Fantasy short. A serving boy seduces a prince who is tired of the weight of his crown.
Rated M. 13.7k. M/M fantasy, with dark comedy throughout, and a rather fraught romance.
Prince Alexander, who hates the weight of his crown, his kingdom, and his princely identity, tries at every opportunity to escape his position, but is foiled at every turn. A serving boy named Mahon, full of helpless compassion and a certain naivety, tries his best to offer him what comfort he can.
All is not as it seems, and the two have more in common than they first thought.
Themes of parental abuse, gender and assigned role dynamics, themes of suicide, and anti-monarchist themes throughout. Please note a specific content warning for non-consensual tampering with someone’s contraceptives, in the context of a trans man.
The prince was the only son to a small kingdom.
His father was not best pleased about his being his only heir, of course, just as the prince was not best pleased about being prince. He couldn’t leave, of course. He couldn’t travel. His father was terrified he’d be injured or lost or killed…
Or, naturally, that he wouldn’t come back.
When he was a teenager, he was occupied by classes in everything under the sun — long lessons in geography, learning the names of other families, memorising their complex and intersecting genealogies, studying his own family’s history, local history…
Nowadays, he was occupied with other things — overseeing administrative work, constantly working through sheaf after sheaf of stacked papers, redrafting one after the next, compiling minutes of the king’s courts, looking over paperwork within the palace and the kingdom proper.
His father liked to say it was important work, that he did it himself until he was king. He would say it was the best way to learn, to entrench oneself in the background running of the kingdom, to understand the economics, the noble obligation, the logistics. It wasn’t entirely true, of course — before his father took the throne, he was still permitted time for leisure, to play sports, to read, to relax.
He thought it was dangerous to allow his son things like that.
The prince understood, albeit in the way one understood but did not condone another’s motive for murder.
Everything he did was scheduled in one way or another, no matter his attempts to supersede or get out of whatever had been timetabled for him. If he took time to ride, he would find an ambassador waiting for him; if he went for a walk, he was met with the chairman of the Royal Bank; if he retired to his quarters to read, he would cross the threshold to find paperwork, if not a messenger, awaiting him.
He didn’t want to be king.
He had known this since he was a child, had always known it — he didn’t want to be king, and didn’t much want to be a prince, either, but there was no escape.
When he first found the young man in his room, he thought he was an assassin, lurking in the dark, and he lunged forward. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, small and delicate with a youthful plumpness to his cheeks, his arse, a roundness to his belly and chest. The prince had him pinned against the wall very easy, his dagger tight against the young man’s throat, but he realised in short order he had no blade of his own.
“Who are you?” he asked coolly, and the young man quivered, looking up at him with his eyes wide and his lips trembling.
“Mr Job is going to tan my hide,” he said anxiously.
“Is he?” replied the prince dispassionately. Mr Job was the palace butler and the chief of domestic staff, and the prince knew him to be a hard taskmaster.
“I broke a serving platter.”
“You thought Job wouldn’t look for you in my rooms?”
“No, highness, I’m sorry, I’m sorry — ”
“In the habit of hiding from your mistakes, are you?”
The young man looked away from him. “I’m sorry, highness,” he said again. “I thought you were still at supper, he enjoys giving a beating too much — he’ll forget soon enough.”
“Am I to harbour the fugitive in the meantime?” asked the prince softly.
“This kingdom is called Sanctuary, highness,” said the young man.
It was a joke, accompanied with a pained smile. The prince did not smile back: he rang a bell for service as he sheathed his dagger, and watched the young man’s face fall, crumpling inward. He was young. Younger than twenty-five — twenty-two, twenty-one, if not nineteen. No younger than the prince himself, of course, but the prince had never felt young in all his life.
Youth had always felt like it was reserved for people other than him — he’d been old since he was old enough to hold a pen.
“Your highness,” said Job as he arrived at the door, and the prince watched the sudden fury erupt on his face, the square of his shoulders, the snarl on his lips. When he tried to approach, stalking across the floor, the prince blocked his path.
“Is it true you beat the servants, Job?” asked the prince quietly.
“Of course, highness,” said Job, inflating himself to his full height with his shoulders back and his chest forward, his gaze boring fiercely into the young man cowering behind the prince. The prince was still taller than he was, of course.
He hated play-acting at being a hero, and he resented Job for forcing him into it.
“Have you lost command of your tongue, Job?”
“Highness?”
“Your tongue is in good working order? You retain a sufficient command of language to communicate your desires?”
“Yes, highness, of course.”
“And yet you feel your fists communicate your intent better than your tongue? Are you soon to bat me about, when you find I am late for breakfast? Strike my father on the chin, perhaps, when you wish to communicate that his boy is finished running his bath?”
Job was staring at him wordlessly.
“Don’t beat the servants,” said the prince. “Not now, not any of them, not ever.”
“For twenty years I have conducted myself in the same manner, highness, and to be — ”
“For twenty years you have been butler, Job?”
“Yes, highness.”
“For twenty years you’ve beaten servants?”
“For severe infractions, highness, yes.” The man had turned quite red, his cheeks almost purple, and he was all but thrumming with indignation. No doubt he wished he could beat the prince now.
“Twenty years is quite the time,” decided the prince. “Time enough to get out your temper. You can go on beating servants, Job, or you can go on being butler. Which would you prefer?”
“You have no authority to — ”
“I handle every contract in this palace, Job. I can assure you I do.”
Job deflated like a balloon with the air let out of it, his mouth opening and closing, his head slowly shaking, and then he clenched his hands into fists at his sides, and he turned his head away.
“Go away, Job,” said the prince, and watched him depart.
The young man was quiet for a few moments, shifting on his feet. He said “Thank you,” in the tiniest of voices, one so tiny and so small and self-effacing that the prince wanted to spit at him.
“Get out,” said the prince. “Don’t break anything else.”
“I just wanted to say it was very ki — ”
“Out, now,” said the prince coldly. “Or I’ll beat you myself.”
The young man stared at him, his mouth open, before he walked out into the corridor and left him in peace.
* * *
“Fraternising with the staff again?” asked his father after a meeting had come to a close, just as the prince was finalising the minutes he’d made. He’d written them in an easy shorthand, and two of the library clerks knew his shorthand well enough that they could write them up fully afterwards, but only so long as he’d left nothing ambiguous.
Otherwise, he ended up having to either write the minutes himself, have one of the clerks in the meetings with them, or worst of all, spend agonising time checking through the minutes with the clerks in front of him, which the prince despised.
It had been bad enough teaching them his shorthand in the first place.
“I don’t fraternise with the staff,” said the prince. “You pay them to bother me, and I threaten them until they leave. Isn’t that the pattern we’ve fallen into?”
“I’ve never paid any of the staff to bother you, Alexander,” said his father, wrinkling his nose and looking genuinely quite wounded. He was very good at that.
“How many of them have you paid to befriend me?”
“I don’t need to pay them,” said the king softly, his voice full of kindness and a sweetly false compassion. “They want for their prince to be happy, Alexander, instead of miserable all the time.”
“Well,” said the prince mildly, “you know the trick to putting me out of my misery, don’t you? Why don’t you share it with them?”
His father’s good mood dissipated and was replaced with cold, hardened disapproval, and in the face of Dravel Sanctum’s hard features, his tightened jaw, his cold eyes, the prince smiled a pleasant smile, and turned his focus back to his minutes.
* * *
The young man was called Mahon, and he worked in the palace as a junior footman. He was the same age as the prince — twenty-two — and he worked at a noble house outside of Sanctuary City, in the kingdom proper, before coming to work at the Royal Palace.
The prince learned all of this against his will — the cook told him everything she could think of, and he couldn’t tune all of it out.
“He’s been talking you up,” she said as she rifled through a drawer, looking for the right paper. “Been telling everyone who will listen how kind you are.”
“Yes,” said the prince idly. “I had gathered already that he wasn’t tremendously bright.”
“Thinks you’re a marvel, he does.”
“Not many people have been listening, I hope?”
“Everyone thinks he’s stupid as anything.”
“They’re hardly wrong,” said the prince, and picked out a bar of chocolate. He ate a piece on the way back to his room — one square exactly, each day, until the bar was done, so long as he was able to secrete it somewhere in his room where a housemaid wouldn’t take his only pleasure from him under the guise of cleaning up.
“Get out,” said the prince upon crossing the threshold.
Mahon was in his room again, barely hidden behind the curtains of the prince’s ridiculous four-poster bread.
“I wanted to thank you,” said Mahon.
