled by their
undisciplined feelings, utterly without reason or restraint. And yes, there was something
of that in Joel—the simple, compelling drumbeat was there between the two of them,
with Kai adding his own ornaments to the rhythm from his own desires. But Joel had
drawn back, had not even made an attempt on Kai’s body. There must be therefore some
subtlety to him, some strength of will or principle of belief that stood in his way. He
could not be the savage Kjartan’s people thought.
And if Joel was not a monster, then what else had Kjartan’s people lied to him
about? Kjartan had expected an attempt in the shower—thought he would get it over
with, one way or the other, give in to the man or kill him, whatever had seemed more
appealing at the time. None of that had shaken him the way Joel had this morning by
noticing his grief and trying to comfort it, by noticing his thirst and finding a way to slake
it.
He had watched so carefully, paid so much attention to Kjartan’s words and actions,
that he had been able to give Kjartan what he needed before Kjartan had even thought to
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ask. Kjartan had never felt so seen, so real to another person in his life. He wasn’t sure he
liked it. To suddenly become visible to others was to risk being targeted and hurt.
He squirmed on the sofa again. Besides, this flood of arousal and need seemed
curiously external to him. If he concentrated hard, rubbing his fingertips together, he
could even sense the pressure of something held in his right hand.
He watched the human, his face narrowed with concentration, make swift, darting
movements towards the white square in front of him. This at least he was familiar with.
Artists in Vagar worked just the same, with a similar look of preoccupation, of
meditation. Kjartan had always wondered if the process felt the same as his ventures into
the world of shaping lower life forms. Now, if he half-closed his eyes and allowed his
awareness to wander, he could actually feel Joel’s mind at work, holding all his
preoccupations and thoughts away from himself, so that the eye and hand could work
together to show what was really there. A powerful mind, warm as his skin.
Kjartan looked at his own hands suspiciously. He should not be able to feel the
human’s mind and moods like this. He thought he’d been careful and thorough at
removing any physical link. But if that was so, why should he feel the pressure of Joel’s
weight through his heels, or the seethe of excitement, shyness, reluctance, yearning,
tension and relief nestled under his breastbone like a cuckoo?
“Phew,” said Joel, and at once Kjartan felt the well of satisfaction, could close his
eyes and still see the picture in front of him, his own face, looking thinner than he
thought it, drawn in black charcoal lines. Then Joel looked up, and Kjartan made the
mistake of opening his eyes and catching the gaze, and it was as though he had been
tumbled into a field of nettles; his skin felt alight all over, almost painfully so, and his
blood buzzed within him.
“That’s…” The catch in the human’s voice made the sensation worsen. “That’s the
outline done. You can move a bit…a bit more freely now. I was just wondering if I
could…”
His speech was full of these little pauses, Kjartan had noticed, where the important
thoughts were left out and one had to guess at his meaning from one’s experience and
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knowledge of human behaviour. As Kjartan had neither of these, he found the man’s
conversation hard to follow. Even though Kjartan heard what Joel wished him to hear, all
too often that changed midsentence, and it was as though the words had failed.
Sometimes—as now—Joel even moved the same way. Here he came out from
behind his picture stand. Two steps forward and a hesitation, and the fierceness of the
want in Kjartan’s throat combined with annoyance at the ridiculous tentativeness. He
threw himself to his feet, grabbed the man by the stretchy material of his short overtunic
and pulled him into a brutal kiss.
Kjartan felt the shape of the man’s teeth through his own lips, hard enough to bruise,
but the pain and surprise didn’t seem to help him work out what he was feeling, identify
whether this lust was his own or Joel’s.
Joel made a low growling noise in his throat and dropped the charcoal to wind both
arms around Kjartan and slide one hand beneath his shirt.
No, this was not doing much to dispel the demanding blaze of heat that itched in
every fibre of his body. It blazed so high he couldn’t tell if there was any of his own
desire in there at all. For a moment he teetered, undecided, at the thought of just letting
this happen, purging the need through satiation, ignoring the indignity of being used by
someone else’s lusts. It could be fun. It certainly need not be important.
Pride won out, and something stranger than pride. In that part of himself where all
the hurts of late accumulated, a strange pleasure had also grown, associated with Joel. He
liked the man’s gratitude. He liked Joel’s gentleness, the way he could be emotional
around Joel without fear of rebuke or contempt. If Joel had truly not been important,
Kjartan might have toyed with the man for the transient thrill of it, walked away after
without regrets. But he found himself hoping for more than that, though what that more
could be he wasn’t quite sure.
Breaking the kiss, Kjartan pushed the man away. When Joel stood, gasping, looking
confused and bereft and eager, he said, “Your blood is still on me, isn’t it? Where?”
It was gratifying how quickly the thrumming heat quenched at the words, although
he had not expected to miss it as much as he did. Savage? Uncontrolled? No. Joel’s
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emotions were strong, but they were held in check by a will and a reason equally as
strong, and that was a revelation indeed.
“I’m sorry?”
“So you should be. For through that link I can feel everything you feel. Your wishes
have invaded my head and trampled upon my own—”
“But you kissed me.”
“Because you wanted me to. I grew impatient of the fear that you would take what
you wanted. Better that I should do it than have it done against my will.”
This was not the entire truth, but Joel did not need to know that. He needed only to
be reduced to… Ah, and there it was, gratifyingly sudden and thorough. “Nor do I now
need to feel your guilt,” Kjartan lied, pleased. It was not a test he had meant to subject the
human to, but he found it enlightening to realise that emotions themselves could be part
of the reasoning process. That rather than being inherently weak, feelings could be used
to make you strong.
They lied to me all my life.
“But I need to tell you about it,” Joel said, thrusting his blackened hand into his short
springy black hair with a sad, reproachful expression. “The guilt, I mean. I don’t want
you to think I’d make a move on you if you didn’t want it. God, I’m sorry. I didn’t
know… I’m so sorry. Look, let me, um. I’ll run a sink of water for you. It’s just here.” He
touched above his own left ear. “I didn’t… God, what a shit I am.”
With passion cooled, Kjartan followed the human back into the room of toast,
watched him fill the large basin by the window with clear water and set out soap and
towels. Joel’s guilt, though instructive, became unwelcome.
“You are not ‘a shit’,” he said. “In every way you exceed everything I expected of
your kind.”
“You’ve been afraid I might…all the time since you’ve been here?” Joel had not put
the last towel down. He stood and twisted the corners as though he were wringing his
hands.
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Kjartan could feel vividly, from the inside, the misery the gesture meant, and it was
odd. He’d felt similar to that when Gisli died, and he’d supposed that nobody could
understand what he was going through. What a strange thought that Joel might have
feelings as strong as those of a prince of the elder-folk. Feelings that he could hurt.
“I was afraid at first,” he said, feeling his way towards compassion. “We have tales
of what to expect from mankind and they are not reassuring. But you proved your good
intent in the shower, though I know you were tempted. I fear it no longer. Only I wish to
ensure that if something of that sort happens between us, it will be because I want it too. I
have little objection to sex with humans, but I will have it on my own terms or not at all.”
“Oh!” Joel gasped and dropped the towel onto the table. “That…sounds great.
Yeah.” The thoughts pressed so thick behind his silence Kai could almost read them
without words. Almost, but not quite. Then Joel breathed in, shoved them down and
changed tack. “If it’s any comfort, we have stories about elves too. They’re not always
reassuring either. Some of you break us for fun, yeah? Mess with our heads, steal our
children?”
That was a new way of looking at some of the hunting trophies Kjartan had seen
over the years. The thought felt cold and hard in his stomach. He didn’t like it. “True
enough. Others—not me.”
Joel did not look as reassured by this statement as Kjartan felt he should. He wrung
his hands, changed the subject again. “Good to know. So perhaps you’d better…” A
gesture indicated the water that lay in a perfectly still pool beneath the window, reflecting
the dusty, greyish backs of the blackout curtains that kept the night sky outside. A perfect
mirror.
It was too much of a temptation. Despite the faint possibility that Tyrnir might sense
the gaze, follow it back and find him, Kjartan found he wanted to know what his brothers
were doing. He could not afford to become tangled up in this little creature’s little world
and ignore his duties to his own people. Not forever.
Besides, suppose his earlier suspicion had been correct, and Tyrnir had enlisted Aud
to his support. Aud could certainly find him without any linking thread. To remain
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ignorant might be more of a liability to him than the slight chance that Tyrnir—having
already made him run away—would trouble to return to finish him.
He leaned down and brought his mouth close to the surface of the water, breathing a
charged fog of his own breath and soul across it. “Show me my brother,” he commanded
it. “Show me Tyrnir’s thoughts and purposes, where he is and what he does.”
In the sink, the reflection of curtains changed colour, shimmered into a rich
burgundy and gold, as though he had cut himself and tainted the water with his own
blood. Gradually the colours began to coalesce, a picture came into focus—a room far
more like what he had expected to find on the human world, grand and gilded and hung
with heavy velvet curtains and tassels of gold bullion.
“Oh wow,” said Joel behind him. “It’s like Galadriel’s mirror. Seriously. I thought
Tolkien made that up. Galadriel’s mirror in my sink.”
“Sssh!” Kjartan hissed. “They’ll hear you.”
For one of the enormous paintings that hung on the high walls—a painting of a man
with long, curly hair and an ostrich feather in his tricorn hat, leaning nonchalantly against
a slightly mad-eyed horse—had wavered in the centre as if made of water. Someone was
web-walking through.
The centre of the painting split and the two sides drew apart. From the unformed
world-stuff in the middle a long arm clawed, its green fingers tipped with black talons. It
shoved the sides of the hole further apart and writhed through. Joel—though he stood
beside Kjartan with his hand over his mouth—still made a strangled sound of horror and
denial at the sight of its full form, the hunched, hungry back and the skull-like face that
had shrunk away from its teeth as though its own maw terrified it. A second came
through, this one with a pike in its hand and a belt of swinging heads.
“Orcs!” Joel leaned forward until he was almost in the bowl, forcing Kjartan to curve
a hand around his mouth and pull him back. He was coming willingly, looking apologetic
for his forgetfulness, when he stiffened and gave a squeak of protest, and bent Kjartan’s
fingers back to force him to let go.
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“Wait! Wait, that’s—look!” Joel pointed at the windows that were visible to the side
of the painting. Their diamond panes were individually painted with sigils—a portcullis,
three feathery things, some animals that might have been cats with very thick head-hair.
More goblins climbed out of the portal and scrubbed their filthy feet on a burgundy
and gold carpet. Then Tyrnir—looking regal in midnight blue, with accents of bone as
pale as his hands—forced the gap wide and stepped fastidiously through. With his right
hand he held the veil of reality open for two score more goblins to worm out. In the left
he held a green glass jar with a plunger at one end and at the other a mesh of silver wire.
“That’s Buckingham Palace,” Joel whispered. “It’s Buckingham Palace, Kai, what
the hell?”
With all this noise, Tyrnir was sure to hear him. Kjartan banished the enchantment
by plunging his hand into the pool. He stuck his head in next, to wash the blood off and
to have just a moment’s respite from the human’s nagging. But when he came back up
clean, Joel was still there, tugging at his arm and looking as though Tyrnir were trying to
attack him personally.
“What are they doing, Kai? What are they doing in the Queen’s palace?”
Kjartan felt a glow of affection for the creature for its loyalty, and for telling him the
answer to its own question. He hadn’t known himself until now. “In token of his
worthiness to rule, my brother swore to bring the king, my father, the captured souls of a
dozen monarchs. It seems your queen is to be one of those.”
Just as he had done when wounded at his emporium of art, Joel took two steps back
and fell into a chair. Apparently shock typically affected his knees. His skin grew ashen
as it had done then, and Kjartan wondered if the humans had so strong a bond with their
queen that her maiming would mean the death of them all. It seemed the only explanation
for how personally Joel was taking this.
“Kai, no.” Joel rose, picked up the kettle as if he were unsheathing a sword, looked
at it, put it down again. He repeated the process with a smooth cylinder of marble, but it
wasn’t until he reached the block of wood from which a number of handles stood, pulled
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the middle one out to reveal an awkwardly shaped dagger, that Kjartan realised he was
looking for a weapon. “No way. We can’t let that happen.”
“I see no reason why the loss of a soul from a woman you do not know should harm
either you or I. The sooner it is done, the sooner Tyrnir will turn his eyes away from here
and I will be safe again.”
Joel had a softness about him, belied by the fact that he was built like a king’s
champion—muscles like stone, heart as fluffy as cloud. Now his brown eyes narrowed
and his face seemed to harden too. “If your brother hurts the Queen, you’re not going to
be safe, because I will personally kick you out on the streets to meet all those other
humans. The ones you were expecting. You selfish little—”
Oh, threats now? Kjartan could do threats ’til the ocean froze on its bed. They were
comfortingly uncomplicated in the face of all these new emotions. “That might still be
better for me than attracting my brother’s attention. You did notice that he tried to kill
me, didn’t you? That he almost succeeded? And now you want me to reveal that I am
here? You think it wise to draw his attention not only to me but also to you? He will not
want witnesses left when he brings his followers here to tear me limb from limb. You will
meet those other elves. The ones from your stories. Is that what you want?”
Joel covered his mouth with his right hand and bit down on his middle knuckle. His
shoulders slumped briefly and then braced back up. His voice was free of anger when he
spoke next, tired but determined. “She’s an old lady, Kai. If I hadn’t known it was
happening, I could have let it go and just been sad after. But I do know now, and I can’t
let them do that to her. Not if I can stop them somehow. You don’t have to come, okay? I
know you don’t want to hurt your brother, you don’t want him to hurt you. There’s
nothing wrong in that. Just send me on my own, and…and then maybe phone the police
afterwards, okay? Please, Kai.”
“I may be sending you to your death.” Kjartan felt sure the blood must still be on
him. Whence, otherwise, came this feeling of dread and sadness? Whence came this
sudden determination to have Joel’s good opinion back, to risk—a small risk, true, but a
real one—to risk exposure, to make Joel trust him again? Yes, it must be the human’s
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influence. He could allow himself to be swayed by it without yet more doubt that he
himself was soft.
He squirmed his wrist out of one of his bracelets, held it out. “If you defeat Tyrnir
once, he will only return later. Tell your queen to wear this in future. It will shield her
from any repeat attempt.”
Joel swallowed and attempted a smile, his eyes shiny-bright as he took the bracelet
and tucked it into his pocket. “I knew you weren’t the cold bastard you try to pretend you
are. Thank you. I…I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try, so…”
Still the maddening pause. So…what? So what? Stung at the thought that his
weakness was obvious to even this poor fool, Kjartan could have shaken him. Instead he
raised both hands together, brought them apart and tore the world between them.
“I may not even bless you for fear that Tyrnir would see my words on you. But go
then. Step through, and fare well.”
Chapter Nine
Joel threaded through the place between the walls of the world like a loose skein of
yellow wool attached to the needle of Kai’s will. He couldn’t breathe, but it didn’t seem
to matter. Couldn’t see or hear, but he felt as though he could have swerved left or right
and travelled across galaxies. Then he felt how easily he could get lost in here, and
mentally shut his eyes, holding on tight to Kai’s guidance.
His foot jarred and he stumbled forward onto plush woollen carpet. Heart
hammering, eyes snapping open, he found himself in the corridor he had seen earlier. It
was empty now, but there was a sound of slithering just beyond the end door. Joel
breathed carefully, taking the time to go through his prebout ritual, to calm and centre
himself, remembering how to walk without jeopardising his balance, without making
more of a sound than a faint brush across the top of that marvellously soft woollen pile.
Knife in hand, he felt a gaze on his cheek, looked up straight into the round black eye
of a security camera. Oh. Oh, no, that was good, really. They could send the security guys
to deal with him, and he could lead them to the real quarry. But probably it would still
take a few minutes until they got here. Time to get moving.
He flowed down the corridor to the far door through which the snakelike noise was
coming. Easing the handle down, he cracked the door open a little. Could see nothing
inside but the darkness of an unlit room.
Throwing the door wide, hoping the unexpected blaze of light from the corridor
would startle and blind the goblins, he slipped through sideways and flattened himself
against the wall. The faint hiss he’d been hearing outside turned at once into a jabbering
babble of thin, harsh voices. His light-adapted eyes picked out two security men
collapsed on the ground with knives made out of stone protruding from their backs. Sad,
crumpled heaps of official black suits.
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The goblins closest to Joel were backing away from the door and clawing at their
eyes. This close to them, he was all but knocked unconscious by their stench—a reeking,
ammoniac, deep-down bottom-of-the-cesspit stink that took away his moment of
advantage by making his own eyes sting and stream.
Over their heads—for they were only about five feet high—he saw a long
bedchamber, oddly modest in its furnishings, with a chest of drawers and a bookcase and
a modern, uncanopied bed in which the Queen slept on through the bedlam noises as if
drugged or drunk or under a spell.
She looked much smaller than she did on TV. Silver haired and wrinkled, in a pink
flannel nightdress. The vague patriotism and principle that had moved Joel to do this was
replaced by a very real fury. This poor old lady—someone’s grandma, who had lived
through the Blitz and worked so long and had so much family tragedy and trouble.
“Leave her alone!” he shouted, as if the protest in itself would help. “You get away from
her!”
“Or you’ll do what?”
The voice shocked Joel—so cultured, so beautiful. It came from a shadow he hadn’t
even seen, leaning over the bed. Joel narrowed his eyes and made out the tall, dark-clad
form of Kai’s brother with a cowl over his bright golden hair. He had a mocking
expression and one knee propped up on the bed, the syringe-like device in his hand
almost touching the Queen’s temple.
“I’ll…I’ll stop you.” Joel’s mind raced. Okay, so he hadn’t come to this fight
equipped with any witty banter—that was fine, he was no superhero.
Kai’s brother—Tyrnir, wasn’t it?—laughed a little and leaned back down. “By all
means, try.”
Joel focussed on what he could see of the goblins in front of him—that one’s weight
was balanced badly. It could be tripped into the one next to it. If he stepped to the right
after that, mawashigeri to the ribs of the one with the flail, pushing it back into the one
with the pike. Then he’d only be two ranks from the front and could take it from there.
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Tyrnir tilted his head, unimpressed. “I am disappointed. This was supposed to be
more difficult.”
Joel reached along the wall, snapped the light switch on, and plunged into the
blinded, gibbering mass of goblins as though he’d been training for this most of his life.
Perhaps he had, though Sensei Richard would be hard-pressed to believe it.
The plan worked perfectly—much to his own surprise—until he got to the place
where he was supposed to take it from there and found he didn’t know what to do next.
By that time he was surrounded, all his mental capacity being used to track movements in
the corner of his eye, to calculate where to turn, where to block. Instinctively, despite the
knife in his hand, he had been punching, kicking, his flesh shrinking from the feel of filth
when it connected with the cold peeled-chicken-like flesh of the creatures around him.
One of them caught him a blow across the back of the head with the haft of its mace.
Stars swarmed his vision, though he felt no pain and wondered why he was staggering. It
was almost by mistake that he brought up the knife hand and swiped the goblin he fell
into across the gut, leaving what should have been little more than a narrow cut.
The moment the knife touched its flesh, the goblin began wailing at a pitch that made
the blood bubble out of Joel’s ears. It reeled away, crashed into the one behind it—he
stepped into the space opened up and found himself facing what looked like their captain.
With a burst of oily black smoke and a gout of blue flame, the goblin he had grazed
spontaneously combusted, burning with an intense heat that cracked the ceiling above it
and drove all the combatants back.
Joel looked at the knife, and then at the goblin captain in front of him. It was clad in
tarnished armour, was almost as tall as he was, and its long grasping arms were silver-
blue in colour, muscled like pistons and tipped with nails as sharp as volcanic glass. It
smiled at him in defiance, showing teeth like hollow needles.
Shit, he thought. He didn’t like to swear, but sometimes there was no other word that
fit. Trying not to telegraph intent in his gaze, he came in with a roundhouse kick to its
ribs, only to have it swing down its buckler to meet the blow. His foot slammed into
riveted copper and agony lanced up his leg from ankle to groin.
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Behind its shoulder, he could see Tyrnir fit the sucker cup of his device to the
Queen’s face and begin to pull back on the plunger. Even under the spell, she made a
muffled sound of protest, the twin of Joel’s louder “No!”
Without thinking, he hefted the knife in his hand by the point and flung it at Tyrnir’s
head. It flew, revolving blade over grip as it did so, and it seemed the room stood still,
briefly. One of the foremost goblins squeaked. Tyrnir looked around in time to bat the
flying weapon away from him, saving his head. The blade drew a long line of orange-red
across the palm of his hand, and something popped at the contact.
Then everything started up again faster. Joel’s formidable opponent feinted for his
throat. When he blocked the blow at its wrist, it stepped closer and broke his nose with its
forehead. There was a crack and his vision filled with red, while his knees seemed to fall
out from under him. As he staggered, it went for the throat again and its long, long
fingers wrapped all the way around, twice, and tightened like a hangman’s noose.
Scrabbling at the grip, he tried to pry the fingers away. It was like trying to shift the
grip of a mechanical excavator. Joel’s throbbing head filled with grey sparks, and his
chest laboured and burnt. He could feel his feet leave the floor as the creature lifted him
up and shook him.
He was going to…he was going to… The thought of death came over him like a
surprise. It couldn’t happen to him. Not like this! This was too stupid. No one could die
like this—strangled by orc—in the twenty-first century. There was probably some kind of
law against it.
His body spasmed and kicked. His tongue writhed out of his mouth, and all his
thoughts had begun to fragment under a great grey wave of nonononono!
A huge bang filled the room, juddered the floor, and something thick and hot hit
Joel’s face. The grip slackened, and he fell to his knees, gulping in air flavoured with the
smell of goblin brains and cordite. Looking up, he found the Queen with a shotgun
pressed to her shoulder, the cartridge steaming on her white linen comforter, and the shot
gleaming in the mess that had once served Joel’s strangler for a head.
“What on earth is going on here?” she said, having firmly got everyone’s attention.
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Joel grabbed the fallen goblin’s sword—knives he wasn’t sure about, but he’d done a
bit of aikido a couple of years back, before he decided to concentrate on the Wado-ryu—
and executed a classic double cut, taking out the stunned creatures on either side of him.
“Um.”
He nodded at Tyrnir, who was cradling his cut hand with the expression of a man
undergoing torture. “He’s an elf prince. He’s come for your soul. That’s what the syringy
thing is for. You were in an enchanted sleep, but I think I broke that when I threw the
kitchen knife at him. Um…this doesn’t sound very plausible, does it?”
