 
**Zandry of Bonewood & Other Stories**

By Lore Lippincott

Copyright 2014 Lore Lippincott

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold

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All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation to anyone bearing the same name or names. Any resemblance to individuals known or unknown to the author are purely coincidental.

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Cover Art Engraving: William Cowper, Govard Bidloo

The anatomy of humane bodies

Oxford, 1698

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**For S.N.**

**and the memory**

**of velour seats.**

**Table of Contents**

The Demon Ex

Colin, Who is Not Quite Dead

Zandry of Bonewood

The Black Arrow

Last Time in Summervale

About Lore

* * * *

## The

Demon

## Ex
The road to the fort had narrowed to the width of a wagon. Evergreens encroached, darkening the waning daylight. Alone as Wilbert Martin felt, he could've been far more uncomfortable. All too well, Martin remembered the last time he'd been trapped in the woods. It'd started out as a frightening experience, a sensation soon erased by the nearness of consummate woodsman Shade Reid. And Reid also happened to be Martin's current destination.

There were two dilemmas Martin faced when again near Reid. The first, and most obvious, was Reid's position at the rival Hudson Bay Company. He did a lot of what Martin did for the North West Company: investigated the unexplained instances one inevitably found in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

The second dilemma had Martin wondering how long he'd wallow in Reid's electrifying presence before the inevitable forceful attraction returned. Their last two encounters had been more sex than work, which, according to Reid, was the way a man should run his life. The only reason that Martin didn't look forward to lounging around in a tent with Reid's cock in his mouth was the actual _work_ they had to do investigating the abandoned fort. He had an inkling that Reid, because he was better at his job than Martin, better at achieving vast amounts of information in a short span of time, would know why the fort had been abandoned and what they had to do to get it under British rule again. But there'd be a great amount of time to suck Reid, too.

With daydreams of Reid's hot erection pulsing to life in Martin's mind, he didn't notice an avoidable object ahead. All Martin saw was a flicker of something dark against the gray light. He screamed and jumped away from the green snake, then froze to analyze it. The snake hung from a branch overhead, but then Martin noticed a thicker, movable blackness, and a paleness that turned into hands, a face that spouted sudden laughter. Martin removed his flintlock revolver and aimed it right at the shadow. A moment later, Martin winced and lowered the weapon.

"Of course it would be you," he said to Reid.

"Of course it would be. I heard you coming. I thought it'd be entertaining to surprise you." He used a forefinger to rub the top of the snake's smooth head. "Good fun, wasn't it, Maddie?"

As much as any man could, Reid befriended snakes. It was a quirk of character that Martin was willing to ignore, as long as no reptiles were ever seen in their tent.

When Reid looked at Martin, it was to find something wrong with him, something cool and distant that might keep their minds on the task and their hands out of one another's pants. Immediately, Reid saw that wasn't going to happen. Even Martin's hair fascinated Reid, the way pieces of it escaped the queue down his back and hugged his face, darkly framing it and bringing more attention to the pale blue of his eyes. His ears stuck out a little, like he was always listening for an ultrasonic warbler. Reid didn't much notice Martin's rather fat nose, only knowing that Martin didn't mind having it near his ass. And Martin's mouth, lightly pink and too wide to be cute, was the greatest piece of him. Not just for what it did, but for the things it said. Wilbert Martin had an honest face, but behind it was the filthy spirit of a pirate.

Reid tugged at Martin until their mouths touched. Now the third time they'd met in as many years, Reid thought this should become their traditional greeting: a good, soft kiss with a lot more love in it than lust. Reid worked his lips over Martin's, slipped his tongue in to catch the subtlety spicy flavor Martin always had, like rain licked off stones. Martin grabbed Reid, deepening their kiss and hoping to show Reid how much he'd been missed in ten months. Reid noticed. He buried his own burgeoning erection against Martin's and let out a moan. If it hadn't been for the snake, they would've had no trouble fucking in the middle of the road. But Maddie the snake was there, and climbed aboard Martin, underneath his braid, around his collar—

"Shit, shit, shit!" Martin cried, tottering away from danger. "Damn that snake!"

Maddie fell to the road, stunned for a second before Reid scooped her up. She coiled around his hands and arms. Martin hiked his curiously-colored eyes to the heavens. Reid gave him a solicitous peck on the cheek.

"Don't worry, when we get to the tent she won't be around. I promised no snakes in the tent." He couldn't resist another splurging kiss with Martin, glad that Martin joined in. Their mouths were wet, anxious to taste one another as much as they could for as long as they could. He bit Martin's bottom lip tenderly, left one more short kiss that turned into words. "I guess the curse is still going."

"Seems that way." Martin wanted to think it was something more than his ex-lover's curse that made him and Reid mad with lust. "I haven't seen him, so I still don't how to break the curse. I'd apologize," Reid's penis twitched to life against Martin's squirming hand, "but I'm not sorry."

Reid helped Martin's hand for the merest of moments, but was alerted to something more important and dangerous. "Let's go."

Martin dumbly nodded his agreement, thinking Reid had sex on his mind and didn't want to fornicate in a place as potentially public as the fort road. Reid understood the fuzzy expression. He bobbed his head to indicate the southern route. "Something's coming. How many rounds have you got for that damn flintlock of yours?"

Dazed by the revelation that they were about to be under attack, Martin automatically replied to Reid's question. Reid scowled, dragging Martin into a tiny clearing in the woods. The horse Bella was tied there, chewing grass. Without warning, Martin was culled from the earth by the back of his coat and lifted onto Bella. He settled in behind Reid, holding his waist when Bella took off into the forest. It seemed like the intruders wouldn't even know anyone had been on the fort road.

They stopped minutes later at Reid's small camp. He slid off Bella and helped Martin safely to the ground. It was nice just to hold Martin close to him. Curse or no curse, Reid liked the silky feel of Martin's hair against his cheek. Textures were noticed more when Martin was around. Sensations were bigger, more intense. Loneliness, isolation and fear were suspended as long as Martin was in his arms.

"Who was back there?" Martin asked.

Reid situated Bella in her shabby lean-to, with a bit of hay and a stroke of gratefulness down her neck. "I'm not so sure they're human."

Martin had heard warnings from his superior in Montreal. "Ah, so we're trying to figure out who's infesting the forest?"

"More like what, not who."

Reid dumped Maddie out of her canvas satchel. She slithered off to hunt, but Martin knew she'd be back before moonrise. Martin crossed his arms at his chest, taking a seat near the fire pit. Reid poked at the coals with a stick, sending sparks high. Flames started to sprout on the new log Reid tossed over the coals. Martin let him have his quiet thoughts. Usually, Reid was more action than thought.

"So," the old Lowland Scotch brogue could be heard in Reid's single syllable, "you got sent all the way out here by the NWC to investigate what I'm investigating for the HBC."

"Since the HBC is more interested in holding to their commodity, id est, their _land,_ I imagine that you're more likely to know what's happening than I do. Once I heard that you were involved, I agreed to examine the rumor myself. I'm one of the few people in the world that can tolerate you. There's a lot of scandal surrounding your name these days. All of it very titillating."

He expected that Shade Reid would haul his big body over him for the comment, and Martin was sorry that he didn't. Reid had difficulty thinking about more than one thing at a time, and if one of those things was sex and the other thing was something that could kill him, he had to make priorities. Martin had no use for priorities. Before Reid could protest, Martin straddled him where he sat. Martin felt strong hands press against his back, search for a new spark of lust under his coat. Reid rubbed his face against Martin's chest, again deeply aware of textures and sensations, things that he never cared about whenever Wilbert Martin wasn't around. Martin hadn't been around enough.

"You need to quit working for the NWC," Reid urged, feeling the outward curve of Martin's ass. "Come work for the HBC. I'll put a word in for you. I can't stand not seeing you more than once a year."

"That's more than some lovers get," Martin argued. He tried to get Reid out of his coat, pushing it off one shoulder before going straight to the buttons of his pants. Martin got a single, teasing touch, then had his hand removed from the moist heat of Reid's crotch. He slumped at Reid's disconsolate expression. "What?"

"We need to think of what we're going to do. I don't know what's out there in the woods, but I think it has something to do with that former lover of yours and that curse he put on us."

Reid was dead serious. Martin stayed where he was, thinking his current lover's lap was the best place to discuss the antics of his former lover.

"Why do you think it's Cyrus?" Martin sent a fingertip around Reid's mouth. "Last time, we agreed that it didn't matter if it was a curse or not."

"Because Cyrus Muir is insane. He used to work for the HBC, and every tale I've heard about him had him engaged in the fanatical, the dangerous. He told everyone that he was a bloody sorcerer!"

"He is, though. I saw him do things that no ordinary human could do. That's why I ran from him. And why he cursed me. He always said he would if I left him."

Martin believed in the curse just enough to think it was possible. How else would he get a man like Reid to fuck him? Only a curse could make Shade Reid stick his meaty cock up Wilbert Martin's hole. Martin swallowed, knowing how good that sounded and how much he wanted to feel all that Reid could give him. Hoping that this chatter about Cyrus Muir and his superpowers might be over, Martin dove his hand into the warm cove of Reid's pants—only to have it pulled out again.

"Will you listen for a second, Martin? I'm trying to tell you that your former lover has not only cursed us, but cursed these woods. Everything round the fort has been void of life the last three months. No birds. No deer. No beavers. That's not really what trappers need, definitely not what the NWC or the HBC need! Even the natives packed up and left! I have enough dried meat and goods to keep me going for another week, but that's it. I can't catch a fish to save my life—and I might have to!"

Now Martin had no choice but to think of Cyrus Muir's evil mind. "He was really all right before—but his father died, left him penniless when all the money was turned over to pay the creditors. Not long after, I left him when he started to tell me what I should believe, how I should think—it wasn't right. Why he's taken over the old fort, I don't know. I believe he's powerful enough to curse everything around him. He's a poison. In a way, he always was. Selfish, avaricious," Martin paused and made an anguished, remorseful face, "but so, so hot in bed. At least, he was at first. My own selfishness nearly got me latched to hell for all eternity. What are those things in the woods, if you have a guess? And how can I help?"

Reid was pleased to hear Martin express guilt, admit selfishness. He'd known that his sweet little tart could be a bit zealous, strange and self-centered. Martin was allowing himself to mature. Naturally, Reid had his own faults, and he was constantly aware of them, though often unable to fix them. He'd loved sex nearly all his life, and once realizing that he had a voracious appetite for it, didn't care who he fucked or who he hurt to get fucked. It'd taken him years to learn his lesson. A few scars from duels and fights certainly helped sink those lessons in, and remind him of what he'd done. But since he'd met Wilbert Martin, the seemingly prim and proper agent of the North West Company, Reid's licentiousness was sated. The only one he wanted now was Martin.

But the tightening in his trousers didn't answer Martin's questions.

"As to what's in the woods, I can't comprehend what they are, but I think I know what they _might_ be."

Martin inhaled sharply. "People in his thrall! Oh, like I was! Except I was more like his sex slave than his ensorcelled soldier. This could be bad. If he's taken a whole armada of trappers under his command, it might be difficult to fight them. Just the two of us, I mean."

"Difficult," Reid smirked, liking the challenge, "not impossible. As to what you can do to help," here, Reid stalled, "I have no genuine idea. I don't even have a plan yet. Every time I think of something," he shook his head, "I can't see how it'll work. If you can come up with a plan, Martin, tell me. I've been at this three months, and haven't thought of a thing."

Martin flung his hands behind him, leaned into the palms. His long legs were crossed at the ankles. He had no idea that he looked alluring and delicious to Reid, but he hoped he did. He also hoped his plan wasn't laughed at. "As much as it pains me to admit it, Cyrus Muir _is_ my former lover, so why don't I just try talking to him?"

Reid reminding him of how dangerous it'd be, that Cyrus Muir might strike him down once he was in sight, had little influence on Martin's decision. Not only would it help return the woods to their rightful state and back in British hands, but it might give Martin and Reid a chance to find out if the curse was breakable.

Reid put Martin in charge of weapon inspections. He had only the flintlock pistol, a sword, and a short hunting knife. Reid's weaponry, more extensive, included a rifle, three pistols, two swords, three hunting knives of various sizes, one dirk, one stiletto, and a fine bow and arrow that he claimed was the most reliable piece of his hunting gear.

They were going to leave for the fort as soon as possible, and no amount of cajoling or orgasmic fun could stop them. Martin watched Reid pack supplies. "It's too bad you want the curse broken, Reid. I thought we were getting along very well together. We'll be nothing to one another if the curse is broken. But I am sorry if the hex turned you into something you didn't want to be."

"Fuck that," Reid said, adding a laugh, giving Martin an affectionate shake at the shoulders. "Before I met you, I stuck my dick in anything that would take it, Martin. Man or woman, it didn't matter! Now, if I've got a cock, it's in my own hand, and all I do then is think about your plump ass bumping against my balls until I cum all over you."

Martin caught his breath as Reid pulled his head back by the braid and nearly sucked the life out of him with a kiss. Martin crept his hand up the inside of Reid's thigh, hoping they could delay the journey ten minutes. The invitation was declined. Reid explained why.

"If I got you into that tent, Martin, I know that the two of us wouldn't want to leave it for hours."

Martin had to agree that the prospect of hours alone together was more satisfying than the quick dip-and-cum he'd had in mind.

Trying to deny how badly they wanted each other made the trek through the woods a long one. For every hundred paces, Martin was pushed against a tree for a tongue-rollicking smooch from Reid, or Reid was taken to the ground by Martin for kisses and a few hurried gropes. At one point, Martin moved quickly to get Reid's cock out of his pants. He was able to pump it a few times, sending Reid into grunts and groans. He licked it at the base and wound his tongue all the way up to the tip, then folded as much of it as he could into his mouth. All he'd wanted the last ten months was to taste Reid's cock again, and it tasted like he remembered, salty, sweet. It angered him when Reid shoved his shoulders.

"Enough of this," Reid said, stuffing himself back in his trousers.

"Seems like a waste of such energy, though," Martin said. "I mean, if I am being sent to my death, the least my lover could do is fuck me like there's no tomorrow. For me, Shade, maybe there isn't."

"That isn't the point. And of course you'll survive, Martin. You have to." Reid's voice quieted but his pace quickened. "I don't know what I'd do if you weren't in the world anymore."

"Likewise," Martin returned, a hand swimming through Reid's sandy mane.

Except for the sounds of their feet, the woods were silent. Nothing seemed to move, just them. Martin was forced to relive Reid's statement that the woods had fallen under Cyrus Muir's curse, too. Martin wondered if that is what the curse was doing to him and Reid, if the two of them were becoming inhabitable, haunted, if permanent lust could do that to souls.

But Reid continued to think of what Martin had said about the nearness of death, the possible loss of tomorrow, and the undeniable appeal of the energy they created. He knew where they were, how close the fort was, and it might be his last chance to share anything with Martin.

He held Martin back by the hand. Martin watched as Reid dropped the pack to the ground, left his coat and hat over it. Martin tossed his own hat on the growing pile of cloth and effects. Letting himself be dazzled by a significant, powerful kiss was manifestation of a simple wish. Then Reid flashed a smile, tenderly cradling Martin's face.

"Not that far from our destination now," said Reid. "And I'm not willing to let there be no tomorrow. What I'm going to do is cause a distraction while you sneak into the fort. You remember what it looks like, yeah?"

Martin nodded. Is this really the only reason they'd dropped their hats and weapons? He could feel the real reason brushing against his thigh, and it heightened his awareness of Reid, their surroundings, that twenty or more enchanted sentries waited to shoot his and Reid's beating, carmine hearts from their bodies.

"I'll distract them," Reid took Martin's hand in his own, anchoring it to his chest, "and hope to God with all the good that's left in me that you come out all right. If I'm not in a decent way, you leave me and you don't look back until you're in Montreal. Got that?"

Martin nodded again. He understood. He got the plan. He'd do what he was told. But he was done with the passive listening. He cupped his hands around Reid's ass and swung their hips together. Unprepared for the shift of weight, Reid lost his balance. The two of them hit the ground. Martin rolled over Reid, already loosening Reid's pants. It took Reid a moment to realize that this was going to happen, whether he'd planned it or not. He ran a hand up Martin's abdomen, feeling the familiar trail of hairs, flats of muscle and heights of bone. He squirmed when his erection popped out of his lowered trousers. It felt good to have it free, but even better when Martin held it gently at the base and took it in his mouth. Reid let Martin do whatever he wanted; everything felt so good when Martin did it.

He liked watching his cock run in and out of Martin's talented mouth, but it was too dark to see a hand in front of his face. Instead, he set his hands in Martin's hair and felt Martin rise and fall. Intense heat burned and pinched Reid from the inside. Outside, he groaned and moaned Martin's name, images of their past encounters flashing through his mind. Just when he thought he was going to reach the welcome apex, Martin stopped. Reid was pushed to his stomach, his hips caught in Martin's grasp. Martin raised Reid's ass up just enough to sink in his throbbing dick. Reid was too tight for Martin to get in far, but he wasn't going to give up so easily. He knew how good it felt for Reid, how good it felt for him. Finally, Reid's writhing stopped and a pressure against Martin's cock told him that Reid had relaxed. He sunk his dick in deeper, loving the wholeness that overcame him, the impassioned groans let loose by Reid.

"Feels good, doesn't it?" Martin whispered. He ran a hand up Reid's back and down to smack one of his ass cheeks. "Doesn't it?" He rammed himself in and out faster, harder, and Reid whined out what Martin wanted to hear. "You said you wanted to cum all over me, Reid. What's stopping you?"

Reid maneuvered around, the two of them dick to dick and eye to eye. But even without touching himself, Reid started to shudder, the shock spreading through his system. Martin flicked his tongue against the rim of Reid's cock, and just that little touch was enough to send Reid over the edge. He got what he wanted, though, with his fluid leaping from his dick onto Martin. Martin stuck a forefinger in it and licked it off.

Reid panted out his achievement on Martin's neck, but wasn't so dizzy that he couldn't seize Martin's cock. When he did, Martin fell with his back to the ground, ignoring the pricks of twigs and stones for the sake of getting all he could out of the sensations twisting his world. Reid pumped at Martin's long, thin cock. He held it close to him, his head on Martin's hip and thigh. Occasionally, his tongue would linger over the shaft, giving new life to Martin's hunt for the perfect orgasm. It could be the final one of his life, and he wanted it to be the most exemplary if orgasms. At the swelling sensation that overcame him, he feared his last orgasm would be subpar, after all. But Reid saved it from disaster when he stuck his fingers up Martin's ass and triggered a whole new sensation. It brought the heat of his groin and the heat of his ass together in one overwhelming surge. He grabbed Reid and held them together, waiting and waiting for the height of his sex to stop pulsing, stop shooting him through with every good feeling he could imagine. He flung his arms around Reid's neck and instigated a lengthy, wide open kiss. He tightened his legs around Reid's and wish he had the strength and time to do it over again.

Instead, in a few minutes he'd seek his doom.

"Would've been worth the ten-minute delay," Reid said, helping Martin out by buttoning his trousers. He'd had a final ogle of Martin's penis, one final compassionate lick from balls to tip. It might be the last time he had the pleasure of seeing it and having it. He patted Martin's crotch, signaling that he was both ready to let the feast beneath the cloth leave him, and that Martin was as dressed as he could get.

"Would've been," Martin agreed. Since Reid was still kneeling in front of him, Martin rubbed Reid's face against him. Reid's surprised him by holding him close a second longer than expected. "Might be the end of our curse, you know. You can go back to fucking anything that tickles your dick, and I can go back to the occasional willing stable lad. I'm afraid it's all cock for me. Perhaps Cyrus' curse is more powerful than I think."

"Remember what I told you," Reid said. He continued to hold Martin, clasping at his buttocks and leaving light kisses over the provoking bump beneath wool. "I'll distract them. You run in. I'll be waiting for you when you get out."

It happened as mastermind trapper and scout Shade Reid had planned, with a few hits and misses. Reid distracted the band of skeletal men—far more successfully than he'd meant to. Whatever Cyrus Muir's curse, he'd done it thoroughly: the ensorcelled, resurrected trappers would stop at nothing to keep the fort and their master secure. They brandished their cutlasses at Reid, and he was quickly surrounded by swiping blades. He kicked and flung them off of him as best he could, but there were so many of them. He had once chance to raise his head from the mad melee, just in time to see Martin's pale face disappear into the blackness of the fort's portal. He flung a percussion cap pistol at a trapper he'd known once, almost unrecognizable with his hollow eye sockets and half his skin rotted away. Reid pulled back the trigger, and with a blast of fire and smoke, a whiff of fulminate of mercury, the corpse trapper lost his head.

The butt of the pistol smacked the head off another that got too close. Reid felt a poke in the back from the point of a sword, and swung around with a fist at the ready. He was in time to see the trapper's head pop right off. As its body hit the ground, Reid could just barely see a green snake uncoil from the white bones. Maddie wasn't the only snake helping. In the strange, predawn light, Reid could see six other snakes. They caught the ankles of the undead trappers and took them down. It made it easier for Reid to sever their heads. He wouldn't have survived if it hadn't been for the snakes.

"Thanks," he said to Maddie. He'd been talking to Maddie for two years, but not until then did he think she actually understood him.

An otherworldly orange glow erupted from the fort. Reid scooped up Maddie and jetted toward the new disaster. Just in the five seconds it took to cover a bit of ground, flames had taken over the whole south side of the fort. Reid started to shake, wondering what'd happened to Martin.

"Martin!" he hollered as loud as he could. The roar of the flames was deafening. "MARTIN!" He couldn't see anything through the entrance but blackness, and the blackness was transforming to the heart-wrenching glow of uncontrollable fire. "MARTIN! MARTIN!"

"I'm right here."

Martin _was_ there, smudged by soot and practically smoking. He bent over, hands at his knees, coughing the smoke out of his lungs. Reid found a few embers stuck on Martin's back. He patted them out with his hand. Perhaps he'd hit Martin too hard, or the smoke of the place had been too much: Martin fainted.

A few hours later, he woke. The canvas tent was bright, but it did a lot to dull the sunshine pouring through the trees. Martin was aware of his own nudity beneath blankets and furs, a smell like fish frying over an open fire, the sweet sound of birds chirping away the morning.

Since Reid was not in the tent, Martin went out to find him. His head ached a little, and he wobbled a few steps before steadying himself. The air was cool against his skin, but emollient and healing as it hit his stinging throat and eyes. He sat his naked rump against the log Reid used as a seat by the fire. Reid wasn't surprised to see him, but a bit speechless about his nudity. He found a blanket and flung it around Martin.

"I don't want you to get sick," Reid said. He turned the fish over in the pan, but it was close to being done. "Guess the curse is lifted on this place. The birds are back. I can catch fish again. I saw deer earlier."

Martin's heart trembled. Now that Reid believed the curse was broken, he wouldn't look at Wilbert Martin with the same crazy lust. Martin still wanted Reid so badly that he could sense his eager shaft springing to life. He tightened the blanket around him and tried to think of something disgusting. He wouldn't think of Shade Reid's tongue over his nipples, or the way Reid— No, he had to think of something worse.

"I killed Cyrus," he declared, hoping that cured the tension between him and Reid, and the growing concern of his needy dick. "I didn't mean to. He came for me. I pulled out the pistol and I shot him. Couldn't believe it. I couldn't shoot a target at five paces with that pistol, but it managed to strike Cyrus Muir right in the head. Blew his face off. Unfortunately, he was kind of—"

"Undead," Reid filled in the blank. "So were the trappers the snakes and I confronted."

"The snakes?"

Reid explained about Maddie and the saurian cohorts that'd saved him from being annihilated by the undead trappers. He pulled the iron skillet out of the fire and arranged the fish on a plate, finishing up his tale with a question. "What did Cyrus say about the curse?" He didn't understand why Wilbert Martin threw back his pretty head and laughed until his enticing silver-blue eyes twinkled.

"There is no curse! There never was a curse!" Martin was so giddy with it that he fell off the log. The blanket fell off him, exposing his nudity to the skies, to Reid. He continued to laugh until Reid helped him to his feet, swept the dirt and grass bits out of his hair. By then, Martin had sobered properly under Reid's intense stare.

"So," again the burly Lowlands accent sent a chill across Martin's skin, "everything we've felt for one another—"

"Is natural. Curse-free. Just plain old lust." Martin sent Reid's hand down to his bare groin. It perked up at Reid's touch, but Reid was still interested in looking Martin right in the eye with a frightening power.

"Maybe it isn't just lust," Reid said. "Maybe I'm in love with you."

Martin was frightened and captivated. "No one's ever fallen in love with me before. Just me, I mean. Usually it's the way I fuck or it's my brain or it's my hair or it's—"

"I love you," Reid said, slipping a hand down Martin's neck, across the bumps of the black queue, over an erect nipple. "All of you, whatever you are and everything about you."

Martin's cheeks overheated. He couldn't believe it, but he was blushing. "Shade, I think I love you, too."

Reid gave him a deep and wet kiss that turned small and exquisite. "But you're recuperating," Reid said, and promptly slung Martin over his shoulder, "and I think you need to be in bed."

"Shouldn't we head to the nearest fort and tell our respective companies what happened?"

"No," Reid dipped into the tent, dropping Martin on the pile of furs and blankets. "There are plenty of provisions for the next week. No one will be expecting to hear from us until then. Now, I've got my cock in my hands and I'm ready to feel your plump ass cheeks bouncing against me as I fuck you hard."

Martin opened his legs, Reid already massaging his chest and for the right moment to stick his dick in. "As long as there aren't any snakes in here, fuck me as long and hard as you want, Reid."

