Sonata Form

by Carole Cummings

  He’d wait. He’d give Milo the space he needed, and wait. It would come, eventually, like it had at Ellis’s birthday party. Because Milo was absolute crap at understanding his own depths, and even more crap at hiding them once he found them. But he was very good at turning to Ellis when the smolder turned to a blaze, so Ellis would just make sure to be there when whatever this was finally dawned on Milo and burst from him like dragonfire.

  Milo pulled back and set his hand to Ellis’s sternum. “You understand. About duty. You understand.” His eyes were so solemn, misted and overbright, tiny chips of green and hazel fracturing through the blue like metal in water.

  Ellis frowned, not quite following the turn, but said, “Of course,” because duty, at least, he knew. “I bloody live it, Milo. You never have to explain something like that to me.”

  Milo smiled, small and pressed-lipped, but it was a smile. “You’re too good to me.”

  “I really am.”

  It made Milo grin, startled. “So I can rely on you to be thoroughly though hilariously offensive for me the next time I enter a room and everyone stops talking to stare uncomfortably into their cups?”

  “It’s like you’ve never met me.”

  Ellis grinned when Milo laughed out loud. It was real, too—open and surprised, and it made Ellis wrap his arm around Milo’s neck and drag him in.

  “There’ll be apologies all ’round at breakfast tomorrow, and then everyone will pretend nothing happened.” He set a kiss to Milo’s forehead. “Stop worrying.”

  “Oh, no.” Milo’s eyebrows went up, and his smile took on a crafty glint. “I’ve plans for you for breakfast.”

  Ellis’s brain immediately took a trip south. “That’s what I like to hear.”

  “Not that sort of plans.” Milo shook his head and pulled away, not even a little bit apologetic. “Though it does still require you to be up early.”

  “If it’s not in the fun way, I don’t see—”

  “You will.”

  Ellis narrowed his eyes. “Is this the surprise Dilys was talking about?”

  Milo huffed, exasperated. “I swear that girl could only keep a secret if she were dead. And even then she’d find a way to snitch.” Milo took Ellis’s hand and turned them both around to start back down the hallway. “I’m not telling.” He gave Ellis a sideways glance that was nothing but suggestive challenge. “Though that doesn’t mean you can’t use those charms you’re so smug about to try to pry it out of me.”

  “Great goddesses.” Ellis grinned and started walking faster until he was the one tugging Milo. “Figure out where we are quick, or I’m going to just pick a room, and we’ll end up shocking one of Dilys’s multitude of cousins.”

  Milo laughed, squeezed Ellis’s hand, and lengthened his stride. “Follow me.”

  “Anywhere,” Ellis said, and let Milo lead him.

  Chapter 13—Motive

  : a small musical fragment used to build a larger musical idea

  Ellis eyed the ladder with a grim frown, peered up farther and glared at the loft beyond. Rain pounded against the roof, almost drowning out the occasional protest of a sleepy cow. A flash of lightning temporarily illuminated the whole of the loft, bales and pitchforks and hay hooks all strobing stark blue-white against the mounds of hay strewn over the length of it. Thunder clapped, loud and violent, making him wince then roll his eyes.

  He sighed. “This is your fault,” he said over his shoulder as he took the first ascending step to what was to be, regrettably, his bed for the evening.

  “I know,” was all Milo said.

  “That woman—what was her name?”

  “Rhywun Catrin.”

  “Rhywun Catrin was all ready to let us stay the night in her parlor.” Ellis tossed his pack up into the hay then swung into the loft, careful not to stand straight and whack his head on the low slant of the roof or the even lower slant of the rafters. He squinted past the shadows cast by Milo’s magelight. Another clap of thunder pounded so close Ellis could almost feel it echo in his chest. “A little less awkward hemming—”

  “I was not being awkward!”

  “—and we could be sleeping somewhere dry—”

  “This is dry.”

  “—and might have even managed a hot supper.”

  Milo’s pack came bouncing up into the hay, just before his dark head crested the top of the ladder. “I told you, I brought supper.”

  Ellis peered pointedly around the loft, trying very hard not to snort, and lifted an eyebrow as another great roar of thunder blatted above their heads. “Are you going to cook it?”

