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You’re waiting for her in her bed, tangled among the sheets. They were soft and clean, but you’ve touched them now. Her gaze catches on you and something flickers through those eyes, light in them guttering. She says, “You know that’s my bed, right?”
“I got lost,” you lie. You open your arms for her. She stays just this side of the doorway.
“What are you even doing here,” she sighs. She turns from you, a swish of her skirts, takes off her hat. Pointed: “The door’s right there, you know.”
“There were a few years in the middle,” you say conversationally, “where you didn’t do that. I thought you’d learned I would listen to you no matter what.”
Gem who always needed a haircut, Gem who asked about your readings. You two never studied together, because you wanted to save all your shared hours for roaming the Cliffs, trying to recite passages from your textbooks.
Sometimes, you were better at it than her. Sometimes, you were better at it than her enough times in a row that you thought it meant something.
Gem is insatiable. You take this knowing and ball it up tight and tuck it into your stomach like the pit of a stone fruit imported from a city whose name you can’t pronounce. She looks at you through her bangs; whatever she found in the library today, it has reminded her she’s a lonely girl. “Didn’t do what?”
You shrug. It makes her mouth twitch down, the corner of it, and then her expression smooths out.
You gesture for her. “Come here?”
“Why are you here,” Gem repeats. “You know Lucy would help you with anything—”
“Oh, come on,” you say. “Gem.”
You’ve always been of the opinion that Lucy deserves better than Gem. But Lucy is too sweet and Gem is good at matching her with sugary words. When it’s easy (and it is often easy) you don’t think— Well. You don’t think. She gives you too much time to stew these days, to put dangerous ideas together.
She says your name back, lured into it too easily. Those friends of hers, they’ve really done a number on her.
“What did you find?” you ask her, and her mouth pinches. You wait for her to meet your gaze before you roll your eyes. “I’m an alchemist. You know whatever I’m studying— I’d probably be better off asking your brother if I cared about stealing someone’s research.”
She’s got this terrible habit of narrowing her eyes at nothing when something pierces her. You hold tight to knowing that hasn’t changed either. “He’d probably just tell you.”
You pat the mattress and she makes you wait, pulling off her boots one at a time with her hand against the side of the doorway. But she does come sit.
“I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t…” You roll the possible words over your tongue but all of them taste like wormwood.
“What,” Gem says, leaning into your shoulder. You asked her to, technically. Where do you get off anyway, nearly shivering with surprise at the heat of her body? “Worried? You were worried about me?” Softer: “Aw, isn’t that nice.”
“See,” you whisper.
She crosses her arms and pulls them close to herself. You’re sure it makes the kings and queens all love her. Then she clearly remembers who she’s actually with right now, because she puts a hand on your stomach and doesn’t exactly push, but causes enough pressure that you understand you’re supposed to tip over. You, in the spirit of the game, do. She follows, puddled awkwardly over your hip, your side, your ribs.
“You were so happy,” you mutter, twisted up under her, though she’s not heavier than you can handle. You keep breathing, and that is as much as you dare move right now. “I thought, She’s practically skipping, whatever happened on the mountaintop must have been perfect. I really thought— I guess if she’s moved on to better things, she’s moved on to better things.” You feel her hand twitch. Gratified, you add, “You know Lucy can tell when you’re being condescending. So can I, for that matter.”
“You saw me?” Gem asks, small.
“Just— near the tavern.” You look at her ceiling, painted with constellations. You know her; you know she did that herself, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, flecks of gold among her freckles. She carved her home here with her own two hands. “By the time I realized, you were gone.”
“I didn’t—” She catches herself. You’re not sure whether the next word would have been no or know.
Then, neither of you says anything for a long while. Someone in the distance, beyond the open window, shouts for someone else.
Then, Gem groans into her hands, yanking your attention back to her, and you giggle, confused.
Then, she’s trying to sit up, and you’re trying to pull her back down, and it’s just Gem again, red hair like fallen leaves lashed together, the softness of her hands — gone strange with a few new calluses — the green of her eyes tinted warm like she’s looking into you and seeing fire.
In the ensuing shuffle, you manage to get the two of you on your sides, facing each other. You’re— Well. You were never kids together. But you were younger than this once, and you faced each other on the same bed and whispered embarrassed admissions, looking through the other person’s eyes at the starry dark beyond.
You asked for this, and you can’t quite believe she’s willing. She has an arm over yours, at an angle.
“I’m so—” Gem starts. She laughs, stuttery, as if it’s been pulled from her chest with a rope, and it pulls a laugh out of you too. Magic resonance. “I can do it,” she insists, though you don’t know who she’s arguing with. Her eyes are fixed somewhere just over your ear. Her breath is so close you might be able to feel it on your lips. “I can. I can brush up on my Old Mythic. I’ll figure it out, I will, it’s just—”
“So it is about your friend the king.”