Colin,

## Who is Not

## Quite Dead

I.

The past three weeks around this old Ohio home presented summer from autumn, brought our first frost and our first glaze of snow, and the death of a servant—that'd be me. "Colin, it is so sonorous, isn't it? Syllables of serenity," so said Mrs. Margrove of my name, when I first appeared, nearly fresh off the ship and full of optimism, at the Margroves' house.

Lingercross was the house's name. Ohio, run predominately by Germans (by way of Pennsylvania) and tilled by Britons (by way of New Jersey), has quite a knack for naming its finest locations. My cousin, also dead, although he was very much alive at the time of my arrival, introduced me to Lingercross. "Something about you tells me that you'll fit in very well there."

I wasn't long at Lingercross before I felt that the windows had grown eyes, that the house seemed to breathe at night, simper maniacally in day. The combination of travel, new surroundings and fatigue lent the excuse that my imagination perpetuated a fictitious paranoia. I struggled to ignore the house: rather than pay attention to it, I dove deeper into my work.

In actuality, I wasn't so far from where I would've been had I stayed in Scotland. I was a groundskeeper at Lingercross, and my father and grandfather had been groundskeepers in Galloway. My mother was displeased. "Doing that, when you could be doing that here!" Her pen reached straight to the point, and I sideswiped with my riposte: "Yes, but, see, it is Ohio soil, and my wages are larger by sum." I hadn't yet told her the strangest things of Lingercross, the strangest things I'd heard in all the world.

It started with death.

Am I dead? Well, yes—and no, not exactly. Not so _very_ dead.

And in that abysmal juxtaposition will you find a hint of Lingercross's mystery: It possesses an ancient magic. When one of its own was snatched in the vice of eternal rest, Lingercross retaliated with loathing.

Oh, I'd have given anything to embrace those symbolic words, eternal rest! I'd been dead three whole weeks, twenty-one blasted days, and I'd never been busier, never been addressed more or seen more.

The tall clock in the front hall chimed the first quarter of the ninth hour. The door opened, and in sauntered the lord and lady of Lingercross, James and Eugenie Margrove. They carried with them the heavy scent of damp earth, soggy leaves, and the house's exterior limestone, a fading odor of wet horses and dinner hosted by their neighbors. Illuminated by the electric chandelier in the high domed ceiling, Mrs. Margrove was shiny-faced, red-eyed, and James, strong of brow and thick of jowls, had never looked so thoroughly relieved to be home.

"That shall be the last of that carriage, I'm afraid," rumbled James, turning out of his coat with the help of reliable housekeeper, Mary. "Goldroad is getting too old for nocturnal excursions in all weathers—heat in the summer, storms in October. Positively ghastly! Poor old friend should have better in his twilight years! No, my dear, we'll turn him out to pasture, and that is that. We will have to get used to an automobile."

"But they're not nearly as romantic as a chaise and four," argued Mrs. Margrove. "Or a chaise and one, as in Goldroad's case. Oh, dear, if you feel so settled about it, then it must be so. Here, Colin, be a good lad and take my effects, would you? Oh, wait, I forgot. You're still—well, still—" She looked me up, down, up again to my eyes, a shield of fire in pale gray irises, but she couldn't bring herself to say what I was—what I wasn't.

"He's not quite dead, my dear," James finished on his wife's behalf.

"Well, yes, I know," she said, full of pity. "We've really got to do something about that. I wish our children would be more helpful."

James applied a handkerchief to droplets on his chapeau. "What do you expect our offspring to do? Sarah is still away at school. Virginia has sense, but she's no mind for magic, never did have. Lavinia has her head full of flowers and nonsense. All she can think of are vows and doilies and cakes."

"Not cakes!" Mrs. Margrove had a mind with a limited track. "If she eats too many of those, we'd have spent a glorious amount on a trousseau she'll get no use of! Good glory, what will become of that girl if all she can think of now are of cakes? Colin." She turned upon me swiftly, again shocked to see me drowned in a kind of misty teal light as if I'd swallowed stars after dying. "Colin, you've become like our own son, you know. It pains me to see you this way. If only Eldrid would return! Eldrid would set you to rights, quick as anything! He's the only one of this house that's ever managed to understand its pithy little quirks."

I was monumentally interested in any information the Margroves had on the whereabouts of their eldest issue. Eldrid had matured beyond the primitive mannerisms of his youthful years, and, with his parents slipping into the idleness and serenity of ripened age, had taken over the management of the household, the family's money, the leaseholders, the formation of crops and the distribution of them. He had a genius mind, a generous and wonderful spirit. We were the same age, born in the same month, and that initiated our friendship, and from there it'd elevated into an incipient sympathy, then an arrangement that glorified the standards and benefits of human passion.

Though the Margroves, and even the servants, did not much discuss it, there was a kind of hiss in the air that enlarged nascent gossip: Eldrid was inadvertently responsible for my death. He'd left the day after its occurrence. No one had heard from him since.

The talk of Lavinia and cakes was the direct result of her impending marriage to a respectable farmer in Pickaway County, on Saturday next. We anticipated several new house guests, and that, more than Lavinia's departure into matrimonial independence (if two words of antithetical meaning can be attached to one another), had sent a quiver of apprehension into every chamber, hallway, linen closet, airing cupboard, pantry and toilet. Escaping the barriers of Lingercross was a dream of mine, but I was plastered ineradicably to my station. I tended to the whims of a mother quite beside herself with an admixture of glee, fear and grief; and I showed viable concern for a bewildered father who continues to wonder how he came to acquire a trio of daughters all of marriageable age. He was relieved to have his son taken off his hands, and he shared the sentiment given by his wife, that I was like their second boy. Their son had chosen me.

Eldrid and myself were the only two who knew how I came to be half-ghost, half-man.

"Uncle Shelton, my brother," said Mrs. Margrove, "will be here at the house the day after tomorrow, and you will have to tell him the story, Colin. I've not had the chance to write to him about it, and just as well that he's coming. He'll know as soon as he looks at you that something's gone horribly awry. If only Eldrid would come back! Oh, but he will," she curved her elbow around mine, or attempted to, and when no solidity met her, she grunted in disdain. "Shelton won't know a way to help, but he'll have his opinions, and they're far more worthwhile to hear than his advice."

II.

By my closeness with Eldrid, and Shelton Krause doting on his nephew, I had the privilege of treating Uncle Shelton as my own avuncular being. He swept through the door, staggered, pulled off his plug hat with an eye on the light blooming above him.

"Good God, what an atrocity," he exclaimed, and from my place at the base of the staircase, where Lingercross tradition had us servants meet guests, I could smell the liquor on his breath. "Never will get used to this electrical nonsense, never will. And the telephone," he wriggled out of his coat with Mary's help, "never will get used to that at all, either. The tediousness of inventions! Why must Americans continue to invent? I wish they'd invent a cheap single-malt drink, that's what I'd wish they'd do, if they must do something! Hello, my dear sister, you're looking mighty plump and proud of yourself."

Mrs. Margrove cringed as her brother kissed her cheek, and rather toppled over her, snored, snorted when his sister smacked him awake.

"You're looking mighty plump and proud of yourself, Ginny." He had no notion of the repetition. Everything within a two-minute span was new to Shelton. "Don't crow too loudly just yet—poor girl's still got a week to go before she's shackled to that—that who's-its—name's gone right out of my brain. What I need is a drink."

"What you need, brother, is a good and hearty meal."

"Food! I get tired of chewing. Makes my jaw sore. What Americans ought to invent, if they must invent something, and it seems that they must by the score, they ought to invent," he burped and excused his brother-in-law for it, "invent a way to turn solid food into liquid, and maybe then I'd eat my sufficiency instead of drinking it. Hello, James. You look constipated today. And a bit hung-up, as if you've got a question hanging on your lips. Where's that lad of mine, the Galloway one?"

James, sure of my wish to have the scene over, openly gestured to me, but his hand formed a fist as his brother's eyes landed on my washed-out form, and he blinked to make the staircase less visible through me.

"Gone and gotten yourself dead, have you, Colin? That's damn awful. Didn't know. Someone should've informed me. Suppose it means you can't touch anything now."

"Afraid not, sir. Unless it is—"

"Yes, I know, of the ambient temperature of the room, or your soul, or however that goes. Incredible inconvenience."

"Yes," I remembered my premiere hour of being half-dead, the lack of being able to touch and console Eldrid, "yes, a terrible inconvenience, sir."

Shelton found a flask in his pocket and sipped from it. "Must make your work difficult, Colin."

"We've moved him to the house from the grounds," James expounded, "and everyone's been very agreeable about it."

"Why shouldn't they be, James? Damn it all. Other than your translucence, you look splendid, Colin. How'd you up and die then? Not too much drink, was it? Everyone's always so damn interested in threatening me with death by way of drink. The world's mostly liquid, isn't it? Damn stuff falls from the sky! It's a miracle we don't all drown. Well, out with it—out with it, Colin. Tell us how it was done."

I'd prepared a simple speech. The blatant truth was curved slightly. "There was an accident one night, almost a month ago, and I'm afraid I was on the mortal side of unintentional bloodshed, sir."

Mrs. Margrove rushed to put a stop to any forthcoming queries; she would not have Shelton suspecting there was more. Of course, there was, yet none of them knew precisely what it was, only that it _was_.

"We are hoping, Shelton, that Eldrid will soon return from his sojourning and set Colin back to his traditional self. They are so attached to one another, you see. I'm sure Eldrid is just trying to figure it all out. Been so long since anyone at the house has died this way."

Shelton examined me, his sister, brother, and back to me. "Damned despicable house. Damn its curse, and damn us for letting it do whatever it wills. Making ghosts out of us! Ah, Colin, my lad, if Eldrid truly loves you, then he'll bring you back."

The whole house and its staff knew of me and Eldrid. In any other world, any other place, we would be despised, perhaps prosecuted. Not at Lingercross. Everyone there was alien in their thinking, freed from conventional restraints.

Again, I waited for the announcement of Eldrid's return home with as much anticipation as my heart could bear. It was dreadful, his going away, but, since one of us had to go, it had to be the one capable of leaving Lingercross. The second I stepped beyond the borders, I materialized in the grand front hall. Once, in desperation, I'd tried to climb a tree and hop upon the grounds of freedom, and fell upon the foyer floor instead.

"Let's not loiter in the hall, Shelton." James slapped his brother on the shoulder. Mary guided them to a parlor readied with coffee, sandwiches and a good fire. Mrs. Margrove, endeavoring to set Shelton on the path to sobriety, shuffled behind. "Perhaps a glass of milk in lieu of alcohol today, eh, Sheltie?"

I sighed, unable to bear another second in the hall. If Eldrid was coming home, it would be on a date and day my ears were forbidden from hearing.

When he returned, I prayed it was with the capability to anchor me to my body. As I was not _quite_ dead, I was not quite ready to be wholly dead, either. I was just beginning to enjoy being alive, too. Then—the accident, and I was gone into blackness for several seconds, resurrected to Eldrid's sobbing, and no tactility, no way to console him but useless words. I shut my eyes, willing the house to take me to the unused parlor in the western annex.

There I lay, my corporeal self in a box of pine, on a table of wood and slate, waiting for total separation or a return to wholeness. I longed for unity, for completion. The dreadfulness of being forever divided from Eldrid cooled my willingness to obtain infinite slumber. Our love seemed the only representation of infinity I was able to accept.

III.

Being in a situation upheld by death, I had none of the troublesome activities those in the living world endured. Chief among them: bathing, eating, sleeping. Through the last fortnight, I spent long hours in the upstairs library, alone.

A fine reader from a young age, but too busy and too wearied by a groundskeeper's duties lately to indulge the hobby, I had, at last, found one reason to be grateful for half-death. I'd finished ten books already. The library was substantial, maintained almost entirely by Eldrid, with a smidgen of help from his academic sister Virginia.

At my request, no fire burned in the library, so that the furniture maintained its tepidity, allowing me to lounge on it. While many of the rooms in Lingercross had been properly wired for electricity, the library was one of the few that had no modern conveniences. I lit candles, a sense of nostalgia seeping out of the matchstick and warm wax.

It continued to rain, soughing through the gutters, adding a backdrop to the dreariness of _Great Expectations_. If I had no need to force my concentration on Dickens, I would've wandered into the horror of having a spirit seated on the sofa, a body in box in a nearby chamber. Perhaps I hadn't read ten books since my demise from sheer talent and speed, but as a result of shaking myself free from the ghastly daydreams of incurable weirdness. I was seated on the sofa; additionally, I was in a box. Wasn't that the epitome of peculiar?

Eldrid had told me all I knew of Lingercross. It was one of the first topics the two of us ever discussed together, a mere two weeks after the start of my employment.

In the back garden, I happened upon a rabbit that I believed to be dead. Rabbits do die of illness and old age, just as often as the dogs and cats of the house slay them. I'd gone to the shed for a shovel to take the carcass elsewhere, and upon my return, my breath was snagged as the rabbit returned to its feet and tore across the grass!

Confused, I ventured into the kitchen to find Mr. Houghton, the head groundskeeper. Instead of Mr. Houghton, I found Eldrid Margrove slicing an apple.

Mr. Eldrid had been a curiosity to me the first fortnight, quiet, conspicuously handsome, engaging in activities many would think improper for a man of the house, such as preparing his own afternoon eats. As shy as he was, he was severely self-sufficient, wishing to do as much as he could for himself. His brown eyes were bland but for the spirit he poured into them, and at times he pierced me so sharply with a well-placed glare that I felt encumbered by inexplicable nudity. Since I'd never encountered any difficulty with Mr. Eldrid, and I suspected that many of the comforts and gifts I received were thanks to his efforts, I was plenty emboldened to straightforwardly ask:

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Eldrid, but I was wondering if you could tell me whether or not Lingercross has a bit of an enchantment on it?"

Eldrid continued slicing an apple. I wondered if its companions in the orchard withered to rot once on the ground, or if they simply maintained the peak of their perfection. Eldrid, dark hair in waves off his brow, and some mark of a hat's weight pressed into it, wouldn't look out of place among magicians and princes of fairy stories. While I anticipated a response, favoring a belief that I'd receive no answer, he placed the apple slivers in a wooden bowl.

"Have a bite, if you'd like."

Food was far from my thoughts then, my stomach churning in the opposite direction. "No, thanks just the same."

"Sit, at least. I know you hardly have a chance to sit during the day."

Eldrid had sidled to the servants' small table at kitchen's end. I chose a chair removed two yards from him. Behind the glass window, a fine view of the yard, the garden, the spot where a rabbit had been miraculously resurrected.

"Many strange things have I seen with my eyes since I've been here."

"Strange things?" started Eldrid. "What a shame. They're such nice eyes."

His compliments, handed to me in sweetness and a voice so absolutely deadpan that it was impossible to take him seriously, had no influence on my response. "Strange things, sir," I repeated dumbly. "Flies in my room that won't die, no matter how many times they are swatted. The flowers in the vase in the grand hall have been the same flowers that were in that vase when I got here. Just today, I saw a rabbit in the garden, which I would swear on my life—"

"Don't swear on your life, Colin. Swear on _mine_ , if you must pick one."

"On _my_ life, sir, that it was dead. The moment I returned to it, with a spade from the shed, it—it ran off, sir. Is the house enchanted? Does nothing here ever die?"

Eldrid fixed a gaze upon me, steadily measuring—measuring what, I couldn't decipher. My ability to understand, perhaps, my ability to relate. He was such a good-looking man, square in jaw with a small, pink mouth, a fine nose if it drooped a bit at its point, that I hardly minded being stared upon by such a face.

At last, ready to answer, he broke an apple slice in half but didn't eat it. "Does anything we love, love completely, ever really die? That is the involved question the house is always trying to answer."

"Begging your pardon, sir—"

"Eldrid, please. I'm not some infernal old man."

I skipped over the syllables of his name, paused, and attempted to reach him another way. "The house is blessed, then, by magic folk?"

"If you're implying that we Margroves are magic folk," Eldrid grinned, "then I'd say you're the most observant visitor we've had here in many years. Not everyone notices. Do you think Mr. Houghton believes the house is magic, that we're magic? Not by any degree."

My lack of surprise mellowed me further. "Who else knows?"

"Me, my siblings, my parents, a couple of the housekeepers, Mrs. Stiles the cook, the laundress, and—and who am I forgetting? My uncle, of course, Uncle Shelton. You're not going to leave us," he was genuinely alarmed, "are you, Colin? I've grown accustomed to seeing you pottering about the yard, and your boots heavy on the stairs at night, thudding past my bedroom door."

"I should take the back staircase, if I'm interrupting—"

"I hope this bit of magic doesn't scare you off."

Magic never had an ability to frighten me. I'd grown up around it, in a way, perhaps without the potency of its presence at Lingercross. "Do the people of the house die," I stopped when a light in his eyes flickered, and I forced myself to say it, "Eldrid?"

"Does anything we love ever really die? Only Lingercross knows. Have some apple, Colin. I can't eat all of this."

I was expected to open my mouth and allow him to feed me a bite. The sourness of the apple collided against the spice I tasted off his fingers. He let them linger on my lips, first to touch and to hover, then to draw away, taking with them the veil between us.

In all my twenty-two years, I'd never been pursued by anyone for an affair of the heart, neither woman nor man. While family and friends around me gleefully accepted love, I was broken from it. I had no money, no looks, no sharp wit or intelligence that appreciated me to anyone, and I hardly walked up and down the street without causing a clumsy incident. When my sister asked if I ever meant to marry, I said, my throat tight, "Why does any man ever _mean_ to marry? I can't quite grasp the idea of it." Though not a misanthrope, I wasn't exactly making the world shine with love and happiness, and any sort of carnal love was simply out of the question.

With Eldrid Margrove, I was propositioned to love for the first time. Naturally, it became an ordeal trying to explain to him that I'd never thought of being in love before. There was much giggling and blushing and stuttering, and that was just from my end. Eldrid had always lived a solitary life, other than his family.

"And with the family the way they are," he roved his eyes to the ceiling, and I saw the candlelight bouncing off the whites, "and with this house the way it is, well, I'd always wanted—desired—thought it might be nice if—if I could find someone to be with."

"You found me," I said, tucking my hand inside his coat, and knowing in an instant the warmth of his body through shirt and vest. His breath landed near my ear, in my hair, and portions of me began filling up, unusually tight and loose all at once. He tested the taste of me using a small kiss on my forehead. I was glad it was late, thankful for the invite to meet with him there.

"The house found you." His voice turned low, gravelly. The tension in his arms gripped my waist. A hand, fingers gently curved, explored my thigh, the curve of my backside. "It brought you to me."

He sought the vastness in me the way I'd grown to accept, and touched on a soft place in my soul that made my sight twist, my abdomen flip. That was the moment he chose to dive in, grab my jaw and hold in me in a long kiss. My eyes opened involuntarily: One of the lamps had gone out, and the smell of oil and smoking wick stank up the room. The lamps on the mantel continued to cast light into four corners, and while Eldrid opened a window, I turned down the mantel wicks. My hands shook, I was nervous and elated. Eldrid had been lonely, trapped at Lingercross, unloved and sorry about it. Perhaps the house had summoned me from across the ocean, but if it brought Eldrid happiness, I could've been summoned anywhere, even, I thought, into death.

Eldrid stood by the window, drinking in the sight of me, disheveled, collar undone and shirt open across my chest. I rubbed and scratched a significant patch of hair.

"I hope you don't mind hairy men."

"I don't mind you."

"Almost necessary in the winter where I grew up, you can imagine."

"It gets cold here, too. You'll see that when November comes. You're young to be that hairy."

"Starting shaving when I was five."

"Really?"

"No, not really, eejit. Thirteen, more like. You should see my mum's legs."

"I'd rather see yours. You. All of you. Hair and all."

He swallowed. I could see the lump rising in his throat, a lace of perspiration on his forehead, wondering: Had I the power to do this to him? It was no wonder people fell in love, with the beauty of the loss of control, with the realization of possessing control of a secret kind.

To compliment his response, he set his face to my chest, and worked his tongue around my nipples, with nibbles, licks and smears of spit in a line to my waist. The shakiness of my legs made it impossible to stand, and, reading my mind, Eldrid grabbed my hand, led me to the bed, and smiled over me before he took another kiss. He had love in his kisses, and as he pawed and petted his way across my chest, undid the buttons on my trousers, he executed marvelous teases with his tongue, and let each embrace become a watery mess. I didn't mind, inhaling the smell of his saliva, a smell that matched his body as it heated and sweated.

I was less aware of myself, more aware of Eldrid. Less aware of the light in the room, the cold air shifting through the open window, and more aware of the blackness behind my eyelids, splashed with green and red as spasm of pure and welcome agony arched across my being.

I rolled around him, over him, and set him beneath me, cupping our hands together, leaving a trail of red specks where I bit at his flesh. He still had his shirt on, still across his back, and when he pushed me around, I saw how it clung to him. I scraped the cloth off, licking moist skin hilly over muscle and bone. He clasped my wrist, leading my hand inside the warm cove between his thighs, just cooler than the erection dangerously brushing my forearm. My own furnace of desire had the luxury of being pressed between his back and my front, and I tried to ignore it, tried to think of Eldrid, touching Eldrid.

He whipped me around again, quick and fast, letting the two of us see each other. I shuddered, never believing I could feel so close to someone, safe in the coils of lust. I winced, grimaced, wishing he would do something, anything, bounce against me, let me take him with my willing hands, my mouth. Then I heard him sniff, and a wet drop from the point of his nose landed on my cheek. I never did hear from anyone that men had the capability to cry in bed, but facing the magnificence of love, and so unexpected, joy can permeate a man's ardor more than anything else can. My palms flattened against the lower plain of his back, slid down to the coarse skin and thick, sparse hairs of his prat. A few choice fingers grazed the crack. I waited until his quiver of pleasure ended, and his eyes again filled, before I attempted to break the rhythm of our breaths.

"Maybe the house did bring me here." I spilled the words close to his mouth. "But I'll stay, stay forever, since I can't love anyone else in the world, and I know it."

He lifted his hips, the crack of his arse taking my fingers by surprise. He came down again, exhaling hard, and curved downward across my abdomen. The muscles there trembled, reacting to his presence, his breath, his kisses. Though I thought nothing between us could rise to a higher degree of intensity, the smile he bestowed sent me flushing red from neck to penis to toes.

"I love you, too, Colin."

The coolness of tears remaining on his face was alluring and provocative against the heat inside my thighs. But it was nothing to the wetness as he swabbed his tongue on the sensitive underside of my needful cock. I let a tear of my own dribble out the side of my eye.

Everything smelled like sweat and rain.

IV.

I heard footsteps in the distance, contorting the memory of sex into the shapeless present. I looked up from the pages of the Dickens, espying the door, catching no sign of light betwixt it and floor. Yet I stayed motionless, waiting for the footsteps to reach their destination. No one with any inclination to wander came to the library at God's unattended hours of the morning. I did smell rain, just a hint of it, like the wet limestone at the top of the library chimney, a hint of damp ashes in the grate. Footfalls deadened, and silence reigned anew.

My breath was loosed, and I closed the book to return to the memories of Eldrid and I in bed, where we'd spent every night since, as I'd moved into his chamber the next day. It was happiness to be with him, and remarkable at how quickly the members of the house cottoned on to our togetherness. If we were any other place but Lingercross, we'd be condemned, sent to live elsewhere where such aberrancy was less disturbing, or sending ourselves to live nowhere, to be lost, nomadic, tied to nothing but one another.

I could ignore it no longer, the scent of rain. Since my death, my senses were often heightened, particularly once the sun set. Nearing the door, I was forced to withdraw a step as it flung open. I blinked: the flame of a small lantern outlined the physiognomy of my partner in dreams.

"Eldrid," I said, trying to appear calm, but nothing in his appearance calmed me. My contentment shriveled to concern. "You look dreadful. And why are you here at—at whatever wonderful single hour of the morning it is?"

His disbelief left him at the threshold, poised for flight. He looked ghastly, but his eyes, like I'd seen them in memory, sparkled in drops of anguish.

"You knew I was dead when you left. You can't be so shocked that I'm still here. If you wish to leave again, I'll understand," and I dragged my leaded feet nearer to him, "but I wish you wouldn't go. No one in the house blames you."

"Blames me?"

I waited, having ached for weeks to hear his voice again. The distress in it, in his whole being, screamed at me.

"I blame myself." He let out a gulping sob, wiping his nose on the damp sleeve of his coat. "I-I pushed you, when I didn't mean to, we were—"

"Only playing."

"Roughhousing," he added, "and you fell, hit your head on the cabinet—and the next thing I knew, you were—were there, in flesh—and there, out of flesh."

"I _was_ present," I said smartly, "I do remember, thank you."

"I repeated it for my own benefit."

"It was an accident."

"But no one ever means to kill the one he loves."

It was my chance to give an unguarded, appreciative smile; after all, I still loved him, even without the weight of solidity. Love does not recognize gravity or bodily extinction. "The ones we love never die."

Eldrid snickered, scraping a wet streak from his face. "Very funny." He drew in a long breath that quaked his shoulders, sent the flame in the lamp's short chimney into a dance. "Colin, I am sorry—so sorry."

I rushed to him, the two of us able to stare at one another, the color in him deepened by the hue of the flame, the color in me all but gone. I wished I could touch him, and lifted my hand to try. The rain had soaked into his coat, cooled him, and I could brush the very top of the fabric.

