by Maisey Yates
This was something real.
She began to tremble with pleasure, and she felt an answering quiver in his muscles. And when he found his release, she found hers at the same moment, and he cradled her face, pressing his forehead against hers, growling with the intensity of it. And her cries mingled with his, echoing off of the stone walls. And she knew that this was always meant to be. These walls were always meant to house their mixed cries of release. And she snuggled against him, beneath the covers. Her hand on his chest.
“We go back to Liri in the morning,” he said. “We will try to make the journey in one day. Are you prepared for that?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I should not have dragged you here.”
“You need me,” she said.
And she looked up at him. “It’s okay to admit that.”
“I need you,” he said.
A rush of relief washed over her. For it was all she had wanted to hear from him. All she had wanted to hear from him that night in Paris when she had ambushed him with the sword. And she had been told that he did not. She needed him. It was only fair that he needed her right back.
“Good. Then there should be no more talk of sending me away.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE ENTIRE JOURNEY back to the palace, Lazarus felt a strange sort of frustration. He wanted to do something for Agnes. And he did not know what. He wanted to give her something. In truth, he wanted to give her everything, but he certainly didn’t know how to accomplish that. And he had to focus on the task at hand. Joining these two people together, working out the details of it with his brother and figuring out how a joint leadership situation worked. He did not need to be obsessing about a woman who had been his shield maiden up until a couple of weeks ago.
Still, they stopped and took a break, and Agnes seemed like she was filled with some sort of forest magic as she hopped from rock to rock, until she was up at the top of a very tall one, sitting with one knee pulled up and the other leg dangling over the edge of the moss-covered stone. She looked like a fairy. And she was to be his fairy princess, he supposed.
While Agnes sat and drank in the rays of the sun, he went into a thicket and found vines and flowers. He had learned to make things out of vines very early, a practical technique when you lived in a place with so many. He quickly fashioned together a crown, placing flowers all around, feeling especially silly as his large hands moved over the delicate material. And when Agnes came down, he placed it upon her head. “If I am to be a King,” he said.
Her dark eyes shone bright, and she smiled, bigger than any of the smiles she had given when he had brought her designer dresses. No, she had looked more annoyed about those than anything else. But this... This thing fashioned from the forest she was alight with joy over.
It did something to ease the knowing feeling in his chest, but not everything because he still felt...
Agnes had lived such a difficult life. Didn’t she deserve a man who had not? He had asked her to show him what feeling looked like, he had desperately begged her to, and based on what?
He knew full well that what he was asking of Agnes was... It was unfair. Asking her to fix these things inside of him when he had no reasonable method of fixing anything in her. Nor did he have any expectation of being able to do so. It was not fair.
And yet, when he looked at her, with her crown of flowers on her face full of sunshine, he could do nothing but continue to walk with her. For he was losing his grip on all that he was supposed to be, and Agnes felt like an anchor. She felt like the path forward. Like the thing that might make all of this possible.
* * *
Things had gone well in the wood. And not only that, she felt the bond between herself and Lazarus grow stronger.
It was not about things that they owed each other, not anymore. And now that he was firmly set on joining forces with his brother, she could breathe. She didn’t have that horrible knot in her chest when she looked at Tinley. In fact, she and Tinley were becoming friends, and it was a wonderful thing. Agnes could not remember the last time she had a friend. She wasn’t sure she ever really had. Growing up, she had moved around so often, and she had never wanted to lie to the girls that she had come into contact with, as usually, her father was swindling their parents. Consequently, she had been very lonely. Always. And she loved Lazarus, with all of her heart. Her days with him here at the palace were not as intense as the time they’d once spent together. He had other duties. He was currently entrenched in meetings with Alexius, and the other men of the wood, trying to figure out a reasonable system of government. Trying to figure out how to... Rewrite a nation. It wasn’t easy. But they were good men, and they were doing their best, and whatever they didn’t get perfectly, Agnes had absolute certainty they would sort out when the problems were identified.
The nights though... They were a great deal more intense than the nights they had spent together before.
He took her in his arms every night at bedtime, and turned to her multiple times between fits of sleep. He was insatiable, and so was she. Reaching for that connection they had found with each other, and only each other. And she knew it to be true. With him as well as with her.
That he felt exactly the same thing she did. It was a glorious thing, this.
They had spoken no more about marriage, though, and she realized that she had never formally accepted him. She had simply... Not refused him. And she found that she wanted him to ask again. Even if that was silly. And after they had been at the palace for two weeks, it filtered down to Tinley that Lazarus was planning something.
“All I know is he has asked for there to be many cakes,” Tinley said, grinning.
“Then it is certainly for me,” Agnes said, feeling jittery.
“Do you care to tell me the whole story of your relationship with Lazarus?”
