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Part 1
They crawled home from the adventure in the sewer soaked, exhausted, and euphoric, having outrun death together once again.
There was only one bed in lady Evelyn’s rented room. This suited Royce just fine, because he was terrible at asking to sleep together but always rested better with one of Hadrians big arms draped over him.
“Lady Hemsworth is not going to be happy about the puddles on the stairs,” Hadrian said, wringing his cloak out over the edge of the window.
Royce laid his hood over the back of the desk chair and began to unlace his boots. “Old hag can deal with it.”
“I wouldn’t call her that if I were you. She’s got very good ears. Almost as good as yours.”
“Don’t compare the two of us.”
Royce watched Hadrian’s back and arms move as he took his damp shirt off, bronze skin and ridges of white scar tissue.
“Why not? You’re very similar, if you think about it.”
“Not funny,” Royce said without any real malice. He finished laying his own tunic, shirt, and trousers on the floor to dry and, lacking a change of clothes, made for the bed.
Hadrian came to the same conclusion, and looked to Royce as if to gauge his comfort. His partner rolled his eyes and held up the covers on the other side, so Hadrian didn’t say anything. He got in beside his partner, reflecting that usually when they’d shared a bed in the last year or two, they’d either had a far more passionate pretense, or they'd worn the first layer of their day clothes. Other than that, everything was as it ordinarily was. He knew not to stretch his arm under Royce’s pillow because Alverstone would be there. He wondered if they would still—
In a familiar deft movement, Royce rolled onto his side and took Hadrians arm, draping it over himself. Duster, the terror of Colnora, liked to be the little spoon. Hadrian wouldn’t tell anyone.
Sleeping together was their one concession to the great sex that had been one of the only redeeming qualities of their early partnership. They couldn’t stand each other’s methods and had disagreed on nearly every philosophical level, but in a fight or in the bedroom, their bodies fit together like they were never meant to be have been separate.
When Royce and Gwen got more serious, they’d agreed to take a step back and keep their hands off each other, but the sleeping—actual just sleeping—had stuck around. By the campfire, Royce had come to expect to fall asleep with his head tucked into Hadrians neck, weapons still strapped on, sharing blankets that smelled like horse sweat.
But it had been a long time since he’d felt the bare lengths of their bodies pressed together.
Royce definitely still wanted Hadrian. He’d never quite managed to make the longing go away. He could just roll over and kiss him. Maybe take his time with his fingers, make his big partner beg. What he really missed—something the sheer strength in the sewer earlier reminded him of—was when Hadrian used to lift him up. When they were almost done, he’d stand up with his hands splayed under Royce’s thighs and find this perfect angle deep inside him while Royce dug his heels into the small of his back and saw light. Only Hadrian could do that to him. Only Hadrian was allowed to.
They couldn’t do that anymore. Not just because he was in love with Gwen. By now it was clear that he and Hadrian needed each other, and Royce wasn’t about to let something as stupid as sex get in the way of something as rare as love.
He didn’t want to ruin what he had with Hadrian or what he had with Gwen, so Royce simply threaded his fingers into the big hand that spread over his ribs and waited while their bodies warmed the covers and Hadrian’s breathing slowed into soft snores.
And if he took his time falling asleep because he liked the small movements of their breaths together and the broad warmth of Hadrian’s chest against his back, that was for Royce to know.
They were probably going to be late for breakfast, but Hadrian rested well. He was even pretty sure he’d woken up first, though he knew Royce was good at pretending to be asleep. Either way, it felt good to lie there and soak in the familiar feeling of his partner’s small, wiry body pressed against him. If Royce was pretending, and there was a good chance he was, maybe he didn’t want this to end either.
“You awake?” Royce finally asked, not moving.
“Yep,” Hadrian said, not moving.
“I wonder if she means dawn, or when first light hits the house.”
“Whichever ones later.”
“Doubt it, but okay.”
Precisely eight minutes late, on a technicality.