"I'm sorry, too," I said, unable to respond another way. "I've missed you, you insufferable, sweet jackass. Where've you been? Your sister's marriage is this upcoming Saturday, and Uncle Sheltie and the rest of your formidable gang were just beginning to show signs of consternation that you'd miss the grand event."

His tight mouth reluctantly swept itself into a smirk. He loved it when I tumbled my R's on certain words, falsely raising their importance and my own self-worth.

"Come," his tone was as it used to be, when he'd sweep us off to his chamber late at night, "come with me, and I'll show you what I've brought."

He talked while I listened, traipsing behind him, down one floor and another. We were heading to the front parlor, I suspected, then caught my thoughts wandering from his short tale.

"It has taken me this many weeks to find one, and no one ever said I would, no one! I had to go to three counties to find her—three! I found her at the heart of Vinton County, there among cows and hills and the stillness of the place. She nearly shot me, once I was on her property. But she took a look at me, and she said, 'Oh, it's you. I've been expecting one of you.' Do you believe that? She would, wouldn't she!"

"Who?" I queried, annoyed that he'd had an adventure without me. "Who would?"

Eldrid swung in the parlor door, and there was a potent amount of light, both electric and flame. The glow poured upon a diminutive young woman, garbed in a fine blue evening gown, her lemony hair in the nicest, shapeliest pompadour, a glint of a tiara at the apex. I had a strange notion to bow, but was arrested by the blue of her eyes, the intensity of them, as if she'd broken off pieces of an autumn welkin and placed them there. So enormous were they that I could even see my spectral self shift in the shadows. If she was fully human, I would've been astounded.

"I believe I had the privilege of meeting many of your kin in my homeland," I voiced, sans proper introductions. "I'm Colin Farquar, who is not quite dead."

"I'm Catriona Dougal," she said, her brogue thicker than mine. "Very pleased to make your acquaintance, not-quite-dead Colin. Now, lads, with the niceties out of the way, shall we get started?"

From a chair, Catriona drew into her hands a leather pouch, and from the pouch appeared three books, a fountain pen, and a soft-sided cowhide journal, whose contents, it appeared, were invisible. She applied the pen nib to a fresh page.

"Colin Farquar, Case Number One Hundred and Sixty-seven. October, in the year nineteen-hundred and aught-seven. Ah, sevens, that'll be lucky, that will. Don't worry, I've heard me grandmother telling great tales of Lingercross House. Ah, she used to love comin' here, she did, back when you Margroves were making a mess of that gift-curse ye got from us. The great bard did be getting it right when he was penning that phrase about mortals being fools. I'll be needing to see the corpse. That's very important. I'll assume, too, that the house has been keeping ye all preserved, eh, Colin?"

"Er," I dribbled across a formidable lay of words, and yet had to choose one from a vast selection, "yes." I couldn't even recall to what question I'd provided an answer. All I could do was look at Eldrid, my wonderful Eldrid. "You rode all the way to Vinton County to find a witch? It's more than a hundred miles away!"

"I _had_ to ride all the way to Vinton County to find a witch," he replied. "Between such an exhausting quest to find a helpful witch, or living the rest of my life without you, do not wonder with so much puzzlement which I would choose."

"Yeah, dearie," Catriona stuck the capped fountain pen behind her ear, it clashed adorably with her tiara, "how many of us fairy witches do you think are left hereabouts? We're rarer than we once were. I'll have you wholly yourself again, Not-quite-dead Colin. I promise ye that."

V.

The parade to my body roused almost the everyone in the house. Whether Eldrid's boots were louder than ever, or if Catriona left a trail of waking-potion behind her, I failed to determine during that critical sojourn. Suddenly, doors were flung ajar, and there were the girls in their dressing gowns, Mr. and Mrs. Margrove likewise, and Uncle Shelton, who ought to have been comatose with drink at that hour. I heard snippets of dialogue, questions, answers given unconfidently, more questions directed to me, to Eldrid.

Lavinia giggled, the situation farcical, and Mrs. Margrove shushed her. "Do you think it very amusing to have the two of them," meaning myself and Eldrid, "separated like this? You wouldn't like it for yourself, Lavinia." The affianced supposed she would not like it in the least, and maintained strict silence and wide-eyed glances at Catriona until our group fanned out in the unused parlor.

I thought the sight of me framed in pine would undo Eldrid, but his anxiety over Catriona's ability proved more potent than sorrow.

Catriona leaned over the box, waved a hand in front of me, put an ear to my chest. "Aye, true then, he's not quite dead, and the house has its magic gripped on him, no doubt of it! Well, guess I'd better—now what'd I do with—ah—there it is."

She took out the pen from behind her ear, made a note in the black book, then thumbed through two of the three books nearly at the same time. She was busy, animated, aware that every eye of the place was on her, but for the instances Eldrid and I shared peeks of intrigue and hope at one another.

Out of her leather satchel, she unwound a jute rope with many fragrant bundles knotted to it. One wreath was thrown over my neck, and the other over my body in the box. A collective gasp rose in the room. The wreath on my body had sprung to life, like I'd seen the rabbit do. Vines and flowers smothered me in greenery and color. I touched the cold object suspended from my neck, and it was the same jute as before.

"It's supposed to do that," Catriona said, beak poised over the red book. She closed it with a snap, and brought out a seemingly plain white pillar candle, breathed on its wick until a flame burned. This was set to rest at the top of my head—the version of me in the coffin. "All the rest of you can clear out of here, if you will, that's the way, yes, just go on—go on—we'll all be set to right in the morning, you'll see."

Like a gentle shepherdess, she ushered the family from the hall, everyone but me and Eldrid. They were too tired and bewildered to protest, though many of them flung worried glances upon me. I straightened my shoulders, endeavoring to exhibit a confidence in the witch's remedy. The door closed, providing needed finality.

"Colin, Eldrid." She herded us, too, and we listened with acute ears. "When that candle gets low, the ghost of you will disappear, Colin, and you'll be sucked back into your body. When he's disappeared, Eldrid, you have to kiss him—his body, I mean."

"Kiss him?" Eldrid questioned hesitantly.

"Of course, don't you know the fairy tales? Kisses always break enchantments, and the house, before it brings him back, needs to be sure you really love him."

"That I do." The assurance in his tone brought me a smile.

Catriona ignored the amorousness. "Colin, when you wake up, it'll be some time in the past, but I don't know when, so don't ask. The recent past. You'll remember being dead," she fanned a hand to indicate everyone else, "the rest of them won't. That's the best I can do, lads, and I'd better get some shut-eye, if you don't mind." Catriona, in her puffy evening gown, lay on the sofa and snored in an instant.

Eldrid and I sat in the window seat, waiting for the rest of morning and the death of a stout candle. Catriona's snores began to blend with noises of birds, the distant sounds of a house beginning to stir.

"Colin," Eldrid said, "you're fading—lightening."

I looked at my hands against my bent knees, and I seemed more translucent than ever. The candle wick sputtered.

"Colin," he shook with urgency, "if you have a chance, stop me, stop me from—"

"It didn't hurt," I said, "and I didn't feel anything. Don't forget to kiss me."

"But you must stop me. Promise you will."

"If the house lets me, I will."

He hadn't heard, and made a grab for me before everything wound into a spiral, then doused in nothingness. I remembered thinking, "I must've died again, and now that's twice."

VI.

I flung open my eyes, aware and awake. My chest filled with air, life, and the quickening throb of blood poured through me. A thrum carried on behind my ears. My hands were in color, and my body felt hot and cold. I was back. Colin, alive once more.

The situation ahead of me was well-known. It was the hour that I'd died. Minutes ahead, I would be gone. I had promised Eldrid that our fate would change.

Warm in our bed, I forced myself upright. In front of the fire, as I'd witnessed him three weeks ago, Eldrid. The firelight burnished his nude form, his thighs, arms and face, as he pitched two logs upon the pulsing embers.

"El," I began, "come back to bed. Why stare at the fire? It's a mild enough night. It is still September."

"I was making plans for the day."

This wasn't quite how we'd first acted it. I hadn't spoken at all. I'd remained asleep until he returned to the bed, dragged my foot from beneath the covers, tugged and pulled and roughened me into wrestling with him. The mention of plans was true of what he'd said, but his plans had been abruptly undone the moment my head smacked into the cabinet's corner. I cringed, looking away from the murderous furniture. Tomorrow, I'd have the rubbish removed.

Eldrid stalked towards me, inched his hand beneath the covers as he'd done before, set his fingers on my ankle. I ripped it away, tearing the linens aside, and refused to let death come for me in the presence of such life. I wrapped my arms at his middle. He tensed his hands in my hair.

"Do you love me?" I asked, being coy, scraping fingertips inside his leg, and pressed down my palm, hard, to bring his flaccid organ to attention. Eldrid gave a squeak that transformed to a groan. It was marvelous to touch him again, to have that empty space in me refilled by his skin, heat and anatomy.

"It wasn't exactly my plan," he leaned in, forcing me to welcome him, "to stay in bed with you all day."

"No one will mind." I let him taste my collarbone, the dip at the base of my neck. "You know what I was thinking about just now? I was almost dreaming it. The first time I ever thought you wanted me."

"In the kitchen," Eldrid murmured between deep breaths, "when I fed you an apple piece. You had the most wonderful mouth." He kissed it to be sure of its wonderfulness, then nodded. "Still do."

"And I asked you if the house was magical."

"I was always honest with you."

"If there's no death here, do we get to stay forever?"

"Ah, now, Colin," with one hand he prisoned my wrists above my head, and his other bound our cocks together, bringing us a coinciding rush of pleasure, "you know the ones we love never really die."

I hadn't quite died, that was true. Maybe at Lingercross, no one did die, but looped around in a heavenly replay of his happiest times. Eldrid bit at my shoulder, gasping my name. I was thankful to feel him, have him, return the love he'd ignited. A magnificent pain blossomed as he entered me, and I was thankful this moment of forever was mine.

## Zandry

of

## Bonewood

The previous two days of Flint's life had not been great, not by any stretch of the imagination. Difficult as it was for him to believe, at noon on the third day, he was already applying a sorrily soiled handkerchief to the sore spot below his nose, already catching more drops of his oozing blood. The only good thing about his current predicament was the hunched over position of his small-boned, rather wiry body. And that was only classified as good since it kept Onelis from lobbing him in the face for roughly the fourth time in a row. Flint could say one thing about these highlander dudes: widespread rumors of their posh hospitality were excessively exaggerated.

Flint tried a tactic he hadn't before. He chuckled. That might have something to do with the couple swallows of drink romping around his stomach. He didn't even know what the drink was but that it stank and it burned. His laughter deepened. After years of trying to separate Lutter from drink, by lecturing, by tough-love, by self-imposed sobriety, the moment he's on the tough land of the Outer Borders, scarred and ravaged by war, what did he do but go to the only saloon in town and knock back a couple? If Lutter were there, he'd be enjoying a mighty fine guffaw right about then. Then again, if Lutter were there, Flint would have no reason to be in the highlands himself. He'd be at home. In the city. It'd be time for his mid-afternoon, post-lunch nap on the drawing room sofa, then back to the office from three until seven.

It was possible that Lutter was gone because his spouse had been a first-rate bore.

Maddened by the idea, Flint gave a wild swing that landed far closer to his target than he'd believed possible. But Onelis had a soft belly, jiggly and protrusive, and its padding wound inexplicably around his entire torso. Flint's knuckles had met a well-padded sternum.

Onelis just looked at the fist stuck to his chest. "Was that supposed to do something, _eskaku_?"

If he heard that word one more time, Flint was going to start throwing some barstools. It'd taken him ages, and a clandestine exchange of vocabularies with the hotel's chambermaid, before he found out that it was an insult. The highland patois of that hellhole known as Bonewood contained a few linguistic beauties, such as eskaku. Roughly translated, it implied that Flint was the fecal matter horses left behind on roadways.

"You," Flint struggled to say, "are a blind suck worm that lives in the sea and—" His mouth received the side-chop of a hand. It didn't hurt as much as the punch to the nose.

Onelis removed Flint's hand before he had a chance to do it. With the whole crowd at the saloon in a jolly mood—they did love a nice brain-bash—Onelis lifted the pipsqueak interloper like he weighed as much as a feather pillow. Flint tightly shut his eyes, old prayers to the gods under his breath. And just when he began to feel Onelis' hands leave him, the creak in the batwing doors of the saloon told of a newcomer. The titillated crowd fell silent. Flint felt himself fall—not over the bar but straight to the ground.

He woke to the strangest sound, a kind of repetitive hiss. Was it a hiss? No, more like a hollowness. It was not a steady noise, either, but varied. Indisputably varied. Quite familiar, too, in a way. Struck by a sensation of having gone back to his boyhood, Flint's eyelids peeled back. Above him, the sky, whose true blue color could only be found in the highlands on a clear day. It had the strangest dark splotches—

"Oh, those are leaves," Flint said aloud, the voice faint and crackly.

The blotches changed to the leaves of a chiporee maple, the maple turned into grass, the grass turned into a lawn, and the lawn became the Roses' garden. The Roses owned the inn where Flint had stayed the last three nights. How did he get back there? The last he remembered, he was falling—and he must've hit his head and blacked out. Blinking brought focus to Flint's blurred vision. Explorative fingers grazed lightly over a sore spot on the back of his head. He wasn't bleeding, only dazed. The stars were thanked for small favors. Onelis hadn't won that round! But what had happened?

The rhythmic wheezing was the Roses' mutt. He sat, stationary, near Flint's booted feet, his coat shiny and amber, his eyes upon Flint imploringly.

"Shelton," mumbled Flint, and the dog gave a brief jerk, a sudden lick of its nose, before standing statuesque again. Flint rather doubted Shelton had dragged him from the saloon, all the way across the road, up two doors, through the gate and into the garden, no matter how fond Shelton was of Flint the stranger of Bonewood. "Good boy, Shelton."

Flint unwittingly gave Shelton the opportunity to lift and drop a pale stick, hoping to entangle him in a retrieving game. Flint bobbled the toy before he was able to drag it ahead of eyes still zipping in and out of service. The stick was no ordinary twig dropped from a maple. It was roughly twenty centimeters long and two centimeters in diameter, prettily carved, like the work of the craftsmen in southern littoral towns. The ornamentation was ornate, and Flint had only seen such work on the fine jewelry makers of Aiven, the government city. Their artisans stretched back hundreds of years, and many of them were employed by the city's elite, the royal family, even the queen. The stick had an unknown origin, but Flint guessed that it might be a clue to one of the two problems that'd sent him scurrying haphazardly into Bonewood. He tricked Shelton into chasing another stick while pocketing the other. The game continued for several minutes, until Flint was sure he could get to his feet, though unsure of how long he'd stay there.

Using a series of waddles and toddles, and grasping garden decorations whenever he required an object steadier than himself, Flint hoisted through the rear door of the inn. Abruptly in the kitchen, where the two cooks and the chatelain were busily applying their skills to supper comestibles in various states of preparation. Rose, a withered, leathery man, took one look at Flint and let his shoulders drop. His hands fell in yeast dough.

"Been in a fight again, eh?" He and the two cooks shared a crisp laugh.

Flint would prefer being poisoned and tarred to having another round of fists with Onelis—or, for that matter, anyone in Bonewood. "Did you see someone drag my sorry carcass to the back garden?"

"No," Rose said. He pitied the man and guided him to a chair by the fire, where pot lids rattled and the tea kettle was one constant exhalation of steam. Shelton returned, and lay on his belly by the hearth, his jowls on Flint's toes. "I didn't see much, and neither did anyone else. We saw the smoke from the house, went out to see, and there was everyone from the Silver Socket running into the street. We thought the whole place might've caught fire."

Flint sniffed, nose lowered near the lapel of his coat. "I don't smell like smoke."

"There wasn't a fire," Rose said. He wrung a cloth in some foul-smelling, herbal-infused liquid in a glass bowl, and pressed the cloth over the bump Flint couldn't stop touching. "Looked like someone set off one of them fancy smoke bombs. Don't get excited, Flint. Doesn't mean anything round here, where any bored kid makes handfuls of them every summer out of fungus, paper and talc. We got plenty of all that in this place."

"A kid did this?"

"Nah, not likely. Kids are in school now this time of year, and not too many of them are even in town. Most of their parents send them off to nearby cities for their schooling. The sheriff said it was probably Zandry's doing."

It took every ounce of Flint's manners and maturity to refrain from rolling his eyes and heaving out a heavy breath of utter exasperation. He'd been raised in genteel society, with an upstanding mother and father, and he recognized how rude it might be to belittle the advertised greatness of Bonewood's folk hero, Zandry. As tired as Flint was of hearing the insult eskaku thrown at him, he was just as tired of hearing about Zandry.

Yet Flint could hardly make sense of Zandry interfering at the Silver Socket. "Why would Zandry try keeping Onelis from hurting me?"

"Now that's just like you city boys to think it's all about you, isn't it? You stay still. I'll get you a shot of whiskey, might mellow that pain a bit. You want the doc?"

"No!" cried Flint, flapping an arm, absolutely sure he did not want the doctor examining him for another round of Onelis-inflicted bruises. "I mean," he swallowed, his throat tight, "no, thank you, Rose."

Rose went out of the kitchen smirking and snickering.

Flint's mouth cinched into a frown, lips thrust forward and thick eyebrows tugged down. Rose had been a little too amused, and that annoyed Flint further. He sighed, closing his eyes, leaning into the chair, and bringing into his photographic memory the first page of the report Marshal Giffens had left with him. Zandry's name was all over it. What few details they had of Zandry's existence were there, too. Flint mentally switched to Page 2. Here he found eyewitness testimony to Zandry's escapes last winter, and in that escapade was one of the reasons Flint had come to Bonewood. He was supposed to talk to Zandry, not be saved from ignominious barroom brawls by him.

Returned with whiskey and soda in a glass, Rose reported the little bit of news just given by his neighbor. "Sheriff says it was Zandry for sure. He went in, let loose the bomb, socked Onelis right in the jaw, then dragged you out."

Flint's heavy-lidded eyes widened, breath stuck in his lungs. "How curious," he croaked, then topped off the whiskey. It hurt more than the bump on the head. "Who is Onelis, anyway? Besides an overgrown ass who can't help but pick on unsuspecting urban visitors."

"Onelis has never said too many kind words about Zandry. Said his pop was run out of town long time back by Zandry. Onelis hasn't been the same since. Do yourself and him a favor, and don't go back to the saloon."

"It's the most sociable location in Bonewood," Flint argued, already sure he couldn't prove his point to a local. "How am I supposed to ask Zandry for a meeting, in the name of Queen and Country, if I am to avoid every sociable location in town?" And how am I supposed to find Lutter if I hide in my room day and night? He asked silently, sent it out as a plea. It was Lutter he wanted to find, and Lutter he hunted for in every railway station from Aiven to Weirrock. And while a passenger on the stagecoach from Weirrock to Bonewood—the railway hadn't gone that far, yet—Flint looked upon the hardwood forests, the browns and the greens of rainy land, and intently at every homestead he passed, for any trace of his lost love.

Rose patted the kid on the knee. "You gotta do what you gotta do, Marshal. But don't think you'll find much cooperation from the rabble at the Silver Socket."

No, he probably wouldn't, but the most common saloon patrons had to leave it every once in a while. He'd investigate that route, see if it led to anything. Once he was able to stand and walk without noticeable teetering, Flint selected objects of use from his room: a composition book, a stylograph, and the marshals' file on Zandry. Armed with these components of his job, Flint rested in a cushioned rocking chair on the inn's front porch. The bank was across the street, with the smithy not so far up road that the rapping of hammers against hot steel were muted. Nearby were the postal house, the milliner's, the saloon, and the biggest shop in town: the general store. If the headache had receded as he'd wished, Flint would've been roaming the aisles of the general store, sopping up local culture, gossip, and, naturally, ogling the candy. If he was barred from entering the saloon, he could put his hearing to use clandestinely acquiring information from garrulous patrons who did not know, or care, that they were his spies. Most people, however, clammed up when a marshal was within earshot. The next time the marshals wanted to send one of their own into the wild west, the least they could do was send him incognito. His badge and tell-tale dark red coat were getting in the way.

Unable to concentrate on his notes, Flint finished accounting his ghostly and unconscious meeting with the town's hero. He took the stylograph with him into the postal house, and sent a wire to Marshal Giffens. "HAVING A BAD TIME. NO FUN. NO LUCK. BACK IN 2 DAYS." There seemed to be nothing else Flint could say. If his misfortune continued, he would certainly return to Aiven in two days. And while he was on the stagecoach, while he was on the train, he'd be on the lookout for his raven-headed spouse, the one who probably thought he was a bore, who appeared so dreadfully boring himself it wasn't any wonder Flint's attempts to locate him had failed. Lutter was an everyman, with a face so featureless it blended with crowds, and he became nobody at all. But it was a face Flint had regarded every morning for the last dozen years, across the breakfast table, across rooms at smart parties, and across his heart now he had only shadows and memories.

Bibby's General Store was not the garrison of chatterboxes Flint had hoped for. Old man Bibby, and little Bibbies, were behind the L-shaped counters, showing off wares to a slew of persons from all walks of life. Flint noted the banker's pretty daughter—and a trifecta of her suitors in the corner. One of the Bibbies struck up eye contact with the visiting marshal, and quickly found an activity to keep him from asking for help. He didn't want help. He wanted information—and possibly some peppermints. He managed to get the eldest mister Bibby to take his money for a sack of peppermint sticks. Just as he was on his way out the door, Flint's eager ears latched upon words from Ms. Dennis.

"So there's poor Jimmy, sitting in the saloon minding his own business, when who do you think he sees coming up to the bar on his horse?"

Flint winced at the woman's poor grammar. Whose horse? It had to be Zandry's horse. The myth had a horse. A real, live, breathing, tangible, material horse. Flint became interested in a shelf of books for sale, listening to Ms. Dennis.

"It was Zandry, of course, who did you think it was? So then there was Jimmy, about to tell everyone that Zandry was coming and that they'd better scatter if they knew what was best for them. But what do you think he sees? He sees Zandry throw something 'neath the saloon doors, and it rolls in and explodes—poof!—and all this smoke comes out. Jimmy was closest to the doors and he ran out fast as he could—he actually _bumped into_ Zandry! Yes, he really did! But, sadly, Jimmy's not known for his bravery, is he? And so when Zandry went into the saloon, Jimmy was going out of it, and I'm afraid that's all the more I was able to get out of my poor Jimmy."

Without thinking, acting on his marshal instincts, Flint turned to Ms. Dennis. "What color was the horse? Zandry's horse?"

Weary blue eyes zipped up and down the marshal's dust-ridden red frock coat, the flat black epaulettes at his shoulders. It unnerved people in the highlands to see someone in uniform. They'd had enough of it through the years of border wars. She, like others before her, and certainly many hundred would do in the future, became grotesquely haughty in the marshal's presence. He wasn't Army, but he still was paid by the government, used by the government for discombobulating the populace. "It was _black_ ," she emphasized the color in the stiff progression of words. "Blacker than night. Blacker than anything you can imagine."

Since she'd said several words to him, and hadn't spit on him or told him to go back to kiss the queen's robes, Flint bravely issued a second query. "Do you know how I might go about finding Zandry?"

Ms. Dennis puffed a laugh. "My innocent little marshal, what a fool you are! No one _finds_ Zandry. One is usually thrust into his presence, and thrust out of it again just as quickly. I suggest you conclude your business in Bonewood and return to your rightful place," she glanced at his epaulettes again, this time with significant contempt, " _sir_."

He sidestepped Ms. Dennis on her way out the door. Though continuing to browse books, Flint's mind rotated around the information he'd gathered of Zandry. What would the folk legend do if he knew the queen wanted to see him? He'd probably fear being arrested. Flint let out a long, slow breath. Speaking to Zandry had become as difficult as speaking to Lutter in those last weeks they were together. It was as hard for them to talk about the weather as it was to talk about why they were still together. Love often avoided description, avoided action, but it was not content to remain unspoken, unappreciated. Flint put the book away, left the general store, and returned to the rocker on the porch. He wrote notes until the sun went down. The moment its beams were eclipsed by the top of Mount Seakey, the entire town doused in the lavender light of evenfall. No longer able to see, and supper just announced by wide-cheeked Chatelaine Rose, Flint hurried indoors. But for a long while, before retiring, he sat on his knees before the ajar window, with its unobstructed image of downtown Bonewood, and waited, waited, waited for Zandry's black horse to clop along the lane. It never came, at least not before Flint fell into a doze. Stiff-necked, sore-kneed, he flopped into bed, and squeezed the spare pillow to his chest to pretend it was Lutter. Then he threw it across the room, also pretending it was Lutter. Spouses do not leave one another without a very fine reason. Lutter hadn't even left a note.

His eyes reddened and sore from sleeplessness, nightmares and the fatigue of sobbing intermittently, Flint betook himself to the barbershop for a fine shave. His hands were too shaky that morning to handle a blade. By coincidence, if there was such a beast, Sheriff Meede was there—not for a shave but to have her hair washed and pinned.

She bobbed her head at him while the barber worked her bronze hair around curling tongs. "Marshal Flint, g'morning to you."

"Ma'am," Flint murmured as congenially as a headache and sore eyes permitted.

Meede couldn't leave Flint alone with his thoughts. "Heard you were part of some of that trouble over at the bar yesterday."

The shaving foam smelled like southern spices, reminding him of the carved bole found beside his body the day before. "Well, Onelis is—Onelis is—"

"Particular about who he chooses to associate with."

"That's one gentle way of stating it. How is Onelis?"

