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Even after close to four weeks, Anharion wasn’t used to the weight of the Collar around his neck. He found his fingers straying to it, again and again, almost unwillingly. Every time, he expected to find it searingly cold, and every time he was shocked to find it as warm as flesh. He traced the front, where rubies shone like spilled blood, and said, “You could have made it beautiful.”
He didn’t look back at the other person in the room, as he spoke. He didn’t need to.
He couldn’t bear to.
“No,” Sarcean said, very quietly. “I couldn’t have.”
“You could keep me under its influence always.”
“I couldn’t do that, either.”
“Why? Do you want me to beg for it? Is that it?” Humiliatingly, he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t. It was so much easier, to allow the Collar to cloud and overwhelm his judgement. It wasn’t that it made him forget what had been done to him, but it turned it… remote. Unimportant.
“It would be a lie.”
Anharion laughed. He couldn’t help it, even if it sounded deranged. “So now you’re an honest man?”
Sarcean laid his hand to Anharion’s shoulder. It was warm, through the thin crimson silk of his robe, and strong and steadying, and he could have used it to spin Anharion around to face him, and he didn’t. “I am.”
“An honest liar,” Anharion said. “I’ve seen everything now.”
“My heart-”
“Is that what I am?” Anharion asked. His resolve broke. He turned.
Sarcean looked the same. That was the worst thing. Gazing at him, cast in the pale, sinister light of the flickering mage-lights, stood in this cold, shadowed hall, Anharion saw the same man who had teased him and played with his hair in the sun. Sarcean didn’t speak. He just reached up, and took a lock of Anharion’s hair between his fingers, and stroked it as he had on that long-ago day.
Anharion let him do it. He felt frozen to the spot. He felt on the cusp of something; poised on a precipice, so close to the brink that even a breath might tip him over.
Eventually, Sarcean sighed, and whispered a name. Less a breath, and more a blow. The name Sarcean spoke was not Anharion’s name. The man who had answered to that name was dead. Sarcean had killed him, by forging the weapon that had done the deed. The Sun King, too, had killed him, by snapping that weapon around his neck.
It was too good. Such a great joke: Anharion, they called him now. The Betrayer. No one called him what he was: the Betrayed. “You say you love me,” Anharion said. “Tell me, Sarcean: what is love without trust?”
Sarcean’s hand slipped lower, until he was fingering the edge of the Collar. “You ought to leave the deception to me. You can’t really expect that ploy to work.”
“It’s not a ploy,” Anharion snapped. “Take this Collar off, and I’ll claw your heart out. Of course you can’t trust me now. You broke any trust between us already, can’t you see?” He couldn’t quite bring himself to say the whole of it: Can’t you see that you never gave me a chance?
Sarcean smiled. It was infinitely bitter. “You didn’t take my side, when your king accused me. Was it worth it? Do you think he loved you? He didn’t trust you, either.”
Those words hurt. More than swords and blows and arrows, enough to leave him breathless. He made himself hold Sarcean’s gaze, when he answered. “Have you ever wondered if he was right to distrust me?”
It was a blow as heavy as the one Sarcean had dealt him. The Dark King was such a skilled liar, but in this he was transparent: his eyes wide and stricken, his cheeks blooming red, his lips parted. Desire, given shape. “Would you…” he trailed off. Paused, cupped Anharion’s cheek with a trembling hand. “Would you really have joined me? Willingly?”
Take the Collar off, Anharion half-wanted to say, and find out. It would have been a cruel thing to do, when he held Sarcean’s vulnerable heart in his palms, but Sarcean had been cruel to him. He had stripped him of everything that he’d ever treasured, and hadn’t even given him the mercy of a quick death, or of keeping his judgement clouded more than he strictly needed to. “I don’t know,” he said, instead, because he had never been capable of being purposefully cruel to Sarcean. “I suppose I never will, now.”
Sarcean laughed, more breath than sound. “Couldn’t you have told me a comforting lie?”
“I’ll do whatever you want,” Anharion said. Then, because that wasn’t quite right, he amended, “Whatever you ask of me.”
“Kiss me,” Sarcean said.
Anharion did, helplessly, his mind going pleasantly blank. He felt ashamed of it, afterwards - not of doing it, since he’d had no choice, but of liking it. Liking the kiss, and worse, liking the way obeying Sarcean’s orders made him feel.
“I’m sorry,” Sarcean said. “I shouldn’t have done that. Forgi-” he broke himself off.
Anharion laughed. It was a jagged thing, like glass splintering in his chest. “You use my king’s hand as your tool to enslave me. You make me slaughter my own people, but a kiss - that is where you draw the line?”
Sarcean’s expression was full of pain, so much that Anharion could feel the echo of it in his own breast. “Those other things,” Sarcean said, slowly, “they are necessary. I will lose without you. You know I would never force you to do anything if I didn’t have to. The kiss - that was for me. There is no excuse for forcing it upon you.”
If Anharion had been a stronger man, he’d have taken the escape he was being offered. He’d have stepped away, forgotten the feeling of Sarcean’s touch, and not sullied himself in the arms of the man who had betrayed them all.
But that had always been his most jealously guarded secret: for all his magic, for all his strength and his skin that would not split and would not bleed, Anharion, the Sun General, the man he had been before, the one who’d had a name… they were all weak.
Let me pretend that I don’t want it, he wanted to beg. He didn’t. What would the point have been? Sarcean had already stripped that pleasant fiction from him. “And what of me?” he said, instead. “Is there to be nothing left for me?”
Sarcean’s eyes were shining. He said that name again, reverently, the one that belonged to a dead man. He gathered Anharion close, but not quite close enough. He held him only loosely, with the tips of his fingers, and did not press their bodies or their mouths together.
That part, he left for an Anharion to complete.
A final cruelty.