Arrivals

by J. M. Frey

  “Bevel!” my lover gasps, scandalized. “I don’t want a wife!”

  This admission does something to my insides, makes them all warm and melty, unwinds a knot of fear I didn’t even realize had been twisting up behind my sternum. For all that we are Paired, it’s not the same as pledging a Troth—the closest thing to marriage two men can achieve. And Pairs can be broken, or remain Platonic. It doesn’t surprise me at all that Lord Gyre is willfully misunderstanding our Pairing to be a soldierly one.

  “What reply do I send him?” Kintyre begs me. “You’re the clever one, the thinking one. Tell me what to say to him to put him off.”

  “Put them all off, you mean,” I say.

  “All?” he gasps in dread.

  “Kintyre,” I say, tapping the ashes out of my pipe on my boot heel and stuffing it into my pocket. “You are the eldest son of House Turn, with no lordling in the wings. You are wealthy, you are titled, you are of noble birth, you are knighted and a bit of a folk hero. Even if you didn’t have the seat of Lysse, I think the moment you settled down, these letters would have begun arriving.”

  “But I don’t want these men’s daughters!” he complains.

  “Writer, am I glad we got ourselves sorted before we retired,” I say, brushing the messenger hawk off him so I can pull Kin down into a sweet kiss. The bird circles us, and then alights on the edge of the garden wall, waiting for our return message or its command to return empty-clawed. “I don’t think I could have stood it, watching all these women throw themselves at your feet, trying to trip you into marriage, when I wanted you so badly for myself.”

  “Yes, that is one blessing from Pip, at least,” he says, leaning into the kiss. We reassure one another with lips and tongues until the cold begins to wrack us.

  “Into the stable with you,” I tell the hawk when we part. “I’ll have a letter for you soonish.”

  The hawk chirrups and goes.

  “‘All these women,’” Kintyre says as I usher him into the warm kitchen and fuss at him until he sits by the bread oven. At least I had been wearing my house robe when I went out for my smoke—Kin’s just in his shirtsleeves, and his fingernails have turned blue. “Writer, I hope not.”

  “Hope all you like, Kin,” I say, brushing his hair back from his face. “But they’re coming, mark my words. And the only way to stop it is to marry.”

  Kintyre hooks his fingers into the pockets of my house robe and draws me close. And that’s all we say on that subject—for the moment, at least.

  ✍

  Though I’ve augured no signs, my prediction proves depressingly accurate. Days five, six, and seven bring five more messenger hawks between them, and Toflan the groom is getting annoyed with the amount of hawk shit collecting in one corner of the stable; Kin hasn’t let me send back replies yet.

  “Not until we’ve come up with a plan that will stop all of them, all at once, once and for all,” he begs me.

  “Coward,” I reiterate.

  “Politics,” he corrects.

  We’re seated in another one of those seemingly useless rooms in Turn Hall, a salon on the ground floor filled with squashy furniture that Velshi called the ladies’ parlour, but which has the nicest view of the back lawn and the snowfall that is persistently filling in the gaps the mild thaw left in the carpet of white. It never snowed this much in Bynnebakker at Solsticetide, never mind this early in the season. I think it’s enchanting.

  “Still cowardly,” I reply.

  “I can’t seem to be favoring one offer or another, so I have to answer them all at once. I remember this, at least, from when I was eighteen. My father hired someone to handle the matchmaking.”

  I startle and blink at my lover, turning from where we’re leaning against each other on a sofa, watching the wintery sunset. There’s mulled wine keeping warm on the hearth, and empty goblets in our hands. “Kintyre Turn, are you telling me you were betrothed when I met you?”

  Kintyre shrugs. “If I was, nobody told me.”

  “And nobody’s said anything about it all the times we’ve been back?”

  “Nope.”

  “Huh,” I say, and look back out. The messenger hawks are chasing each other across the sky, playful in their boredom. “I guess there was no one, then.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because Forsyth would have bullied you into at least meeting her, if the matchmaking had been completed.”

  Kintyre makes a humming noise and rises to get us both refills.