She giggles again. She doesn’t seem to notice you don’t. In fairness, you started saying it as a joke, years ago. Her precious friend.
That’s not fair. She’s the one who taught you that love feels like a vine around your heart, squeezing tight. You touch her hair and she winces. You sort of wish you hadn’t known that would happen.
“Not the business of commoners,” you say. The way her hair has fallen has exposed the shell of her ear, the delicate curl. You’ve grown so used to her attention skipping past you that the full weight of it hurts.
You see her frown. You can’t help yourself: your eyes catch on the triangle of freckles by her nose. “You’re not… You’re not a commoner.” She taps the backs of her fingers against your cheek.
“I bet you say that to all the girls,” you reply, wry.
“I don’t know what girls you think I’ve been talking to,” Gem mutters. “I haven’t even—” She laughs again, exhausted and bragging. “I haven’t even been back here in days. I’ve been sleeping in the library.”
“I did think that was an interesting perfume you had. Paper and gunpowder. I thought it might’ve been a kingly gift.”
Gem rolls, clambers on top of you and pins you down. Her hands are bony on your shoulders, inescapable like needle through marrow. “What is with you? Why do you care about him so much? Why does it matter?”
Her braid is falling apart in your face. “You’re bad at being a diplomat,” you say to see her flinch. “You were the best spellcaster in our class, but you were terrible at playing nice. None of the teachers ever told you because they figured it didn’t affect your grades.”
Gem’s eyes are flat and dark like riverweed drowned in mud. It’s getting late, and even the enormous windows of Gem’s room won’t stop the encroaching dusk. “Look who’s talking,” she mutters.
“You asked why I’m here,” you blurt. She raises an eyebrow at you. Suddenly, she’s the person you thought you knew again, seen only at a distance, understood only in fragments of text not meant for you to see, colder and more distant than the peaks of the mountains. “I’m not in charge of anything either. You could do anything to me and it wouldn’t have a single political consequence.”
“Okay?” she says. You didn’t think you’d live to see the day she’d turn that voice on you.
You shrug hard and she catches herself before she falls on you. You take her face in your hands. “I’m saying you could do anything to me, Gem.”
She stares down at you. It’s not a cold room, but you can’t quite tell, pressed together, which parts of you are you and which are her. You will cherish this fiercely later, this burned-through hesitation.
Gem sits up, out of your grasp but still straddling you. “So you want me to hurt you?” She looks toward what’s left of the setting sun. Not much.
“If you want.”
She says your name.
“Yeah?”
“I’m tired,” she murmurs, dreamy.
“Any time you want me,” you say, watching her eyelids droop. “Whatever you want.” You ghost a hand up her leg, over her hip. Rest it there and hear her inhale. “You’ve locked yourself up in that tower for so long.”
“I have to,” she says. “His story doesn’t make any sense. He came back. Whatever I did— Whatever the Staff did, it’s not what he said. It’s so— It’s weird.” She gets up on her knees, as if to stand. Hesitates. “I wouldn’t even be here if not for the librarian; she said I should get some rest.” She sits back down, anvil-heavy.
“Okay,” you say, too soft. “Then rest.”
Gem is gone from this room, expression narrowed at something beyond these walls, these cliffs. “But if I dream—” Then she blinks, snap and return. “I have to ask him what he dreams about. He said he was going to sleep, I have to—”
You grab her wrist as she tries to scramble away from you. She’s too slow; you manage to grab both. “Gem, what happened to rest?”
“Let go of me!” she yelps, but you won’t let her fall. You let her drag you up, push-and-pull until you’re nearly eye-to-eye.
“Fight back then,” you say, and her eyes go wide. You don’t let go of her wrists when you shove at her, and the motion echoes up her arms like you’re only shaking one another, back and forth. “Can you even stand right now?”
Gem says, eyes round as you stare into them: “I missed you.”
The confession startles you both. You release her wrists.
She is not impulsive. If she ever was, time has tempered it out of her. But her cheeks are flushed. You think, privately, that her friend would never hear her say this. You take a fistful of the front of her blouse. Pull her in slow and make her look at you as you do.
She whispers your name and goes still when your lips touch hers. Just a brush. You let go.
She takes your face in her hands as if you are skull and jewels, nothing but. She presses your mouths together, too hard, and draws back with her brow furrowed.
“Come on, then,” you say. “What is this for? What did you do?”
She picks kissing you again over giving you an answer. You did say, Whatever you want. You are disappointed at your own disappointment when she steals another handful of kisses, sighs against your mouth, and nudges you over so she can lie down.
You sleep. She is gone in the morning. You won’t like the cold lack of surprise when you try her door and find it enchanted against lockpicks, next time, so you don’t try that again. Any of it. You carry, instead, the question of whether her king ever did that.
Surely not. That would be improper.