Page 119 of The Boy Bride

Finally the tears stopped coming. Lill mopped at his face with his sleeve.

“You did good, little snake,” Vanu said in his rough voice.

Lill wondered when he’d begun to find the sound of Vanu’s voice comforting. Like something you listened for to orient yourself in the dark, when you were lost.

He snorted. “Didn’t do anything.”

Vanu rubbed his cheek against Lill’s shoulder and shifted over so they were touching all down one side. Lill hooked his leg around Vanu’s. He felt very comfortable. Even the tears, when he’d realized Vanu wasn’t fazed by them, hadn’t been so bad. They just seemed like part of it, something his body had needed to do after giving up so much else.

“Do you … want me to do something for you?” Lill asked tentatively.

Vanu seemed to think about it for a moment. “Another time, yeah. Right now I got what I wanted.”

Lill thought vaguely that he should feel some loss of honour at obviously being thought incapable of reciprocating—but he didn’t feel that. He felt as if honour might be another of the things that he had floated free from. He also felt very tired and not at all sure he was quite finished crying, and he was very grateful that Vanu didn’t want him to do anything other than lie there.

He realized there was no sticky mess on himself or the bedclothes, and it occurred to him why that was.

“Hey, Vanu? I heard that the husband’s seed has to flow into the wife’s body to consummate the marriage—do you think it counts if it’s the other way around? Because I’m your wife, but … ”

“You got seed, and I swallowed it? Yeah, I think it counts.”

“I guess I did do well, then.”

“Yeah. Made me your husband.”

“Only took me two weeks.”

“Pssh. No time at all.”

Lill felt something warm and expanding in his chest, and he wasn’t sure if it was the feeling of needing to cry again or something else.

“Downstairs,” he began, “earlier, you said you’re happy.”

“Yeah.”

“I am too.”

Lill could feel Vanu’s gaze on him. He turned his head so they were looking into each other’s eyes. Vanu smiled. Lill felt as if he were seeing it for the first time.

He was, in a way. He was looking at Vanu for the first time with the certainty, clear as the mountain sunlight, that there was no one in the world he was less likely to kill than this man.

That had probably been true for some time now. He just hadn’t been able to see it. His world hadn’t been arranged like that; he’d had a mission, and that had been the only thing that mattered, because that was the only thing he would allow to matter. He hadn’t even been telling himself a very convincing story about why it mattered.

He didn’t have a mission anymore, but he still had a husband. He might have married Vanu for a reason that was frankly nonsense, but the marriage was real. It was like he’d woken from a dream, and the waking world was better—so much better—than what he’d dreamt.

“What’s in your mind now?” Vanu signed lazily.

“You,” Lill signed back. “I’m thinking about you.”

Chapter 32

A Peaceful Life

“Lill seems happy,” Atari remarked at dinner that evening.

“He is happy,” said Vanu. “He told me so.”

He winked at Lill, who sat on the other side of the balcony. Lill could feel his cheeks heating as he smiled back.