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Chapter Text

When the second Lantsov son is born, a celebration is held in the castle. The revelries extend into the towns beyond, where merrymakers dance in the streets, proclaiming their joy and well-wishes to the new prince.

Only in the cool dark of the forest is the festive atmosphere not felt. A foreboding air lays over the moonlight-dappled clearing where the Fae king stands, observing in a scrying pool the tumultuous swirl of gowns and suits in the grand ballroom. The image in the pool shifts, a riot of colours and shapes, before resolving into the nursery where the infant prince sleeps peacefully, unaware of the intruder slipping through the shadows.

The baby does not cry out when he is taken up by the intruder, perhaps does not even wake, for his slumber is that of magic. When the shadowy figure leaves the nursery, they leave behind, not an empty cradle, but an identical baby boy, only distinguishable from the stolen prince in the fitful manner of his sleep and the scroll of parchment held tight to his chest.

The Fae king smiles to himself, reveling in a job well done. The swap will not be noticed until the morning, when a nursemaid comes to check on the prince and discovers the changeling and the note. She will never know what the note says, and she will be dismissed from service that same day, forever unsure of why.

The king and queen will be furious, of course. The king will rage and the queen will faint. They will vow to get their true son back. That vow will come to naught, as the shame of their new secret will overwhelm them, prevent them from sending search parties into the woods, keep them from ever speaking of this dreadful day.

They will raise the changeling — or, more accurately, they will foist his rearing off on tutors and staff — and they will despise him all the while, this Faerie babe.

And the king of the Faerie Court will rule his kingdom in the woods in peace, knowing the changeling boy running around the human castle is his insurance. For what king would ever admit his own son isn't truly his?

Chapter Text

The Faerie Court had always been a taboo subject within the walls of the castle. Nikolai didn’t know why, but any time a tutor or member of the staff was caught with the word “Fae” on their lips, they were sent packing within the hour.

Of course, that didn’t actually stop anyone from whispering about Faeries, imparting wisdom to the young second prince in hushed tones, or spreading gossip from the neighbouring towns amongst themselves. They just used euphemisms.

“The Old Folk took another girl,” Nikolai overheard one of the maids telling another as they dusted a practically unused room. “Village is in a right uproar about it.”

“Heard there was a strange young man come into town,” the other replied. “Could be one of Them.”

When the tutor he was hiding from found him, well after the maids had left, Nikolai told him about the exchange.

“The Fair Folk like to trap humans in Their realm,” the tutor told him wearily. “Best be wary of any strangers. Never give anyone your name, never take food you don't know the origin of, and never go into the woods alone.”

Nikolai was a rather contrary child who also happened to think being trapped in the Faerie realm might not be such a terrible hardship.

“Why not?” he asked petulantly.

“Names hold power, and giving it away to Them can give Them power over you. Their food will trap you in Their realm. And the woods are the gateway to Their land.”

“But what's so bad about being trapped in Their realm?” Nikolai pressed.

His tutor sighed. “Humans have no place in the Otherworld, except as servants to Them. And They are very unfair in Their bargains, so serving Them is no easy task.”

Nikolai, in all the arrogance of childhood, said, “I bet I could outsmart Them.”

His tutor gave him a long, hard look. “And that is how They get you.”

He still thought, at this point in time, that he and Vasily, his older brother, might be friends, the way brothers in books were friends. So when their lessons for the day were over, Nikolai sought out Vasily and conveyed the start of a plan that had formed in his mind over the course of the day.

“Yes, why don't you do that,” Vasily said with a sneer. “Go get yourself kidnapped by a Faerie. At least then you won't be here to annoy me.” And he walked off without a backward glance.

This was when Nikolai began to suspect that Vasily really couldn't care less whether Nikolai lived or died. He didn't think the same of their parents until the day he got lost in the woods.

He was 11 when it happened, bursting with restless energy and the kind of confidence only felt by a particular brand of brash youth who experienced only enough supervision to “keep them out of trouble”. It was practically midsummer, and Nikolai, supremely bored with his lessons, decided to make good on his old plans to trick the Fae. He knew the plan was inadvisable and reckless, but he was hot and bored and in a bit of a tiff about being left behind on yet another trip to a neighbouring kingdom and not even receiving a souvenir when his parents and brother returned. All in all, a perfect mood for inadvisable and reckless decisions.

That evening, Nikolai packed a satchel with some bread rolls and fruit he'd snuck away from lunch along with several candles and a packet of matches. He set out the letter he'd written explaining his whereabouts, and headed off.

Sneaking out of the castle posed little challenge to a boy who'd grown up exploring it. He knew of secret passages that had long since been forgotten by everyone else and happened to bypass the guards in an almost deliberate-seeming stroke of luck. In less than half an hour, he was off the castle grounds, standing wide-eyed and heart racing at the edge of the woods. It was still daylight out, but the trees, which seemed impossibly tall, were thick enough that dappled sunlight only crept a few feet beyond their start before everything was swallowed by an impenetrable gloom.

With a deep breath and one final glance back towards the castle, Nikolai stepped across the border that separated the sweltering evening from the refreshingly cool dimness of the trees. And nothing happened. No Faeries swooped down to snatch him away, the air didn’t fall still, even the birdsong didn’t change as he took his first cautious steps into the woods.

He grew more bold as he wandered further into the artificial dusk, tromping happily along with a nice stick he found along the way. He found a small creek and followed it along, caught up in the adventure and not particularly heeding his surroundings. He didn’t realize how dark it was getting until he could no longer see the creek he was following. Looking up and around, he noticed how foreboding the trees suddenly seemed, their tops too high to see in the gathering dark.

For the first time, uncertainty crept into Nikolai’s mind. He’d expected something to have happened by now, a convenient Faerie circle to step into, or one of the Fae just showing up to scold him for being in the woods so late. Perhaps he was too used to his tutors. He wasn’t unprepared, though. He pulled out one of his candles and the matches he’d brought with him, creating a small pool of light when he lit the candle. If a part of him expected a Faerie to show up at the striking of the match or the lighting of the candle, it was disappointed.

He turned in a slow circle, observing his surroundings, and realized with an unpleasant jolt that what he’d thought was the creek, was in fact just a line of moss in a small crevasse. He didn’t know how far back he’d left the creek, couldn’t hear anything that sounded like water flowing, and was now too turned around to properly backtrack. He swore rather impressively for an 11 year old and sat down on a nearby rock, cradling his small flame.

The woods had fallen eerily still, and for a while Nikolai sat there, half-convinced he was the only living thing aside from the trees. In the strange calm, he tried to come up with a plan. He decided that, for the moment, he would wait and see if anyone came looking for him. After all, it was reasonable to assume his absence had been noticed by now, that his note had been found, and that the king and queen would send their soldiers after their wayward son.

It took about 45 minutes for his confidence in that sequence of events to crack. His first candle had burned down to a stub and in the flickering light of the second he prodded restlessly at the leaf litter on the ground with a stick. He ate one of the rolls, now lightly dusted in lint and tasting faintly of candle wax. He stood and paced.

After another half hour that felt six times longer in the settled dark, Nikolai despaired of rescue. He felt certain that a search party would have made it this far into the woods by now, but he’d not even caught the sound of twigs cracking under careless feet in the distance. Growing anxious, he began to contemplate just how long he could survive in the woods with his two plums and singular remaining bread roll.

As he was contemplating this, once again sitting on the wax-spotted rock, a movement at the edge of his vision caught his eye. He looked up to see the glint of an eye near the ground, just beyond the circle of light cast by his guttering candle. The eye seemed to blink out, but before his brain could spin the shadows into something appropriately terrifying, a flutter of dark wings brought a crow into the light.

Nikolai let out a startled huff of laughter. “Hello,” he said cautiously, though he was tremendously cheered by the sight of the bird. “What are you doing out here all alone?” He glanced up into the dark, confirming the lack of similar glinting eyes or rustling feathers.

The crow made a clicking noise, tilted its head, then hopped closer.

“Would you like some bread?” Nikolai held out the last roll. The crow eyed it quizzically. “No?” The crow rustled its wings. “Fair enough. I have some plums, but I don’t think crows like fruit…”

The crow made a noise that resembled a sigh. It hopped backward, then dipped its head. The candle went out.

By the time Nikolai managed to light a new one, the crow was to his left, pacing. It stopped when the light fell on it and turned to him. It cawed softly, turned and hopped off, beyond the reach of the candle light.

“Oh.” Nikolai tried not to feel disappointed. He’d found it nice to have a companion in the dark.

Then, from the darkness, came another caw, followed by that same sighing noise. Some flapping, and the crow was back in the light, looking almost expectant.

Nikolai stared at it. “You don’t- do you want me to follow you?”

The crow dipped its head and cawed again. It hopped backward, to the edge of the light.

“Okay.” Nikolai got to his feet, grabbing his satchel and being extra careful to not let the candle blow out.

He followed the crow through the trees, its hopping, fluttering path easy enough to follow. He had to stop only once to light a new candle, and that one hadn’t even burned halfway down when the darkness began to lighten and he could see the edge of the woods.

The crow stopped at the treeline and Nikolai hesitated to step past it.

“Here,” he said after a moment. He crouched down to set the bread roll and one of his plums on the ground. “Thank you.”

The crow tilted its head to one side, then the other, as if analyzing him. It made another clicking sound, then fluttered off into the dark. Nikolai left the food on the ground at the edge of the trees.

When he got back to the castle, it was to find not a soul disturbed by his absence. He knew better than to expect Vasily to have cared, but he was stung by his parents’ apparent lack of concern.

At breakfast the next morning, they showed no sign of even having noticed he’d been gone.

“I got lost in the woods last night,” he said as casually as he could manage.

His father narrowed his eyes and his mother looked up sharply.

“Vasily,” his mother said, for the king and queen rarely addressed him directly, “tell your brother he must never go into the woods.”

“Yes, brother, don’t go into the woods,” Vasily drawled, condescension dripping from his voice.

When their mother was no longer looking, he leaned closer to Nikolai and hissed, “Or do and save us all the trouble of pretending to care about you.”

And the matter was dropped. It was then that Nikolai knew his parents cared as little about him as Vasily, that they truly hadn’t noticed he was gone, and that, should he disappear into the woods forever, no one would truly mourn.

It’s been nearly 15 years since then, and Nikolai still hasn’t forgotten the burning feeling in his chest as the realization set in. He’s feeling a similar feeling now as he trudges through the scattered orange and yellow leaves that line the ground beneath the soon-to-be bare trees.

He should be used to it all by now. The lack of recognition, the indignity of being left behind and not acknowledged when they return. But somehow, it still always hurts. He still always gets his hopes up that this time, it’ll be different. It never is.

This latest diplomatic trip was to a kingdom across the entire sea, which gave Nikolai ample time to build up the hope that maybe, just maybe, they’d be a little bit less assholeish when they came back. They weren’t. His parents didn’t call for him when they arrived back this morning, and it only took until around noon for Vasily to seek him out to rub his nose in it.

He’d escaped as soon as Vasily had looked the other way, not even caring who saw him slip away from the castle and into the woods. And now here he is, hot and upset, crashing through the undergrowth with all the grace and dignity of a shaved circus bear.

It shouldn’t hurt as much as it still does. Saints above, why does it still hurt this much? Why does he still care so much about the opinions of his family who care so very, very little for him?

He’s just deciding, for about the seventeenth time, that he’s officially done giving a shit, when he shoves past a particularly dense bush and into a clearing. And the very firm body of a person. A person who topples unceremoniously to the ground with the force of Nikolai’s shove.

Chapter Text

The person — a man not much younger than himself, Nikolai notices — gets up, swearing viciously in a low, raspy voice. He turns and Nikolai is struck, not by the glare levelled on him, but by the prettiness of the face wearing it. There’s an almost unearthly beauty to this other man that leaves Nikolai floundering for a moment.

Then the man starts talking.

“You ungainly, lumbering fool,” he spits. “How dare you lay finger on me, you who should lay prostrate before me like all mortal-kind. Do you not know who I am? I, who has dominion over this place. I, who is lord and master of-” He stops rather abruptly as his eyes finally meet Nikolai’s.

He frowns, and his eyes sweep down Nikolai’s body and back up again. Then his face transforms, flashing from confusion to surprise to a cold, disconcerting smile.

“Ah,” he says, and even his voice has changed. Gone is the venom — though not the arrogance — and in its place is a sort of smugness that Nikolai doesn’t understand. “But how could you know who I am, when you don’t even know who you are?”

Nikolai blinks and frowns. This question is bizarre enough to pull him from his awe-induced stupor. “I- what?”

The other man doesn’t respond, instead beginning to circle around Nikolai, an inscrutable look on his sharp, beautiful face. Nikolai’s gut instinct screams at him that he’s in dangerous territory with this man. Which would be ridiculous, except that he’s in the woods and the man scrutinizing him with a strange half-smile radiates an air of power so inhuman it’s impossible to ignore.

After a moment of feeling disconcertingly like a prey animal, Nikolai asks carefully, “What are you doing?”

There’s still no response from the man circling him, only a slight narrowing of eyes.

Nikolai clears his throat and tries again as the man starts his second loop. “What did you mean, I don’t know who I am?”

The man stops, levelling his dark gaze on Nikolai’s face. “Well, you don’t.”

“Of course I do,” Nikolai says. “I’m-” His mouth is just forming the “N” of his first name when a warning careens through his brain. Never give anyone your name. Even if this strange, otherworldly man isn’t a Faerie as he’s beginning to suspect, it’s still probably wise to keep his name to himself. “-the king’s second son,” he finishes.

An amused look settles onto the ethereal face, lips quirked, eyes glittering, and one eyebrow raised slightly.

“Are you, now?” the man says. “Well, my sincere apologies, your majesty.” He executes a small bow that somehow manages to convey contempt and disrespect while being perfectly correct in form.

Nikolai scoffs at this display. True, if he had more courage, it would be the kind of bow with which he’d greet his father, but… “I thought Faeries were supposed to be polite.”

The man looks up, cocking his head. “Who said I was a Faerie?”

Nikolai shakes his head in disbelief. “Are you forgetting the whole ‘kneel before me, puny mortal’ speech you just did?”

The other man laughs, and the sound lacks any warmth. He flicks his dark hair out of his face with a sharp jerk of his head, then looks Nikolai over again. “You should be more careful in these woods, princeling. Worse things than Faeries lurk here.”

“And you’re one of those worse things?” Nikolai guesses.

The man shrugs. “Perhaps.”

“So I should be careful of you, then?”

“You should be careful of me regardless.”

Nikolai is reminded suddenly of his childhood plans to trick a Faerie. Standing in front of this man — whose Fae blood Nikolai is fairly certain of now, in spite of his claims — he wonders how poorly that would have turned out for him if a Faerie really had shown up. He probably would have ended up trapped in the Otherworld, serving the Faerie Court for the rest of his life. A part of him wonders, even now, if that would really have been so bad.

Perhaps it’s that part of him that makes him say, “You don’t seem so bad.”

The man laughs again, a short sharp burst of sound. “Don’t I?”