“We all want things that don’t matter,” he retorted. “Out.”
“Aren’t you lonely?” Mahon’s voice was very soft, and the prince rolled his eyes.
“No,” he said impatiently. “Get out.”
Mahon looked at him in a way the prince supposed was meant to be understanding or compassionate, and was instead profoundly irritating. “Are you lying?” he asked.
“Yes,” said the prince tonelessly. “I’m so lonely I could cry, my heart aches for companionship, I yearn for the friendship of a clumsy servant boy, et cetera, and so on. Nonetheless, I reiterate: get out.”
“You needn’t be so sarcastic,” said Mahon.
“Needn’t I? I’m glad to hear it. Get out.”
“Would it kill you to have one friend in the world?”
“Perhaps,” said the prince. “One never knows, best not to risk it. Should I repeat myself again?”
“You’re such a kind, noble — ”
“Oh, do stop before the nausea takes hold,” muttered the prince, folding over the cloth and paper covering of his chocolate bar to set aside. “I’m not your romantic ideal waiting to be softened by your kind attentions. Go downstairs and embarrass yourself singing my praises if it amuses you, but you needn’t involve me in the process.”
Setting aside the chocolate bar, he began to strip off his clothes to go to bed, and Mahon, stunned and embarrassed as more of the prince’s skin was revealed, hurried out of the room with his cheeks aglow with a blush and went downstairs.
The prince started stripping the next three times Mahon appeared in his room regardless of the time of day, and it worked remarkably well to keep him at arm’s length.
The fourth time he began to strip off his shirt, Mahon faced rigidly the other way, but didn’t actually flee.
“Do they give you any actual work to do?” asked the prince, his shirt hanging loosely from his side, his hands on his hips.
“Do you want to be lonely?” asked Mahon.
“Desperately,” said the priest, “more than anything. And yet here you are again.”
“Do you not think you’re kind?”
“I’m not.”
“But you — but you care about people, don’t you?”
“I am forced to interact with people all day. You are interrupting my only respite.”
“Th cook says you don’t have any friends, that all you do is work.”
“Your belief being that, based upon pleasing the whim of a footman, I ought become some manner of socialite?”
“You just seem unhappy, that’s all,” said Mahon quietly.
“Is it a crime to be unhappy in one’s own bed chamber?”
“I think you’re unhappy everywhere.”
“Who gives a toss if I am?”
“I do,” said Mahon, his eyes wide and very round, his expression painfully innocent and full of a revolting naivety.
“Gods above,” muttered the prince.
The earnestness made his skin crawl in its saccharine sweetness, and this time when he grabbed Mahon it was by the hair, lifting him up on his toes to hold his dagger to his throat. He pressed hard enough on the skin this time that he left a thin, white line, and Mahon whimpered in sudden terror. His chest heaved with breaths in and out, but he desperately tried to hold his head still, his neck, although he swallowed compulsively so that his throat bobbed and twitched under the knife’s blade.
“Do you know what would happen if I killed you?” asked the prince in soft, deliberate tones, and Mahon whined out an uncertain, fearful noise, trembling on his tiptoes but too frightened to attempt to struggle free. “Have you thought about that?”
“Please — ”
“I would slit your throat, just like this,” said the prince, “and watch you bleed on the floor. As you drew in breath, you would find that with the wrench in your throat you were unable to fill your lungs — you would wheeze quite pathetically, robbed of your voice, and each time you tried to inhale, it would serve to make the blood draining out of you bubble and froth. You would leave quite the puddle on the floor, although I might lay down a towel for the worst of it — and when your eyes were glassy, your body no longer twitching, your skin cold to the touch, do you know what would happen then?”
There were tears on the young man’s cheeks, and when his knees went weak, the prince gripped his hair tighter to keep him upright.
“I would ring for service,” the prince whispered, “and they’d take your body away with nary a word.”
“Highness,” said Mahon tearfully, hiccupping as he stared down at the shine of the dagger’s blade, “highness, please — ”
“A maid would clean your blood from the stone; your body would be pieced apart and fed to the palace pigs; the other staff would barely notice your absence, let alone make an accusation of me. One of the guards would record in his notes that he saw you leaving at some late hour of the night, and two witnesses would corroborate his lie.”
Mahon’s breath was reedy, his cheeks red and sticky with tears, and the terror writ in his features was quite extreme.
“They wouldn’t just hide that I’d killed you,” said the prince softly. “They would make it seem as though you’d gone looking for death, that you’d shown foolishness, and disappeared as you deserved — and more than that, they’d deny your family your last month’s wages.”
The prince pressed harder before pulling back, just before he could draw blood, and Mahon hiccoughed miserably as he reached up to touch the mark on his throat.
“I could kill you very easily and face no consequence but the mess,” said the prince. “Do you think a kind man could do that?”
“No,” coughed out Mahon, sniffling pathetically. “But you won’t. You wouldn’t.”
“I could.”
“But — ”
“Do you know what a monarch is, Mahon?” asked the prince, spinning the blade in his hand, and Mahon stared at its shine and turn as if hypnotised, his lips parted, wet with tears and snot.
“A ruler,” said Mahon stuntedly, “who rules based upon their blood.”
“By blood is correct,” said the prince. “The monarch, in this way, is comparable to a tick or some other parasite.”
Mahon stared at him, shocked and confused.
“The tick is incapable of kindness,” said the prince. “By his very existence he bleeds and weakens those in his proximity, spreading the natural disease of his being in the process. Get out, Mahon, before I call a guard to do what I was too kind to do to you.”
Mahon ran out of the room so quickly that he stumbled and slipped on the floor.
* * *
Mahon left him be from there, at least for the following weeks.
The prince spent his late evenings alone, as he usually did, staying up as the hours ticked by for no reason at all. He knew it would be exhausting the next day, but he so hated to sleep, knowing that as soon as his head hit the pillow, he’d be giving up this day for the next one, and all the work that came with it.
The prince, distantly, mused on how much he hated his life, and for the umpteenth time planned how he would escape, the scale he might attempt down the palace walls, the gutters, his path through town to the outer gates.
He was fairly certain that there were guards devoted specifically to stopping him doing that, just as there was always a dedicated guard that checked in on him a few times a night to make sure he hadn’t tried to kill himself.
His father had told him, of course, that there were no such guards, which was a confirmation of the fact in itself, but more than that, he knew that every attempt was swiftly headed off, whether he tried to escape via the city walls or by bleeding into his bathtub.
He ate a square of chocolate.
“Don’t you ever do anything?” asked Mahon. He was carrying a tray of cheese and fruit and a class of wine, and the prince looked at it with little interest as it was placed on his desk.
“No,” said the prince. “Nothing. Not ever. I simply sit here and wait for time to pass.”
“When you’re king, it will be different,” said Mahon encouragingly, in the tone of one who had rehearsed his statement many times.
The prince dreaded the day King Dravel was dead and he was chained even more so to this husk of a nation, made to grow fat on its blood and its blood alone.
“What makes you say that?” he asked dully, although he knew the answer.
“You’ll be a good king,” said Mahon confidently.
“Oxymoron,” replied the prince, taking one piece of cheese before pushing the rest of the plate back to Mahon with a vague gesture of his hand.
He looked eagerly at the prince, although he did his best to hold back the expression. Quite the array of meats and cheeses were laid out on the plate, and the bread was a fine, thickly crusted thing. Perfectly pleasant fare, and something the prince was very lucky to be given when this was more food than some of the kingdom’s peasants saw in the course of a week.
“May I?” asked Mahon. “I’ve not eaten since this morning.
“I invited you, didn’t I?” asked the prince, but it made his blood boil in his veins.
How many of this useless castle’s wasted servants were starved, today or any other day? How many hundreds of people in Sanctuary City, in the surrounding towns and settlements, were eating for the first time all day just now, or going without food because such a high tithe was taken in grain this year, only to sell most of it because the royal granaries were full?
“You’ll be able to fix things when you’re king,” said Mahon.
“I won’t be king,” said the prince.
“Highness?”
“I won’t be king,” he repeated.
Mahon was looking at him without comprehension. “I don’t understand,” he said. “What else would you be?”
“Whatever I can be,” said prince. “And if none of that, dead.”
“Oh,” said Mahon.
For some reason he looked utterly miserable, and the prince rolled his eyes in embarrassment, wondering if the guards still had someone stationed in the sewers below the kitchens to keep him from leaving that way. It had been a great many years since he’d tried it.
“But you’re so lucky,” said Mahon, sounding slightly stiff and tight, the emotion too spineless to be called anger. “Don’t you feel lucky?”