  The next evening isn’t as blissfully domestic, because around noon we are inundated with the first of our guests. The Gyre girl comes just before lunch, and Kintyre and I have to abandon our plans to eat over the maps of the estate farms, forced to eat with her in the family dining room instead. It’s paneled in wood that matches the ballroom, and was probably added to the labyrinthine Turn Hall around the same time. It’s smaller than the grand hall, but that’s not saying much, because the table is still large enough to seat at least twelve adults comfortably, and the walls are absolutely jammed with a century’s worth of disapproving Turn ancestors rendered in oil paint. Kin explains that they’d break their fasts here as a family when he was little, and points out a scratch in the table from a tussle he and Forsyth had over some plate of sweets or another.

  The Gyre girl—I say girl, but she’s probably twenty-five, already a desperate spinster—is pretty enough if you like them emaciated and doe-eyed. I used to be a connoisseur of woman-flesh, or at least the kind that Kin preferred. But now that I haven’t lain with a woman in months, and I have all that I want in Kintyre, I find that I’m not attracted to her at all. I don’t know what to hope with Kin, though; he’s never said no to an easy tumble, and I find myself nervously picking at the impressive meal Cook managed to pull out of thin air, fairy dust, and a last-minute warning.

  When I mention that it’s my first time at this table, the Gyre girl smirks, as if this being mutually our first meal in the cold, formal room puts us on some kind of level playing field.

  Ha! When I’ve taken so many meals in Kin’s rooms? In Kin’s bed? I find myself irresistibly tempted to tell the silly little bitch so to her face. But what good would that do? It’s clear now from the tone of the letters that everyone knows we’re Paired platonically, and probably also romantically, too. But that doesn’t stop the correspondents from pointing out that the scion of a Great House needs children, and for that, he needs a wife. And they’re not wrong, that’s the wretched part of it.

  Writer’s nutsack, all these fathers are expecting to sell their daughters to House Turn, knowing that they’ll all be second to me? Or do they assume their daughter’s charms could usurp me? And these women are content with being breeding stock? I mean, well-kept breeding stock, sure, but breeding stock all the same. And then what? Are this wife and I meant to compete for Kin’s affection? Share it? Share each other? Or is the assumption that she won’t be part of our lives at all, except for the nights when she lays with my Paired?

  No. I have no problem with dwarvish marriages, even among humanfolk, but I’m a jealous man. I don’t share. I won’t share. Not my Kintyre. Not after everything it’s taken to pin the ruddy bastard down.

  The Gyre girl—she has a name, I’m sure she does, but I don’t give a fig what it is—flirts and flutters and flushes her way through lunch, and I can’t look at Kintyre. I can’t. When the plates have all been cleared away, I beg my excuses and flee the dining room as fast as I can. I probably shouldn’t leave Kin alone in there with that . . . that harpy, but if he is going to change his mind, if having a flesh and blood woman right there, available, eager even, stirs his blood even a little bit, then I don’t want to see it. I can’t.

  And the worst part of all of it is that it would be the right thing to do.

  Kintyre Turn should marry some nobleman’s daughter. He should produce heirs. He should live a proper, laced-up, traditional life with a woman to head the household and manage the staff and host the ba
nquets. He should be attending court, and presenting his children. And I should be . . . I should be back in Bynnebakker, sweating my life away at the forge and having dalliances with whatever passing soldiers fancy a tupping from a little hedgehoggy powerhouse like me. Maybe have a wife and children of my own, just so I won’t be lonely, and be miserable in it, anyway.

  Why did the Writer ever create men like me, men who prefer the bodies and company and pleasure of other human men, but who also long for the children a union of two men can never produce? How cruel, this Writer! I wish Pip was here so I could yell at her in proxy. Or demand an explanation.

  I’m halfway down the hall and so lost in my own mind and misery that I don’t hear Kintyre coming up behind me. I don’t even know he’s been chasing after me until he grabs my elbow and drags me to a halt.

  “What in the seven hells was that?” Kintyre snarls at me, anger and betrayal in every line of his handsome face. “I thought you were on my side, here!”