The air seems to shift around them, drawing in and making it harder to breathe. The man’s features sharpen further, turning his face almost skeletal. His dark eyes glow with an unnatural light and when he bares his teeth, they’re sharper than any human’s. Though he’s a few inches shorter than Nikolai, he seems to loom over him, leering ghoulishly. A wind has picked up in their clearing, whipping the man’s hair across his brow and around his ears like a thousand living creatures.

“Are you scared, princeling?” the man asks, his voice strange and hissing through the air between them like a viper.

Nikolai swallows past the thundering of his pulse. The truth is, he is a little scared. His body has come to the realization he’s in way over his head and is reacting appropriately, his palms sweating, his mouth dry. But his stubborn brain, the obstinate part of him that won’t die no matter how many times his will is broken, refuses to give ground.

He forces a laugh past his parched lips. “Of a party trick? Hardly.”

The other man draws back. The wind recedes, the tension in the clearing lessens, and his face returns to the pretty mask Nikolai had first seen, pulled into a frown.

“It is unwise,” he says slowly, “to make light of the magic of these woods.”

“I’m prone to unwise decisions,” Nikolai replies lightly, though his heart still pounds an unsteady rhythm in his chest.

“Clearly,” the other man says, almost to himself. Louder he adds, “One might easily mistake stupidity for bravery.”

“One might,” Nikolai concedes. “One might also mistake inaction for caution.”

The man narrows his eyes. “And what action are you taking, princeling?”

Nikolai shrugs with as much careless ease as he can muster. “Haven't decided yet.”

He looks around the clearing, not really taking any of it in, but watching the other man from the corner of his eye. His gaze lands on a bag a few paces from where the man stands and he voices the first question that pops into his head.

“What were you doing out here, anyway?”

Before the man can answer, there’s a sound from behind Nikolai, the crack of a branch under a booted foot. Nikolai spins, hoping against hope that he’s not about to come face to face with another Faerie, or, worse, one of his father’s soldiers. Through the fading foliage, it’s easy to see that there’s nothing there. And by the time Nikolai turns to once again face the strange Fae man, there’s no sign of him either.

Feeling discombobulated, Nikolai turns in a slow circle, searching for any evidence that his interaction with the other man even happened. There isn’t even an indent in the grass where he fell.