“I suppose anyone would feel luckier being born the executioner rather than the man sentenced for the block.”
“How’s that the same? That’s… different.”
“You’re right,” said the prince. “I suppose after a fashion I might respect an executioner — though not as much as I might respect a victim of his axe.”
“But it’s in your blood to rule.”
“Is it in yours to serve?”
Mahon did bristle at that, his round shoulders squaring. “Maybe it is,” he snapped.
“Imagine what a wonder you would be, then, serving the people instead of me. Wandering about this crypt to my bloody inheritance, polishing my family’s boots, starving whilst you feed us — am I more worthy, do you think, than the women we’ve widowed starving in the slums? Wouldn’t you rather serve a woman who works to feed her children, a man who works to cure plague, someone who does something valuable, instead of a thing like me?”
“It’s not that you’re more worthy,” said Mahon, and the prince bitterly laughed, standing to his feet.
“Finally, on something, we agree.”
“But it’s part of your position. We must embrace the path in life laid out for us.”
“Why?”
“… Because.”
“Keen on debate, aren’t you?”
The prince wheeled to make some other point, to cut and needle at him, surprised at how he warmed to the task, but before he could say a word, Mahon was on his tiptoes to kiss him. His lips were warm, his eyes closed, and although he kissed the prince he seemed frightened to so much as touch his chest.
The prince stared at him as Mahon pulled away.
“Have you a fiancée?” asked Mahon in a whisper.
“No,” said the prince. “My father fears it might make me harder to control.”
“I’m sure that’s not why.”
“You seem sure of a lot for knowing so little.”
“I wish you weren’t so sad and so angry,” said Mahon, and the prince took another piece of cheese, chewing it silently. Mahon, for all he was talking nonsense, had taken enough time to eat some of the plate, at least, and it was looking far barer than it had.
Mahon stepped closer slowly, faultingly, and put his fingers delicately on the prince’s thigh. “I’d like,” he said, “to… to serve you.”
Nausea rose in the prince’s throat as Mahon’s hand slid up his thigh, and the prince grabbed his wrist, twisting them around. Mahon cried out in fear more than pain as the prince pinned his arms at the small of his back, bent over the desk with the prince behind him, his body over Mahon’s.
“Is this what you want?” he asked in Mahon’s ear, feeling his body shiver. “You want to serve me? You want me to fuck you, do you? Use you as a prince ought use his servants? Want me to make use of your body until I lose interest and turn you out in search of another novelty?”
“But you won’t do that,” said Mahon, and the naivety of it made the prince inwardly rage.
“I could chain you down if I wished,” said the prince. “Bugger you ’til you begged me to stop — more than that, I could flay the skin off your bones and laugh when you screamed. I could do it in front of an audience, if I wanted — who would question me?”
“But you won’t,” said Mahon, and the prince shoved him toward the door, away from him.
“But I could,” said the prince, taking off his clothes for bed.
“I only want to touch you,” said Mahon. “To kiss you. Is that so awful?”
“You want the lie that you think I should be, that you dream princes are. You want a figure in a tapestry, a character in a fireside tale, an exaggerated depiction of nobility, whatever the fuck that means. I’m not any of those things. That won’t change if you kneel before me and serve me with your mouth.”
“But what if I want to?”
“We don’t always get what we want,” said the prince. “Case in point: here I am.”
Naked, he clambered into his bed, rolled over, and laid his head on the pillow. He closed his eyes until Mahon left.
* * *
The prince’s chance came for escape, this time, with a riot.
He was glad to see the smoke as it rose from the base of the city proper, in and around the central market and tax office’s third new location in as many years. Even as much as the advisors had been trying to keep such upsetting news from reaching royal ears, the prince had naturally been hearing whispers from the palace staff.
He took the pack hidden beneath a floorboard in his room, banishing the spell trap he’d inlaid into the wood to keep any of the servants from messing with it. He always had it ready packed, and after he’d checked it hadn’t been tampered with or otherwise enchanted, he went down to the kitchen.
The cook had a bar of chocolate waiting for him, which he took.
“Thank you,” he said, as he usually did. They must have done this thirty times.
“Good luck,” she replied affably. “Hope not to see you soon.”
The two of them had danced this dance a good many times before, but never had so many of the guards been called away from the palace, desperate to sooth the ruckus with the use of their swords and truncheons, as though starving bellies could be mediated now with shouts and threats.
“What are you doing?” asked Mahon, appearing in the doorway with his eyes wide and horrified. He was out of breath, his plump chest rapidly rising and falling, red painted in his cheeks, sweat glistening on his skin — no doubt he’d rushed about in search of the prince in quite the panic.
“What does it look like I’m going?” asked the prince, and kicked down the ladder under the pantry’s grating.
The sewer guard was gone — gone very recently, judging by the fact that he’d abandoned his pack on his little chair. The prince smiled.
Mahon rushed after him as he slid down the ladder and began to move. He was clumsy on the rungs and even clumsier on the polished bricks of the main drain’s floor, letting out a horrified noise when he realised where they were treading into once they came into the sewers proper, groaning about the stench.
“But you,” he was saying breathlessly, trying to keep pace with the prince and yelping when he almost stood in the drainage flow, and then doing his best to keep pace just behind him, not trying to walk by his side, “but you can’t just run away!”
“Am I running?” asked the prince, stepping cleanly over a gap and turning down a new pipe, where there were big grates that he’d quietly broken half a dozen escapes ago, but had apparently never been repaired.
“What will Sanctuary be without you?”
“Better off, I expect,” said the prince, crossing over another tunnel piece. He knew the sewers of the city like the back of his hand, knew their maps inside out, knew the date each piece of huge, working pipe was laid and warded and put to work, and likewise, he knew the ones that were decommissioned and no longer providing active flow for waste or water but would still lead the way.
Mahon was struggling to keep up, especially in the dark.
“But they’re rioting,” Mahon said. “The city is in tumult — don’t you want to help?”
“How?”
“By telling them to calm themselves, by leading them? You know how to give speeches, you know how to convince — ”
The prince’s laughter echoed off the pipe around them, many voices disappearing down each trough. “You think that is the end of a riot? A speech from a man who caused it?”
“How did you cause it?”
“They are rioting because they are starving. They are starving because taxes are too high, because we’ve taken too much farmland, because we hoard, because the palace guard is overinflated and overfed — the country guard is too thin on the ground, lack training, and are barely better fed than the people. That’s all down to me, after a fashion.”
Mahon was stepping behind him quickly, one hand resting on the prince’s back like he was frightened to lose him in the dark, which the prince supposed he probably was. Mahon wouldn’t even be able to find his way around these sewers with a lamp in his hand.
“But the solution to that isn’t for them to tear one another apart like dogs,” he spat with surprising venom. “To steal from one another, to destroy each other’s homes — ”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” said the prince. “It’s the royal guard they’re aiming for, and royal offices they’re destroying.”
“But your safety, highness,” said Mahon. “What if they find you?”
“Find us both, you mean,” said the prince. Down one of the sewer lines, the one that adjoined the run off of one of the public pumps, which was always getting blocked, he could hear shouts and jeers and stamping feet. “I suppose they’d kill me — it would serve me right. You, I imagine they’d let free.”
“But we’re at risk,” said Mahon. “It’s dangerous here, for us, but if we, if we go back now, and you go to the square, announce a banquet — ”
“A banquet? Feed them for one night in luxury and then let them back to starvation?”
Mahon faltered. “If you really want to change things,” he said, “you should stay and change them, shouldn’t you? You can accomplish far more from the ins — ”
There was a clunk, and a wet smack. The prince, his eyes imbued with magic from how often he studied with it, could better see in the dark than Mahon likely could, and now he saw that the other man was quite unconscious. He turned his back to the body of Mahon, leaning back to examine the bar he’d smacked his head on, the bar he’d leaned himself to avoid without even thinking of it.
Mahon was bleeding only a little, which was for the best, but a test of his wrist showed him to be quite out of it.
“Small mercies,” he muttered to himself, and hoisted the other man easily over his shoulder to keep walking.
Mahon was only fully unconscious for a few minutes, but he was confused when he came to, and the prince sighed in irritation when he realised he might be concussed. He kept him awake as best he could, pinching his hip when simply ordering him to stay awake didn’t work well.
He kept repeating bits of his spiel in and out of order, and the prince tuned it out as so much noise.
