Page 55 of The Boy Bride

Lill looked confused, another genuine expression.

“You’re beautiful,” Vanu clarified for him. “People must be drawn to you. Want to please you. No?”

“Not—not really. I’ve often been called pretty, but never as praise.”

He was blushing again, deeper this time. Vanu had a bizarre fancy that he might have tasted the flush on Lill’s cheeks, a kind of sweetness, if he had licked them.

“Earth’s heart,” he said. “It’s praise when I say it. You catch the sign for it?” He repeated it. “I might want to say it a time or two.”

“I—I think I’ve got it. Thank you.”

Vanu looked at him for a long moment. “You’re surely much more than beautiful … ” His throat felt raw with overuse, and his voice was genuinely beginning to fail. He went on anyway: “I want to know all the other things that you are, too. I hope that I can make you happy. Almost forgot—” He sat up and reached across the table for the bowl that he had carved. “I made this for you.”

He put the bowl in Lill’s hands and then looked into his face and was startled by what he saw there. This was fear, there was no other word for it.

Maybe he shouldn’t have carved a snake around the rim? He’d tried to make it a friendly-looking snake, but maybe his carving skill hadn’t been good enough for that.

He touched the inside of the bowl, where he had carved letters in the Hawa script. Lill probably didn’t know how to read those.

“It says, You have a home with me forever. Heard that once in a poem, thought it’s a nice thing for a husband to say. Didn’t think I’d ever be a husband.”

He turned away, because Lill was staring at the lettering in the bowl as if he were on a battlefield, nerving himself up to face the foe. Or maybe it was Vanu’s imagination, and his look meant something entirely different. It was just that he’d seen a look like that so many times before. He’d never seen anyone look that way at a wooden bowl.

“Thank you,” said Lill, his voice low, stripped of emotion. “You’ve done a very nice job of the carving.”

Vanu smiled. “Something to pass the time. Might have to stop talking … ”

He did, in fact, right then. His throat had seized up like a dead man’s fist. He wouldn’t be getting any sound out of it for a day or two, if his experience was anything to go by. It had been years—a lot of years—since this had happened, and it had never been because he just wanted to talk too much.

“Oh no!” Lill exclaimed. “You shouldn’t have … But no, it’s my fault. If I’d found out sooner, I could have spent the last week practicing hand language, and you wouldn’t have had to use your voice so much.” He winced. “I should have done better.”

He seemed seriously to blame himself, which Vanu thought was odd. He didn’t say, “If only someone had told me,” the way most people would have. He said, “If I’d found out,” and “I should have done better,” and he seemed to really mean it.

“It is not your fault,” Vanu signed.

“That is kind of you to say,” Lill replied aloud. He yawned suddenly, rather elegantly, behind his hand. “I’m tired. I might—could I—sleep for a little?”

Vanu nodded readily. He got up from the cushions.

Lill was scooting back into his corner, still holding the bowl, as if he planned to sleep right there, and he looked up in surprise as Vanu stood and gestured toward the door to his room.

“Oh. Oh, I could sleep in that—in my room. Yes, that makes sense.”

He popped up and accepted Vanu’s offered hand to climb back up through the doorway. Vanu stood outside, watching him set the bowl carefully down on the table by his bed, rearranging things slightly to accommodate it. Then he folded back the quilt on the bed, moving a little tentatively, slipped under it, and curled up with his back to Vanu. He looked back over his shoulder.

“Thank you for everything,” he said, then turned away again. Vanu had assumed the sudden need to take a nap was put on, but he did sound sleepy.

Vanu remained looking in at him for a minute, but there was not much to see: just the little shape that he made under the quilt, the pool of long black hair on the pillow. Vanu rolled his shoulders and stretched and lay down across the cushions on the balcony, hands behind his head. Birds were singing in the yard, and the remnants of the storm were dripping off the eaves of the roof.

He was beginning to fall asleep himself when a thought floated through his mind that made his eyes pop open. What if Lill didn’t know …

Vanu sat up, pushing his hands through his hair. He should have thought of this before. He had been selfish, unforgivably selfish, not to think of this before.

* * *

The order, when it came, was not to deliver a warning to the nobleman they had spied on before, but to eliminate him. Lill would have thought it unwarranted, if it had been his place to question an order, which it was not.

They travelled to Torakand again, the same group as before, posing again as entertainers. Zish as the acrobat, Kush as the clown, Master Hadda as the leader of the troupe, and Lill as the knife-thrower. They had to hire musicians in the city, because no one from the Order was trained in that kind of thing. Lill thought that for the security of this type of mission, at least one of them should have learned to play some sort of instrument or sing, but when he’d suggested this after the last mission, Master Hadda had thought he was trying to offer an excuse for himself to indulge in unmanly arts—and maybe he had been, though he’d tried to cover his shame by saying he wasn’t suggesting it should be him. Kush would have been a good candidate, Lill privately thought. He couldn’t be any worse as a musician than he was as a clown.