A Royal Affair (31 page)

I fell upon him, overwhelmed with need. I had been thinking about the feel and taste of him in my mouth for so many months that it did not feel like a first time. I was entirely home. I took him very deep: right to the back of my throat. I knew by his sharp cry of delight and shock that he had never even thought this possible. He was in an awkward position to get him deep enough, so I made him stand against the tree. I knelt to him. This position, me kneeling to him, him the king, added some extra spice I had not planned. It was incredibly erotic. I could stretch my neck and take him down a very long way, and Aleksey was well blessed in his member. I worked him hard, holding his slim naked hips in my hands. He was gripping the trunk of the tree so tightly his nails had whitened. If we had been discovered at that moment, I think we would both have demanded they wait until we had finished, although my demand would have been muffled.

Finally, I knew he was there. I eased off and encouraged the spill with my tongue and caught the release with open mouth. He pulsed copiously, despite his earlier spills, young as he was and awed as he was by this first experience of such delight. I rose to my feet, seized him once more, and kissed him with a passion he had not yet known. He could taste himself, and I knew that next time he took me so he would want to taste me fully too. I would let him.

We replenished the fire. I had half a mind to go through with my plan to kidnap him then. I could not bear the thought of returning to the court and seeing him every day but
not
seeing him. At least in the army, when we had struggled with our mutual unspoken desire, we had actually been able to speak and flirt and be with each other all day. This new life was agony for me, and I told him so. He said his was not a bed of roses either, and we argued about this quite pleasantly as we drank the second bottle of wine. We’d missed the arguing too, he more than me, for no one argued with the king. I promised that I would always take that role on for him, and he was suitably grateful.

After a while and half a bottle more of wine, I finally asked him how he was feeling—about the death of his father, his brother, and all the changes that had occurred. I am very selfish, for I could have asked him this at the beginning, but I had had other things on my mind and had not wanted to ruin the moment. He told me that he was fine. He was very busy, too busy to mope, as he called it, and then he changed the subject, asking me what I had been doing and how many anal fissures I had explored since he last saw me. I pointed out that I cauterized them, not explored them, but I saw through his attempt to distract me and would have pushed him to admit his sorrow when he came out with unfortunate news.

“The
Absalon
has docked. Did you watch her sail into harbor? She was always my father’s favorite. We will deck her out in funeral—” He stopped abruptly.

Although I knew, I asked to forestall the inevitable argument that was to follow. “What are you talking about?”

“The flagship. We sail the day after tomorrow. I will have the state apartment, of course, but I thought you might take the—”

“Aleksey, why do we not ride for Hesse-Davia? Think on it, black horses with pennants, a somber funeral cortège. Would that not be fitting?”

“Ride? Hardly. Even in winter, imagine the state of the body… no, I mean, we will sail. We are only one week’s sailing time from Zadworna. Why would we ride?”

Why indeed. I mulled this over for a while as he continued to tell me of the draping of black and the adding of colors to the mast and things like that, which meant nothing to me. I had to confess before his imagination ran away with him entirely. “Aleksey, I cannot go with you. I’m sorry.”

He was lying on his back by the fire and I sitting cross-legged next to him. He turned from contemplating the flames, his expression confused.

I stroked his cheek. “I cannot go onboard a ship. You know why. Please do not make me speak of it again.”

He sat up. “But you were going to leave me by sea. I went to the port with you to look at likely ships.”

I had to then confess my secret: that I had actually done this to make him angry and jealous and ask me to stay. He seemed fascinated by this and questioned me closely about things I had said or done and what I had actually meant by them, and this was when much about Aleksey’s true thoughts were revealed to me. It was a particularly interesting conversation for both of us, as there was much about my behavior toward him that puzzled him excessively. But our interesting revelations did not distract him for long enough. Too soon, he said with some determination, “Well, you must let all that go now. We understand each other very well now, and I want you with me.”

“Aleksey, no, I—”

“I am ordering you as your king.”