He stole a horse once they were outside of the city’s fort walls, and he kept Mahon against his chest as they rode, multitasking with one hand loosely gripped on the reins. She was really quite a lovely mare, tremendously good-tempered once he’d given her an apple from his pack, and with his free hand he did what small diagnostic spells he could on Mahon.
A concussion, but a mild one — it was pleasant to actually put some of his magical tutelage to work for once, albeit not in an ideal situation. Mahon was remarkably quiet and obedient as they rode, and the prince managed to get him to drink from his water skin. He didn’t seem to have suffered any damage to his actual ability to construct sentences or understand them, mercifully — he was just dazed, confused, and a little sick and dizzy.
That worked rather well for the prince, all the better to keep him distracted, because they rode rather fast for forty minutes, and rode at a more sedentary pace for two hours more.
Out at an inn several villages out from the borders of Sanctuary’s primary sprawl, the prince tethered the horse, and supported Mahon inside.
They didn’t recognise him, of course — the prince’s father always looked over the portrait artist’s shoulder and made adjustments, asking them to strengthen his jawline, make his nose smaller, change the precise ship of his lips. His eyes had been any colour but brown, these past few years.
They wouldn’t notice him gone just yet, the prince knew — the riot would keep the guards distracted for quite some time, prevent them from going back to look after the young prince even if King Dravel did demand for them to do so, and the cook never told tales on him.
He’d gotten this far before, though, and there was no need to rest on his laurels — but in the meantime…
In the meantime, he would do as needed.
After the prince had gotten him to eat something, Mahon slept very easily, and the prince took a few hours himself, but before light had broken he nudged Mahon sleep.
He looked around in exhausted bafflement, the effects of the concussion already having cleared up significantly — not for the first time, although the first time the prince would answer, Mahon asked, “Where are we?”
“It hardly matters,” he said, sliding Mahon’s boots on for him and ignoring his horrified look as the prince’s fingers moved to pull tight his laces. “We won’t be here for long.”
“What are you doing?”
“You’ve not seen these laced up before?”
“We’re outside the palace?”
“Oh, yes. This is, uh, Urston, I think. Off we go, chop chop.”
“But, but we can’t, we have to — ”
“I thought you wanted to serve me?” asked the prince dryly, and watched in interest at the way Mahon blustered. “I thought it was your place to serve me?”
He looked frightened, confused, overwhelmed — he looked like a man who’d lost control of his horse.
“But we have to go back,” said Mahon again, and the prince turned to examine him with quiet, cool interest. “It’s, it’s dangerous. We have to go back, it’s — ”
“Why must we go back, Mahon?” asked the prince slowly, stepping closer to him, and he saw Mahon’s eyes widen as he realised he’d made a grave misstep, and couldn’t go back on it now. “The two of us, together?”
“Because you’re the prince,” said Mahon desperately, looking everywhere but the prince’s face as he came closer and closer, his movements very deliberate. Mahon’s eyes flitted down to where the prince’s hand was hovering over the dagger at his belt. “Because they’ll come for you, because you really, you really aren’t meant to leave the palace — ”
He floundered the closer the prince got, sweat shining on his plump cheeks, which were darkening with blood. The prince couldn’t stop smiling, felt utterly manic with it.
“You can, um, you can change it from the inside,” said Mahon, scrambling to try to get hold of his old script. “You can’t just leave, I mean, what will Sanctuary be without you?”
“You’re reusing your lines, darling,” said the prince softly, crowding Mahon back against the wall, chuckling at the way he sharply inhaled. “And you were saying we a moment ago — now, it’s all about me.”
“How can you help the kingdom if you run away?” asked Mahon in a thick voice, on the verge of tears. He could cry oh-so-prettily.
“Not the most graceful of pivots,” the prince remarked.
Mahon stared up at his face, his eyes wide as saucers. “Pivot?” he repeated in a tiny voice.
“Who told you I wasn’t to leave the palace?” asked the prince delicately, his dagger now unsheathed, and he brought it up the side of Mahon’s neck, pressing the tip just under his jaw, threatening to pierce.
Mahon released a breathless noise, and although he didn’t move his head, he looked wildly down at the blade.
“You did,” he said.
The prince laughed. “No,” he said, very amused, feeling in a better mood than he’d been in in years. “No, I don’t believe I did.”
“Your highness — ”
“I thought it was strange,” murmured the prince, tapping the tip of the dagger’s blade against Mahon’s chin. “I’m not ugly, and I’ve had my share of servants coming to throw themselves at me, especially when my father puts extra money in their pockets.”
“I, I, no — ”
“Mmm, no point denying it,” said the prince, and with the blade of the dagger pushed a curl of Mahon’s hair out of his face. “He’s done it before. Most of the servants, nonetheless, are put off by how cold I am, but not you. Not you, you cared.”
“Of course, of course I cared — ”
“Because my father’s been giving you something better than money,” said the prince, and Mahon clenched his jaw. When he turned the blade in his fingers, touched against Mahon’s cheek, the tiniest droplet of blood welled up, and the look in Mahon’s teary eyes was more angry than fearful. “Is your name even Mahon?”
“What’s wrong with you?” hissed Mahon, lips curled in a sudden snarl. The anger was quite becoming, and suited him well. “Born into the lap of luxury, only son of a king, and all you can think of is these, these horrible little people with no manners, no class, no education, who would kill you as soon as look at you! You’re a prince — you’ve a duty.”
“To whom, pray?”
“To your blood,” said Mahon sharply. “To your blood, to your father, to the city, to Sanctuary. Not to farmers and beggars and rioters whose minds are empty and whose fingers are filthy with dirt.”
The prince laughed, and for the first time, he kissed him.
Mahon was taken by surprise, but made no protest — he moaned into the prince’s mouth as the prince shoved him back against the wall, lifting him up by the hips and plundering his mouth with all the passion he had — which was a surprising amount, of recent.
He hadn’t kissed a man like this since he was sixteen, when he was still able to attend events with boys his own age, and Mahon’s lips were soft, and his mouth yielded so eagerly to the prince’s own.
When they broke apart, he looked up at the prince blearily, dazed, but there was a smile on his open mouth.
“I knew you’d see sense,” he said breathlessly. “The advisors picked me out personally, knew I’d be the right sort of person for you, and if we just go back now, before — ”
“We aren’t going back.”
Mahon’s growing smile dropped. “What?”
“I’m not going back,” said the prince, smiling as he charged a little magic between his fingers. “And seeing as you’re my own personal spy, I’m afraid you won’t be going back either.”
“Will that make you moral?” asked Mahon defiantly, lifting his chin. “Scrub all the taint of royalty off you? Killing a man loyal enough to serve you, who cares enough to pull you back from the brink of madness?”
The prince chuckled. “Who said anything about killing you?” he asked, and knocked out the other man with a basic sleep spell.
* * *
When Mahon woke, it was with a bad headache, which the prince had been expecting — he’d placed food in front of him and an analgesic too, which Mahon scowled at, but took.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“You think I’ll tell you?” asked the prince.
Mahon was quiet, glaring at him in the gloom, and to avoid the obvious answer to the question, he picked up a piece of the buttered bread, biting into it. The prince could hear the rumble of his stomach. “How long have I been asleep?”
“I won’t be answering that, either.”
Mahon chewed and swallowed in silence for some time until he asked, “Are you going to kill me?” His fingers had slid up to the side of his own neck, touching the scab where the prince had cut him earlier.
“I’d rather not,” said the prince, “but that’s not to say I won’t.”
Mahon ate, and the prince watched him. He waited until Mahon had finished half the plate before he asked, “Is Mahon your actual name?”
The other man hesitated for a second, lips pressing together, but then he nodded his head.
“You’re not from Sanctuary, I take it.”
“I’m from Mercy.”
“You’re titled?”
“No. My father is the Duke, and then it’ll be my brother.”
“And here you are,” murmured the prince, “acting the lowly serving boy.” He knew the Duke of Mercy’s family on paper, knew the line had four boys and one girl, although he couldn’t recall their names — Mercy was too conservative a kingdom even for his father’s standards, and even if they cared to connect with them, it was some ways away, at least a month’s sail, and two or three months’ ride away at least.
Mahon set his jaw, staring resolutely down at his plate.
“My father’s people thought to send you to me and make something of me, hm? Lull me to the embraces of aristocracy via what, the skill of your mouth?”
“You are lonely,” said Mahon. “It’s not like I was wrong in guessing that. They know it too.”
“But you see, I am lonely because I reject them, not because they reject me.”
“Isn’t it the same thing?” Mahon demanded.