Cursing to himself, he begins the trek back toward the castle before one of the guards really does come after him.

~~~

Kaz reclines languidly in his chair beside the head of the table, the image of bored royalty attending a meeting he finds beneath him. His father cuts him a look from his seat to the left, no doubt wishing for his first and only son, his heir, to take better note of the running of the kingdom. And normally, behind his facade of boredom, Kaz would be paying rigorous attention to the meeting. Not, perhaps, the details his father hopes him to take heed of, but important things nonetheless.

But today, his mind is far too preoccupied to be concerned with which ministers are being bribed and how many times Advisor Hoede suggests some kind of reconnaissance mission. There is a changeling in the human castle. The human king’s second son. A changeling. And he doesn’t even know it.

No doubt this is one of his father’s plots to undermine the human king and guarantee safety for their kingdom in the woods, but it’s still ridiculous to see a changeling running around without the true knowledge of his heritage. Perhaps it’s time for this wayward soul to be brought back to the Otherworld. Kaz shifts in his seat as a plan begins to form in his mind.

He’ll need information on the prince, insight into his habits, his tastes, everything and anything that will give him a tactical advantage when it comes to tempting him into the Fae kingdom. He ruminates on the best way to acquire this information as the meeting draws to a close.

His thoughts continue to spin on the walk back to his rooms, spiralling out through possibilities and plans.

“I need your help,” he says by way of greeting when he enters his antechamber.

Jesper startles and turns from a tray of food on the table, his eyes widening as he takes Kaz in. “Scheming face,” he half-whispers to Wylan, who’s paused in his dusting of the mantle.

Kaz rolls his eyes. “I need information about the human prince.”

“The heir?” asks Wylan, dropping his cloth and brushing his hands together.

“No, the other one.”

“I could go intelligence-gathering,” offers Jesper.

“You’re shit at recon, Jesper,” Kaz says.

“Doesn’t my enthusiasm make up for it?”

Kaz lets out a weary breath. “Your enthusiasm is for time alone in the human realm. Don’t think I’ve forgotten what happened last time.”

“That was one time.”

“And it was one time too many. Wylan, you don’t need to put your hand up.”

Wylan lowers his hand. “The king’s second son spends a lot of time in the woods,” he says. “A lot of the servants have seen him wandering around.”

“You talk to the servants?” Jesper asks.

Kaz tunes out the ensuing conversation, fitting this new information into his plans. It’d be so easy to run into the prince again in the woods. He’s probably drawn to them the way all changelings are, though he won’t know why. He may avoid them for the next few days, their earlier encounter unsettling him, but he’ll be back soon enough. And in the meantime Kaz can observe him at the castle.

“I’m going out,” he says, interrupting whatever gossip Wylan was relaying.

“You have another meeting shortly,” Wylan protests.

“Tough.”

“Kaz,” Jesper says, “you can’t just-”

“Yes. I can.”

“What are we supposed to tell your father?”

“You’ll figure something out.”

Chapter Text

Kaz spends the next three days watching the changeling. He can’t go into the castle, of course, but he can watch, concealed, from the edge of the grounds as the prince goes about his days. He seems to spend most of his time out of doors anyway, which makes Kaz’s job all the easier.

Kaz discovers that he has a fondness for fruit, that he talks to the castle’s staff and guards and has an easy laugh and a quick smile, that he likes all the royal horses, but has an affinity for one called Punchline.

On the third day, he even goes into the nearest town and Kaz trails him from stall to stall as he charms each vendor. It’s fascinating to watch, the way his demeanor shifts slightly with each person he talks to, sometimes brash and bold, other times reserved and quiet, but always enduringly kind.

There's a trick to this, Kaz knows, to being seen only as those around you expect to see you, to playing into their hopes and desires. It's a necessary skill in the Fae Court where secrets are currency and everyone's trying to get a leg up through any means. He wonders if the politics of the human royalty are as demanding, if that's where this changeling learned to be so malleable.

“Oh, Sobachka!” The cry of an elderly vendor startles him from his reverie, and he watches with interest as the changeling prince’s posture shifts and a bashful smile plays across his face.

He greets the vendor in hushed tones, whatever he says making her eyes shine as a smile cracks her weathered face. They converse for a few minutes, the woman gesticulating animatedly while the prince nods along, until she eventually hands him a beautiful looking apple and waves him away.

The prince slips the apple into his coat pocket, then, as he walks away, slides a coin onto the corner of her table.

Kaz marvels at this. In the Faerie Kingdom, getting something for nothing is an almost unheard of boon that, once granted, is guarded jealously. Paying for something when not asked to would be seen only as an exploitable weakness. He stores this knowledge about the princeling away for later use.

The changeling wanders the streets of the market for a while longer, making purchases and connections at almost every stall.

Back at the castle, he watches the prince spar with a young guard. From what Kaz knows of sword play, it seems the prince is better than the guard by a wide margin, easily disarming him time and time again, no matter how the guard attacks. Eventually, another guard joins the fray and the three practice until dusk begins to settle over the castle grounds.

The light fades quickly in autumn, and Kaz can barely make out the changeling’s silhouette by the time he and his companions head inside. Unwilling to linger near the human castle longer than necessary, Kaz magics himself back to his own chambers, safe in the Fae Court.

He ruminates on all he’s learned over the past few days as he prepares for bed. The changeling seems too trusting, almost naïve in the way he navigates the world and the people in it. On the one hand, it’s disconcerting to see a denizen of his kingdom — aware of it or no — be so unguarded. On the other hand, it should make it exceptionally easy to bring him back to where he belongs, in the Otherworld.

Kaz does not dream that night. The wards he’d paid far too much for are too good to let any dreams through.

The next day, Kaz decides to walk to the human castle. He’s having a manageable pain day and he wants to enjoy the nice weather while it lasts. It’s easy enough to slip out of the palace unnoticed; everyone else is too preoccupied with their own business and Kaz always walks with too much purpose to be interrupted by servants or guards.

He basks in the sunlight falling through the half-bare canopy above him as he walks. This is his kingdom, his domain, and he is at ease within it. He feels himself relaxing as he steps silently over the leaf litter-strewn ground.

Even as his body decompresses, his mind is still hard at work, furiously working at the problem of the changeling. How should he approach him? As one prince to another? Anonymously from the shadows? Is there a way to tempt him back indirectly? Would that work better than the direct approach he’s been imagining?

He’s so caught up in these questions, he almost doesn’t hear the noise. But even relaxed and distracted, Kaz is still in tune with the woods, and when something doesn’t belong, he notices.

With all the ease of a practiced sneak, Kaz makes himself invisible and creeps forward, towards the sound that’s so out of place under his trees.

What he finds, in a clearing so small it hardly counts, makes him freeze. Sitting in an undignified heap on the ground is the changeling. This, in itself, would be reason for Kaz to celebrate, an opening for him to tempt or trick the wayward child of his kingdom back home.

But the changeling, the prince of the human realm, is not merely sitting in Kaz’s woods, waiting to be brought to the palace, he is weeping. Tears fall hard and fast from the princeling’s crumpled face, pattering onto his knees. The sound that alerted Kaz to this scene was not, as he might have expected, sobbing, for the prince cries silently, but a quiet sniffling that repeats at uneven intervals.

Kaz finds himself unable to pull his gaze away from the crying man, even as his body reactivates and tries to beat a hasty and silent retreat. What happens instead is Kaz’s bad leg buckling beneath him as he attempts to take several steps back, sending him sprawling loudly onto the ground.

The prince startles and looks in Kaz’s direction, hastily wiping his eyes in the process. His face uncrumples into a mask of confusion and suspicion.

“Who’s there?” he asks hoarsely.

Kaz rolls his eyes skyward as he drags himself into a sitting position before releasing the spell that made him invisible.

“Boo.”

“You!” the prince exclaims, pointing an accusing finger at Kaz.

“Yes, me,” Kaz grumbles, getting delicately to his feet. He looks pointedly past the changeling’s face as it rearranges itself into something a little less messy. After a moment, he dares to pull his eyes back. He hesitates, then asks, “Are you hurt?”

There are still traces of tears on the other man’s face. His eyes are red around the edges and his blond curls stick to his forehead.

Kaz only realizes he’s been staring when the changeling clears his throat and belatedly says, “No.”

“Good,” says Kaz, eyes darting away from him. Then, “Why are you back in my forest?”

The changeling scoffs. “Who said the forest was yours?”

Kaz can’t help the abrupt laugh that overtakes him. The sound cuts through the stillness in the clearing and startles a few birds from a nearby tree.

“I don’t see what’s so funny.”

“Of course you don’t,” Kaz says flatly.

The changeling crosses his arms. Kaz’s eyes catch on the wince he’s too slow to hide, then flit down his body, examining him more closely. Upon inspection, he notices a tear in his loose white shirt revealing a gash on the changeling’s side. It looks relatively shallow and isn’t actively bleeding, but the sight ignites something inside Kaz. Something that feels an awful lot like rage.

“You said you weren’t hurt,” he says through gritted teeth.

The changeling shrugs. “I guess I must’ve lied,” he says easily.

Distantly, it occurs to Kaz that this shouldn’t be possible, but the thought is so far off he can’t be bothered to examine it. Foremost in his mind is a swirling, seething fury that anyone would dare lay a hand on one of his subjects. That any human, for he has no doubt this injury was inflicted by a human, would ever even conceive of harming one of the Fae, someone under his protection.

In two quick strides, he’s beside the changeling and crouching down to inspect the wound. Instinct has him reaching out to run an assessing finger over the cut, but the changeling flinches away from him.

“Please,” Kaz says tersely. “If I wanted to hurt you, you’d already be hurt.”

The changeling’s eyes remain wary, but he relaxes, just a little.

As Kaz’s finger lightly traces over the gash, causing the changeling’s breath to hitch, he feels his anger simmering ever hotter. “Who,” he asks, and his tone is dangerous, even to his own ears, “did this to you?”

“Why do you care?” the changeling asks, voice taught with poorly suppressed pain.

“It’d be bad diplomacy if I didn’t.” Let the changeling make of that what he will.

Kaz feels his fury start to cool, a plan forming from the embers. He stands, offering his hand to the wounded prince.

The changeling stares at the proffered appendage as if it’s a snake liable to strike at any moment.

“If you come with me, I know someone who can heal you.”

“Thank you for the offer,” he says slowly, “I do appreciate it, but I’m going to have to decline.”

Kaz’s patience begins to fray. “My healer is better than any human healer could ever hope to be,” he says, a little snappishly.

“While I’m sure that’s incredibly useful for you, my answer is still no.”

Kaz takes a deep breath. “Why not?” he asks as evenly as he can.

The changeling quirks an eyebrow, letting out an astonished sounding laugh. “‘Why not’?” he echoes. “Maybe because you’re a Faerie? Your whole deal is trapping humans in your realm.”

Kaz blinks, then scowls. “Why on earth would I want to trap random humans in my realm?” he asks. “I don’t like humans. The only useful humans are the desperate ones who come to make deals with me.”

“Well I’m not that desperate,” the changeling shoots back.

“And I’m not offering you a deal,” Kaz says before he can think better of it. “Only help.”

The changeling prince hesitates a moment more before deciding, “Fine.”

He takes Kaz’s hand.

“Why did that convince you?” Kaz asks, pulling him to his feet.

The changeling furrows his brow. “You can’t lie,” he says, as if that should be obvious.

Standing this close, Kaz can more clearly see the tear stains still streaking the changeling’s face, the broken blood vessels in his eyes. He can clearly see his expression change when he smiles and says, “Can’t I?”

Before the changeling can react, Kaz transports them out of the woods.

Chapter Text

Nikolai rips his hand out of the Faerie’s grip, but it’s too late. They no longer stand in the partial shade of half-bare trees, but under a dazzling blue sky that's not quite the same shade as the one they just left behind.

He stumbles a step back, putting distance between himself and the Faerie as he tries to get his bearings. As his eyes adjust to the shift in brightness, he takes in his surroundings.

They stand at the top of a grassy hill that slopes gently down in front of them, revealing a breathtaking view. A small mountain rises up before them, a waterfall glittering down its face to splash into a lake, in the middle of which is the biggest building Nikolai has ever seen.

Before he can truly process the enormity of the sight, his eyes are drawn to the sparkling trail of a river, which wends its way down from the lake and through a town of stone and wood buildings unlike anything in the human world. Sunlight reflects off coloured glass set into almost every building. Glass panels gleam from rooftops and windows and even doorways, dazzling the eyes as much as the river.

Through the glinting reflections, Nikolai is able to make out what look to be banners of celebration and decorations lining the streets, similar to what the towns near the castle put out for feast days like Vasily’s birthday. He wonders at this, but his eyes quickly catch on a group of people gathered in what he assumes is the town square, and the thought is lost.

He can't tell what the people are doing, but their lively energy and the vibrant hues of their clothing are spellbinding.

Only after he's stared his fill does Nikolai notice that the Faerie hasn't moved in the whole time he's been looking around, that he’s staring in dismay at the decorative flags, banners, and pennants fluttering in the light breeze.

He swears suddenly, startling Nikolai out of his captivated silence.

“Is there a festival on or something?”

The Faerie turns his glower on him. “Do I look like I know?”

Nikolai shrugs. “I thought you might, considering you live here.”

“It was not like this when I left,” the Faerie grumbles. He curses again.

“Is this… a problem?” Nikolai asks carefully. Best to tread lightly around this strange Faerie.

“Well, it's not going to make sneaking you around any easier.” The Faerie turns, muttering something Nikolai doesn't catch, and begins to walk down the hill.

“Sorry, why do we have to sneak me around?” he asks, hurrying to catch up.

“Because.”

No further information is forthcoming as Nikolai follows the Faerie through the outskirts of the town. They cut an arcing path through the long grass and wildflowers on the hill, giving wide berth to the buildings and making their way around the town.

After a few minutes of walking, Nikolai notices a limp creeping into the Faerie’s gait and asks, “Couldn't you have just teleported us where we're going?”

“No.”

Nikolai doesn't press the issue, and they walk on in silence, until they reach a small hut, set apart from the rest of the buildings in the area. It's decorated with the same panes of colourful glass as all the other buildings and up close he sees that the glass isn't merely inset into the stone as he thought. In many places, it sticks out from the building, as if designed to catch the light as much as possible. He can't be certain, as they approach, if they serve some purpose or are merely decorative.

The closer they get to the little structure, the louder Nikolai can hear what he soon realizes are waves lapping at the shore of the lake. He hadn’t realized how far around the town they’d walked, too caught up in the wonderment, thoughts, and questions swirling through his mind. Now, though, as they pause in the shade of the hut, Nikolai peers around the Faerie and can see the glittering surface of the lake.

The Faerie gestures for him to stay behind as he walks cautiously towards the door. Nikolai watches as he peers through a window in the door, then pushes it open and steps inside. After a moment, he comes back out and waves Nikolai forward.

Nikolai approaches slowly, suddenly wary that this might all be some sort of elaborate trap and through some weird loophole about the meaning of “help” he’s about to get jumped by a gang of human-hating Faeries. But when he reaches the door and looks inside, it’s to see nothing but his Faerie and a bunch of small rowboats.

“Are we crossing the lake?” he asks as he steps inside.

“In a manner,” the Faerie replies, closing the door. “Help me with this,” he adds, nodding to an overturned boat.

Nikolai, slightly bemused, helps him move the boat, revealing a trapdoor in the floor of the hut. After they set the boat down, the Faerie pulls out a knife from a sheath Nikolai hadn’t noticed at his hip. With the tip, he pricks the pad of his thumb and waits for a drop of blood to form. Then, he sinks into a crouch beside the trapdoor and presses a bloody thumbprint into the wood. His eyes flash as the air around them shifts, and Nikolai’s skin prickles.

The Faerie waits for a moment, then lifts the trapdoor. Beneath is a roughly twelve foot drop, with metal rungs pressed into the side at one-foot intervals.

“After you,” the Faerie says.

Gingerly, Nikolai lowers himself into the hole and begins to descend the metal rungs. Only when he reaches the bottom can he see the tunnel that slopes down and away from the entry point.

Before he can get a good look at it, the light above him is blotted out by the Faerie climbing into the hole, then closing the trapdoor. A moment passes before he begins his descent, and then he’s standing next to Nikolai, muttering under his breath. A small light appears in the palm of the Faerie’s hand, illuminating the space they’re in.

It’s an undecorated tunnel, wide enough for the two of them to stand side by side and roughly seven feet tall. As he’d noticed previously, the tunnel slopes down as it progresses.

“Where does this lead?” Nikolai asks.

“You’ll see.”

“Are you going to give me any information?”

“For free?” The Faerie laughs as he passes Nikolai and begins walking down the tunnel. “Try to keep up.”

It’s not hard to keep up with him, his limp now more pronounced, and Nikolai again wonders why they couldn’t just teleport wherever they’re going. As they progress, the tunnel gets cooler and damper, and Nikolai realizes they must be under the lake. It’s only when the tunnel abruptly turns that Nikolai understands where they must be going and why they couldn’t just take a boat.

“Are we going to the palace?” he hisses incredulously.

“Took you long enough.”

Nikolai is rendered momentarily speechless.

“We can’t just sneak into the Fae palace!” he exclaims when he gets his voice back.

“And yet, that is precisely what we’re doing.” The Faerie is infuriatingly calm.

“I’m not risking my life for this!”

The Faerie half-turns his head. “Who said you’re risking your life?”

Nikolai throws up his hands. “What will happen if we get caught in the palace? If I get caught in the palace?”

“We won’t get caught,” the Faerie says with an abundance of confidence and a shrug. “Now be quiet.”

Nikolai mutters, “I can’t believe this,” but at a sharp look from the Faerie, closes his mouth.

The Faerie holds the light up, illuminating the end of the tunnel before them.

This end of the tunnel does not have rungs with which to climb out, it just dead ends into a stone wall. The Faerie extinguishes the light and the tunnel falls into utter darkness. Nikolai hears the slide of a blade clearing leather, and figures the Faerie must be about to perform a similar kind of ritual as he did when opening the trapdoor.

Sure enough, a few seconds later, he feels the same shift in the air, the same prickling sensation along his skin. The feeling of magic, he thinks. Then, a dim light in front of them. Nikolai stares in amazement at the space where the stone wall had been. The source of the light is unclear, but it illuminates a narrow passage leading into what looks like a storage space.

The Faerie slides his knife back into its sheath, glances back at him, then walks through the passage. Nikolai has no choice but to follow.

“Where are we?” he asks as he steps into the room. Some sort of lamp glows behind them, though it’s unlike anything he’s ever seen before.

“Cold storage for the kitchens. Shush.”

“Shouldn’t there be guards or something?”

The Faerie rounds on him. “If you don't shut up, I will magically sew your lips together and it'll hurt just as much as if I didn't use magic. Understood?”

Nikolai’s eyes widen as he snaps his mouth shut. He nods.

“Good.” The Faerie turns back around and leads the way through a maze of shelves filled with wrapped bundles. The castle has a similar room to this, underground to keep certain food items fresh for longer. Eventually, they come to a set of stairs at the far end of the room, which lead up to a door.

The Faerie pauses at the door, pressing an ear to it before gently pushing it open. There’s no one on the other side. They cautiously make their way down the hallway until they reach an intersection, where they turn into a perpendicular hallway.