  No answer but a roll of the eyes from Milo as he slid that stupid gigantic bloody hamper he’d been toting the whole way—and had kept closed and latched, and wouldn’t let Ellis get a look into—to the floor of the loft and hoisted himself up fully after it.

  “A little bit of charm, that’s all I’m saying.” Ellis plopped down into the hay, flipped his pack over and began unlacing his bedroll from its ties. “You can do it, I know you can, I’ve seen you. You’ve charmed me right out of my—”

  “Gah, Elly, not now.” Milo ran a hand through his damp hair, clearly frustrated. Strangely angry.

  Still behaving oddly and pretending he wasn’t, and Ellis was still waiting semipatiently to find out why. And trying, in the meantime, to at least jolly him out of it.

  Ellis waggled his eyebrows. “A bit of a smile here, a quick touch to the arm there, an unspoken promise I’d have no choice but to prevent you from keeping, and we’d be inside that warm kitchen, probably even now scoffing stew or whatever that heavenly smell was coming from Rhywun Catrin’s stove.”

  Milo sighed. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  …So, that wasn’t really what Ellis had been going for. The mood had been coming and going with no pattern Ellis could find, and he was no longer sure it stemmed from what happened in Whitpool last month. Something at the coven last week, maybe? That disconcerting discussion in Nia’s study last night?

  Whatever it was, it was clearly weighing on Milo at odd moments, and Milo wasn’t talking. Yet.

  Ellis had thought maybe that was the point of this walking-trip-turned-comic-tragedy. Except Milo didn’t seem to think any of it the least bit funny.

  Face closed, head down, Milo shook out his bedroll with a firm snap then spread it out over the space between them. “Anyway, Rhywun Catrin happens to be Rosa Evans dy Critchett’s mam, in case the name didn’t dawn on you. If I’d tried this charm you seem to think I possess, and it by some stretch of the imagination actually worked, the contract offers would never stop.”

  “Stone me, that’s who that is?” Ellis laughed out loud. “I take it back. No charm. Ever.”

  Rosa Evans dy Critchett had been sending conjugal contract offers to Old Forge since Lilibet’s party two years back. The arrival of a new one every six months like clockwork made Milo squirm so badly he’d asked his solicitor to not even notify him anymore, just politely refuse them.

  “We’ve never even met!” Milo’d told Ellis, mystified, the second time it happened. “For all she knows I’m hunch-backed and full of the pox!”

  Ellis had laughed and laughed and laughed.

  “Rosa Evans dy Critchett.” Ellis shook his head, unable to hide a chuckle. “Only you, Milo. Of all the places in all of Kymbrygh, and you end up in the one—”

  “What was I supposed to do, build a house?”

  “Nooo,” Ellis replied, teasing, “because that would be absurd, while stopping here has to be the most inspired—”

  “Well, someone had a massive huff when I suggested we might find a bit of shelter in the lee of the cliffs farther uphill. And this is the last farmstead I know of until we get to… where we’re going.”

  Ellis ignored that last bit—he’d tried everything he could think of all day long, but Milo refused to tell him exactly where they were heading, only insisted that Ellis would be rewarded for his patience when they got there. Ellis couldn’t rem
ember ever having been rewarded for patience—mostly because he possessed very little of it—but hadn’t had much of a choice: when he wanted to be, Milo was as enigmatic as Ellis was impatient.

  “I did not have a huff,” Ellis protested. “I only said that if there was standing water on the floors of those cliffs, I was going to throw you off them.”

  “You’re right.” Milo dug into the hamper and emerged with a bottle of wine. “Murderous intent is much more respectable than a huff. I stand corrected.” He gave Ellis a grin that was… off, too distracted around the eyes, then flumped to his bedroll, propped his back against the rough wood of one of the rafters, and set about working at the cork.

  Ellis frowned.

  There was an ease between them, always had been. It had perhaps been on holiday during the years they’d been apart, but had slotted right back into place as they lay on the rug in Ellis’s rooms and watched a sea made of fire roll across the hearth. It was… maybe not entirely missing now, but strained, as though Milo had to try too hard to catch it.