—
They didn’t figure out who’d tried to flatten them with a wagon, but they did find out that the captain of the guard was Hadrian’s old army buddy, Roland Wyberg.
Royce didn’t know why that sat wrong with him, but anyway it had got them out of a sticky situation. He didn’t think much about it while they pulled the carriage maker thread. More interesting things: Genny Winter was most likely still alive and it had nothing to do with monsters. Dead people left bodies. What would have happened to hers?
In a sense he was almost glad this wouldn’t be another Colnora, even if that would have been simpler. That had been a raw time in his life. Backed into a corner, he’d been desperate, and he’d expressed it with his claws and his teeth. That whole summer Royce had only wanted to feel in control. He’d done it the only way he knew how, the whole time hoping what he saw and did was real after a year of hard labor and little sleep in the salt mine.
It was one of his greatest professional achievements, the year of fear. It gave him his reputation, ensured to this day that any local Guild left Riyria the fuck alone. But here in Rochelle, Royce wasn’t sure he wanted to be reminded of that cornered man. In Rochelle he wasn’t desperate.
He really just wanted to get paid and go back to Medford.
—
Galenti. If our pasts aren’t our present, there’s likely a reason. Royce had always wondered. Hadrian had been a career soldier. Blood was what they had in common.
After Little Gur Em, after the body, the guard post, and unicorns and polka dots of all goddamn things, here was Hadrian’s old army buddy again.
Royce was a master of unlikely escapes, but he’d come to the conclusion that one simply didn’t escape having at least a little crush on Hadrian Blackwater. His partner could charm the leaves off a tree in the dead of summer, even with Royce standing next to him in his hood smelling like mortality.
With the lopsided smile and the broad, sculpted shoulders and that way of making you feel important—desired—the natural conclusion was that being attracted to him was inevitable and correct.
You could see it in every tavern they ever visited, the way eyes lingered on him. You could see it in the way roadside merchants gave them an easy price after small talk and a smile.
You could see it in the way Roland Wyberg kept stealing glances when Hadrian wasn’t looking and Royce was. Rochelle’s guard captain looked twice each time, like he couldn’t believe his eyes, his luck.
It didn’t usually bother Royce. So why was he imagining all the ways he’d like to kill Roland Wyberg as soon as his his use wore out?
It went like this: Wyberg made them coffee. Wyberg and Hadrian shared old memories and old smiles. Royce wondered if Roland was an old flame. In their earlier days, his partner had once said he knew his way with men because of mercenary camps. Wyberg invited Hadrian out for drinks. Royce wanted no part in drinks. He didn’t like most people and he didn’t like most drinks. Normally when someone invited Hadrian to something like drinks, he was glad to be left in a dark room to brood like the professional assassin he was.
So what was different this time?
Lying next to Hadrian that night in Lady Evelyn’s rented room, Royce listened to his low snores and watched his chest rise and fall, steady. Wyberg’s eyes had kept flitting to that enticing dip at the center of his chest, usually shadowed by the open lacings of his shirt and the silver medallion he always wore.
Hadrian had noticed, too.
That was it. The difference this time was Hadrian. The way he was responding.
He could flirt with anybody on two legs, especially after a couple of drinks, but this wasn’t a nothing conversation in a tavern, a one-night thing between two attractive people. (Roland wasn’t even that attractive. He smiled too much, and he had those stupid dimples.) They had history together. Roland had clearly missed Hadrian, and it seemed like maybe Hadrian had missed Roland. They had history together and Hadrian was flirting back.
Royce was overthinking this. It was just what this big idiot did. Fight, snore, and flirt.
One more than the others right now. Royce shoved his shoulder until he managed to roll him over onto his side. The side that faced Royce, so he could see his face relaxed in sleep, lips slightly parted, breathing more than snoring now. His shoulders dipped towards each other, and Royce remembered putting a mark just there years ago, near his collarbone. It wasn’t like Hadrian was his, but some part of him liked to imagine Roland Wyberg seeing the edge of a bite when Hadrian stretched and wondering if the scary little partner had put it there.
