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The capital looks almost beautiful from the king’s window. A toymaker’s diorama in the moonlight, people little more than ants crawling through the bright patches cut by the street lamps. From even higher—for a bird flying above, for a great dragon soaring the skies, for the skyrunner the engineers are coaxing into operation in the bowels of the royal shipyards—maybe it would be easy to forget the rot upon the city altogether.
Louis stands naked before the window and pictures the distant streets below being swallowed by flames.
“You’ll catch a chill like that,” rasps a voice from behind him. Hythlodaeus is watching him, when Louis turns to look—neither leering nor glaring, but watching nonetheless. The black silk of his dressing gown seems to swallow him in the dark, leaving the rest of him ghostly in the moon’s cool light.
Louis wordlessly moves for his clothes, folded at the foot of the bed. He usually dresses and leaves quickly, and Hythlodaeus usually, by word or by deed, makes clear he expects him to—but then Hythlodaeus shakes his head.
“Come here,” he says, and Louis still cannot help but to expect a trap as he does as he’s told.
Three years of this—sparse and far-flung within those years as their trysts have been—and the king’s moods are still far more opaque than they ever were when Louis was a child. Time and intimacy have granted him even less clarity than he’d had in his banishment; as a boy he could draw a clear line between the prince he had known and loved in the sanctum and the king who took him into his confidence as a friend and soldier, but now he can never quite escape the feeling that he’s been getting into bed with a stranger wearing Hythlodaeus’s skin.
Perhaps his Majesty feels the same way about him. Or perhaps he’s never thought overmuch about what lies beneath Louis’s skin at all.
“Surely you don’t want me to be seen here in the morning,” Louis murmurs as he slips back into bed, and Hythlodaeus’s eyes flutter shut as he lets out a slow exhale through his nose. His austere profile, his long lashes, the silvery sheen of his hair, the sharp curve of his small horns—all of these things are unchanged, even as flesh and spirit alike have withered under the weight of the crown. All of these things make some small part of Louis feel like a little boy again, peering out through the bushes at the gallant prince on horseback and feeling his heart stir for the first time.
“Sometimes I wonder what it would matter,” Hythlodaeus sighs, sagging back against the pillows. “One more sin in the eyes of the people. ‘Tis not as if public opinion could be much worse.”
Louis’s mouth twists in a grimace. “You didn’t always speak like that.”
“It wasn’t always true.” Hythlodaeus opens his eyes to look at him sideways, his expression grim in the gloom of night. “You cannot pretend you’ve never thought the same when your own soldiers decry me the loudest.”
“And I shall not apologize for them,” Louis says flatly. “A people bereft of hope look to their leaders to provide it. You did provide it, once.”
You even dared to give me hope, once. The words lay heavy on Louis’s tongue, unspoken as Hythlodaeus runs a hand through his hair. And—
“What has that amounted to?” Hythlodaeus finishes for him, as though he’d read Louis’s thoughts. If only he could, then perhaps... “What hope have I to give a country that rejected all I sought to achieve?”
“Did the country reject it, or the church?” Louis asks, turning onto his side to face Hythlodaeus fully—only for the king’s dark eyes to flick away from him, drifting to something in the vague middle distance. “Many may be blinded by their dogma, but those that are not—”
“Would be happier to see you upon the throne than me.”
Hythlodaeus’s eyes slip shut again, another harsh exhale passing his chapped lips. Something twists in Louis’s chest, stabbing at a part of him he’s always surprised to realize can still hurt, a part that should know better. Pathetic, he thinks, and swallows down the taste of smoke in the back of his throat.
“Is that so absurd? I have always made my ideals clear, and proven I have the strength to uphold them.” Unlike you. “Their king has all but abandoned them to their despair, and the Sanctists’ prayers are nothing but a false comfort to the gullible.”
He reaches for Hythlodaeus’s jaw, turning his face toward him. Nearly nose to nose, he can see the lines of age and sorrow carved deep into his king’s face, the yet-beautiful features those lines bracket. Still Hythlodaeus tries not to look at him, eyes darting around for an escape from Louis’s piercing gaze—but though Louis isn’t holding him in place with any pressure, he doesn’t offer any resistance.
“And you,” Louis continues, curling his fingers in the unkempt hair of Hythlodaeus’s beard. “You would have me as your lover, but not your heir?”