"Choked a bit on the smoke bomb Zandry threw in there, but he'll be on his feet again in no time. Can't say I blame Zandry for it none, either. Onelis gets to roughhousing one night, then it's all he can think about. With the mine still being repaired, there's not much for these men to do in town but get into trouble if that's what suits them. First thing I thought when I heard Aiven was sending in a marshal was that you'd be here trying to fix blame on someone for the incident down at the mine."

"No," Flint rested his head—it still ached—and let himself relax enough to draw his eyelids closed. Meede didn't bother him. She might be an elected official, and have the trust of the people of Bonewood more than a visiting marshal, but, more or less, they were on the same side, the side of law. "I'm strictly a paper-pushing marshal, Sheriff. It's not often I'm sent to any establishment outside Aiven."

"Then how come you're here?"

"I volunteered."

"Huh, knew you didn't fit in right when I saw you walking into town in your ugly coat and city hat."

"I did not have the time or inclination to acquire a hat more suitable for my surroundings. What do you know about Zandry, Sheriff?"

"Probably about as much as you do, Marshal."

"The file on him suggests that he goes back sixty years."

"That's what I hear. My daddy used to sit me on his knee and tell me tales. Didn't he, Cam?"

The barber shaving Flint smiled, nodded, but kept his hand steady. "All our daddies and mommies used to tell us tales of Zandry. He was good—and he was bad. We wanted to be like him—but we were scared of him."

"That about covers it," Meede finished. "Only seen him a couple of times with my own peepers. Him and that magical horse of his."

Flint's eyes whipped open. " _Magical_ horse?"

"Oh, sure, you know the kind," Meede said, implying that the joke of Zandry's magical horse had gone on for years, each year more fantastic than the next. "Can ride through fire and not be burned. Can coast like a boat upon water and not drown. Can fly when the moons are full and high. That sort of thing. Frankly, I know it's a lot of cark and bilge, but what can you do? Kids will be kids. I fanned a few of those Zandry tales myself when I was in bibs and pigtails. Didn't I, Cam?"

"You did," replied an obedient Cam. "I remember one time you and me was out past town here, out visiting my cousin at their ranch by the watershed, and there was a snow storm coming in and we didn't have no way of getting back home 'fore the snow starting flying. We was all but buried and about dead when we was all the sudden back at my parents' house."

"And there was a long trail of horse hooves in the snow," continued Meede. She grimaced when a pin to set her hair had dug a little too forcibly into her scalp. Being tough, she recovered quickly. "I wanted to go out and follow them, but my mother made me stay indoors. My older brother went out to chase down the trail as far as he was able, but he said he got to the end of town and the trail just stopped. Said it was like the horse just took off. But the moons weren't full then, and I think the truth of the fact is that Dunny got cold and wanted to come back inside."

Cam laughed. "That's what I think, too."

With the threat of a blade at his throat diminished, his shave nearly over, Flint spoke. "And nobody knows where he lives, even after all these years?"

"Weren't you listening, Marshal? People here love Zandry, but they're scared of him. It's just like when we were kids. Nobody wants to go out and find where he's hiding. And nobody wants to know more about him than he wants us to know."

"That's too bad," Flint left a couple of coins in Cam's palm, "since I was hoping to get a message to him."

The sheriff's curiosity lifted, but she was too protective of her emotions to flaunt them. "Then you'd better find another way of doing it, Marshal. No one ever speaks to Zandry, and, last I heard, legends don't talk back. You ready to go? So am I. Want to go over to the saloon with me and have some breakfast?"

"I'm not particularly welcome at the saloon."

"Cark and bilge," Meede intoned, slapping the little marshal heartily between the shoulders. "Didn't you hear me say that Onelis is laid up? He won't be at the saloon. And Ms. Edie's eggs are something even your urbane Aiven palate should try before you skip on out of Bonewood. I'll tell you one thing, Marshal, and that's that I'm plum amazed you ever go to be a marshal at all, what with your sour listening skills."

Flint's defensive instincts transformed him from malleable to implacable within seconds. A tension turned his slack fingers into fists. "I've had—had rather a lot on my mind these last six weeks or so."

"Ah, personal trouble, is it? Yeah, I hear the lot of you marshals can't keep a spouse any more than you can keep a criminal in jail. Come on over to the saloon and tell sympathetic Meede all about it. I'm the one most people come to round here for spilling all their hearts' woes."

Unable to fabricate an excuse, Flint went. His woes seemed minimal, and he fabricated or downplayed his turmoil, as an instinct rising to offer further protection. At the end of the meal, Meede gave a crafty summary. "What you're saying is that you'd be happy if you found your spouse and went back to Aiven, continued with the old life you two had, even though it wasn't all that appealing, apparently, to Lutter. What you need to do, friend, if you're up to doing anything at all, is change your mind a little bit. Find out what he wants. Might even be possible that the two of you want the same things but you don't know it."

While Flint digested her commentary, word for word, he realized, with a suddenness that paled him, that he had no pressing need to defend his actions, his beliefs. Her estimations of his life were far too profound, and too accurate, for him to callously rend them for pride's sake. Lutter was gone, and Flint's pride might have forced itself between them once too often.

He fumbled for coins to pay for his meals. Meede was protesting, saying it wasn't often she got to take another man out for a meal, "and I rarely have the chance to be reimbursed for business expenses." Flint's nerves gained a level of inappropriate apprehension. He was boggled by Meede's proclamations, and he was frustrated at his inability to speak directly to Lutter. Yet when it came to personal breakthroughs and life's small triumphs, it was automatic—instinct—to take stories and evidence of those triumphs to Lutter, for laudations and acceptance. But what was he to do when the alterations of his character were directly influenced by his missing spouse?

Flint left three coins on the table, to cover his bill and to pay a tip to a server who recognized him as the one Onelis always brawled with. He jumped, nearly out of his seat, when a pudgy hand smacked over bill and coins. The hand belonged to Onelis. Flint searched the man's tiny eyes for signs of hostility.

"Now, Onelis," started Meede, drawing up from her seat, slowly, as one creeps away from a threatening panther. "You really should be at home resting."

"I wanted a drink," Onelis said, still watching Flint. His nostrils flared, and, without warning, he dropped his gaze to the coins. One by one, he pushed them back Flint's way. "You keep these, Marshal. Let me pay for this."

Flint regarded the sheriff. Was Onelis joking? Unable to speak for himself yet, Meede investigated.

"Onelis, Marshal Flint wants no trouble, and he'd probably appreciate it if you let him pay for his own meals. He doesn't want to owe you anything."

"He doesn't owe me anything. It's me who owes him an apology."

Flabbergasted, Flint leaned into the chair, mouth starting to gape, words yet invisible. Finally, unable to withstand the gazes cast his way by other Silver Socket patrons, by Meede and Onelis, Flint jetted from the seat. "See here, Onelis, I'm perfectly capable of paying my bill, and I should like it if you would keep your mocking apologies to yourself."

"It isn't a mocking apology, Marshal," Onelis said, slipping into a soft smile Flint didn't entirely trust. A boyish gleam passed across Onelis' round features, and it was in his faintest glimpse of it that Flint placed his trust.

"But why should you? What made you change your mind about me?"

"Wasn't you so much as it was Zandry," said Onelis as he dished coins from his leather purse onto the counter. "Any friend of Zandry's is a friend of mine. If he came into this saloon to keep me from beating you up again—even though I like beating people up so when they rile my tempers—and you _did_ trample on my coat—"

"That was an accident! I would never trample a person's coat if I—"

Onelis raised a hand. Flint quieted, unsure why he allowed the temperamental miner to dictate the conversation. Flint's curiosity was getting the better of his sense. He remembered his revelation moments ago. Pride he had enough of, plenty to spare and lose, and if he failed to deflect every minimal insult flung at him, pride would stay unharmed.

"I realize it was an accident," continued Onelis, recognizing the marshal's need to repeat how much of an accident it'd been. "But you can't mind me, Marshal. I'm surprised you didn't arrest me for hurting a law officer."

"Well, I don't really possess the proper authority to make arrests. That would be the law marshals. Well, as it was, before I ventured to Bonewood I was given an order to arrest no one, if I could help it. Creates too much paperwork, you see, too much to file. I've made this journey against the reluctance of other marshals; it was a personal favor. Nevertheless," his hand raised, "I shake on your acceptance to let the incidents," he'd hesitated adding the 'S', "remain in the past, and unmentioned in the future."

"Good," Onelis chucked his hand into Flint's, "that settles it. Darleigh!" he called for the barkeep. "Bring us some stouts!"

Flint was welcomed into the social circle of the saloon, and through his afternoon there he was subjected to various opinions on Zandry. The legend gained popularity through a tirade of cattle-thieving forty years prior. Zandry had saved countless heads of cattle, from thieves, from death during drives, from the spring flood twenty-two years back. Many averred, too, that Zandry had prevented miners from perishing in the disaster that'd shut it down two weeks ago.

Meede filled Flint in about the mine catastrophe. "Everyone round here knows what company's on the mine's name, on the boys' helmets and even, sometimes, on their coats and pickaxes. But we know, between you and me and the barstool, Marsh, who, exactly, owns Wardash Mining and Holding Company. It's the duke. Only, see, we're not supposed to know all of that, so you'd better not be spreading round the rumor that we know what we're not supposed to know."

She only continued after Flint swore he would tell no one. A great many things, from facts to ideas, had come to Flint since his arrival in Bonewood, and far too many of them were so unreal that any of his compeers or acquaintances in Aiven would struggle to believe him.

"The duke had let the miners know that he was going to shut the mine down for a little while, sometime in the summer."

"When did he let them know this?" Flint planned to file the information away, perhaps, in his spare time, which he suspected would be plentiful, he would cross-reference these facts with newspaper articles once he returned to Aiven.

"About two months ago. Those weeks would've been sufficient notice if he was planning to shut the mine down in the summer. We had a lot of snow and rain this winter. Made the land soft. Miners began fretting about digging into the shaft, upsetting the earth, that things might get slippery down there. And now here's where it gets kinda tricky. See, we found out that the duke, or the president of Wardash Mining and Holding, was sending us a letter telling us that he was _not_ going to go ahead and shut down the mine down this summer. Instead, we got a message, sent by one of the Wardash cronies, that said the president had decided to go ahead and shut the mine down _now_ , while the weather was awful and the mines were wet."

"Why find that so perplexing, Sheriff?"

"We found out later that the president hadn't sent any message of the sort. In fact, he'd sent the _opposite_ message, that the mine wasn't going to be shut down at all. Nilky, the overseer, went in to inspect the mine before he was going to close it up, you know, until things dried out. He wasn't down there twenty seconds before it started caving in. He got as far as the opening before he was crushed under rocks and dirt, but said Zandry pulled him out. He had some busted ribs and he's recuperating at home, I'm sure to the annoyance of his housekeeper."

Flint chortled appropriately. "Zandry sent the message, then, the fake one from the president of Wardash? How fortunate to be blessed with a heroic soul in your town, Sheriff, but one that seems possessed with a mystic's precognition as well! Is he more in the habit, now, of saving miners, and has forsaken his earlier venture of saving cattle?"

"Zandry saves what he can. That's all we can ask of him," Sheriff Meede said, truthful, saccharine, grateful. "No amount of marshals and sheriffs could've saved all our miners, nor all our horses. That's why we need Zandry."

"The cattle saving is what Zandry did first," Onelis told his new friend in the dark red government coat. "That's when we first starting _hearing_ about him," he belched, "but it wasn't till much later that we started seeing him with our own eyes." He pointed forefinger and middle finger to his eyeballs, then to Flint's. "Some say he doesn't live anywhere, nowhere round these parts. I think he probably has a hovel or a cave or something out by the petrified forest, the part of town that Bonewood stole its name from. You mark my words, Marsh, if you want to be tracking down our local hero, that's where I'd start. But why you should want to find him, that's beyond me. No one's supposed to go chasing legends. Legends have a way of finding you, and not when you expect it, either. They just show up. Out of thin air."

Returned and nestled into his room at the inn, Flint subjected the oversized, heavy furnishings to unfair and paranoid scrutiny. In his mind's eye, in his insecure heart, he was certain that the chest-of-drawers, the chair, the wardrobe—even the fireplace mantel—had expanded to monstrous proportions. "I feel quite closed-in," he explained, finding comfort in the weak warble that parted his lips, sculpted by his tongue.

In the process of gathering his paraphernalia for a trip into the parlor, Flint's acute hearing returned the slightest echo of a footfall—or perhaps a thud. It was near enough to his room that he filled with tension. He pressed an ear to the door, eager to catch a dropped whisper or two, and yet nothing reached him from the quiet corridor. A second noise came, this the hiss of paper. Having cultivated a professional career whose foremost ingredient was paper, Flint knew the sound. He knew where it'd come from, too. At his feet, he plucked up a note written on coarse old paper, with words upon it in a neat, slanted cursive, rising high above the midpoint line and low below it, too. It wasn't a hand he recognized, and he was known in his office as the marshal to see for expert opinions on the comparisons of handwriting. Flint devoured the brief phrases. "Old Bonewood - nine o' clock - alone." It was signed with the most flourished and ornamental "Z" Flint had ever had the privilege of seeing, that included a wavy horizontal line slashing the letter in two.

"Zandry," Flint arched his voice in proportion to his astonishment, "wants to see _me_?"

Flint jerked the door inward. No sign of the hero lingered, not even a smell, not even a speck of dirt.

"Out of thin air, is it? Well, I guess they must stick to what they're used to, our folk heroes."

He closed the door, pocketed the note from Zandry, and readied himself for the lengthy walk to the petrified forest.

Able to sneak out of the inn without being seen proved challenging. The chatelains were dozing in the parlor, and Shelton, the beautiful mutt, wanted nothing more than to trail after Flint. Just as he was waving Shelton away, "Stay, boy, _stay_!" given in his harshest and most severe whisper, Flint detected a squeak on the staircase—the third stair from the top, in fact, had the most imposing creak—a young lady's voice called "Someone there?"—and with a final effort Flint was able to escape. His heart beat thickly, and flew thrums all the way up his throat. Several deep breaths in a row brought him calmness, as well as the welcome distraction of lightheadedness.

The town of Bonewood was relatively deserted at that hour. Even the saloon's raucous piano had stopped its maddened jangling, and its innards above the batwing-shaped doors were impenetrably dark. Only houses at that hour showed any signs of life, in the way their windows glowed or their dogs barked sleepily in the gardens at a stranger, the marshal, passing by. It took him the entirety of four minutes to walk from the Bonewood Inn to the end of Bonewood, when the houses trickled away, the trees multiplied, and the smell of forest overcame that of woodsmoke and the less-pronounced but more profound odor of horse leavings. As dew settled upon the forest, the perfume of pine and leafmold grew deep and rich. Flint found his heartbeats had returned to normal, that he was relaxed by the jaunt through a dozing town, though, in a few minutes, he was to meet the evasive Zandry!

He might be meters yet from the petrified forest of Bonewood, but Flint had a strange sensation that he was being observed from the recesses of the woods. He heard nothing, and his eyes certainly spotted no anomaly, but the sensation would not abate despite his peppering it with the assuredness of logic. Using a suddenness not common with his character, Flint halted entirely. He was sure, then, that he'd caught the faintest thunder erupting from the earth, almost like a—

He wrenched around, a cry tamped in his throat. A black sphere came towards him. It was blacker than the world around him, untouched somehow by celestial light. "Zandry's horse!" he sputtered, aware of his speech and how unnecessary it was. If he did not move, he would be a squashed marshal, perhaps not the first one to be found trampled to death on the Bonewood road. He shut his eyes, spun, and ran. Had he more sense, he would've made a dash into the forest, but, as it was, he achieved only a paltry distance before a clamp and tightness wrapped at his neck. His feet treaded emptiness. He was flying! Flying like Zandry's horse! But then his bottom hit with the far end of the saddle, a very uncomfortable position that brought him human feelings caused by a spectral being—and that was a ghastly unfairness. He rubbed the pain out of his tailbone while examining his surroundings. His proximity to Zandry was most stunning. Zandry was right in front of him in the saddle, holding the reins of the mysterious horse. Flint used a forefinger to poke him, to test the substance and humanness of him, and met with reality's solidity and human warmth.

Not two minutes later, the land around them changed from a thriving woods to a sparse valley. It was the petrified forest. How it became so remained one of the kingdom's greatest and most alluring perplexities. Flint's preference was for the tale of the mage who had lost his lover, who'd lost control of his powers in a fit of grief, and had exploded—quite literally—there in the valley, and his powers had transformed the brilliant, lush forest into one of brittle stone. Even as they moved, magical horse or not, Flint heard snapping, like of chicken bones old and dried, and wondered if they were twigs, leaves, underbrush that came in contact with the horse.

At the mouth of a dark cavern, the horse touched the ground once more, and Zandry followed. It was true what the townspeople had said of Zandry: Nothing could be seen of his face, it was too heavily swaddled and too cleverly concealed.

"Get down."

Not too concealed to muffle his voice, however. Flint slid off the horse, patted its flank as if to thank it for the ride—or, perhaps, for not running over him in the road—and turned to find Zandry had lit a lamp, was quickening his steps into the cave.

"The denizens of Bonewood that you persist in rescuing are right about your living quarters. There are many who believe you live in the petrified forest, that you live in one of the caves. This used to be the bed of a river, wasn't it? But that was five hundred years ago, before the Maddened Mage—if, that is, you prefer _that_ particular creation story of Bonewood and not another."

Zandry held the lantern to the height of Flint's face, the two of them coming to a standstill in a warm cave. Dribbles of water fell from active stalactites. Zandry let out a huff, either of impatience or of sorrow, Flint couldn't be sure.

"I have a message for you, sir," Flint began, thinking, if he should die right there at the very least he would've done his duty to his queen, "and that is to tell you that Her Highness wishes you to come to Aiven and have a word with her. In a good way, of course. She heard what you did for the miners, as well as—as that incident with the stagecoach and the train. The explosion you stopped before it hurt hundreds of innocent people? Perhaps—you don't recall?"

Behind the black mask, Flint caught sight of eyes dark, twinkling, full of grievances—and wincing as if in pain. A hand, gloved in new black leather, waved over his face. It drew the cloth away into curls and clouds of black smoke that dissipated.

Flint removed himself half a step. His mouth puckered, and his heart, again the acrobat, leaped optimistically and surprisedly up the whole of his throat. He swallowed, hoping to keep it in place. The moment of shock left him with a thrill, a pride, and tears circling his eyes. "I thought it might be you."

Zandry, the hero of Bonewood, turned into a simple man from Aiven, who'd done nothing more heroic than save a bird that'd once found its way into their house. Lutter let his fingertips scrape along the side of Flint's face. "What gave it away?"

"One too many coincidences, that's all. The incident with the stagecoach, of course, happened just two days after you left me."

"I didn't mean to leave you," Lutter started saying. He grabbed Flint's wrist, flinging them deeper into the cave. It was no home, just a place for a hero to hang his mask, plan escapes, plan on how many lives he might be able to save. "I had to leave you, Flint. I had to."

"I see that," Flint said, understanding, compassionate, though absolutely bewildered. "Now I see why. How am I, a boring paper-pusher with the government, meant to compete with saving countless lives here in the Highlands?" Flint gulped, waving a hand and pulling out a kerchief. "Be kind to me, Lutter, and do not answer that question."

Lutter had imagined what he would tell Flint when the two of them were again together. Given the opportunity, and staggeringly sooner than he'd foreseen, he was unable to piece together the reasons. He let them lay scattered in the back of his mind. He gripped Flint's shoulders and pulled the two of them together. "I miss you—so much—every minute. And you're not boring. Don't talk about my spouse like that. It's impolite." His fingers massaged Flint's shoulders, their gazes matched, their wonder at the appearance of the other fading. Lutter already felt more like Lutter now that Flint was there, to touch and speak to, than he had the last six weeks without him. "Are you really only here to tell me that the Queen wants to see me?"

"I came out here looking for you," Flint said, taking his chance to explain. Lutter pushed him gently into a comfortable seat—and it was through this maneuver that he noticed the room, with its ill furniture, its strange smell, its low lights slung above tables scarred and disrepair, highlighting countless shire maps. He snapped his gaze once more upon Lutter, fearful of looking away too long. Lutter brought a matching chair nearby, their knees mingling with one another, Flint's hands finding his. He squeezed, pressed and massaged, and noted the fresh layer of calluses on palms and fingers. Lutter—his Lutter—had had soft, untried hands. "The Queen wants to knight you."

Lutter shot his head back and guffawed like a man deranged. He rubbed his chest to free it of a shadowy pain; he had not laughed in weeks, and it required muscles he hadn't lately used. "Knight me! I didn't realize the Queen had such a wonderful sense of humor."

"Really, Lutter, this is strange! Why didn't you tell me about all of this?"

"What is there to tell? It's an inherited position. It's been in my family for—I don't know—forty or more years. When Uncle Tisloe died—that's when I had to take his place. Nennu contacted me at once. She's my cousin. She'll be taking over as soon as she's old enough. She's just fourteen."

"An uncle! A cousin! Lutter! You told me you had no family to speak of!"

"One of my inconsiderate lies. I couldn't explain to you that my family is a legend. Would that have made sense to you at the time?"

Flint returned to the days of yore, when he'd just met Lutter at a dinner extravaganza for one of the marshals. Lutter was an unassuming general's secretary, possessing only the barest of social skills, charm and sophistication to be a general's secretary. Flint had courted him immediately, and Lutter, while smitten, had been, at first, wary of attachment. He was very much in love with his job, as Flint recalled. It would've been impossible to believe that a competent man of administration should have in his past a legend of such profundity as Zandry of Bonewood.

"That was the biggest hole in my drawn-up version of you being Zandry. I couldn't make it work. How could you be Zandry if people in Bonewood have relied on him for countless decades? I did not think of there being more than one Zandry. Who started it?"

"My grandfather. It started as a means of saving cattle from thieves. My grandparents owned thousands of cattle, had them way up on the high plains. Easy thieving—or so they thought. Not hardly. They got a scare they never forgot. And my grandfather," his sigh was brushed with regret, "became a myth. The horse is named Soot—and she's as old as the hills, as old as the legends. She is the only one of the two of us that is a real legend. She's a ghost of a horse, Flint. Blessed by an old mage far, far back in history, and given to my grandfather. She can only be used for the expansion of goodness and love in the world, and never for any nefarious and wicked deed. She flies, she's silent, she obeys every command in my thoughts. She will obey you, too, one day."

"The people of Bonewood know that of your horse, too." Flint let go of an excited breath, and, at the peak of it, kissed Lutter. "Then what happened—after your grandfather died?"

"Then it was my father, and my mother for a while; then my stepfather, and, finally, my uncle. He wrote me two years ago and told me that my time would have to be after his death. It's a myth of demise, is Zandry. It's my turn now. And I'm sorry," he knelt in front of Flint, remorseful, pitiable, unable to look him in the eye or forget the press of Flint's lips, "but I cannot leave it—Bonewood and Zandry and Soot—and go back to Aiven with you."

"No," Flint's shaking fingers wound through Lutter's hair, "no, I hardly expect that you can." He kissed the crown and closed his eyes tightly.

The next morning, alert and willful, more his usual self, Flint strode across the street and interrupted Sheriff Meede's morning ritual of coffee and toast. The office smelled of marmalade and cedar, but those were smells far better than his dingy, dank quarters at his Aiven office.

"Well, g'morning to you, Marshal." Her voice was as big and large as ever, coming from the depths of her barrel of a chest. "Want some coffee? It's the real stuff, too. I get it sent to me from a roaster in Sabour City. Don't know where _he_ gets the beans, but some stuff is better left to the proper authorities. You know what I'm saying? 'Course you do. Here you go. Drink up. What brings you in this morning?"

Flint sipped the scalding liquid, pleased to have a chance to procrastinate. But he had to do what he had to do—and this is what he'd drawn himself out of bed for. He had to abide with the rules of his own life.

"I was wondering, Sheriff," he inhaled, certain that his feet were on the ground, "if you would—would consider—"

His nerves petered into a breathlessness. Meede attempted to pull him from his coils of tension.

"What is it, hon? Come on, it's just Meede," she slugged him lightly on the arm, "you can tell me anything. Is it your spouse? Want me to send out a search party for him?"

In one exhalation, Flint poured it out. "I was hoping that you would consider hiring me—" then he paused, "perhaps as your assistant, or a deputy, or someone to send out on rainy nights when you would rather be at home."

Meede set hands on her hips. She looked away, a yellowed incisor showing where it bit her bottom lip. "It's funny you should ask me that, actually."

"Is it?" he croaked.

"Yeah, it is. My deputy's been less than savory lately. He's expecting a kid. In my experience, babies make men a little," she twirled her hand next to her big-haired head, "zappy in the brain department. I think he wants to quit, anyway, and I'll be needing someone else around here to boss around, to send out for assignments and investigations that my old bones are just too lazy to do. Say!" Meede pinched him at the chin, then slugged him again on the arm. "Had no idea that we here at Bonewood made such an impression on you! That's nice to know! See, I knew Onelis was all wrong when he said you was just a squeamish stuffed-shirt city-boy! But you're all right! And of course I'll hire you! Gotta remind you, though, it's not as glamorous as the marshals. And we get brown coats," she thumbed his collar, "not red."

"I'm willing to accept a change of wardrobe—as much as I am willing to accept a change of location."

She spit into her hand and left it out for him to take. He spit into his, trying to appear gallant. They shook on it, and that was as certified as a deal got in Bonewood.