“No,” said the prince simply. “Perhaps had you any principles to speak of, you might know that — or, I suppose, if you had ever been in the position to reject, rather than be rejected.”
“You don’t know a thing about me,” spat Mahon.
“I wouldn’t say that’s true,” said the prince softly, arching one eyebrow and letting his dagger dance in his hand. It had been his mother’s before it was his — he marvelled, at times, how well it fit his palm. “For example, I know I have you at my mercy.
Mahon gulped, and the prince’s smile was razor thin where it pulled at his lips, and just as sharp.
“What will you do with me?”
“I suppose my plans with you aren’t dissimilar to what yours were for me — keep you with me until your principles become closer to mine, and I think you might betray them for me.”
“You haven’t got principles, you’ve got fantasies,” muttered Mahon. “You just don’t understand a fucking thing about how the world worked — it’s no wonder your father kept you under lock and key when you were ever liable to go get yourself killed. Some people are just more fit to rule than others, to see the big picture, and others aren’t. That’s how it’s been, how it’s always been. It’s not unkindness, it’s not cruelty, it’s not parasitism, it’s just… a fact of life.”
“And those that starve?”
“How is that our business?”
“You didn’t like the riots, did they? We caused them: tithes were too high and the farmers were made to serve with too little grain on which to live.”
“They knew what the tithes would be — had they thought ahead, grown more, they’d not have starved. It’s a matter of basic forethought.”
“Oh, I see,” said the prince wryly. “They ought have foreseen the drought these past two years, and the katterbug infestations.”
“They ought have planned for any eventuality,” said Mahon. “They live on Sanctuary’s lands, at Sanctuary’s pleasure — if they don’t want to pay their due, they ought seek out farmland elsewhere. What comes of their lack of planning isn’t our business.”
“Isn’t it?”
“How can it be? I’m not a farmer, and neither are you.”
“Tithes could be lowered to little, or naught, of what they are. Royal grain might be spread to the people.”
“We trade with that grain,” said Mahon. “You like your chocolate from the Hourglass Continent, don’t you? You like your books and your finely made paper, the purple leather they make your boots with?”
“Certainly I do,” said the prince, “though I could easily go without. But none of the grain hoarded in the three palace granaries has been traded — it’s just rested there in case the palace needs it. We might have shared that.”
“Fine,” said Mahon. “Do that, then.”
The prince laughed. “You really think that would be enough, don’t you?”
“Isn’t it? Feed them with that grain, fine, and next year — ”
“Why not every year?” asked the prince. “Why shouldn’t we all eat from the same plate when we grow enough — the farmers, the king, every noble and peasant in Sanctuary?”
“Even those that don’t pay for it? Who don’t work for it?”
“Oh, yes. Especially those.”
Mahon stared at him, looking infuriated in a way that made the prince laugh again. “Why will anyone work if you feed them for nothing?” he asked slowly. “What do people need the coin they work for, but for bread?”
“You think the people of Sanctuary only work because otherwise they’ll starve?”
“Most of them.”
The prince leaned in, elbows on the table, leaned close enough to look at Mahon’s face, the indignation on it, the tightness in his features.
“Is that why you took this job?” asked the prince.
“People hunger for things more than food,” said Mahon. “It doesn’t mean everything should be handed to the on a platter.”
“Everything’s been handed to me on a platter. A golden one, at that.”
“Has it? Haven’t you worked? Aren’t you working all hours of the day, with nary a break or respite?”
“You think I work harder than a mason or a farm labourer, or an enchanter or an apothecary, or a seamstress or a farrier, or a stoneworker or a delivery man, or a stable boy? Do I work harder than they do, for more hours, do harder labour? Do I deserve the reward I get, where they receive a pittance?”
“You’ve done your duty. You receive due reward.”
“My duty in what? Overseeing the starvation of the people? Fussing over family trees and petty land disputes?”
“Change it if you so dislike it,” said Mahon. “When you’re king, you can change it. You told Job not to beat me, and now he doesn’t.”
“Did he even beat you in the first place?”
“That’s not the point.”
The prince laughed again.
Mahon clenched his hands on the table, and growled, “Just because your butler didn’t beat me doesn’t mean I haven’t been beaten. Why do you think your way is the only way? Haven’t you heard of compromise?”
“And what compromise do you think I ought make?”
“Go back, soothe the rioters. Lower the tithe, give out grain. Command the kingdom as you think it ought be commanded, make it… gentler. Softer. Whatever you imagine. You needn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, nor the crown out with your social reform. You’re only running away as it happens — it’s all happening still, you’re just not a part of it any longer.”
“I’m done being a part of it,” said the prince. “I’m done with all of it. The title, the luxury, the position, all of it. If they try to take me back this time, I’ll slit my throat before they can put hands on me, and if they bring me home, they’ll bring home my corpse.”
Mahon stared at him, horrified beyond horror. “How can you be so opposed to your birth right?” he asked in a whisper.
“It’s been quite a long while since I was born,” replied the prince. “I’ve had a great deal of time to develop since then.”
“And if they kill me because of how I’ve failed? Because you’ve seen fit to take your “freedom” from the luxury you find so distasteful?”
“Who? My father, his people?”
“Them.”
“The solution, I think, is for you not to go back either.”
“Maybe I don’t want to run away from life like you do.”
“Not life,” he corrected. “Just my life — or, my old life. No more Prince Alexander. He never existed, and as for the shadow of him, I never liked it.”
“You won’t feel a thing if this gets me killed?”
“I haven’t abandoned you yet,” said the prince. “And I have no particular intention to let you die. Do you think I’m about to?”
“You said you’re only keeping me to stop you from betraying you.”
“Not just that,” said the prince. The sarcasm in his next words dripped from every syllable: “Without you, Mahon, I might be lonely.”
Mahon, rolling his eyes, sipped from his drink and looked away.
* * *
The prince told people his name was Allegro, which Mahon snorted at derisively.
“Is your made-up name better than mine?” asked Allegro pleasantly.
“I just think it’s a stupid thing to choose, that’s all.”
“It’s not my choice. My mother called me Allegro when I was a boy. I never liked Alexander, and nor did she, really.”
“Was she opposed to everything about the world the same as you are?”
“I really couldn’t say,” said Allegro, “she died when I was quite young. She didn’t choose her position, but she did marry a king, and was a duchess in her own right. I recall her being kind to servants, but that means nothing when you steal from their plates and let their fathers die labouring for your luxury.”
“You don’t feel bad speaking ill of your mother?”
“What ill am I speaking of her? Is it speaking ill of the dead to disagree with them, or criticise their bad choices? Were that the case, we could never disagree with anything, nor talk about history. Besides, parents are often wrong. They aren’t sacred by virtue of parenthood — you don’t talk to yours, do you?”
“Your father is kind to you,” muttered Mahon. “You’re lucky to have a father like that. Goes to every effort to teach you, to protect you — ”
“To control me, you mean,” said Allegro. “The old man keeps me tightly leashed, that I might not stray.”
“Perhaps you should be leashed.”
“Mmm, like I have you?”
“Am I leashed?” asked Mahon, and Allegro pulled him close by the collar of his shirt, wrapping his arms around Mahon’s waist and making him gasp. They were in the middle of a town square, people bustling to and fro around them, and Mahon stiffened as Allegro kissed the side of his neck.
“No one cares,” he said. “We’re two young men in love — why should any of them look at us?”
“Is this what you dream of?” asked Mahon woodenly, seeming quite hurt by the in love comment, and Allegro had to swallow back his laughter. “Being unimportant, being no one? Having no duties, no title, no responsibilities?”
“Oh, I plan to find duties and responsibilities, once I’m no longer being searched for.”
“How could they stop searching for you?”
Allegro nipped his ear, and Mahon shivered. “If they think I’m dead,” he whispered, and Mahon gripped tightly at one of his hands.
“Why?” he asked. “You could have everything, and you’re just… throwing it away. For nothing.”
His voice was tortured, and Allegro pulled him closer, kissing the back of his hand. He wondered why he cared so much.
“What’s the point of everything if it’s at a cost to someone else’s anything?”
“You don’t know what it’s like to have no power,” said Mahon, and Allegro did laugh at that, couldn’t help himself, especially because he sounded like he meant it. “You don’t understand what you’re giving away.”
“Don’t I?”
They were a long way from Sanctuary, and it had been weeks.
“Are you going to fuck me?” asked Mahon. He hadn’t yet tried to run away — Allegro believed he was frightened of what might be done to him if he was caught. It wasn’t a pleasure, but it did work in his favour.