The Queen was indeed looking at him as though she couldn’t believe her ears. It was
odd to see her with her silver hair rumpled and a smudge of gun oil on her shoulder, but
Joel remembered her lifetime of hunting and shooting and acknowledged that the shotgun
by the bed might not be entirely out of character.
She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders and turned to aim the shotgun between
Tyrnir’s closed eyes. At the gentle pressure of the muzzle on his forehead, he screamed
and threw himself backwards, the fair skin above his nose already blistering as if from a
deep burn.
The goblins around Joel eased their weapons down, their heads turning to watch their
leader and the human queen assess one another in a long, speaking gaze.
“Young man,” the Queen said eventually, and Joel tried not to believe that she was
amused, “if you are a prince, it is a prince of no realm that I acknowledge. What a shame
to open negotiations with our country by an act of war. Does your father the king know
you’re here?”
Tyrnir eyed the shotgun and swallowed. It seemed impossible for a face that
beautiful to look less than proud, but his voice had an edge of uncertainty when he spoke
next. “He is…not aware of the specifics.”
“Then take your little assassination party away and tell him that We would have
words with him.” She jerked the shotgun up slightly, and Tyrnir backed rapidly away.
But he was muttering under his breath. Joel saw the elf’s fingers twitching by his side,
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was going to shout watch out, he’s casting a spell! when Tyrnir raised both hands,
conjured a globe of blue fire and hurled it at the Queen’s head.
She flinched, but the aim of the shotgun did not waver as the fire hit a barrier an inch
from her face and streamed around it to either side, scorching the floral wallpaper behind.
Yes! Joel thought in triumph, Oh, Kai, I should have known you’d be better than your
cold words. I should have known you’d help after all.
Tyrnir gaped, then he leaned forward enough to sniff at the air above the Queen’s
hand. His eyes narrowed, but his mouth smiled.
“Kjartan.” He turned to look at Joel for the first time with a faint trace of respect. “So
that’s how you knew. That’s how you came here in time. Tell him I will kill him for this.
If he doesn’t have the guts to play the game in person, he should not send his little pets to
do it for him.”
A stir in the corridor and the sound of running feet. The door opened to reveal the
Prince Consort in a dressing gown, also with a shotgun under his arm and boxes of
cartridges distending his pockets. Behind him came the long-awaited but still welcome
press of a dozen men in dark suits, bristling with guns.
A spasm of further fury went over Tyrnir’s face. Then he squared his jaw, ripped the
fabric of time and space asunder and disappeared into it, taking all but the corpses of his
orcs with him. Joel was left suddenly alone, sword in hand, an armed intruder in the
Queen’s bedchamber.
She wasn’t even able to get the words “leave him alone” out before he was disarmed
and on his knees, bent double in a shoulder lock, with his cheek pressed into the carpet
and the muzzles of four very high-tech handguns trained on his skull and throat and heart.
For a long, crushed moment he thought this would be the end of it all—prison ahead
of him, and an angry Tyrnir heading for Kai at his flat. Whatever Tyrnir had called him, it
was pretty obvious he recognised his brother’s magic. Kai had said he couldn’t interfere
because if he did it would lead the royal assassin straight to him. On sober reflection, Joel
didn’t know whether to be horrified or over the moon with gratitude that Kai had changed
his mind. Both perhaps.
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After an awkward period of being pressed to the carpet, then searched, the palace
security team had wanted to take him away somewhere they could ask him a lot of
questions. The Queen overruled them and had him taken instead to a small sitting room
with gold-upholstered chairs that were exactly as uncomfortable to sit in as they looked.
Tea appeared moments later, delivered by a maid in proper black-and-white maid
uniform, whose face seemed to have been as starched as her uniform for all the emotion
he could read there.
Joel added three lumps to his cup, using the sugar tongs provided, sat and sipped. His
mum had made him drink sweet tea whenever he had been in a fight at school, and the
taste brought back the reassurance that it was all over now. That everything was safe, for
the moment.
He’d only just started on the garibaldi biscuits when the Queen came in, dressed now
in a turquoise skirt and jacket with an ivory blouse, her hair curled as on the coins.
Caught with teacup and biscuit in his hand, he scrambled to his feet and tried to lock his
knees against the impulse to curtsey.
“Please, sit down.”
He had just taken a huge bite of biscuit. Now he chewed industriously, trying to clear
his mouth for concentration, aware that he looked like a bumpkin and equally aware that
his consciousness of this fact was making everything worse.
There were dark-clothed men just outside the door, and slipping in behind the Queen,
an unassuming middle-aged woman in tweed took a silent seat in one of the corners and
opened a notebook full of the wiggles of shorthand.
“We can surely manage to be informal, since I gather you saved my life, Mr…?”
“Wilson, ma’am.” Joel put down the rest of his biscuit and wiped his fingers. “Joel
Wilson. Um…” He hadn’t quite looked at it like that. “I suppose I did.”
“The bodies have been taken to be examined.” The Queen poured herself tea, despite
the frown of disapproval on her lady-in-waiting-cum-secretary’s face. “So I dare say we
will have proof of what just happened in a little while. In the meantime, why don’t you
tell me what you know.”
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“Okay.” Joel tried to martial his thoughts, to find some way of putting this that
wasn’t frankly unbelievable. There wasn’t one, so he settled for the unvarnished truth. “I
know this is going to sound insane, but…”
“If it is insanity, it is one that we share.”
God, there was steel in that straight backbone. Joel had never been much of a
monarchist, but now he thought he could cheer. He smiled instead. “Heh, yes. Well, two
days ago I was coming home when I found someone lying unconscious behind my back
door. And when I say ‘someone’, I mean an elf.”
“Like the young man with the syringe?”
“Yes. Not like the goblins. I think they’re just like evil minions, or mercenaries or
something. Anyway, mine didn’t have goblins. It was just him on his own. I couldn’t
leave him there, lying outside on the street. So I took him inside. It turns out he was a
prince of some place called Vagar. One of three brothers sent out to prove themselves by
doing something amazing, so their dad, who’s dying, could choose which one gets to
have the throne.”
The Queen inclined her head with an encouraging little “hm?” The secretary turned a
page in her notebook.
“Well, so this one brother, Tyrnir, killed the youngest one, and tried to kill the one
who ended up on my doorstep. That’s how he ended up on my doorstep.”
“This is why we have primogeniture.” The Queen selected a gingersnap and severed
it into more manageable pieces with a fork. “Otherwise the more children one has, the
more potential for carnage.”
Quite possibly, thought Joel, feeling like he’d never been further away from reality
in his life, she was taking this so well because she already lived in a vastly different
world from his own.
“Kai—that’s my elf—except I think that might not even be his name, because Tyrnir
called him something else. Anyway, Kai said that in addition to getting rid of the
competition, Tyrnir had sworn to give his father the captured souls of a dozen monarchs
to accompany him to the afterlife.
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“We both—or actually maybe it was just me—assumed that he meant, like, elf kings
and troll kings and so on. But Kai was checking on what his brother was doing—it was in
the washing-up water—and we saw him here in Buckingham Palace. I knew no one
would believe me if I tried phoning, and besides by the time any message got through it
would be too late.”
Joel shrugged. It had all seemed so inevitable at the time, and now it seemed so very,
very mad. He wondered when he was going to wake up. “I’m a second dan in karate and
I’ve done some other martial-arts training, so I hoped I could do something. I got him to
send me here with that teleport thing they do, and you know the rest.”
It was dead dark outside the windows, and rain fell with a whisper that served to
make the silence louder. Joel’s lack of sleep began catching up with him now that the
adrenaline was wearing off. He rubbed suddenly gritty eyes.
“Well, I admit that without the evidence of the corpse, and of my own eyes, I would
not believe a word of this.” The Queen set her cup back in its saucer with a decisive click.
“But I have those things. This Kai, he is not of an equally murderous mind as his
brother?”
“That fireball thing, that didn’t hit you? I think it was Kai’s magic that defended you.
I think it was him who saved your life really.” Joel fumbled in his pocket, suddenly
remembering. “Actually, he gave me this to give you.” He held out the twisted silver
bangle. “It’s got some sort of charm on it which will prevent Tyrnir from trying again.”
The Queen looked down on the unassuming bangle for quite a while, turning it in her
hands and examining the way it shone with subtly the wrong shades for silver. It struck
Joel as he watched the play of purple light on the metal that he was deeply tired. Then—
coming up like a wave of fire—he remembered that Kai was alone in the flat, and he
didn’t know whether Tyrnir could backtrack that fireball and find him.
“Um…am I under arrest?”
The Queen slipped the bracelet over her hand, and with a writhing motion, like a
constricting snake, it shaped itself to her wrist, sat snug there. She raised her eyebrows at
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it, and then—receiving no response—smiled at Joel. “Not at all. In fact I find myself
pressed to think of a way to thank you. What is it that you do, Mr. Wilson?”
For a moment he had visions of a million-pound reward, of asking her to send one or
two of her men in black around to deal with Drake. But if there was one thing his mum
had instilled in him, apart from a love of tea, it was pride. You didn’t ask to be paid for
doing the right thing.
“I run the Teasel art gallery and shop on Brompton Road, ma’am.”
“And what kind of things do you sell?”
Now this had begun to feel like one of those meet-and-greets, where she walked
down the line of important people and spoke a few gracious words to each of them. It was
at once strange and reassuringly familiar—he’d seen celebrities do it on TV. It was part
of a real life he could actually believe in. Things seemed to solidify around him as he
answered.
“Mostly paintings by up-and-coming young artists, photos of street art, jewellery and
glass by independent designers.” God, he would never set the world alight as a
promotions manager. This sounded stilted and bored, despite all his enthusiasm. He took
a second run up at it. “We’re having some financial difficulties at the moment, but when
we’re back on our feet I want to get in some of the young artists from Brixton and the
East End. You know, a lot of artists from the inner city don’t feel they’re ever going to be
taken seriously by the art establishment—I want to give them an outlet.”
That sounded too embarrassingly worthy. He backtracked in an attempt to stop
sounding as though it was all about him and his works for charity. “Also, we just recently
sold some elvish jewellery that Kai donated, and I’m hoping I can set up some sort of
exchange there. I mean, it would be kind of awesome to be the exclusive outlet for art
from another world.”
He heard the words come out of his mouth and thought wow! Somewhere in the dark
of his brain, his subconscious must have been working overtime on that plan. It was
typical of it to only let him know at the same time he told the world. But that thought
reminded him once more of Kai and the possibility that he was in danger.
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“But if I’m not under arrest,” he said, aware that trying to weasel out of conversation
with the Queen was ruder than snubbing your own grandmother, “I should go. I’m
worried Tyrnir might have tracked Kai down. Kai’s better than he was—he was hurt. Oh,
yeah, I said that before. But he’s still subpar, and I don’t want him to have to face the
goblin hordes on his own.”
The Queen smiled and looked at the ornate golden clock on the mantelpiece. It was
quarter to four in the morning, and if the tubes were running at all, there’d still be a hell
of a wait before one turned up. “I will have Dorothy get one of the chauffeurs to drive
you home,” she said. “And once some solid evidence comes back from the labs to prove
that neither of us dreamed this, I may need to have words with your guest.”
Rising, she held out her small hand to him, the elvish bracelet curling around the
wrist. He wasn’t sure if he was meant to shake it or kiss it, compromised by pressing it
lightly and letting go, awkward as ever. There was a twinkle of something in her eye, as
if she found his gaucherie charming. “Do get some sleep, Mr. Wilson,” she said warmly.
“I certainly intend to myself. All of our problems can wait until the morning.”
As he drowsed in the back of the discreet black car on the way home, goblin brains
drying on his collar, the sound and smell and feel of death replaying itself over and over
behind his eyes, he thought that was easy enough for her to say, with her massive staff to
handle everything for her and the finest psychiatrists in the realm to untangle her head.
But he had to let himself in, alone, and stumble across his bike in the hall like nothing
had happened, and for all her talk of a reward, he’d just blown Kai’s cover for nothing
more than a lift home.
And doing the right thing.
Well, yes, for that too. Yes, he’d been brought up not to ask for praise or thanks, but
it still stung to have done something so heroic and come out of it with only nausea and a
replaying soundtrack of exploding heads.
He caught himself in front of the bedroom door, tired, upset, working himself into
resentment, and tried to push the feelings away. Goblin sword in hand, he eased down the
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door handle and pushed it gently, quietly open, prepared to spring into action if there was
any kind of ambush beyond.
The door squeaked a little on its hinges. The room behind it was dark, but in the
centre of the bed Kai lay sprawled, glowing like the man in the moon. He half-opened
golden eyes as Joel padded in, and gave him a sweet, sleepy smile.
All of Joel’s ill temper fell away at once under a startling flood of relief and joy. Oh
shit, you’re in trouble now, said a voice at the back of his mind as he recognised
infatuation, maybe even love, but he didn’t pay it any attention. He was too busy kicking
off shoes, pulling the stiff, crackling T-shirt over his head and lying down in the hollow
already warmed by Kai’s body. Kai did not move away, but put out a long arm and
snugged him close, as though he too had been worried and now needed the reassurance of
touch.
He talked a load of nonsense about revenge and killing, hurting Joel and others.
Skinning people and using their leather for parchment. But pretty much the only time
he’d been remotely threatening—when he woke up to find a monster leaning over him—
he’d stopped the moment that monster started to cry. Having now met Tyrnir, seen what
normal looked like among the elves, Joel was acutely aware of how gentle Kai was by
comparison. A gentleness Joel would really like to cherish and keep safe.
“He didn’t find you then?” Joel asked, wriggling to set his head on Kai’s shoulder,
where he could lean in and feel the skin of Kai’s throat bare against his face.
“Not yet. He didn’t kill you then?”
Joel could almost feel Kai’s glow, like…like tiger balm all over his skin, cold and
hot together. “Not yet,” he whispered, cursing his eyes for sliding closed. The warm
velvet darkness of sleep stole out of the corners of his mind and settled over him like a
blanket. He thought he felt Kai lean in and kiss him on the outer edge of one eyebrow,
and wanted to rouse, offer his mouth—offer everything.
Instead he fell asleep with a smile on his face and dreamed of stars.
Chapter Ten
Kjartan awoke to find himself entangled with the human. If he kept his eyes shut, he
could see the man through them as a spider’s web of light, track upon track of it, glowing
gold and pulsing with every beat of his heart. He could hear the blood as a constant
rushing hiss as it hurried through Joel’s veins. When Kjartan opened his eyes and saw
smooth flesh and skin, the great muscles of the man’s arms and shoulders, brown as good
soil, it was a wonderment to him. He thought it astonishing that all his tutors had
neglected to mention that humans could be fair, that he might want to give what they had
threatened the creatures would take.
Feeling exposed and defenceless at the act, he pulled the second of his warded
bracelets off, allowed it to slither up Joel’s arm and wind itself there with its knotted head
laid flat on the back of the man’s hand. His arms felt bare after, since he had given away
his protection, as though Joel’s life meant more to him than his own.
The thought was unsettling, so he chose not to think about it. His life was currently
in no danger, and as long as he acted fast he could be armoured again before it was. That
was all he needed to consider.
Worming his way out from his human’s grasp, Kjartan found his newly cleaned
court finery folded on the kitchen table. Repairing it with a word of command, he dressed
himself as well as he could. Now Tyrnir knew Kjartan was in hiding on the human’s
world, he would be searching for the exact spot. Troubling as this was, it had its
advantages. With Tyrnir’s gaze turned away from Vagar, it should be safe enough to
return for a short while. There were other bracelets and charms in Kjartan’s chambers,
stronger ones. He could gather the means of utterly defeating Joel’s enemy, Drake, and
arm himself against his own foes at the same time.
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With Joel himself made invisible to magic, he thought it superfluous to charm the
walls of Joel’s abode. If Tyrnir knew where it was, he would have come already. If he
knew it not, better to leave it mundane and innocent seeming than allow it to draw
attention with too much defence. The same reasoning applied to the place where the man
toiled all day—shields would make it more vulnerable rather than less. Better to trust in
concealment than open defiance.
This being a strategy Kjartan had successfully used all his life, his conscience was
easy as he bent the world-stuff and slipped into the passageways beyond. Sliding through
them like an eel in dark waters, he came to the place that tasted like home. Then he let the
film of worlds spring back into shape around him. He stepped out into his own chambers,
into the smell of spilled sap and the prickle of the servants’ rage.
Lob jumped up from beside Kjartan’s bed as he stepped into existence. The sprite’s
spindly hands were sticky with green ichor. Kjartan gasped in denial and felt it choke in
his throat at the sight. For Lob had been kneeling by Tuburrow’s side, trying to hold in
the ooze that welled from a deep axe-blade cut in his flank. On Lob’s face was the same
disbelief that Kjartan felt, the sense that everything sane had been upturned at once, that
no thought followed another on its accustomed path.
Kjartan went to his knees beside his servant’s body. Still a flicker of life there, still
one furled green bud on his brown head. Unmaking the floor with a gesture, Kjartan held
out his hand and willed the power stones into it from where they were buried beneath the
foot of his couch. “Who did this?”
He drained one of the stones to force the wound closed, looked up at Lob’s strained
face and had to acknowledge that he too was unfair in his anger. No servant could accuse
a prince even if it was the truth. He rephrased the question into something more like the
statement it was. “Tyrnir did this.”
Lob kept his eyes on the floor, but he whispered, “Yes, my lord.”
“He goes too far!” Kjartan exhausted a second stone—two out of his precious
reserves of five—to replace the spilled life force, smooth the cut side and make his
servant live again.
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Lob could not agree—that too would constitute a criticism against one of the sons of
the king—but he didn’t need to. He and Kjartan, he and every decent member of this
kingdom, agreed, unspoken. The sidhe might fight and kill and betray one another—that
was how they were meant to be—but to lay hands on a servant, on one so bound by oath
and loyalty and engineering as to have no will of their own? It was abhorrent. It was
unsporting. Kjartan would rather die in torment than thus be the kind of workman who
blamed his tools.
Tuburrow’s eyes opened, and the dried, sticklike hair on his head fell like winter
leaves to make way for a fuzz of new growth. He tried to raise his aspen-long fingers to
press them to his forehead in salute, and Kjartan found himself grasping them in his own
hands. Joel’s desire to touch everything must have infected him. Something in his chest
ached, because this creature had been with him since he was taken from his mother. This
creature had given him the most of all the kindnesses he had received in this court, and he
was ashamed to find that one also did not prey on servants because one had become fond
of them, almost as though they mattered.
“Master…”
“What happened here?”
Weary still, Tuburrow did not reply. It was Lob who said, “Prince Tyrnir came for
your books and your artefacts, my lord, and we told him that since you were away, he
might not have them.”
This too was an ancient rule, in place to make the dynastic infighting that much
harder—to limit the damage and make sure only the most talented succeeded. A prince
was entitled to what he could steal from his sibling, but only when the sib was there to
defend it. It was no kind of test of skill to steal from an unlocked room.
Kjartan took the dimension locket from where it swung from his ear and twisted it
until it grew from the size of a pea to that of a small chamber. “Lob, put every item of
power I own in this, even the flagstones of the hearth. I will have it all on me, so that you
need not defend this place again.”
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Tuburrow had begun to try levering his long, inflexible frame back to his feet.
Getting his shoulder into the servant’s unyielding belly, Kjartan helped by shoving.
“Then he took an axe to you?”
“I do not think he meant it.” Tuburrow held out both hands to the light of the sun,
which streamed through the unglazed windows on a wind that smelled of salt. “At least,
when I fell he seemed horrified enough to run away, and so we succeeded in our
guardianship.”
“I don’t think it was horror.” Lob returned, dragging the hearthstone with both pairs
of arms, both pairs of legs braced hard on the pincers of his bare feet to try and coax the
weight of the thing across the polished floor. “That was when the wall nearly came down,
remember?”
Both servants looked away from him, one gaze going to the window, one turned as
though he could see through the wall all the way down to the sea. Kjartan became aware
of a roaring thunder which was not the sound of waves. He must have missed it before
only because he’d wrestled with Tuburrow’s death.
Whatever it was, it could wait until he was better defended. Slipping his two most
powerful bracelets onto his forearms, he scooped the rest of his jewellery and trinkets
into a chest and placed the chest on a shelf in his infinite storeroom. Then he shrank the
thing back to the semblance of a pearl and hooked it into his ear.
Another roar and a sound of sliding stones came from outside. Shadows swept the
sky above him as the great gulls of Vagar wheeled and shrieked in the sky, but his
window faced the meadows, not the sea, and he could not make out what was going on
out there.
“You need not accompany me,” he said. “Nor, now, do you need to defend these
chambers. When I am ready to return I will call on you, but for now I release you from
your service. Whatever is going on here, you are free to turn to your advantage.”
He thought they looked uncomfortable as he pushed past Tuburrow’s outstretched
hand—it too, covered over with a fur of leaflets—and went out into the corridor. So they
should. He had been more generous than was wise or sane. Why should a servant
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released ever come back, after all? They, as well as he, might have suspected sentiment
under it. Friendship, even. Not a perversion one expected of the most refined and
exquisite of the nobility.
Shaking off his discomfort at the thought that his human was bringing out in him all
kinds of unseemly softnesses—hadn’t he already decided his people lied when they
refused to call these things strength?—Kjartan checked his defences and strode hurriedly
down to the throne chamber.
His father lay there like a giant caterpillar. White threads of decay had begun to spin
themselves out from all his dry limbs and attach themselves to the stonework of the
throne around him. He was swaddled in dry silk like a cocoon, his mouth stopped with it.
As Kjartan came in, he gave an angry grunt, and Aud leaned forward to twine the threads
across his mouth around her finger and draw them away. When she had done the same
for his dry and lifeless eyes, she found time to examine Kjartan closely and to smirk.
On the floor of the chamber, silhouetted by the sky, Bjarti stood with his back to the
king, looking out into the distance. The sound of stone on stone, the shriek and thunder
were stronger here.
Kjartan walked to his eldest brother’s side and saw what he saw:
The sea boiled. All along the white beach between the ocean and the shore, a wall
fifty feet high and five paces wide had sprung up in the short time Kjartan had been gone.
The warriors of Vagar fought along the top, throwing back siege ladders which had their
further ends down deep in the water, tipping hot oil and boulders on the things in metal
skins that scurried out from the sea and gnawed at the base of the wall.
As he watched, something tall arose from the sea, as though the mast of a ship were
coming up from the depths. The war gulls descended on it in a melee of yellow beaks and
mad yellow eyes. They tore it apart and swallowed it.
And perhaps Kjartan was not entirely perverse after all, for at the sight of his country
under siege from the sea-people—an enemy with whom they had held an uneasy peace
for the last hundred years—he laughed until his sides were sore.
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“Don’t!” Bjarti’s meaty hand clipped him around the ear, made him freeze and
stiffen with insult.