Flint nearly skipped, in a carefree state, down the road to the postal house. There, he penned one more telegram to Marshal Giffens.

"FOUND ZANDRY. SAYS NO TO KNIGHTHOOD. TELL STORY WHEN BACK TODAY. ALSO I QUIT."

He went into the general store to purchase a fresh bag of peppermints for the stagecoach and train rides back to Aiven, where he would stay only as long as he needed to arrange matters of work and house, before returning to Bonewood.

"Three semms is your total this morning, Mr. Flint," said Ms. Bibby. "Would you like me to put this on your tab?"

Flint stared at her. Through youthful intuition and, perhaps, the grapevines of gossip quite alive in such a small town, Ms. Bibby, and by then every Bibby, knew that Flint the Marshal was to become Flint the Sheriff, that he would become one of them: a denizen of Bonewood who loved the generous spirit and supernatural powers of their very own folk hero—Zandry.

## The

Black

## Arrow

I.

"It has been arranged."

The last line of a note disguised an intrigue.

Again, Ellnor's bones hummed with possibility. It _had_ been arranged. Six months ago, at the start of winter, the tragedy swept through the forest, a fire spread among dry hearts. News of death reeked more than the dead themselves. In the Upper Valley, mining was life, and miners' lives were erased from existence. Gone, yes—but lost. It brought loss to their families, so that they, too, were lost. Ellnor, never seen clearly in a crowd, observed the remorse, the listlessness, the horror that came with the unknown. He watched the village he cared for recede into an echo of memories. He'd never known another home, and while the Valley denizens acknowledged him only a little, he vowed to do what he could to fight for them. Each suffering house had a right to know the truth.

The letter was upon his person, recorded verbatim, like a sheet of music, more than a week ago. An old friend had brought him to the edge of the disastrous mine. Ludren, now of the royal guard, had penned a haphazard missive to the Upper Valley instrument maker. _Bring your wares to sell_. The young royals wanted something to do, and music was a way to settle their thoughts during the half-year winters of the far south. Ludren had penned nothing personal, no mention of their friendship, thirty years ancient, or offer an apology to mend the gap forged when Ludren sprang to freedom in the night.

Ellnor gazed upon the woods, doused in its ambient twilight. The moon had taken over the purple sky in the east, letting the stars brighten in the west. In the north, a stripe of pale yellow clung to horizon's infinity. He used it to find his way, now far from the road, split from the direction of the castle and edging closer to the site of doom.

No trace of it now could be seen. What might've been visible lay beneath winter's fleet: white, powdery, hardly cold to the touch. Only the flat expanse ahead, amid frozen rocks, was a visible section of the mysterious place: the lake. At the far end of it, blackness in blocks against the sheer rise of a mountain's side. The squares, lacking dimension, marked the location of the miners' cabins. Through Grandfather's spyglass, used in the Wars half a century before, Ellnor counted seven stone chimneys, seven doors hanging limp and crooked on broken hinges. If ghosts plagued the scene, none was present then, and no music drawn from flute or harp carried in Ellnor's pack would manifest them. The dead were always too silent, too unwilling to help the living.

Ellnor roamed closer to lake's edge. Sleeping beneath it, who could imagine what? Small fishes, fins and eyes in the deepness and seeing what no human ever would. The miners had used to the lake as a water source, not far from the cabins, removed from the smoke and contamination of the mines. Ellnor winced, trying to imagine a summer's day alive with voices, laughter—and caught a drift of some old campfire tune he'd learned as a boy. It might be the night when the ghosts visit, but they would stay by their fires, by their lake, and remember better days. They wouldn't help a nameless bard find a meaning for their deaths, find the murderer of them.

A twitch at the edge of his sight sent him spinning around, snow rising at his boots, small wind taking it on a dance. Had it not been for that breath from the sky, Ellnor would've missed the remarkable object, the embodiment of legend.

From the bole of a conifer protruded an arrow. Its point sank deep into the tree's flesh, and its shaft, durable and linear, crept out a foot. Like those arrows left by an indescribable myth, it had no fletching. The latter edges of its shaft was bound by silky ribbons, done up tightly like a girl's rag curl. Knotted among the ribbons' tails, five chicken feathers, five inches in length. The pointless fletching of the myth that shot the arrow.

Ellnor longed to touch it. Hadn't he heard the stories all his life? Didn't Ludren's parents own the one and only artist's sketch of a ribboned arrow? And they used to make their own, along with Osk and Rina, and play the myth out in the green by the village well. They took turns acting the myth, and acting the scoundrel who'd wronged the world, who'd brought the myth from the malignant shadows of the woods to reprimand, to capture, never to kill. To touch one of the myth's arrows was to reap the bitterness of death, and only the arrows they made were safe to touch. Ellnor stared at the arrow, remembering, his fingertips numb with cold inside furred mittens. The myth had no remarkable name, and many referred to it as Myth, by the younger generation as Arrow, by some as female, by others as male, and very few who said it was the god of the forest and mountain, inhuman, eternal. Witnessing the ribboned arrow for the first time in his thirty-eight years, Ellnor drifted into disbelief.

The arrow was left in its place. To his back, Ellnor hitched his bag with a clank of metallic instruments, a crunch of snow beneath his weight as he reset his balance. He walked on, unable to forget the sight of the arrow. So the myth had come, after all. Perhaps that is what had drawn him to the edge of the site. He wanted to know if the myth still existed, if he wasn't the only one aware that somehow, some way, the Twin Valley Mining Company would meet the onslaught of citizens seeking revenge.

The castle neared. Ellnor was nervous to encounter Ludren again, and uncertain of his position in the royal fringe. He returned to the image of children playing myths and arrows on the green, to Osk and Rina, two of the thirty-seven miners swallowed into history.

Ahead on the snow-dappled road, rhythmic pounding wended to him. These adumbrations turned into the hooves of a horse. It grew into a silver reflection of the moon, a white horse, a rider in heavy white robes. A member of the royal guard, always in white, helmed in gold. The horse slowed, stopped, and Ellnor stopped with him. His numb hands tingled in elation, his heart skipped in delight. The gold helmet winked as it freed the familiar face of Ludren Nolce, publican's son, now one of the best knights in the realm.

The trees lining the road made details impossible to note, but Ellnor saw creases around his old friend's eyes, a thin mouth hidden in the tangles of an overgrown and scrawny beard, and ears whose tips continued to reach far from his scalp of ungroomed hair. Ellnor remained still, being analyzed too.

"You have not changed in twenty years," Ludren said, lying a gauntlet on Ellnor's shoulder, then to the side of his face. He patted it, let his arm drop. "And still quiet, I see. You were never much for talking. Preferring music, as always. Can you not sing me a hello, at least?"

"Hello." Ellnor spoke it, then incapable of singing.

"There, you have found your voice. We have a bit of a walk ahead of us, and I'm afraid I can't be expected to do all of the talking, Ellnor. Give me your pack. I'll put it on the horse. This is Sargon."

It took Ellnor a moment to realize the introduction was for the horse.

"Don't look terrified. The king and queen know you're coming, and his children wait impatiently to see what you've brought. Your quarters will not be the best, but it is near me, and that is not so terrible." Ludren searched Ellnor, finding a hint of the boy he knew, the man he'd left behind to pursue this childhood fantasy, and he stumbled over his thoughts in view of a heartache he thought he'd forgotten. "When we get there, we can talk about what you're doing here."

Ellnor matched his steps with Ludren's, not meaning to. He'd always let Ludren lead him, when it'd seemed that, once in the past, music led every one with ears. Ellnor pawed at Lundren's cape of blue-white ash. Dark eyes stared into his, breaking years of silence and six months of puzzlement.

"It was arranged," Ellnor breathed the hook of Ludren's note.

Ludren winced against the light of the castle torches by the gate, transforming the snow into fire's glow. Ellnor was there: everything would be all right. The worst was over.

"It was arranged," Ludren finally said, drawing Sargon and Ellnor into the royal palace's opulent terrain.

II.

The disparity of riches sliced unbidden into Ellnor's weary mind. Flames of morning reached the tips of the high ceiling, across a wooden floor refinished to smoothness, upon the fine furnishings of a small palace guest room. Yesterday's journey had been an arduous one, more for the mental preparation than the trek. He'd said very little to Ludren, hadn't yet mentioned the arrow, hadn't given further hint that he understood more in the note than any spy's eyes might perceive. Ludren had left him in the room, alone, a candlestick for company, a promise that they would meet again in the morning.

Ellnor hadn't quite decided to throw off the covers of lavish bed linen when the chamber was raided. It riled him from his place, staring at the entrance of three figures in a row, a fourth bringing up the rear, tall and fine and older now that the moonlight played no trickery. He was Ellnor's own Ludren. While the servants worked as silent mice to display laden trays, Ellnor hunted the deportment of his lost betrothed. Ludren looked well, muscles hidden beneath layers of clothes, his eyes still protuberant, like a forest—brown and green and gray, two leaves left in a brook. The white cloak wasn't upon him yet, and no gloves hid his hands. Ellnor saw the bare fingers, no ring on Ludren's thumb, no lover's bracelet or symbolic token. The absence sent a hum up Ellnor's throat. He transformed it into a hello.

Ludren left his examination of Ellnor's interesting musical apparatuses. "Is that all you can say, hello? You had better speak in song if you can't talk at all." He went on, knowing that Ellnor's response, if it came, would be short and harmless. "I'm glad you were able to sleep so well, to find you in bed, still, at this hour. How nice." He flashed a smile, giving his beard an opal crescent. "Come and eat with me. It's been terrible eating alone all these years."

Without a squeak, the mice had tiptoed from the room, goods left behind them. Ellnor, rooting his arms into the holes of his greatcoat, examined the fresh feast.

"I didn't know what you wanted," Ludren explained, "and I made them bring me a bit of everything. We can talk in here, as far as I know, as freely as birds—or sing like one, if you'd rather. There is nothing above us, and the kitchen is below us. Two layers of stone between us."

By suggestion, Ellnor eyed the ground. "The floor's wood."

"But beneath it, two layers of stone. Believe me, trust me—I've seen the castle plans so often as to have them memorized. Sit—eat. Do you remember how I was always trying to get you to eat, back when I was still at the inn?"

Ellnor's sense of betrayal swooped into the opening. "After my grandmother died, you vowed to take care of me."

Ludren had anticipated the point of his absence being reached, only not quite so quickly. "I did what I could _while_ I could. You were too terribly self-sufficient. But—eat." He filled a plate with comestibles: bread, fruit, meat. "I can feed you, if nothing else."

"You said we could talk here. What would you like to say?" Ellnor's heart throbbed for an apology. He needed Ludren to assuage the bitterness of a young man waiting on the green, morning to dark, for a groom who never came.

"First of all," Ludren began, placing a cloth napkin over Ellnor's knee, "I'd like to ask why it is you came. Of all in the Valleys I could've chosen, why did you answer me?"

"I was the only one who knew what it meant."

The answer was simple to Ellnor, less so to Ludren.

"How's that?"

"That—that I can't tell you, Ludren."

"You used to tell me everything."

Ellnor let his eyes glint to the hard fire inside. "And you know now why I don't tell you everything."

"What is it you want to talk about, El? We can talk about thirty-seven missing miners, or we can talk about why I left you that day—stranded, on your own, without a word."

"Some lines in a note reached me the next week. To aid your conscience, no doubt."

"You do want to talk about this," Ludren said, aggrieved. He leaned into the chair at the table, the scent of food beginning to swirl his senses. Looking upon Ellnor Cross, he found again that scintillation, that nebulous amazement that'd captivated him since boyhood. "All right, I'll tell you why I left, and I didn't write that note to help my conscience." Ludren set his forehead to waiting fingertips, hiding. "I wanted to be here at the castle—as a knight. It was always my ambition to make more of myself than publican, than miner."

The young man of eighteen flung out a tear, landing at the top of Ellnor's beard. "I knew what you wanted," he picked at toast to pass seconds of hope, "and I was prepared to go with you."

"But that was the problem."

Ellnor flinched at the catastrophe of his hand beneath Ludren's, twenty years too late. "What problem? I loved you—so much—I—"

"I couldn't have you come with me," Ludren said quietly, the words slung together in a sullen breath. Anger against the establishment ignited his voice. "Knights in training are not permitted to bring their spouses with them. It was you—the inn—Upper Valley—forever. Or it was me—alone—trying to win a different dream. But you were always part of the dream, too. You still are."

Ellnor landed on a pinnacle. On one side, disaster akin to death at the mine. On the other, the abatement of neglect. "I can't answer you now, Ludren."

"I know," Ludren patted Ellnor's wrist, "you need time. And, anyway, you seen I've grown as old as you, as seamed with wrinkles—not quite as youthful-looking as you—and you may not want me, you may have someone at home waiting for you."

"There's no one," Ellnor drifted into an unplanned pause, "no one at home. Only your mother remembers me, notices me. She gave me the note you wrote. You asked why it's me that's here now, and that's the answer I have for you. You asked for me." Ellnor's thoughts flickered. "You never said so, not outright, but—but there was a moment that morning that I was scribing a song heard in my sleep, and when I blobbed its notes to scaled paper, I thought of you, envisioned you here, and saw myself nearing the palace in the moonlight. I didn't mean to travel that far into the night, but it happened that way—it just happened that way. I didn't think you'd ride out to meet me."

"My mother," Ludren became quieter, "gave you the note?"

"She said it was for me from you." Ellnor saw the blankness of Ludren's expression. "She said it was. And I often have visions—daydreams, I call them—while writing my music. Your mother brought me the note when I'd just finished the song. All I could think of was getting here, but I couldn't leave immediately, had too much to do, orders to send, a case of instruments to pack."

Ludren sighed Ellnor's name, no longer hiding his face behind quaking palms. He angled towards a window, away from it again, to Ellnor, dark and handsome and mystical. "I did not think you'd come. I had it all planned. The children, looking for a fresh hobby, and you—you could provide them with it. And I would get to see you—at last. But I didn't _plan_ for you to come to find the miners."

"I came for the miners," Ellnor said, "I didn't come to ease the boredom of children. For the miners, because you wanted me to. And why?" He overstepped any lingering announcements of their romantic faults.

"I didn't _plan_ for you to come to find the miners," repeated Ludren, "but I thought you could, if anyone could."

"I can," declared Ellnor. His misty gaze followed Ludren around the room. "Where do I begin? What do you know?"

"Too much," Ludren mumbled, tumbling into the chair, "too much to feel safe. Too many holes and me—always trying to fit pieces into the puzzle. Lord Pately is here. He rules the Twin Valley Mining Company the way he rules his lands: with an army of a thousand souls, and nothing to say for his stronghold but that he is wary of undefined enemies. He shapes them out of ancient feuds, out of the soldiers of wars we don't remember. Pately has turned himself into an enemy. He has been staying here three weeks. He never talks about the missing from the mine. No one talks about it. Silence is killing us all."

"There is no common cause for it, is there? A dragon?"

"Dragons are hard to come by, and they are always in the north, hibernating where the suns turn into stars. That is what the legends claim. And I was there at the site, more than once. And there is nothing—no hint of foulness, no hint of a beast, just the mine, the silence."

"And a ribboned arrow shot by the myth."

Ludren shuddered a breath between parted lips. He set down his cup of strong coffee. "The myth—the myth knows?" Captivated, as much by Ellnor's voice as by his mouth, solidity and movement, Ludren listened to the short tale of finding the arrow in the tree, not far from the mine site. "This could be terrible, Ellnor, or grand—grand if the myth knows Lord Pately is not innocent. We'll begin at the site." He steadied Ellnor, smiling at the eagerness. "Later. You must act out the pretense of wayfaring salesman from my corner of the Valley."

"That is the closest thing to the truth of who I am, what I'm doing here."

Ludren rose swiftly, cupping hands around Ellnor's chin, pressing a puckered kiss onto Ellnor's nude crown. "Then I'll tell the other knights I'm planning to woo and win you."

"What happened to giving me time?"

"I'll give you time, but I'm terribly confident you'll agree—in time. If I don't claim you as mine, someone else will want you. Watch and see. You must know, Ellnor, that Lord Pately can buy anyone, anyone at all. Knights are not known for their venality, but they're as vulnerable to the shine and chink of gold as any mendicant. If I tell them that I know you, that I love you, it'll keep the spies from infiltrating your mind—and it'll be the closest truth of who I am. I'll send Florka to you. She takes care of the children."

Ludren opened the door, moving too swiftly. Ellnor's mind was cuffed, his heart sunk. He didn't know how to free himself of the current fear.

III.

Florka contained no remarkable element. Minutes after meeting her, one would be inclined to forget her. He had no use for her but as a guide. He was better among the three children, aged five, seven, and nine. He forgot about teaching them instruments and flung them around, wound them in circles about him, over his head, carried them from one end of the room to the other on his back.

Their laughter deadened at a shrill scream in the distance. Guards roared down the hall, orders shouted. Ellnor stood in front of the tiny trio, arming himself against the opening of the door. But it was only Florka, and the children clung to her skirts. Ellnor heard her bland voice recite that she didn't know what'd happened. He went on to find out.

Flinging himself around a corner, his forehead met with the body of someone else. A man, not aged significantly in face but hair wiry, with faded coppery strands smudging gray. The stranger grunted, shifted past. Ellnor gave another glance, seeing a pale braid cinched in four spots with leather straps, stopping at a belted waist. It might've been Lord Pately, yet Ellnor's instincts told him it was not. He used the remainder of his instincts to find the dilemma's source.

A group of guards, Ludren at the front of them, surrounded a doorway to a chamber. Flocks of eyes, men and women of the house, honed upon the door. Ellnor's vertical advantage permitted him a view over the tops of heads, helms and hats. He caught a glimpse of it, a narrow ebony shaft against the door's dark stained wood. Ludren's voice, strong and pure, disbanded the oglers. Ellnor stayed, as did Ludren and three of Ludren's guards.

Ellnor couldn't grasp the arrow's appearance. The shaft contained a single strand of satiny ribbon, wound, criss-crossed, knotted all the way to the phony fletching. He examined Ludren next, waiting to hear who the arrow had come for.

"This is Lord Pately's chamber." Ludren's eyebrows rose, a semaphore of his and Ellnor's lost language. To Ellnor, Ludren said no more. He addressed his guards, two women and a man, commanding them to form search parties and find an intruder in the castle, and to do it without disturbing the entirety of the household.

"Do you think that's going to work?" Ellnor asked, humor fledgling.

"Honestly? No." Ludren herded them down the corridor. "But it'll give them a purpose, and people like to have a purpose. I think it's someone in the house. Someone who's already here. With Lord Pately around, and two-thirds of the workers here having some kith or kin employed at Twin Valley, it was only a matter of time before his life was threatened. It'll happen again. It's happened before. Where's that scrummy pup of his?"

"Who?"

"A man—a boy—I can't decide which. His age is deceptive, like his intentions."

"White-haired?"

"Mostly."

"He snarled at me in the hall. Who is he?"

Ludren's stare fixed on a space ahead. Ellnor saw who he did: the white-haired man with the long braid. While he'd scampered from Ellnor's presence minutes before, he came directly to Ludren. And there was an unusual quality about his age, one moment looking fresh as a babe, and the next as old as the wisest sage. He gave a half-bow in front of the guards' captain.

"I'm here to tell you that I saw nothing."

"Marvelous, I'm quite convinced now," Ludren said, mockingly relieved.

The man pulled an unamused expression from a limited repertoire. He slammed his gaze to Ellnor. "You must be the bard."

"He's here to keep the little royals from being snoopy and bored. And me, too. He's a very old friend of mine, and I ran away from him on the morning we were to marry. Stupid of me, wasn't it?"

Ellnor disapproved of unleashing private information upon Lord Pately's liaison. Ludren had said he meant everyone in the palace know that Ellnor was his, and that included the entourage of unlawful Lord Pately. An internal clash went on inside Pately's deputy, and if Ellnor sensed it, no doubt Ludren did.

"I don't sing stories," said Ellnor. "I sell the songs, the musical instruments to play them."

"With magic," Ludren threw in.

The deputy's eyes widened, and already he disregarded the formed judgments he had of Ludren, of Ellnor Cross. "Name's Brufaire—Frey Brufaire. Lord Pately's legate, the only consistent member of his envoy. The knights told me what was found on my lord's door."

"Yes, a ribboned arrow." Again, Ludren was partly comedic, falsely so. "I wonder who could've put it there. I didn't think we allowed myths to enter the castle. I'd better check the doctrines to be sure. You know of the myth, don't you, Brufaire?"

"Of course," but fear clouded the back of his eyes.

Ellnor was unsure if Ludren saw what he did in Brufaire: hesitation, a desire to stay incorruptible. "If you know anything about the mine—"

"I know nothing about the mine," Frey grumbled, "except that it was a tragedy."

"That word implies that it was an accident." Ludren freed a thread of provocation. "Many of us do not believe it was an accident. If there was nothing to be afraid of, where are the perished miners? Why not leave the death scene as it was, if it was an accident?"

Frey edged between Ludren and Ellnor. "I must go," was his excuse.

Ludren's hands formed fists. Every instance that caught him looking at Brufaire's back, Ludren wanted to torture him, spill from his blood the secrets he knew. Ellnor preferred the passive approach to breaking a man's spirit.

"He's cracking in a harsh tide," he said. "I would like to have him confess, and save him, if I could think of a way to do it."

"Use your music," Ludren hopelessly suggested. "It has a way of tearing the heart. It might tear up his, if he has a rag of it left."

Ellnor's shoulders were clasped, his body heaved into Ludren's. His mouth was touched with an ephemeral brush of Ludren's lips.

"I have to go," Ludren said, pushing into Ellnor, "duty and guards and all. If someone did do this, I'll find out about it. If it was a myth, let it stay a myth. At least it is doing some godly good around here. You'll be able to entertain yourself, yes?"

"Yes." Ellnor had minimal control over his voice, mind, actions. "It's remarkable being near you again. I thought you were gone forever."

"I wanted to bring you back so many times, that I—" He paused, calculating the past and his lame actions. "It seemed like a child's dream, and I began to feel old when the years got to be too many. But you're here now. That's the purpose of the thing. Entertain yourself," his hand touched Ellnor's belly, "and raid the larder. I'll find you in a few hours."

Ellnor drowned in the music that filled his room. When Ludren came, Ellnor was more than prepared, but had a plan. At a certain portion of the plan, Ludren paled, appalled.

"You want to seduce Brufaire? Really!"

"Not exactly."

"That's what it sounds like."

"When I use words, yes, that's what it sounds like. But, my music is the seducer. I'm the one channeling its will. It'll help Brufaire."

"A little tussle in the tick helped many achieve greater heights of philanthropy, I'm sure. I won't let you do it!"

Ellnor reached the point of exasperated humility. "That's not what's going to happen. We're not going to tussle in the tick, Ludren. And if you're so frightened that I'll think of man other than you, come with me. My music might break the shroud around your heart, too, and make you confess your darkest secrets."

"I haven't any," Ludren admitted, smitten by the idea and cradling his bottom on Ellnor's thighs. He shifted, groaning, not in pleasure but in the fierceness of a confession. "Before you arrived, Brufaire was very engaging towards me. I told him about you, and he didn't believe me. That's why he seems incredulous to your presence. You may as well be the Arrow. Fine," he slithered from Ellnor's lap, "then let's go and have it done with."

"I'm sorry you're not the musician, the one with magic in his touch. You could do this, if Brufaire wanted you."

"He can't have me, that's all there is to it. No, wait here. I'll fetch him. Better your chamber than his—right next to Lord Pately. We'd be beheaded if he imagined Frey Brufaire would betray him."

IV.

Frey Brufaire wanted to betray his lord. He knelt in front of the open window, allowing the cold to storm against his hot face, hoping he'd catch the old plague and die, be rid of his strife and bothered soul. With the soft rap in the background, he unfolded, rising, and greeted the being behind the door. Whiskery Ludren stood there, his eyes widened and blackened in the dim, his white cloak left behind to make him unrecognizable in a gloomy passage. Frey grew less confused when the knight gestured him to follow.

They circled down a staircase, through a narrow doorway and narrow lane of stone, and herded inside a warm room, lit well by lanterns and candelabra. Ellnor sat in a chair at the table, bare head clasped by wide hands. Frey swallowed, struggled, edged nearer the closing door, but Ludren's hands gripped him, shifted him to the bed. He sat, dumbfounded. His palms and the spaces between his toes began to perspire. There would be no escape from them.

Before he could clog his ears or wish again that he were dead, Ellnor had grabbed a small harp with fat strings, and plucked sadness out of it. Heat and humiliation collided with the tones, and in the echo off the walls Frey revisited his haunted past, retold all the lies he had to get nearer the man responsible for so much death. He knew he was being hypnotized, but didn't want to stop it. He thought of crushing Ellnor's harp and throwing the bits in the flames, yet he couldn't, he wouldn't. It was his chance to leap to freedom.

"What do you want to know?"

Ellnor and Ludren hardly heard him. Ludren held up a finger to Ellnor, silencing the harp. The reverb took one final frolic around the ceiling. Frey lifted his chin, sharp and youthful eyes snapping, glaring.

"What do you want to know? My life is worth nothing. I'll say what I have, and give it, if you would just—just let me die in some other way than the one he has planned for me."

"Lord Pately," said Ludren, "means to kill you?"

"He will, when he knows I've let you bewitch me. But no more than I've been willing to let you. Both of you."

Ellnor was satisfied that his talents had wrung from Frey Brufaire a longing to confess. He was less sure what part Ludren had acted, apart from being sensibly on the side of good, and showing Brufaire a shred of kindness. "Why is Lord Pately here?"

