Winter Knights

by Harper Fox

  Winter Knights

  By Harper Fox

  Historian Gavin Lowden is in Northumberland on Christmas Eve for two reasons: to find evidence of a romantic bond between Arthur and Lancelot, and to finally tell his partner Piers that he loves him. Piers has promised to come clean with his conservative family and join Gavin for their first holiday as a couple, but at the last minute, he bails. Devastated, Gavin heads out onto the moors alone, just as snow begins to fall…

  Gavin stumbles into an underground chamber, where strange happenings cause him to question what is real and what is fantasy. He’s found by two mysterious men who offer him a bed for the night—and awaken him to nuances of erotic pleasure he didn’t know existed. Pleasure he hopes to share with Piers.

  When Piers learns that Gavin has gone missing, he is desperate to find him. He knows now breaking up was a terrible mistake, and he’s ready to take the next step in their relationship—if it’s not already too late.

  35,000 words

  Dear Reader,

  In December 2010 we published our first set of three holiday collections. I hoped at the time it would become a Carina Press tradition, and I’m pleased that we were able to do this again in 2011.

  I invited four authors who have built strong careers in the male/male niche to work with me to create this year’s holiday collection of male/male novellas. Josh Lanyon, K.A. Mitchell, Ava March and Harper Fox each brought their own unique voice and flair for storytelling to the Winter Knights collection to create something truly magical.

  As I read Winter Knights by Harper Fox, Lone Star by Josh Lanyon, My True Love Gave to Me by Ava March and The Christmas Proposition by K.A. Mitchell, I found myself falling in love with the strong men in these stories, just as they fell in love with each other. These novellas combine the perfect blend of hot chemistry and raw emotion to transport any reader to that lovely place of good book glow!

  I’m incredibly pleased to make these stories available to you both individually, and as a collection, and I hope you fall in love with them just as I did!

  We love to hear from readers, and you can email us your thoughts, comments and questions to generalinquiries@carinapress.com. You can also interact with Carina Press staff and authors on our blog, Twitter stream and Facebook fan page.

  Happy reading!

  ~Angela James

  Executive Editor, Carina Press

  www.carinapress.com

  www.twitter.com/carinapress

  www.facebook.com/carinapress

  Dedication

  To Jane, who shares with me the magic of the Northumbrian hills, and to Lena for all her kindness.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  My pen scraped dryly on the page. Midsentence, on the trail of an idea, I paid no attention and ploughed on, only noticing at the end of the line that I was no longer writing but carving invisible letters into the paper. Damn.

  I sighed and sat back, chain of thought snapping, dissolving in fireworks behind my eyes. I was due a break anyway. If Piers were here, he’d be calling time, reminding me of the promises I’d made a year ago when my headaches started getting out of control. Ten minutes’ rest every hour, Gavin. I smiled, thinking of my cramped little study at home, where Piers had propped up a massive metal sign, nicked from the verge of a motorway: Tiredness Kills. Take a Break.

  Nicked by him, I suspected, though I never could get him to confess. And he was taking care of me in absentia now too. The pen had been a gift from him. At first glance an ordinary biro, the barrel was packed with tiny Swarovski crystals. I’d never have bought such a thing, or imagined I wanted one, but the glimmer of the crystals in sunlight or neon would catch my eye from time to time as I worked and distract me, making me stop for a minute and turn the pen idly in my fingers. It was the prettiest, most frivolous thing imaginable. It gave me great pleasure to flourish it before the bearded professors in my academic publisher’s meetings.

  Take that and the motorway sign together, and you’d get an impression of Piers diametrically opposed to the reality. He wasn’t a devil-may-care young student with a taste for mischief and glitter. He was a theology postgrad, tall and thin, serious enough to make you weep. He had silky, thick black hair that would flop into his eyes whenever he took off his glasses, and those eyes were so beautiful, hazel struck through with golden green, that I’d offered to pay for corrective laser surgery. But Piers had no time for personal vanities. He was a Catholic, quietly and fervently devout.