“I know you said you would conquer a dozen realms, Eldest.” Kjartan sighed, wiping
his eyes. “But I hoped even you had more sense than to start with our neighbours.”
“They were the closest threat.” Bjarti now wore the bronze collar of one of the sea-
people’s machines around his red hair like a circlet, and he had replaced three of the
shrunken heads on his belt with the remains of sea-knights. He was ferocious and
immovable and he stank like a fish.
Kjartan turned to the thing that was his father. “Did you want this? You must have
known what would happen if you let us all off the leash. Is this your epitaph—to draw the
kingdom into ruin with you by means of your sons?”
“If you leave your realm to the stupidity of one brother and the spite of another,”
King Volmar wheezed, “you are as responsible for this as they. Stop complaining, child,
and act.”
Kjartan hated this kingdom. He had always hated it—always told himself so, at least.
And it was true—he desired to be anywhere but here. He desired to be back in Joel
Wilson’s bed, where he had felt safe for the first time in his life. So whence came all this
pain and rage? Why did it feel as though the stones themselves were crying out for him to
help them, to stop this? He was a dilettante little scholar, an artist, not a ruler. He didn’t
have the strength or the skill to take on Bjarti’s army and Tyrnir’s assassins, and he
definitely did not want to sit on a throne into which his father was softly, sweetly rotting
away.
“There is nothing I can do!”
“Oh.” The rasping, gurgling noise must be laughter. “Alas for your brother Dagnar,
who had everything but timing. The rest of you are nothing. Ineffectual. Incompetent.”
Bjarti picked a goblet from the window ledge and drained the contents. Then,
scowling at them both, he strode out. A moment later saw him on gull back, flying down
to the stalemate on the wall as though the addition of a single warrior would turn the tide.
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“I don’t have a brother called Dagnar.” Kjartan gave the only possible diplomatic
response to his father’s outburst. He watched with some discomfort as one of Volmar’s
body servants leaned down and licked the king’s open eyes, moistening them. The king
blinked after, apparently relieved.
“You don’t have a brother called Dagnar because Dagnar was a worthless, usurping
piece of shit,” said Volmar, “and I exiled him and struck his name from all the records. I
would have done the same to the rest of you if I’d known you’d turn out worse. Can you
truly bear to stand here and watch this? To know what Tyrnir did to your own servant in
your own chambers—and do nothing? Whatever ruin they bring on us, at least Bjarti and
Tyrnir are trying. At least I know this place means something to them. If they are stupid
and cruel, they are at least not nothing at all.”
There were, undoubtedly, a thousand witty replies to this, but none of them came to
Kjartan’s mind when he needed them. Part of him agreed—it was a bitter caustic part that
hurt him like swallowed vitriol—that he was indeed as worthless as his father said. As
much in reaction to that part of himself as to Volmar’s words, Kjartan snapped his mouth
shut, bowed stiffly, and—storming out of his father’s presence—scarcely waited until he
was in the corridor before he tore the universe and fled. Why should he stay and listen to
this when he could go back to the one person in all universes who looked at him with
awe?
Chapter Eleven
Joel woke up alone and tried not to worry about it. The unexpected bracelet he could
not pry off his wrist indicated that Kai had a plan of some sort, and—he hoped—had left
him the same kind of protection he had given to the Queen.
When he looked at it like that, it made him smile. The memory of touching Kai in his
sleep seemed to have seeped under his skin and relaxed all his bones. He felt rested as he
had rarely been before, and having cornflakes for breakfast instead of toast—because
now he could afford both—made him inclined to count his blessings and sing along with
the radio.
It was a cold and rainy morning, but he cycled to work with an inner glow, and
stripped off his streaming waterproofs in the gallery’s little lobby with a better will than
at any time previously this week. Hanging his wet coat up as he switched on the lights, he
paused with a familiar feeling of dissatisfaction at the sight of the showroom. Something
was still wrong. He had to face the fact that he just didn’t know how to arrange the place
in a way that made everything in it look good. Now it gave the impression that he was
desperate to sell the paintings and ashamed of the glasswork, and that wasn’t right either.
Sighing, he went to put the kettle on, trying to hold on to his good mood. It would
have been nice if Kai had told him where he was going, or even just that he was going to
come back.
That thought stopped his hand as it suspended a spoonful of coffee granules above
his mug. He supposed he’d started out on this adventure with elves thinking it was just a
temporary fit of madness—that Kai would recover and leave, and his life would go back
to what passed as normal. Now Kai had left, and he was assuming, hoping his absence
was the temporary thing. Joel had fallen, without thinking about it, into the assumption
that Kai would now be a part of his life for good.
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He put the coffee in the cup, added water and stirred it, looking down into the dark
liquid as though it were a looming ill-omened future. But who said Kai assumed that too?
Nobody. It was stupid to imagine that a guy who was a prince of a country in turmoil
would want to do more than recover in a safe place before he went back to do some
righteous smiting of his own.
Joel’s shoulders sagged as though a great weight had come down on them. He sipped
the coffee and didn’t taste it. As he was just settling in for a good day’s sulk, the bell
above the door jangled, forcing him to put on his politely helpful shop assistant’s face
and go out to dismay Kai some more by prostituting his art and the art of others to
whoever was at the door.
Mrs. Ringle turned towards him as he emerged from the back rooms. The floral
pattern of her cardigan crazily mismatched the zebra pattern of her skirt. Her unmade
face was pallid and blotchy, and her eyes red-rimmed. It didn’t take the hanky that she
twisted in her hands to tell him all was not well, or make him feel like a heel. He should
have called—should have made sure she was all right too—and had forgotten.
“Mrs. R!” Grabbing the chair which stood by the till, he plunked it down behind her,
prompting her to give him a watery smile and to fold with aching caution down to its
seat. “I just made a coffee. Here you go.”
He offered it to her and watched her struggle with the impulse of politeness that
would have insisted she should push it away and tell him it was his. He knew the news
was bad when she took it instead, held it in both hands, hunching up over it as if she was
terribly cold.
“How is…” No, he couldn’t ask that, could he? Something terrible must have
happened to her husband—the one with whom, despite his dishonesty, she had lived her
entire life. The one whom she no longer knew how not to love. All at once he was guilty
about Mr. Ringle too. Obviously Mr. Ringle had been hurt worse than they’d thought if
he was… Was he dead? If he was, then Drake was wrong and he hadn’t arranged a
convenient accident at all—he’d hardly have arranged to have himself that badly hurt. If
that was the case, then Joel had been thinking badly of him all this time when maybe he
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was an innocent man and he’d actually meant it when he said he had a way out for them
all.
Mrs. Ringle’s lips tightened. The fine skin of her eyelids crumpled in a frown that
told of anger and grief together, and Joel abandoned his own self-castigation in favour of
trying to help her. “I mean what is it? What’s the matter?”
She drank a little of the coffee and wiped her eyes with her lace-edged handkerchief,
sniffing. Then she tried the smile again. “I went to see my husband at the hospital
yesterday. They kept me waiting for hours, and then a doctor came to see me, and a
police officer. They said they couldn’t…they couldn’t find him. He’d obviously
just…done a runner, the young woman police constable said.”
Her eyes filled, but she held the hanky under them and the tears soaked away into the
fabric. “They talked to me for hours about what he might have done and whether they
were going to hold me liable for anything. In the end they said that as it was his own
money he’d taken, and he’d obviously gone of his own accord, I would ‘be glad to know
they weren’t going to charge me with anything’. I felt so accused. What right do they
have, talking to me like that, when I’ve done nothing wrong at all?”
“Um…”
She waved his attempt at comfort away. “Then I went to the bank and I found out
that not only do I have no money at all, but he’s also remortgaged the house and taken
that. And he’s just gone. Just gone, and cleared everything out, and left me.”
Oh God, and she was that much older than him, that much less resilient. Not used to
looking after herself—not brought up to suppose she ever would have to. Joel didn’t
think she was of a generation that would appreciate a hug, but he knelt by the chair
instead and took one of her hands in his. “Hey, it’s okay. I mean it isn’t okay, but it will
be. We’ll sort this out. I’m getting the shop turned around and the debts paid. Don’t be
sad—”
“I’m not sad!” Tears spilled onto her cheeks. “I’m angry! All those years of telling
him he was a lovely man—telling him I believed in him. All those years of putting up
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with his affairs and thinking it was my fault, and he gives me this. If I was only twenty
years younger, I’d…”
Her voice trailed off into dark thoughts. Joel sighed and squeezed her hand again
while she drank the rest of her coffee. Then he resorted to fixing what he could fix and
leaving aside what he couldn’t. “Have you had anything to eat today, Mrs. R?”
At her headshake, he went back to make toast, to refill her coffee and get one for
himself. By the time he returned with plate and mugs, she was sitting straighter, looking
around herself with an interested eye. “You think the shop really does have the potential
to work? It always seemed more of a drain than a resource to me.”
Ah, and there was another strange thought. If Mr. Ringle had disappeared, maybe
that meant Mrs. Ringle was his boss now. “I do think it could,” he said earnestly. “It
made several thousand pounds yesterday. It’s just a bit safe, you know? A bit boring. I
want to make it a place where you can get stuff you can’t get anywhere else in the
world.”
He watched her eye rest sceptically on the white walls and the glass stands as she
daintily consumed her toast. Then she sniffed again and said, “Well, if you want exotic,
this is not the way to go about it. You need more colour in here. Curtains—I have a pair
of golden ones in the spare room that might do. Something to make the place look
mysterious but opulent. Alluring—like the ballroom of a great steamship filled with
treasures from all over the world.”
Hope gave a little skip in Joel’s heart. “That sounds brilliant. I was just thinking this
place looked wrong, but I don’t know what to do about it. I’ve seen your house—what
you’ve done with decorating the rooms—and it’s fantastic, the way you can make stuff
look good together even when it doesn’t look good apart. Can you do something like that
here? Something that makes people want to come in? Something that makes us look
amazing?”
She blinked and, handing him her plate, peered again at all the corners of the room.
When she looked back at him, her eyes were dry and defiant, recovered. “I’m going to
wash my face and put a little powder on,” she said. “Then yes, I think I can.”
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They spent the day bringing props from Mrs. Ringle’s house, ends of experimental
paint cans from his, dressing the windows and moving the stock, until the inside of the
shop had been transformed from a white, minimalist vacancy—just like the white,
minimalist vacancy of all the other galleries—into something akin to the treasury in the
Narnia books. By the time they’d finished, every object looked like a priceless artefact
carelessly set down by kings.
Customers began to trickle in from the moment the first window was done. Though
most of them only poked around, wide eyed, picking things up and frowning at the prices,
one or two of them bought. Some jewellery, a great ceramic bowl with a stylised stag on
it that looked like it had come from a Celtic chieftain’s burial mound. Three more of
Joel’s paintings.
The paintings sold to well-dressed young business people, who went straight to
them, ignoring everything else on offer. By the third time this happened, Joel was curious
enough to say—as he swathed the painting in protective tissue—“May I ask why you
chose it?”
The plump, pale-haired woman tugged at her suit jacket and gave him a look that
said plainly she would much rather he hadn’t asked. She addressed her reply to the
thinner friend who had come in with her. “We saw some of this artist’s work in…” a
pause and an intonation of disdain for Joel’s tiny, gauche business, “…Harriman and
Mittelmark. A more upscale establishment. That one had already sold, but Joan
Mittelmark—who is a personal friend—was kind enough to tell us where to look for
more. I’m surprised, actually, that such an up-and-coming young artist would choose to
exhibit in somewhere as…whimsical as this, but perhaps when he’s better established he
will find somewhere with more refinement. In the meantime, it’s a lucky find for us, isn’t
it?”
She smiled to show that, although she held his taste in interior décor in contempt, she
at least approved of his business acumen in stocking the works of an approved ingenue.
He wondered if she had even looked at the painting she’d bought, where Chinese dragons
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flew steampunk tourists above improbable mountains. Maybe whimsy became
respectable if it carried with it a large enough price tag.
Mrs. Ringle, who had been learning how to operate the till while she paged through
paint catalogues, waited until the women left and gave Joel a fleeting, awkward hug. “Ah.
That will be the woman you sold Oscar’s portrait to, pet. Joan Mittelmark. She’s put your
picture up in her swanky place, so all the folk who couldn’t care less about art but love a
good investment want to get in early before you realise you’re famous and put your
prices up.”
“Famous?” Joel laughed, not quite believing her, though the woman who had bought
Oscar’s portrait had certainly been sharp eyed and scary enough for an authority in the
field. “Not likely.”
“Maybe not,” Mrs. R replied, “But we should put your prices up regardless.”
By closing time they had made another good profit. Nearly three thousand pounds.
Mrs. Ringle—beaming with relief and gratitude—took five hundred for her own bills and
food and locked the rest in the safe. “We’ll open a new account for the gallery in the
morning. Something that Howard can’t get his sticky fingers on. If you like, I can help in
the shop so that you can paint some more bestsellers for us and find those interesting new
artists you were talking about. At this rate, we’ll need more stock soon.”
As he locked up, he watched her leave with a firm step and her chin raised. It only
renewed his determination to make this work. Maybe Drake could be satisfied by being
paid off once, in whole, with the ridiculous interest all accounted for. If he wasn’t, if he
tried to spin this out, squeeze Joel for every extra penny, well, then Joel would have
to…do something. What that something would be, he didn’t know. But it would come to
him. Look what he’d achieved already.
He cycled home the long way, so that he could pass the skips at the back of Tesco on
West End Quay where the supermarket tossed its past-the-sell-by-date food. Half an
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hour’s rummaging netted him some pulverised noodles and the ingredients for a curry.
No sense in spending good money on food if it was being thrown out for free.
So it was with a feeling of satisfaction that he drew up to his door and wrestled the
bike inside, hauling his bag of slightly squishy vegetables into the kitchen. There was
time for a brief, cold blink of unhappiness when he thought the flat was empty, but then
the door to the bedroom opened and there was Kai, and pretty much—pretty much this
was the best day of his life.
He stepped forward, grinning, reached out to brush his thumbs along Kai’s paper-
white cheekbones. Kai flinched a little at first—not like he didn’t want to be touched, but
more like touch simply wasn’t a thing in his world and he didn’t quite know what to
expect. Then he leaned into it, closing his tawny eyes in a gesture that looked just too
tired and sad to permit Joel to follow the caress with a kiss.
“I’m so glad you came back,” Joel said instead, while his eyes prickled suspiciously,
and he wished that Kai would touch him in return. “I thought maybe you’d gone for
good. You know—that you were off to finish your quest and defeat your brothers and be
king. All of that.”
Kai’s mouth narrowed to a slit. He stepped away from Joel’s hands and it felt like
being punched. “Not you too.”
“Sorry?”
“I did not ask for any of this! I do not want to be related to that pile of fungus, my
royal father. I would not choose to be trapped between jingoistic folly on one hand and
murderous ruthlessness on the other. I do not need your—”
Kai had stormed to the far corner of the kitchen and stood now with his back to Joel,
his arms wrapped around himself, trying to go further but wary of the potential iron
content of the fridge. Joel didn’t really understand the words, but he heard the frustrated
misery of them easily enough. After a few minutes more, he worked out why exactly Kai
was upset.
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“No, no! I don’t mean you should leave. I don’t want you to leave. I don’t really care
about your kingdom or whatever. I think you should stay here with me. Yeah? Let
someone else have it, and you and me, we can…”
Kai spun round and swept the cups and milk bottles from the draining board. They
shattered around his feet in a cascade of glass and pottery shards. “Either of them will
destroy it. I don’t want to rule. I don’t want them to rule. I don’t know what to do! It’s all
up to me and I don’t know what to do.”
This was not a problem Joel had previously thought afflicted the heroes of epic
quests. Enchanted guides just seemed to turn up, and as long as the youngest son did
exactly what he was told by the venerable old dude, things generally worked out. It was
kind of harsh to expect the young prince to go through it without any help at all.
Fortunately, Kai seemed to have shocked himself with the violence of his reaction.
He stood still and allowed Joel to sweep up the shards around him and wrap them in
newspaper before dumping them in the bin. His expression had lapsed into despondency,
but Joel had the impression that he was waiting for Joel to hand him a solution, gift-
wrapped. Maybe I’m his magical mentor, Joel thought, amused by the thought at first and
then shocked. Oh hell. Maybe I am.
Wisdom was beyond him, but he thought they both needed a break, to take their
minds off everything. “Let’s have an evening off, all right? Do you like to dance?”
“Of course.” Kai looked at him as if he couldn’t see the strategic value of this, but
there was a new glimmer of interest in his eyes.
“Okay then. Why don’t you tone yourself down—do that thing where you look
human—and we’ll go and hit the clubs.”
An hour later, with Kai dressed in Joel’s other set of clothes, which he had somehow
shrunk to fit himself, they were in Sailors. Remembering that Kai half-suspected all
humans to be ravening rapists, he’d picked the most sedate club, where the music was
almost quiet enough to allow for conversation at the tables, and the straight girls came
when they wanted nothing more than to drink and dance without being hassled for a
hookup.
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Heads still turned when Kai walked in, tall and lean and blond as he was, with the
dizzying lights turning his skin to pearl and his expression of wonder making his face that
of an innocent angel. He was enchanting, enchanted, and looked very willing to be
debauched. Joel made the mistake, early on, of finding an empty table in a cramped and
out-of-the-way corner and getting Kai to sit there while he fought his way to the bar to
buy drinks.
Coming back, cosmopolitans in hand, he found his date surrounded by a rugby scrum
of hopefuls, all being as charming as they knew how and as bitchy to each other as a hive
of bees. The expression on Kai’s face hovered somewhere between fear and fascinated
amusement. Totally engaged, slightly uncomfortable, visibly delighted. He was
answering flattery and repartee alike with a level of subtlety that Joel could only
admire—until after ten minutes more, one of the two men in front of Joel shoved the
other in the shoulder, the other retaliated with a smack across the face, and Kai burst out
laughing as if he hadn’t had so much fun in years.
That was the point Joel realised Kai’s subtlety had been gradually and deliberately
winding the group up until they were all ready to come to blows. Rather than try to push
through the crowd of cross suitors, he climbed over the back of the bench and handed Kai
the cocktail to a chorus of accusing and disappointed exclamations.
“What the hell are you doing?” Joel yelled over the sounds of Armin Van Buuren.
“If they want me in their beds, they should fight for the privilege, don’t you think?”
Jealousy felt like he had swallowed a dozen chilli peppers, like his mind and his gut
were burning together. “And you’d go with the winner, would you?”
Kai tilted his head like a bird trying to focus on a tricky worm. Evidently this
manoeuvre allowed him to think clearly, because the expression on his face slid from
confusion to glee. “I’d go with you, of course. But it would be exciting to watch.”
This cleared his admirers out far more effectively than Joel could ever have done,
and it brought the blood up to scald Joel’s face and stiffen his prick. A part of him even
agreed—it would have been fun to watch, if he had been able to show them all afterwards
exactly to whom Kai belonged. Like much of what Kai said, it was a fine fantasy but a
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little too savage for him in reality. Instead he seized Kai’s wrist, where a new, larger arm
ring gleamed, and pulled him out onto the dance floor.
It was packed and loud and sweaty, reeling with spots and strobe lights. Dancers in
glittery thongs, glistening with oil and body paint, writhed on their platforms above the
crowd, and as Joel pushed through to find a place he and Kai could fit, hands skittered
over his arms and chest. Legs and arses slid against his and away. Under the scent of
deodorant and aftershave, the smell of arousal hung thick.
He took off his T-shirt and stuffed it into his belt, locked his hands above his head
and let the music take him—synths and a racing beat like a heart at the point of orgasm.
A voice that might have been man or woman’s, high and sweet and exultant.
Kai was hesitant at first, watching the other dancers. Probably, Joel thought—a bit
belatedly—all he knew was the madrigal or some kind of morris jig. Then he too took off
his shirt and fitted himself close to Joel. As they moved, his pointed hips and his bare
belly and flanks brushed against Joel’s skin and away in no rhythm he could ever predict.
Joel’s mouth tingled. His heart drummed, he tasted copper, as Kai danced, light and lithe
and lissom, with the lights slipping over his skin. In the dark he glowed and, when the
UV lights came on, long sweeping lines, curlicues of radiance, shone on his arms, his
chest and his back like intricate tattoos.
Joel thought he would die—he would die if he couldn’t throw Kai down then and
there and lick along every line, suck him, see if he could taste that glow, if he could
swallow it. He didn’t—that too would have been a little too uninhibited for Joel’s style—
but when Kai made him sleep on the couch again that night “because you are important,
Joel. You are too important to rush”, he dreamed of it and woke up sticky twice.
Chapter Twelve
When he woke it was to find Kai in the kitchen, eating the last of the Nutella from
the jar with the aid of a plastic medicine spoon. Joel would have said something about
this, but for the prismatic blaze that shimmered on top of the kitchen table, lighting up the
yellow walls and Formica cabinets with otherworldly colours.
By force of habit he got his morning coffee—without which no matter what the
wonder, he still couldn’t face it—and sidled close to see what it was.
Earrings the colour and transparency of soap bubbles. Collars, like those jewelled
collars worn by buried pharaohs, but made of shifting subtle shades and twisting designs
that begged the eye to follow and unknot them. Hair clips and sticks on which trembling,
jewelled sea birds swooped. Bracelets too wide for the wrist—anklets, then—made of
pearls like the full moon, and silver with a sheen on it such as was never seen before in
this world.
Joel swallowed and reached out wary fingers—the things looked like they might bite
those who touched them impiously—and his brain told him that what he was seeing must
be wrong, for even the metal felt more like amber, warm to the touch, and the pearls were
like fur, and the stones like tiny sparks of sunlight. “What…what’s all this?”
Kai looked up with a self-satisfied tilt to his mouth and waved a long, dismissive
hand over the hoard. “Trinkets. I visited my home yesterday and brought back with me
all that I owned. These have no enchantments on them—no worth other than the
ornamental.”
His smile broadened and chilled. “I have not forgotten my oath to see the man who
wounded you outclassed. Wealth is a power he understands, therefore I give you wealth.”
Oddly enough, Joel’s heart sank at the words. Maybe he’d hoped Kai would reward
his help with friendship or even love, not try to buy him as if he still thought of him as a
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kind of prostitute. “I don’t need all this, you know? I didn’t take you in in expectation of
some kind of reward—”
Kai’s pleasure turned into a confused frown. “Of course not. If you had, I would
have cursed you with boils, or taken away your sight, or burnt your house down while
you slept in it.”
Ah…okay. Joel turned to the toaster for comfort in the rush of retrospective fear.