“Do you want me to?”
“You kiss me.”
“I thought you liked my kisses.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t.”
“One gets the impression you’ve not been kissed much.”
“As if you have,” muttered Mahon, but colour rose in his cheeks.
“I haven’t,” said Allegro. “My father banned me leaving the palace, let alone the city, and we rarely have visitors. Who would I have kissed?”
“Other nobles,” said Mahon, and Allegro sighed.
“I don’t much care to kiss people who seem to care about my title, seeing as I never wanted it. Many of the nobles who’d take up with me would do so hoping to marry me.”
“Well, I don’t,” said Mahon.
“Glad to hear it,” said Allegro, and took Mahon’s mouth under his own.
* * *
A month on, Allegro asked, “What did they promise you?”
“What do you think they promised me? Money. Power.”
“Money is by the by,” said the prince. “But power seems terribly vague. What sort of power were you hoping for?”
Mahon wasn’t looking at him.
They were in the balcony of a restaurant, and Mahon was looking down through the crowd below, to a little man being flanked by two others — the man is Pelot Driver, an inquisitor from Sanctuary’s military archive. The two men flanking him are in Sanctuary armour.
To Allegro’s interested surprise, watching the inquisitor speak with a town guard, the expression on Mahon’s face was not one of triumph or anticipation, but fear. He stayed well back from the balcony’s edge — they were eating tonight not in exchange for coin, but for services rendered when Allegro helped with their books and spoke to the tax man. They were three kingdoms over now, in Compassion — the name was kind, but their taxation paperwork anything but.
Mahon had been variations of horrified and fascinations as they’d made their way day by day in this manner, paying for food, lodgings, clothes, directions, entertainment more often with a direct exchange of services rather than coin — Allegro had been teaching children their letters, teaching people new card games or telling stories and sharing songs and poetry, had offered help with accountancy or property contracts, formal letters. He’d used his more esoteric skills, of course, healed people with magic or demonstrated complex fencing footwork, encoded messages or decoded them, but for the most part, his most valuable expertises were his education in that which was mundane and everyday, but nonetheless difficult.
“Why do they trust you?” Mahon had demanded when a woman had given them a place to sleep for the night some weeks ago, the two of them lying in a hayloft and sharing the space with the resident barn cats, both of them purring with delight at the warm bodies of their guests. Allegro had tended to her husband’s bandage dressings and healed some of his bedsores, and helped her draft a formal letter to their landlord, helped her go through her accounts, too.
“Because I seem to know what I’m talking about,” said Allegro. “Because I’m polite, helpful — it doesn’t help that I’m so handsome and erudite. The further we go, the more people will know us, as word spreads. I imagine we’re quite infamous now, the beautiful, charming philanthropist with empty pockets and his ill-mannered assistant.”
“Someone will try to rob us eventually,” said Mahon, sounding spitefully hopeful. “Or kill us.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” Allegro had said at the time, smiling as a barn cat rested on his chest.
Now, Allegro asked, “What is it you think they’ll do to you?”
Mahon’s express was tight, his lips pressed together. “What does it matter to you what I’m frightened of?”
“Perhaps I can help.”
Mahon scoffed. “Why would you?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“To punish me for not believing in your nonsense.”
Allegro shrugged, sipping at his beer. He hadn’t moved a muscle, although the guards kept looking up at the balconies, and he could see that their remaining in place was bothering Mahon and making him nervous.
“I don’t know if I believe in punishment,” he said mildly.
“Good Gods,” said Mahon, forgetting the guards and Driver — as Allegro had intended — and turning to stare at him. “What the fuck are you talking about now? You don’t believe in kings, don’t believe in money, now you don’t believe in punishment? What else don’t you believe in? Trees? Chairs? Cows? The sky!?”
Allegro laughed, and Mahon groaned, hiding his face in his hands.
“I didn’t want Job to beat you,” said Allegro. “But you think I’d toss you to the wolves? I assume what you’re frightened of is more significant than a mere beating.”
“Maybe so,” said Mahon. “Aren’t we going to move?”
“Why?”
“They can see us, Allegro.”
“They can look at us, certainly,” said Allegro, pouring the last of the beer from the bottle, half into Mahon’s glass and half into his own. “They’ve looked at both of us several times. Haven’t seen either of us yet, though, have they?”
“Driver knows our faces.”
“Driver knows our clothes and the context we normally appear in,” said Allegro. “And I don’t know what etching he might have of you, but any he has of me will be wholly inaccurate. I’m sure you’ve noticed there’s not a portrait in the castle that actually looks like me.”
Mahon exhaled hard, shifting in his seat. “How are you like this?”
“You’re always so afraid of people looking at you. Why is that?”
“Why are you so confident?” demanded Mahon. “Barely any exposure to the real world certain everyone will be kind and charitable to you for no reason. Like you think the world was just made to give everything for nothing.”
“Maybe it was,” said Allegro. “Maybe it should.”
“And the people who’ve paid their way? People who put in the hard work and, and made their sacrifices, should they just sit and watch other people get things handed to them, the same things they worked for?”
“Yes,” Allegro said confidently. “There’s more than enough to go around.”
“I hate you.”
“If you hate me so, run,” the prince replied in a pleasant voice. “Wait for the Sanctuary guards to leave and run in the other direction. Go, be free, et cetera.”
“I don’t have any money,” muttered Mahon.
Allegro, chuckling, sipped at his beer. “You don’t have the same skills I do? You can’t read, do mathematics, dance?”
“I can’t teach,” muttered Mahon, squeezing his hand into a fist and glancing down at the street again as the guards went in another direction. “And I can’t just…”
“What can you do?” asked Allegro. “You’re good at lying. Do you play any instruments? Recite poetry or speeches? Sing? Fight?”
“I’m not like you,” said Mahon. “Most people aren’t, if you haven’t noticed. I can’t just, just go up to someone and say, oh, let me in your house and feed me, and in exchange I’ll do some odd job for you. I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“What did Sanctuary offer you?” Allegro asked again.
Mahon was silent.
“They must have offered you something,” said Allegro. “You don’t exactly commit to lying and seducing a prince with no reward at the end of it.”
“I’ve already told you.”
“You’ve given me one non-answer after the other. Did they threaten you?”
“So what if they did?”
“You don’t think I can help you?”
“I don’t understand why you would.”
“Haven’t I established I would?”
“You’ve said you would,” said Mahon. “That’s not the same as establishing it.”
“I see,” said Allegro dryly. “Because, of the two of us, it’s my integrity that seems to be the most in question.”
“They… They gave me something,” said Mahon. “Something I don’t want them to take back.”
“What?”
“None of your fucking business,” said Mahon, uncomfortably crossing his legs. “But they didn’t… They didn’t give me all of it. Everything. They did half… half to get me started. Said they’d do the rest after I’d done my job.”
“Half of what?”
“I said none of your business.”
Allegro pressed his lips together, humming out a sound of intrigue as he drummed his fingers against the tabletop between them. “What was the job?”
“You can’t work that out?”
“It’s all very well to say you’d fuck me,” said Allegro. “But assuming I did — was that the measure of success, that we’d had sex? That I told you I loved you, that I trusted you? Was there something else you were meant to do, to prove you had me on your side, or to make use of my trust?”
Mahon’s crossed arms tightened, and he seemed tightly knotted in his chair. For such a plump young man, with such pleasantly rounded edges, he could go so square. “I was meat to get you committed,” he said in a low voice. “Let you do that… that thing with the grain, if you wanted. They mentioned other things you’ve wanted to do before — re-doing some of the wells and water supplies, or starting up schools. They mentioned some things they absolutely didn’t like of your ideas, like lessening the palace guard and putting more time into the militia over the army, or publicising council minutes. But the things that were alright, I was to… to encourage you to change it, and convince people, and you could make your changes.”
“Until I thought it was worth more to stay than to go?” asked Allegro, tilting his head. “Until I thought incremental change was the answer?”
“I suppose.”
Allegro’s brow furrowed. “And then?”
“I don’t know, and then you’d… then they’d marry you to someone, and you’d be king?”
“Not for me,” said Allegro softly, feeling like he had a loose thread in his fingers, one that would soon unravel the whole dress, once pulled. “For you.”
“For me?”
“They offered you a job? A position, a title? Land?”
“They were going to train me while I was with you,” said Mahon. “I was going to say I hated being a footman, and see if you couldn’t get something else for me, and they’d give me military training. So I could be part of the guard.”
“What weapons training have you done already?”
“The normal amount,” said Mahon.