  Desire shivered through me. I got up, went to the window of my hotel room and looked out. Snow was coming down with the four o’clock dusk. The roads were still clear but the hills were hushed and shrouded, a deep chill reaching me through the glass. A perfect Christmas Eve, in this outpost of northern England, among the crests of the Pennines. I imagined a train leaving Newcastle, threading the Tyne Valley and stopping at Bardon Mill. I imagined Piers, who could drive but didn’t like to, loping through the snow like an elegant short-sighted wolf in time to catch the little bus that ran from the station up to Hadrian’s Wall. It wouldn’t be long now. He was on his way.

  Coming to join me for our first Christmas together in three years. How so chaste and earnest a Catholic boy had ended up in my bed in the first place I had no idea. Perhaps it had been because I had known little about his religious convictions and cared less. We’d met at a drunken party in a mutual friend’s digs. I’d taken one look at him, and disregarded the alarm with which he’d returned it. I’d wanted him. I’d bulldozed him into the nearest bedroom; laid him down among the coats and college scarves, where thirty seconds of protest and struggle later he’d been coming down my throat with a force that suggested starvation need. I’d been bulldozing my way past his scruples ever since. They didn’t matter. He’d grow up and get over them. He’d never told his family, and we’d never spent a holiday together, but all that was coming an end at last. I’ll come clean with them tonight, Gav. Then I’ll get the train out and join you at the hotel, I swear.

  I turned from the window and looked around the room. Hotel was generous. More of a backpacker’s hostel, conveniently perched near the vast ridge of rock where a Roman emperor, three thousand years ago, had decided to build his frontier. I’d had good reasons for choosing the place too, but it was hardly romantic. And Piers, whatever I thought of his inhibitions, was making a brave gesture.

  I’d brought with me candles and as much tinsel as would pack into my laptop bag without attracting attention. The hotel garden walls had yielded some strands of frosty ivy and a berry-clustered holly branch. Fire and evergreens, good ancient symbols. Piers could use a reminder of the origins of this Christian feast. With the lights turned down low, the room was welcoming and festive, and I meant to show my man such a good Pagan night in here that he might never look back.

  I meant to tell him I loved him, as well. Somehow I’d never got around to that.

  Though at this rate, I’d scarcely have time. Behind me, scattered across the desk and dressing table, were thirty-three handwritten sheets of proposal for my doctorate thesis. The deadline had come and gone two weeks ago; I’d argued passionately for an extension based on new research findings I’d turned up near Hadrian’s Wall, and been granted a stay of execution until New Year.

  In a way I didn’t need the damn PhD. I had my degree and my Master’s, and I was writing anyway
, articles for journals, and short academic texts which earned me a living of sorts. My reputation was growing. I wasn’t desperate to enhance it by sticking a Doctor in front of my name, nice though that would be. No, I was seeking another type of validation entirely. I, Gavin Lowden, student of British folklore, of poor family and no particular academic background, believed and thought I could prove that King Arthur of the Britons had been real.

  My stomach flip-flopped and the warmth of incipient erection faded from my groin. I was close, so damn close! I’d checked in here a week ago and had been working like the devil ever since. My nose had bled and I’d eaten my way through half a prescription of strong migraine meds, but without Piers to restrain me I’d been able to crash my pain barriers at red-hot speed. Even this morning, I’d thought I’d get it done before he arrived, but my hopes of that were fading.

  I made one last check of the room. Yes, it would do. I’d even wrapped a couple of presents and put them on the bed, one serious, the other less so. Dismissing all such trivia from my mind—emotional clutter, the enemy of thought!—I sat back down on the creaky dressing-table stool. The pen had run out on page thirty-four. Blindly I reached for a biro. My laptop sat ready and waiting, but at this stage of the game I needed the grip and drudgery of handwriting, needed the physical effort to come somewhere near the mental one.