The king’s gaze sharpens, his mouth pressed thin beneath his mustache.
“We might have married years ago, if I had been a girl.” Louis trails the tips of his fingers up to Hythlodaeus’s ear, starting to come to a point like those of so many clemar men in middle age. “Even the church would have had little ground to interfere, if you would have had me. Or would you have thought me beneath being even your consort?”
Hythlodaeus turns on his side to face Louis too, his dressing gown falling open to expose the scattering of fine hair on his pale chest. In mirror image, he reaches for Louis’s temple, tucks a stray lock of hair behind one false horn. Three years, and still his king seems half-afraid to touch him more than he must to fuck him.
Fifteen years, and still the full weight of Hythlodaeus’s regard makes Louis’s breath catch in his throat like it had when he was a child.
“Why are you doing this, Louis?”
Because I still want you to open your eyes and do something. Because this is the only way you’ll look at me. Because I want to believe the dreams you gave me weren’t all lies. Because it needs to have meant something. Because I want you to forget about them and think of me as much as I’ve always thought of you. A thousand answers that Hythlodaeus would never believe, that would beg yet more questions with answers he wouldn’t believe either. Answers that might have been worth something fifteen years ago, or twelve, or nine, or three, if his Majesty had only been willing to hear them.
“I might ask you the same thing,” Louis murmurs in place of any of them, and Hythlodaeus’s expression only grows grimmer. He’s silent in thought for a long moment, and even in the dark Louis can see the tension in his jaw. Eventually he sits up against the headboard, putting his face in his hands, and Louis sits to follow him.
“Your Majesty?” he prompts; More, he always longs to call him. But when Hythlodaeus lowers his hands, the expression on his face is one More never would have let the little boy from the Eldan sanctum see.
“Did you kill my son?” Hythlodaeus asks, forcing out the words as if every syllable burns his throat—and every syllable hits Louis like a backhand across the face, like a knife to every soft part of him he still dares to bare.
“Why would you ask that of me now?” he snaps, before he can so much as think of anything else—and what else is there to ask but why? If he’s truly believed that all this time, why welcome Louis into his bed these three years? If he’d ever had any doubt, why let Forden ruin the life of a boy he’d once so happily treated like a son? Why ask now, when the prince has been missing longer than he’d lived in the palace? Why ask at all, when Louis had already sobbed at his feet and sworn on his life that he’d done nothing as soon as he’d been taken into custody?
It hardly matters. Louis can see what answer Hythlodaeus thinks he heard in the way his face crumples like a soldier’s helmet between a human’s jaws.
“Get out,” Hythlodaeus whispers, like a death rattle. “I cannot—just go.”
Louis snatches his clothes with mechanical efficiency, his eyes burning and his heart hammering in his chest. He’s of half a mind to storm out half-dressed—or not dressed at all—and let the king deal with the consequences, but he will not let himself be called a petulant child. If his Majesty will grant him nothing else, he will leave with his dignity.
Pathetic, he thinks again as the king once again buries his face in his hands as Louis dresses. Pathetic, he thinks as he bows primly at the waist and thanks his Majesty for the honor of his company this evening. Pathetic, he thinks as he stumbles down the stairs like a drunk, oil still dripping down the insides of his thighs.
“Pathetic,” he hisses under his breath as he finally slips through the servants’ exit into the garden, rows upon rows of lilium flowers taunting him in their oppressive bloom. Seized by a sudden impulse, he grabs a handful of the nearest blossoms and tears them from the ground, tossing them at his feet as the elda throw them atop their funeral caskets and grinding them into the dirt with the heel of his boot.
It does nothing to piece together the heart he hadn’t realized could yet still break, nor to dry the foolish, childish tears it sickens him to realize have wet the corners of his eyes. The king’s bedroom doesn’t even overlook the garden; Hythlodaeus could not have borne witness to his ridiculous outburst if Louis wanted him to. A servant will clear away the mess before his Majesty has any cause to see it, and it will be like Louis had never come here tonight at all.
He takes one more flower with him as he leaves, tucked into the buttonhole of his uniform. That might have thrilled him, once—taking a trophy of their tryst, marking himself with the symbol of all the things he’s always envied most—but now it feels more like he’s leaving his heart buried in the dirt he plucked it from.
More will know, he tells himself, and perhaps the most pathetic thing of all is that he still wants to believe it.