—
The next night, they didn’t get to sleep because Hadrian surrendered himself to a mob of revolutionaries and Royce had to lead a gargoyle on a rooftop chase.
Walking away from that cell—from Hadrian—should not have been so difficult. Going out into a city at night to accomplish an illicit mission involving papers and the rich was what Royce did; what he was for. What he was supposed to be for.
Now he was operating Hadrian’s way, and it was terrifying.
He didn’t notice the pressure that had set in his lungs until the next morning when he’d collected his partner from the cell, sore from the chase, angry that Mercator Sikara had met such an undeserving end.
Royce felt release because Hadrian’s loud footsteps were at his side again as they trudged back to Evelyn Hemsworth’s house in the dawn.
—
Royce and Hadrian were about half way down the hillside, picking their way back towards the city.
The fight over, church burnt and statues once more statues, Royce could feel exhaustion lining his limbs, hear Hadrian’s steps falling heavier. His partner was covered in shallow cuts from the chase through the thorns, sweat sticking his torn-up shirt to his skin.
You really like me, don’t you?
Idiot. Big idiot with his stupid knight in shining armor complex and his stupid lopsided smile. No, Royce thought desperately. Most of the time I don’t.
He did like him, was the problem. Royce didn’t like people. This one was prodigiously, magnificently stupid. Surrendering himself to a mob, in a town where people were alive to remember blood he’d spilt bitter years ago—Hadrian should have been dead as many times over as there were thorns on this hillside, and would have deserved it each time.
“That was something,” Hadrian said, oblivious, meaning the scale-model statue of Novron they’d just fought.
“Don’t do that again,” Royce said, more quietly than he meant to.
Hadrian looked at him, and the way his brows drew together said he saw something Royce didn’t want to think himself capable of.
They picked through another thicket, still on the trail Genny Winter left in her dash down the hill. The breeze delivered another wave of smoke from the hilltop. Royce liked the smell. Setting fires was straightforward; simple.
“You mean the night in the cell?” Hadrian asked.
Royce didn’t answer.
For a second, Hadrian was quiet, too. Then, “I’m sorry.”
Almost certainly not for the right part of what he’d done. Royce kept walking.
—
Hadrian satisfied himself with the one look back at Rochelle. Picturesque.
Roland had offered him a place in the guard. The kind of job he could recognize. The honest kind.
When a person’s past isn’t their present, there’s usually a reason. Royce had said that.
Hadrian couldn’t help but think that if he were to take another job, he wouldn’t miss the lying and stealing. But he’d miss Royce and all his sharp edges.
They camped off the road, surrounded by dead leaves. The better to hear crunching footsteps in the night.
Setting up camp was wordless, and they did not bother with a fire. Too close to Seret headquarters to risk the light, not far enough into the mountains to need the heat.
Hadrian laid down and realized this would be the first night since they’d arrived in Rochelle—not counting the nights they’d been awake and running—that they wouldn’t be sharing a bed.
He stared up at the stars. Royce laid down a few feet away. An owl made a mournful sound somewhere in the trees.
“I’ll sleep better once we’re a good week’s ride from that castle,” Hadrian said quietly, remembering the Seret on the Crown Tower.
Royce exhaled, and it sounded like agreement.
Sometime in the deep part of the night, Hadrian woke to hands shoving him over on his side. He knew it was Royce.
“You were snoring,” his partner said in case he was awake enough to process language.
And Hadrian waited, hoping.
Royce laid down in front of him, his back to Hadrian’s chest. Hadrian closed an arm over him, pressing his dangerous little body close.
In the morning, Royce simply rolled away, leaving a cold spot everywhere his warmth had been a second ago, and began to pack up camp.
Hadrian shoved down the dull ache and focused on testing the injuries he’d collected fighting a hillside of pricker bushes and a statue of a god.