There was no reason not to tell Tinley, not now.
“Well,” Agnes said. “It is just that we were not engaged when we came. He was... He thought that it would soften his image. If he pretended that we were in love.”
“I see,” Tinley said. “But you... You were in love with him.”
Agnes nodded. “I am. I have been. That much was true. I have been in love with him since I was sixteen. I love him with all that I am. And now, as things have changed between us I can only hope that he loves me too. But I don’t know. I don’t know, and I don’t know that I shall. I don’t know that he’ll ever speak of his feelings. It’s okay. He has said that he wants to marry me. In truth.”
Tinley nodded slowly. “I know a whole lot about men who have difficulties opening up their hearts. The Alexius that you have met is very different than the one that I knew for most of my life. He was a stone wall. And I was so convinced that I loved his brother that I could not understand the overwhelming feelings that took me over completely when I was in his presence. He was and is the best of men, though. And it was true even before he could figure out how to tell me what he felt. Things between us were not easy. Not in the beginning. Not when he was... Not when he was trying to figure everything out. That was very difficult for him. As I mentioned before, he was so scarred by the loss of Lazarus, by the loss of Dionysus...”
“I fear that Lazarus has begun to address his scars,” Agnes said.
“So the question is, what are you willing to do for him? Do you require that he be able to tell you he loves you? Do you require that he be able to show it in exactly the same way you show him?”
She thought back to when she had been a girl, taken in from the streets of Paris. She thought back to how he had rescued her. And taught her to fight, slowly and painstakingly. How her muscles had been soft at first before becoming honed, her instincts finely tuned. You were what you were made. But you could become something different. But it did not happen overnight. And it took someone who was willing to come alongside you and help with the resh
aping. He had done it for her. Could she do any less for him?
“I am willing to meet him where he is. Because whether it’s tomorrow or thirty years, when he finally says the words, when he’s finally able to... I will feel the same. Whether I’m here or somewhere else. Whether I am off in Paris pretending to laugh while I drink champagne, or sitting in the palace and the wood with him. And I would rather be with him.”
“I knew the moment I met you that you were as good a woman as there was, Agnes. The exact woman strong enough to love my brother-in-law. I have known the two of you for the exact same amount of time. But I see so much of Alexius in him. And I feel a great deal for him based on Alexius’s feelings. You are exactly what he needs.”
Agnes nodded, but then Tinley continued, “Is he able to be what you need?”
“Did you care? When you were having to decide about Alexius?”
Tinley offered her a rueful smile, and then shook her head. “No. I confess I didn’t much care as long as I was with him.”
“It is the same for me. There are many things out there in the world, and my father spent his entire life chasing them. Fortune, esteem. He was always after something that he could not grasp. And he had a child right beside him who would’ve loved him, if only he would have spared one single moment to look my way. But he saw me only as a tool, and nothing more. He saw me as something to be used. I have been out in the world. I have been to most countries in Europe. I have learned languages. I have been rich off of the money of other people, and very poor. But never have I been happier than when I was by Lazarus’s side. No matter the nature of our relationship. It is the people in our lives that make it worth living. Circumstances change. But if you can never look to who is beside you, who would stay beside you no matter what, then you will never truly find happiness. My father died unhappy, in front of his child, who only ever wanted his love.”
“You are young, Agnes,” Tinley said. “But your soul isn’t.”
“I don’t think Lazarus or I ever had the luxury of young souls.”
“I hope tonight brings you what you want.”
* * *
Lazarus was planning on proposing to her. Really proposing to her. He had visions of her as his bride, a crown of flowers in her hair, like the one he had made her in the wood. Yes, he could adorn her in gold, and might even like to sometimes, but mostly, he wanted her as his forest fairy. His little earthen warrior. For anyone could gleam in gold, but it took someone truly special to glow with vines and leaves.
And his Agnes was special.
Alexius had suggested a picnic on the lawn, as it was a gesture he had used with Tinley, and one that she had liked very much. Lazarus didn’t quite know what to do with this new brotherly relationship. This new input that he received from him. It was a strange thing indeed. And yet, he could not say he was opposed to it.
When she came out onto the balcony, his heart caught in his chest. She was wearing a bright orange dress he had not seen before. The fabric flowed over her curves like liquid. The deep gold of her skin made the color catch fire, and her hair, glossy and dark, was arranged in a beautiful style high on her head. There were little orange flowers placed throughout, and she was exactly as he had just been thinking. A forest fairy.
A forest fairy who could cut him.
His body responded with intense pleasure.
He cared for this woman. Would fight armies to ensure her safety. She smiled when she saw him, and that was when he noticed she had gold makeup on her cheeks, her eyes.
“Did Tinley have a hand in this?”
She blushed.
“Yes. Do you like it?”