“What’s normal for Mercy? Short swords, long swords, axes, archery? Hand-to-hand combat?”
Mahon said shortly, “I don’t…”
“You’re the son of a duke,” said Allegro, “and they didn’t teach you to protect yourself?”
“I didn’t need to,” said Mahon, hackles rising. “I had a guard, a personal guard.”
“What, all hours of the day?”
“Well, yeah, she — ”
“She?” Allegro repeated, leaning forward. “They gave you a female personal guard? I thought Mercy was… conservative about that sort of thing. Strict gender segregation and all that.”
Mahon stared at him, his gaze cold, jaw clenched. “It’s not a nice place to live,” he muttered. “Mercy. “We do that bullshit you keep talking about — food’s shared, all these schools, everyone gets enough, but it doesn’t fix anything. It’s worse than Sanctuary.”
Allegro watched Mahon’s face, aware he was smiling slightly, like he always did when faced with a puzzle he didn’t have all the pieces to.
Mahon looked, as ever, frustrated with everything about him.
“What was it,” asked Allegro delicately, “that they gave you? That you wanted them to fix?”
“You can do magic,” said Mahon.
“A little. I’m no great sorcerer.”
“Your palace employs them, though. Sorcerers.”
“Of course.”
“Why haven’t you fucked me?” asked Mahon, and Allegro leaned back in his seat, surprised at the non-sequitur.
“Why haven’t you fucked me?” he retorted.
“You don’t find me attractive?”
“I think it’s clear I do. It’s evidently not your moral virtues that engage my interest.”
“But you don’t try to fuck me. You just — You just kiss me sometimes. Or hold me, hug me. You don’t even try to touch between my legs or grind against my arse.”
“You want for me to stop what I’ve been doing? To do that instead, or stop altogether?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You want me to fuck you?”
“Do you want to?”
“Not it if wouldn’t please you. Not if it would scare you, if you’d hate me for it. I’m holding you hostage — when I kiss you, it seems to me you like it, and you’d tell me if you didn’t, I think. I shouldn’t like to pressure you further than that. I don’t believe you truly like me, Mahon, but I don’t know that I could cope with you hating me.”
“You’re not very hatable,” said Mahon, as though the fact itself displeased him, and it made Allegro smile.
“Why did they pick you?”
“Because I’m a noble, I suppose. From far enough away no one would recognise me.”
“But why you? Why you, particularly? What special skills made you appropriate — or what particular leverage did they have against you?”
“You don’t understand how easy your life is.”
“I do, as it happens.”
“No,” said Mahon. “You think you do, but you don’t. You don’t understand anything, you don’t have any idea what it’s like for anyone else — you can do this… this nonsense bartering, but someone like me couldn’t. Most people couldn’t.”
“Why don’t you make me understand?” asked Allegro. “Educate me, why don’t you?”
“Do you know already?” asked Mahon, suddenly suspicious. “Are you making sport of me?”
“I’m not trying to,” Allegro murmured. “Do you feel I’ve made sport of you so far?”
“I don’t know what I feel,” said Mahon. “I’ve never met someone like you, especially not a nobleman. My brothers aren’t you.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re all… sedentary, I suppose. They don’t explore things like you seem to — and when they do, it’s to get something, to learn. You just wander, amble, but you never fucking stop. Don’t smile, Allegro, it’s not a compliment. Unlike you, they can sit still and be satisfied with things for half a minute.”
“And your sister?” asked Allegro.
“I don’t have a sister,” said Mahon.
Allegro watched Mahon’s face for a few moments, imagining the royal sorcerers making adjustments to his face the way his father made adjustments to Allegro’s portraits.
“Oh,” he said.
“Is that it?” asked Mahon. He had a nice voice, strong and with an edge of richness — he wondered if he had selected out of some options, or if it was simply the voice that had come from his throat after the sorcerers had tilted his compass to point more to man than woman. “Oh?”
“What do you want me to say?” asked Allegro. “Want me to tell you I secretly suspected it, or that I’m utterly blown away? I can’t tell you I’m one or the other — I’m too stupid to have put it together beforehand, but too worldly to be entirely surprised.”
Mahon, damningly, said, “You’re insufferable.”
“The crown has employed your services to cudgel and ensorcel me, using your gender as a cudgel to keep you here,” said Allegro. “That ought have been clue to my insufferability before we ever said a word to one another.”
“They haven’t used it as a cudgel,” muttered Mahon. “I told you Sanctuary is better than Mercy. People in Sanctuary respect me, call me… call me what I want to be called. Help me.”
“Mmm,” said Allegro, understanding having dawned in a quick, uncomfortable snap of a final puzzle piece into place. “Helped you with half now, and told you they’d help with the rest later.”
“What’s wrong with that? If they’d given me everything, I’d have no obligation to stay.”
“I can tell you if you like,” said Allegro quietly, “but I can’t promise you’ll like it.”
Mahon was staring at him, his brows furrowed, his lips twisted. “What?”
“What half did they give you?” asked Allegro, and watched Mahon’s body go stiff.
“Excuse me?”
“I know more than you do of my father and the way he and his court thinks,” said Allegro softly. “You think that Mercy is worse than Sanctuary, but the ways in which Sanctuary is truly cruel are hidden below the surface. They’re… subtle. Not in their impact, but in the beginnings of their execution. The way my father’s court manipulate, the way they balance a situation in their favour, it’s implacable, impossible to meaningfully combat: it’s why I can’t stay with them. There’s no way out of the maze they lay than further in, and they’re always a few steps ahead than you are.”
Mahon was staring at him, uncomprehending and painfully, painfully naïve. Was it wrong of Allegro to want to kiss him in this moment?
“What do you think further in looks like, where you’re concerned?” asked Allegro.
“What, getting you back into the… the fold?”
“I won’t marry a woman,” said Allegro. “My father knows this about me, as do his court. They know I am inclined only to men.”
“So?”
“So I expect a far more solid way to ensure I remained in my place was to ensure I had a pregnant spouse to look after, one that I could neither abandon nor safely smuggle out with me.”
Mahon stared at him, mouth agape, and Allegro looked at him but carefully didn’t touch him, didn’t reach across the gap.
“As I said, they’re always steps ahead,” said Allegro. “Were it a game of strategy, they would ever be five or six moves ahead of whichever they had just made, always planning for every eventuality, planning for… after-effects, responses.”
Mahon’s hand was over his mouth and he looked very green, his mouth twisted under his hand as he stared down at his lap.
“But I have,” he said haltingly, “I had… I had things, to stop — ”
“Were those things provided to you by the palace alchemists?” asked Allegro.
Mahon was staring, unblinking, into an invisible voice. “Can we go back to the room?” he asked in an unfeeling voice.
“Of course,” said Allegro. “Yes.”
* * *
Mahon didn’t cry as Allegro carefully closed the door to their loaned room behind them. When he reached for him, he did it carefully, making sure Mahon could see his arms and the emptiness of his hands, giving him every opportunity to pull away.
Mahon launched himself at Allegro’s chest and gripped him hard.
It hurt slightly, in all honesty, he was grasping at Allegro so quickly, but Allegro didn’t permit himself to flinch or let out any sound of strain. Putting his hands on Mahon’s back, he squeezed him, gathering Mahon up against his chest.
“Fuck,” spat Mahon, voice muffled by the pleasant warmth of the wool Allegro had paid for with a recitation of Pleidol’s twelfth speech for the benefit of some school children some weeks ago. Mahon was all but frothing at the mouth with anger, and Allegro distantly wondered if he was dampening the wool. “Fuck. Fuck!”
You like that word, don’t you? Allegro didn’t say, deciding to save it for later.
“It’s not your fault,” he said quietly instead, because this was also true. “It took me years to understand the extent to which they moved me about, and I knew from the beginning what they were like. It’s — ”
“It’s sick,” hissed Mahon. Allegro liked to see him angry — there was so much anger under his skin, so much that he’d never seen before. He wanted to see it all.
“Yes,” he agreed.
“It’s fucking sick,” repeated Mahon, drawing away from him now, rage writ in his features as he paced and gesticulated wildly. “It’s worse than Mercy — at least they tell you what the fuck they’re at to your face. It’s evil and cruel and dehumanising, but they don’t pretend it’s not! This, this is… underhanded, and deceptive — it’s precisely the same monstrosity masquerading as liberal acceptance!”
“You begin to see why I hate the place.”
Allegro was beaming, his cheeks hot with delight, and when Mahon turned to see his face he looked ready to throw something at him. “Don’t you fucking laugh at me!” he spat at him — no, no, not spat. Growled.