Every dozen or so yards, on one side of the hall, there’s an alcove with stairs leading to some sort of drapery. Nikolai spent enough time exploring his own castle as a child to know what servants’ passages look like. He longs to ask the Faerie any of the hundreds of questions crowding his brain, but his threat lingers in the back of his head.

Instead, he follows the Faerie through the surprisingly empty passages. They only need to duck into one of the alcoves one time, when a harried looking procession of young women round a corner and hurry past them, too busy chattering to notice them.

Eventually, the Faerie leads him out of one of the drapery-disguised nooks, down a short passage, and through a fancy door, into an antechamber.

Two young men are already inside, and they startle to attention as they enter.

The younger looking of the two, with ruddy hair and blue eyes, jumps to his feet. “You’re back!”

The other man, dark of skin and darker of hair, though with startling grey eyes, is slower to stand. “About time,” he adds.

The Faerie rolls his eyes. “Care to tell me what in all the realms is going on?”

“If you hadn’t skipped all those meetings to go spying, you might already know,” says the second man.

“Jesper,” the Faerie growls warningly.

The first man steps in. “Inej is here,” he says softly.

“Fuck,” the Faerie says emphatically.

Unable to stand being this in the dark anymore, Nikolai asks, “Who is Inej?”

All the attention in the room turns to him. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, gaze sliding from face to face.

“Kaz,” says the man, Jesper, turning his attention back to the Faerie. “He shouldn't be here on a good day. But today? Worst possible day to bring an outsider in.”

The Faerie — Kaz? — closes his eyes. “This is so not how this was supposed to go,” he mutters. Louder, he adds, “Tell me where Nina is.”

The light haired man says, “She’s attending Inej.”

Jesper snorts. “More likely flirting with her bodyguard.”

Kaz — and it’s odd to know the Faerie’s name now — rolls his eyes. “Thank you, Wylan,” he says, “for being useful.”

“Ouch,” says Jesper, holding a hand to his chest.

“Come on,” Kaz says to Nikolai, turning his back on the other two.

They leave the room and its occupants behind, darting back into the servants’ corridors. They retrace their steps back to an intersection and turn into the adjoining hallway. The further they progress down this hall, the more servants they have to hide from.

They come dangerously close to being spotted when Kaz drags him into a niche on the inside wall of the corridor that’s barely big enough for one person, let alone the two of them. They’re pressed together, waiting for the parade of servants to pass, their ragged breaths mingling in the air between them. Nikolai studies the other man’s profile. He’s beautiful, in an ethereal sort of way, with high cheekbones and a sharp nose, his light skin contrasted by the dark hair that falls over his brow. Being in such close proximity, Nikolai finds his heart racing, not just from the fear of being spotted.

Eventually, they’re able to move on and Nikolai wonders dimly why the Faerie has such an effect on him. He’s too preoccupied with heightened alertness to give it much thought, so he tables the question and the thousand others he has for now.

It takes a full quarter of an hour to get where they’re going, and Nikolai reckons it would’ve taken a third of the time had they not needed to stop so many times. Kaz pulls him into one of the little alcoves and carefully twitches aside the hanging, which looks to be a woven tapestry. Through the gap, they can see around a nearby corner, where two guards stand outside ornate double doors.

“Now what?” Nikolai whispers.

Kaz shoots him a look. “Stay here.” He rolls his shoulders, then slips past the tapestry.

Nikolai watches as he walks into view of the guards, his demeanour shifting. He does his best to disguise his limp and walks with his head held at a haughty angle. Nikolai narrows his eyes at this display. Walking with purpose can only get you so far, and unless the Faerie is remarkably silver-tongued, he doesn’t think he’ll be able to talk his way past two palace guards.

As he approaches, the guards straighten to attention, but neither looks particularly concerned. They look surprised, certainly, but also a little… is it relieved?

“Your majesty,” says one guard, stepping forward, and Nikolai feels his worldview crumbling around him.

“We were told you were indisposed,” says the other guard.

“I was,” Kaz says easily. “Now I’m not.”

“That’s good to hear,” says the first guard.

“I’m here to see Inej,” Kaz adds.

The guards exchange a look. “I’m afraid she’s not receiving visitors at the moment,” the first guard says, sounding genuinely apologetic. “Her journey was long and she was expecting to call on you later. May we take a message to her?”

“No need,” says Kaz. “I’ll just speak to her attendant.”

“Of course,” says the guard, gesturing to his companion, who quickly disappears through the doors behind them.

The hallway falls into silence, and Nikolai digests what he just witnessed. “Your majesty”. It explains much of the Faerie’s behaviour, especially on their first meeting. It doesn’t explain why he’s going out of his way to help Nikolai like this, or why they’re sneaking through the servants’ passages of a palace that Kaz has every right to walk through the main halls of.

The door reopens and the guard reappears, with a woman in red in tow. Something flickers across her face when she sees Kaz, too quick for Nikolai to make sense of, before she curtsies.

“Your majesty,” she says in a musical voice. “What can I do to assist you?”

“Come with me,” Kaz replies. “I require your services.”

“Of course, your majesty.”

Kaz nods to the guards, who return the gesture before retaking their posts, then leads the woman back toward Nikolai’s hiding spot. They turn the corner and pause, Kaz watching until the guards fall into some discussion, before pushing aside the tapestry and pulling the woman into the alcove. The woman does not question this, nor does she look twice at Nikolai, simply following Kaz through the passages, hiding when necessary and generally being the picture of obedience.

When they reach the corridors that are all but abandoned, the mask slips. She stops in the middle of the hall and Kaz, a few steps ahead, stops shortly after, realizing he’s no longer being followed.

“What the hell, Kaz?” she snaps.

“I need your help with something,” Kaz says in tones that say this should be obvious.

“I want no part in your schemes,” she says frostily. “I was having a lovely time attending Inej, like you should have been doing, but you were nowhere to be found. And, by the way, good luck getting out of this one, because Jes and Wy are not nearly as good with words as you, and I doubt anyone believed you were confined to your rooms like they implied. Certainly, Inej didn’t.”

Kaz rolls his eyes and turns to continue walking. “Tell me something useful or stop talking, Nina.”

“I ought to go to your father,” she says, trailing after him. Nikolai follows after her, bemused by this sudden about face in temperament. “I doubt he’ll be so lenient with you shirking your duties this time, you know. Putting the alliance at risk while he’s away…”

Kaz stiffens slightly at this, though Nina doesn’t seem to notice.

“If Inej’s father finds out you snubbed her arrival for absolutely no good reason, they’ll both be furious.”

“And who’s going to tell Inej’s father?” Kaz snarls. “Certainly not you.”

Nina sniffs. “Maybe Inej will.”

Kaz snorts. “You don’t know her very well at all, do you, Nina dear?”

“I know she deserves better than you,” Nina shoots back.

“So you’ve said.”

By this time, they’ve made it back to the door that leads to the antechamber where Jesper and Wylan had been.

“I’m serious, Kaz,” Nina says as he opens the door. “You need to get your act together.”

“Thank you for telling me my business,” Kaz snaps. “Now, if you don’t mind, that one —” he nods to Nikolai — “needs your attention.”

Nina spins to face Nikolai, her face immediately softening as she takes him in. “Hello,” she says gently. “Are you the reason he’s bullied me away from my duties?”

“I suppose I am?” says Nikolai.

“Well, let’s see what’s the matter, then.”

Nikolai lifts his arm and half turns to give her a view of the gash he’s almost managed to forget, but for the slight pain every time he breathes.

She sucks in a breath, her hand reaching out to run delicate fingers along the wound. Nikolai tries and fails not to wince.

After a moment of careful examination, Nina pauses suddenly, and looks deep into his eyes. Her brow furrows and she turns to Kaz.

“But he’s—”

“—too pretty to be hurt that badly, I know,” Kaz finishes drily.

Nikolai blinks. Kaz… finds him pretty? His brain revolves slowly around this information, sticking on it in a way he doesn’t know how to examine.

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it,” Nina snaps.

“It’s not important right now,” Kaz says firmly.

“I bet it’s important to him.” Nina jabs a finger towards Nikolai, who finds this conversation so far beyond him, it might as well be in another language.

“I forbid you from telling him,” Kaz says. “Or anyone else.”

“Fine,” Nina growls, turning back to Nikolai. “Come here, dear.”

Nikolai edges a step closer, and Nina puts her hand back over his wound, more firmly this time. Now Nikolai feels that almost familiar pressure change, the prickling as the hair on his arms rises, and an itching sensation where Nina’s fingers press against his skin.

His brain is too overwhelmed with the information it’s been provided in the past 45 minutes to scream at him about the rules of dealing with the Fae. On some level, he’s aware that accepting help from and being healed by Faeries is definitely in violation of the safety measures his tutors drilled into his head as a child. But another part of him, the kicked and bruised part of him, can’t find it in him to care about all of that. Because it’s nice to be fussed over, even if it’s by entities who would probably just as soon trick him into being an unwilling servant for the rest of his days.

“There,” says Nina, pulling her hand away. “Good as new.”

Nikolai cranes his head to look at the flesh peeking through the rip in his shirt. Sure enough, the skin is as whole and unblemished as it had been that morning.

“That’s… incredible,” he says. “Thank you.”

“Oh, don’t thank me,” she says, making sidelong eye contact with Kaz.

Kaz looks entirely unbothered. “Alright, let’s go.”

He leads Nikolai back out of the antechamber.

“I’ll just be here, then,” Nina calls after them, voice taut with impatience.

Kaz merely waves a hand back at her. Nikolai can just hear her huff in annoyance as the door swings shut behind them.

The trip back through the servants’ corridors is silent and swift, Kaz walking fast in spite of his limp. They arrive back in the cold storage room almost before Nikolai has processed everything that’s happened.

“So that’s it?” he asks, once they’re a suitable way down the tunnel under the lake.

“Yes,” Kaz replies.

“You just get one of your, what, servants? maids? to heal me and then dump me back in the woods?”

“Is there a problem?”

“No,” Nikolai says slowly. He doesn’t know what he expected from this trip, but somehow it wasn’t any of this. “You’re a prince, then?” he asks, changing the subject.

“Well spotted.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You never asked.”

Which is fair enough, but still an infuriating answer.

“And what was I supposed to ask? ‘Are you deliberately hiding the fact that you’re a prince of Faerie’?”

“I wasn’t deliberately hiding it. And I’m not a prince, I’m the prince.”

“Oh, my mistake,” Nikolai says hysterically. It’s all suddenly too much. Not only has he spent the afternoon in the Otherworld, he’s been sneaking around the Faerie palace with the prince himself, getting magically healed by a woman who’s probably in some way indebted to the royal family, and now he’s about to get unceremoniously returned to the woods where he’ll have to return to his shitty normal life like nothing’s happened. “What the fuck,” he whispers fervently.

Kaz makes no reply to this, and soon they’ve reached the end of the tunnel. Kaz climbs the inset ladder first to magically unlock the trapdoor, then helps Nikolai out of the hole when he reaches the top. He reseals the trapdoor, and Nikolai helps him move the boat back over it.

“Not coming back this way?” he asks as they leave the boathouse.

“No.” Kaz doesn’t elaborate, and they don’t talk for the rest of the trek around the outside of the town.

They make it back to the hill where they’d first arrived in Faerie, and Nikolai sees the woods beyond it.

“Is that the way back?” he asks.

“Yes. I’ll summon a familiar to guide you,” Kaz adds when they’re closer to the trees.

A beat passes, then there’s a cawing from overhead and a crow flutters into view. Nikolai remembers his experience in the woods as a child and wonders if crows have an innate magic to them. He almost asks, but Kaz is already turning away.

“Follow her,” he says, “and you’ll make it back to the human realm.”

“Thank you,” Nikolai says. “For… all of this, I guess.”

Kaz waves a hand dismissively through the air. “Just go.”

So Nikolai goes. It’s a surprisingly short walk through the woods before he starts to see places he recognizes from his time spent wandering the woods throughout his life. A little creek here, a large mossy stone there. He turns back in the direction he’d come, but the woods look just as thick and impenetrable as ever. When he faces forward again, his crow guide is gone, as if it sensed that he knows his way from here.

What Vasily will think when he comes home completely healed is something Nikolai has yet to think on, though it’s just as likely he won’t even notice. He may not even remember inflicting the wound.

Nikolai swallows past a lump in his throat and makes his way back toward the castle. Whatever the case, he’ll have to face it eventually.

Chapter Text

Kaz watches as one of his crows, Magda, leads the changeling into the woods and out of the Otherworld. There's a tugging in his mind at the sight of the blond man trudging after the crow’s light, hopping steps, like a half-buried memory trying to resurface. He pushes it away as he turns his back on the woods. There are more important things for him to worry about right now.

He buzzes with irritation as he begins the walk back to the palace, cutting a direct path through the city. Jesper or Wylan should have told him about Inej. That’s half their job, for fuck’s sake. Yes, he’s been out of the palace more often than not the past few days, but that’s all the more reason for them to catch him and let him know.

It’s no wonder they cleared out in the time it took him to find Nina and bring her back to heal the changeling. He’s going to have words with them when they show their faces again.

No one bothers him as he passes through the city and onto the bridge that crosses the lake to the palace. Even the guards at the entrance take one look at his stony expression and simply step aside. He supposes there are some perks to being heir to the kingdom.

He bangs open the door to his antechamber and is startled to find Nina still there, pacing. She stops to level a glare at him as he closes the door.

“What?” he snaps.

“What are you doing with that changeling?” she responds, as if the words had been pressing against the backs of her teeth in their haste to reach his ears.

“None of your damn business.”

Nina huffs. “It became my business when you brought me into one of your stupid schemes.”

Kaz throws himself into one of the room’s ornate chairs and rubs a hand down his bad leg. “You are tangential at best to my schemes.”

She rolls her eyes. “Be that as it may, I was involved. What did you get from him for my help?”

As Nina stands there expectantly, arms crossed and eyes narrowed, Kaz wonders, not for the first time, why he didn’t strike a bargain with the changeling. Just because he’d been so reluctant? But he’s pressured tougher souls than him into deals with little effort, so surely that can’t be it. Kaz is not prone to reckless decisions. So why can’t he come up with an explanation for this one?

“Well?” Nina presses.

Kaz hesitates a moment more before softly replying, “Nothing.”

Nina blinks hard. “What?”

Kaz bristles. What right does Nina have to judge his decisions? “You heard me.”

Nina laughs, high and incredulous. “You have… the gall,” she says, “to offer my services, in exchange for nothing, to some nobody?”

“You work for my family,” Kaz points out.

“No, this isn’t about that, Kaz,” Nina says calmly, enunciating his name in a way that betrays her fury. “This is about every time I have come to you, every time I have begged you for help and you have never, not once, offered what could even be considered by the meanest standards to be a reasonable deal, let alone something for free. This is about—”

“If I helped you solve all your petty problems,” Kaz interrupts, feeling all his earlier frustration well up again, “where would you be right now? Even more beholden to me than you already are?”

Nina’s eyes flash. “Fuck you.”

“Like it or not, I’ve made you into the self-reliant, powerful person you are today.”

“Fuck that, Kaz, this is about how you treat your friends!”

Kaz feels an unfamiliar jolt at her words. He laughs, a cold, hollow sound even to his own ears. “My friends?” he sneers. “I don’t have friends.”

“Obviously not!” Nina spins away from him, toward the door.

“Tell Inej I’m ready to see her.”

She pauses her exodus, glaring over her shoulder at him. “And what in all the realms makes you think I’m going to do anything you ask right now?”

He glares right back at her. “The fact that I’m your prince.”

She sets her jaw, but makes no reply as she opens the door and storms away.

Kaz runs a hand down his face as the door slams shut. He usually has a better handle on his emotions, even when Nina riles him up. Maybe it's the lingering frustration with Jesper and Wylan, maybe it's the growing ache in his leg from so much walking, but he feels well and truly worked up.

As he stands, his brain, as if fuelled by his irritation, finally unearths the memory it had snagged on earlier. The sight of a young blond boy in a pitiful puddle of light following behind one of his crows as it led him through the woods on a summer night.

Kaz feels his eyes narrow to dangerous slits. “Damn it,” he growls. Then, louder, “Damn it!”

He turns and kicks the foot of his armchair, swearing viciously. Because he’s suddenly certain that the boy in the woods all those years ago was none other than the changeling prince he’d helped earlier today. Which makes it twice now that he’s helped this man without getting a single thing out of it.

“What am I, a fucking altruist?” he mutters as he sweeps through the antechamber and into his bedroom.

Despite the pain emanating from his right leg, Kaz finds himself unable to stay still. He paces the length of his bedroom, irritation peaking as he contemplates his next move. Before he can deal with the changeling, he first has to deal with the Inej mess.

Nina was right about one thing — it’s bad that he wasn’t there to greet Inej and the delegation that undoubtedly accompanied her. If his father finds out that Kaz forsook his duties, both as a host and as a fiancé, he’ll be furious.

Kaz cringes at the word “fiancé”. It’s not that he doesn’t want to be engaged — he doesn’t, but that’s not the point — it’s that he and Inej simply aren’t compatible romantically. They’d tried.

Years and years ago, the betrothal was not new — practically older than the two of them,  a political alliance struck between the fathers of two infant heirs to two vulnerable Fae kingdoms — but Kaz and Inej were old enough now to understand what it meant. And old enough to look at each other in a new light, the way they were supposed to look at each other. So they had tried, for a while, all the things they were supposed to do. The flowers and dates and affection, and all of it had led to them both being miserable, in their own ways.

So they had mutually agreed to stop trying. That they liked being friends, being each other’s closest confidantes, despite rarely seeing each other in person, and that they would do everything in their power to change their fathers’ minds about the whole thing.

For all the good that’s done them. Years have passed, and though Kaz is still eager to see Inej, a part of him that grows larger every year dreads her visits, terrified that this will be the one when their fathers will decide it’s time. He knows the political alliance is important, that a wedding would seal the deal the way no other pact could, but the thought of tethering Inej to himself in this way makes him feel sick every time he thinks of it.

He’s pulled from his reverie by the muffled sound of a knock. He pauses halfway across his room, wondering if he’ll have to open the antechamber door himself, but then he hears footsteps and muted voices, and realizes Jesper or Wylan must’ve come back while he was lost in thought. After a moment, there’s another knock, this time on his bedroom door.

“Yes?”

“Inej is here for you.”

Wylan. Which Kaz probably should have guessed. He rubs his forehead as if he can rub away all the thoughts pressing at him, rolls his shoulders, then says, “Send her in.”

Kaz tries his utmost to look composed as the door opens to reveal Inej, looking resplendent as always. He hardly notices Wylan’s quick bow before the door closes again. As soon as it clicks shut, the space between them collapses, Inej trailing swaths of fabric as she hurries to him.

Concern creases her forehead as she looks up at him, her dark eyes searching his. One hand comes up to rest gently on his cheek and Kaz stiffens by reflex before relaxing into the touch.

“You’re tense,” Inej says softly.

Kaz snorts.

“What’s the matter?” Her thumb brushes feather-light across his cheekbone.

“Nina didn’t tell you?”

A small smile works its way onto Inej’s face. “She just said you were being a dick.”

Kaz rolls his eyes, turning away from her knowing look and caressing fingers.

He hears the slight rustle of fabric as she drops her arm. “Does this have anything to do with why you weren’t at the welcome party?”

Kaz takes in a deep breath, closing his eyes. He exhales slowly and says, “What do you think?”

“I think,” says Inej, her voice moving past him, “that you’re avoiding my questions.”

He opens his eyes to find her once again in front of him, arms crossed, head tilted just so.