How differently everything could have gone if he had tried to fight, instead of appealing
to Kai’s pity. Was it sheer blind luck that he’d reacted in the right way? If he didn’t—if
he took a misstep, did something he had no way of knowing whether it was wrong until
too late—would Kai do something storybook ironic that would make Joel regret his
mistake for the rest of his life?
Or had Joel reacted right out of instinct, out of the immovable fact of his own
personality? Had he done the right thing to turn aside Kai’s wrath simply because he was
Joel? He could mostly rely on being Joel from now on. He reminded himself again that
Kai liked him, and that Kai was gentler in action than he was in his words.
“But you should have a reward nevertheless,” Kai went on slowly as if explaining
this to an unusually slow child. “I would not be in your debt.”
Joel wondered if Kai was thinking something of the same thing he just had—that
whatever this was between the two of them, he did not want it to arise out of obligation.
“You wouldn’t be in my debt,” he said gently. “You aren’t. I wanted to help you. That
doesn’t mean you owe me anything.”
“But now I want to help you in return.” Kai got up and pulled on the pair of yellow
rubber gloves Joel had found for him in his skip hunting. They had both been surprised
and gratified at the fact that with them on, Kai could turn taps and hold stainless-steel
cutlery. Now he filled the kettle again and made himself a mint tea.
Joel heard a finality in the musical voice he didn’t think he could fight against—a
tone that said “this is how it’s going to be, because this is the only way it could be.”
“I just think you’re…unbalancing it the other way,” he tried. “I mean it’s too much.
Now I’m going to be in your debt and—”
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Kai turned and beamed at him, all sun-gold eyes and delight. “And then you will
have to make it up to me again.”
Abruptly, Joel got it—as long as the scales were unbalanced, as long as one of them
owed the other something, neither could walk away. Joel had saved Kai’s life in the
street. Kai had evened that up by saving Joel from Drake’s razor. He could have walked
away at that point, but he’d chosen to come back with a new debt and a new start. It
wasn’t a paying-off gesture, a goodbye, at all. It was the elvish equivalent of having
exchanged numbers and Kai being the first one to call.
“Oh wow,” Joel said, and allowed joy to inflate him from the inside out. For a man
who didn’t know how to love, Kai was doing pretty well, picking responses out of the
unpromising toolkits of his culture that added up to I trust you. I want to stay. “Wow.”
He picked up a pectoral pendant the size of his fist, on which a solitary humanoid
figure was battling what looked like Cthulu. It was light and soft in his hand, moulding to
his grip. “Um. Okay then.” Putting the jewel back on the table, he turned to find Kai only
a step away, watching his moment of revelation with bright-eyed pleasure.
“Can I…um…I’d like to…” Joel closed the distance and slowly, waiting for a denial
that didn’t come, curled his hand around the back of Kai’s neck and pulled him in for a
brief, gentle kiss. When he let go, Kai’s eyes were shut and his ice-white mouth was
smiling and faintly tinged with pink.
“Are you aware how rarely you finish a complete sentence?”
Joel blushed, delighted by the sweetness and the ease of the moment. Oscar had been
all smoulder and danger, and looking back on that he knew he had been as much
dismayed and afraid as he was enthralled. This, though Kai was a far greater danger in
real terms, made him feel cherished. Secure. “I can’t help it if you leave me speechless.”
With his witty repartee used up for the day, Joel took one of the hairgrips and one of
the bracelets. Asking Kai to put the rest away wherever he had got them from, he cycled
in to the shop. Kai chose to stay behind and attempt to educate himself about Earth via
daytime TV.
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When Joel arrived at Brompton Road, he found an incident waiting for him. Police
had set out cordons around the gallery’s door. They lined the pavements in shiny yellow
jackets. Behind them the normal flow of passersby had slowed, as Londoners recognised
a chance for possible fame or entertainment. Crowds had begun to gather.
A middle-aged black policewoman with a gun holstered on her hip stopped Joel as
he tried to turn in to the road. “This road’s closed, sir. Except for access.”
“I work just there.” He tried not to look with disbelief at the holstered pistol. Was
that thing real? Was she allowed to be out on the streets in uniform wearing one of those?
Some kind of terrorist incident going on, or what? He waved at the gallery, outside which
two burly men in black suits stood, with wires trailing from one ear and sunglasses on
despite the threatening drizzle.
“In that case”—she summoned a red-haired constable—“do go in. PC Thomas here
will come with you and execute a search.”
“A search?” Joel’s mind jumped immediately to Drake, the thin scalpel of the man’s
smile and the blade invisible in his hand. Being chased off must have rankled with the
man, and Joel had been waiting ever since for some sort of retribution. He wouldn’t have
put it past Drake to have corrupted the local police department, to be using them now
to…do what?
His imagination threw up a dozen different possibilities. Drake had planted bomb-
making equipment in the cellar, taped drugs to the backs of the pictures while Joel slept.
He’d informed the police like a concerned citizen, so they could come and find the
devices, and remove Joel for him, allowing Drake to keep his elegantly gloved hands
clean.
“Have you got a warrant?”
PC Thomas, who had the redhead’s milk-and-water complexion, couldn’t go any
paler, but his expression suggested that he might if he could. “We do, sir.” He brought a
folded document out of his top pocket and passed it to Joel. “But innocent people don’t
usually ask.”
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“Well, yes, but innocent people are not used to being interrupted at work by armed
police officers. I don’t have anything to hide, so what have you got to search for?”
Scanning the document and conceding that it looked official enough, Joel gave it
back and rolled up the shutters. Then he took a couple of pieces of mediocre silverwork
out of the window and replaced them with the elvish jewellery. Mrs. R had decorated that
entire section in dark-blue velvet, with lighter blue and green scarves that had been gifts
from her children in happier days. With the iridescent gems catching even the dull grey of
the London morning light, the window was lit up with palest shades of blue, pink and
silver, like the scales of semitransparent fish seen through clear water.
Outside, Joel thought he saw lightning, told himself he must have imagined it. Then,
remembering all the other things he had recently learned to take for granted, he went to
the door to see if Tyrnir had sent some kind of storm creature against him.
Mrs. Ringle met him in the porch, shaking out her umbrella. She looked puzzled, but
delighted. “How on earth did you manage this one, dear? Tell them Lady Gaga was
coming, did you?”
When he leaned out, the flashbulbs of a dozen cameras went off at once—hence his
lightning—and from the gallery window there came in return a coruscating blaze of cool
and brilliant light. There were actual crowds now, and Joel could hear them gasp at the
sight. Then down the far end of the road came the rumbling hubbub of distant cheering.
Joel caught Mrs. R by the elbow and gave her a startled look. “Maybe she is! Oh my
God, and I haven’t washed this T-shirt in three days… What on earth is the press—”
The cheering broke around the corner like the barrel wave of a falling temple in an
Indiana Jones movie. It was followed almost at once by two motorcycle riders. They were
followed by a small black car, and then a larger one, with a red-and-gold flag flying from
its bonnet and four more armoured motorbikes behind.
“It’s the Queen! It’s the Queen!” Mrs. Ringle squealed like a girl at a Justin Bieber
concert. “Oh, Joel, what did you do?”
The Queen, today in a smart outfit of teal cashmere with mint-green hat and shoes,
was handed out of her car by a flunky. Standing in the middle of the road, in full view of
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crowds and reporters, she raised her eyebrows at Joel, waiting for him to come to her.
When he did, she shook his hand while an electrical storm of flashguns went off all
around them.
Under cover of the crowd’s cheering and the shouted questions of the press, she
leaned forward as if graciously asking his name, “I hope you’ll forgive the little surprise.
My husband’s idea, and while his ideas are generally impish, I rather fancied this one. So
this is the shop you spoke about? Will you give me the tour?”
Though phrased as a question, it was of course a command. So Joel, still speechless
and bemused—and grateful as hell—gestured for her to go in. She was preceded by
another lady-in-waiting and followed by a bodyguard, and once she was in she looked
around with open curiosity. He had the impression there was something professional
about the way she looked at his paintings—a lifetime of careful tact and measured
approval. But it sharpened into genuine fascination when he lifted the seagull brooch out
of the window and let her hold it so she could feel the way stones felt in another universe.
“This is from the same place as my recent guests?” She didn’t indicate that she knew
they were being overheard, but despite her entourage’s practised invisibility, Mrs.
Ringle’s scarcely contained, fidgeting joy didn’t let either of them forget it.
“Yes, ma’am. The friend that I told you about, who’s staying with me? He brought it
with him from his country. Some other pieces too, but I’m…well, rationing them.”
“Very wise.” She smiled and looked around again, levelling a hard gaze on the door
to the inner rooms. “He is not here, your friend?”
“He stayed at home today, I’m sorry.”
“Well. I should tell you that our experts are most intrigued with the items you left
with me last time. Now that they are assured of their quality, I wish you to bring your
friend to meet me. You will do that, won’t you?”
Joel resisted the impulse to say oh yes, anything you want. She had a voice that,
without giving the slightest impression of anything so vulgar as force, brooked no refusal.
He was overwhelmed with the feeling that to deny her anything would simply be horribly
impolite.
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“I’ll…ask him. I can’t make him.”
“Of course. I am not suggesting you should try. Now do tell Elaine here how much
you’re charging for this piece. I would like to wear it home.”
A little more than quarter of an hour later, she left to the accompaniment of more
photos, with the brooch pinned to the lapel of her smart jacket. As soon as the cavalcade
had gone and the police removed the barriers, Joel was swamped by press jostling for his
story.
Yes, he said, he had discovered a new designer—a personal friend. Known at the
highest levels, but whose work was only just becoming available to more ordinary
mortals. No, he couldn’t say the name—his friend was shy, a reclusive genius. He might
appear to the royal audience he had just been offered, or he might not. A terrible case of
the artistic temperament, but his work spoke for itself. No, it wouldn’t be available
anywhere else. Only here. Joel couldn’t guarantee how long that would last—such a
transcendent creator could not be constrained by the mundane forces of commerce
forever.
When the press had wrung him for every drop of information he would let slip, the
public swarmed the shop and ran Joel and Mrs. R both off their feet for the rest of the
day.
He put a ridiculous price on the hair clip, and it sold in the late afternoon to a horse-
faced woman with a “Lady” in front of her name. Mrs. R took the takings to the bank
with a look as though her car were powered by joy.
Then Joel wrote out a very ceremonial cheque to Drake, and a letter in his most
formal, clearest language that plainly said, “Here is your money. Our contract is now
over. If you bother me again I will set the police on you.” He cycled to the post office,
took photocopies of both, before he stapled the cheque to the letter, folded them into an
envelope and had them couriered—recorded delivery—to Drake’s business address,
which he had found on his loan agreement. He paid for the express service and was
assured there was still time for the final delivery to get to his tormentor today.
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After which he went home in an exhausted but happy daze, feeling that, okay, it was
definite now, his burdens were off his back. His luck had finally changed for the better.
He found Kai silent and sharpened like a pointer dog in the hunt, watching a
documentary about nuclear submarines with bright, lustful focus.
“You have money now, yes?” he said, barely looking up as Joel walked in. On the
screen, the simulated Trident sub let loose a couple of torpedoes and a battleship on the
surface exploded in a plume of flame. Folding in on itself, the ship wallowed, burned and
sank. Kai grinned with delight. “Buy me one of these.”
Joel sat down cautiously on the other end of the sofa and reminded himself that he
was tangled in things far bigger than his own human concerns. It wasn’t a pleasant
thought. “Um, you can’t go and buy a submarine at a kind of submarine shop. I think
you’ve got to be in the army—navy, I mean. They only let governments have them. They
don’t sell them to normal people.”
Kai’s expression put him in mind of the iceberg that sank Titanic. “I am not normal
people.”
“Even so.” Joel felt he should be apologising but couldn’t quite bring himself to. He
was not backing down on the yes-of-course-you-can-have-a-weapon-of-mass-destruction
front, no matter what. “I mean we—this country, I mean—we do sell stuff like that to
representatives of the governments of countries friendly to us, but…”
“Then buy me one, for I am a prince of Vagar. I am the government of my country.”
Ah. As he sat in his mundane flat with cars rolling by outside the window and the
incomprehensible cry of a news vendor rolling in from down the street, it occurred to Joel
that, bizarre as his life had become, this might be his best tactic for doing what the Queen
had asked and bringing Kai to meet her. “The trouble is that your country isn’t
somewhere my country even knows about. If we kind of told our officials about you, and
it was established that you weren’t our enemies, and you set up some kind of embassy so
that we could have trade agreements, then maybe we’d be willing to sell you a submarine
or two. The fact that you saved our queen’s life is probably going to weigh in your favour
there.”
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Kai tilted his head, as seemed to be his habit when he was allowing unfamiliar ideas
to roll gently from one side of his brain to the other. “She cannot simply gift me with
one?”
Joel thought about trying to explain parliamentary democracy and the function of a
ceremonial monarch to his little princeling. Decided not to even try. “I don’t know if she
could or not, but she’s not going to equip your country with serious weaponry like that
when, for all she knows, Tyrnir is going to end up on the throne. He tried to kill her once
already.”
Scowling, Kai clicked his fingers. The TV and every other electrical device in the
room—and the street lamps outside—went dark. “Such weapons would enable me to
annihilate the sea-people, undo Bjarti’s mistakes, and so heap my own glory on Tyrnir’s
head that he would have no choice but to concede my victory. They would, with ease,
enable me to put all right in my kingdom. Yet you tell me I may not have them until I
have already made things right?”
Joel wasn’t an expert on these things—normally he switched the news off halfway
through, too depressed to listen to the end—but he still laughed at the way sod’s law
scaled up. “Yeah, that sounds pretty much how most international diplomacy goes.
Catch-22. But the Queen does want to meet you. It would be a good first step to try that,
yeah?”
“Why does she want to meet me?” Kai’s hand snapped out, faster than sight, and
caught one of the bluebottles that was buzzing around the corner light. When he opened
his palm again, the fly sat in the centre of it, flicked its wings to neaten them and rubbed
its forelegs over its bulbous eyes as though it felt completely safe and happy. “Is it not so
she can give me over to her mages, for them to pull apart and study? Is it not so she can
imprison me somewhere, as a thing that would disturb her subjects’ minds to think upon?
My folk have been secret in the past, and it is not only we who have chosen to keep it that
way.”
“Are you saying that our government might already know about your people?” Joel
did not want to believe that. He didn’t think, in fact, that even if the government had such
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a secret to keep, it could ever be efficient enough to do so successfully. Something as
major as the existence of elves or extraterrestrials would get out. A briefcase would be
accidentally left on a train, or a memory stick discovered by the dry cleaners in the
pocket of ministerial trousers. Then it would be all over the papers for years, and despite
all the denials, everyone would know.
“I don’t believe that. They’d act differently. They’d do things that didn’t seem to
make any sense if you didn’t know. However mediocre they are, they’ve never seemed
irrational. I seriously think she’s sincere—she wants to talk to you one monarch to
another, because if anyone can understand what it’s like being a prince—or a princess—
well, it’s her.”
Passing a hand over the fly, stroking the air above it almost like someone telling over
a string of worry beads, Kai considered this. “If I did meet her, there would still be proofs
that needed to be given on both sides. I have seen how long it took the most subtle and
delicate of our bards to negotiate the treaty with the sea-people. Endless talks and
gestures of goodwill. Months, years even, and all that time with my own country in flux
so I knew not where I stood from day to day? When I knew not, myself, if I was to be
king or exile or corpse?”
Under the restless fingers the fly’s head seemed to be growing, its body elongating.
Its black threads of legs shifted position, the lower pair becoming thicker and stronger
than the four upper limbs. As if unaware of this, Kai shook his head. “No, if there are
meetings to be held between Vagar and Britain, they will be held when this is all over.
She must speak, if at all, with Vagar’s king. And I don’t know, I still don’t know, if I
could bear it for that to be me.”
Joel watched as the fly on Kai’s palm stood up on its hind legs and rolled its four
new shoulders. For the first time, Kai’s magic, his casual violation of the laws of nature,
made Joel feel queasy. “I don’t know if I could bear it either,” he agreed quietly.
“Because that means you’d have to go home, wouldn’t you? You can’t be an absentee
king. I don’t want you to go any more than you want it, but from everything you’ve told
me about your brothers, I think you’re the kingdom’s best bet.”
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“I am diseased with emotion, and weak. I am of no use except as an ornament, and
the proof of that is that my father has said worse things of both my brothers before, and
they laughed. Only in me do these barbs strike home, because I…”
Kai gritted his teeth and breathed in hard, while the remade fly launched itself into
the air and tried to put all four of its arms around his neck. “Because I desire…affection.”
He swore the word, his voice coming out thin as if knives in his throat had cut it into
slivers. “I desire…”
Joel was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of familiarity. He knew what a coming-
out speech looked like from the inside. Lunging closer, he grabbed Kai’s left hand and
held on tight. Kai closed his eyes and gulped air. “I make these creatures to…because I
want someone to…” And then he hunched, shoulders rounding, head down. “To love
me.”
Edging closer, Joel put both arms around the stricken prince and cautiously hugged
him. Kai stiffened at the touch, but slowly unwound until Joel could pull him in tighter,
fit the platinum head under his chin and enfold him.
He felt again the faint buzzing prickle beneath his skin that Kai gave off instead of
warmth, and dropped a reassuring kiss on the top of Kai’s head. As he did so, Kai looked
up, nuzzling against Joel’s jaw, rubbing his smooth cheek against Joel’s stubble. He
looked as watery as someone who has spent the last half hour weeping, and Joel could
feel the fine shake of powerful emotion in all his muscles.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Joel murmured. “But, you see, to me that makes
you better than the rest of them. Not to love anything at all… That’s not a good thing—
it’s a wound, like if you lost a limb or something.”
“It is something we cut out,” Kai agreed, his eyes closed and his body growing
heavier in Joel’s embrace. “It is not fitting for one of the nobility to be ruled by feelings.
A childish thing that must be discouraged as soon as we learn to speak. Gisli—my
youngest brother, whom Tyrnir murdered first—he was worse than I. I found it
reassuring not to be alone in it, and I did not rebuke him as I should have done.”
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“You just keep confessing this stuff that makes you sound like a good guy to me.”
Joel brought up a hand to curve around the back of Kai’s head, pull it closer to his
shoulder. This—this was why he could trust Kai despite his perilous power and his cold
judgments, because under it all the elf had such a good heart. Joel wanted to tend it, help
it to grow stronger, give him all that love he knew he needed. Make him “soft” if you
like, where soft was the same as happy and good.
With a little disconsolate sigh, Kai rested his forehead in the junction of Joel’s neck
and shoulder, closed his eyes and yawned, while Joel smoothed a hand down the long,
straight fall of his silver hair and smiled. He’d tried love before, and friendship, and had
both taken advantage of. He was sure he’d still have a lot of doubt about falling in love
again with another human. But maybe Joel’s bad track record of picking losers just meant
he’d always been looking in the wrong place, among the wrong species. When he thought
of his paintings—the faerie landscapes, the steampunk comets, the puzzles that were
neither one thing nor another, the shape-shifting faces and the endless wells—he could
see that half of his heart had always been in another universe. Maybe he had to cross the
wall to find his star.
“Kai,” he confessed, gently, gently, because he was pretty sure this was a huge thing
for them both, “you don’t need to make yourself little toys to love you. I’ll do that, if you
want me to. Hell, I think I already love you. Do you think you could learn to love me
back? It’s a debt I’d prefer if you paid me back in kind.”
The elf went rigid in his arms, gasping. Kai raised his head, joyous anguish again in
his wide eyes and his open mouth. But he hadn’t forced a word out in response when a
silky voice across the room remarked, “Oh, now isn’t this touching?” and there came a
sinister, mechanical click.
Joel’s face throbbed, his mouth filled with the taste of blood, and his eyes snapped
open just in time to catch the end of the movement as gloved hands slipped back the
safety catch on a gunmetal-grey pistol. Standing in the doorway to the kitchen, as though
he’d never met a lock he couldn’t pick, neat and precise as his gun and smirking with
self-satisfaction, was Drake.
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Bolting upright, Kai tore himself away from Joel, his appearance shifting as he did
so. Once he was sitting rigid and wide eyed a foot away from Joel, he looked as human as
any of them. Joel only hoped it was enough to fool the loan shark that he’d been
imagining what he’d seen at first.
“Gentlemen, don’t stop on my account. I am happy to have a show before we get
down to business.”
Fury boiled up from Joel’s gut, as scalding and bitter as if he were heaving up bile. “I
don’t have any business with you any more. You’ve been paid off. If you don’t have the
letter today, it’ll arrive in the morning. Paid in full, all the interest too. Now leave before
I call the police.”
Drake’s grin broadened. “I think you should check your contract again. I can change
the terms at any time. You see, my friend, I was inclined, last time, to leave you with a
clean slate and a sharp reminder. But this evening I turned on my TV to find you on the
news, hobnobbing with the Queen. I was somewhat taken aback. I asked myself, ‘Do I
really want to terminate this relationship just when it’s becoming rewarding?’ And I
answered myself, ‘No’.
“You have begun stocking some remarkable things in that shop of yours, Joel
Wilson. Remarkable things are my business. So I think it’s time for some renegotiation.
Whatever your deal is, I want in on it.”
Joel had been trained in a number of ways to disarm a man with a gun. They seemed
cleverer in theory, and they all relied on the man allowing you to get close enough to
touch. Under their ever-present mockery, Drake’s blue eyes were Arctic cold. After the
razor to the face, Joel really didn’t see him as the kind of man who would hesitate to
shoot if Joel tried to close the distance slowly.
He stood up, and while Drake’s stance—already beautifully well balanced, his gun
hand steady, the arm relaxed and still—did not alter from its perfection, something about
him seemed to sharpen. No, not a man to hesitate. Probably not a man to take by surprise
either. Rushing him would be a stupid bloody risk, but Joel was angry enough to chance
it.
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“Your contract is with Mr. Ringle. If you can find him, you’re welcome to
renegotiate with him. But I’m giving you thirty seconds to get out of here before I call the
police. You cut me. That isn’t legal. I can have you put away for that.”
“It’s healed remarkably well.” Drake lifted an eyebrow in amusement. “Yes, I can
see a jury believing I opened your face when you stand in front of them looking like
this.”
Joel made the decision, settled his breathing, and began to feel out for his body’s chi,
to help him spring into sudden, explosive motion.
“As for the police.” Drake narrowed his eyes, as though he could see what Joel was
doing. “Please. Since I came to this city, I have done more to control crime than they ever
could. The chief of police sends me a bottle of brandy at Christmas, and I send him one
of my enemies, gift-wrapped. I don’t think you know what you’re dealing with, but—”
He was midsentence when Joel sprang. Joel pushed off with all the power in his legs.