  All right. Closing argument. Hundreds of places across Britain had an Arthur legend. That in itself was interesting, and I’d touched on it, but some—Cadbury, Tintagel—had better claim than others. Almost enough to bring the dream, solid and smiling, down from the stars. Always falling crucially short of the point where myth could meet and meld with history.

  That was what I wanted. That glorious golden meeting point. In each of the places I’d visited, I’d applied what had become a rigid series of tests. Place-name meanings and etymology, peripheral legends. Manuscripts in libraries, inscribed Roman stones in museums or in the field, unnamed tombs, mounds and castles. Anything medieval I dismissed. He hadn’t been a flouncing creation of Mallory and the troubadours, that was for certain. If anything, an Iron Age warlord, a soldier, a charismatic tribal chief who had made his peace with the Roman invasion in order to ward off a worse one from Viking marauders who would wipe out all learning, compassion and beauty from his land. No, by the Middle Ages the waters had been muddied. I needed songs as old as the stones of the Celtic and Saxon settlements that had inspired them. I needed swords discarded in peat bogs or lakes, early maps that showed how landscape could trap and preserve memory.

  I wanted proof. I sat up suddenly, willing away the ache in my skull the movement caused. I hadn’t chosen the best place to work: the dressing-table mirror gave me back a pallid ghost. I wished I looked like Piers. Scion of a family of religious intellectuals, he was an academic all the way down from his pensive, beautiful brow to his long-boned and elegant feet. I looked like what I was—survivor of the rough streets of my northeastern council estate, a scrappy interloper who’d sought in the gym what nature had failed to bestow on me. Someone who worked too hard, tried too hard, put weary circles under his eyes and made his crewcut stand up like an angry coir doormat with frustrated rubbing. A bloody fool who’d run around all over the country chasing a legend whose heart, I was now almost sure, lay right here in the county of his birth.

  Northumberland had everything. Roman history extravagantly laid out all over its hills. Dragon legends, always a marker buoy, because Arthur got tied up in folk memory with sun gods, and they in turn got overlaid by legends of St Michael, in later times himself subsumed by patriotic nonsense about dragon-slaying George. I’d chased back the name of the nearby Roman fort, Vindolanda, to a Celtic word that meant white meadows. Lancelot’s father had been Ban, the fair-meadows lord.

  I’d never been much concerned with the dynamic between Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot. No—since I’d opened my first child’s storybook of the legend (silently under my bedsheets at midnight, my brothers regarding any reading matter higher than the Beano as hopelessly effete), my whole focus had been on the bond I’d sensed—yes, even in those kids’ books—between Lancelot and the king.

  I was queer to the core, I supposed. Always had been. I’d never even glanced at a girl, and that could have killed me, growing up where I did. I’d needed a light to live by, and I’d found one. Now I had the power to weave all those threads, all the shadowy evidence, into a groundbreaking thesis. Arthur had lived in the north, and Lancelot had lived and fought at his side. Just across the ridge from the fort was a lake, a unique glacial tarn where a sword had been found, rusted and ancient, presumed medieval, left to gather dust in one of the area’s obscure little museums. I’d known at a glance it was older. I’d pulled every string I could reach, in the university’s science labs and the Department of Antiquities, to get it removed and tested. I was expecting a phone call any minute. A well-bribed metallurgy undergrad had promised to forego the Christmas Eve festivities and get me my results.

  My proof? No. Even if the sword turned out to be Iron Age—even if I had enough folkloric and documentary evidence to place it in Arthur’s hand and call it Excalibur—I would still have to convince my peers. That was secondary. I wasn’t a believer, not like Piers. I had to convince myself.

  The pain in my head increased and I reached for the migraine meds. Reluctantly, because for the first hour after taking them I would feel anything but sexy, I popped one out of its foil. By the time Piers had got here and had a cup of tea, I ought to be all right again. Swallowing, making a face at myself in the mirror at the bitter taste, I surveyed my sprawling empire of books, notes, sketches and maps. Yes—even as a kid, I had to be the most rational little escapist in the northeast. If I’d allowed Arthur and Lancelot to become my highest romantic ideal, it had been only on condition that one day they met me halfway and stepped out of their legend to find me.