“How could you tell?” he deadpans.

She shakes her head. “I could help you, you know. If you just talked to me.”

Kaz frowns. “Why are you here anyway?”

“Kaz.” Inej says it so forcefully, it would make any other man jump. Kaz just blinks at her.

“I don’t have to tell you anything.”

She tilts her head the other way, studying him. “Neither do I,” she says calmly. “So, if you want to know why I’m here…” She shrugs.

“That is not a remotely fair trade,” Kaz says sourly.

“But it’s the only one you’ll get.”

They stare at each other, neither willing to give ground. Kaz is usually good at this game, this contest of wills, but Inej is just as good and half as distracted today. He gives in.

“Fine,” he growls.

Inej beams. It’s a smile Kaz once thought he’d kill to earn.

He tells her about the changeling prince. As he talks, he moves to sit on the bed. Inej folds gracefully onto the floor in front of him, eyes never straying from his face.

When he’s finished, he stares past her, unable to meet her gaze. He sees her put her elbows on her knees, clasp her hands under her chin and tilt her head from side to side, like a curious bird.

“So you’re upset because you’ve freely given your aid to this changeling?”

“And Jesper and Wylan didn’t think to tell me you were coming. And Nina…”

“Is Nina,” Inej finishes, nodding. “I get it. But Kaz, what are you doing here? What’s the end goal?”

Kaz pauses. The goal had been to bring this wayward changeling back to the Fae Court, back to where he belongs, but that suddenly doesn’t feel like a good enough reason for all his efforts. “He’ll have insight into the way the human king thinks,” he says instead. “Into his strategies and the way he runs his kingdom. It’ll be valuable information for my father.”

Inej stares at him for a moment, as if she can pick apart his statement and find the seed of untruth within its verity.

“So you’re gaining his trust,” she says after a moment. “Trust in exchange for favours isn’t always an unfair trade, you know.”

“Twice, Inej.”

She shrugs and Kaz feels an overwhelming rush of exhaustion.

He sighs and tips his head back, staring at the ceiling where the faint lines of intricate whirls mark out the wards placed on the room. He feels Inej watching him and for a moment he lets her, lets her draw her conclusions in the drawn out silence.

Eventually, he looks at her again.

“So why are you here?”

She blinks slowly before responding. “You really missed a lot of meetings, then.”

Kaz shrugs. “Jesper and Wylan were supposed to tell me anything important.”

Inej smiles faintly. “You know better than anyone not to rely on someone else for the really important things.”

“So it turns out my priorities were out of order. No one told me the meetings were mandatory.” He narrows his eyes. “You’re avoiding my question.”

“Our fathers,” Inej says slowly, “have been summoned along with the other Fae leaders to a Council.”

Kaz sucks in a breath. A Council is no small thing. The last one had occurred years before he was born — a human kingdom had declared war on the nearby Fae kingdom and the rest of the Fae leaders had been asked to send reinforcements.

“To what end?” he asks.

Inej shrugs. “My father wouldn’t say. I was hoping you’d know more but…”

But he’d missed all those meetings. The changeling suddenly feels like a trivial matter. And unless he can find a way to justify his absences and lack of foreknowledge to his father, there’ll be hell to pay for it.

His brain turns through possibilities, spinning out along the different threads of the day, connecting thought and deed and conversation.

Distantly, he hears Inej mutter, “Scheming face,” but he pays it no mind. There’s something here, a pattern amidst the chaos of associations.

If he can convince his father that his time with the changeling was well-spent, if he can find a believable excuse for dedicating so much effort to gaining his trust… The reasoning he gave Inej won’t fly with his father, who has undoubtedly also been keeping an eye on this changeling. But what other reason could he have for his actions?

His gaze falls to Inej, who’s watching him with a half-smile quirking her lips, and it clicks. He lets a smile tug at his own mouth.

Inej sits up straighter. “What?”

“I can fix this. Everything.”

“Everything?” she echoes.

“Everything,” he repeats. “Including the engagement.”

Inej’s eyes narrow in thought, then spring wide. “Kaz, don’t—”

“Don’t you want to be free of this?” he asks, gesturing between them.

“I… yes,” she admits. “But not…” She squeezes her eyes closed, scrunching her whole face up. “Don’t do something you’ll regret.”

“Have I ever?” Kaz asks as he stands.

She opens her eyes to stare flatly at him as he limps to his desk.

“This won’t end well,” she says as he scrounges in a drawer for paper.

“You don’t even know what I’m planning,” he says, mind only half on the conversation.

“I can guess,” she mutters. He hears the murmur of fabric, the subtle creak of the floor, and feels her presence behind him.

On his new-found paper, Kaz starts a list. As his handwriting scrawls messily across the page, Inej sighs and moves to the window, partially blocking the waning light.

Despite all the frustrations of the day, despite the familiar disapproving edge to Inej’s presence, despite even the looming threat of the Council and his father’s inevitable return, Kaz feels energized, fairly buzzing with vigor as he finishes his list and blots the paper.

“How long will you be staying?” he asks Inej.

“Until the Council is over.”

He forces patience into his voice. “And how long will that be?”

Inej lets out a breath. “I don’t know. At least a few weeks.”

“Perfect.” He folds his paper and ignores the irritation in her voice.

“I’m guessing you won’t be around much, then?” she asks.

“Probably not,” he agrees, finally turning to face her. Her back is to him, her arms crossed, and though she stares toward the sunset, he doubts she’s enjoying the view. “When’s the welcome banquet?”

“Five days.”

“I can work with that.”

Inej turns to him. “For what?”

“You’ll see.”

Inej shakes her head. “You’re playing with fire, Kaz. I’ll pray you don’t get burned.”

And in a cloud of silk and perfumed air, she leaves.

Chapter Text

Two days have passed since Nikolai’s foray into the Fae Court, and now he’s back in the woods. Vasily has only gotten worse as the days go on, and though there hasn’t been another “accident” with the swords, Nikolai needed to escape the torment. And the only true escape is the woods. It’s the one place Vasily is guaranteed not to follow him.

So he wanders, wondering idly if there’s a chance he’ll wind up back at the beautiful town with its mountain and lake and enormous palace. It’s unlikely, he thinks, because there’s sure to be some sort of magical protection from mortals, from humans especially. They’ve been taught to fear the Fae, have waged wars against them, but Nikolai, not for the first time in his life, but for the first time with hard evidence, doesn’t think they’re actually that bad.

The Faerie prince, Kaz, had no reason to bring him to see a healer, had no reason to even care that he was injured, but had taken him to the palace anyway. Hadn’t even offered a deal in exchange for the help.

And now Nikolai has to question everything he was taught about the Fae. Did it all come from a place of fear and misunderstanding? Certainly the Fae are powerful, certainly there are bound to be bad actors in any group, but to characterize them all as cruel tricksters seems overly simplistic to him, especially now that he’s met some of them.

Nikolai ponders this as he kicks through drifts of fallen leaves. Sure, it would still behoove him to be cautious, should he run into any Faerie again, even the ones he’s already interacted with, but does he really need to be so worried about being abducted? He’s not sure.

It’s in this state of uncertainty that he walks into a clearing, the added sunlight overwhelming his eyes momentarily. When they adjust, he sees a picnic spread out before him, a mouthwatering array of food and drink laid out atop a beautiful blanket that’s so out of place in the woods. His eyes traverse the assortment of dishes before coming to rest on a black-clad leg. He raises his gaze, eyes raking up the figure, to see none other than the Faerie prince himself, eyes closed, head tilted back, with a goblet against his lips.

Nikolai’s eyes don’t leave the profile of the other man as he backs away, hoping to make it out of the clearing before being noticed. Before he’s made it more than three steps, Kaz lowers the goblet and turns his head to meet Nikolai’s eyes. Nikolai freezes.

The corner of Kaz’s lips turn up. “Well, it’d be impolite of you to leave, now,” he says, and his voice would be almost musical if not for the rough edge, like stone on stone.

Nikolai stares at him, unable to move or speak, wondering if he’s been put under some kind of spell to hold him in place.

Kaz carefully sets his goblet on a silver tray in front of him. “Come, sit,” he says, gesturing to an open space on the blanket next to him.

Nikolai walks on numb legs to the spot indicated. He sits. After a moment of staring at the food in front of him, he finds his voice.

“This is… a lot of food.” He looks at Kaz. “Were you expecting someone?”

Kaz hums. “I’m a prince,” he says, as if Nikolai could have forgotten that fact, “I like to indulge. Surely you can relate.” He raises an eyebrow.

Nikolai has spent more than his share of meals eating alone or with the castle’s staff. The idea of wasting food simply because you can is not exactly foreign to him — it’s the sort of thing Vasily would do — but it’s a concept that doesn’t sit well with him, perhaps from his time with the servants, perhaps because it is something his brother would do.

He slowly shakes his head. “That’s still way more food than any one person could ever hope to eat in one sitting.”

Kaz tilts his head. “What part of ‘indulgence’ don’t you understand?” He takes a bite of a bread roll. “But if you’re so concerned, you could help me eat it.”

Ah. There it is. The trick to it all. Fae food will trap you in the Fae realm, of this much, Nikolai is sure. The stories are far too prevalent to be made from whole cloth. He feels a pang of disappointment. He’d hoped that, for all he’d heard, Kaz was different. Not the kind to go out of his way to trap humans for whatever nefarious purposes the Fae do. But now he knows better and, for better or worse, his guard is back up.

He’s careful in composing his response. Whatever happened in the past, whatever rapport he’d thought they had, it’s important now to respond politely.

“As tempting as that sounds,” he says slowly, “I’m going to have to decline.”

Kaz shrugs. “Suit yourself,” he says, picking up his goblet. He takes a sip, and Nikolai watches the bob of his throat as he swallows.

They sit in silence as Kaz continues to eat, taking bites of each of the various dishes on the blanket.

He’s just made his way to a lush fruit platter, when Nikolai can’t take it anymore.

“I thought you didn’t bother with humans,” he says in a bit of a rush.

“I did say that, didn’t I?” Kaz muses, turning a grape between his fingers. His eyes meet Nikolai’s. “You must be different.” He pops the grape into his mouth, chewing slowly, gaze locked on Nikolai.

Nikolai continues to watch Kaz, even after the Faerie turns away, focused once again on the food before them. There’s something oddly spellbinding about him, something almost unreal about the way he interacts with reality. Nikolai finds himself transfixed by the sight of him eating, his ethereal beauty in sharp contrast with the autumnal foliage creating an image out of a painting.

“You’re staring, princeling,” Kaz observes without looking up from selecting a small sandwich.

“Because you’re putting on a show,” Nikolai says, sure of the words as soon as they leave his mouth.

Kaz does look up now. “I’m just eating,” he says.

Nikolai scoffs. “With no ulterior motives, I’m sure.”

Kaz looks amused more than caught out. “How does one eat with ulterior motives?” he asks the air.

Nikolai watches him with narrowed eyes. “I know what you’re doing,” he says slowly.

Kaz sits up. “Oh?”

“I know you’re trying to get me to eat Faerie food and be trapped in your realm.”

Surprise, or something like it, flashes across Kaz’s face, and he glances over the blanket.

“I must have forgotten to mention,” he says, meeting Nikolai’s gaze again, “this is all human food.”

Nikolai doesn’t break his gaze. “You realize that’s even more suspicious, right?” he asks. “If anything, you’ve further convinced me of your ulterior motives.”

Kaz sighs and sets down the small plate he’d been holding. “Alright,” he says. “I do have ulterior motives, as you put it.”

“Which are?” Nikolai presses.

Kaz tilts his head. “Which are…” He tilts his head the other way, then looks back at Nikolai, though not quite meeting his gaze. “I was hoping to see you again.”

Nikolai’s brain stutters over this. Hadn’t he also, in some part of his mind, been hoping to see Kaz again? Even if he had been, that doesn’t keep him from being suspicious of him and his picnic.

“Why?” he asks.

Kaz shrugs, moment of vulnerability gone. “Colour me intrigued by the princeling who spends his days wandering the Fae woods.” He picks up his plate again. “And perhaps I was impressed by how you handled yourself the other day.”

Nikolai knows, he knows, he’s in dangerous territory. Whatever his thoughts on the Fae, they are powerful beings shaped by magic, and their society is entirely different from that of humans. To be intriguing to a Faerie… it can’t be good.

And yet, there’s a part of him, the same part of him that always surfaces in these situations, that finds it doesn’t mind. That maybe, it even likes the idea of being a source of intrigue to not just any Faerie, but their prince. He feels an odd sense of pride at Kaz’s compliment.

Before he can formulate a response, Kaz adds, “It doesn’t hurt that you’re, well…” His gaze travels slowly over Nikolai’s form and his tongue darts out, as if to catch a nonexistent crumb.

Nikolai feels heat travel from his ears into his cheeks. “U-um,” he manages.

Kaz nudges a bowl of pomegranate seeds towards him. “Eat.”

Nikolai frowns at the bowl, but finds his hand, almost of its own accord, picking up the spoon. He scoops some of the seeds into his other hand and returns the spoon to the bowl.

It’s Kaz’s turn to watch him eat, his eyes following the progression of the first seed from the palm of Nikolai’s hand to his mouth, lingering there as he chews and swallows.

Nikolai is hyper-aware of Kaz’s attention on him as he finishes the pomegranate seeds, to the point he almost doesn’t notice the napkin he offers. As he takes the square of fabric, their hands brush and a jolt travels up Nikolai’s arm.

“Thanks,” he says as he wipes his hands, deliberately avoiding eye contact.

“You’re welcome,” Kaz says. “And you’re welcome to more food.”

Nikolai looks at the food. The pomegranate seeds had been good, but not filling, and, having some food in his system, he’s become aware of just how hungry he really is. He reaches for a bread roll.

The food is delicious, almost better than what the castle’s chefs prepare for the royal family, and Nikolai wonders where, exactly, Kaz got it all.

“Did you really prepare all this on the off chance you’d see me today?” he asks.

“You’d be surprised the things I do on the off chance I’ll see you,” Kaz says.

“Oh?”

“You don’t think it’s a coincidence we keep running into each other?”

“I…” Nikolai kind of had thought it was a coincidence. “I guess I never really thought about it?”

Kaz watches him for a moment, a curious look on his face, then says, “You should try the wine.” He takes the bottle and pours it into his goblet, takes a sip, then offers the goblet to Nikolai.

Nikolai blinks at it, before realizing the Faerie is trying to put him at ease. He takes the goblet and takes a sip, prepared to recoil at the bitterness, but finds the drink sweet and fruity, better than any alcohol he’s tried. Before he can think better of it, he’s downed the rest of the goblet.

Kaz chuckles. “Thirsty?”

“You have no idea,” Nikolai mutters into the goblet, then pauses as his brain catches up to his mouth. He casts a sidelong look at Kaz, trying to gauge his reaction.

Kaz lifts a brow, and though his eyes glimmer with amusement, he says nothing, merely lifts the bottle of wine toward Nikolai.

Nikolai lowers the goblet and allows Kaz to refill it. He takes another hesitant sip.

“This wine…”

“It's nothing you need worry about,” Kaz says.

Reassured, Nikolai drinks more. It really is remarkably good. He’s never been one to imbibe, mostly due to the taste, but that would likely change if he had more of this. He wonders if Kaz would tell him where he got it. He wonders whether Kaz likes it as much as he does. He wonders what Kaz likes.

He shakes his head and sets the goblet a little shakily back on the silver platter. He can already feel the slight fuzzing effect on his thoughts, the minor blur to the world as the warmth of the sweet liquid travels through him.

“So…” he says, with no clear direction.

“So?” Kaz’s gaze has not left him.

Nikolai gestures to the picnic spread. “How did you decide what to bring?” It’s an inane question, but it’s all he can come up with.

Kaz tilts his head. “Some of it is what I like,” he says. “And some of it is what I hoped you would like.”

“And what did you hope I would like?” Nikolai finds himself leaning toward Kaz and quickly corrects his posture.

“Well…” Kaz finally turns his deep, impossibly dark eyes away from Nikolai to reach for something across the blanket.

It’s a bowl of something thick and white, and Kaz’s other hand plucks an apple slice from the fruit platter. As he dips it into the substance, his eyes meet Nikolai’s again.

“This is a particular favourite of mine,” he says, and his voice has dropped almost to a whisper.

He takes a bite, maintaining eye contact as he chews, swallows, then slowly drags his tongue along his lower lip, ostensibly to catch any lingering juice. Nikolai follows the motion and his eyes linger on the other man’s lips until they tilt into a smirk and he pulls his gaze back up.

He clears his throat. “It looks… good.”

“Try it,” Kaz offers, holding out the bowl and then, to Nikolai’s surprise, the half-bitten apple slice.

“O-oh, um…”

Kaz shakes his head. “We’re already sharing a cup, princeling.”

This is true. Nikolai takes both bowl and fruit. He uses the apple slice to scoop up some of the dip, then brings it to his mouth. Kaz watches him with a strange intensity. Nikolai sets the apple slice on his tongue, hesitating just long enough for a bit of what he discovers to be sweet cream to drip onto his chin. He wipes it away with one finger as he chews.

The combination of the sweet cream and tangy apple is, indeed, delicious. He’s about to say as much when a much bolder idea comes, unbidden, into his mind. He glances down at the smear of cream on his forefinger, then back at Kaz. Surely Nikolai isn’t reading too far into the other man’s actions. He had all but stated his intentions when Nikolai pressed him about his motivations, and he’s been brazen in his coquetry since then.

Without breaking eye contact, Nikolai raises his finger to his lips. He parts them just enough for his tongue to peek through and draws his finger along it, licking away the sweet cream. Slowly, he lets his finger drop away, though his lips remain parted. He still doesn’t drop Kaz’s gaze, which has gained a similar heat to the one in Nikolai’s cheeks.

“It’s good,” he says softly.

Kaz nods.

Nikolai looks away first, dropping his eyes to find the goblet of wine. He takes a healthy swig, trying to settle the fluttering in his stomach, the pounding of his heart.

Before he can set the goblet down, Kaz reaches out, stealing it from his grip. Their fingers brush as Kaz takes it and Nikolai feels the heat inside him spread. He watches the Faerie drain the remaining wine and refill the goblet once again.

“So,” says Kaz, setting the goblet down on his empty plate between them.

“So…” Nikolai echoes, gaze stuck on Kaz’s hands as they settle into his lap.

“I’m curious. What occupies the time of the human princeling?” Kaz asks. “Aside from wandering my woods.”

Nikolai snorts at the possessive and draws his eyes up to Kaz’s face, which he finds is oddly earnest.

“Just ‘cause you're the prince doesn't make the woods yours.”

“Are the castle grounds not yours?” Kaz counters.

Nikolai snorts again. “Hardly. If anything they're my father's.”

“A difference in semantics,” Kaz says airily. “Are we not extensions of our fathers?”

This time Nikolai outright laughs, a slightly unsteady giggle that devolves into hiccups. He points to himself. “Second son.”

Kaz studies him for a moment with an indecipherable look on his face.

After enough time has passed that Nikolai is just debating saying something to break the silence, Kaz gives a one-shouldered shrug and says, “Well, what does a second son do to pass the time, then?”

Nikolai frowns and reaches for the wine again. He takes a drink, then says, “Swordplay, mostly.”

“And are you any good?”

“You could say I know my way around a sword.” Nikolai drinks some more. “Do you?”

“I can't say I've had much practice,” Kaz admits, “but I've handled a sword or two in my time.”

“Did you enjoy it?” Nikolai leans forward. He can feel the conversation sliding into something else, but finds himself unable, or perhaps unwilling, to pull it back.

“It was a… stimulating experience.” Kaz affects a lazy smile as he plucks the goblet out of Nikolai's hand and tips it against his lips.

Nikolai watches him drink with a lightness in his head, a faint buzzing sensation in his limbs, and a hundred questions in his mind.

“And your duelling partners?” he hears himself ask. “Did they have fun?”

Kaz lowers the goblet slowly, revealing a much more deliberate grin. “I can assure you, they were most satisfied.”

“Perhaps,” says Nikolai, feeling the subsequent words sliding too fast down his tongue, “one day you could satisfy me.”

And he winks. Or, he tries to. He might only succeed in a lopsided blink.

But Kaz’s smile grows regardless, and he leans forward as he replaces the goblet on the plate, until Nikolai can smell the sweet wine on his breath when he speaks.

“Are you challenging me to a duel, princeling?”

Nikolai meets his gaze. “Something like that.”

“Well, I'm sure ‘something like that’ can be arranged.”

“I look forward to it.”