But he knew, the moment he moved, it was too slow. Drake looked faintly, intellectually
surprised, as though he hadn’t really believed Joel had it in him. Their gazes caught and
Joel felt his brain freeze behind his eyes. The man lived up to his name; he had a
dragon’s old, cold, reptilian stare. Pitiless.
As Joel ran at him, Drake stepped back and fired.
Chapter Thirteen
Motionless and disregarded on the sofa, Kjartan had been preparing for this. The
moment the bang rang out he spread both hands, plucked Joel out of the world and, with
accuracy he didn’t think he had, inserted him back behind Drake. The bullet passed
through the air where Joel had been and slammed into the wall by the window. Plaster
flew, and the room filled with the greasy, sulphurous stink of spent gunpowder.
Joel staggered as he landed, unprepared for the sudden change of position. He
lurched into a weak punch at Drake’s kidneys, but Drake—who surely should have been
more surprised, Kjartan thought—simply spun on one heel and slammed an elbow into
Joel’s sternum, following it up with a back fist to the face. As Joel doubled over, all the
breath driven out of him, Drake settled the mouth of the gun against the top of Joel’s
shoulder.
If he pulled the trigger now, it would not kill Joel. It would just break his collarbone
and shatter the joint of his arm, maybe lodge in the capsule of the ball joint, give Joel a
new understanding of agony, and cripple him for life.
Kjartan was not prepared to let that happen. Though his sword was lost, he formed a
new one out of the glass in the windows, filigreed and annealed together into unbreakable
hardness. With a yowl of fury, he leapt forward and slashed for Drake’s bent neck.
A white, tearing moment. Kjartan thought the sword had gone straight through the
backbone and the body had simply disappeared. Then his sword struck and rebounded
from something that rang out like crystal, and Drake was back, gun still in one hand, the
other holding a shield that flamed like diamond.
But Drake’s little disappearing act had given Joel time to get his breath. Joel
straightened from his crouch and drove his whole body up beneath Drake’s arm. The gun
went off a second time, plaster raining down from the ceiling as the bullet sank into the
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ornate ceiling rose. As Kjartan kept Drake’s shield arm occupied, kept his attention, Joel
seized the wrist of his gun hand, jabbed two fingers deep into the flesh of his biceps at a
very particular point. Drake flinched and his fingers jerked open. As the gun fell to the
floor, Kjartan kicked to send it skittering under the kitchen table.
Still Drake did not break or beg for mercy. This pleased Kjartan, who had none to
give. He clicked his fingers again, and the electricity he had banished from the
neighbourhood rushed back in. He could feel all the wires in the walls pulsing with the
stuff. Reaching out for it, he drew it into his hands, formed it into a spear and stabbed
it—hissing, crackling, blue-white as a thunderbolt—at Drake’s chest, where his small and
withered heart should beat.
Another moment of stasis, and then Drake caught the thunderbolt in his now
weaponless hand. Lashing and biting like a ball of adders, the strands of electric current
wound up his arm and sank beneath his skin. His eyes gleamed silver-white, and his grin
crackled with charge as he made a wide, theatrical gesture and a sword made out of
lightning grew from his hand.
Something very ancient stirred in Kjartan then. He recognised a challenge when he
saw it. He stepped back, to give himself space to do this correctly, and called a weighted
net of adamantine fibre to his left hand, armour to his body and a helm to his head. There
were ritual words that should have been said earlier, but it seemed they were past that
stage already. For Drake laughed with a ringing, joyous sound and was suddenly clad in
black obsidian armour and a helm like a dragon’s maw.
“We should be doing this in the arena,” said Drake, his voice sounding happy for the
first time since Kjartan had met him. And he spoke the truth. Halfway down the cliffs on
the opposite side of Thoka Bay, in a natural bowl worn away in days when the sea was
higher, was Vagar’s place of justice. Its rough walls were beautified by the pierced long
bones of those who fell there. The sea wind would move among the marrowless tibia and
the hanging nets of ribs, and behind the sounds of combat, the dead would sing on
endlessly in thin, whistling voices and wind-chime clicks. There a thousand ghosts would
watch, and approve, and drink the blood of he who was found guilty.
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“Indeed.” Kjartan bowed slightly, though he did not break eye contact. He spared a
moment to regret the fate of the living room—unlikely to come through an honour duel
without everything in it reduced to blackened dust. “But wherever we do this, that place
will be holy.”
Drake’s smile was almost sweet. He touched the lightning sword to his lips in salute.
Joel got between them, put an impious human hand on the centre of each of their
chests. “Wait just one moment. What the hell is going on now?”
Kjartan’s blood shuddered with an age-old imperative—the history of his people, the
codes rehearsed and repeated over millennia until habit became instinct, and instinct
strove to overwhelm thought. But Joel’s hand contradicted all that. Joel’s hand told him
he was not in that world any more. He looked at the human flesh pressed to his own, and
then over at Drake. In Drake’s gaze he saw again something he recognised, wordless, too
deep to be feigned.
Drake too was struggling to come back out of the deep waters. His brow creased, and
with an irritated twitch of his shoulders, he dislodged his armour. The black glass fangs
disappeared from around his face, leaving him looking briefly innocent and almost as
bewildered as Joel.
Abandoning his own armour, Kjartan sank down unsteadily onto an armchair,
allowed the glass in his sword to do as it desired to do and snap back into its place over
the windows. He didn’t know what he felt at this sudden kinship for Joel’s tormentor but,
worryingly, it was a little as though a long homesickness had been deliciously soothed.
“You aren’t human,” he said at last, for however strange a revelation, it could be put
into very simple words.
“No, I’m not.”
“What?” Joel’s slow mortal brain was taking its time to catch up with this, clearly.
The man perched on the coffee table between the two of them and said it himself, as
though it would mean something different in his voice. “You’re not human?”
Drake laughed, and wordlessly shifted his appearance with the same spell Kjartan
used. His hair became blue-black, his skin as white as Kjartan’s and his eyes silver-steel.
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He grew a little taller, slighter and more beautiful, the gloss of high birth hovering over
him like light.
“I am not.”
This changed everything. Kjartan left Joel to his incredulity and leaned forward.
“You had a gun.”
“I did.”
“Can you get me more? The big ones that blow up planes, and the ones that shoot
many bolts at a time?”
Drake grinned like a shark and began to speak, but Kjartan never heard what he
answered, because the ceiling above their heads fluttered like fabric, spun itself into a
maelstrom, and it began to rain goblins like heavy hail.
Joel had time for another moment of incredulity as the roof became a portal into
another world. “What the…?” he demanded.
Kai grinned at him—the same grin that split Drake’s narrow face, the one that put
Joel in mind of a cruising shark. “We forgot Tyrnir,” he explained. “And used our magic
freely. It must have lit up the sky like a beacon for him and drawn him here. This is good.
It’s good. We can have this out and done. No more hiding.”
The floor juddered as the first of the goblins fell heavily to the ground and leapt up
again as sure-footed as a cat.
With a ringing ceramic note, Kai and Drake were armed and armoured again as they
had been for their almost-duel. They separated, each to a different corner of the room,
where they would have walls at their backs. This would have neatly halved the force of
goblins that could have come against each, if it weren’t for the fact that all of the
monsters turned unerringly towards Joel. Those at the front held their swords at arm’s
length before them. Those at the back were armed with pikes and levelled them over the
shoulders of the front rank, so that Joel was surrounded on all sides by a slowly shrinking
sphere of bronze blades.
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Joel didn’t even have a kitchen knife this time. “Fuck!” he said, and then regretted
it—his mother would be very unhappy to know that his last words had been obscene.
Okay…maybe he could dive at the last moment, roll under their blades, get under their
feet and trip them—turn it into the close-quarter fighting where an unarmed man still has
a chance. It would be suicide, but no more so than standing here to be conveniently
speared.
Swallowing, he spent his last moment looking at Kai. Didn’t let himself wonder why
Kai was not coming to his rescue—maybe that wasn’t an elvish thing. Maybe Kai
thought it would be an insult, as if he was saying, You’re too weak to defend yourself. But
Joel would have gladly swallowed that kind of insult right now. “Help?”
A surge of action went through the goblin ranks. The points came in faster. Joel
braced himself, and just as he was about to jump, Kai ran forward, blade twirling, and
sliced into the backs of the horde. Drake didn’t move from his protected spot, but he
gestured in command, and the gun that had been abandoned under the table flew into
Joel’s hand.
Joel laughed out loud, raising the pistol and firing into the dismayed face of the
goblin directly ahead of him. At first the laughter was relief. But when the first goblin
exploded all over him, and the bullet travelled out of the back of its head, through the one
behind, and that one exploded too, and the one behind it, it became something more like
hysteria. He had never deliberately killed a thinking creature before—the ones at the
palace had been either accident or the Queen’s steady-eyed marksmanship. It felt better to
go a little mad than to reflect, now, on the realization that he’d just acquired a stain he
would never be able to wash out.
A whisper of white silk and a scent of bluebells, horrific in being utterly out of place,
and Joel almost drove an elbow into whatever it was that had settled at his back. But the
sound of more honest laughter—the amused laughter of someone who is having fun—
told him it was Kai. For a broken moment the thought that they stood back to back
against a horde of enemies stirred something atavistic, something very old and male, in
Joel’s heart.
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Sensei Richard had told him about being empty, receptive, calm. He would have
been terribly disappointed at the wild joy that seemed to burn up Joel’s limbs then,
scorching away all his regrets.
He found himself grinning too, sure it was the same wolfish expression he’d seen on
the elves’ faces. It had looked so creepy, but it felt so good from the inside.
For a long time, the fight was a blur of red. He was aware only of moving limbs,
weapons to be knocked aside with one hand, the gun growing warm in the other. The air
filled with the scent of cordite and gore. Joel was aware of Kai at his back, shielding him,
moving with him, and he rejoiced in the man’s grace, his smooth and deadly precision.
But Drake still hung back in his corner, and when Joel took advantage of a
momentary lull in the combat, looked over to try and goad him into action, he found the
darker elf braced like a fisherman trying to land Behemoth. Drake’s upraised arms
strained, his hands clenched around a glowing white cable of magic that extended to the
ceiling and disappeared into a dark whirlpool of otherness, where the portal to wherever
the goblins had come from had been prevented from fully closing.
Agony scored down Joel’s right arm. A goblin had seized his moment of distraction,
wrapped the stinging strands of its whip around Joel’s biceps, trying to immobilize him.
The cuts were superficial but the leather had been treated with something that burned like
lime. Brimful of fury, Joel ignored the pain long enough to aim at the creature’s forehead,
pull the trigger. The goblin froze in place, venom dripping from its skin like sweat.
The gun gave a smug little click. Nothing happened. Joel pulled the trigger again.
Same. There had been a full clip of bullets in the stock, but now they were gone.
Without thinking, Joel dropped the gun, grabbed the whip by its handle and tugged.
It came free from the shocked goblin’s hand. He snapped it, faced his attackers with a
weapon he didn’t know how to use. All around him fangs were being bared in triumphant
smiles.
Kai wouldn’t ask—Joel wasn’t sure how he knew, but he was quite certain that Kai’s
pride was greater than his wish to survive. But Joel had no princely honour to uphold.
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“Drake!” he yelled, “A bit of help here? I take back everything I said about the loan. Help
us. Please!”
Drake didn’t spare him a glance. He flung all his weight into a superhuman tug on
the magical cable, the muscles of his neck roping and his face contorting with effort.
Something above him gave. Darkness fell like a great crow out of the ceiling and
shattered the TV underneath it. Drake fell too, at the sudden lack of resistance, but he
rolled with it and came up sword in hand. Two steps across the room and his black sword
came down on the thing that struggled to disentangle itself from the sparking shards of
circuit board and screen. A small part of it rolled away, and there came a great oily burst
of power that flung Joel and his attackers together across the room and slammed them
into the wall.
Afterwards there was a heartbeat of peace, as though the world drew its breath. Kai
came to stand beside Drake—the two of them the only figures still standing. Then Drake
leaned down and pulled a fold of charcoal cloak away from the small part that had rolled
aside from the body in the wreckage.
It was a severed head, the blood still flooding out from the neck, the eyes still
moving in their sockets. It tried to speak but couldn’t. The eyelids slid closed—tried to
open again and only made it to half-mast before the eyes rolled back and the face fixed
itself in death.
It was Tyrnir, of course. At his defeat, his hired soldiers picked up their comrades’
bodies and disappeared one by one.
“That was my brother!” Kai straightened up with a look of utter outrage. He raised
his sword so the point of it lay in the hollow of Drake’s throat. “You may be of noble
birth, but you had no right to kill one of the divine family. May sun and sea and seething
core strike you down for impiety.”
Beneath the spray of blood, the smile on Drake’s face looked almost kind. “I had
every right,” he said smugly. “He was my brother too.”
Chapter Fourteen
Kjartan kicked the headless body out of his way and lowered himself to the sofa.
There was nothing in the room not covered in flesh and blood and brain matter, and the
squelch was unpleasant.
“You are…” Evidently he had caught Joel’s disordered manner of speech. He settled
his startled thoughts and tried again. “You are my brother Dagnar? The eldest? The one
Father got rid of, and yet praises with every curse?”
“I am Dagnar.” Drake shook the armour from his arms and gave a bittersweet smile.
“Though I did not know he remembered me fondly, old bastard. I should have taken his
head off too—given the necromancers more of a challenge.”
Gingerly, Joel settled next to Kjartan on the couch. The moment his presence was
within reach, Kjartan realised how much he had needed it. Heedless of what he was
telling the whole world with the gesture, he allowed himself to lean against the comfort
of Joel’s warm chest and to accept the arm that wound itself protectively around his
waist. Things to think about there. Important things. But not now.
Drake’s smile turned sardonic again. He lifted an eyebrow at the display, but said
nothing. He scarcely needed to. The laughter in his gaze was mockery enough.
“You have a brother you’d never even met?” Joel’s voice shook slightly, but since he
was evidently trying to conceal it, Kjartan gave no sign of noticing. “What’s he doing
here on Earth?”
“I might ask the same.” Kjartan indicated the coffee table for Drake to sit on, but he
took one of the further chairs instead. There was still that about his radiance, about the
way Dagnar’s soul seeped through his wards, that plucked the strings of Kjartan’s heart
and called out a resonance within him that he could not ignore. It was a little like getting
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Gisli back. Kjartan’s blood sang in him—told him he had regained a kinsman, as though
he had regrown fingers he had not been aware he had lost.
“There were three of us,” Drake began, crossing his legs at the ankle, lounging back.
“Bjarti was but a toddling thing, full of tantrums, and you were a babe in the cradle, when
I decided that my father had reigned too long. We had lost half of our nobility by then.
Some were exiled for sedition, some took themselves away because they could not bear
the cold of his reign—touch rationed by law, affection condemned. Many moved to other
kingdoms rather than school themselves to it.
“Then I bethought myself of the old tales—of how the youngest always wins. It had
always seemed to me unwise of the eldest son to allow those two youngsters to grow up
before he made his move. Therefore while both of you were still too young to pose a
threat, or even remember it, I attempted to stage a coup.”
He gestured absently with one hand, and his seat and clothes cleaned themselves,
leaving him an island untouched in a red sea. “I made alliance with the sea-people, with
whose princess I had long had…friendship. They were happy enough to have me use
them as my weapon. All went well. We stormed the palace, we killed the king.”
Laughter, tinged with admiration. “And it was a trap. Aud, who is ever our father’s
staunchest supporter, betrayed me, though I had taken care to bribe her well. To cut a
long story short, I was defeated. I thought I would be killed, but Father—once he could
get his mouth to work again—seemed to regard the attempt as a laudable show of spirit.
He exiled me, I think, only because it was ill planned, and it failed.
“Whatever his thoughts, I was left friendless and penniless in a disused side tunnel of
a disused underground station. The knowledge of how to return had been removed from
my mind, and I believed I would never have a chance to go home. Nor would any aid
ever come to me from my own people again.”
Kjartan fidgeted, discomfited by this story. The punishment might have seemed
merciful to Dagnar, it seemed less so to him. Though he had been lucky enough to find a
Joel to shelter and conceal him, Dagnar could as easily have found someone like Joel’s
boss—willing to sell him to the highest bidder.
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The tacky stickiness of his clothing began to irk him. He cleaned himself, then Joel,
and on second thoughts, the whole room. The spell took away years of London grime
with it—the room gleamed after, only the broken TV and Tyrnir’s now-bloodless body
left to attest to the battle.
Joel lurched to his feet and staggered out of the room. Kjartan could hear him open
his front door, pause a moment and then close it. He did the same with the kitchen
window. “Welcome to London,” he muttered to himself. “Loud music after ten and the
neighbours would read me the riot act. A full-scale interdimensional battle and they
pretend they can’t hear a thing.” A humourless chuckle and a moment later came the
sound of the kettle, the clink of a spoon in a mug.
“By chance,” Dagnar went on, “I fell in with the community of those who sleep on
the streets. I found many willing to steal for me and several willing to be my knights and
do violence in my name. All of these I protected from other predators, learned from and
organised and led.”
Joel returned with a pot of the drink he called “tea”, and the small plastic-wrapped
cakes he had found in the skip. He put them down and poured for all, handing Kjartan his
cup, and another to Dagnar, who received it with the familiarity of a native. Joel cradled
his own cup in both hands and sat staring at the body, breathing in steam.
“At length”—Dagnar drained his cup and peeled one of the little rolls from its purple
wrap—“my activities earned me the attention of men higher in the underworld than I.
These I co-opted or defeated, replacing them with men I considered to be noble at heart.”
“Noble?” Joel scoffed, his hand pressing against his cheek as if to hold the flesh in
place. Kjartan guessed the word did not mean the same to him as it did to them.
Kjartan tried to explain: “A man’s nobles are those he trusts enough to endow with
great power. It doesn’t mean they are good men, only that they are committed to him and
loyal.”
“But nor are they fools enough to goad those beneath them into active rebellion,”
Dagnar finished. “Therefore, although they may not be good, they must be more tolerable
than the alternative.”
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“What I don’t understand…” Joel took his own cake. Hesitated, set it down, then
rose to cover the body with the fleece throw that draped over the back of the sofa. “Is, if
you’re all that, why bother to come and see me in person? That’s like being visited
by…the Queen. Oh, yeah. Well. That doesn’t exactly help my point, but you know?”
Dagnar smiled and brushed his thick ebony hair off his face. “The two I sent to you
were promising knights. I had my eye on them. Yet, taken by surprise, unarmed, you
defeated them. One should not be too high to recognise potential excellence. I came to
see you for myself—how could I decide whether to punish or recruit you without getting
the measure of you first? Then many surprising things happened, and I stayed to find out
what they meant.”
Taking his attention from Joel, Dagnar put his elbows on his knees, rested his chin
on his laced fingers, and smiled sharply at Kjartan. “Now here we are. My brother has a
kingdom to win, and I can provide him with the guns he needs in order to do it. But I
would not have him forget that I also am a prince and that the price of my aid will be
steep.”
“What do you want?” Kjartan asked, intrigued.
“I want to go with you.” Dagnar folded his arms across his chest as if to wall out the
possibility of denial. “I have kept myself occupied here, but I have not ceased to want to
go home. The memory of how to return was taken from me, but you could bring me
there, and I—who have been dealing with mortals’ metals for many years—could bring
the weapons.”
Joel was still reeling from all of this, his stomach roiling from the combination of
adrenaline, shock and confusion. It had not been a good idea to add tea and chocolate to
this mix—his guts cramped and boiled in time with the seething of his thoughts. Their
former enemy sat, looking very relaxed and at home, in one of his balding plush seats,
and now Kai and he had progressed from murdering their brother to storming their
homeland with machine guns?
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Joel’s little fairy tale had plunged into some very dark waters. For all that Tyrnir was
clearly an evil-minded bastard, Joel couldn’t quite reconcile himself to having the man’s
headless body on his carpet. That had been Drake’s doing—and it hardly surprised him
that Drake took to beheading like a miser took to gold. Still, while he could tell himself
that Kai wouldn’t have struck down his own brother with anything like Drake’s callous
ease, he didn’t like the fact that Kai moved on from it so quickly. Perhaps that was unfair,
though, and the reaction would set in later, when big brother wasn’t watching.
“Yeah.” Joel eyed Drake’s elvish form with dislike. His confession of love had been
ruined, and although he believed he was an easy-going sort of person, he hadn’t even
been asked to forgive the days of misery Drake had put him through. He certainly didn’t
feel inclined to offer absolution spontaneously, or to pretend none of it had ever mattered.
“Then when you get home, you’ll have all the weapons. You’ll kill Kai and make
yourself king. No point in denying it.”
Drake gave him a look such as a small girl might bestow on a long-haired hamster. A
sort of OMG, he’s so adorable look. He smiled. “I won’t deny the thought has flown over
my head. But the youngest brother always wins, and with Tyrnir and Gisli dead, K…Kai
is the youngest.”
“You don’t really believe the world works like a fairy tale?” Joel scoffed, but once
the words were out they sounded far less plausible than they had in his head. Kai and
Drake were fairy-tale princes—why shouldn’t the world work by storybook rules for
them?
“You don’t really still believe your world works by the laws of physics, do you?”
Drake tilted his head to look at Joel out of one eye, like a raven sizing up a fresh corpse.
“When you have seen ample evidence otherwise over the past weeks?”
He shrugged, then spread out both hands to Kai in a gesture that looked like entreaty,
or surrender. “But such questions are for mages and folk of science to discuss. Suffice it
to say that I value my life enough not to intend to make an enemy of my youngest
brother. If I come, I will help you against Bjarti, against our father. Then, when you are
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victorious, you will give me some place of honour in your court—advisor or shadow or
chief priest, I care not, so long as you let me come home.”
A week later—for it had only taken that long for Drake to acquire two belt-fed
machine guns, a rocket launcher and five cases of ammunition—and they were convened
again in Joel’s front room. The weaponry was encircled in a net of copper wires, the ends
of which Drake wore in a loop about his wrist. He and Kai both wore elaborate robes—
Drake’s conjured up out of memory and magic, Kai’s carefully ironed by Joel the night
before.
Joel felt filled up with too many emotions to name. Persistently, at the bottom of
everything, disbelief formed the bedrock of it all, but jealousy was there too—Kai looked
so much more at home with Drake than he did with Joel himself. Loss was layered over
that. Kai had never said that he returned Joel’s love. There had been quiet moments since
in which he could have confessed it—could have at least said he would try—but all he
would talk about was his country. Joel knew a great deal about the customs of greeting a
nobleman, how to tell his rank from his clothes, how to move to avoid insult, how to
smile to avoid unwanted propositions and so on. He knew nothing at all about Kai’s
feelings, except that he had been unusually jumpy, nervous and excited all week long.