"To find the myth."

Those four words were not the worst of it.

"He wants no one interfering with what happened at the mine." Frey tumbled into sobs that burned his lungs and added grit to his voice. "No one must know. No one. Including a myth. He rides out every day in the snow and wind, looking for it. And how it must've crushed him, and how silently I loved it, that Arrow was here, leaving that message of death on his door."

Ellnor sat near Frey. Ludren decided he'd better mimic Ellnor's inherent warmth. It was easy to wrap an arm at a weeping man's shoulders when he'd stolen three kisses and hadn't quite put away intentions to run off with more. Ludren looked across the wiry white head to Ellnor. They had the same questions in their sighs. How were they going to escape Frey Brufaire now? And the second question Ellnor voiced.

"What happened at the mine?"

V.

The captain of the royal knights was dizzy and pallid after emerging from the king's study an hour after entering it. Ahead of him, fortification in the forms of Ellnor and Frey. He'd been right about several things: the king and queen's attitude toward Pately, the king's desire to act while they could, and that he and Ellnor could not get away from Frey now. His sunken eyes were still red, his mouth still pink from stress, cheeks as void of color as his prematurely desaturated mane. They knew why his hair had turned so white.

"Feel well enough to ride?" Ludren tapped Frey's neck and ear. "You look like you need a stick up your ass to hold you up."

"Couldn't hurt," retorted Frey.

"Then what would be the point? The rest of the guard will be summoned, and we're to ride out and find Pately. We all know he'll be at the mine."

Ellnor was no great rider, but Ludren found him a slow mare, and Frey, master horseman, took the horse no one wanted for his penchant to throw a rider off. Among the canaille, a lady other than the queen made her intentions known. Ludren permitted Florka to ride in the cavalry. She thanked him, and explained to Frey and Ellnor that, prior to an injury that crippled her leg, she had been in the guard, too. Her brother had died in one of Lord Pately's northern tribe feuds. "Everything Pately touches is destroyed," she said, and lunged forward to catch Frey's gauntleted hand. "Only the strongest ones have the ability to detach from him before it is too late." She excused herself, preferring to ride near the king and queen, to whom she owed her livelihood.

Frey's arm was grabbed by Ellnor, soft reassurance in a shared look.

Snow was in a free fall, no wind to help it along. Only the convoy had a purpose in the woods. Horses snorted, hooves clapped and clonked along the frozen road. Yet no one really spoke, and when minutes had passed that way, Ellnor played a twenty-note pipe until his fingers felt the air's ice. He stopped when the snow stopped, when the low cloud broke from silver to blue, and evening sun, pink-hued, showered the company. All halted at the mouth of the mine.

The cabins were as Ellnor had seen them just a day ago: shadowy blocks, removed from use and purpose, standing only as a reminder of the mine's demise. And the edges of the mountain, destroyed now from the burrowers that desecrated its petrous innards, were shapeless and without depth under months of snowpack. A hint of moisture rose as a drifting fog over the icy top of the lake, giving those who could see it a reactionary murmur, then a pule that rose and fell with surprise and misery. The shrouds slipped away into the air, aimlessly, one after another, like the spirits of the thirty-seven miners rising to greet the gods.

The king shot out a pointing hand. "There! There he is!"

Other cries followed, each marking a sighting of Lord Pately. Ellnor, in the far back, could not see him, but had his eyes instead drawn to the lake. The surface, beneath the fog, had gained a ripple, as if it was waking. He dismounted, taking harp and pipe with him. Ludren, head of the company, did not notice this, but had urged his horse forward to the shape of Lord Pately. Behind Ellnor, Frey came. They reached lake's edge, icily crusted, yellowish, dingy. The tang of sulphur repulsed their sense of smell.

"The mine was failing," Frey said, watching Ellnor lower his hood, show his bald head to the light, his beard snow-flecked and frosted. "The mine was failing, and Lord Pately couldn't have stood another loss. He'd lose his standing with the Twin Valley Mining Company."

"Yes," said Ellnor. "Yes, I understand now. He poisoned the well. Set the plague upon them."

"I came too late," Frey continued, "a day too late after I guessed what he'd done. He would destroy this place, these lives, to save his own. When I came, most of the dead lay near the edge of the water. They might've died of thirst. Might've died longing for water when their lungs no longer worked."

"Yes," said Ellnor again. He slammed the harp to Frey's chest. "Play. It will help you. Don't think you can't—just play. It will want you to."

The harp exuded a dreadful dirge. Once, what might've been minutes or hours later, Frey and Ellnor observed the company's movements. Ludren was far ahead, nearly on the opposite side of the main shaft, nearly to the edges of the cabins. Lord Pately was there, too. Still, white, a statue carved of an angry mountain god. He didn't move even when Ludren plunged a sword into his heart.

Ludren slipped the weapon free, finding nothing on the blade but chinks left by rock and a coating of dust pale as solid snowflakes. He lay the weapon behind him. With the funneled force of his strength, he bombarded the statue of Pately. By inches, it gave way to his stubborn power and toppled to the point of a rock nearby. A great pile of rubble and a plume of harmless, scentless smoke was all that remained of Lord Pately.

Turning back to pick up his sword, mount his horse and return to his Majesties, Ludren's feet took him only a yard before he was halted by a shifting of the lake's water. It cracked with as tremendous a crash as Lord Pately's stony form. From the center of its blackness rose a sphere as wide and white as the moon. It swirled, drawing saturation and shape from everything around it. The uniforms of the guards turned white, the queen's jewels turned white, the horses turned white. What little copper remained in Frey's hair was wiped.

And now that it had gained its color, borrowed from the real world, it had a face, a shape, a garment, a head that made the pinnacle of its being and a billowy robe that drifted out and out to touch the surface of the lake. From the rising wind came a voice, and what each set of startled ears heard was different from one to the next; no one heard a uniform phrase. What Ludren heard was similar to what other guards had heard, minus a word or two, plus a word or two. Ellnor, still beside Frey, reclaimed strength, the pipe, and played the same song again.

In a whoosh like the winds of a fierce storm, stolen color returned to its places, the horses, queen's jewels, tunics, sword hilts, hair and pines.

Ludren inspected himself, finding he was returned to normal. He stared into the vacant space next to him. The remains of Lord Pately were gone. Someone shouted: there was a hustling of bodies to the first shaft of the mine—or where it had been once. The rock had reformed, complete with weeds and shrubs, as if the mine had never been. But the dead, Ludren supposed, were gone forever.

With the convoy in whispers of astonishment, they turned the horses and reclaimed the road back to the palace. Ludren lingered with Ellnor and Frey.

"This is a story for a bard," he said to Ellnor, but Ellnor shook his head.

"I'm not a bard."

"Maybe you'd better _try_. If we're going to be traveling from country to country—"

"You're not!" Frey barked, heart leaping. "I told you, I haven't any idea what happened to the survivors, what few there were. They were rounded up and taken to the nearest port."

"And probably shipped to a slave world," ended Ludren. "We're going to find them. The king has already asked me to go, to take you with me," he said while looking at Ellnor. "If you turn yourself into a bard, Ellnor, you'll be welcome in every court, every port, for that matter. Everyone loves a bard. No one's sure of a knight errant. But I'll be your spouse, and the spouse of a bard is harmless enough."

"We don't even know where to start," said Ellnor.

"Is that really your only protest? The rest of it—spouse and so forth—not so troublesome to you?"

Ellnor smiled, lacing it with a bit of sharpness. "My time is up. And a bard with a spouse is harmless enough. A bard with _two_ spouses, well, that would make him significantly less harmless."

Ludren's wits tangled. "I—what?"

Frey walked by, heading for his horse, and bumped his shoulder into Ludren. "Ha, ha," he mumbled, then stopped entirely to thieve another. "There may still be a map that marks how Pately's guards traveled with the survivors. That's how we'll start."

"This discussion is not over!" cried Ludren, yet feeling like neither potential spouse cared. He turned around and positioned anger towards the god of the mountain, the being in the lake. "This is all your fault."

Ellnor held Ludren close, fearless against the future. "We can't escape it. With Frey, the three of us will have the strength to meet it."

"Frey's a whelp."

"He'll grow."

"He has no talent."

"He can boss you around. I can't. And he's the only one who knows what port the survivors were sent to."

"Might've been sent to. He looks ancient. Look at him—he's ancient-looking, like a fossil."

"We'll rejuvenate him. You like him. And if we didn't ask him, he would come along anyway, trail behind us a day or two."

"How do you know these things?"

"I'm a bard. My music sees the hearts of people. It will help us find the survivors, maybe even Osk and Rina, our old friends. We can find all of them, if we try."

"What's your bard's intuition see in me?"

Ellnor claimed Ludren's mouth, tasking like ice, like something sweet he would later discover in Frey. Beneath his palms, Ellnor smoothed the thin wildness of Ludren's ratty hair. "The two things I always saw in you: love and music."

Last Time

## in

## Summervale

Ages had passed since Riddien Slance was required to observe Kwinn, at the peak of anger, storm from a smoky pub. Sensations caused by Riddien's heated inspection of Kwinn's departure were far from unfamiliar. Dust, blown from the hurt, gave Riddien a clear view of feelings he'd repressed for three years. More than three bygone years, too, for his warmth toward Kwinn over the last two weeks was difficult to disregard entirely. Their complicated history, full of wonder and magic and mayhem, seemed compressed into the difficult fortnight just behind them, also full of wonder and magic and mayhem.

Across the previous two weeks, moments drifted upon Riddien when he wished Kwinn would stab him with the end of his famous sword rather than flee with the stiffness and silence of a parochial mystic. Riddien had grown more used to one, rather still hoping for the other. If Kwinn had made the slightest motion of showing his anger toward Riddien Slance in the form of physical violence, Riddien would've preferred it. Such action would've provided Riddien with something of Kwinn to grip and squeeze. The Kwinn who ran off without a word, with just a slight curl in his lip and a faint gleam of revenge in his eyes, he was a Kwinn too squirmy and illusory to grip and squeeze.

Whether Riddien had dropped an unwanted phrase, or if he had delivered an unappealing joke, couldn't be immediately decided. Perhaps he'd been speaking a bit uncouthly. Sometimes his voice tipped into cadences brutal, intonations unsavory. Yet these were flavors of his character Kwinn had tasted throughout the years, and would not, therefore, be so shocked that escape was necessary.

Riddien's companions, still seated at the thick table in the center of the pub, were quite sure Riddien had been in the wrong.

"You're really not as good at this speaking thing as you think you are," said Trill. His flat-featured face and his watery, white-blue eyes of his people cut a thorough and mean stare. "There's a lot about you that you think you're good at, and you're not really all that good at. Takes a lot more time to learn these things, it does."

Flames of heat burned the base of Riddien's neck. The warmth lifted, covering his ears. Realizing what he'd said and done, how he'd said it and how he'd delivered it, Riddien became immersed in clashing embers of hate and embarrassment, anger and self-righteousness. "I was merely attempting to once again—"

"Yeah, Rid, we know what you was tryin' to do," True said. "'N it's all right 'n all, Rid, it is. You just sit there a minute and let yourself think about what it is you've done."

Being Trill's twin, True was also rich in intuition and understanding. She worried for Riddien Slance, worried that his skills as a human and his ability to be compassionate had not undergone a sufficient conditioning the last two weeks. He wasn't meant to change completely, just enough to grow sense when it came to his heart. He'd neglected it a lot through the years. A Twamp like her and her brother could tell.

The Twamps, humanoid creatures of the northeastern watersheds, had distinct accents: broad on the vowels, short on the very-short vowels, and, to one unaccustomed to hearing it, the speech often resounded as if it, too, was shoot through underwater caves. Though a dozen ears of six travelers might be close to their table in the center of the pub, none of those travelers possessed the skill to decipher what the Twamps were saying. It was perfectly audible, only squished and conformed, too strange to be fashioned into comprehensible dialogue. The drone of the bards, their singing and instruments, drowned any accessible words, as did distant conversations, laughter, clanking dishes, the rain against the road outside and the tilted roof overhead. No one was likely to hear.

Quickly, Riddien glanced at their commodity, their reason for forming a band of dubious heroes. The article that required rescuing was none other than Nitch, nickname of the sylvan elf prince—and Kwinn's nephew by way of Sarene, Kwinn's sister.

If Nitch had a beneficial quip to add, either in defense of Trill's and True's statements, or upbraiding Riddien further, the interest he maintained in a bowl of stew and a plate of fresh bread would have to fade considerably. For the last few days, Nitch had been more interested in cuisine and than conversation. Riddien had no idea elf teens could consume such large quantities. He'd heard rumors alluding to it, of course, often given so facetiously that he was forced to believe they were exaggerations, and not just of elf teens but of human teens, too. It was his second bowl of stew and his third piece of bread.

Being a fourteen-year-old with a questionable regalia of talents, famous parents, and self-centered dramas that brought entertainment and knowledge to his life, Nitch was aware of the undulations of tension excavated between his uncle and Riddien. Exactly what the prince thought of disputing passions, hidden prejudices and unfortunate grudges, Riddien couldn't imagine.

Thanks to Trill's and True's outspokenness, Riddien was severely aware of their thoughts. When shared, as, inevitably, their thoughts were shared, Riddien found them surprisingly insightful, and blatant enough to be understood without digging deeper for an answer.

Riddien's head lifted to pub's corner, a loud guffaw coming from a walrus of a man seated with several others of large proportions. The group was not looking at anyone but each other, yet Riddien's senses began popping off klaxons of impending danger. Another surge of anger hit him. He directed it toward Kwinn, whose presence, already powerful and eye-catching, had manifested a sheer magnificence at his furious exit minutes before, no doubt bringing more pub patrons acknowledging the presence of two Twamps, an elven lad, an elven leader, and a boorish human. They were not a group often seen confabulating with one another with any regularity throughout the realms. It was all the more maddening that Lady Sarene had suggested such an alliance, and a constant irritant to Riddien that he'd accepted without so much as a second thought, a throb of compunction or a hint of regret.

Riddien had once held a deft, magical hand when it came to soothing eruptions, emotional and vicious, with Kwinn. Riddien, no stranger to apologizing, would've done so while instigating the act Kwinn christened "ruthless and beautiful lovemaking." The contrast in words, ruthless and beautiful, was particularly succinct. It dictated what they were, Kwinn who brought beauty, and Riddien who brought ruthlessness, who exchanged it for an unpolished elegance once Kwinn consented, once they were undressed, breathing heavily and kissing passionately in one another's arms.

The rush of memories were sculpted like art, graspable, real to Riddien. An intensity of longing, hope and ardor pierced him. It'd be easy to follow Kwinn out the pub door, into the rain. It'd be wonderful to have the clout and aggression to take Kwinn by the mouth until enthusiasm for one another made forgiveness unnecessary.

"Why don't'cha go out 'n apologize?" asked Trill, shaking his head to rid his tubular ears of natural debris: a small insect flew out.

"Yeah, apologize like," echoed True.

The twins often echoed one another. Their plain features contained a repertoire of childish expressions, oftentimes encouraging and curious. Riddien found their strange faces, their bushy brows and feathery hair as destructive to his sudden brush of lust for Kwinn as their conjoined ability to read his thoughts. He had been considering an apology—a good, thorough, old-fashioned apology.

Consciously and subconsciously, by turns, Riddien entertained lecherous thoughts of Kwinn. It would have been unnatural if he hadn't. Fourteen days and fifteen minutes, Kwinn was so near him that breaths fell on his neck with warm, intoxicating suddenness. Riddien relished Kwinn's presence, and hid from it a bit, too. When Kwinn innocently removed his shirt for bathing, which had occurred seven times since excursion's beginning, either beside a river or at an inn, Riddien would quickly decide his time was best spent on another task, preferably one that removed him from Kwinn.

It was imperative that he remain in the pub. Someone, other than the tailed twins of idiocy, had to keep an eye on Nitch. The devotion Riddien had funneled toward Nitch exceeded the points developed during the boy's growing-up years, those brief periods that Riddien's workload deflated, when he could be at home, around Sarene and her spouse Karrik, the boy nicknamed Nitch by the time he was two—and, as always, Kwinn. Nitch possessed the wit and audacity to banish an unwanted stranger. Already, Nitch showed swirls of cunning and grace that exemplified his development into a leader.

Therefore, Riddien should've required less time to recover once Nitch surprised him.

"Let Uncle Kwinn calm down for five minutes, then you find him and apologize. And buy one of those apples he likes so much, the kind you can only get here. He's been talking about them all day, even before we got here. Take him one and say you're sorry. This isn't hard, Riddien."

Riddien stared, fumbling for an articulate response.

Trill found his tongue quicker, it being bigger. "Cor, look at that! He's got a way with words, hasn't he!"

"Quite gentlemanly, too! Observant. Sees right through everybody!" True hoisted the feathery end of her tail around the bottom of her face, allowing only the stone-colored, watery eyes to show. The assortment of black and white feathers, and gradient of grays between the two contrasts, hid the grin, but it lit up her expression as she teased Nitch. "Do you see me now, Master Nitch? Do ya?" The tail lifted to hide her eyes, almost all her pale, leathery face. "How about now, then? Now? Do ya? Eh?"

Bored with the Twamp twins' persistent efforts to entertain him with infantile methods they enjoyed themselves, Nitch let out a huff and turned to Riddien. The bounty hunter, hired specifically to find him, had a deportment so severe that simple minds and evil souls shriveled in his nearness. Nitch had witnessed that odd, unspeakable magic of intimidation, back in Little Harbor during their escape. Air pirates with convoluted priorities and loose loyalties were crushable to one as tough as Riddien Slance. Uncle Kwinn wasn't without his uses, either, for the two of them together, side-by-side, with Riddien's pistols and Uncle Kwinn's sword, created a wall of impenetrability. They were imperturbable and defiant.

Throughout Nitch's years, Uncle Kwinn was a mainstay, a mentor of humor, social urbanity, and weaponry skills he had no qualms carefully passing along to eager nieces and nephews. As a small boy, already observant and intuitive, Nitch learned why he enjoyed his uncle's company so much more than his four other aunts and uncles: Kwinn was noticeably different from every adult around him. The contrast caused him to stand out against an otherwise dull backdrop. Kwinn regularly ignored the entreaties of Nitch's assembly of watchdogs, allowing the boy to get as dirty as he wanted on their woodsy outings, climb as many trees as he liked, play in mud as much as he liked—though he drew the line at eating unusual agarics and killing creatures for no reason, which Nitch wouldn't have done. Kwinn's adventures away from home enthralled all the sylvan elves, young and old, regardless of the embellishments. Elves often considered a raconteur's elaborations of his sojourns as a sign of intelligence, wit and charisma. In that manner, Kwinn was far from an outcast. Since little pitchers have big ears, Nitch was quite aware of what the adults thought of Kwinn, what they said of him.

Yet wherever, whenever there'd been unrestricted prattle of Uncle Kwinn, there'd been allusions to Riddien Slance. Many came at breakfast before Nitch entered the room, that he barely caught above the common din of the house, and would never have caught at all had Riddien Slance's name not been so sibilant, crashing through the air with hiss of a lightning strike. Nitch soon threw the clues, surreptitiously gathered, into a soupçon of characteristics and circumstances. He learned as much as he could about his uncle's peculiar au pair, the only bounty hunter warily welcomed among the very private sylvan elves.

Riddien had thrown his life into peril multiple times to save Kwinn's nephew. Now the chance had arrived for Nitch to help Riddien. Still ignorant as to the ways of heroes, believing he could become one, simply osmose into one upon a distant future day, he wanted to help Riddien while there was still something to save. "Take the apple and find him. I'm not saying he'll be overjoyed by the apple. He probably won't care. He's been too nervous the last two weeks to eat much. But the point isn't that he'll eat. The point is that it'll give you a reason to talk to him."

Once again, Riddien was sure his skin had turned translucent. He was nothing more solid than the pellucid trails of smoke from the bowl of Trill's pipe. He gave a shake of his head to tamp an emotional surge. Kwinn once held that same quality, the ability to see through his inamorato and right to the core of him, to his bland truths and his clever lies. But his thoughts returned to Kwinn, how strange and distant he'd been the last two weeks. Riddien hadn't expected Kwinn to welcome him with open arms or long, sweet kisses. Riddien could barely see the past from the present. "Kwinn's always been so so annoyingly sensitive."

"Why's that supposed to change?" Riddien wasn't the only one familiar with Kwinn's moodiness. No elf in Nitch's knowledge had an ability to sulk or seethe for the length and severity Uncle Kwinn managed. "He didn't have to change just because you weren't around anymore. And he didn't have to change just because the two of you have spent the last fortnight together. It's usually the sensitive ones who aren't as changeable as the assertive ones. Like you."

The heat resting at the base of Riddien's neck soon lifted. It throbbed in his ears. How humbling it was to be put in his place by a teenaged elf!

"Fine." Riddien growled out the word through clenched teeth. He jumped from the bench and pulled himself away from the roughly hewn table. All he felt were eyes on him, from his own trio to the gallimaufry of ugly tavern patrons. But with a careful inspection of the room, no one was looking at him, only the odd trio in front of him. "Fine, I'll go—and apologize for being a troglodyte. Again. And watch him." He pointed from Trill and True to Nitch. "I mean it."

Riddien was reluctant to leave Nitch in the care of seemingly brain-dead Twamps. In their crusty-headed pates, however, existed a catalogue of strategic combat maneuvers. Twamps were renowned for their stupidity and fierceness, like trolls, though their tails were longer, feathery and wide, and they had very little that mimicked the trolls' fecal scent, which allowed them to be tolerated by sentient societies outside their own. Riddien trusted the Twamps. Nitch was nearly home, another thirteen hours by the main road, but the nearness was no reason to slacken security.

At Riddien's urging, and, to his surprise, Kwinn's concurrence, they decided to stay overnight at the tavern, and finish the journey in the warmer, kinder light of day. Riddien had his reasons for insisting. He'd sensed a shadow lurking behind them, and wanted to do what he could to be sure the shadow kept its distance; he wanted to be in a place where he could see it coming. His less professional reason was a tight coil that claimed his stomach when he thought of meeting Sarene and Karrik for the first time in three years. He'd freed Nitch from Little Harbor, and the boy hadn't a scratch on him. Riddien could hardly boast the same, though he appreciated his cuts, scrapes and bruises, badges of honor that boasted his success as much as Nitch's wholeness and life.

Since being asked to join the recovery party by Lady Sarene, Riddien had been nagged by the entire ordeal. Nagged in quiet ways that were unspeakable but entirely obtrusive.

Nine days before, Riddien had made the mistake of mentioning his doubts to Kwinn about it, but Kwinn, hardly able to see a fault in anyone, had refused to acknowledge any mystery in Nitch's kidnapping, aside from the obvious: Captain Towers was bored, and what was more lively for an air pirate admiral to do with his fleet than kidnap a beloved member of elite society?

Getting out of Little Harbor had been as bad as Riddien and Kwinn had expected when they'd first brainstormed their plan. But, at present, Riddien recognized that the whole thing could've been, and probably should've been, far more difficult.

Not only had Riddien Slance tried to determine how they were going to sneak their way onto Captain Towers' massive ship and off again in one piece, he'd also tried to discover why a pirate captain would want a sylvan prince. It had to be more than Lady Sarene's and Kwinn's theory that the pirate captain's insatiable need to perpetuate evil for the thrill of it.

The situation was odd.

As was Kwinn's behavior. Granted, Kwinn had grown older—but Riddien had twelve years on him—and perhaps that accounted for a bit of the change. Maybe there'd been no real change in Kwinn, as Nitch had proclaimed a few minutes ago. Perhaps just a smidgen of it, a precursor; Kwinn used to fight against the things he didn't believe in. He wasn't convinced that Nitch's kidnapping was more than it appeared. Riddien was unconvinced.

Once more, Riddien made the mistake of voicing his misgivings to Kwinn, who still did not want to hear it, particularly at their table in the busy tavern. Kwinn had raised his narrow black eyebrows, that questioning, taunting manner he used to do, the one that wanted to know why Riddien Slance bothered thinking at all, then having the arrogance to spill his thoughts on others. To cover the gaffe, Riddien hurriedly asked Kwinn for his opinion. Kwinn replied that he had no opinion; there was nothing to form an opinion around. Riddien's temper gushed when he demanded Kwinn give a real answer, "Something out of your head that doesn't belong to someone else!"

Kwinn had chosen then to rise from the table, pale but calm, and leave the tavern. Riddien wasn't immediately sorry. He spent a handful of minutes annoyed at Kwinn. He knew he was right, that Kwinn would never form an opinion that wasn't a regurgitation of his sister's thoughts. Riddien's sorrow slowly suppressed his personal irritation. No doubt Kwinn was trying the best he could to understand a situation that had developed out of the blue. Kwinn had always tried his best. Riddien knew dealing with him, with the two of them together no matter how dispassionately and coldly, were not easy tasks.

Riddien bought one of the gold apples from the publican. Knowing which door Kwinn had used minutes ago, Riddien followed the same path. Before departing, Riddien scanned the loud eatery for suspicious characters. It brought a furrow to his brow and a tightness to his mouth realizing that Trill and True, sitting with a boy, were the most suspicious of the lot. Riddien was used to being the one at the village inn that gathered malice, suppositions and fright. Twamps, in their infrequent wanderings, hardly ever so far from their homeland, were ogled with curiosity more than scorn. Elf boys—Riddien was far from knowledgeable about them. Nitch's docile looks, his round face, big green-hazel eyes and head of curly auburn hair seemed to warm the spirits of the elderly and paternal.

