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Paris, France
August, 1186
“What do you think?” Philip asked, turning to display the ermine-fur lining of the cape.
“You have courtiers to dress you,” Geoffrey drawled, sprawled on the king’s disgustingly extravagant bed, his boots muddying the silk sheets with the dirt of the list-field. “And if I may, majesty, fishing for compliments is unbecoming.”
A smile danced upon Philip’s face. “You know I delight in your honesty, Geoffrey. Irreverence from the mouth of my vassal is… most refreshing.”
“I am as honest with you as I would be with a snake.”
“If I am a snake, then you are one as well.” Philip undid the clasp of the cape and threw it over the back of a gilt chair. The purple fabric pooled on the floor like spilt wine. “So let us be honest as two snakes are to one another.”
He snorted. “As if you do not play with me like a pawn on your ebony chessboard-- no, that is too kind an assessment. As a child plays with his wooden toys, crashing knights and horses together, with all knowledge of what ruin will befall them, as God judges mortal souls.”
“Ah, but you are my favorite toy,” Philip replied, coming to sit on the edge of the bed. It buckled slightly under him, a man’s weight battling with the down of a thousand plucked geese. “Precisely because you know that you are one.”
He cocked an eyebrow-- black as sin, a sooty stain on his golden genealogy.
“If I didn’t, I wouldn’t betray my ignorance.”
His king smiled at him again, the cutting kind, and set his crown upon the night-table. It was meant to be placed on a cushion, or, if retired for the night, inside a magnificent carved box. But in casting it aside, Philip had not truly removed it. It was always there, far subtler than the halos of light in the church window-- a shadow of a thing, barely noticeable, for how could one outshine the sun? Philip and ‘king’ were two made one as the weaver entwines the warp and the weft, passing the thread over the other until made indistinguishable.
The silence (a thing he was unused to, living in the house of his father) prompted Geoffrey to speak.
“I don’t trust you, Philip.”
“Would you put your life in my hands?”
From the drawer of the night-table he drew an ivory-handled knife, the kind meant to shear hair, as sharp as could be had.
Geoffrey laughed. “Never.”
Philip pressed the hilt into Geoffrey’s hands. Reflexively, he closed his fingers around it. Philip raised the hand, until the blade was flat against his throat. The king’s touch was light, steadying, but not restrictive. If Geoffrey truly wished it, Philip would be dead.
“I would put mine in yours,” he said. His eyes, twin pools of shifting hazel, were a hymn given shape. “The king who cannot trust those sworn to him is a very poor one, indeed.”
Philip removed his steadying hand, but Geoffrey did not move the blade. He kept it there, considering; but it was no true consideration, only a feigned one. Quickly, he twisted it, so that the flat was pressed against the skin of the throat instead of the edge. Philip did not flinch, his stillness betrayed no fear. Geoffrey wondered whose heart he heard beating faster.
After a moment, he removed the knife, placing it on the table beside the crown.
“I fear I have ruined you,” he said, as Philip looked at him with far too much adoration. “It happens sometimes, they say, when a man takes a boy under his wing. He forms… an attachment.”
“Don’t pretend you think I’m a fool,” Philip chastised.
“I don’t think you’re a fool,” he argued. “I think I’ve made you foolish.”
Philip rolled his eyes, the portrait of youthful insolence he never dared to paint in the presence of anyone save his closest confidante.
“Let me be frank with you, Geoff.”
“Uh-oh.”
Philip glared until he sobered himself.
“You are the only one of your father’s brood that I would see King of England,” Philip said, “and that is not a delusion or a lie.”
“Because you can keep me leashed like a dog?”
“Because you are not foolish enough to lose my favor.”
“That is a leash, of a sort.” Geoffrey leaned back against the pillows, smirking. “Shall I also get on all fours and lick the tallow from your fingers, my liege?”
Philip laughed, airy and bright, ever the boy Geoffrey had always worshipped— wicked as sin and sweet as the Lord’s salvation. “That would please me, certainly. But you must believe me, Geoffrey.”
“I do not doubt you. I only think that you want me for the wrong reasons. Shall you charm me into giving you the Aquitaine, Poitou, and I will hand it over like the uxorious husband, who lets his woman rule himself and his coffers?”
“Richard is a chivalrous fool, and little John could fall to anyone, not only me,” Philip went on. “You would let our allyship endure, the allyship your father would see crumble like a neglected battlement, some dusty ruin of the Romans. And he grows weaker every day. Soon, England and Normandy will be a mad scramble, between true sons and bastards. Henry, at least, was suitable. I know his death weighs heavily on you.”
Henry was the only one of them Geoffrey had ever felt any brotherhood with. They were not Richard or John, beloved by their warring parents, or the scattering of half-siblings that existed in their periphery as faint stars pale to the moon. They were neglected save in obligation, yet in virtue they succeeded their brothers. Richard was hasty to the point of ruin, terse as a peasant, and one day he would go on crusade and get himself stuck on the end of an infidel’s sword. John was a year younger than Philip but had already made whores out of half the women in Normandy and would soon move on to England.
“It does,” he admitted. “You know that Henry, in his sickbed, begged my father’s forgiveness? But Father feared my brother’s pleas were a trap ,” he spat. “The coward never gave him peace, not even when he was dying for lack of it.”
“I know, Geoffrey,” Philip said, “I wept for him-- and for you. May your brother find absolution in the Kingdom of God.” The king closed his eyes for a moment, as if in prayer.
“You wouldn’t know, Philip,” Geoffrey murmured, “what it’s like. You loved your father.”
“I was too young to hate him.”
“Thank God for that.”
“We will be better than our fathers,” Philip assured.
“You are already greater than half the kings of Franks, Auguste ,” he said, “and you are not yet twenty-two.”
The king smiled, and laid beside him on the bed, black hair feathering out on the white sheets like a halo of ink.
“When I have a son, Geoffrey,” he said, “I will treat him well, and love him, and I will fear naught from him betrayal.”
He hummed. “You can try, I suppose.”
“Yes.” Philip looked up at him with Cupid’s eyes. “Yes, I can.”