A Royal Affair (20 page)

“What…?” Suddenly it all became clear. “As
spies
? You are going to spy on the enemy?”

“
We
are going to spy on the enemy.”

I was furious. “You are a prince, Aleksey. It is not your job. You
have
spies to do this kind of work.”

He nodded. “I do, but they have not returned. And I am the ideal person, actually. I speak the language and know the customs. Who better?”

He had me there. I tried to think of a good reason why he could not do this, other than the obvious one: it was too dangerous, and I was terrified of losing him. I was not unaware, of course, that I did not actually
have
him, but I would take this semifriendship and all the arguing and fighting over losing him entirely. Finally I settled on asking, “So why me? Surely you have more competent officers who could accompany you.”

He grinned, a flash of perfect white teeth in the darkness. “Oh, probably, but I didn’t want them. I wanted someone who was not soldierly.”

“What do you mean by that?” I’d taken this as an insult, of course. What man would not bristle a little at being told he was not soldierly?

Aleksey rolled his eyes, as if pandering to my vanity was too much effort to make. “You do not behave around me as the others do, Niko. You have no stiffness and respect for authority or rank—particularly mine! You will not slip up and call me sir or Your Highness or bow or, God forbid, salute. I have never seen anyone ride like you or fight like you. You are too tall to be a native of Hesse-Davia, and your hair and skin sets you apart from all in these lands. You look like a god from a mythical distant place of sunshine, and I want
you
. There, is that enough, or should I go on and expound upon your exceptional beauty and how we might use
that
to our advantage as spies?”

“No, I think that is sufficient for now.” I walked Xavier slowly forward. Aleksey turned his horse and caught up to ride alongside. Once more, he had called me beautiful. He’d called me a god. He said he wanted me. I had some pleasant things to dwell on to keep the cold at bay.

Whilst I had many skills, enduring the cold was not something I could boast about. I had been raised in warm climes where for most of the year we could live with little covering, day or night. In the winter, we had cold and snow, but we also had furs, excellent dwellings, and good food. I had never been able to tolerate the cold as well since leaving the colonies. English cold was particularly difficult to endure, with its associated damp and habit of coming one day and leaving the next. Its unpredictability always caught me out. I had not been looking forward to campaigning in the winter with Aleksey’s army, but in camp I had a tent with a wood stove and a warm uniform. Now I had none of these things. I was dressed, in my view, wholly inadequately for such a cold night. I began to shiver, and not in little shakes, but the deep body jerks that I always felt preceded death. I glanced over at Aleksey, clenching my teeth to stop my jaw rattling. “Are you not cold?”

He turned. Clearly he had been deep in thought. “Cold? Yes, I suppose so. We will put some miles behind us in the dark, and then we will stop. We cannot travel in the daytime, as soon we will be crossing the border and in enemy territory.”

After a few minutes, to distract myself from my increasing discomfort, I asked, “Will they not recognize you in Saxefalia? Is this not very dangerous for you?”

“Oh, I hope it will be dangerous. No fun otherwise. But no, I doubt they will know me. I was ten when I left. I have changed a little since I was ten.”

“I meant the eyes, Aleksey.
They
have not changed.”

“My eyes? What is wrong with my eyes?”

“Don’t be so dense. They are
brilliant
green. Do you know how rare a shade that is? I have never encountered anyone with green eyes like yours before, and I have seen more of the world than you.”

“So… you have noticed the color of my eyes, Doctor? I am
terribly
flattered.”

There it was again, the flirting. I’d missed it, so replied in kind. “And
you
have noticed that I am very godlike. Shall we continue with our mutual flattery or think seriously for a moment?”

“Oh, continue the flattery. I love being flattered. I know. I’ll walk around with my eyes shut to hide their brilliant beauty, and we can pretend I am blind and you are my doctor, which is true and will add veracity to my affliction.”