Now Joel watched the preparations for the elves’ departure with a heavy sense of
inevitability. At least Kai had done him the courtesy of making no promises. The two of
them would go back to their world, deal with whatever the crisis was, and forget—in that
arbitrary, unemotional way of theirs, which was not quite deliberate enough to be called
callous—to ever come back. Joel couldn’t call this a betrayal, because he’d never been
led to believe it could end any other way. He would live out the rest of his life not
knowing if they made it, or if they’d both been killed, or if Drake had proved the villain
he seemed and turned on Kai in the end.
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As he watched Kai reach out and close his long hand around Drake’s silver-grey
sleeve, the feelings rose to an unbearable pitch, forced him to jerk forward and take Kai’s
other arm. “I’m coming too.”
He expected to have to argue, maybe fight for the privilege. But Kai just frowned
and gestured for him to look at himself in the hall mirror. When Joel did so, despite
mortal peril and the threat of interplanar travel, he couldn’t help but let out a small
squeak of glee and clap his hands over his mouth.
It was the opposite of what Kai and Drake had done to fit in. Joel stood two feet
taller than he had, his dark skin now literally black, but with a sheen of gilt over the
surface as though airbrushed in gold. His nondescript hair had lengthened and reached to
his waist, bound in finger-thick dreadlocks and wound around with gold wire. His clothes
had been replaced by armour of gold, and he looked, even to himself, so like a pharaoh he
half-expected to be followed by linen-clad girls with ostrich fans.
“Wow, that’s cool!”
“Of course you are coming.” Kai’s cool fingers slipped around his wrist. “You are
my champion and my protector. I would not go without you.”
Right at that moment Joel couldn’t have felt more like a hero. That was his chance to
get rid of me. He passed it up. Maybe, just maybe, I ought to be hoping after all?
The elation lasted even through the wrench of magic, through the corridor in time
and space that felt to his mind like the taste of liquorice. But it dissipated the moment his
feet thudded onto the sand of an alien landscape.
There was a long moment when nothing he saw made sense to him. He stood stock-
still, trying to process, until Kai tripped and shoved him to the ground behind a broken
wall, left him there to help Drake set up the first gun.
Things resolved themselves slowly once he had ground and wall, shadow and sky
sorted out, even though the sky was a delicate shade of lavender and a great ringed planet
leaned upon the horizon in shades of gold and bronze. The wall at least was recognisable,
made of dry grey stone stacked together. Recovering himself, he knelt up to peer over the
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top. A short incline of dunes on which red grasses hissed, beyond that another wall, and
between the two the humped backs and crouching scurry of soldiers.
Beyond the second wall he could not see, but the ground beneath him trembled with
the sound of heavy machinery and angry surf.
“With us now?” Kai pulled him up by the shoulder and offered him the rocket
launcher. He had enchanted the ammunition so that it could fit into Joel’s pocket. Slowly,
so that Joel could follow how it was done, he loaded it up with a high-explosive shell,
showed Joel the safety catch and the trigger, before turning away to pick up his own
weapon.
Joel tried to choke down the giggles that threatened at the sight of Kai in his dragon
helm with a heavy machine gun in his yellow rubber-gloved hands. “Yes, sorry.”
“Good, then we will go forward. Have a care.”
Joel understood the scurry as soon as he came out from behind the shelter of his
scrap of wall. Something from beyond the front line was lobbing rocks into the narrow
space. They came up bright against the sky, crusted with colourful barnacles, trailing
seaweed, and they smashed like a crimson egg anyone not fast enough to get out of the
way.
The defenders did not appear to be doing very much defending. There was some
desultory arrow fire from the men on the outermost wall, but mostly it was a disorganized
milling as of people who wanted very much to run away but didn’t quite dare.
They parted for Kai though, like the Red Sea parting for Moses. Following in his
wake, Joel didn’t have to shove to get across the no man’s land and up the stone stairs of
the much larger, much wider far wall. The commanders of Kai’s side were huddled
together in a guard tower on its top.
They turned when Kai came in, with Drake and Joel following. Joel had somehow
not expected the guy in charge to be—as she clearly was by the moulding on her
breastplate and her helmet of swan feathers—a woman.
“Aud?” Kai asked, and he sounded just as taken aback. “I expected Bjarti. Where
is—?”
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“He is where he can do most good.” She indicated an arrowslit, moved aside so first
Kai and then his retinue could look out. From the stiffening of Kai’s back, Joel knew he
had seen something that outraged him. It still took him a moment to work out what he
saw, when he was allowed to look.
Beyond the wall, a shallow sea crept up the beach, but things had crawled higher
still. Massive devices like steampunk octopuses were dragging themselves out of the
water, curling their tentacles around the rocks scattered over the beach and hurling them
over the wall. Some had even fastened suckers to the wall itself and were laboriously
trying to pull themselves up and over it.
Looking back, through the opposite slit, Joel saw behind him only the narrow band
of soldiers, and behind them a steep, cloven valley sweeping up to a castle on a cliff top.
The bodies of seagulls the size of Spitfires choked the stream that came down from
there—its waters were red when they reached the sea.
But that was not what had upset Kai. Joel was pretty sure Kai’s wince was because
of what else stood out on the beach, surrounded by the water-filled walking devices of the
mer-army.
Waist deep in the water, a pole, narrower than a telegraph pole, wider than a spear,
had been set up. One end had been driven deep into the sand, the other into the body of a
well-built red-haired man. He looked like he’d been dead for some time—there was a
snail in one eye socket and fish feeding on his feet.
“How dare you!” It was Drake, surprisingly enough, who attempted to shove Aud in
the chest, only to be held back by a shield of magic as she raised a tattooed hand.
“I dare nothing. He died a warrior’s death. It’s only his meat out there, and that was
at the king’s command. Prince Bjarti started this war, he should be used to end it, so said
the king. And it is true that since we made this gesture, the ferocity of the sea-people’s
attack has died down. Do you have more to offer?”
“Much,” Drake began, his face thin with rage—eyes and lips compressed. “But first
you will bring him in.”
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“I will not disobey the king’s command for you,” Aud said, drawing herself up, tall
and regal and uncanny in her silver mail. “Exiled and nameless child.”
They were about to come to blows. Joel could see it on both of them—the realisation
that they had both gone too far to back off now. Quickly, he shoved himself between
them, received twin glares and the startled grateful smile of Kai.
“You can speak to the sea-people’s general?” Kai asked, as though the standoff had
never happened. With the change of subject, Aud took a step back, Drake smiled a cold
smile and did the same. Joel breathed again.
“I can, my lord.”
“Then tell them that the crown prince of Vagar is here, and he revokes his brother’s
actions. Say that if they will depart now, he will consider all of this as nothing. The treaty
will stand as it did of old, the seas will be theirs and the land ours.”
He had looked very stern as he said this, but now he licked his lips, and a frown
made a long upright crease above his nose. “And then tell them that if they do not leave,
we will pile the strand so high with their corpses it will be as if we had built a second
wall.”
Aud laughed, sucking in the air across her bared teeth. Her sceptical look dismissed
Joel, lingered on the three awkward, out-of-place guns for which he had begun to
assemble tripods and viewfinders. Leaning forward, she sniffed delicately at the air above
them, and recoiled. “You brought iron here? The work of human hands? Do you know
what you have done?”
“I have not done anything yet.” Kai deflated a little, looking worried. As he did so a
squealing rasp outside the arrowslit pierced the bare rock chamber in which they stood.
There came a sound like thunder and the floor shuddered under their feet. Then the edge
of the roof curled back, exposing a glimpse of deep sapphire sky and a tentacle made of
brass, hinged with rings of copper. Studded all over with disturbingly organic suckers
that moved like seeking mouths, it curled about one of the tie beams of the roof and
pulled.
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The whole wooden construction creaked and flexed above them. Slate tiles sliced
through the air and shattered on the hard oak floor.
Kai and Drake shouldered their guns, and each ran out of a different door, pelting
towards the two further towers that guarded either end of the wall. Joel—breathing
carefully, moving without haste—coaxed a shell into the rocket launcher, set the muzzle
to the arrowslit. Out there, all he could see was the enormous climbing monster of a
device.
It was spotted all over with what at first he took to be ornamental circles of glass.
But then at the closest one, a green blur came into focus, and he saw a face looking out,
green skinned, the gills at its neck fluttering, and its unblinking round eyes as metallic as
those of a toad.
It saw him and recoiled, and he—also recoiling—squeezed the trigger without
thinking.
His shell impacted the war machine above its circlet of tentacles. It exploded as
thoroughly as the goblins had at the touch of a bullet. A great wash of something
orange—light or pressure or magic, it tasted of sherbet and seaweed—passed soundlessly
through the keep wall as the thing burst apart. The machine was some kind of tank, Joel
realised—or perhaps more like a submarine—a device that allowed the mer-people to
carry their environment with them as they ventured out on land. As it burst, a score of
mer-creatures were hurled against the stone and fell, gasping for breath, as the water
inside their vehicle drained away.
They had long, flexible, flipper-tipped limbs without either the bone or the muscle to
hold them up on land. Those who had not been crushed in the impact began to flop their
way down the beach, trying to return to the sea before they suffocated.
Aud gestured above a basin of silver on a pillar, and a light came from it, casting
Kai’s image on the white ceiling above. “I will send the message, Lord.”
“Wait, how many of ours did they kill?”
“Three thousand and seventy-three, Lord.”
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“Then we will kill three thousand and seventy-three of theirs, and then send the
message.”
Joel realised with a heavy heart that Kai had no choice now but to be ruthless. If Kai
had tried to be merciful here, no one, not even his enemies, would have respected him for
it. But it didn’t make it any easier when—in response to the loss of their sub—the beach
boiled with a new attack. Machine guns opened fire on the outermost corners of the wall,
cutting swathes of destruction through the advancing armies. It was like watching the
massacre in Gandhi, like watching Zulu and thinking, What’s so heroic about taking on
an army of spear carriers when you’ve got rifles? Only it was worse, because it was him
involved, shooting the vastly outgunned sea-folk literally like fish in a barrel.
With no further attack from the middle tower, the sea-people made a last desperate
assault on Joel’s position. They swarmed and slithered and writhed towards him like
something out of Lovecraft’s bad dreams.
He stood paralysed, seeing the broken bodies bleeding green on the strand, as it
finally came home to him that this was real. This was real—they were real people he was
killing, he in his stone tower as safe as any video gamer…
A dozen tentacles squirmed through the window and plucked at his weapon,
flinching away as if burned.
“Strike!” Aud yelled at him. “Strike now, or the wall will go down and the war be
protracted and our own people slain. Strike, you coward!”
But he couldn’t. In the end she shouldered him aside, wrapped her trailing sleeves
around her hands to protect them, picked up the rocket launcher herself and let fly,
counting down under her breath as she picked off tanks.
They stopped coming before she reached fifty. The seethe of slithering became a
retreat as everything that could move away fled down the beach, sinking to safety under
the waves. Then Aud made the water mirror-smooth just below the tower and sent her
message.
A single figure came out of the waves to reply to it. Like a deep-sea diver, it was
armoured all over in a metal suit, green as verdigris and inlaid with designs of bright
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copper-red and gold. Its bowl of helmet was gold-plated like that of a spaceman, and it
leaned on a trident that looked as though it had been carved from a single pearl. Very
quietly it stood in the range of the silent machine guns, its ankles in the water, waiting.
Kai went out to it, in his armour of crystal. Joel considered trying to get the gun back
from Aud so he could cover him, but decided she would do a better job of it. Leaning
forward, he tried to hear what was said.
It was too far away. All he saw was that they walked together a little, along the edge
of the sea, and then the mer-noble put hir spear down in the surf, walked out to where
Bjarti’s corpse hung and, lifting him down, laid him on the sand in front of Kai’s feet.
“I would not have thought it of Kjartan,” Aud remarked quietly, bending the gaze of
her tip-tilted eyes on Joel as if she saw right through him. “Nor have supposed him
capable of this. He was ever…soft. But I suppose, out of those who are left, he is the
youngest, so I should have known.”
Chapter Fifteen
After the constant roar of the battle, it was quiet as Joel stood in Kai’s chambers and
watched his treelike servant deck him out in cloth of silver, winding strings of emeralds
into his starlight hair and ropes of pearls around his waist.
A seagull the size of a small ship sailed on stiff wings outside the window, angling
its oarlike tail feathers to skim out to sea. From here, it was not possible to see the ocean,
but it could still be heard and smelled in an omnipresent miasma of salt and ooze. They
had left a crew of strangely shaped beings working to repair the wall at the base of the
bay, and on the other side of it, a crew of equally strange creatures dragging away the
dead. They were singing as they worked, and the sound of it blew up with the sea breeze
in cadences of inappropriate joy.
By tomorrow all the evidence that war had ever happened would be gone.
Joel rubbed his biceps to get some warmth into them. The sea wind struck straight
into these rooms through glassless windows. Its moisture trickled off the far wall and
snaked in runnels down to a stream that ran through the centre of the floor. There, more
of Kai’s little abominations swam, occasionally lifting their torsos out of the water to
glare at Joel with jealous eyes.
He opened his mouth to say, So…crown prince, eh? You’re not going to have a lot of
time for me in future, are you? and closed it with the words unsaid. It would be petty of
him to interfere now. Particularly when he knew Kai didn’t really want this—was only
doing it because he felt he owed it to his people. Joel would have been pretty glad he’d
been born a commoner, without such high duties, if it weren’t that his very common birth
made it all the less likely that a king could afford to keep him on as anything more than a
temporary amusement.
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Common as they come, he thought, and cast another nervous glance at the second
servant—the one who looked like an enormous, polite spider. It was hard to tell, but he
was fairly certain all eight of those pupil-free eyes were staring at him with disapproval.
However good the glamour which Kai had put on him, they all seemed to sense there was
something not-quite-right about him. He didn’t like to imagine how much worse it would
be if they knew he was a filthy human.
It didn’t need to be said that he was as far away from being an appropriate consort to
the king as possible, so he supposed he was grateful that nobody had said “thanks for
everything and goodbye” yet. He just wished he weren’t so sure it was only a matter of
time.
“There.” A strip of gold leaf had been applied over Kai’s eyelids and continued onto
his cheeks. It gave him an unfortunately bisected look, and Joel didn’t like it. “We should
go. This will not get easier by delay.”
Lifting a small circlet of red-gold from his desk, Kai worked it into Joel’s tightly
bound hair and smiled. “I had this made just before Father made his announcement. No
one has yet seen me in it. I know it is a little plain, but I would have you look like a
visiting prince, and they would recognise aught else of mine. This will have to suffice.
Come then.”
“I…” said Joel as he walked along draughty corridors of grey stone, past metal doors
and doors of bone and leather. Oh, we’re lying about me, are we? Of course we are. “I
guess I should congratulate you. Thank you too. You turned my life around when you fell
into it.”
Kai grimaced. Joel thought it was meant to be a smile, but if so it failed in every
way.
“And maybe you can visit…sometimes. You know?”
Kai opened his mouth and shut it again in silence, his expression souring. They
stopped outside a door large enough for a jumbo jet to pass through, and Kai took a deep
breath, thrust it open with one hand and went in. Feeling unsure of his welcome, unsure
of everything, Joel trailed after.
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There was a pile of fungus on a pedestal in the middle of the room. An unhealthy
pigment-free colour, with strands of fine hairlike spores that reached a hand’s breadth
above it and stirred in the wind.
Drake stood on a step immediately down from it. “You stay here,” Kai reminded
Joel, and left him on the ground to climb up to the next step down. Around this
tableaux—the two beautiful young men flanking the pile of rot—the room was packed
with silent, motionless elves. They were all inhumanly perfect to look on, with a gloss
that became meaningless, even repulsive after a while. Most bore swords, and all wore a
look of mingled curiosity and fake sorrow.
Joel didn’t know why he was still here. A longing for home came over him, like the
inflammation of a bruise in the chest. He could see why Kai didn’t like this place, but he
would bet he liked it less. It said something good about Kai that Joel could tell he didn’t
really belong here, but it made the tragedy of his having to stay that much greater.
Already the place was forcing him to become colder, harder than his natural wont.
Compressing his lips, Joel swallowed down fear and loss, only to have it almost
come back up again, accompanied by his lunch, when a pair of milky blue eyes opened
among the strands of rot. A liquid-choked voice said, “Well?” as if it were sucking the
shell off the word and letting the albumin splurge out.
“The war is over, Father.” Kai smoothed down his already perfectly smooth sleeves
and—at the susurration of voices all around him—twisted his hands in the cuffs. “The
treaty with the sea-people holds once more, and Bjarti’s body lies in state in his room,
ready to be honoured as of old.”
They could hear the thing in the throne gurgle before it forced out, “Tyrnir?”
“His corpse lies in his chamber also.”
The murmurs of the courtiers grew warmer, more appreciative. Joel could see smiles,
hear snatches of praise and rejoicing that Kai, whom they seemed to call Kjartan, had
finally grown into his promise.
“Then, Kjartan, my youngest son, come forward and receive the crown.”
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Joel couldn’t fathom the look on Kai’s face. Perhaps a little pride, a lot of disbelief, a
lot of misery, but no lack of resolution.
He wanted to snatch Kai by the collar of his overelaborate robe and drag him back to
Earth, where he had been happy, where they had both been happy. He even made some
slight movement towards him, and all around the chamber came the whisper of swords
being drawn.
Kai looked up straight at Joel, his golden gaze seeming to say something. But Joel
couldn’t interpret it, didn’t want to push it, end up skewered and ruin Kai’s big day even
further. He stepped back, bit his bottom lip, tried to relax.
“Father, I…” Kai sounded lost, choked. But he climbed the stairs to the king’s dais
and reached down into the nest of rot to take the crown from its bed of maggots and flies.
“You were always my favourite,” whispered the old voice, trailing away with a wet
slap as though the tide had come in. A little blackish rivulet welled and fell from the soft
mouth, and Kai straightened his back, pressed his face into sternness and—shaking the
larvae off the crown—he raised it high and set it down on his own head.
Cheering shook the room, and though Kai’s mouth was thinned into a line, as if he
held back a shout of pain, Joel still felt like he’d been punched hard in the stomach. He
hadn’t honestly expected Kai to choose him over the throne. That would have been
so…so huge. Embarrassingly huge. Joel would have had to work all his life to pay back
such a debt, and he couldn’t imagine ever succeeding. But I was willing to give it a try.
They hadn’t really even been together yet, so it wasn’t that he was being dumped.
There’d been a possibility maybe. One which had not seemed unattractive to Kai at the
time. Maybe he’d been a good fallback, with only a second-best life to offer. Something
Kai might have taken gratefully if he couldn’t have his first choice.
Kai… No, he should call him Kjartan now. Kai was his friend, and this man was not
that. Kjartan motioned for servants to come and scrape the ex-king out of his throne. The
cheering died down in the chamber but spread out of it. They could hear running feet
outside, and bells, as the news of a new king dispersed from the centre of the realm to its
outskirts via messenger and rumour.
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Joel swallowed, though it did nothing to dampen his dry throat, and looked at Drake
above him. The older prince was scowling. His long hands clenched by his side, and his
slate-blue eyes were cold. Joel wondered if that was an assassination attempt in the early
planning stages. He would understand if Kjartan began his reign by imprisoning his
brother. Nor did he think he’d really mourn overmuch if Kjartan did—Drake’s razor
touch was still too fresh in his mind.
“My people.” Kjartan’s voice broke his thoughts, and if it started breathless and thin
with nerves, it rapidly gained confidence as he went on. “You have heard my father
acknowledge my right to the crown, and all the powers of the king that that entails. You
may be telling yourself that of course the youngest son always triumphs, and perhaps you
are right. As the youngest living son, I claim my right to achieve my heart’s desire.”
He let his gaze rest on Drake, beckoned with his chin. “My brother, Dagnar, come up
to me.”
The emotional temperature of the room dropped at once. Though they were not
human, Joel could still feel the elves’ unease as if it was his own. He recalled that Drake,
Dagnar, whatever he was called, had been exiled. Wondered what he deserved for
coming back—execution? Torment? They were taking the old king out of the chamber
now, in a small dripping sack. Something infinitely worse than either of those things?
Dagnar hesitated over the final step that would put him on the same level with
Kjartan, and there was a hiss as of many snakes when he squared his shoulders and set his
foot down on the dais reserved for the king. But Kjartan took him by the elbow and
turned him so both of them were shoulder to shoulder, facing out.
Joel hadn’t appreciated before how similar they looked, under the differences of
colour. Dagnar had a greater air of maturity and danger, slightly more bulk and height,
but the family resemblance, once seen, was striking.
“As king,” Kjartan went on, his posture loosening as he began to relax, “I revoke my
brother’s banishment.”
A small smile flickered on Drake’s face and his fists eased. Had he expected Kjartan
to break his word, Joel wondered, surprised. Then he thought about Tyrnir and told
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himself not to be so naïve. Of course he had. So what would it be instead? An earldom—
something far away and tricky to administrate, to keep him occupied and out of trouble?
Or something close to keep him always under Kai’s watchful eye?
“Once exiled to the human Earth,” Kjartan continued, his voice loud in the wary,
silent chamber, “Dagnar began with nothing but his own wits. It was with that weapon
alone that he made himself a lord and a ruler of men. It was with his wits and his wisdom
that he showed he could choose champions, subdue fiefs and inspire the loyalty of killers.
As the youngest son, I tell you that the crown is not my heart’s desire. As king, I tell you
that my brother is far more fit than I to rule, and I hereby abdicate in Dagnar’s favour.”
The crown had barely touched his head—an ugly thing in the shape of a slow worm,
with two green eyes that opened above his brows—and he was lifting it off, like he was
lifting a fallen house off Joel’s chest, letting him breathe again. Hollowed out by a wild
pressure of joy, Joel hardly believed it, but oh how he hoped.
Something of the same joy, though fiercer, shone from Dagnar’s wide eyes. He took
the crown almost by reflex and looked at it as if he didn’t know what it was.
Kai closed his hands around Drake’s hands and guided them up to his head. “You
want this, kinsman. I do not. You are suited to it, and I am not.”
As Drake still hesitated, Kai looked over to Joel and gave him a glittering smile. “If
there is one thing I have learned from the humans,” he said quietly, “it is that stories can
be rewritten. If we wish for the oldest son to triumph, why should it not be so? Take it.”
“What of you?” Drake asked in something almost like concern. All sorts of
“weaknesses” coming out already now the dead king’s influence was ended. And okay,
maybe Joel would forgive Dagnar for the face-cutting after all, if he’d just carry on
asking all the questions Joel didn’t dare ask himself.