Royce always pulled back on the road home. Hadrian knew to expect it by now. He was thinking about Gwen. And honestly? If the world had a scrap of happiness that it was willing to leave out for Royce Melborn, Hadrian was not going to be the thing that kept him from it.
It was beautiful that his partner was falling in love.
Just hurt a little, too, as all real things did.
Part 2
Gwen was on the front porch, waiting to meet a duke to discuss a discreet inquiry and wondering how Spring seemed to have arrived overnight when she spotted her boys at the end of Wayward Street. No one else moved the way they did, even leading horses weighed down with gear. Hadrian waved, big and friendly, and Royce tilted his head up so his face met the light and smiled a little.
“Welcome back,” she said once they’d handed off the horses. “What have you two been up to?”
Hadrian and Royce exchanged one of their glances. “Just a bit of jiggery-pokery,” Hadrian said, grinning.
“In some places, that’s illegal between two men.”
Hadrian burst out laughing, but Royce couldn’t find it in himself. Did she know? Still, he’d join the moment. “I was entertained by a duke. Turns out I’ve been going about larceny the wrong way. The trick is to walk in with the captain of the city guard and ask a chamber maid where to find the master of the house. I could have taken anything.”
Gwen rose her eyebrows. “Did you?”
“A proper, upstanding fellow like myself?”
The eyebrows remained elevated.
Royce produced a crystal ash tray from the folds of his cloak. Hadrian regarded him with bemused disappointment.
“From the duke’s house,” Royce assured him, “Not Lady Evelyn’s.”
“I could tell. It’s not shaped like an elephant.”
Royce snorted.
“Lady Evelyn?” Gwen echoed, “Do I have another rival?” He’d told her about Lady Dulgath. The parts he could tell.
“Oh, absolutely,” Hadrian said. “It was difficult to tear him away.”
Royce knocked their shoulders together, rolling his eyes.
“The elderly lady we rented our room from,” Hadrian elaborated for Gwen’s benefit, “She was determined to make civilized men out of us. No cloaks at the breakfast table.”
“Had to thank Novron before we ate,” Royce added.
“Really good waffles, though.”
“I think I would’ve liked to see that,” Gwen said. “Lord knows I’ve struggled to domesticate the two of you. We could have compared notes.”
The thought of Gwen and Lady Evelyn comparing notes sent a chill up Royce’s spine. He was glad when she said, “Come inside, I brought a bottle of wine upstairs.”
They’d been home about a week when Spring took two steps back towards winter. Riyria was between jobs, lying low for the day. Hadrian was still in bed. Royce was enjoying the quiet of the porch before business hours, black cloak around his shoulders, breath white in the air.
The door opened. Gwen’s step. Why did his chest have to do that?
“Mind if I join you?”
Gwen did one of his favorite things. She let herself into his cloak, lifting the edge and curling up to his side so that her body curved right against his, warm and impossibly soft.
It was quiet on Wayward Street this early, and for a time the only sounds were her breathing and the birds.
Her hair tickled against his cheek every time her head moved.
She took a breath in and whispered, “Are you two going to take a few more days before you take another job?”
Royce nodded, tightened his arm around her waist. “Gotta give Hadrian some time to recover from fighting a forty-foot statue.”
“Em told me.” She smiled. “Told me something else, too. She said you two met an old friend of Hadrian’s. It started with an R, I think…”
“Roland Wyberg.”
“That was it. Didn’t like him?”
“He was fine. Why?”
“Your tone. Well, what was he like?
Royce didn’t think it mattered, but decided to humor her. “A bit like Hadrian if the world had had any reasonable effect on Hadrian. Pleasant. Practical. Kept smiling at him like he was some kind of miracle, talking about old times.”
“What’d he look like?”
“Average height, brown hair. He had this big smile with dents here and here.”
“Ah,” Gwen said, like this proved some sort of theory.