I had a feeling he wasn’t taking this spying mission as seriously as he should. I commented dryly that he wouldn’t make a very good spy if he had his eyes closed, and we carried on in silence for some miles more.

By the time the light was beginning to rise ahead of us, I was so chilled that, dismounting, I stumbled, my legs too cold to save me from the fall. I got up and swore silently. We were possibly in enemy territory, according to Aleksey, and I did not want my voice to carry. We were encamped by a stream with a cliff rising behind us, and we made a shelter with some undergrowth and pulled the horses in close. We could not light a fire but ate cold rations. It did nothing to warm me. Aleksey told me we would have this one day and then one more night of riding, and we would be across the border, well into Saxefalia and able to stay at an inn.

After we had been seated in our small position for a while, Aleksey said out of the blue, “I could not tell you that I was riding with the wagons because we have spies in our camp. I could not allow the enemy to discover that I was injured. You might have been followed, and it would have been discovered. Johan insisted that you not be told, and as I was… incapacitated, I could not reach you myself. There, now you know, so perhaps you will stop being cross with me and tell me something interesting to while away the day. Tell me something more about living with the Powponi.”

“I got the impression you were sick of hearing of them.”

“Not in the least, as long as you are comparing me to one of their chiefs or telling me of their interesting sexual practices.
That
I like to hear about. I do not want to hear that you prefer their company to mine, no.”

“They did not have green eyes.”

He smiled softly and leaned back against the rock face behind us. His thigh was touching mine, something that was distracting me considerably. “Do they have a language?”

I frowned and gave him a look. “No, Aleksey, they have learned to grunt. Two, like this, means you are an arse.”

“Hmm. Teach me something, then. How would they say… ‘I am still hungry’?”

I told him, and he repeated it, glancing at the apple I was eating. I sighed and gave it to him. Munching, he asked, “How would they tell someone they liked them?”

I frowned, trying to remember if I’d ever heard someone say that. It is not something you actually hear every day and sounded odd, now that he had said it. I tried a phrase, and he repeated it. I shrugged. “It means more ‘I am wishing good things for you’ than ‘I like you.’”

He stared into space for a while and then said, as clearly and as well as any of my brothers might have, “
I am hungry for you
.” He had apparently been able to hear and understand the syntax of the simple phrases and put together his own cobbled statement. I stared at him. He raised his eyebrows and said innocently, “I tried to say that I wished I was not so hungry. Was I correct?”

I pulled my knees up to my chest, wrapped my arms around them, and lowered my chin. “No.”

He mirrored my position. “Are you still cold?”

“Yes.”

“Move closer, then.” I swallowed my pride and did so. “You do not look like someone who feels the cold.”

“Is there a look for someone like that?”

“Well, yes. Someone small and weak?”

“It is fat that keeps you warm, and you may not have noticed, but I do not carry any.”

“Oh, I had noticed. But I am not fat either, and I am not cold. Well, I am not moaning and whining about it anyway.”

“I have not mentioned it
once
.”

“Not out loud, no, but you have been deafening me and the horses with the whining going on in your head.”

I chuckled at that, for it was true. “I have a theory about it, if you would care to hear it.”

“Oh, yes, I love your theories.” He held up one hand. “See? Clean nails.” He smirked. “Just in case I should touch you today. So, tell me another of your theories. I am aquiver with excitement.”

“I shall not speak at all for the rest of the day if that is the
reception I
get.”

He nudged me, and I relented. “It is something to do with the heart and how much blood people have in their bodies. Heat is carried by the blood, is it not?”

He frowned. “I suppose so.”

“If you pour a little hot water over a large surface it cools more quickly than the same amount put in a small vessel, yes?”

“My head is hurting. I have no idea. If you say so.”

“So, it is the
spread
of the thing that cools it. I have a lot of skin because I am so tall and possibly very little blood, so I cannot keep warm. There, that is my theory.”