I gave him a look. “You are not, actually, my king in the way you mean, as I am not a citizen of Hesse-Davia.” Before he could react badly to this, I added, pulling him into my arms so once more his back was tightly to my chest, “But you
are
my king in all other ways. Even though you are a baby.” Even some tickling and wrestling would not distract him.

“Please, Niko, you have to come with me. I have all these people around me all the time, and when I go to ask my father what to do—” He suddenly stopped. He swallowed a number of times and calmed his voice, trying to pull out of my arms. “I apologize, that was an unfor—”

“Aleksey?” I kissed his ear, not letting him out of my arms. “Let it go. There is only us here, and I am so grieved by his death that I will join you in tears, if that is what you need.”

“I do not need to—” But he did. He shuddered. His words caught in his throat, and he began to sob. I buried my face in his hair and held him. Many times in my life I had been so unmanned, but no one had been there to hold or comfort me, and it was the least I could do, loving him so intensely as I did. His grief was like the pus that I had released from the young merchant’s leg. It poured forth at first under its own pressure, as he had been bottling it up since the horror of seeing his father crushed and bloodied on a day when all should have been glorious, and then the rest I eased out, as I had done with that ill-humor, by gentle pressure where it was needed. He hated being king, he missed the army, he missed Johan, he wanted to be a prince again, he wanted his father back, he wished he had not hated his brother so and that they had been friends, but most of all, he’d missed me and wanted me. And in the midst of all this release of pain, he begged me not to desert him now. He was slightly theatrical, and being on a boat for one week without me was now being seen as desertion on my part. What else could I do? I promised that I would never leave his side again in this life. I can be theatrical too, when pressed.

He calmed after the application of the third bottle of wine. He’d exhausted himself with emotion but seemed now quite calm and able to discuss things that interested us both: who would be the new head of the army, what I thought about Boudica, whether he should make Stephen his new official royal page, and what Faelan would think of the sea voyage. I was not ready to even have the words sea or voyage mentioned yet so used the opportunity to say that it was time to leave. As I had not kidnapped him and taken him away as I had promised I would, he was anxious about our story, what we would say to explain his absence. I tried suggesting that, as king, he tell them to mind their own business, but his look told me that I had not fully understood the balance of power in the court. In the end, I fished out the old horseshoe with bent nails from my pack, which I had acquired earlier. “We will tell them my horse threw a shoe and that we have had to find a blacksmith and have it replaced. See?”

He took me in his arms, considering me. “I do not think I like to know that you can be so deceptive. Should I trust anything you say ever again?”

I gave him a light peck on the cheek and swung up onto Xavier. “And I am not even speaking my own language. I can lie much better in Powponi.” I proceeded to talk to him in that language all the way back to the edge of the trees, much to his amusement. It distracted him, as I had intended, from the thought of being found, which we were a few moments later. He was swallowed up once more by state and duty, and I was left to return alone to my shared room. I had nothing to distract me from my misery but thoughts of the sea crossing to come.

I
KNEW
things were going to be bad when I threw up the morning we were due to leave Saxefalia. I was not a man afraid of very much in life, but I had not slept all night thinking about how I must not show fear on this journey and so had worked myself into something of a state by the time morning came. I wished I had been
more
ill and I could have used this as an excuse not to walk up that gangplank at all. The only thing that got me up there was that Xavier had already been boarded with the court horses, and I wanted to check on him and apologize once again for forcing this crossing upon him. His quarters were pretty awful, but he was next to Boudica, with whom he now had a firm friendship. He was warm and he was fed, so I refused to listen to his complaints and went back up onto the deck. I was sick again over the side, but fortunately no one was paying me any attention, as boarding a dead king and a live one with all due pomp and ceremony was not an easy thing to accomplish.

The ship did not really bear much resemblance to the one upon which I had spent so many miserable months. But it was a ship—it was made of wood, and it moved oddly beneath my feet. It was enough for my mind to make the connection and thus make me ill
again
before we had even left land. I resolved to spend the entire journey in my cabin and there keep my misery to myself.