“He’s the captain of the city guard. He offered for Hadrian to stay.”
There was a meaningful pause.
“How did you feel about that?”
His default response was to avoid direct questions, but this was Gwen. He would try for Gwen. Words. “I didn’t want him to. He doesn’t like our work, but—“
“He likes you.”
“Or something.” He let himself say, “I don’t want this to end.”
Riyria. Coming home to Medford. The three of them.
“Royce…were you worried that this Roland would make a better partner for him than you?”
To have it put so directly—Royce hated that he hadn’t managed to phrase such a thing for himself, and hated even more that he could not seem to speak.
“He needs you. And you need him. You two have something special, and that’s okay.”
“Gwen,” Royce said gently, “He’s an idiot.”
“Yes,” she leaned her head away so their foreheads were angled towards each other, “But he’s your idiot.”
And I’m your thief, he thought. So Hadrian couldn’t be his idiot.
“It’s okay to be jealous, Royce, but you need to either tell him that or let him flirt. You can’t just be mad at him and not tell him why.”
Royce had done just that before and felt fine about it, but didn’t want to say so to Gwen. (Was she turning him into an okay person? Was okay a strong word for the strange, if-not-soft-then-blunted thing he was becoming?)
Then the full gravity of her words set in. “Hold on. Jealous? Let him flirt?”
“That’s what this is about, right? Hadrian’s old army buddy with the nice smile shows up and keeps making eyes at him, and clearly it bothers you…” she gestured as if the conclusion was in the air in front of them.
“But…” his mouth was moving before the thought was finished. He was like that around her. But I love you. And they were both men. It wasn’t that Royce didn’t know men could be attracted to each other.
It was that he’d never heard it talked about so openly.
“Do you miss Hadrian?”
“What?”
“Being with him. Like this.” She nudged his leg with her foot, squeezed his waist.
“You knew about that?”
“Was it supposed to be a secret?”
“What?” He thought a moment. “I mean, I guess not, but…” But they were both men. She should have been repulsed, even if she wasn’t sort of in a relationship with one of them. How to make her understand? Ordinarily Royce would just not answer. Or lie. But this was Gwen.
“There weren’t…feelings involved.”
“Uh-huh.”
She wasn’t upset.
She was definitely judging him, but she didn’t sound upset. More…disappointed. Royce couldn’t tell if that was worse.
“Royce, that man is in love with you, and you can’t tell me you don’t care deeply about him. If it’s not romantic, then you’d better have a serious conversation with him.”
This was beside the point. “Gwen…why aren’t you upset? What about you? It’s true that Hadrian and I messed around before you and I…” he still couldn’t quite put words to what they were. What he wanted with her. “But we’ve stopped that. We sort of…” Yeah, he was going to say it, “I guess we didn’t realize how important we were going to be to each other. It started out as hate sex.”
“Figured,” Gwen smiled. “So, do you miss him?”
“I don’t understand. He’s right here all the time. How could I miss him?”
“Do you miss being with him that way?”
“Gwen, why are we talking about this? I want to be with you.” More than anything he’d ever wanted before. She was his fifth thing. Food, water, sleep, shelter, Gwen.
Where did Hadrian factor there? Royce considered. He couldn’t miss Hadrian because he was always there. Gwen was here in Medford for her business and her girls, and he missed her powerfully when he was away, but Hadrian was with him all the time. A constant. Maybe Hadrian didn’t make the list because, at some point, Royce had simply assumed he was there, sharing his shitty food, water, sleep, and shelter.
“Royce,” Gwen said slowly, “You’re very intelligent. Surely that scheming mind has entertained the possibility that there’s a solution here that could make everyone happy?”
You could bring her with you! Lady Dulgath had said. And then something about traditions and times changing. But he couldn’t say it. Voicing this change was too much like letting go of the one good thing he’d ever managed to do, which was fall in love with Gwen DeLancey. If he’d read this wrong, if she wasn’t thinking the same thing—
She must have read his hesitance, because she shifted on the bench as if to get comfortable, looked away, looked back and said, “You bring out the best in each other.”