He appeared to be thinking deeply about this, then ventured, “I am almost as tall as you and thin as well, so your theory does not work. But you might have less blood; that I grant you. I suppose we will never know. I
hope
we never know. In my experience, being able to gauge how much blood a man contains is never good for the man.”

“No. Perhaps one day we will look at men when they are dead and explore their bodies more, and then we will know these things.”

“That is the most disgusting thing I think I have ever heard you say—and I sat in a sweat lodge with you for a day watching you vomit. Who would want to poke about in a dead body?”

“At least they would be silent when you poke them.” He looked at me, and we both laughed at the same time. “I did not mean that in quite the way it sounded.”

“That is fortunate, for it did not sound well.”

We were quite comfortable again with each other now, and I felt the warmer for it. Perhaps some of my shaking had been from repressed tension and anger. It had dissipated now in the warmth radiating from his body and from the pleasure of having almost every part of my body close and touching his. On impulse I took his hand on the pretext of approving his cleanliness. He let me hold it on the same pretext, perhaps, then murmured, “What do you see in my hand? Can you read it and its lines?”

“I am not a mystic; I am a doctor. I was looking to see if it was clean. Which it is, for once.”

“But what can you see in the lines? Am I going to have a long life?”

I sighed and turned his hand over, looking at his palm. After a moment, I let it drop. “It is superstition. Next you will have me trying to perform alchemy or necromancy.”

He seemed not to have noticed my change of subject on seeing his lifeline. He took my hand instead. “We had a gypsy come to court one Christmas and read all our palms. My father did not ban her, and so the priests could say nothing. You have a very deep line here. What is this?”

“The heart line. Leave it, Aleksey. It is not scientific, and people only want to hear good things anyway. I could as well toss some bones and read your future in them as I could from lines formed in flesh. Your future is written in the things you do today.”

“What do you mean? Is this another theory? I like your theories.”

“You fell off your horse and broke your rib. That affected what happened to you for the next few days. If you had not fallen off your horse, you would not be here sitting with me now. You would be somewhere else, doing something else. We should all make careful decisions about what we do, and think about the consequent ripple from those decisions before we act.”

He thought about this for an inordinately long time. I was very content sitting there warm against him and with the weak winter sun on my face. Finally he roused himself slightly and asked in a deceptively even voice, “So you are saying that every action has a consequence.”

“Yes. It is not magic or superstition that cause things to happen. It is men and the things they do.”

“So if I decide to do something, I should think through all the possible consequences and weigh them in balance.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“And even if I can foresee bad consequences, I am still justified in making the decision to act a certain way, because I will be acting with
conscious will
against my better judgment?”

“I suppose so. But I do not see why you would ever foresee unfortunate consequences from an act but
still
do it.”

He turned to me, caught my face in his hands, and kissed me.

A
MAN
cannot be a rational creature, a man of science and thought, all the time. He is still a man when all is said and done. I was a man, and I was being offered the one thing I had wanted since I was old enough to want such things and from the very person I had fixated on as the person I wanted it from. I turned into the kiss, my hands going to his hair, tugging him closer. He opened his lips. Our tongues met. The joining went like a spark to my groin, awakening the touch paper of my need. I could have swallowed him whole.

He pulled off, his face glowing and triumphant, sparking with that intense vitality I always associated with him. “There. I’ve
done
it. I said I would, and I have!”

I jerked back, shifting bodily away from him. “What do you mean?” I felt a terrible chill run though my body. “Was this a bet? Are you playing a game?”

His face was a mask of hurt and confusion. Poor Aleksey. He had made this incredible first move only to have it received so. But of course he could not know why this thought dismayed me. He knew nothing of my history. I seized his arms. “Who did you say it to? Have you discussed this with anyone?”

“I only—Johan said—”

“Johan!”
This
was what Johan had been discussing with Jules. Aleksey had proposed this dare; the bet had been accepted. Had they laughed as they’d planned it? Laughed about me? Probably whilst enjoying—I could not take that awful thought to its conclusion.