~~~

Nikolai wakes up feeling like he’s fallen off a horse. For all he knows, he did fall off a horse. The previous night is a blurry collection of half-remembered feelings, most of them… positive? Perhaps not an accident then.

He opens his eyes and nausea immediately swirls into his stomach. The single crack of sunlight that falls across his bed hits him like a nail driven between his eyes. He groans and slams his eyelids shut, turning to bury his face in his pillow where the light can’t reach him.

Decidedly not a horse riding accident.

He’s never been properly hungover, never drunk enough to reach that point. He’s overheard Vasily whining to his friends about the aftereffects of alcohol enough times to immediately recognize the symptoms, though.

At the thought of Vasily, Nikolai groans again, getting a mouthful of pillow for his trouble. He absolutely cannot face his brother in this state. Not after the week he’s already had.

With the threat of increased torment to motivate him, Nikolai forces himself out of bed and in front of the wash basin to freshen up. He doesn’t open the curtains, the dim light in the room already too much for his sensitive eyes and pounding head. Splashing cool water onto his face does little more than make him wet. He blinks hard at his dripping countenance in the mirror, then stumbles to his wardrobe to find something to wear.

He’d long ago insisted to the servants that he didn’t need help in the mornings, only allowing them to do the bare necessities while he sleeps, so he’s well acquainted with his options as he fumbles for a shirt in the near dark. He finds an undershirt, then pulls out a slightly faded blue tunic, soft with wear, and the first pair of trousers he finds, which he thinks are brown.

He tosses the clothes onto his bed, then struggles out of his sleep clothes. Every movement sends either a sharp spike through his head or a roil of nausea through his stomach, making his progress falter as he does his best not to puke all over his clothing.

Eventually, though, Nikolai is dressed and as ready as he can be to get out of the castle. He slips out of his chambers and through the halls. Though it’s still relatively early, he knows the servants have been awake for hours, preparing the castle for the royal family’s awakening. He doesn’t see anybody as he makes his way out of the building, for which he’s grateful. He doesn’t know if he could handle even a basic conversation right now.

Only when he’s stealing across the grounds does he begin to wonder if this was the smartest idea. The sun may only just be peeking over the horizon, but already the world outside is bright enough to make his head and stomach revolt. He glances back at the castle and decides he’d rather face the worst his rebellious body can throw at him than whatever Vasily may have in store.

He expects the woods to be a refuge, from the light at least, but in his misery had forgotten that the protective canopy he’d been imagining now lies almost entirely on the ground beneath his feet. Each crunching step is like a crack hammered into his skull, the inconsistent light almost worse as he moves beneath the trees. And the smells. Have the woods always been home to so many smells?

Dirt and decaying leaves, tree bark and rotting berries. Each scent sticks in the back of his throat, gagging him.

He stops behind the nearest tree, overwhelmed by the assault on his senses, and bends down to expel the contents of his stomach into the underbrush. He’s too busy retching to hear approaching footsteps, but looks up when a voice above him speaks.

“Have a little too much fun last night, princeling?”

Nikolai blinks blearily at the Faerie prince, standing on the other side of the tree and looking just as put together as ever.

“Can you hush?” he mumbles thickly. “Just a little?”

Kaz chuckles and takes a step closer.

“Here,” he says, and his voice is softer now. He reaches out a hand to help steady Nikolai as he rights himself.

Nikolai swallows down more bile that rises as he does and takes a better look at Kaz. He seems to be suffering none of the ill-effects Nikolai is, and it feels deeply unfair.

“How are you so…” He lets his head loll to one side. “Normal?”

Kaz gives him an amused look. “There’s this spell,” he starts.

“Oh, right, of course,” Nikolai mutters, cutting him off, but not really talking to him. “How could I forget?”

He rolls his head to the other side, and his eyes catch on Kaz’s hand, pale against his sleeve where he’d grabbed his arm as he stood.

His brain sputters into motion, churning through the alcohol-induced haze to pull out memories of last night.

It doesn’t hurt that you’re, well…

Oh.

Perhaps one day you could satisfy me.

Oh, no.

Nikolai feels his face flare as he stares at Kaz’s hand.

He hears Kaz chuckle again, and slowly pulls his gaze up to his smirking face.

“Something on your mind?” Kaz asks knowingly.

Nikolai swallows. “Last night…” he begins hesitantly.

Kaz’s smile widens. He takes a step closer and Nikolai finds it suddenly harder to breathe.

“Did you have a good time?” Kaz asks, his eyes searching Nikolai’s. “Because I found the evening quite enjoyable.”

Nikolai’s brain, still slow and sticky as syrup, struggles to incorporate this. Kaz had enjoyed the evening he spent flirting with Nikolai. Surely that has to say something about his motivations, right? And for all that he wants to answer that question, his mind will not stop replaying Kaz’s admission.

He had found the evening quite enjoyable. The picnic, the food, the flirting. And, Nikolai realizes with a jolt, he did too. The food and the wine had been sublime, but they weren’t the main cause of the giddy rush of emotions he suddenly remembers from the walk back to the castle. That had been the company, the way they’d passed the time together, the coquettish remarks passed back and forth.

And now Kaz is here again, standing far too close to be proper, and waiting for Nikolai’s answer.

Nikolai clears his throat. “I did,” he says hoarsely. “Have a good time.”

Kaz’s eyes drift across his face. “Good,” he murmurs.

His eyes land on Nikolai’s mouth, his hand tightens around Nikolai’s arm, and Nikolai’s heart picks up as his own eyes drop down. For a moment they stand there, a breath apart, the air taut with expectation.

Then Kaz’s gaze drops. He releases Nikolai’s arm and steps back. Nikolai lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding and tries not to feel disappointed.

Kaz’s lips twitch slightly, but all he says is, “It was good to run into you again.”

He turns and is a few steps away when Nikolai’s brain catches up.

“Wait,” Nikolai blurts, somehow louder and quieter than he’d intended. His head twinges.

Kaz pauses, but doesn’t face him. “Hmm?”

The word had spilled from Nikolai’s lips before he could properly think through the consequences of saying it. He tries to come up with a reason for Kaz to stay that isn’t desperate or pathetically transparent.

“It’d be rude,” he settles on, “if you left me alone in the woods in this state.” A mere step away from pathetically transparent, but it’ll do.

Kaz does turn now. He watches Nikolai for a moment, an almost predatory look on his face. “Do you want me to stay?”

Nikolai does his best to seem nonchalant. “Maybe.”

Kaz’s expression shifts into a knowing smirk. He sighs dramatically. “I guess I have no choice, then,” he says. “Since you need taking care of.”

Nikolai is about to protest that he doesn’t need “taking care of”, when a sudden bout of nausea has him bending double again to heave into the bushes. As he’s spitting the last of the sour taste from his mouth, he feels a hand rub soothingly across his upper back. It moves to steady him once more as he stands back up.

“Have you had any water yet today?” Kaz asks.

Nikolai shakes his head carefully. It hadn’t occurred to him, in his rush to leave the castle, to bring water.

Kaz stares at him.

“What?”

“You need water after you drink that much,” Kaz says slowly, as if to a small child.

Nikolai feels instantly defensive. “Well, I never have before. Drunk that much.”

A sly grin makes its way up Kaz’s face. “Am I your first morning after?”

Nikolai drops his gaze. “I will puke on you,” he warns.

“Sure,” says Kaz. “But first, you will drink some water.”

Picking up a bag Nikolai hadn’t noticed, he leads Nikolai to a stream that cuts through the woods and guides him to sit on a sturdy log on the bank. Nikolai can’t see what he does when he kneels at the edge of the stream, but a light breeze picks up between them and he feels that same strange prickling sensation across his skin. He swallows back another onslaught of nausea.

Kaz straightens and returns to him, carrying a glass jar filled with water as clear and pure as what was in his wash basin earlier.

“Is it… okay for me to drink?” Nikolai asks, hesitantly reaching for the jar.

“I wouldn’t give it to you if it weren’t,” Kaz says.

Nikolai doesn’t quite trust him, not really, but he does believe the Faerie is incapable of lying, as he was taught. Nothing he’s said has been untrue so far. So he takes the water and drinks, his cautious sips turning into greedy gulps as the cool liquid hits his parched throat.

Kaz returns to the stream three more times before Nikolai’s thirst is quenched, then sits beside him on the log as Nikolai nurses the last jarful.

“There’s a banquet in two days,” Kaz says, abruptly breaking the silence between them. “You’re going to accompany me to it.”

“What?” Nikolai asks, startled. “Why?”

“You owe me.”

“For what?”

“For healing you the other day, for a start.”

“You said—”

“I said,” Kaz says, speaking over him, “that I wasn’t offering you a deal. Not that I was offering my aid for free.”

“That is the tiniest difference in wording,” Nikolai complains.

Kaz shrugs. “Wear something nice.”

“I haven’t actually agreed to this.”

“I’ll meet you at the edge of the woods at sunset.”

Nikolai closes his eyes and rubs his forehead with his free hand. It doesn’t help with the pain, but it does help him compose himself just a little. “And if I don’t show up?” he asks, opening his eyes.

Kaz turns his own cold, dark eyes on him. “There are other ways I can exact my price, princeling.”

Nikolai turns this over, along with all the stories he’s heard about the wrath of the Fae, in his head. There isn’t much the Faerie could take from him to make his life worse than it already is, but for the refuge of the woods. The thought of losing that peace would be enough to sway him, but he also finds he doesn’t want to upset whatever is between himself and Kaz. Whatever that is.

He sighs and takes another drink of the water.

“Fine,” he says. “I’ll be there.”

Chapter Text

Kaz paces between trees near the edge of the woods. He can see the castle, its bulk silhouetted against the oranges and pinks of the sky, its finials gleaming in the fading sunlight. It isn't a pretty building, even in full daylight, but cast in shadow it looks only like what it was designed to be: a sturdy fortress against outside forces. None of the grandeur of the palace Kaz grew up in, but still, it cuts an imposing figure shrouded in the growing darkness.

Kaz feels an odd jittery sensation in his chest as he wears a path through the fallen leaves. He shouldn't be feeling anything other than the satisfaction of a plan coming to fruition, but as time passes with no sign of the changeling, the restless energy within him grows.

Too many things could go wrong tonight. First and foremost in his mind being the changeling not showing up.

Those worries, at least, are assuaged when a shadow peels away from the castle wall and hurries toward the treeline. Kaz pauses in his trek through the underbrush to watch the changeling’s approach.

As he draws nearer, Kaz can see that the prince looks resplendent in a dark blue coat with gold trim contrasted with light trousers and a white tunic. When the other man spots Kaz, he alters course to head in his direction, and Kaz makes a show of eyeing him up and down as he comes to a stop.

“Well,” he says, allowing a smile to settle on his lips. “You certainly clean up nicely.”

The changeling pats absently at his hair before looking Kaz over. “As do you.”

Kaz extends his arm. “Shall we?”

Delicately, the changeling places his hand on Kaz’s forearm. Kaz uses his free hand to tuck it into his elbow.

“Are you ready, princeling?”

The changeling lets out a slightly shaky breath, mirroring the tension radiating through Kaz, then nods.

“As ready as I'll ever be.”

Kaz nods once, then focuses on the path to the Otherworld that he's known his whole life, the hill on the other side, and draws on the magic around them. There's a half-second of darkness, almost like a blink, then the Fae Court is before them, a glittering tapestry spreading beneath them.

The changeling’s grip on his arm tightens and Kaz looks over to see his expression looking much like it had the morning after he had crashed Kaz’s picnic. He pats the changeling’s hand.

“It’s not that bad,” he says.

“Easy for you to say,” the changeling mutters.

Kaz does know that the teleportation magic takes some getting used to, especially when someone else is in control, but he doesn’t concede this point. Instead he says, “You’ll be fine,” and takes a step down the hill, leaving the changeling no choice but to come with him.

Kaz steers them straight down the hill, on a direct path through the heart of the town. The more people who see them together, the better.

As they walk, the changeling’s hold on him loosens and he strides beside Kaz with more self-assurance than many of the courtesans of the Court ever have. Good. The changeling’s adaptability will help sell his role in tonight’s performance.

They haven’t made it far into the town when the changeling leans in and murmurs, “People are staring.”

This is true and, frankly, to be expected. After all, when the reclusive and stoic crown prince parades through town with another man on his arm a mere quarter hour before the welcome banquet for an honoured guest, it’s bound to draw attention.

“We don’t often get outsiders,” Kaz says. A simple truth that can be construed as an explanation.

“And I’m guessing few of those outsiders get a personal escort from the prince himself?”

“Very perceptive.”

“Is there a reason we’re walking through town this time?”

Kaz shrugs. “No point in sneaking when you’re my guest.”

“Couldn’t we have just teleported where we’re going?”

Kaz shakes his head. “Not directly. There are wards that limit teleportation magic around and within the Court.” He looks at the changeling, whose eyes are fixed on him. He sighs. “It’s a lot to explain, and we’re running late.”

They pick up speed through the town square, where curious citizens pause in their celebratory preparations to watch them pass. Hushed conversation picks up behind them as they hurry along the main road up to the palace.

Kaz’s leg starts to ache as they reach the bridge over the lake, but he almost doesn’t mind as anticipation builds within him. His plan is coming along almost better than he could’ve hoped. All he has to do now is make sure the changeling doesn’t trip him up at the finish line. But that should be easy enough. He’s planted the seeds, and from the way the changeling leans into him almost subconsciously, it would seem they’re growing nicely.

“Your majesty,” says one of the guards at the gate, pulling Kaz from his thoughts.

“Yes?”

“Who is…?” He gestures to the changeling.

Kaz closes his eyes briefly, praying that an inquisitive guard will not be the end of all his hard work. Before he can decide what to say, which half-truth to tell, the changeling jumps in.

“I’m an ambassador,” he says easily. “From the human realm. Our fathers have been in talks and thought it best if I be here tonight.”

Kaz does not stare at the changeling, that would give the whole game away, but he does hesitate a fraction of a second before nodding, marvelling at his quick thinking and again wondering at his ability to lie.

The guard looks surprised, but nods. “I see. Well, welcome to the Court. Please, enjoy your stay.”

The two of them pass through the gate and into the palace’s grand entry hall.