Allegro rolled his shoulders slightly, feeling the delicious heat under his clothes. “I’m not laughing,” he said, trying to dampen his smile and not doing well. “I am but a man in exile delighted to hear his tongue from another’s mouth.”
“For once in your life,” said Mahon, “would you stop being such a smug, self-satisfied prick, and shut the fuck up?”
“It’s going to be alright,” said Allegro. “You know now — I know now. There’s nothing they can do to harm you.”
“That’s besides the point!” Mahon snapped. “Maybe it’s me who wants to harm them!”
“I wouldn’t fault you if you did.”
“I told them I didn’t want that,” said Mahon, tearing at his hair. “Not ever, not from anyone, that the very idea made me… It makes me feel sick, makes me feel like I’d not even be my own person anymore, I used to wake up every night with nightmares about it — it’s the whole reason I left Mercy and begged Sanctuary’s compassion in the first place!”
“I’m sorry,” said Allegro.
Mahon radiated a furnace-hot fury when he said, surprisingly steadily, “Not as sorry as they’ll be.”
Allegro watched Mahon stand in the centre of the room, hands clenched in fists, lips curled in a snarl. He was staring with such ferocity into the middle distance Allegro half-expected him to set the curtains aflame. “They’d never have trained me in anything,” said Mahon coldly. “They wanted to use me as a broodmother, put me down to being a man’s wife, the same as my family. They were just going to let me play at being a man, and not even treat me as you treat your women, but treat me like Mercy treats ours.”
“I’d have tried not to let it get so far,” said Allegro. “I can tell you I would have been livid, but I’d not have blamed you even had their plans gone as far as they desired.”
“But you’d want a baby?” asked Mahon.
“Gods, no,” said Allegro.
Mahon looked at him suspiciously, and Allegro sighed, moving to sit down with his knuckles rapping against his own knee. “I don’t pretend to have so visceral an investment in the matter as you would, being the one made pregnant, but… You recall what I said about their being steps ahead?”
“No,” said Mahon sharply, eyes glinting with anger, sarcastic voice imbued with spitting venom. “I must have forgotten it.”
Allegro sighed.
“I’m my father’s only son, Mahon, and to remarry would introduce all manner of variables he should not like to factor in. For me to have a child would make me happily disposable, if it came to that.”
Mahon was apparently so taken aback that he forgot to be angry, because he went quiet and his fists loosened as he stared at him.
“As I said,” repeated Allegro, “always steps ahead.”
“How are you so fucking calm?”
“I don’t know,” said Allegro, shrugging his shoulders. “I’m calm by nature. It has frustrated the crown no end — unfortunately, Mahon, anger is a fairly easy emotion to manipulate.”
Mahon spat on the floor.
“For instance.”
“Will you teach me to fight?” asked Mahon.
“If you like,” said Allegro. “I’m quite good at teaching, as you’ve noticed.”
“And humble, too,” was Mahon’s cold retort. “And then we go back.”
“To Sanctuary?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
Mahon turned to look at him, mouth twisting, the very image of warrior spirit, all but ready to lay siege to the place between the two of them. “Why not?”
“You recall the position I’ve stated numerous times now as to punishment?”
“But this was against me!”
“If I don’t go back, there’s no reason it should happen again, to you or anybody else.”
Mahon fell back onto the bed. “I’ll never understand you.”
“Which part is hardest to grasp?” asked Allegro, coming to sit on the bed’s edge and lean slightly over him, Mahon staring up at him. “Perhaps I can explain.”
“You’ll never go back?” he asked softly. “Never? What about revenge? What about closure?”
“Is that what you managed, ten years down the line?” asked Allegro. “Returning to your family’s lands in Mercy, a soldier in your own right, a man in your own right, and lay waste to all the ambitions they once had for you?”
Mahon looked away.
“Without me there, the monarchical reign is significantly weakened, and it’s been waning for years,” said Allegro. “And to be honest, I was integral to a lot of key processes, more so than I think my father or any of his advisors intended — in tat instance, the short term benefit of overworking me overwhelmed the long term understanding of what all my control could lead to. I’ve intentionally installed several subtle faults in certain legal processes, amongst other things.”
Mahon frowned. “What does that mean? Faults?”
“In the short term, almost nothing,” said Allegro. “For the next year or so, naught at all. But given time, quite a bit — employment and territorial contracts, trading agreements, leases… In a year, a few differences between paper agreements and verbal ones. In two, significant alterations to the workings of the treasury — higher wages for some, reduced budgets in other areas… Lost land. Lost power here and there. Oh, don’t get me wrong, they’ll catch some of it, but I’ve buried little clauses and expiry dates in all manner of places, places they’d never think to look, to benefit people they barely realise exist, let alone think of as important. Each fault will sow discord between people and crown.
“In short,” he went on, “I’ve set several dominos to fall. In some places, simply handing people things they need — in others, laying down foundation such that they can demand or leverage for it. And in the event they don’t receive it, well, it’s not a matter of not being given what they wanted — it will be a matter of not being given what they were due, what they were owed, what it is written in ink that they would be given. A thousand broken promises, each one a crack in the king’s crown. This process moves forward best with my being completely gone — I’m well-liked by the people, although it’s hardly deserved. They’ll question why I’m no longer there, when I always followed a contract to the letter.”
“They’ll be suspicious of your disappearance. Blame it on the king.”
“Yes.”
“And if they depose him? Kill him?”
“I don’t think they would,” said Allegro. “I think they might edge him further into powerlessness, force him to renounce some of his powers — perhaps even permit him to retain his position as pure ceremony, with no real command of the courts or the law or the kingdom. For him, that would be far more painful.” Allegro was smiling distantly at the thought.
“But don’t you want to watch?” Mahon asked urgently, sitting up on his elbows. “Don’t you want to see, to know?”
“No,” said Allegro. “I want to settle somewhere, be peaceful, help others. Make amendments for my past inaction. Fussing over petty revenge would just be an indulgence.”
“Petty revenge,” Mahon said scornfully. “How can this satisfy you?”
“I don’t know yet that it will,” said Allegro. “But I can tell you I’ve been happier these past few weeks than I ever have been before. I suppose you got what you wanted after all, hm?”
Mahon was quiet, staring up at the ceiling. “I’m not like you,” he said.
“I’ve noticed we share little in common.”
“Is that what you’ll do then? You’ll just… just find somewhere, and stay there? Do what you’ve been doing on the journey?”
“Yes,” said Allegro. “I might open a school or something like it. I thought I might travel a while first, though. I’ve always wanted so badly to travel. To meet people. I love people very much, you know. I always have.”
“There were people in Sanctuary.”
“People I was feeding off of, as though they were chattel,” said Allegro. “People who saw me as a portrait that didn’t look like me, more than as a person myself. This is different.”
“And me?” asked Mahon.
“You can come with me,” said Allegro. “For as long as you like, and leave as you want to. I can’t promise I can gather coin for you in any sufficient quantity to fund a solid resettlement somewhere, but I expect I can pull favours for you. Get you a job along the way, if anywhere looks nice.”
“I think you’re cracked in the head,” said Mahon softly, meeting his gaze. “I think you’re insane, a lunatic.”
“Alright,” said Allegro reasonably.
Mahon’s gaze turned up to the ceiling again. “I think I might be too,” he said.
“Well,” said Allegro, patting knee. “One doesn’t like to say, but I’ve noticed certain signs.”
“Shut up,” said Mahon, slapping his hand away, and Allegro smiled. “You like me? Really like me?”
“Rather a lot, yes.”
“I don’t understand why.”
“Insufferable as you are, it’s a mystery to me as well,” murmured Allegro. “But one doesn’t have to understand everything. And what with your fears of… I don’t presume to know how you feel about one thing or the other, but we needn’t fuck, if you don’t like.”
“Of course I want to fuck,” Mahon snapped at him.
Allegro’s smile widened; Mahon’s glare intensified.
“You’ve not convinced me of your nonsense philosophy,” said Mahon. “I want revenge — that’s why I’m coming along.”
“I’ve got time to convince you yet,” said Allegro. Before he could say anything else, Mahon held up his hand.
“No,” he said sharply. “No more talking. Just… We could have sex now. Maybe.”
“Maybe,” said Allegro softly. “And — ”
“No. Talking,” said Mahon, pulling Allegro down on top of him.
Allegro was quiet for a record-breaking thirty seconds, and it took some time for Mahon to render him wordless again.
FIN.
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