Kwinn and Nitch hardly resembled one another, making it easy for them to travel as friends rather than family. Kwinn barely resembled his sister, save for their dark eyes, a legendary piece of their physiognomy heard of through ancient orated tales and bardic lore of ancestral escapades. Coming face-to-face with Kwinn after being bereft of him for three years, Riddien felt clumsier, thicker, older. It provoked Riddien to the point of erotic madness that Kwinn grew handsomer, more alluring, more charismatic as the digits of his years increased. His black-brown hair, highlighted in red and gold, hadn't been softened by pure white strands, and he still wore it as he had when they'd met: loose below his shoulders, sometimes held in place at the nape of his neck by a narrow leather band. In moments of foreplay, Riddien loved to take out that band and lose his fingers in Kwinn's hair. But all of that was a painfully long time ago.

Outside, Riddien had an opportunity to notice the contrast of climates, and, for a moment, thought the damp, cold conditions surrounding the inn should be immediately replaced with the warm, cozy tavern—or the soft bed waiting for him upstairs. It'd be another long night with little sleep, and the pressure of Kwinn's rejection of his ideas, Kwinn's rejection of him, and the formless shadows at their backs would certainly increase the risk of insomnia.

Not far from the turn of the pitted, rocky path from the inn's side door to the barns and stables, Riddien stopped beneath the canopy of a fat-leafed tree. The natural umbrella gave him a chance to espy Kwinn from a dry place, though the rain didn't bother Kwinn: he roamed the rear garden with short but quick steps, swiping at tall grasses and shrubs as he went.

Everything about Kwinn was long, limber, graceful and free. During his mindless parade around the back garden, between the inn, the barns and a nameless forest, he continued to stew, failing to win the battle against his emotions. If still sore at Riddien for the declaration of mistrust that all was as simple as it seemed, it would be unusual. Kwinn failed to retain the zenith of his anger longer than a minute or two. And, by that second minute, if it was Riddien's doing that emotions had exploded, Kwinn would be wholly distracted by Riddien's tongue dancing with his, Riddien's hand sliding into the heat of his breeches. Riddien had enjoyed his and Kwinn's nonsensical arguments for their joyful endings.

The last one, however, he had not enjoyed. The darkness and harshness of it had been different from the onset. It had ended much differently, too.

The present argument proved awkward. In a sense, Riddien was accusing Kwinn's sister of wrongdoing, of secret-keeping. Riddien was quite able to see how Kwinn could fume at the mere notion that his sister, the sylvan elves' high diplomat and clan guardian, was involved in the kidnapping of her own son. Though the accusation now tasted false, Riddien had an obligation to observe the kidnapping at every angle. He wanted to find the reason behind it. Kwinn wanted to let it be. He enjoyed life much more when there was no gray area of politics, ethics and morals to squint into. Riddien had learned that about Kwinn the day they'd met. He kept learning it, over and over, every time they argued.

Riddien longed to fix their new fissure the way he'd fixed the old ones: with grand sex. He'd accept adequate sex, as long as it was with Kwinn. Now feeling too old and lovelorn to care about the quality of intimacy, he cared more for quantity. Any attempts he'd made over the last three years to satisfy the empty cavern created by Kwinn's loss had Riddien hosting a series of performance malfunctions. He'd devoted a quarter-century of his life to Kwinn, and it was only Kwinn he wanted.

The conviction loudened Riddien's steps. Kwinn was too swift for Riddien to recover from the sword, drawn and lifted, creating a cool speck at the base of his neck. Kwinn might be aging as well as Riddien—Riddien was beginning to feel the daily aches of his toils—but Kwinn would never lose the acute senses of his people.

Kwinn knew it was Riddien stalking him through the garden. The sight of the face across from him put him in no rush to lower the weapon. "You still smell like the sea," he said, indicating how he'd been alerted to Riddien's presence.

"Considering we were at the sea," Riddien began, his normal, stiff voice that used to amuse Kwinn, "that's hardly the shock you want it to be."

"You could've done a better job bathing the other night." Now Kwinn, bored with the spectacle of an insouciant Riddien, lowered the blade. He had no interest in seeing Riddien relaxed, at ease with their odd, deceitful surroundings. He had an uncanny interest in being as close to Riddien as possible, an obsession that'd haunted him for weeks, even years. The tension of the previous weeks had been bearable: they had a task to complete. They had combined their efforts for success and achievement, the way they had done before. If they'd failed, no one would have seen or heard of them again. The enemies of an air pirate captain as powerful and influential as Towers had a way of disappearing. But Nitch was safe, only a day's journey from home. One more day, one more night, and Kwinn did not know what would happen to Riddien. The sorrow of soon becoming separated from Riddien augmented every sensitivity Kwinn possessed. The tension of the past few days maimed Kwinn, chiefly his heart, closely followed by the venomous desire that tightened his groin. A heavy weight landed over his chest, knowing he might spend another succession of years without Riddien.

Riddien hadn't forgotten what Kwinn had said to him, the quip about bathing. "I didn't want to do a better job bathing the other night," he explained. Kwinn's narrow face fell in feigned disinterest. Kwinn often appreciated his jokes, though he'd be the last one to admit it. "If I'd done a better job, I couldn't have been able to grow fungus for us to eat while traveling through the Veil Mountains."

A startling grain of truth existed in the fictitious quip. "I wondered where you found those mushrooms."

"Now you know." Riddien crossed his leather-covered arms, offering Kwinn a brief, vibrant grin. "The wonderful damp and smelly vale of my armpit. I brought you this, speaking of tasty morsels."

Kwinn claimed the offered apple, holding it to his nose to absorb its strong, sweet odor. Kwinn gave his gaze over to match Riddien's, and held it as long as he could before his chest started to feel fragile, and his mouth started to feel heavy with want. The garden light was dim, ambient, produced by the lanterns hanging outside the two doors, by the few lit windows of rented rooms. Riddien was shown in a rough, lumpy way, with teases of light across his loveliest parts, like the deepening wrinkles on the sides of his mouth, the thickness of his eyelashes. The unanticipated beauty of Riddien caused Kwinn's stomach to swerve in all directions. Riddien's eyes, fair blue and wide, had first nabbed Kwinn's heart twenty-five years before. Kwinn had caught him thieving peaches in the west orchard, and Riddien, self-righteous and charmingly arrogant, claimed that the unguarded peaches were as much his as anyone's. Within five minutes, Kwinn was on his back in the sun-drenched grass, the debris of fallen peaches, bees buzzing nearby and Riddien Slance's greedy, velvety tongue searching every inch of his mouth.

Kwinn remembered the apple, still in his hand, and Riddien, still in front of him.

"Thanks," he said quietly. He bowed his head, dropping his eyes to the ground. A few raindrops patted the back of his head, barely making it to his scalp through the thickness of his hair. Every sound and aroma was ten times stronger than normal. The smoke from the hillside village's array of chimneys. The gurgling of a hurried river and a swelled creek. Hundred of toads enjoying the rain and the last of their breeding season. Riddien's coal locks coated in soot and mud, carrying a perfume like autumn leaves, like stringy, frothy remnants of a sea they'd left behind days ago. "I was hoping we'd stop here for the night. It's the only village in this area that grows these apples. We used to grow them, used to distribute them here before Father fell ill, before—"

Riddien's had clamped Kwinn's mouth shut. Like all the rest of Kwinn, his mouth was long, occasionally graceful, lean, saying only what it needed. That last day of their union, absolute and unbreakable, Kwinn's mouth hadn't said enough. It'd been too economical, too lethal. And Riddien couldn't make up for Kwinn's missing words. He knew how to be sorry, how to say he was sorry, but he'd always been better at showing his feelings rather than speaking them. He healed their griefs in other ways.

Kwinn smacked the hand off his mouth, eyebrows bent in anger. Riddien wasn't going to play the lion, not then, not anymore. It'd worked in former days, when they were younger, when repairs were easier, forgiveness and love in every breath. He let out a sigh then, hearing a lack of malice, an eagerness to be loved again.

"Why do you persist with that obnoxious idea of yours? Especially when you know—clearly, without a doubt—that I don't believe you?" Unable to look at Riddien's dumb, docile expression, or wait to see the rise of his stubbornness, Kwinn turned around. Anger fueled his steps, taking him deeper into the garden. A cherry tree grew tall beside a square of earth devoted to the growth of herbs and everyday vegetables, and he headed for it. The scent of rosemary and dill drew him. Riddien wasn't dismissed that easily, and their paces were soon united. "There is nothing more sinister and vile going on, Riddien. Captain Towers has always hated the elves. We're a menace to his way of life. You know that. You know how he feels about us, and yet your argument continues. Do you realize how much of an ass you're being, how ignorant and petty you sound?"

Riddien had no willingness to concede to everything. "I might sound petty, and I'm used to sounding like an ass, especially when I'm forced to talk between your pretty and erudite speeches, Kwinn, but I'm telling you this situation is hardly as simple as it seems."

Kwinn stopped at the trunk of the cherry tree. The lowest branches went over his head, but Riddien's forehead hit one, and Kwinn was sorry that he found Riddien's grunt, curse and rubbing of the wound so funny. He knew better than to laugh. It would only encourage Riddien in all his efforts. It would invite too much casualness.

Kwinn finally asked the one question he'd purposefully avoided. "Why are you so sure, anyhow? What possible evidence could you have to support this ridiculous idea?"

The faint scrape on his forehead ceased to burn as intensely. Kwinn's eyes, however, burned with a conflagration of enormous stars. "You don't think it's just a little uncanny that Captain Towers, larking it up at his castle down in the Grannlin Tropics, should suddenly hurry on up here to this marshy wasteland, this morass of distain, and kidnap an unimportant elf boy, one not even old enough to wield his own sword and join Towers' fleet? And the pirate would do this to alleviate a short-lived boredom—really? You think this is far more probable and realistic than my idea that someone—not necessarily Sarene—just _someone_ —put him up to it? I find it difficult to believe that Towers has become that disinterested in his life and his lifestyle. Yes, it must be so exhausting having one's own harem!"

To himself, Kwinn admitted that the idea of having a harem sounded tempting. Or it was a combination of the rain, the smells, how provokingly moist Riddien's mouth looked. To keep his oral thoughts elsewhere, Kwinn turned his thoughts to Captain Towers. Was it suspicious that Towers had, seemingly on a whim, kidnapped an elf prince?

"We did get out of Towers' stronghold rather easily," he finally agreed, unable to say more on the subject. He didn't want Riddien believing his own harebrained theories. "Have you decided if someone's following us?"

Riddien rubbed the back of his neck, feeling something crawl on it, or perhaps just a drop of rain slithering into his shirt. "Oh, I decided hours after we escaped that we were being meticulously followed. I think they're Towers' goons, but, given my predilection to believe in crazy conspiracies, it could be anyone. On this, Kwinn, I would rather defer to your knowledge, vast and unflappable as it is."

"Don't be sarcastic. It's not funny."

"Who's being sarcastic? I was quite sincere."

"If we're being followed, then why are we here? Why are we staying?"

Riddien had an answer, knowing that Kwinn was trying to catch him in a trap. "Ah, yes—that. Fording the river took a lot more out of us than we'd like to admit, except for the twins. They're used to such things. Your nephew's brave, but he was frightened."

"I'm aware of Nitch's behaviors." Kwinn couldn't resist poking Riddien in the chest. "Why are we here? Don't prevaricate. Just tell me."

Riddien toyed with the idea of asking Kwinn what would happen if he didn't obey. Kwinn could get a little vicious with their coital roughhousing, but only about as often as a blue moon. He gave Kwinn's wrist a testing squeeze. "The rain's washed out the majority of rivers, fords, docks and rafters from here to Yelonde. They're a good three days behind us, perhaps more than that. I thought we could use a rest, a night to consider what will happen when we return Nitch to his parents."

Kwinn became too comfortable with Riddien and moved himself from the cherry tree to the swath of grass behind the shed. His wrist still exploded with tingling heat where Riddien had touched it. "Three days, is that all? I estimated at least five." He lied. There'd been no estimation, no certainty at all that Towers had sent a company of his best goons after them. Not them, no, but Nitch, his nephew. "Suppose I support your theory for a moment, Riddien. Then enlighten me: Why do they want Nitch? He's a boy."

Riddien returned to what he did best, being bland. "I really hope you're not just now asking yourself that question."

"Of course not," spat Kwinn, annoyed and insulted. "I have my own ideas." Kwinn didn't want to stand around in an aromatic garden, in the rain, on a cold summer's night to hear Riddien's vilifications. Abruptly aware that he'd left his nephew back in the inn with only the Twamps for guardians, Kwinn turned around. He bumped right into Riddien. "Who's with him, with Nitch?"

Riddien clenched Kwinn's jaw, leaving his thumb free to rub a tempting bottom lip. He felt Kwinn tremble, the flash of annoyance at his impertinence, but he was more amused by Kwinn's quick inhalation. "He's fine. He's aware of what's going on, knows his surroundings, who to trust and who to hate. At the moment, he's being entertained by Trill's stories, and True's spit when she talks."

Kwinn snickered. True could have the whole table covered in a decent coat of spit after an hour's dinner and conversation. He caught the end of Riddien's thumb with his teeth, lightly licking the scarred pad. He wanted Riddien so terribly, and wished he could take back what'd happened. But he had his pride to fight for, too. "You can't end an argument with me by a smooch and groping session anymore, Riddien. I'm not saying that I agree with you, that there's something bigger and—" He leaned back, Riddien tilting closer and closer to him, looking once at his eyes and again at his mouth. Kwinn tried to find what he'd been blathering on about. His worry for Nitch was not as grand as it should be. He trusted Riddien's statement about the river, Towers' minions three days away. "And I don't know, Riddien, I don't see how your idea amounts to anything significant."

Riddien grunted dismissively. For the first time in three years, Kwinn was in his arms. Every other thought but Kwinn was secondary.

Kwinn gave a brief wriggle, entertained the action of stepping on Riddien's foot or kicking him in the shin if he would just _let go_. But the smell hurled him into nostalgic desire. Leather, horse, the sea, the outdoors, the citrus oil that Riddien sometimes put in his hair to keep it from frizzing on damp summer days. The reminder of Riddien's one vanity hitched Kwinn's reluctant mouth into a small smile. Riddien hadn't changed, and Kwinn very much doubted that the changes he'd wrought in his own life were so remarkable. It'd grown too difficult to convince himself that his life and Riddien's were so different. Their separation was reconcilable, after all.

Riddien sent the tip of his nose searching through Kwinn's hair, and when his mouth met the bone and flesh of Kwinn's temple, kisses, tiny and moist, were dropped. The touch of Kwinn's cheek against his, the feel of their bodies together, it was much the same as it'd been, as far as angles and geometry, but the thrill was far grander and deeper. Riddien slid a palm down the slope of Kwinn's fundament, cupping the bottom curve and pulling them together. Kwinn's sigh shook, and the push against Riddien's chest ended with a twist of the wrist, a fistful of leather coat, and their lips holding one another's. After a couple of soft, testing nibbles, Kwinn poured himself into Riddien, remembering the last time they'd kissed, and the first time in the orchard a quarter of a century before.

Riddien let his hands express exactly what he wanted from Kwinn. He prodded and massaged Kwinn's lean buttocks. He pushed his thigh against Kwinn's rising cock, all the while paying attention to the mouth he'd missed. "I'd forgotten how good you taste."

The words combed a nerve in Kwinn, one of love and eagerness. Next thing Riddien knew, he was being hauled to a thicket of shadows. He noted that they were behind the garden shed, with trees plentiful, overhanging and protecting them from spits of rain. It wasn't exactly the place Riddien had envisioned a sexual reunion with Kwinn, but it was quiet, beautiful in its own way, and not that far removed from the arbored majesty of Kwinn's family orchard, where they'd met, where they'd kissed, where they'd decided to run off together. Anywhere was all right, as long as he could lay his hands against Kwinn, revel in the destruction of their useless, lustful tension.

Kwinn sucked Riddien's bottom lip, caught it with an incisor and tugged. He tugged, too, at Riddien's belt. It didn't give easily, causing Kwinn to raise his palm to the flesh above. His touch set off a spasm, a gasp from Riddien. His wrist was grabbed, his hand guided between tough leather and warm, waking skin. As Riddien shifted to press his hot erection into Kwinn's palm, he shuddered, loosed a long sigh with his forehead to Kwinn's shoulder.

"Been a while, has it?" Kwinn teased. He ran the tip of his tongue along the top of Riddien's ear, left a nibble there. "I don't know how much I can do. Your breeches are far tighter than they used to be."

To prove that it could be done, that he wanted it, Riddien tossed his hips forward, releasing a groan. Unfortunately, it was a little tight, and he wanted more. He wanted to be exposed to the air, to Kwinn, to himself. It'd been a long time since someone else had looked at him the way Kwinn had, the way Kwinn was so closed to doing again. And it'd been ages since Riddien had felt like a sexual being, oozing one smidgen of charisma that might set off a frenzied orgasm in another.

He pressed his willing sex into Kwinn a final time, grunting with remorse and longing. "So unfair. I finally have you after all these years, and this isn't how it should be."

"I know." Kwinn's mischievous fingers clasped and stroked Riddien's dick as he released his hand from the moist cove. He shoved Riddien's shirt hem back in place, too. "Riddien, maybe you and I should—"

"Should what?" Riddien hoped for the words he'd been aching to hear for years: reconcile. The best moments of his life had happened with Kwinn at his side. He nuzzled Kwinn, touching their noses, almost touching their mouths. He fingered Kwinn's ear, the back of his neck where his braided molasses hair was softest, warmest, driest.

Kwinn gave in to the presence of Riddien and kissed him hard. A squirmy, wet kiss that sent their tongues after one another, until they were separated and they tasted raindrops and each other, then crashed together again. Kwinn drifted away, raising his neck at Riddien's urging.

"Maybe we should get our own room tonight." He could hardly expel the words, crushed as he felt against his longing for Riddien. His hands curled at Riddien's back, traveled the same path that Riddien's hands had taken earlier. Even his hands remembered Riddien's body, the rise and falls of it. He drew Riddien's useful pubis close to him, piled his confined mound into it, let the pressure overcome him. "Room," he swallowed against a mouth gone dry with panting, "now—soon—as sure as we make sure Nitch is all right."

Nitch was a sobering thought, and one that vacuumed all sensuous energy right out of Riddien—and the boy's uncle. Kwinn swam a hand down Riddien's sweaty, cooling face, stole another second's kiss. His throat constricted, but he pushed words out of it.

"The last couple of weeks have made a mess out of me, Riddien. I was upset over Nitch being stolen, of course. Then I had to deal with you. I hated you at first. Then I was embarrassed over what happened between us. But I focused on Nitch, what had to be done. During this journey home, though, I grew more anxious to talk to you. I've always been sorry that I couldn't tell you that I was sorry."

"I was sorry, too. Right when I saw you walk out, I was sorry."

"I missed you."

For the sentiment, he was kissed hard, long, then multiple times. Riddien grabbed Kwinn at the shoulders, holding their foreheads together. He sniffled, not sure if the rain was getting to him, or if he had too much water in his eyes from too much feeling.

"Don't ever let me let you walk away again. Promise?"

Kwinn nods were rapid, his promise conveyed but unarticulated.

It seemed bright in the pub when they returned. They winced to fight off as much of the overhead light and hanging lanterns as they could. At the table, the twin Twamps were nearly asleep, and Nitch listened intently to the crooning bards. He sipped a cup of chamomile tea before noticing his uncle and Riddien Slance.

"The publican brought it for me," Nitch explained to his uncle. "Thought it'd help me sleep." He understood why Kwinn held it to his nose, sniffed it, sipped it, and handed it back to him. If someone wanted Prince Nitch, he rather doubted they'd sneak poison into his tea.

"Speaking of sleep, you and the twins had better head upstairs for some rest. We're all to sleep well tonight, and you'll be refreshed when you see your mother tomorrow evening." Kwinn swished the boy's strange hair, helped him out of the bench and toward the staircase.

Riddien had the duty of rallying the marshland humanoids to follow. He'd purchased two rooms for the night, with the idea of using only one of them. Now that he wanted to spend a little time alone with Kwinn, both rooms would be used. His sexual desire was severely hampered by a duty to keep True and Trill alive, and, sacrificing everything else, even his own life, Nitch had to be protected. He couldn't quite block the guilt clouding his sensibilities, should he leave Nitch in the care of True and Trill. Whatever he wanted to do with Kwinn, and he knew exactly what he wanted to do with Kwinn, as well as _to_ him—it would have the wait.

Nitch settled into the wide, short room, finally taking off his black cloak and deciding, after the assurances of his uncle and the bounty hunter, to take off his boots. Weary from a day's worth of riding, his bones and muscles seemed to protest his horizontal position on a comfortable bed. His wired mind tore through the galaxies of knowledge he'd gained, and it was within thirty seconds that he begged True to tell him one of her favorite stories.

"Ah, yeah, that one," she said, wiping her mouth when it caught a string of spit. "That one I know you're talking about. About the trout and me and Trill. Yup, that's the one. It's a good one though, yeah? Well, you just hunker on into these warm blankets, young master, and let Nanny True tell it again." She shooed the boys away. This was her province, not theirs, when she had a good story to tell and a fine young being willing to hear it.

Kwinn and Riddien claimed the time to recover from the long journey, most of it on horseback, save where the flooding had blocked roads and the ferrymen were busy. The inn's washroom was no bigger than a closet, about as dim as one, but it had a door that locked, and it smelled like more than woodsmoke and fried fish. With his face still damp from a rinse, Kwinn tucked his lips to Riddien's. Their wild, harmonious petting session continued where it had ended minutes before.

Riddien turned and pushed Kwinn against the wall. He was lucky he'd committed the feat without hurting either of them, tiny as the room was. He plied his thumbs to removing the strands of hair that always cascaded around Kwinn's elevated, pointed ears. He bit and nibbled and sucked Kwinn's luscious mouth, loving every second of it but finding maneuverability in the washroom rather difficult. And it was a communal washroom, used by every guest on the second floor. As Kwinn freed Riddien's tricky belt from its buckle, a fist pounded against the door.

"C'mon, you've had your turn!" said a gruff country voice. "What'choo doin' in there, then? Paintin' pictures? Let others have a go!"

Indelicately, Riddien snorted. He wasn't going to let anyone else have a go at Kwinn. "Just a moment," he told the waiting man. He kissed the end of Kwinn's nose. "I thought your sister's a lunatic for asking me to help you recover Nitch."

"But I know why she did," Kwinn replied. "She knows I still love you. We should be together, Riddien." He caressed Riddien's high cheekbone, hand dropping against his man's brawny chest.

"I know we haven't seen one another in three years, and it was hard and stupid and devastating, I never considered that you and I weren't together. You're always a part of me. Even the not-nice parts that piss you off."

Kwinn hadn't a chance to reply, at first too elated to think of what to say, then interrupted.

"Hey, you two in there?"

At the new call behind the door, Riddien and Kwinn looked at one another, questions rising. What did Trill want, and why hadn't he gone right to sleep?

Trill asked for directions to the second room Riddien had purchased. "Got words for the two of you." He started his declaration with an ominous overtone. To be on the safe side, he slid the bar lock into place once they were in the reserved bedroom. "Look here, Kwinn, Slance, I've been riding with the two of you about two weeks now, and I've come to have some concerns. First off, I demand to know what's going to happen to the young master once we give 'im back to his people tomorrow."

Kwinn shivered, crossing his arms to ward off the evil pressing close to him. "What do you mean?"

"Well, I mean, it's rather obvious, ain't it? When he gets home, I mean, he's not going to be at home long, that's what I mean. I mean that it's obvious that his father's got something to do with his disappearance. I mean, ain't that what it is?"

Riddien joined Kwinn's unrefined stare at the Twamp. Kwinn could only repeat the phrase in his mind: Nitch's father, Karrik! Karrik was involved! It wasn't Sarene at all! Karrik!

With Kwinn too shocked to reply, Riddien claimed the responsibility. Stepping forward, he thwacked Trill on the arm, grinning.

"Well, Trill, you're showing a lot of intuition and imagination this evening."

"Ain't, though," argued Trill, waiting for one of them to say he was right, that the boy shouldn't be returned to his no-good father.

"Yes, you are," Riddien insisted. He gave Trill another congratulatory pat. "Look, Trill, erm—it'd probably be best if you not mention that to anyone."

"No, sir," Trill shifted, his wide boots making squishing noises, as though always filled with a bit of swamp water. "No, I wouldn't say nothing to anyone."

Even if he found a receptive audience, it wasn't too likely he'd be understood.

Riddien's nod was accompanied by a slow "Right." He shot a quick glance at Kwinn. The two of them knew what they were doing, and their silent communiques hadn't lost power over time.

"We're going to do all we can to make sure the situation ends happily," Riddien assured Trill. He had nothing more than that, and hoped the Twamp was satisfied. "Nitch will be as safe as we can make him. I promised to protect him with my life, Trill, and I will."

Trill straightened through the neck, head and shoulders. His fist landed over his heart and he observed a distant spot with allegiance and loyalty. "As will I, Riddien Slance, as will I!"

"I'd better go down and check on Nitch," Kwinn said, excusing himself.

Riddien, irritated by Kwinn's sudden absence and being left alone with Trill, rotated to a window of the rented room. It offered a view of the rear garden. With it still void of vile air-pirate henchmen, Riddien allowed himself to replay the new memory of kissing Kwinn behind the shed. It seemed seedy, clandestine and youthful, the kind of thing young lovers, forbidden to be together, would enact to satisfy their physical urges. Kwinn had always unearthed Riddien's youthful side.