  Something at the coven, Ellis decided, or what happened at Old Forge. One or the other, had to be. Ellis was going to lay his money on the attack. And if he happened to win that bet, no blame to Milo. The incident with Cennydd had been shocking and awful, and no doubt shook Milo at a fundamental level.

  Ellis knew he shouldn’t have left Whitpool so soon.

  The label on the wine bottle, when he caught sight of it, immediately distracted him.

  “You brought La Belle Blanc? On a walking trip?”

  A rather expensive import for enjoying in someone’s barn.

  Milo grimaced as he twisted at the cork. “It was to be a… Well, I thought… I was trying to…” He paused as the cork slipped free then he shrugged, muttered something that sounded like “special” then took a long swig from the bottle.

  “Special?” Ellis grinned, anticipatory.

  All right, Ellis’s birthday was months away yet, and Milo’s was after that, so Ellis hadn’t missed one of those. Highwinter was ages away, and there were no gift-giving occasions Ellis could think of between. And they’d never really celebrated their sort-of-contract, considering its official unofficialness. With the secrecy, that ridiculous hamper, the wine, Milo’s very clear displeasure that none of this was going how he planned…

  “Special how?”

  Milo ignored the question, only handed the bottle over to Ellis, said, “I forgot cups,” then leaned back and glared at the low-slung ceiling.

  It rather thumped Ellis’s anticipation. And his mood in general.

  He peered over at Milo, still staring at the rough slope of the ceiling, his profile carved in blue from the magelight and illuminated occasionally when periodic flickers of lightning burst across the sky. Ellis took another swig from the bottle, leaned across and tapped at Milo’s elbow with the mouth of it; Milo took it without looking, necked it and drank more deeply than Ellis knew was his wont. Milo usually made it a point to savor good wine.

  Confused, getting a bit broody himself, Ellis stuffed his pack and his bedroll up against the nearest bale, slumped down and closed his eyes. If nothing else, the sound of the storm would lull him to sleep, and if it passed the way Ellis suspected it was going to, they could get the bloody blazes out of here before anyone came in to start milking in the morning.

  “Are you hungry?” Milo asked, quiet.

  “Mm,” was all Ellis replied.

  Maybe it was bit too terse, a bit too hostile, because everything went silent. For quite a while. Until:

  “Elly?”

  Milo’s low voice was accompanied by the nudge of his foot into Ellis’s shin. Ellis dragged his leg away.

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “No.” Ellis drew his knees up, well away from any further advances, just in case Milo didn’t get the point.

  “But you always want… you know.”

  Ellis opened his eyes, rolled them. “It’s called sex, Milo. You are allowed to say it out loud in front of cows, you know, I doubt you’ll shock them.”

  “Fine. You always want sex, so what—”

  “I do not always want sex!”

  A pause—Ellis could almost hear Milo’s eyes crossing. “All right, perhaps you don’t want sex right after you’ve had sex, but otherwise—”

  “I’m tired. I’ve been up since before dawn, and I’m—”

  “And whose fault is that?”

  “It comes from decades of living on a farm. We don’t all get to sleep ’til midday if we want.”

  “Who sleeps ’til midday? An hour or two after sunrise is not midday.”

  “Well, you’ve been dragging me halfway across Tirryderch since even before lunch—”

  “Godwick Vale! Not even a day’s march!”

  “—in a bloody gale—”

  “A thunderstorm, for pity’s sake!”

  “—and I said, I said it was going to rain, I told you—”

  “Six thousand times.”

  “—and now I’m tired and not at all in the mood to go rolling about in all this bleeding, scratchy hay, when all I can smell is cow and dung!”

  “You live on a farm, for pity’s sake!”

  “Right.” Ellis sat up to give Milo a flat look. “And I always make it a point to sleep with the cows. You know—except for the bit where I don’t.” He snagged the bottle, took a long, slow gulp before shoving it back into Milo’s hands. Then he turned, punched at his pack a couple of times and flopped his head to it. “And it’s more than just a farm.”

  “You said farm.”

  Ellis thought back... All right, so he had. But still. “Well, it’s more.”

  “I know.”

  “The Croft, you know.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard of the place.”

  Ellis sat up again, scowled at Milo. “Lots of people depend on me, you know, it’s not just a farm. Acres and acres, as well as the whole of Wellech, and the Wardens, and I—”

  “You work very hard, yes, I know.”

