Page 52 of The House of the Red Balconies

“I don’t know. You should have talked to me first. No—I don’t mean that. You kept your own counsel, and I don’t begrudge you that in the least. I daresay … you were used to needing to.”

“Holy God, you’ve no idea. You couldn’t trust anyone. Even the people … even the people who were trustworthy could be turned against you by your enemies. And I had enemies. I was a boy, not a courtier, and I tried not to offend anyone—I made a study of it, how to be charming to everyone—but I still had enemies, because of who I was, who my father was.

“I wouldn’t have run away. The thought never entered my head. I was well provided for. I missed my family, but I had—thought I had—friends at the king’s court. I’d started to have love affairs. I’m courtier material—I thought I was. And I was being useful to my father, in the best way I could be, as a hostage for his good behaviour. You might think it sounds unfeeling of him to give me up, as if he must not have cared for me, but it wasn’t like that. I was a favourite, his youngest—he’d have loved to keep me with him, but he had to send me. My eldest brothers were men already, and he needed them at home. My middle brother was a troublemaker, and I’m sure my father would have liked to send him away, but you can’t give your problem child as a hostage to your sovereign, how would that look? I was the obvious choice, so I offered to go.”

“You were a good son.” Hylas squeezed his shoulder, a chaste gesture although they were lying there half-clothed and sticky with semen. Zo wondered if he was being an idiot, spoiling the mood like this. It was the poor man’s very first time having sex.

“I tried to be.” There was no help for it now, and he doubted Hylas minded, really. He was so serious himself. “Anyway, I told you I fell ill when I was fifteen and never got better—I didn’t tell you what made me sick in the first place.”

“No … ” said Hylas on an indrawn breath.

“Yeah. I was poisoned. It was like that there—that was the kind of thing that happened. I think it was meant to kill me, but they miscalculated, maybe, got the dose wrong because I was small and slight and they thought I would succumb easily.” He shrugged, and Hylas’s hand tightened on his shoulder again. “I survived and got better, sort of, but my health was never the same, and I knew that left me vulnerable to other attacks. I was pretty sure I knew who did it, and why—it was a problem that I knew wasn’t going to go away. As I saw it, I had three choices. I could do nothing and probably be killed, and my family wouldn’t benefit from that. I could fight back, become a poisoner and an intriguer myself—and if I got caught, it would be ruin for my family, and if I didn’t, I’d probably end by having to betray a friend or a lover. I’d already seen that happen to other people. Or I could run away.

“It took me nearly a year to find a way to get a message safely to my father to ask his permission, or warn him that I was going to do it—I’m not quite sure which I was doing. But he sent back immediately an embroidered coat, a specific kind of coat that you give your sons in the Parkan as a token of your blessing, when they leave home. He’d given me one when I left the first time, but he sent me another one. I knew that meant that whatever I did, he’d handle the result, that he wanted me to go and live. But I think it also meant I couldn’t go home—which I knew, of course.

“The actual leaving of the king’s palace wasn’t hard. I just had to bribe some people and know the right place to sneak out—a complex that big can’t be guarded as well as all that. I staged a bit of a fake suicide, as if I’d drowned myself in the artificial lake—I left some clothes on the shore and wrote a note. I don’t know that it would have held up for long, but it didn’t need to, and in that place, it was much more likely they’d suspect someone had killed or kidnapped me than that I had run away.

“I made my way to the coast and got on a ship headed for Glif, not for any particular reason—by then I was exhausted and sick, and I got on the first ship I could that was going far enough away. I could have continued on to Glif after that ship was wrecked here, if I’d wanted to, but I just didn’t bother. It wasn’t a dramatic wreck. We ran aground on some rocks, but the ship didn’t sink, and everyone was ferried to shore with all our luggage. A couple of my fellow passengers brought me here—I’d been unwell the whole voyage and couldn’t really fend for myself—and Theano had me put in this room, which they were renting out just like your room at the time. I stayed until my health improved, but by then I’d begun to feel at home here. I was already more or less working for the house. I’d go out in the evenings and sit in the courtyard and chat with the guests, sometimes play my flute. I flirted with people, I drank tea. It was like the good parts of life at the Zashian court without anyone trying to poison or backstab or intrigue with you. Very much. I mean, they do intrigue here, or they think they do, but angels of the Almighty, it’s amateur stuff, Hylas. It’s quaint.”

Hylas chuckled. “I don’t think we Pseuchaians are very good at intrigue.”

“You’re really not. I like that about you.”

“So you found a home here, and you decided to stay.”

“I guess I did. I guess … the only thing that was missing was … ”

He felt tears suddenly, out of nowhere, stinging in his eyes. What was that about? He reached for Hylas’s arm, pulled it by the wrist to draw it over his body. Hylas obediently gathered him in.

“What was missing?” Hylas asked innocently.

“Someone I could open my heart to. Trusting … ” He was crying in earnest now. “Trusting them not to betray me. I never—I never had that. I never told anyone all this. And I just did, just now. It’s you, Hylas. You are the only thing that was missing. Please don’t betray me.”

He shouldn’t have said it. It showed weakness and wouldn’t make a difference. But it also didn’t need saying. This was the man who hadn’t allowed himself to leave Ariata and live fully as himself until all his duties to his family were discharged and half his own life was over. He didn’t need to be taught anything about loyalty. He deserved someone who could trust him unquestioningly.

He hugged Zo to his chest and kissed the top of Zo’s head.

“Never, Zo. Never. I can’t promise not to disappoint you or that I can give you everything you deserve. But betray you? No. You can trust me. I’ll tell you so as often as you need to hear it.”

Zo snuffled against Hylas’s chest and let himself be held tightly for a little while before he wiped his face and rolled over to sit up. Hylas released him, pushing himself up on one elbow. Zo drew a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“I was going to apologize, but I guess it’s rather special, being the first person to be trusted with someone’s secrets.”

“Incredibly special. Frightening, even. Though—I promise I can handle it.”

Zo smiled down at him. “Let us get up and eat our breakfast. There is still a world out there, and I suppose we should face it.”

In fact, there was plenty for Hylas to do in the world outside the Red Balconies. He had plans to tackle another of the broken water pipes on the edge of town, which meant scrounging up a work crew from somewhere. Then he had an appointment with Mutari in the afternoon, mostly to return the copy of The Bronze Dolphin that he had borrowed from her.

He had never imagined how it would feel to do any of that after having made love to Zo first thing in the morning.

He felt changed by the experience, but somehow less so than he would have imagined. No one asked him, “What are you smiling about?” or “What’s gotten into you?” and that didn’t seem strange; he didn’t think he showed any outward signs of the transformation inside him.

But he thought about Zo so much that day that it was distracting. When he was waiting to speak to a clerk at the government office, he was remembering the feeling of running his hand over Zo’s thigh. When he was supposed to be assessing the state of the pipe that had been dug up under the road, he was thinking about the way Zo’s tongue had felt in his mouth.

He almost couldn’t bring himself to remember how it had felt to touch Zo’s prick. He had done it, he had touched it extensively, explored its shape, rubbed it against his own … It still felt wrong to dwell on it—as if he might have made it less real by not thinking about it.

He stopped dead in the street outside the House of the Peacock when he had that thought. He wanted it to have been entirely real. He would make a point of thinking about it deliberately, just to spite whatever impulse from his upbringing was telling him he shouldn’t—just maybe not right now, because right now he was outside the House of the Peacock and due to be drinking tea with Mutari.