Trill waited for Riddien to guide him, to tell him if there was anything else he could do tomorrow to save Nitch. He had a feeling that, tonight, they were safe. Safer than they'd been in weeks. The flooding had secured them a quiet evening at a fine inn in Summervale, a place he knew to be slightly familiar to Kwinn, thanks to the apples, and probably not unknown to Riddien Slance. Though Lady Sarene, Kwinn's elegant and powerful sister, had declared that Kwinn was the elf in charge of her son's rescue mission, it was Riddien that the members of the mission turned to. Kwinn himself was not immune to Riddien Slance's displays of leadership, nor his more blatant sexual appeal. Trill sensed that wasn't unknown to Kwinn, either, a lot like the village of Summervale, except more so.

"So, sir, what's gonna happen next? I mean, is we taking the boy back to his folks up yon hill, or isn't we? And what if we do, sir? What about you and that elf there, Kwinn? You two is smitten on one another, or I'll eat me tail."

Riddien's premiere reaction was to declare it none of the Twamp's business. Yet he delayed several seconds, the silence allowing Trill to expound.

"I don't know how his family would feel about it, sir, if you don't mind me saying so. I mean, him being a prince and all that, or at least whatever they've got that's a bit like a prince. I mean, his family's big into the agriculture and all of that, ain't they? Not sure they'd like him being spoused up to a bounty hunter, sir. I'm not meaning any offense by that, sir, not a bit of it, but—but there's a proper way of doing things, sir, and a not-so-proper way, and he and you together ain't really so popular an idea."

"Please," Riddien's thick black brows rose, "stop talking yourself into a bigger hole, Trill. Kwinn and I can't be spouses—"

"Ah, there you go, then."

"Because we already are spouses."

Trill deflated, flapping his juicy lips as he let out a long breath of air. Culturally, it was how the Twamp expressed surprise. "To each other, though?" They were also known for getting over their surprise rather quickly, their brains unable to contemplate much for too long.

"To each other," Riddien said, a softness edging his voice. "I've known Kwinn for ages. Why do you think Sarene picked me for this mission?"

"Though it was, you know, you being you and all that."

In a manner of speaking, Trill wasn't wrong. Riddien continued his vigil of the rear garden. Trill's mind looped.

"You're still spouses to one another then, is it? You must've signed a lot of them spousal contracts if it's true. I mean, you two haven't seen one another in years, but you're still all knotted up."

Riddien wanted to get rid of the topic. "We signed all the contracts—"

"Even that there final one? That forever one?"

"Even that one," responded a plagued Riddien. "Could you check on the others for me? And make a swoop around the pub, make sure there's no one creepy lurking about." When he didn't leave right away, Riddien glared at him. "Get a move on, Trill."

"It's just that—"

"What?"

"I don't like seeing someone I care for getting his heart all broke up."

Riddien pushed him toward the door. "My heart's fine. Believe me. Just do as I ask, and then _you_ won't break it."

With Trill finally gone, Riddien continued to spy out the window. Every once in a while, he thought he caught movement among the shadows, but it would take eyesight keener than his to be sure. Though he had plenty of time to think about Kwinn, Riddien chose instead to ponder the mystery around Nitch's kidnapping. That isn't to say that every thirty seconds or so, Riddien didn't remember the kisses and, more profoundly, the moans and gropes that'd passed between him and Kwinn a half-hour before.

He heard Kwinn's quiet approach, and saw his spouse enter the room cautiously. "What's on your mind?" Riddien demanded.

"Three things."

Kwinn's hands were behind his back, holding an object he didn't want Riddien to see just yet. Riddien pretended not to notice.

"First, regardless of Towers' men being three days behind us, Riddien, you know very well that we can't stay here the whole night."

"Of course I do." Riddien sailed a hand across fatigued eyes. "The chatelain has orders to wake us at dawn. We do need to rest, Kwinn. Whoever is after us, Towers' men or Karrik's guards, we must rest. And what about Karrik? How did Trill know?"

"That isn't the second thing," Kwinn said. "I'd rather we stick to my three things right now. I can't bring myself to consider Karrik's involvement, or ponder how Trill divined Karrik's involvement."

"That's fair." Riddien sat on the end of the bed, rubbing a damp palm against the old quilt. He was tempted to ask Kwinn if he would come and sit on his lap, kiss him again as they'd kissed behind the shed. But Kwinn, forlorn and weary, did sit beside him on the bed. Some object remained hidden behind Kwinn's back. "What's the second thing?"

Kwinn's mouth tightened, an indication of indecision. "I lied to you, stretched the truth a little, earlier when I asked you what Captain Towers wanted Nitch for. I think I know what he wants Nitch for."

He let it out in a harsh whisper close to Riddien's ear. Riddien heard what Nitch had done to get kidnapped by Captain Towers, or, at least, what Kwinn assumed was the reason. Back at the premiere meeting, before they left to fetch Nitch, Riddien had begged Sarene for the answer to that very riddle, and she hadn't obliged. Now Kwinn, against his conscience, spilled the secret. The disclosure left Riddien bothered.

"I can see why Towers would be hesitant to let him go," Riddien said.

"And that explains why we managed to get out of his stronghold with hardly a scratch."

"We could sit here and think about it until we're sick," Riddien paused, cupping Kwinn's knee, "or you can just tell me what thing three is."

One of Kwinn's hands shot forward, the concealed object exposed. Riddien took the folded paper, opened it, and a great heat hit his face. He'd never seen an abrogation sheet before, only ever heard about them from friends who'd signed too many contracts and regretted it.

"You want to separate?" Riddien could hardly get the question out. All they'd been through the last two weeks, even their talk a little bit ago, did that now mean nothing? "It's been twenty-five years, Kwinn. What could I have possibly done now that angered you so badly? We eloped the day we met—and I've done a lot of awful things since then. I don't see you for three years, and suddenly I'm not good enough for you? But didn't you just tell me, literally _just tell me_ that you were sorry, that _we_ were sorry?"

Kwinn swiped the abrogation from Riddien. "Don't be a swine. I meant everything I said." Kwinn zipped in and kissed him, then zipped away again. "I brought it—in case you wanted it. Since we'll be going home soon, I thought I'd better ask. I didn't want to ask before. I couldn't bear the answer. And that was a lot of time to think of all the possibilities, everything that could happen."

Riddien held them together, sighing. "Kwinn, despite everything that's happened, I love you. I'm not leaving you if you're not leaving me."

Kwinn clutched him tightly. "No, thanks. I still love you, too. Besides, you keep my family on their toes. I enjoy the spectacle you make back at home. And I miss that. But we don't have to stay at home all the time, I won't force you to. Maybe we could try teaming up as a bounty hunters. You seem to like it well enough."

"We can talk about it later." Though he enjoyed the idea of Kwinn being with him on the road, throughout the realms, in seedy taverns and dilapidated castles. "You're going to have to learn to use something more than your sword if you do come along. But, as I said, we'll talk about it later. Let's not talk about separating again. I'm going to destroy that thing."

He claimed the abrogation, found a match at the mantel and tossed the flaming paper into the fireplace's iron grate.

As the fire turned to carbon, Trill, huffing and puffing, returned from his rounds. "Nothing unusual, sirs," he said to the two of them, still recalling that Lord Kwinn was the one labeled the leader, while Riddien acted as the leader without the weight of a label.

"Good," said Riddien. He gave a new batch of orders to his subordinate. "Now, if you don't mind, Trill, Kwinn and I would like to get a little sleep. I suggest you rest, too. We'll be leaving at dawn."

Trill went off with a light whistle breaking the quiet hallway. Riddien watched him for a moment, hoping all went well. Flutters of fear erupted in his chest for the first time since they'd left Captain Towers' place. His outlook improved when Kwinn inched the door closed and slid the lock over. The room, without the lanterns in the hallway, was sooty and dimensionless.

"Want to work on that sleep you mentioned?" Kwinn wound arms around Riddien's neck, finding his mouth and exploring it, massaging it with succulence and decadence.

"There's no hurry," Riddien replied, panting, heart already beating fast.

But with the amount of chattels and clothing covering both men, undressing quickly was a privilege Kwinn thought they should forego.

"It'll take us an hour just to rid ourselves of everything," he said, sitting on the bed and having the decency to remove every accoutrement connected to his heirloom sword. Riddien crept up behind him, moved his hair out of the way to leave small wet kisses on his neck, close to his ear.

"Only the important bits, then."

On the floor beside the bed, small armament pieces slowly grew into a pile. Knives, from dirks to stilettos; and two of Riddien's revolvers, one much bigger than the other, along with cartridges of spare bullets. Eventually, the pile contained Riddien's holsters and belts.

"How do you carry around twenty pounds of metal and leather?" Kwinn joked. With the toe of his boot, he inched the last belt over to join the others. Riddien pulled him back by the shoulders, until his head rested against warm thighs. "You're probably mistaken for an air pirate yourself."

"I have been—often enough."

Kwinn turned to his belly, half off the bed, half on it, and balanced by the grip he had on the waist of Riddien's breeches. He found the buttons easily enough, and releasing the bottom one with his hand, he urged Riddien to the pillows. Another button was undone with unnecessary pressure against Riddien's bulging crotch. Riddien bucked a little into the teasing pleasure Kwinn offered. Kwinn slid over Riddien, sucking his mouth until he heard a moan. Riddien grabbed him, rammed them together. Kwinn, taken by surprise, muttered a swear against Riddien's chest. The spasms of love, lust and happiness tightened his belly, especially as Riddien's fingers curved against him. Riddien was awarded when Kwinn rolled into his palm, and wished the light was a bit brighter to see the look on his face. Riddien could imagine it, and kissed Kwinn again to thank him for it. Trying to find a way into Kwinn's soft leather breeches proved a challenge. The hem of his undershirt was so long it took several tugs for it to come free.

"How do you fit all of that in there? Is that why you always look so well endowed? For an elf, I mean." Riddien said between kisses, laughing as if drunk. "We all know elves have the smallest penises of all bipedal mammals."

Kwinn unclasped his pants from the back, causing Riddien to murmur, "That's very sly." But Kwinn shimmied the breeches over his hips, Riddien enjoying what he could of the show and not bothering to help. As soon as Kwinn's erection bounced free, it did, as it had before, put to shame Riddien's insipid jokes about the anatomical gifts of male elves.

Riddien was less interested in correcting himself and more interested in finding the quickest way to get Kwinn into his mouth. He liked Kwinn exactly where he was, straddling him, cock exposed and butt cheeks soft against his knees. It took a little finagling, but Riddien at last had the tip of Kwinn's penis against his lips. It was warm, wonderfully wet. Riddien smeared the fluid over his fingers, already knowing what he'd use it for. He palmed Kwinn's scrotum, loving the moisture wrapped up in the hair, and inched his hand upward until at the base of Kwinn's cock. There, Riddien ringed his fingers and applied gentle pressure. Kwinn groaned, rocked backward, forward until his forehead landed on Riddien's chest. With Kwinn at such a pitch, Riddien's wet fingers curled into the wonderland of Kwinn's ass. With just a little pressure to the opening, Riddien could already feel the muscles' welcome spasm.

Kwinn didn't know what to do, torn between the pleasure burning in his cock and the whole-body sensation in his backside. He stroked his penis once, brushing against Riddien's grip. But then he glided away, slipped forward to finish undoing Riddien's breeches' buttons with his teeth.

"Ah, that old trick," Riddien commented, throwing his arms behind his head. It was grand to just feel Kwinn at his crotch, knowing it was Kwinn. His fingers curved against Kwinn's funny ears, into his hair.

Kwinn was afraid he'd lost the ability to undo buttons with his tongue and lips, but he hadn't. It was the lone talent of his that only Riddien knew about it, since it had no uses outside the bedroom—or, in their case, wherever they happened to be when unavoidable lust came upon them. Like an inn in Summervale, with enemies closing in and a traitor at home.

As if the nearness of that moment seized him, Kwinn quit messing around and undid the final top button with his adroit fingers. Unceremoniously, he tugged the breeches over Riddien's lean hips. For a second, Riddien's abdomen lay bare and in the dark light, showing that he was fit and muscular. Kwinn's hands ran over the sculpted stomach, but it was another variety of muscle he had his sights set on. The shaft of Riddien's cock was wide, its appearance stout and valuable. Kwinn shifted the foreskin around and licked at the dampness. A shudder and sigh of ecstasy shook his mate.

Kwinn did nothing else to Riddien then, merely returned to his previous position over Riddien. Riddien kissed him, tasting a bit of himself, but he shoved his tongue far into Kwinn's mouth, simultaneously connecting Kwinn's hips against his elevated pelvis. Riddien scraped his fingertips along the skin of Kwinn's thighs, loving the feel of him as much in the present as he had in the past. He wished they were in a better place, somewhere they could lie in sun-warmed grass, nude and content, have sex until the day ended. But with their limited time, it almost seemed better to do nothing at all than to tease one another into believing an unsatisfactory episode was worthwhile.

Still, he was with Kwinn, and how did anything else matter?

Riddien slipped his hands around Kwinn's hard ass, the muscles tightening in awareness. Kwinn pulled at Riddien's shirt, causing them to lurch forward. Now on his back, his mouth lost in the wetness of Riddien's, Kwinn thought it fair to put Riddien through the same torture. He shoved his hand into Riddien's crack, felt the instantaneous reaction of spasms and indecision, mollified by Riddien's incipient groan. His neck was nibbled with a wide-open jaw, then the bush above his cock treated with the same vehement declaration of ownership. He liked the authority Riddien used the moment his cock was pounded by Riddien's mouth, smoothed over and over with every stroke of Riddien's hands.

Deciding that they were going the oral route, the first way they'd made love hours after meeting, a mere hour after signing the first of their spouse contracts, Kwinn pitched Riddien's head up and away from him, rolled them again and eagerly lapped at Riddien's dick. Opening his mouth a little more, he eased his way over the shaft's tip, letting it fill him up with a sense of power and love. Grateful for it, Kwinn slithered up to Riddien, slinked his slick tongue over the edge of Riddien's ear, then whispered sentiments before plunging Riddien's erection back in his mouth. Riddien helped him find a rhythm, and while he moved Riddien's shaft in and out of his mouth, Riddien's moans grew louder, less controlled.

Riddien started to thrash about, nearly at the peak of frenzy. He stopped himself by grabbing Kwinn and throwing him against the pillows, sucking Kwinn in the harsh way he liked. Riddien found his own hand to take care of him while whisking Kwinn to the height of pleasure. He loved Kwinn's orgasms, the silence of them, the virtual stillness that overcame him, a statue magically hitting the acme of desire. Riddien finished himself, Kwinn, hypnotized, watching on. Since he could see better in the dark, he got more out of the look on Riddien's face, a pain mingled with pure happiness.

Without the luxury of time, they cleaned up fast, repaired their clothing, and situated themselves in bed, this time with the intention of sleeping. Kwinn hadn't slept in twenty-one hours, and Riddien wasn't far behind that. They talked only a little, drowsily and brokenly. Kwinn resisted the temptation to ask what would happen when Nitch was all right, when the whole situation was disclosed, when Karrik was confronted. He let Riddien fall asleep, staying awake another half-hour to listen to his thoughts, to Riddien's deep and even breathing.

Four hours later, each was on his horse, or, in the twins' case, their ponies, riding east into the sunrise. Rather than maintain a strict connection to the main road, which might lead them into a pack of enemies, Kwinn found a small farmer's path through the woods. It soon narrowed, becoming nothing more than a deer trail, but it was passable, though the horses required the occasional chirrup to keep them going.

Riddien, at the head of the train, discovered too late that the path debouched them unexpectedly upon a road, worn enough to show frequent travel. It was just as well that he gave a mighty tug to the reins, since it delayed the horse just long enough to avoid a collision with an oncoming riding party.

Riddien, on guard, looked around, revolver released at the horrible sound of guns cocking and swords slipping from sheaths, horses neighing and hooves stomping. The glare of sunshine dazzled Riddien, but not Kwinn. The moment Riddien's eyes adjusted from the dark forest to the sunlit road, Kwinn had his sword crossed with an elf in a blue tunic. The heraldic badge caught the light, and, instinctively, Riddien commanded his horse in front of Nitch to protect him from his father.

There was silence, tension impossible to fathom, hatred boiling below the surface. Karrik wasn't stupid enough to hunt his son on his own: eight other elves on horses filled the road, verge to verge. Riddien knew they were grandly outnumbered. Kwinn hadn't seemed to care.

"We know what you're doing, Karrik," Kwinn told him coldly. He'd wondered how he'd feel seeing Karrik again—and now he knew. "We know what Towers wanted with Nitch."

Karrik's lip curled. "What's that to me?"

Kwinn swallowed his anger. "We know about your business venture with the Grand Shipping Corporation, that they would just happen to lose some shipments along the way, seek shipping insurance from you, paying you thousands in the process. Nitch came across your ledgers on a rainy day. You know how curious bored children get. And you know that he remembers everything."

"You bore me, in fact, Kwinn. Why tell me what I already know?"

Kwinn's hand shook, holding up the sword. Then... then everyone was in on it. Everyone who flanked Karrik, even the earls in their livery collars. Maybe even Sarene. No, that wasn't possible. Sarene would've never sent her brother to find Nitch if she'd thought he'd be successful. And now that Kwinn looked back on it, Karrik had been noticeably absent from all those meetings—those very clandestine meetings held in strange, unused rooms around the royal house. Kwinn fumed, rage hitting every bit of him.

"You can't have Nitch, Karrik!"

"I'll take him," Karrik said, eyeing the boy behind the useless bounty hunter Riddien Slance, "and I'll send him back to the pirates, who'd be only too glad to make something useful of him. Towers could use a boy who remembers everything he hears, everything he reads. And it would get that damn fool boy _out_ of my way! Don't look so bothered, Kwinn. It's not as awful as you seem to think it is. Nitch will have the time of his life. All boys like piracy. Even you and I used to pretend we were pirates. I'm merely trying to make the boy's dreams a reality. Sarene got in the way of that, too. I knew she'd be up to something. You and your whole clan, always planning a scheme for the good of the world, taking good money out of the hands of those who want it so terribly. Bothersome rot you all are."

Again, Kwinn's unsteadiness was exposed by a quiver in the sleek sword. "Where is she?" His gruff voice was fueled by fear and anger. "Where's my sister?"

"I'm right here."

Kwinn did not glance in the direction of Sarene's call, but Karrik, evidently expecting his spouse to never surface among the living again, did shoot his gaze toward her. Kwinn used the moment to flick the sword's point beneath the Karrik's hilt: the cutlass hit the pebbled road. Free of immediate danger, Kwinn, still armed, looked at Sarene. She was on his own white horse, Linnes, an anniversary present from Riddien ten years ago. And behind Linnes, the whole of Summervale's marshal service, a dozen men and women, each with a revolver pointing at Karrik and his company. And, as a side effect, at Kwinn and his company. But Sarene was whole, unharmed, and Kwinn released a thankful breath.

The marshal leader demanded that Karrik and his men dismount. Not one of them moved. Karrik gulped, knowing he was done for.

"How is this possible?" He shot the question to Sarene, still annoyingly perfect, her sheet of straight black hair untouched by the wind, and fine porcelain face unmarred by stress. Her eyes held the fury she failed to unleash. "How did you know?"

A horse from his party moved forward, crossing the invisible line between evil and good. It was his steward, the gray-bearded old fool Lenir.

"Not every member of your staff was so venal, Karrik, even if it meant giving his life for doing what was right."

The marshal had had enough, and no royal family of wood elves was going to keep him from arresting Karrik. "Everyone off your horses—right now!"

It was so demanding that Nitch, scared to pieces, slid from the saddle. But once receiving a push from Riddien, he ran directly into his mother's waiting arms.

Riddien let out a sigh, finding himself in the middle of the Twamp twins.

"Cor, I do think this means we be gettin' paid and getting' on back to our waters now, brother!" cried True, watching mommy and son hug their love for one another. "Ain't that a bit sweet, though. Makes me want to get back to me own brood."

Riddien just glared at True's wavy, weird profile, protrusions where there shouldn't be, yet an affection was in her eyes. "I didn't know you had kids."

"Got a whole pack of 'em. Some of 'ems mine, some of 'ems not."

"She looks out for the whole village, she does," Trill added, proud of his sister's hard work. "Takes in them that needs lookin' after, and does a good job o' it too."

"You're welcome to come by sometime, sir, and we'll feed ya." True slugged him affectionately on the arm, her way of showing she cared. That brood of hers probably went around with mild bruises on their shoulders and small umbrellas over their heads to keep from getting spit on.

With that image in mind, Riddien smiled and thanked her for the invitation. "If Kwinn and I are ever out that way, we'll stop and see you."

"Listen to 'im!" True hit him again, her mouth contorted into a monstrous smile. "Listen to that! 'Im and Kwinn! That do bring me heart some touch o' joy, that it does."

They waited in the road until the marshals roped Karrik and his miscreants, herded them into a flatbed wagon for the ride into Summervale. Two marshals lingered with follow-up questions and additional information of what would happen next. Then, with the marshals gone, it was Sarene and Steward Lenir, Riddien with his crew, and Nitch still clinging to his mother's hand.

In the way of Twamps, the twins left abruptly, awkwardly, anxious to get back on the homeward road now the adventure was over.

"If we see Captain Towers, we'll give him what's coming to 'im," vowed True, banging a fist into her palm as if it was Towers' face.

"Send us the monies, Lady Sarene, when ye can," said Trill. He smeared Nitch's hair out of place. "This one here, he'll be rememberin' our address now he's got it in 'is ole noggin."

Trill and True hugged Riddien and Kwinn individually, then as a smashed group of all of them together. "I'll miss ye, I will. Let me know next time adventure's afoot!"

The ponies were soon around the bend, out of sight.

Sarene brought Linnes to her brother, holding the soft leather leads for him to claim. "You'd better take him, and I'll take mine back, if you don't mind. Linnes doesn't really like me."

Linnes snorted and nodded, completely agreeing. He stepped close enough to Kwinn to smell him, leave his muzzle against his shirt. Kwinn patted Linnes' neck appreciatively.

Steward Lenir walked his lady's horse to her. "Let's go home, my dear. All of us, for much needed rest."

With a graceful leap, Sarene was in the saddle. Across from her, Kwinn was turning his horse east. She wanted to say she was sorry for the mess, but seeing how he and Riddien looked at one another, smiled at one another as they started to ride home, her sorrow wasn't required. The quest had not only returned her son to her, but had reunited Kwinn with Riddien, just as she supposed it would, and as they, no doubt, supposed it would.

Kwinn nearly glowed with satisfaction, with a sense of pride and accomplishment. Though he would've gladly sacrificed everything to rescue Nitch himself, alone, the team of mercenaries he'd selected had proved themselves trustworthy, powerful and successful. He'd known that Riddien Slance would climb out of the hovels and hells he'd been living in to answer the plea of his estranged spouse. However reluctant, quiet and aloof Riddien had been at first, he soon showed all the qualities Kwinn remembered of him. Riddien was a natural leader, gifted with insight, talented at creating realistic ploys to dupe unsuspecting adversaries. Kwinn had known Riddien would help, but he'd been less sure that Riddien would still love him.

Riddien rode beside Sarene for the purpose of speaking to her. She was no longer the distant diplomat that, on some level, used to intimidate him. "I'm sorry, Sarene, about Karrik."

"It wasn't so surprising. For many years, I'd had my suspicions regarding some nefariousness on his side. Think nothing of it, Riddien. My son is safe," she gave him a rueful half-smile, "and that's all that matters to me right now. I'm glad that you and Kwinn are safe, too. It'll be," she paused a second, trying to smile again as she fumbled for an unoffensive word, "pleasant, Riddien, to have you at home again, however long you decide to stay. I understand the lure of adventure. But stay awhile," she threw a glance her brother's way, "for Kwinn's sake."

"I'm not leaving Kwinn," Riddien declared; "and, as far as I know, he's not leaving me. Thank you for choosing me to help rescue Nitch, Sarene. I've had so much returned to me, not just Kwinn, but you and Nitch, even old Lenir, my only family."

"I would welcome your thanks had I been the one who'd suggested to Kwinn that you join his secret brigade. But it was he that thought of you, first of you, and refused to instigate the rescue without you."

Riddien's eyes snapped like fireworks. "He told me—!" But he breathed deeply, looking over his shoulder at Kwinn, who was talking animatedly with a less enthusiastic Nitch. Kwinn felt the weight of Riddien's eyes, lifted his head and extended a short wave. Riddien's chest felt full and weak. Kwinn's sneakiness hardly mattered, now they were on their way home.

"It seems that the two of you have reconciled," Sarene said. She'd hoped for it, too, not merely because Kwinn wanted it so terribly and loved Riddien so terribly, but because Nitch admired Riddien, and the whole village respected him, Sarene, too, respected him. "I assume that you tore up the abrogation Kwinn's been carrying around forlornly for the last three months."

"I burned it."

"Good! Then the two of you are still spouses."

Riddien let his inner warmth turn into a nod, a small, grateful smile. "Always."

###

Thank you for reading _Zandry of Bonewood and Other Stories_! Please consider leaving a review and, most importantly, telling your friends that you enjoyed this book!

* * * *

**About the Author**

Lore Lippincott has published

several short stories

and two novellas,

The Carols of Holly House,

and The Information Man.

Please visit

http://www.breezydaystories.com

for more tales.

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