  “Your side?”

  “Or have you changed your mind?” Kintyre asks, searching my face, suddenly scared. “Do you not like it here? Do you want to leave me?”

  “What?” I ask, stunned, and reach up to cup his jaw in my palm. I run my thumb across the small white scar under his left ear, a souvenir from a Sunsong siren. “Of course not. What makes you think that?”

  “You just sat there, Bev! You let her flirt with me, and you didn’t . . . you never snapped at her, you never teased, you never . . . you usually chase them off. I was . . . why didn’t you try to chase her off?” He sounds like a child when he whines like that, and I shouldn’t find it adorable, but I do. Oh, I’m so sunk in this man it’s appalling.

  “I . . .” I say, and then trail off, uncertain of what I actually want to say. “I suppose because it’s your house? And I feel that you should be the one defending yourself in it? I mean, you’re the lord. I don’t want to undermine—”

  “It’s your house, too!” Kin says. “Yours and mine! We’re going to stay here, together, forever! Right?”

  The vehemence and desperation for reassurance in his voice reaches into the core of me and shakes it. “Yes, of course, Kin,” I say around a growing lump in my throat.

  “And it’s your House, too,” he adds, fingering the lapel of the Turn-russet waistcoat Keriens nagged me into donning when it was announced that we had a guest. “You are a Turn, now. Unless you want me to be a Dom. I could do that. I look good in amethyst.”

  “And where would we live then?” I tease. “My mother doesn’t need an eighth son, and there isn’t much room in the loft above the forge.”

  “Your mother already has an eighth son,” Kintyre insists stubbornly, and, Writer, he’s not wrong.

  “Fine then,” I say gently. “I apologize for not defending what’s mine.”

  Kintyre nods, smug. “As well you should. Do better at dinner, will you?”

  “If my lord wishes it,” I laugh.

  “He does.”

  We kiss again, and make our way back to Kintyre’s office, where we lose ourselves in the maps. We’re forced to entertain the Gyre girl at dinner, but with Kin’s leave to be as vicious as I like, she looks like a woman whose hopes have all been dashed when we part for bed.

  Good.

  I feel sorry for her, I do, because of her age and the way her father is trying to dispose of her. But Kintyre Turn is mine, and Bevel Dom no longer walks one step behind.

  Part Five

  The Gyre girl stays the night, apparently not prepared to give up the field just yet. Or perhaps she’s not allowed to go home without a marriage promise. Who knows what a father who’d offer up his daughter like a prize cow might do if she returned to him defeated.

  Unfortunately, House Gyre isn’t the only one to decide to wave their daughter under Kin’s nose like a well-cooked steak, and we are soon inundated with pretty maidens, which works in our favor. Traditionally, the men and womenfolk separate to their own pursuits in the evenings, unless they decide to stay together. And stay, we certainly do not. With one maiden, it would have been rude to abandon her. With many, they have each other for company and we needn’t bother.

  Besides, between my correspondence with King Carvel sorting out the Lost Library and the Ivory Tower, and the readying for scholars to descend upon both places, my aiding Kintyre in unravelling the nuances of where Forsyth tied up the Turn wealth and patronage in Lysse, and my twice-weekly visits to Law Manor with the Library Lion—whom young Lewko has resolutely renamed Capplederry—to spar with Pointe, coach his apprentice, and learn from them both the finer nuances of keeping the peace in a Chipping, Kintyre and I simply can’t seem to find the time. There are not enough hours in the day to attend the endless reading circles, winter picnics, skating parties, and card games the noble ladies keep inviting Kintyre (and, grudgingly, me) to.

  Last I counted, there were six eligible young misses filling up the guest rooms and eating our stores for the winter, and Keriens keeps us fully apprised of the funny bits of competition or drama amongst them while he shaves us each morning. Three of the ladies seem determined to wholly replace me in Kin’s affections (as if they ever could!). Two seem content to politely ignore me and share Kin, without admitting to having to do so. And one seems as if she is actively trying to court the both of us simultaneously. An intriguing prospect, and one Kin and I would have jumped at even as little as a year ago, but not now. We don’t need a woman to mediate our lovemaking. Not anymore.