“That was… good,” Kaz says once they’re out of earshot of the guards.

“Probably could’ve made it more believable if I knew what the banquet was for,” the changeling says pointedly.

Kaz ignores him, in favour of flagging down one of the servants. She executes a deep curtsey when she reaches them.

“Your majesty,” she says, eyes on the floor.

“This is the guest I was telling you about,” he tells her. “I’ll need you to be extra diligent in taking care of him.”

Her eyes dart up to the changeling, then back to the floor. “Yes, your majesty.”

“Excellent. Thank you.”

It had cost him three favours to get human food into the kitchens, prepared alongside the regular food, and to get the servant to agree to serve it. But, should everything work out as he hopes, it will be absolutely worth it.

“Alright,” he says to the changeling as the servant scurries away. “Ready for our grand entrance?”

The changeling nods. “Let’s do this.”

Kaz leads the way to the massive double doors set into one wall of the entrance. They lead to the banquet hall, which is even larger than the entry hall, with a vaulted ceiling painted to resemble the clear blue sky of Faerie at midsummer, along with vast picture windows overlooking the lake and waterfall.

He pauses in front of the doors, where a herald waits to announce the incoming guests. He nods to the herald, who cracks open one door to slip inside.

Kaz can just hear the herald’s magically amplified voice announcing, “His majesty, the crown prince of the Fae Court, heir to the lands and kingdom thereof, ruler presiding, his most royal Kaz. And guest.”

The double doors open on silent hinges, revealing the hall within, crowded with people in every colour imaginable, all staring at the two of them.

At the opposite end of the hall, swathed in silks and in the centre of a large group of the Court’s ministers, is Inej, her disapproval evident to Kaz even over the immense distance and crowd between them. He lets his gaze sweep over her and the ministers attempting to win her favour, then turns to the changeling, who, to his credit, only looks mildly overwhelmed.

“Just follow my lead,” Kaz says, and pulls him into the crowd.

~~~

Nikolai stumbles slightly as Kaz drags him into the banquet hall. He’s only ever been to a few banquets in his life, and none anywhere near this scale. He’d had to dig in the back of his wardrobe for his most formal attire, given that he rarely has an opportunity to wear it.

Still, he finds his main anxiety is from being in a room full of Faeries, rather than the size of the gathering or his lack of familiarity with them. There are more ways for him to mess things up in the Otherworld than at home, where he mainly has to worry about staying out of his brother’s way.

They don’t make it very far into the hall before they’re stopped by a middle-aged woman with sharp eyes and a saccharine voice.

“Your majesty,” she simpers. “Such a pleasure to see you again after your confinement. And who is this —” she turns her gaze to Nikolai — “fine-looking young man?”

“This is my partner,” Kaz says, apparently unaffected by the cloying quality of her speech.

Nikolai’s smile freezes as the woman takes his free hand.

“What an honour to meet you,” she says, grasping his hand between her own. “And which part of the kingdom are you from?”

Nikolai blinks, stunned into a complete lack of thought.

“He’s from the human realm, actually,” says Kaz, and the conversation feels like it’s happening apart from Nikolai.

“Oh?” The woman raises her neatly manicured eyebrows at Kaz before turning back to Nikolai.

“May I have your name, young man?” she asks smoothly.

This is enough to kick Nikolai’s brain back into motion. He clears his throat. “I’m afraid you may not,” he says, the words practiced a hundred times when he was a child. “You may, however —” his gaze slides to Kaz, who’s watching him curiously — “call me Sturmhond.”

The eyebrows tick up again. “Very courteous,” she murmurs, dropping his hand. “I wish you and… Sturmhond? the best, your majesty.”

Nikolai sneaks another look at Kaz. His face has gone cold.

“You may think twice about trying to steal names here, Sofiya, especially from those under my protection.”

The woman’s eyes widen and she curtsies. “My apologies, your majesty, I didn’t know—”

“That I knew who you were?” Kaz finishes frostily. “Do not do it again, or I will have you thrown out of the Court altogether.”

“Y-yes, your majesty.” She hurries away, disappearing into the sea of brightly coloured fabric.

Nikolai is still trying to process the interaction when a servant approaches with a tray of small sandwiches.

“Refreshments?” he asks, eyes downcast as he holds the tray out.

Nikolai glances at Kaz, but his gaze is off in the crowd somewhere, apparently unaware of the new arrival.

“Thank you,” Nikolai says slowly, “but no.”

“Very good, sir.” And he heads off into the crowd.

Nikolai pulls his eyes away from his retreating form, to find Kaz now staring at him.

“Sturmhond?” he asks.

“It’s… a long story.” Nikolai sighs.

Sturmhond was the name he gave himself in imagined childhood adventures, an alter-ego who could brave everything Nikolai feared and then some. As he grew older, the character version of himself grew too, becoming not a knight or adventurer, but a privateer, winning treasures for the king and queen and receiving all sorts of favour in return. It’s a foolish dream, that maybe if he changed his name and face and vowed to serve his parents in such a way, they might notice or care about him, but it’s kept him company for so long that it’s hard to let go of.

Kaz watches him for a moment longer before shrugging. “Whatever works.”

They continue through the hall, getting stopped every few feet by attendees eager to have a moment of their prince’s time. Without fail, after the pleasantries are exchanged between prince and subject, attention shifts to Nikolai. Sometimes there’s an almost predatory hunger in the attention, sometimes it’s more of a mild curiosity, but no one lets his presence go unnoticed.

And without fail, Kaz introduces Nikolai as, “My partner,” to the point Nikolai begins to wonder if the words mean something different in the Otherworld.

Eventually, they find themselves face to face with a bronze-skinned woman around Kaz’s age, dressed in beautiful silks.

“Kaz,” she says, and her voice holds none of the adulation of the others they’ve spoken to.

“Inej.” Kaz is equally informal.

The name sounds vaguely familiar to Nikolai, though his mind is too full of the here and now to recall in what context he’d heard it before.

The woman looks Nikolai over, then looks back at Kaz. They hold each other’s gazes for a long moment, seeming to have a conversation comprised of nothing but slight facial twitches.

Eventually, she sighs and says, “This isn’t going to end well.”

“So you’ve said.”

“I mean it, Kaz. This is a bad idea.”

“What’s done is done,” Kaz says firmly.

“It’s not too late,” she insists. “You could leave and—”

But Kaz is shaking his head. “I’m already here, and so is he. It’s done.”

Nikolai, feeling very left out of the conversation, wonders what’s done, and what it has to do with him being at the banquet.

He’s about to ask something to that effect, when he notices the servant Kaz had spoken to earlier is now beside him, holding a tray of sandwiches that look almost identical to the ones he’d declined earlier.

“For you, sir,” she says softly, darting a shy glance at him. “They’re… safe for your consumption.”

“I see,” says Nikolai. “Thank you.”

The girl nods, and holds out the platter. Nikolai selects a few sandwiches and thanks the servant again as she leaves.

By the time he looks back at Kaz, the woman he’d been speaking to has vanished. Nikolai holds out one of the sandwiches.

Kaz frowns looking at it.

“They’re for you.”

“I know,” Nikolai says. “But you haven’t been offered any from the other trays and I thought you might be hungry.”

Kaz takes the sandwich, still frowning.

“Cheers,” says Nikolai, raising a sandwich of his own before taking a bite.

It's just as good as the food at the picnic the other day and Nikolai lets his eyes fall closed in pleasure as he finishes the hors d’oeuvre. When he opens them again, it's to see Kaz watching him, sandwich still uneaten in the palm of his hand.

Nikolai cocks his head. “What?”

“Nothing.” Kaz lifts the sandwich to his lips, which twitch upward. “Just enjoying the view.” He pops the sandwich into his mouth.

Before Nikolai can formulate a response to that, their moment of respite is interrupted by another guest intent on talking with Kaz.

“Your majesty,” says the man with a deep bow. “It is an honour to be in your presence.”

Something like distaste flashes across Kaz’s face as the man completes his bow, but it’s replaced by a cordial smile by the time he rises.

“Mr. Van Eck,” Kaz says. “You look well.”

“I trust the serving boy I sent here hasn’t caused too much trouble?”

Kaz’s smile stiffens, and Nikolai wonders about the history at play between the two men.

“Not at all,” Kaz says evenly.

“Good, good.” The man’s attention slides to Nikolai. “And who is this?”

Kaz’s hold on his smile releases as soon as Van Eck’s gaze is off of him. “This is my partner,” he says. “Per his request, you may call him Sturmhond.”

Van Eck holds out his hand and Nikolai takes it.

“Jan Van Eck. Former minister to the king.”

“A pleasure to meet you,” Nikolai says.

“The same, I’m sure.” He drops Nikolai’s hand and returns his attention to Kaz, who doesn’t bother to readopt his smile.

“Was that all?” Kaz asks.

“Yes, I simply wanted to make sure things were well taken care of at the palace, with your father away.”

“They are.”

“Good. Then I wish you all the best with your…” He eyes Nikolai with undisguised disdain. “Fling.”

Nikolai gapes after the man as he disappears back into the crowd. He turns to Kaz, who has procured a champagne flute and is taking a long drink.

“And that’s Jan Van Eck,” Kaz mutters.

“I take it he’s always like that?”

“Worse, usually.”

“Is that why he’s a former minister?”

Kaz sighs. “He’s retired, actually.”

“I think my father would’ve had a man like that killed.”

“Really?”

Nikolai shrugs. “Hey, why do you keep doing that?”

“Doing what?”

“Introducing me as your… partner.”

Kaz opens his mouth to respond, but is interrupted by the musical sound of chimes. The chatter around them dims and the crowd begins to make its way in small groups toward the tables bracketing the room.

Kaz sets his empty glass on the tray of a passing servant and grabs Nikolai’s hand. Nikolai pockets his remaining sandwich as Kaz pulls him between groups of Fae nobles, to the back side of the table running along the back wall of the hall.

They stop at the middle of the table, where two ornate chairs sit beside one another. Kaz pulls out the chair on the left, slightly taller and grander, and gestures for Nikolai to take the one on the right.

“But this is your chair,” Nikolai hisses.

Kaz squints at him. “And I’m offering it to you.”

“I can’t just—”

“Sit,” Kaz says in a harsh whisper.

Nikolai sits.

It takes a while for the hall to settle, people finding their places at the enormous tables, and when they do, Nikolai is surprised to find the woman, Inej, sitting across from Kaz and himself. Although, given the informality with which the two had greeted each other, perhaps he shouldn’t be.

Servants begin to dish out the first course of the meal and the hall grows steadily quieter as people receive their food and begin to eat. Nikolai notices that the servant who had given him his sandwiches is the one to put a bowl in front of him, and he guesses it must similarly be made with human ingredients.

Only once everyone has been served and started to eat does Kaz stand back up. He clears his throat and the attention in the room shifts in their direction.

“It is my greatest honour,” Kaz begins, “to host you all here this evening. My father is away on business, so it falls to me to take up his duties as host. But tonight is not about me, but our honoured guests. It is with great pleasure that I once again welcome my dearest friend, her royal highness, the princess Inej of the Kingdom Under The Hill, as well as her entourage. They will be staying with us for the foreseeable future, and it is our duty and our privilege to make their stay comfortable and enjoyable.”

Kaz pauses for a small smattering of applause.

“These are not the only honourable and respected guests here tonight, though,” he continues. “Some of you have already had the privilege tonight of meeting my own personal guest, a prince from the human kingdom and my loving partner.” Here, Kaz gestures to Nikolai who quietly lowers his spoon as he feels countless eyes slide to him. A murmur arises from throughout the hall, and he sees Inej, who has been frowning since the start of Kaz’s speech, narrow her eyes.

The addition of the word “loving” to the phrase “my partner” is not lost on him, and while it clears up some of his earlier confusion, it also serves to create more. Is there some Fae courting ritual he’s accidentally taken part in without knowing? Does sharing a meal together create some sort of bond in Fae culture that Nikolai was unaware of?

Before the murmur can grow too loud or Nikolai’s thoughts can spiral too far, Kaz goes on. “This is his first night in the Fae Court and I hope to make it special for him. Now, please eat, drink, and be merry and enjoy this welcome feast for our most esteemed guests!”

Kaz claps his hands, and, like a spell breaking, chaos erupts through the hall. Voices rise around them and some people do too, arguing loudly and clamouring for Kaz’s attention.

Nikolai lets go of his spoon altogether and turns fully in his seat to stare at Kaz, who he finds is already looking at him, with a slightly manic smile.

“What—?” Nikolai starts, but before he can get another syllable out, Kaz grabs his wrist and pulls him up.

Nikolai only has a fraction of a second to wonder why, before he’s hit with a flash of vertigo, an instant of darkness, and finds himself and Kaz no longer in the banquet hall at all. He squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head, still unused to the feeling of teleportation.

“Where are we?” he asks, cracking his eyes back open.

That question is answered before Kaz has a chance to respond, as Nikolai sees servants bustling past in a familiar low stone hall, interspersed with alcoves.

“Okay,” he mutters. “Why are we back in the servants’ corridors?”

“Fastest way to get where we’re going,” Kaz says. “Come on.”

Nikolai has no choice but to follow Kaz through the servants’ corridors where they are completely ignored by the servants passing them by.

“Why did you—?”

“Not now,” Kaz says curtly.

So Nikolai waits, questions building in his mind, until they’ve walked long enough that the corridors are no longer busy and they reach a familiar looking door. Kaz pulls out a key and unlocks the door, leading Nikolai into the antechamber where he’d been healed by Nina.

The room is empty but for the furniture. Nikolai looks around as the door swings shut behind him. There’s an armchair beside the fireplace off to one side of the door. In front of the fireplace is a couch, big enough for two people to sit in side-by-side, and against the back wall in the opposite corner is a small table with two chairs. An end table on the other side of the couch has a lamp, though it doesn’t seem to require flame to diffuse a soft light throughout the room.

“Come sit,” says Kaz, taking a seat on the couch and patting the space beside him.

Nikolai walks over slowly and lowers himself to the edge of the couch cushion.

“What,” he asks, “was all that?”

“I’m sorry,” Kaz says, sounding genuinely apologetic. “I thought I could make it a surprise.”

“Make what a surprise?”

“This.” Kaz gestures between the two of them. “Us.”

“Us?”

“I mean… if you want. I thought, based on how things went the other day…”

“The other… Oh.” Nikolai feels his face warm as he remembers the shared flirtations from the picnic, from the day after. The moment he’d thought Kaz was about to…

He swallows thickly. What Kaz is proposing would be dangerous. If Nikolai’s parents were to find him in a relationship with a Faerie, with their prince, they would disown him for sure. He would be left with nothing. But on the other hand, haven’t his parents shown time and again that they pay no mind to his goings on? Doesn’t he enjoy spending time with the Faerie prince? Doesn’t some part of him wish for something more between them?

Almost before he’s made up his mind, he feels himself nodding. “Okay. Yes.” He looks at Kaz, who’s watching him with a hungry intensity. “We can…” He hesitates, dropping his gaze to where his hands fidget in his lap. “Be ‘us’.”

~~~

And just like that, stage one of Kaz’s plan is complete. He turns away under the pretext of fiddling with the lamp, hiding the victorious smile he can’t keep from sliding across his face.