My absence was noted the first night, when I did not attend the king for dinner. The servant sent to inquire why I was not present reported back to Aleksey that I was indisposed. The next night a different servant came, and I sent back the message that His Majesty need not concern himself with my health. He arrived in person within a few minutes. He was attended by his usual flock of wastrels so was unable to say what I think he wanted to say—and I do not think this was actually loving or reassuring. He was very annoyed that I seemed to have… collapsed.

He had never seen me like this before, and fear made him angry. I had to forgive him. He had just lost his father and brother and was naturally a little off balance at the thought of losing someone else. Did I look as if I were going to die? Possibly. I had been throwing up continuously since getting on the ship, as I knew I would. I could not sleep for waking nightmares where I could actually feel and smell the sailors’ hands upon me, and I had been entirely unable to eat. Worse than this, although I would not have it known generally, I had been stricken with an uncontrollable weeping which left me shaking and afraid. I had never been afflicted so before, except perhaps for the actual time of my imprisonment. After, of course, I had been riding high on the remembrance of their throats opening to my knife and the delicious taste of their blood painting my face with its warm flow. Aleksey, therefore, found me almost dead—as he thought. They nearly had two dead kings upon the ship.

I was glad I could not find my courage those first two days, for when Aleksey saw me, he immediately ordered me to be taken to his cabin. This command had two interesting effects. Firstly, I was now in his company, which was always much to be desired. Also, it laid the seed in Aleksey’s mind that he
was
actually king, and that when he wanted something done, it
would
be done.

That was the first time he questioned why things were always as they were rather than how he wanted them to be.

Sick, shivering, feeling as if I would die but not wanting any of this to be known by anyone, I found myself in Aleksey’s cabin on a pallet that had been previously occupied by the servant of the royal bedchamber. He was now dispatched to my bunk, for space was very limited on the ship, and he had nowhere else to go. I do not believe he resented the exchange much, for he now no longer had to sleep confined with the wolf. The cabin had a dayroom, where Aleksey held counsel, and a tiny bunkroom where I now lay alongside the king’s more spacious bed. Thus I had the privacy I craved but could hear him in the adjoining room, talking with the ministers. At night, though, we were alone—just. That first night we could hardly speak, for the dayroom remained packed with people, and we were both afraid of being overheard. In whispers, therefore, as he undressed (I was glad to see that he could still remember how), he murmured, “You should be very ashamed of yourself, Niko, for making me feel so guilty. You were right; you should not have come on this journey.”

“I told you that.”

“Yes, that is what I am saying. You did tell me that, and I ignored you, so it is all
your
fault that I am feeling so guilty and so ill because of it.” He had climbed in behind me, despite the narrowness of my cot, and was stroking my sweaty hair off my forehead. He could be as angry as he liked with me if it led to this. He was silent for a while, then asked, “Do you know that sensation of stabbing yourself over and over again with the tip of a knife?”

“No.”

“Oh, well, if you do, after a while you cannot feel it. I do not mean breaking the skin, but that pricking that whitens it until it goes numb.”

“Is there some point to this? I am not feeling well and do not want to think about blood—or pricks, come to that.”

“That would be a first, then. No, what I meant was could this not be like that? If you took
more
sea voyages, you might come to not notice them.”

“Thank you. Remind me not to send for you when I am in need of a doctor. You will cut off one leg to get me used to losing the other.”

“I am only trying to help.”

His words only dismayed me more. I could not help but remember a woman I had met once when newly arrived in England and still establishing myself as a doctor. She had recently lost the twelfth baby she had conceived since marriage. When I arrived, the house was filled with children and babies—her sisters’. Her husband had invited them to stay. “Cheer her up a bit,” he said. My expression betrayed my thoughts, for he’d added, disgruntled, “I am only trying to help.” I do not believe his help aided his poor wife much. Aleksey’s wasn’t doing much for me either. I didn’t want him to feel as I had made that poor man feel, though, and explained calmly, “It is not a physical thing. There is nothing to get used to. It does not lessen with exposure.”