  And it’s funny. But it’s also eating me alive.

  Kin is good at what he does, and what he does is to be honest, good, forthright, brave, strong, and, the Writer bless him, a bit obvious. There are no hidden depths to my lover, no secret scheming, no plots or ploys. He is what he seems.

  It’s both his greatest weakness and his greatest strength. Every emotion he possesses, every thought that he has, flashes across his face. He is rubbish at games of bluffing and cards. But people trust him, implicitly, for he has no deceit in him.

  So he feels sorry for the maidens, and it is genuine. And while I sometimes pity them, I hate them, too.

  I feel, suddenly, that I’m not good enough for a man like that. For a man who feels sorry for maidens. I’m not good enough. Not good enough to be the Shadow Hand of Hain. Not good enough to be a Lord Consort.

  “Maybe I should be moving back into my own room, Kin,” I venture softly, slowly, as we lie in bed together. And maybe my voice is soft with cowardice. Maybe I hope he doesn’t hear me at all over the women downstairs, playing whist and drinking their way through Forssy’s carefully curated wine cellar. But he has, obviously, because those blue, blue eyes of his open, and stare at me across the shared battleground of our pillows.

  The look of them is inscrutable, tinged around the outside with patience, but otherwise, I can’t decipher what he’s thinking. It’s rare, with Kin. I know him so well. But sometimes, just sometimes, he can channel his brother and put on a face that’s unreadable.

  “Oh?” he prompts when I don’t say more.

  I chew on my lip—a nervous habit that frustrates me when I catch myself doing it. It’s so missish. “Maybe I should move into my own room,” I repeat.

  “Why?”

  “We’re not trothed, and—”

  “We’re Paired.”

  “That’s not the same. It’s not . . . it’s not proper the way a trothing is.”

  “So?”

  I roll over and jam my head back against the pillow, annoyed. “Are you being deliberately obtuse? Because it’s not cute.”

  Kin levers himself up on one elbow and peers down through the gloaming of our bedroom at my face, as if everything I haven’t been able to make into words the last few months will appear inscribed instead on my forehead. I almost wish it would. It would save me the agony of trying to articulate it.

  “Are you feeling stifled?” he asks. “Is that what this is about?”

  “What?”

  “I dunno—the tape
stries and the velvet and the crystal, and all the people, all around us, all the time. Can’t seem to ever get to be alone, you know? ‘M half tempted to bugger off some days, go hide in the glade off the Northward Road and just be alone with the world.”

  He reaches out and runs his fingers through my hair. What was once a perfectly normal straw-blond has now become so threaded with dull, tarnished gray that I think I’m seeing my pa every time I catch my face in the looking glass. Kin’s hair—a gleaming gold—is artfully threaded with a silver that shines. Lucky bastard. Even his wrinkles look charming and distinguished. Mine just make me look old.

  My hair is also shaggy, clearly not neat enough for Kerien’s taste, with the way he keeps hinting at how easy it would be to call the barber up to the Hall. But I don’t want a barber summoned for me, don’t want to fetch people like they’re things, like my legs aren’t perfectly capable of carrying me into Turnshire on their own. I’m not some stupid invalid or infant who needs things done for him. And what’s wrong with a bit of shag? I’ll get a haircut when there’s a reason to get one.

  I knock Kin’s hand away, frustrated with myself and his gentleness.

  This . . . this new Kintyre. This Kintyre with forethought, who works to make me smile; this Kintyre who listens thoughtfully to petitioners, and gives way to his cook; who wears lawn shirts, and lets someone else dress him . . . I don’t know who this man is. And I don’t know what part I have to play in his life. In his bed. In his heart.

  What’s the point of me, when he has other people to do things for him? To be his walking apology in my place? To feed him? To watch his back? To tell his stories? To do all the work of being lord while he is the face of it?

  “What’s the point of me?” I catch myself asking out loud, and immediately wish the words back behind my teeth. I roll over in the bed and bury my face in the pillow, mortified.