Page 67 of The Boy Bride

Vanu nodded. “I’ve missed him for a long time. Thought I would get to see him again … some time. Sorry. Didn’t mean to cry in front of you.”

“No … it’s all right,” said Lill slowly, as if working something out as he spoke. “You are my husband … you can show me how you feel. You should.”

Vanu wanted to repeat that back to him, but he didn’t because he had a good idea of the answer it would get. Lill would say, “Of course,” but he wouldn’t mean it. And what would be the point of that?

What he really wanted to do, because he was basically a beast, was draw Lill over to sit in his lap. Put a hand up under the boy’s shirt and get him worked up the way he’d been yesterday. Even if it ended the same way as yesterday—though maybe it wouldn’t. But they’d just been talking about their dead. His friend, his first real lover. Lill’s father. His brothers. Heart of the Blue Heaven. It would feel to Lill as if ghosts were in the room with him. He’d be revolted if he knew what was in Vanu’s mind.

“Haven’t shown you around my place yet,” he said instead, moving to rise from the cushions. “Want me to?”

“Yes, but—show me the signs for things as you go. Could you? For instance, what’s the sign for this room?”

Vanu showed him: “Main room. Seating platform. Cushions. Cupboard.” Lill repeated all the signs dutifully and precisely with his thin hands. (Vanu was distracted thinking about how he’d like to press them to his lips, take the slim, calloused fingers into his mouth one by one.) “Stairs. Door. Come.”

Lill followed him into the kitchen with its cold hearth, unused in the warm weather when they preferred to cook outside.

“There’s just the two upstairs rooms, yours and mine. There’s this room … ” He opened the door under the stairs to his room. “No use for it. You want a room for anything, it’s there for you.”

Lill leaned in the doorway to look at the bare room. “We could put our bard in there.”

Vanu laughed. From where he was standing, he had a lovely view of his bride’s neat, trousered ass. He wanted to squeeze it or maybe swat it lightly. (Beast.)

“Nah, he can have his own house. We got plenty.”

“I suppose you do.”

“We do.”

Lill looked at the floor. “We. Yeah.”

Vanu gestured toward the door at the back of the house. “I’ll show you the yard,” he signed.

* * *

The sun was setting; the sky above the fortress wall was purple, with brilliant pink-lit clouds hanging above the dark blue shapes of the mountains. The shadows stretched long over Vanu’s yard as Lill walked beside him around the garden plots, the small duck pond and cisterns for gathering rain-water, the outdoor kitchen, the exterior of the girls’ house, which was a similar size to Vanu’s, with a matching balcony running the length of one side and a half-finished design of flowers painted in white around the window frames. On the other side of the girls’ house the yard continued, delineated by the dry stone wall that Vanu confirmed he had built himself soon after their arrival. There was a small round building in poor repair, the roof half missing, but with a sturdy door that had a lock on it. Vanu did not identify or explain this, and Lill didn’t ask about it.

He tried not to think about Vanu weeping for his dead friend. Weeping. The Lion of the Summer Pass. He hadn’t tried to hide it; he’d apologized to Lill after drying his eyes, but he hadn’t seemed ashamed. He’d accepted whatever nonsense Lill had said about sharing their feelings because they were married. Lill wasn’t even sure what he had meant by that.

And what had Vanu and Davanu been to each other, anyway? It didn’t matter at all to Lill, but he couldn’t help wondering about it. The two men had been far apart in age, and Lill couldn’t imagine them having been lovers except maybe when Davanu was much younger, when Vanu would have been very young … He would stop thinking about it.

He had seen this part of Vanu’s domain before, when he climbed the wall from the other side, looking for a way out of Umtúshta. But he saw it differently now. He noticed how vines had been trained on trellises against the wall on this side, how the pot of paint and brushes were sitting out waiting for whoever was working on the decoration around the windows. Equipment for a ball game was lying in the grass, and a target and straw dummy for sword practice stood in a bare, sandy area.

It struck Lill that he was being shown around a happy home, and that this, under the circumstances, was a very strange thing.

“Where you train?” he signed to Vanu, indicating the area with the target and dummy.

He knew the signs for all the martial disciplines, for various sword techniques and terms relating to punishments and stealth-craft, because these were the things they’d talked about in the Order, where he’d begun learning the language. He’d have been able to explain to Vanu in hand language that he was here to assassinate him and describe the methods he had so far considered using.

“Every morning,” said Vanu. “Tomorrow you can join me, hey?”

“I’m sadly in need of exercise,” said Lill. “I was tired out just by the dancing this afternoon.”

“You’ve been recovering. Taking it easy. Right thing to do.”

At some point as they walked around the yard, Vanu had taken Lill’s hand, and now he led Lill back toward his house. He yawned hugely.

“Might go to bed early. You?”

“Oh, that’s … I—I am quite tired.”