Kai had not dropped his gaze, and at the sight of Joel’s hope and fear he gave a wide,
proud grin. “I intend to go back.”
Surely that was “I love you too?” Joel bit his lip to stem the tears of joy that
threatened to spill. This didn’t seem like a safe place in which either to weep or to dance.
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It was hard to hold it all in and not to explode, though. Look, this time he had trusted and
his trust proved justified.
“And you the favoured child…” Drake mused.
“Father didn’t mean that.” Kai guided Drake’s hands down until the crown nestled in
the raven-wing curls of Drake’s hair. “He would have said it to whichever of us had
claimed the crown, just to pretend his plan had paid off. So that he could end his life with
all of us thinking he had won. But if he did mean it, how much sweeter to take it away
from him at the last, eh? I won’t be beholden to him.”
Kai stepped back, and Dagnar—touching the crown with his fingertips as if making
sure it was really there—sat in the newly cleaned throne. As he did so, Kai stepped down
from the dais, down to the floor, where he could put his hand into Joel’s glamoured hand.
Though he looked sure and proud, Joel could feel him tremble, a fine tremor of terror
fluttering in his fingers.
“Why are you afraid?” Joel lowered his mouth to whisper it against Kai’s water-
silver hair. He personally didn’t think he’d ever feel anything but joy ever again.
“Drake is the king now. He may do with us as he pleases.” Kai grabbed Joel’s other
hand, held on tight. “That may not be a good thing if he thinks we are a threat it is politic
to remove.”
But Joel didn’t have time for more than a shallow scrape of fear before Drake—King
Dagnar of Vagar—turned on them a brilliant smile. “Then I accept the crown. I bind you,
my brother Kjartan, to do nothing against the interests of this country. Having thus bound
you, I set you free to be whatever your heart desires.”
Chapter Sixteen
They stayed for the funerals. When they returned to Earth, it was the evening. Joel
picked up the milk bottles from the step, turned the key on the smell of unaccustomed
deep-scoured cleanliness and new dust. He had just put the kettle on for tea and was
filling a hot-water bottle from the tap to air the bed—not entirely sure how long they’d
been gone—when the doorbell rang loudly three times.
“All right, all right, I’m coming!” he shouted as he set down the bottle on the drainer
and wiped his hands. Trying not to be too disappointed or furious at the interruption to
their homecoming, he opened the door with a look of polite disapproval on his face.
The Queen was on the doorstep. She saw Kai over his shoulder—Kai still all in cloth
of silver and emeralds, with his face half-gilded in red-gold—and her eyes widened. Her
grip tightened on her designer bag. “Gentlemen, if you would get into the car, please?”
There were two generals at her back, in full-dress uniform, stripy trousers, gleaming
epaulets and all. Behind them lurked a black car large enough for a party. Joel stuttered
and failed to come out with any words, and Kai came to his rescue, stepping out beside
him, smiling.
The Queen offered Kai her hand. He bowed over it, managing to make the gesture
look simple, courtly, not at all subservient. They got into the car. The generals, trying not
to show their incredulity at sharing space with Kai, nevertheless sat as far from him as
could be managed. In his gleaming regalia, with his snow-white skin and bird-of-prey
eyes, slender and luminous and inhumanly beautiful—like a Photoshopped advert in
Cosmopolitan—Kai made everyone else feel like a sparrow in the presence of a silver
peacock.
“I am, by the grace of God, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Northern Ireland, and of my other realms and territories, Head of the Commonwealth,
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Defender of the Faith,” said the Queen, with such unflappability it seemed she chatted
with aliens as regularly as attending the Proms. “And you?”
“Prince Kjartan of Vagar, lady.”
“Not the king?”
Kai returned her little smile. “Briefly, I was. I left the kingdom in the hands of my
brother, Dagnar, who I could see was more suited to it.”
“And are you exiled here or…?”
Joel was somewhat disappointed by the interior of the car. Lots of black leather, but
no minibar. He’d learned quite recently that Kai could take good care of himself in
matters of courtly diplomacy, so he settled back into his seat and wished he’d at least
been able to drink his cocoa before this.
“I am in good standing with the king, his loyal subject and trusted by him.”
“But you are not a citizen of the United Kingdom, Prince Kjartan. You cannot
simply assume you may live here as you please while your allegiances lie elsewhere. We
require that those who settle here should contribute by taxes to the greater good of our
society, and should acknowledge our sovereignty and be bound by our laws.”
Joel snapped back to attention. This was a hiccup he hadn’t foreseen.
Kai bristled. “I have made oaths to Dagnar. I will not be forsworn.”
The Queen smiled at the hard expressions of the generals, and Joel’s shell-shocked
face. “There is one way around this problem. I think we may have to establish diplomatic
relations with your country and name you Vagar’s ambassador to Britain. Mr. Wilson, are
you happy for your house to serve as an international embassy, for now?”
“Um…” said Joel, “…yes? What does that…?”
“There will need to be exchanges of diplomats and a long process of negotiation,”
one of the generals warned.
But the Queen smiled like a woman who knows exactly how far she can push the
limits of her power—who knows it is further than anyone suspects. “I’m sure all that can
take place in due course. Just as I’m sure we can arrange something temporary this
evening, to tide us all over. I have lawyers and ministers waiting on your arrival.”
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Kai’s expression cleared and then warmed. He set his elbows on his knees and
leaned forward, gesturing with his hands. Joel blinked, because the posture could have
come straight from Drake. “You are kind,” he said approvingly. “Let us speak of how to
mutually enrich each other’s nations. You make weapons, I understand? We would be
interested in buying such things.”
The general on the Queen’s right held up a finger as if reminding her of something
they had spoken about earlier. “It is a little early for that,” she said gently. “But we would
be more than willing to trade in other things. MI6 are eager to learn how to pull off your
teleporting trick. If you could teach us—”
“That too I think would take a little more time and trust.” Kai seemed to be
considering his words carefully as the car drove into an underground garage and they
were taken through heavily secured corridors to the staterooms of Buckingham Palace.
“But there are certain foodstuffs we would gladly buy as much of as you could provide.
We would give you in exchange jewels such as have never been seen in this world. Joel
will be in charge of that.”
Inside, Joel settled into an armchair upholstered with maroon velvet and stuffed with
horsehair. The room began to fill with negotiators and lawyers and military, and Kai
looked at him as if this was the sort of battle he’d always trained for, always loved. Joel
barely followed it, and after two hours of listening to them wrangle, even the resentment
of a ruined evening dissipated. He had everything he wanted. He could wait a little longer
while two people he trusted hashed out the exact details for him. Left washed up on the
shores of safety after what had felt like too many weeks of shipwreck and storm, he put
his head down on the armrest of the chair and slept.
By the morning he awoke to find an official treaty in place and a small stipend being
paid into his bank monthly for the use of the official residence of the Vagaran
ambassador. He shuffled blearily into a bright “morning room” at the palace and was
handed an enormous silver plate of breakfast and a paper still warm from being ironed.
Kai looked very pleased with himself, glamoured into his human form and sporting a
much less outrageous outfit. He ignored the various retainers and staff around the table to
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come to Joel’s side and press a kiss on the hinge of his jaw. That made everything about
the day look up.
Taking the paper from Joel, Kai folded it to bring to the front an article about a dead
body found in the Thames and put it back into Joel’s hands with the whisper of “A
parting gift from Drake, I believe.”
The dead man was Mr. Ringle.
As soon as they were released from the palace, Joel took a taxi to Mrs. Ringle’s and
spent most of the morning listening to her alternately sob and try to tell herself that
everything would be better now he was gone. The money that went into Mrs. R’s account
would stay there, and the house would no longer be in danger of being sold out from
under her, but it didn’t take away the reminder that Joel was tangled up with creatures
who didn’t know how to tell ruthlessness from kindness. Brother-in-law to a murderer.
By the afternoon, Mrs. R had pulled herself together enough to come in to the
gallery, and they were able to meet some of the demands of the queue of buyers who had
built up over the morning. At close of day Joel found himself sipping a dark coffee in the
tiny garden at the back of the shop, with the evening air full of the scent of lilac from the
white-flowered bush that shared the crazy paving with pots of forget-me-nots and
pansies. City noises ran in an unending backdrop to the moment of sweetness, as Mrs. R
handed over a ledger in which they had made profits he would scarcely have dreamed of
a week ago.
She was smiling as she did so. A brave and slightly strained smile, but a true one.
“Perhaps,” she said quietly, “this was why he ran in the first place. Perhaps he knew
someone was after him, and he was running for his life. Not just because he was bored
and greedy, but because he didn’t have another choice.”
When he was younger, Joel’s mum had firmly told him that about the only
inexcusable thing he could do to her was to lie, and it had taken him a long time to get
where he was now—to the point where he knew it was kinder, more compassionate to
nod and say, “You might be right, Mrs. R. I still can’t believe he would have left you
alone if he didn’t feel there was no other choice.”
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It wasn’t true, but it strengthened her smile and straightened her back, so he felt it
had to have been the right thing to do. “I’ll see you in the morning, yeah?”
“Yes,” she said, and patted her tight white bun as if comforting it, “bright and early.
Good luck with your young man.”
He wasn’t sure how she knew about Kai—had he said anything? Had she heard what
he said about his temperamental new genius friend and put two and two together? But
despite his reservations about Dagnar, it was a stab of numinous delight that someone
else knew they were together. That they were maybe even official now.
He grinned so hard his face hurt, but couldn’t think of anything more appropriate to
say than just “Thank you.” Then he locked up behind them both, taking their profits to
the bank and going home. To the embassy of a strange and amoral nation, and the
embrace—he hoped—of an immortal myth.
And yeah, he couldn’t expect Kai or his people to behave like humans. But there was
something reassuring in this, after all. Kai was no Oscar. Joel knew Kai came with some
pretty vast character flaws of his own, and even worse relatives. Kai had stormed in and
turned his life around, but he had not lied, he had not played Joel for a fool. He listened
when Joel spoke, paid attention, changed his behaviour where it was necessary…
Even with the disadvantage of his unfortunate relatives, Kai was better than Oscar.
Kai had given up a throne and a world to be with Joel. Oscar had never even given up the
remote control.
Joel’s shock eased, and the ball of horror he had carried all day, diluting his
happiness, lightened in his belly. Kai was not Drake either. In fact he was here with Joel
precisely because he was better than that, kinder than that, an innocent whom his people
had tried to corrupt and failed. If Kai had grown up in the Kingdom of Callous, and had
already turned out so well, what could he become after a few years of living in a world
where people were encouraged, praised for being good? He could end up taking that
kindness back to his own people, could save Drake and his own world too, like a proper
storybook prince.
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As he drew up to his door, the last of the distress turned into something new in him,
dissolved into his bones and hardened them. Not being a dupe any more meant taking
responsibility for his own hurts and labours. Kai clearly came with world-changing
baggage, not all of which was good. Loving him might well hurt Joel as much as Oscar
ever did. With one of them an alien ambassador to Earth, this could not be a relationship
of undiluted sweet domesticity. But this time he was prepared. Open eyed. In control.
And Kai was more than worth it.
Kjartan wandered about the empty rooms of the small dwelling and wondered if he
had done the wrong thing. Such seemed his habit. But the westering sun shone through
the windows and made all the shabby furniture glow, and outside, the city whirred on—
cars and trucks and motorbikes aglow with lights, scurrying humans, each one full of an
infinity of emotions which he was now allowed to experience himself. For the first time
in his life, he had come out from hiding and allowed himself to reach for what he wanted.
He understood renunciation, silence, endurance, and sullenly pretending to be what
others wanted him to be. Now that he had given all that up, he didn’t quite know how
being true to oneself worked. The freedom was frightening, and when Joel wasn’t there to
fill it with reassurance, Kjartan filled it himself with worry and planning and thought.
He looked around again, poured himself a shot of chocolate liqueur, and considered.
They would make money—the bringing of luck and fertility to any enterprise was the
simplest of spells and worked here perhaps even better than at home. With it, he would
buy a better house. A palace fit for him, with taps of gold and implements of silver and
brass—no iron in the place. Perhaps a stable of horses? No, a waterside residence with a
mooring in the river. They could have a small ship and employ servants to run the
crudely mercantile part of business, while he and Joel went sailing on these uninhabited
seas.
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Perhaps the humans would be interested in being given the gift of breathing
underwater. They evidently loved to sculpt their own flesh, and he could do it without the
butchery of knives. Surely if they knew this, they would flock to him to be changed?
He settled back into the sofa and let the sun and the dreams take him into the future.
He was soaked in both, lazy and contented like a warm cat, when Joel came through the
door and looked at him with startled desire and a strange unspoken anxiety.
They set out food—microwave mushroom risotto with new-bought salad and bread
and apples—still in a waiting silence. Kjartan’s satisfied sprawl tightened as the evening
wore on until at last he could bear it no more.
He reached over and caught the man’s hand as he tried to scoop ice cream from its
tub. Joel dropped the spoon with a dull thud of metal against cardboard and clutched at
Kjartan’s fingers as though he expected them to be snatched away.
“Tell me what troubles you.” Kjartan rubbed a thumb along Joel’s knuckles,
intrigued by the rough, warm skin. “For I had thought it was all over—our problems
solved and only a pleasurable adventure ahead.”
Joel looked at the joined hands and licked his lips, his umber eyes warming.
“Drake…” he said, slightly breathlessly. “Um…the Queen’s going to be pissed if she
finds out he’s been killing her subjects, no matter how neatly it ties up the loose ends.
Can you get him to stop doing that?”
“If it troubles you, I can.” Kjartan was mystified. “But I do not see why it troubles
you. It will not be traced either to him or to you. I thought it was a touching gesture.”
“You don’t go around killing people.” Joel pulled his hand away and squirmed in his
seat. “All right? That’s top of the list of ‘stuff you must not do, ever’. Okay?”
“I do not see the harm in it. He was mortal after all, doomed to die. Why should it
matter when or by whose hand?”
Kjartan hoped the list of “stuff you must not do, ever” would not be an extensive
one. He’d come here for freedom after all; he didn’t want it to turn out to be more of a
trap than Vagar’s court.
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“It just does, all right? If you can’t see that it’s wrong, well, I guess I can’t expect
you to, because you’re not human. But at least try to see that it could ruin everything for
us, yeah? If you won’t stop because you know it’s wrong, stop because my people think
it’s wrong, and they wouldn’t let you get away with it.”
Kjartan didn’t see them having much choice in the matter. Nor did he understand
why the death of one rather repugnant human should outweigh in Joel’s mind the death of
Tyrnir, prince of Vagar, whom Drake had slain in front of him and allowed to bleed all
over his living room. But it must be important to him, because it was making the human
shake until his hair quivered.
“Do you ask me to do this as a courting gift?” Looked at that way, the promise was
something extravagant and strange, offered as a wondrous novelty to prove his affections.
Looked at that way, it was a high demand that proved Joel knew himself worthy of great
sacrifice, and showed he believed Kjartan capable of keeping great and meaningless
oaths only for his sake. Looked at that way, it was a sweet compliment indeed.
Kjartan smiled, wide and pleased, leaned over and recaptured Joel’s hand. “Then I
swear I will refrain from killing any of your people, nor will I allow my brother to do so,
if I have knowledge of his plans and am able to prevent it.”
Joel let out a cough of breath, followed it with panting laughter, as though an inner
pain had ended with sudden relief. He leaned over and cupped Kjartan’s cheek, the scent
and strength of his hand making a happy buzz bloom in the pit of Kjartan’s stomach.
“Is there more on this list of things I must not do?”
“I just…I… No. You’d do that for me? I want to. I mean, you’re—”
Kjartan snorted. “Silence. Formulate the sentence in your head. Then say it.”
The rueful smile he got in return was as sweetly hot as the flood of light through the
windows. “Yeah, I should, shouldn’t I? Okay.” Joel took a deep breath, his eyes
flickering as if he were reading from an internal memo. “Kjartan, I want you to live with
me and be my lover for the rest of my life. I want to be faithful to you—to have no other
lovers—until I die. I would like it very much if you could swear the same thing. But I
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think I remember that the fae are fickle by nature. So I guess it would be wrong to ask
that of you…”
After this burst of coherence, he trailed off into silence, leaving Kjartan
unexpectedly speechless. Joel had offered him love before, and it had been like a door
thrown open in his mind, letting through this possibility of escape. If Joel had not said it
then, he might have been tempted to stay in Vagar, use the power of kingship to force
change until either he learned to be happy there or Dagnar was forced to kill him.
Love, though. Love he had not had to force on a being created for that purpose?
Love that came from outside him, and accepted him, and wanted him, for what—from
Joel’s perspective—was forever? He yearned towards it as though it was a severed part of
his own soul without which he would never be whole again.
He had already given Joel one great gift. Now he wanted to give more,
extravagantly, to meet Joel’s own generosity, and maybe to better it, just a little.
He rose and tugged the man up into his embrace. They stood for a while quietly,
arms around each other, Kjartan’s face pushed into Joel’s neck. It had been too long since
they had touched like this, and he felt himself soak up Joel’s warmth as a frostbitten
flower soaks up the sun, a hundred little aches in his body soothing away as he relaxed.
At length the soft reassurance began to slide into a warmer twist of desire. He
hooked his fingers into the waistline of Joel’s trousers and pulled him into the bedroom.
They sat on the bed where he had woken up that day, still a half-formed callow thing,
waiting to bud and bloom beneath Joel’s care, and the moment turned shy, sacramental,
around them.
Joel’s hands had settled on his own, the fingers interlinking. Kjartan looked down at
the knot that held only because both sides wanted it to, and thought he understood
something he had never seen before.
“All my life I have wanted to be loved like this,” he confessed—and this was
something he could never have said in Vagar, could never have said to another of his own
people. This was one of the best reasons why he was not an exile at all here on Earth, but
had come home. “When I was young, my mother would follow me with her gaze. I would
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look up and catch her watching me, and there was such a yearning in her, such a pain.
She wanted something of me and I didn’t know what it was—for she never spoke. On
rare occasions she would come close. She would say something, and I, being made
uneasy by her need, would give one word for an answer and run away.”
Joel pulled his hands from between Kjartan’s, but only so he could shuffle round
until they were facing each other and pull Kjartan back into that pain-killing hug.
“If I went to her,” Kjartan went on, the part of himself that had hurt at Gisli’s death
breaking open, showing depths of grief like the sea he had not known he possessed, “she
retreated alike. Once she told me that it was cruel to make the little creatures I create to
worship me, but I didn’t see why. Not until you told me I need not make them because I
have you to love me did I understand. I had her to love me. She wanted me to love her,
and instead I turned to toys who had no choice in the matter. Who took no effort or
understanding or bravery to love—as both she and I would have needed to be brave if we
were ever to reach out at the same time and touch hands.”
The sea with all its dead came up from his soul and overspilled from his eyes, as
understanding brought pain, and pain brought the beginning of healing. “I missed that
chance. There will never now be a way to reach her—never be a way for each of us to
give one another the love we needed and dared not ask for.”
His tears soaked into the stretchy material of Joel’s blue T-shirt with the strange
swirl of stars, and Joel’s hand was strong and cradling on the back of his head, fingertips
like spots of light on his scalp. A sense of enormous relief overcame Kai, as though this
were a purging of some illness, after which he could hope to be stronger. Great Star
Spirit, they lied. They lied about everything. To be frozen is not to be powerful, but only
to be brittle.
He sniffed, the ocean of tears within lowered by a measurable level, and finally
approached what he had been trying to say all along. “I will always regret not seeing that
sooner. Not seeing it in time. But I see you, Joel Wilson. I see the hand you offer to me,
and for as long as you hold it out, I will take it and hold it with all the power in me. It is
not a mistake I mean to make twice. I will not chase after novelty or vain delight when I
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have the one thing here I have been searching for all my life. You do ill to judge me by
the standards of my kind.”
Joel’s eyes widened and his fingers moved deliciously in Kjartan’s hair, solid and
caressing and tender. The human’s face was caught between sympathy and incredulous
joy when Kjartan leaned in and kissed him, slow and sure and deep.
“I cannot make you immortal, or me mortal,” he said, dismissing that thought as
unimportant, “so let us enjoy the time we have together. You have made me free, and I
will never forget my debt or the love I feel for you. You will be remembered as long as
the world endures, Joel Wilson. So you had better start giving me something astonishing
to look back on, so that for all eternity, when I scream a name, it will be yours.”
Joel’s pity burned away like morning mist under the words. He gave a cocksure
smile, all the more charming because it was so obviously fake, and pushed Kjartan down
on the bed. “Then prepare to have your world rocked, your highness.”
Sex was not new to Kjartan—it was one of many weapons in the gladiatorial arena of
court life. It had been used against him before he learned in mere self-defence what he
could do with its edge himself. But this was as alien to those cold couplings as Joel was
himself.
Joel knelt astride him, too heavy for any partner Kjartan had ever had before. He
peeled Kjartan’s clothes off so carefully, as though he were unwrapping something
precious, and he smiled so. The touch of his hands on Kjartan’s bare skin was almost
reverent. The sensation was like sex, a drag of smooth arousal, an uncoiling of pleasure in
his stomach, but the touch held something utterly unfamiliar. It made him feel cherished.
Closing his eyes, he allowed himself to be bared all over to those long, wondering
caresses, as Joel mapped him with his fingers.
“I am glad you were shy in the shower, and did not do this then.” Opening his eyes
caught Joel’s look of wonder and humour, his good heart showing out in his face, making
him strangely beautiful, for a human.
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“I wanted to.” Joel smiled and picked up Kjartan’s hand, where it lay beside him on
the bedclothes, relaxed and open to receive Joel’s worship in whatever way he chose to
give it.
“I even guessed you’d let me, if I tried. But you were alone and hurt. What kind of a
git would I have been to take advantage of that?” He laid a kiss on Kjartan’s palm and
then pressed it to his own shirt, giving an encouraging tug.
Oh, he wanted Kjartan to be a little more involved? Another novelty, for it was not
Kjartan’s place to handle another’s clothes like a valet. Well, it was too late now for
Kjartan to stand on ceremony. He tugged the T-shirt up and off, and laughed to find no
one telling him he shouldn’t. There was no one here to look down on him for stooping to
such lowly work. No one here but Joel, who did not despise him at all, but was still
looking at him as though he was an answer to prayer.
“I expected you to take advantage, yes. Then I would have thought myself justified
in taking anything I needed from you. When I woke up healed in the morning, you would
have found even those few poor things you still possessed gone, and me with them.”
He reached up and touched his own hands to Joel’s skin. Oh. So warm, the skin soft
over hard muscles, a drag of sparse hair curling on his chest. He leaned up to close the
distance between them and feel that hair scratch teasingly across his nipples. His face
ached from grinning.