“I know,” he said quietly. He couldn’t imagine his life without Gwen or Hadrian. He couldn’t imagine wanting a life without them. It didn’t necessarily have to be romantic, as long as he could be around them, bask in their impossibility, protect them from the world he lived in and, in exchange, taste the one they believed in.
“I’m not sure when it started,” Gwen went on, “I think I noticed little things at first, like, you smiling more, showing glimpses of mercy, and I thought maybe Hadrian was rubbing off on you. So I started looking more intentionally, and then I started noticing things you do that help him, too. And before I knew it…I was in love with the men that you make each other.” Gwen’s voice dipped down with this last admission, though she did not let her eyes follow it.
Royce felt his pulse jump. He hadn’t lost her. Life until this point had made him suspicious of good things, and this—what Gwen was admitting to, possibly suggesting—this was a very good thing. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he couldn’t possibly have it.
But he couldn’t have Gwen looking like that. She was mistaking his hesitance for repulsion, and he couldn’t possibly fault her for being in love with two people.
“I think we want the same thing,” he said, taking her hand tightly, partially to steady his own.
Her eyebrows softened out of their furrow, and Royce heard the birds in the eaves and the wheels on cobblestone return from static silence.
“Lady Dulgath said something to me.”
Gwen felt herself smile. “My rival?”
“She said—when I rejected her proposal, told her there was someone else—she said I could bring you with me.” He chose his words carefully. It felt awful to omit the elven parts of the Dulgath story for Gwen, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell the full version, to face that particular rejection. “I think, in the old empire, more than two people could be in a relationship, if…”
“If they loved each other?”
Royce nodded, looking at his knees.
“She also fully assumed the 'someone else’ was Hadrian, at first.”
Gwen laughed, and while that sound lasted, everything was going to be okay.
—
Gwen was going to talk to Hadrian first. She’d offered, and while he was grateful, all Royce could do was keep busy and try not to crawl out of himself imagining all the ways it could be going while he wasn’t there.
He’d spent the last two nights casing an estate in the noble quarter for a low-stakes plant job Albert had found while they were in Rochelle. There was almost no security. There was, however, a yappy dog. Maybe if they took the job he’d bring Hadrian in to keep the thing quiet. Dogs loved Hadrian. It was like they knew.
There he went again, thinking about him. Couldn’t even enjoy a good plant job without being in love. He always had been, but talking to Gwen—finding out that loving him was something they shared—made it louder.
There was still the possibility that Hadrian would reject them. It was mildly alarming for Royce to realize that he was clinging to this shred of cynicism like a life raft simply because it was the only thing in this situation that he recognized and knew what to do with. Good things didn’t happen to Royce.
—
They were together in the Dark room when he came back. Something in the air, but not the wrong sort of tension. Only two chairs by the fire.
“How was the noble quarter?” Gwen asked.
“The wrong shade of blue,” he said to Gwen. To Hadrian, “There’s a dog. Gonna need you.”
“Thought I wasn’t quiet enough.”
With the closest look that Hadrian had ever seen on him to absolute despair, Royce said, “You're not. Need you to keep the dog quiet.”
“I can do that,” Hadrian said, smiling.
There was a moment in which everyone waited to talk about what they were really here to talk about.
“Come here,” Gwen said, and patted the armrest of Hadrian’s chair.
Royce perched there, and felt his partner’s arm wrap around his waist.
These feelings were not supposed to go together. Home with Gwen; home with Hadrian. Gwen stood and leaned over him, resting her fingers under his jaw, and kissed him.
Hadrian’s hand spread out over his core, and one of Gwen’s hands found its way into Hadrian’s hair.
Gwen kissed him deeply, with all the buildup of three tense days, and when they parted, she gave him to Hadrian, who kissed him too.