He wrapped his arms around her waist. And he kissed her, with all of the hunger inside of him. “It is a good thing we are in a semipublic space.”
“Is it?” she asked, lifting a brow.
It was strange how they could know each other as they did, and still find new ways to speak. New ways to be. Their relationship had been marked by seriousness for a great number of years, but now they could laugh. And he could touch her. However he wished. And she seemed to enjoy it. She also returned the favor, with frequency.
That was one thing he liked very much about Agnes. She returned his enthusiasm for making love with passion and intensity. Gave as good as she got.
His physical equal in all things, as he had suspected.
She walked out to the center of the lawn, where there was a table and chairs set out for them, lights strung overhead.
“It’s beautiful.” She looked toward the wood, a strange smile touching her lips. “Isn’t it odd, how it feels like were in an entirely different world and we’re only about two hundred feet away from where we came from?”
She looked abashed. “Well, I guess you started out here.”
His chest went tight of a sudden. Because of course he had come from here. It had been this very lawn where they had been playing before he had wandered into the woods.
“I know what you mean,” he said.
“Good,” she said.
He looked at her as she sat at the table, with the wood behind her. And he realized... It was so. He had not really gone anywhere. And neither had she.
Hadn’t he promised her something more? Hadn’t he promised her experiences?
And he supposed it was only a man with a very big ego who would consider his body the experience that she required.
And no one could ever accuse him of having a small ego, it was true. But that was not all he wanted for her.
And there was something... There was something stifling about sitting here like this. On the lawn. He should’ve thought more critically about this. Should’ve thought more deeply about how it would feel to sit here with her.
But he had told her he wanted to marry her, and it was true.
It was true. In his pocket, he had a ring. Alexius had brought in tray upon tray from a jeweler down in Liri’s largest city. And he had selected the grandest for Agnes.
He knew that it was something a lot more ostentatious than her typical style, but it had to do with what he wanted to give her. Which was simply everything.
Everything he could. And it was in his pocket now. Ready for him to propose to her, because he felt that she deserved that at least. Not these demands that he had been making of her before.
And yet, all of this was beginning to get tangled up. In the promise he made to her before. How had things changed?
And she had declared that she wanted to be free, had she not?
But then, he had dismissed that as injured pride, since she had clearly been furious with him when he’d said he didn’t need her.
And the fact was, he did need her. He needed her more than he could ever say. He needed her in a deep, profound sense, and there was a strange twisting and burning in his chest, and suddenly, Agnes rose from her seat.
“It’s funny, this, how it hit everybody for so long, how these woods tore so many lives apart out here, but you and I simply saw home.”
Had he? Had he really seen it as his home?
“Have a seat,” he said. “Dinner will be coming soon.”
And of course, he wasn’t afraid of the wood. But for some reason he didn’t like the image of her standing there at the edge of it. He could remember when he had been the dangerous thing lying in the deep waiting for Tinley. He didn’t like... He didn’t like seeing Agnes in that position. And it clotted another memory too. One that he simply didn’t want to have.
“It’s funny,” she said. “How we never see the wolves.”
“They’re real,” he said. “I’ve seen them.”
“Yes. I just mean... I was only commenting that it’s funny how...”
“Yes,” he said, a leaden weight in his stomach.
Their meal came, and he did his best to brush off the strange feelings coursing through him. The
re was steak and bread, cursory vegetables, though he knew that Agnes didn’t really want them. And afterward, trays of cakes, which he knew for certain she did want.
They ate, and all the while, he was planning on issuing his proposal as soon as they were through. But then they finished, and Agnes got up from her chair again, wandering to the edge of the wood.
He could follow her. Ask her.
He stood from the chair, and overwhelmingly, abruptly, the images in front of him were not the images of now. He began to have flashes of memory. His ball, bouncing to the edge of the wood. And he stopped, looking inside. And he could see something. Something moving. And then he saw a hand scoop the ball and take it farther into the trees. He remembered being afraid. But he was a prince. There was nothing he should be afraid of, not in his kingdom. He and his brother played with wooden swords, and they were heroes. He knew exactly what to do if there was a foe. Prince Lazarus did not run. And he wanted his ball.
So he went forward into the darkness. And that was when he realized his first mistake. It was impossible to see. But then he could see his ball, somewhere deeper, and in he went. And just for one moment, he saw a man’s face, hiding in the bushes, right behind the ball.
Agamemnon.
Agamemnon.
It had not been an accident that he had been in the woods. He had been lured there.
It had been the plan. All along.
The wolves...
There were wolves. But Agnes was right. Why did they hear from them not at all now? And why...
A sour feeling turned in the pit of his stomach.
Dogs.
The dogs that Lazarus had cared for, until the pack had eventually reached old age and died. The same dogs that had torn his face to shreds.