  My mobile rang. I’d left it charging by the bed. I jumped up, knocking over the stool in my haste to get there, and repressed a pang of disappointment when I saw Piers’ number flashing on the screen. Where was Charlie with my damn results? Knocking back the sherry, I supposed, or buying a round in the union bar with the money I’d paid him… “Hiya. Are you at the station?”

  “Er, no. No, I’m not.”

  He sounded odd. Subdued. Well, my unenthusiastic greeting could account for that. Ashamed, I brightened my tone. “Well, you want to hurry up, you know. They stop the trains early on… Oh, Piers. You didn’t get out at the wrong one again, did you? It’s Bardon Mill.” Bardon Mill. I loved that. Drop a medieval R and you had the name of Arthur’s last battlefield, the scene of his death and resurrection. Badon…

  “No. I’m still at home. I’m not coming, Gav.”

  I sat down on the bed. The migraine meds worked by decreasing the pressure in my brain, and they often spaced me out. I watched the candlelight dancing in the black and empty glass for a moment, feeling nothing. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you well?”

  “I’m fine. It’s not that.”

  I listened to the background noises coming down the line. Not the wash of Gregorian plainchant I associated with a call from Piers’ own flat. No—discreet laughter, a ripple of piano music. The sounds of genteel merriment produced by a de Val family gathering, in the Victorian manor house where I’d been introduced by Piers once as my good friend from college and once, memorably, since we’d just quit sucking one another off in the library, my study partner. Charades, carol-singing round the piano, and off to church with the whole lot of them, hearty and arm-in-arm like children in the snow. “You’re at Elmgates.”

  “Yes. I can’t do this. I came out here to tell them, but…”

  “But what?” I swallowed. My throat was gravelly and hot. “Did you even speak to them?”

  “No.”

  “For God’s sake… Okay.” I scrabbled in the pile of papers by the bed and found a train timetable. “Leave the grand confession for now and just jump in a taxi. There’s one last tra
in from Central at—”

  “Gavin, you’re not listening. I can’t come.”

  I cradled the mobile. The candles threw a small sphere of light, a nimbus, out into the dark. I could see wind-driven snow. Dispassionately, as if hearing a folktale from an old man in a pub, sieving the rhetoric for its grain of truth, I analysed my lover’s voice. Piers was diffident, shy. Unlike me, he came slowly to his resolutions. But once they were made, they were fixed. “Don’t do this to me.”

  “You don’t understand. You’ve never tried. I can’t hurt them. And it isn’t—it isn’t right.”

  I pounced on the last word, consigning the rest to oblivion. My temper boiled up, a hot sweet relief. “Right? How many times have we been through this? You’re a devout bloody Catholic screwing another man. How can right come into it?”

  “It can’t. I know. I have to choose.”

  “Piers, no.”

  “I had to choose. I…” He fell silent. Then his lovely voice, which had been fracturing, breaking to shards, resumed its habitual calm. If I closed my eyes, I could picture him in the window seat of the library. I could see, as clearly as if I’d been there with him, that someone had just walked into the room. “Gwen’s here,” he said. “You remember Gwen, don’t you?”

  I nodded, as if he could see me too. I wasn’t bloody likely to forget the girl to whom he’d been engaged, in the nearest thing to an arranged marriage I’d ever come across in the English free world, when I’d arrived on the scene three years before. I’d liked Gwen. She’d been nice. A good loser.

  “Gwen and I are… We’ve been going out again. We’re renewing our engagement.”

  I don’t know which of us hung up. I had a new mobile and I wasn’t too deft with it yet. My hand had cramped, and I might have hit the button. Piers wasn’t big on dramatic cut-offs—no, not my gentle Piers, who closed doors softly behind him, and never raised his voice no matter how much I’d provoked him. The network signal was bad around here, seeming to shift with the weather. It might just have been the wind.