  Ellis narrowed his eyes. “Helping or hurting, Milo?”

  “I was agreeing with—” Milo scrubbed at his face, blew out a long breath. “Right.” He peered about himself with a dubious slant of his gaze. “I’m sorry. I really am. This hasn’t turned out at all like what I’d thought.”

  Well, Ellis would have to be a complete dolt not to know that. He deflated.

  This wasn’t them. They didn’t do this sort of sniping and bickering. And Ellis still didn’t understand it. Any of it. Milo had planned… well, something, anyway, and even if it still irked Ellis a little that Milo wouldn’t tell him what the plan had been, the fact that he had planned something was really quite touching. Despite the disconcerting feeling that Milo had thrown some kind of barrier up between them that Ellis couldn’t puzzle out, the realization of that fact alone served to soften Ellis’s mood considerably.

  “I know, Milo. It’s not… Well, I don’t know, but, Milo.” He huffed. “I wish you’d just tell me. Whatever this is, whatever’s had you all arse-about-face, you can just say it. You know that, right?”

  Milo looked away. “I’m bodging this so badly.” Quiet. Defeated.

  ”Bodging what, though?” Ellis scrubbed at his face. “No, never mind, keep your secret. But whatever’s bothering you, Milo, whatever’s got you all…” Ellis flailed a wave at Milo’s current lack of Milo-ness. “Whatever’s got you not yourself, just say it, yeah? It’ll be like popping a blister.”

  It made Milo’s mouth quirk. “That’s… kind of disgusting.”

  “Though helpful.”

  “Is it?” Milo looked away for a moment, contemplative, before he straightened his spine, and gave Ellis a smile that was almost right. “Hopefully it will all come clear in the morning. Without the pus.” He peered again at the ceiling. “If this lets up, anyway.” He took another drink of wine then held the bottle out to Ellis. “Hold this. I imagine you must be starving.”

  Considering
the fact that Milo had almost literally shoved him out of Ty Mynydd this morning with a couple of pasties in hand for breakfast, and hadn’t thought to pack more than a few apples, some leftover rolls and a sack of walnuts for lunch, yes, Ellis was starving.

  “I don’t suppose it makes sense to save this until we get there.” Milo unlatched the lid of the enormous hamper (stupid, enormous hamper, Ellis’s petulant side insisted) and set about digging supper from it. In light of what began steadily emerging from it, Ellis didn’t pursue the subject of where “there” was this time, only took a nip from the bottle and watched.

  A plate of cold beef, perfectly pink in the center, appeared from within several layers of cheesecloth, along with a large loaf of crusty brown bread. Sliced ham came next, followed by baby asparagus, freshness confirmed when Milo jammed a stalk in his mouth and crunched it down as he continued to pull what Ellis had to admit appeared to be a rather significant supper from the hamper that was looking less and less stupid as each dish emerged. Just-off-the-vine snap-peas joined the asparagus, along with three early cucumbers. A great slab of lemon cake had survived with minimal squashing; Milo set it down next to a few apple squares Ellis remembered from supper last night.

  “I appear to have forgot silver, as well,” Milo said, head nearly submerged in the depths of the hamper as he hunted about for something to use as utensils. In the end, he only shrugged, dug out his pocketknife, and began slicing up the bread. “No plates, no cups, no silver. I reckon it wouldn’t’ve been entirely perfect after all.” The knife was too small—he was smooshing more than cutting. Milo growled, tossed the knife down next to the plate of beef and simply tore the loaf in half. He thrust a hunk at Ellis.

  Ellis took it, gulping more wine before handing the bottle back to Milo.

  “Keep it.” Milo dipped back into the basket and came up with another. “If I get you drunk enough, maybe you’ll forget where you are and who’s responsible for dragging you there.”

  Ellis almost said, I doubt it, but… well, Milo was… Ellis sighed. Milo was Milo and almost impossible to stay annoyed with. Ellis only took another swig from the bottle, slapped a slab of beef and one of ham on top of the hunk of bread and took a bite. He leaned back, stretched his legs out and snugged his shoulders more firmly into pack, blanket, and hay. He reckoned it wasn’t that uncomfortable.