At the shift of position, Joel caught him around the waist, his strong arms supporting
him. The man tipped his head forward so he could kiss the juncture of his throat and
nuzzle along his shoulder. “I would have deserved it.”
Joel raised his head, looking thoughtful, disturbed. His hands paused in the long
sweeps they had been making along Kjartan’s back. They had started at the waist,
explored up to his shoulders and were now making their way down towards his arse. He
didn’t approve of having that trajectory interrupted. “You would.”
“But it’s all right now? I mean you are…this does seem…” nervously inarticulate,
Joel nodded at the rucked-up bed linens, the scattered clothes, “…like permission. Isn’t
it?”
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Kjartan caught his worried mouth with his own and kissed like he could taste the
sweet inside of him. He left his smile on Joel’s face when he pulled back. “I didn’t want
to have sex with you. But now that I know you, I want very much to make love. Is it done
much differently?”
Joel’s laughter lit him up, made Kjartan touch him again as if Joel were a well of life
and joy into which he could dip his hands. This worship, he thought, as Joel pushed him
back down flat and took his eager prick in hand, goes both ways, for he is a wonder to
me.
He gave an approving murmur at the stroke and arched up to get more of his skin in
contact with Joel’s.
Joel laughed once more, fondly. “You don’t need to worry about that, your highness.
I honestly think you’re a natural.”
About the Author
Alex was born in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and grew up in the wild
countryside of the English Peak District. She studied English and philosophy before
accepting employment with the Crown Court, where she worked for a number of years.
Now a stay-at-home mum and full-time author, Alex lives with her husband and two
daughters in a little village near Cambridge and tries to avoid being mistaken for a tourist.
Alex is only intermittently present in the real world. She has led a Saxon shield wall
into battle, toiled as a Georgian kitchen maid, and recently taken up an 800-year-old form
of English folk dance, but she still hasn’t learned to operate a mobile phone.
She is represented by Louise Fury of the L. Perkins Literary Agency.
You can find Alex at her website (
), her blog
www.facebook.com/AlexBeecroftAuthor
),
on Goodreads (
www.goodreads.com/author/show/1289325.Alex_Beecroft
), or on Twitter
as @Alex_Beecroft.
Look for these titles by Alex Beecroft
Now Available:
Captain’s Surrender
Shining in the Sun
Under the Hill
Bomber’s Moon
Dogfighters
Coming Soon:
The Reluctant Berserker
The faeries at the bottom of the garden are coming back—with an army.
Bomber’s Moon
© 2012 Alex Beecroft
Under the Hill, Part 1
When Ben Chaudhry is attacked in his own home by elves, they disappear as quickly
as they came. He reaches for the phone book, but what kind of exterminator gets rid of
the Fae? Maybe the Paranormal Defense Agency will ride to his rescue.
Sadly, they turn out to be another rare breed: a bunch of UFO hunters led by Chris
Gatrell, who—while distractingly hot—was forcibly retired from the RAF on grounds of
insanity.
Shot down in WWII—and shot forward seventy years in time, stranded far from his
wartime sweetheart—Chris has been a victim of the elves himself. He fears they could
destroy Ben’s life as thoroughly as they destroyed his. Chris is more than willing to
protect Ben with his body. He never bargained for his heart getting involved.
Just when they think there’s a chance to build a life together, a ghostly voice from
Chris’s past warns that the danger is greater than they can imagine. And it may take more
than a team of rank amateurs to keep Ben—and the world—out of the elf queen’s
snatching hands…
Warning: Brace yourself for mystery, suspense, sexual tension, elves in space and a
nail-biting cliffhanger ending.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Bomber’s Moon:
Ben studied the gesture of self-control. His mouth turned up at the ends. “Thinking
bad thoughts, Wing Commander?”
Arrogant little sod. What did he expect Chris to say with Grace in the room? Oh, Ben
might have poured out the whole story—the boy was young, and youngsters these days
had no shame when it came to sex…
Wait, though, that was an interesting thought. Youngsters had no shame these days,
and there Ben was, smiling like he’d got one over on Chris. It came up like the lava in a
lamp, shouldering everything aside with a great glossy welling up of relief; Ben was
smirking.
And smirking was not, perhaps, the expression of a victim, of a man betrayed. Not
even of a man embarrassed and ill at ease. If anything, Ben was exuding the smugness of
a man who’d found buried gold and intended to keep it all to himself.
“Bad thoughts, Mr. Chaudhry? I never have anything but the best of thoughts, and
my instincts are splendid.”
“For an old man.”
Oh, Chris swallowed. That was…uncalled for. And rather delightful. “If you have
complaints, I will of course try harder next time.”
“Harder? How much harder?”
Grace set her flask down on the work surface with a click, leaned back, crossing her
arms. They both started guiltily. Just for a moment it had been as though she hadn’t been
there at all. “I don’t think I want to know what this is about.” She pursed her lips, raised
her eyebrows, then snorted, blowing out exasperation through her nose. “I can see I’m in
the way. Here.”
She handed the vial of water to Ben, who sniffed at it cautiously, the little plastic
stopper held in his other hand. “It smells of snuff. I thought you said there wasn’t any
witchcraft in this.”
Grace chuckled. “I think it’s funny—holy water in an imp. The smell does cling,
though, even when you’ve used all the perfume up and washed the bottle twice. Think of
it as the odour of sanctity. I know I do.”
“And this”—Ben looked askance at the tiny test tube full of water, with its plastic lid
and remnant of torn-off label—“will protect me from…them…so well I can go back to
work?”
“Yes.” Grace poured out a cup of very stewed tea and gulped it down. “It needs to be
on you at all times, though. I suggest you sew it into one of those tennis sweatbands that
goes around your wrist—something you can sleep in. Don’t take it off. If you’ve had the
sort of fright that makes coming for help to Matlock Paranormal seem sensible, then you
don’t want to risk ever putting this down. Not until the larger problem is sorted. All right?
And bear in mind that you haven’t even addressed the larger problem yet. That has to be
done if you’re to be secure in the long run. This isn’t a solution. This is just buying you
time.”
Ben looked at the door with an expression of uncertainty. Chris had not shut it
properly and the wind, gusting over the peaks, kept opening and closing it—a stripe of
bright morning and the skirl of cold, granite-scented air, and a creak and thud as it shut
again. “What do I have to do to get rid of them permanently?”
“You could convert.” Grace refolded her arms and the brief moment of cordiality
was over.
“Even that might not help,” Chris said. “Remember Tam Lin? The old star on his
brow? But they still grabbed him and held him.”
Responsibility hit Chris like flying into turbulence. There was nothing beneath his
wings holding him up. He fell, heart in mouth, hands slippery on the joystick, brought the
nose up, increased speed and won through, plunging back into confidence on the other
side. They would not get Ben. He didn’t know what to do to prevent it, but he would.
Dying in the attempt was acceptable, but failing was not.
Wiping his hands on his shirt, he wished for a shower. Wished, in a moment of
weakness, that he had left all of this alone, as the RAF had advised—or that all of it
would have been content to leave him alone. But that way lay madness. You couldn’t un-
see what you’d seen, or un-know what you’d known. Besides, he’d never have met Ben if
it wasn’t for them.
A lord in danger. A magician in turmoil. A snowball in hell.
The Magpie Lord
© 2013 KJ Charles
A Charm of Magpies, Book 1
Exiled to China for twenty years, Lucien Vaudrey never planned to return to
England. But with the mysterious deaths of his father and brother, it seems the new Lord
Crane has inherited an earldom. He’s also inherited his family’s enemies. He needs
magical assistance, fast. He doesn’t expect it to turn up angry.
Magician Stephen Day has good reason to hate Crane’s family. Unfortunately, it’s
his job to deal with supernatural threats. Besides, the earl is unlike any aristocrat he’s
ever met, with the tattoos, the attitude…and the way Crane seems determined to get him
into bed. That’s definitely unusual.
Soon Stephen is falling hard for the worst possible man, at the worst possible time.
But Crane’s dangerous appeal isn’t the only thing rendering Stephen powerless. Evil
pervades the house, a web of plots is closing round Crane, and if Stephen can’t find a
way through it—they’re both going to die.
Warning: Contains hot m/m sex between a deeply inappropriate earl and a very
confused magician, dark plots in a magical version of Victorian England, family values
(not the good kind), and a lot of swearing.
Enjoy the following excerpt for The Magpie Lord:
The grey awful misery tangled round his heart and throat, choking him, sickening
him with the vileness of his own nature. The shame and self-loathing too deep for
repentance, too deep for words. Too deep for anything but the knife and the red flow and
the longed-for emptiness of the end…
The voice seemed to come from a long distance away. “My lord? My lord! Oh,
Jesus. My lord! You stupid sod!”
A slap, hard, round his face. He registered it through the haze of grey misery, then
felt strong hands dragging him onto his feet and out of the room. His wrist hurt. He
needed to finish the job.
He lunged clumsily back towards the knife, only to find his arm twisted up behind
his back and a hard tug pulling him off balance.
“Out. This way.” He was marched forward, pushed, dragged, the litany of doom
pounding in his mind. All he could think of was ending it, making the unbearable guilt
and shame stop, removing the foul stain of his soul from the world…
He vaguely noticed the hard grip on the back of his head, just before his face was
plunged into icy, greasy water and held there, ruthlessly hard, as he inhaled a lungful of
dirty dishwater, and something around his mind snapped.
Lord Crane jerked his head out of the suddenly relaxed grip, came up spluttering but
entirely alert, gasped for air, and kicked backwards viciously, aiming to cripple his
attacker with a rake of his foot across the kneecap. The grizzled man in black had already
jumped out of the way, though, and was standing back, holding up his hands in a gesture
of nonaggression that Crane had no intention of testing.
Crane held himself ready to fight for a second, registered that he had just been half-
drowned in the butler’s sink by his manservant, let out a long breath and dropped his
shoulders.
“It happened again,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Tsaena.” He shook his head, sending grey water flying from his hair, and blinked
the liquid out of his eyes.
Merrick threw him a dishtowel. He caught it in his left hand, sucked in a hiss at the
pain as his wrist moved, and mopped his face. He spat in the sink to get the taste of foul
water and bitter leaves out of his mouth. “Son of a bitch. It happened again.”
“Yes,” said Merrick, with some restraint. “I know. I found you sawing at your wrist
with a fucking table knife, my lord, which was what gave me the clue.”
“Yes, alright.” Crane pulled over a chair with a screech of wood on tile. “Can
you…?” He gestured at his left wrist. The shirt cuff was unfastened and rolled back. He
didn’t remember doing that. He didn’t remember the other times.
Merrick was already setting out lint and a roll of bandages, as well as a bottle of
volatile-smelling spirit.
“I’ll have some if you’re pouring. Ow.”
“I reckon that’s enough killing yourself for one evening.” Merrick dabbed the raw
wound with the raw alcohol. “Jesus, this is deep, you’d have done yourself for sure with
anything sharper. My lord—”
“I don’t know. I was reading a book, thinking about getting dressed. I didn’t…” He
waved his right hand vaguely, and slapped it down on the worn tabletop. “God damn it.”
There was silence in the kitchen. Merrick wound bandage carefully round the bloody
wrist. Crane leaned his right elbow on the table and propped his head on his hand.
“I don’t know what to do.”
Merrick gave him a steady look from under his thin brows, and returned to his work.
“I don’t know,” Crane repeated. “I can’t—I don’t think I can do this any more. I
can’t…” I can’t bear it. He’d never said the words in thirty-seven years, not even in the
times of hunger and degradation. He wanted to say them now.
Merrick frowned. “Got to fight it, my lord.”
“Fight what? Give me something to fight, and I’ll fight it—but how the hell do I
fight my own mind?”
“It ain’t your mind,” said Merrick levelly. “You ain’t mad.”
“Right. I can see how you reached that conclusion.” Crane made a sound that was a
little, though not very much, like a laugh. “After all these years, after he’s bloody dead, it
looks like the old bastard is finally getting rid of me.”
Merrick began rolling up the lint and bandages with care. “You’re thinking about
that word again.”
“Hereditary,” enunciated Crane, staring at his narrow-fingered hands. “Hereditary
insanity. We might as well put the name to it, no?”
“No,” said Merrick. “Cos, I’ll tell you what word I’m thinking of.”
Crane’s brows drew together. “What?”
Merrick’s hazel eyes met Crane’s and held them. He put the bottle of spirits back
down on the table with a deliberate clink. “Shaman.”
There was a silence.
“We’re not in Shanghai now,” said Crane eventually.
“No, we ain’t. But if we was there, and you started going mad all on a sudden and off
again, you wouldn’t be sat there whining, would you? You’d be right out—”
“To see Yu Len.”
Merrick cocked his head in agreement.
“But we’re not in Shanghai,” Crane repeated. “This is London. Yu Len is half the
world away, and at this rate I’m not going to make it to next quarter day.”
“So we find a shaman here,” said Merrick simply.
“But—”
“No buts!” The words rang off the stone floor and tiled walls. “You can go to some
mad-doctor and get thrown in the bedlam, or you can sit there and go mad for thinking
you’re going mad, or we find a fucking shaman and get this looked at like we would back
home, because hereditary my arse.” Merrick leaned forward, hands on the table, glaring
in his master’s face. “I know you, Lucien Vaudrey. I seen you look death in the face
plenty of times, and every time you either ran like hell or you kicked him in the balls, so
don’t you tell me you want to die. I never met anyone who didn’t want to die as much as
you don’t. So we are going to find a shaman and get this sorted, unless you got any better
ideas, which you don’t! Right?”
Merrick held his gaze for a few seconds, then straightened and began to tidy up.
Crane cleared his throat. “Are there English shamans?”
“Got to be, right? Witches. Whatever.”
“I suppose so,” said Crane, trying hard, knowing it was pointless, knowing he owed
it to Merrick. “I suppose so. Who’d know…” His fingers twitched, calling up memories.
“Rackham. He’s back, isn’t he? I could ask him.”
“Mr. Rackham,” agreed Merrick. “We’ll go see him. Ask for a shaman. You got any
idea where he is?”
“No.” Crane flexed his bandaged wrist and rose. “But if I can’t find him through any
of the clubs, we can just hang around all the filthiest opium dens in Limehouse till we
meet him.”
“See?” said Merrick. “Things are looking up already.”
Rebellion, war and survival. Love’s a bitch.
Hell’s End
© 2013 Ally Blue
Hellscape, Book 1
Tuck’s a Gutter, one of a gang of violent orphans running level thirty-six of Hell’s
End, the solar system’s outermost space station. There’s only one way out of this
brotherhood of blood—grow up and be killed and eaten by other Gutters.
Tuck barely escapes his death sentence, only to fall prey to the powerful L’arisian
family. Rescue from a L’arisian whorehouse never happens, but rescued he is, and by
Gov soldiers no less. Alone among the enemy, Tuck trusts only one person—the man
who risked everything to pluck him to safety.
Ivan’s a soldier. No more, no less. But the disquieting things he learns about the
Government’s plans for the Gutter kid have him doing the one thing a soldier shouldn’t
do. Think about doing what’s right instead of what he’s told. All for a guy he can’t get
out of his head.
Getting involved in a rebellion that might get them killed is a problem. Falling in
love? That’s a disaster in the making.
Warning: This book contains rebels, spies, soldiers, bad guys, love, sex, betrayal,
fights to the death, and robot spiders. Really.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Hell’s End:
Jossi leaned back so Ivan could take point. He went up the remaining steps with his
sizzler ready, put his back to the wall and swept the visible area while Kuro and Jossi
climbed up and took their positions. The floor seemed empty other than the one woman.
Judging by the wall of monitors in front of her desk and the locked cart next to it—full of
drugs, most likely—Ivan figured she was more of a nurse than a guard.
Which made the whole thing easier for him and his guns. Giving Jossi the signal to
watch the stairwell and central area, Ivan jogged toward the target cell with Niahm
behind him.
Niahm let out a quiet laugh when they saw the so-called security on the cell. “Just a
latch? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“They don’t take anybody who’s got people to rescue ’em.”
“’Til now.”
He shot her a glare. “Shut up and give me the lock pick.”
She did, still grinning like it was funny. Personally, he didn’t much think it was. Not
that it mattered. They had a job to do.
The lock took longer to open than he liked, but he got it in the end. Handing the lock
pick back to Niahm, he raised his sizzler again—just in case; Rapture junkies could get
violent sometimes—and eased inside.
Behind him, Niahm snorted. “Think you can put the gun away, Ivan.”
“No kidding.” He holstered his sizzler and crossed the dim little room to the pale,
limp, barefoot kid curled on the cot against the wall. The boy didn’t move. Hell, was he
even breathing? Ivan pressed his fingertips to the kid’s wrist and found a faint, too-fast
pulse beneath the strange eye-shaped tattoo. “Damn. Well, he’s alive, at least.” He lifted
his hand and peered at the tattoo—a rough black outline of a human eye. “Wonder what
that tattoo’s all about?”
“Who cares?” Niahm, parked in the doorway, glanced at Ivan. “Get him and let’s
go.”
“Stay cool. We’re going.” Ivan stared at the kid with a frown. Sweat dotted his pasty
face and stained the armpits of his ancient shirt. He smelled like he hadn’t been washed
since the L’arisians took him, and he looked half dead, which bothered Ivan on multiple
levels. “Shit. Niahm, I’m gonna have to carry him. Cover my back.”
“You got it.” She stepped into the hall, sizzler pointed at the ceiling and sharp gaze
darting back and forth.
Jupiter’s balls, Ivan didn’t want to carry this kid. But what choice was there? He was
too doped to notice when strangers broke into his cell. Walking was obviously out of the
question. Resigned, Ivan knelt beside the cot and hoisted the kid onto his shoulders.
That got a reaction. The boy groaned. “Ow. The fuck?”
“You’re being sprung, kid. Keep quiet.” Ivan shifted his grip on the boy’s thigh,
remembering the way he’d limped in the video. The wound had been cleaned and
bandaged but clearly still hurt. “And be still too. Unless you want me to drop you.”
The kid shut up after that, but his body felt tense and his breathing sounded rapid and
pained, especially on the way down the stairs. His eyes were wide open now, watching
Ivan with the sort of glazed intensity only a person on Rapture could manage.
Ivan didn’t like it. As far as he was concerned, the kid was a wild card. If he
panicked and drew attention to them, they were all fucked. The kid included.
Luckily, he seemed to realize it. He kept still and quiet as Ivan and his team hurried
across the empty space to the fence. Ivan had to put him down to get through the fence,
but by then the kid seemed to get the urgency of the situation. He crawled through the cut
on his own and collapsed to the ground on the other side, waiting.
The passive trust in his big hazel eyes made Ivan feel strange inside. He wondered if
the kid would be so willing to trust him if he knew where Ivan was taking him.
Probably not.
Shaking off the creeping guilt, Ivan went to the boy and crouched beside him.
“What’s your name?”
The kid blinked, as if he was surprised Ivan had asked. Hell, Ivan was surprised too.
He scratched beneath his ponytail, embarrassed now.
The boy’s lips curved into a smile. “Tuck. I’m Tuck.”
“Ivan.” He smiled back, feeling distinctly weird. “Up you go.”
Something about the look on Tuck’s face warned Ivan in time to avoid being kicked
in the jaw when Tuck reared back and swung. Still, he wasn’t prepared for how fast Tuck
moved when he jumped up and ran.
To Tuck, running from the Gov soldiers—he’d seen the insignia, of course; he was
high, not stupid—felt like moving inside a slo-mo vid. The air pulled at his legs like
something alive, slowing him to a frustrating crawl.
Lucky for him the yahoos who’d stolen him from that stinking pit seemed to be stuck
on permanent stop. All five of them gaped at him, still as statues, as if he’d done
something spectacular by getting away.
His childhood had taught him not to question good fortune when it came. He kept
going, pushing his body until he got the weird sensation of flying and being nailed to the
ground at the same time.
At least running didn’t hurt his leg that much anymore. Turned out Rapture was good
for something besides getting fucked up after all.
The whole floaty, slow-motion thing crashed and burned when Tuck’s strength gave
out, and he crumpled like the rag doll Bug had been clutching when he and Mags found
her hiding behind a seedy bar down on level 15. Everything started moving again. He
tried to do the same, but couldn’t. His arms and legs shook and refused to hold his
weight. He felt like all his bones had dissolved.
Fuck if he’d lie here and cower, though. Rolling onto his back because he couldn’t
sit, Tuck aimed his deadliest glare at the Gov soldier nearly on top of him already.
Ivan, the man had called himself. Shit, he was big. Tall. Solid. Strong. Black hair in a
tail the way the Gov guns usually wore it, jaw tight and dark eyes snapping with pure
grade-A fury.
Tuck wondered if it was the Rapture making him find all that barely controlled anger
sexy.
Naw. It was the packaging, he decided, watching Ivan kneel beside him. Tuck had
always had a thing for powerful men. There were a few Family goons out there he could
probably blackmail into a comfortable living for himself, if he thought he could manage
it without getting killed. No one connected to the Families wanted people to know they’d
fucked a Gutter boy.
Ivan the Terrible shoved a finger in the middle of Tuck’s chest. “That was stupid.”
“Yeah, well. Can’t blame a guy for trying.” Tuck gave the big man his best cheeky
grin.
Which wasn’t as drug-fucked as he’d figured, apparently, ’cause Ivan’s wide,
gorgeous, made-for-sucking-cock mouth curved into a grudging half-smile. “Point.
Still…” He reached behind his back. His hand came back with two bits of string.
Tuck didn’t try to struggle as Ivan held Tuck’s wrists together in front of him, laid a
self-adjusting restraint over the place where his arms crossed and tapped it to activate it.
What was the point in fighting? The Rapture coursing through Tuck’s blood made
everything seem alternately fuzzy-slow and painfully sharp, but it also made sure his
body didn’t have the strength to back up the crazy plans his racing brain insisted on
making. Besides, Tuck’s gut told him Ivan wouldn’t hurt him, and his gut rarely steered
him wrong.
He watched the second restraint tighten around his ankles with a sense of fate closing
in on him. “Where’re you taking me?”
“Gov territory.” Ivan’s impressive muscles bulged as he lifted Tuck across his
shoulders.
Tuck laughed. “Yeah, I figured. But where exactly? And why? What does the
Government want with me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Which part?”
“Any of it.” The big hands gripped Tuck harder as the group picked up the pace
along the deserted streets. “Now shut up before I gag you.”
Ivan sounded mostly pissed off, but a little bit of regret hid behind the irritation.
Tuck filed that knowledge away for future use. He had a feeling he’d need whatever edge
he could get.