“I told the servant to bring the rest of your food here,” he tells the changeling when he turns back around. “I figured you wouldn’t want to be bombarded by everyone trying to learn more about you after that.” The truth, but not the whole truth.

In reality, he has to keep the changeling away from the ministers in attendance at the banquet, all of whom know of his betrothal to Inej. It was a near thing, running into Van Eck, though the former minister clearly dismissed this relationship as another of Kaz’s rebellious schemes, doomed to fail. Half-right, though this time Kaz is determined to succeed.

And keeping the changeling in the dark about the betrothal, about Kaz’s true purpose in courting him is paramount to his success.

It should be easy enough, convincing the Fae Court that he’s in love with the human prince. After all, it hadn’t been so hard to play the part at his staged picnic.

Kaz smiles to himself as he answers the knock at the door. Absolutely nothing stands in his path to success.

Chapter Text

The next morning, Kaz is jolted from his already light sleep by pounding on the door of his antechamber. He slips from his bed and pulls a robe on over his nightclothes, before swinging his door open and glowering out into the antechamber. A servant has the door to the hall cracked open and is whispering furiously to whoever is on the other side.

“Just let them in,” Kaz says flatly. “I’m already awake.”

The servant glances back at him, nods, and opens the door wider. In storms Nina, fully dressed in her usual red tones and with a look that says murder.

Nina waits for the servant to excuse himself before exploding on Kaz.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“It is too damn early in the morning for this shit, Nina.”

“You think I don’t know that? I would still be in bed if it weren’t for you and your bullshit !”

She does not hit him, though he’s sure she’d like to, but she does hurl the pillow from the armchair across the room. It hits the edge of the table beside Kaz and falls to the floor. He blinks at it, then turns to Nina with a raised brow.

“Done?”

“Not hardly. Your little stunt last night has got everyone in a fucking state and guess who has to deal with it. I am so sick of your shit.”

“Did you really come here at the crack of dawn just to yell at me?”

“Of course not, you self-obsessed ass. The ministers want your fucking head for putting the alliance at risk, Jesper and Wylan are under scrutiny for potentially being your accomplices, and Inej has been threatened with confinement to her quarters until the end of her stay. Because of you.”

“So…”

“So, you’d better come explain yourself or else it’s all our heads.”

“Can I get dressed first?”

Nina throws up her hands as if this is an unreasonable request. “If you must.”

Kaz retreats into his bedroom and takes his time picking out his outfit. He’d known the ministers would have something to say about his statement and subsequent disappearance, he just hadn’t realized they’d want to see him first thing in the morning. If Nina is to be believed, his ploy must have seriously alarmed them. Good.

He finishes dressing and returns to the antechamber where Nina is pacing and muttering to herself. She stops when she sees him and rolls her eyes so hard Kaz thinks they might get stuck.

“You are a real piece of work,” she says.

Kaz grins at her. He’s wearing the outfit that had been commissioned for his first solo trip to Inej’s home a few years ago. It’s unmistakable, with its loose-sleeved white shirt and flowy trousers.

“Well?” he says. “Best not keep them waiting.”

Nina glares at him for a half-second longer, then turns and flounces out of the room. Kaz follows, trailing her through the palace halls and up the three flights of stairs that he always avoids when he can, to the assembly room.

Nina knocks on the door, announcing, “His majesty is here.”

The door opens, revealing a room crowded with ministers and advisors who all clamour to be the loudest voice in the room.

Kaz winces at the noise level, but otherwise ignores them all as he makes his way to his spot at the head of the table. When it becomes clear that Kaz will not be addressing any of their overlapping concerns, everyone slowly stops talking.

“I’m sure you have questions,” Kaz says once it’s quiet. He holds up a hand to forestall any further commotion. “I will do my best to answer them. However, I would like to make it clear that I acted on my own accord. I would ask that my retainers and Inej not be punished for my actions.”

He can feel Nina’s gaze on him and he does his best not to roll his eyes. She and Inej are two sides of the same coin when it comes to assigning morality to his actions. Inej always tries to project goodness onto him, while Nina is convinced he’s always trying to cause the most harm. Neither of them are correct, really. Kaz has never operated within the bounds of their morals, and only ever incidentally falls to one side or the other.

“Furthermore,” he continues, “I do not expect any of your arguments to sway me from my course of action. I will listen to your objections, of which I’m sure there are many, but I assure you I have thought through my decisions.”

“But,” one minister at the far end of the table bursts out, “what about the alliance? You cannot throw it away for some boyish whim.”

“I fully intend to forge an alliance with Inej,” Kaz says evenly. “I simply do not believe a marriage alliance is in either of our best interests.”

“Your father will think—” starts an advisor.

“My father will think what he will when he returns and I will handle it. I know half of you are only here because you’re worried for your job security, and I will remind you that you are not my keepers. Your jobs are to advise and to manage the governance of our kingdom in my father’s absence, not to oversee my every action.”

“What about the king of Underhill?” another minister asks.

“I have a proposition that should make him reconsider the necessity of the marriage alliance.”

“What proposition?”

“I’m afraid that’s between him and me.”

“You cannot expect us to do our jobs without sufficient information!” Advisor Hoede blusters.

“I concur,” says the first minister, sitting back and crossing his arms. “This whole idea is ill-informed and bound to fail.”

“I disagree,” Kaz says. “And, if I may speak candidly, I don’t think you of all people are in a position to judge the actions of others.”

“I don’t… What are you insinuating, your majesty?”

“Only that every person in this room has things they don’t wish my father to learn about. It may be beneficial to all of us if we just let the matter rest for the time being. After all, there’s nothing any of you can do until my father returns.”

“And I suppose you want us to just cancel all the planned activities?” one advisor huffs.

“Not at all, Dryden,” Kaz says, standing. “Just know I will be attending them with my partner.”

“The whole point,” argues Dryden, “is to entertain our guests.”

“And I’m sure they will be entertained. Our outings are always diverting.”

And Kaz pushes his way out of the room, leaving the advisors and ministers in almost as much turmoil as he’d found them.

“I suppose you think that helped?” asks Nina, who had apparently followed him out of the room.

“It gave them something else to think about,” Kaz says, limping determinedly down the hall.

“You can’t blackmail your own government into letting you do whatever you want!”

“I’m not committing any crimes, Nina, dear.”

Nina growls. “And what about the —” she lowers her voice — “changeling? Does he know you’re using him as a political bargaining chip?”

Kaz gives her a look over his shoulder. “What do you think?”

“You really don’t give a damn about anyone but yourself, do you?” she snaps.

“I try not to.”

Nina makes a disgusted sound.

“Are you going to keep following me all day?”

“No, thank fuck.”

She turns down a perpendicular hall and leaves Kaz to his thoughts as he makes his way down the stairs and back to his rooms.

Inside, he finds Jesper and Wylan conversing in hushed voices. They look up when the door opens, and Jesper’s face hardens.

“Kaz,” he says flatly.

“Jesper.”

“Do you know they interrogated us?” Jesper asks, a hard edge to his voice.

“Oh?”

Jesper narrows his eyes. “Don’t play innocent, Kaz.”

Kaz sighs. “What do you want me to say?”

“An ‘I’m sorry’ would be nice.”

“I’m sorry.”

Jesper shakes his head. “Wylan thought they were going to send him back to his dad’s place.”

Kaz closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. “I wouldn’t let that happen. Van Eck is an insufferable prick.”

“Right,” says Jesper. “Lest we think it’s because you care.”

“I don’t have time for your pity party, Jes,” Kaz says, opening his eyes.

Wylan still hasn’t said anything, looking subdued in the corner farthest from the door.

“This is exactly why I didn’t get you two involved,” Kaz mutters. “Look, I am sorry. I didn’t expect the ministers to be this uptight about it.”

“About you threatening the alliance?” Wylan asks, a note of incredulity in his tone.

“It’s not—” Kaz breaks off. “I can’t do this right now. Did they tell you anything?”

“Nothing we didn’t already know,” Jesper says. “Which is jackshit, by the way.”

“If you knew anything, you wouldn’t be back here already.”

“So we’re supposed to thank you?”

“No,” says Kaz. “Just be about 15% less salty.”

Jesper huffs and rolls his eyes, but lets it drop.

Kaz flops into the armchair by the door. “Do either of you know about the activities the advisors planned?”

“There’s a boating excursion in a few days,” says Wylan.

“And a luncheon next week,” adds Jesper. “And obviously the masquerade ball when your father returns.”

Kaz looks up at that. “Do you know when that is?”

Jesper shrugs. “A couple weeks? I’m not sure there’s an exact date yet, since the Council could go for a while.”

Kaz nods thoughtfully, turning this information over in his head. It should be no problem to get the changeling to these events, but in the meantime, they’ll have to be seen together outside of the palace to really sell the ruse. If even the townsfolk believe their prince to be in love, it will make everything run smoother.

“Alright,” he says. “In that case, I’ll be going out today. Let me know if anything comes up.”

~~~

It’s easy enough to find the changeling again. Why he haunts the woods like a restless spirit is beyond Kaz, but it makes getting a message to him more straightforward.

After informing his purported paramour of the upcoming outing on the lake, Kaz returns to the Fae Court to begin his preparations. This involves a lot of scoping out places at which he and the changeling could be spotted spending time together.

Rather than walk from location to location, Kaz works within the strictures of the town’s wards to teleport between sites, only walking when absolutely necessary.

After two days of this, interspersed with hours spent locked in his bedroom in deep thought, and a few visits to local socialites, his leg is in less pain than it would have been had he walked everywhere, but feels stiff regardless.

He curses the poorly healed limb as he dresses for a day spent on the lake, foregoing his usual black attire for a dark blue tunic over a grey undershirt and trousers. Once he’s satisfied that he looks presentable and won’t pass out from too long in the sun, Kaz heads into the woods to meet the changeling.

He spies the changeling from a little ways off, balancing his way along a fallen log. As he nears, Kaz gets to watch as the changeling spots him and hops off the log, excitement radiating from him. There's something almost endearing about how his face transforms into a boyish grin at the sight of Kaz.

Kaz allows his own face to soften into a smile as he takes in the changeling. He wears a deep teal tunic that suits his complexion and his curls are arranged less surreptitiously than they had been the night of the banquet.

“You look nice,” Kaz says.

“So do you.”

“Are you ready to go boating?” Kaz can’t keep his voice from going flat on the last word.

The changeling cocks his head. “Not a fan of boats?”

“The water,” says Kaz, not willing to elaborate beyond that.

The changeling looks like he wants to ask more questions, so Kaz cuts him off with a blunt, “Come on.”

He reaches for the changeling’s hand, then teleports them back to the hill outside the Court.

The changeling regains his composure much faster this time, and Kaz leads him back into the town before grabbing his hand again.

“Wha—” the changeling starts before the flash of darkness overtakes them.

“—t?” he finishes, blinking at the boathouse they’d visited before.

He looks around at the bustle of people moving boats into the water, then frowns at Kaz.

“I thought you couldn’t teleport here.” His voice is accusatory.

“I told you, it’s complicated,” Kaz says, a little irritably. The proximity to the shore of the lake always makes his nerves fray.

“Okay,” says the changeling, apparently sensing his shift in mood. He glances between Kaz and the shoreline. “Are you going to be… alright?” he asks. “I mean, if you don’t like water…” He trails off.

“I’ll be fine.” As long as everything goes smoothly, that will remain true.

Before the changeling can voice the thoughts so clearly etched on his face, they’re noticed by one of the men handling the boats.

“Your majesty!” he says with a bow. “And his most esteemed guest.” Another bow toward the changeling, though not quite as low. “Please, come with me. Your boat has already been prepared.”

Kaz, still holding the changeling’s hand, follows after the man.

Their boat is not yet in the water, which is good. It’s next to a boat into which climbs Inej and, in Kaz’s stead, Nina, who, upon seeing Kaz, makes a rude gesture behind the backs of everyone else. Inej, settled into the boat, turns and sees Kaz and the changeling approaching. Her lips flatten into a fine line of disapproval.

“Your highness,” Kaz says, nodding to her.

“Your majesty.” She returns his nod with a slight dip of her chin, before turning away from him completely to take the provisions being handed to her and Nina by the servant who will be rowing them.

The man leading them dutifully pretends not to have noticed this exchange, and instead helps first Kaz, then the changeling into their own small boat.

“Specht will be rowing you today, your majesty,” he says.

Kaz nods as another man salutes from the shore beside them. He stares with no little trepidation at the waves lapping the shore a few inches from the prow of the boat as provisions are handed into the boat and preparations are made for them to get underway. Unbidden, his memory flashes to another time, another body of water. His stomach rolls and he closes his eyes against the unwanted flashback.

“...Kaz?”

He realizes the changeling must have asked him a question. He takes a deep breath and turns to him, opening his eyes.

“What?”

“They want to know if we’re ready to go,” the changeling says.

“Oh. Yes.” Kaz makes himself nod.

Their rower, Specht, salutes again and begins to push the boat into the water. Kaz squeezes his eyes shut again at the sound of the water splashing against the wood of the boat, at the rocking feeling as the ground beneath them gives way to open water and Specht hauls himself up into the boat behind them.

Abruptly, he feels a hand cover his, and he opens his eyes to find the changeling watching him, concern etched across his brow.

“Are you okay?”

“I’ll be fine,” Kaz says again.

“Why are you doing this?” the changeling asks without judgement. “If it’s this bad…”

“Because I have to,” Kaz snaps. He closes his eyes again and takes in a steadying breath. “It’s bad form if I don’t show up to these outings.”

“I see.”

They carry on in silence for a while, Kaz swallowing down his rising panic as they’re rowed further from shore.

Usually, when boating is on the docket as an activity, he has Inej by his side to help him through it. She’s one of the few people who knows why the water is so bad for him, maybe the only one who knows how bad it truly is.

But this time it’s just him. Him and the changeling, who doesn’t know, doesn’t understand, and Kaz cannot make him. He might as well be alone. Alone on the lake with the memories of the water.

Kaz shudders as the water invades his senses. The sound, the smell, all of it pulling him down into the depths of his mind like an anchor tied around his waist.

“Hey.” A voice cuts into the darkness, a rope hauling him back toward the surface. “You’re alright,” it says. “You’re alright.”

He is patently not alright, but the voice is helping. “Keep talking,” he says roughly.

“Okay. Um…” The voice falters for a moment. “Oh! You remember the picnic?”

Kaz tries to focus on that memory over the ones threatening to overwhelm him. He nods vaguely.

“I really did have a good time with that,” says the voice. The changeling’s voice. “The food was good. Better than good, honestly. And the wine was… delicious. But you know my favourite part?”

Kaz shakes his head.

“My favourite part was the company,” says the changeling. “I enjoyed our…” He pauses in a way that’s either deliberately suggestive or just comes across that way due to the context. “Conversation.”

Kaz swallows hard and opens his eyes. The changeling is looking at him, his features soft. Normally Kaz would roll his eyes at such a display, but he doesn’t have the energy.

“Maybe we could do it again sometime?” the changeling suggests.

Kaz narrows his eyes. “Converse?” he asks.

The changeling laughs, shaking his head. “No. Well, I mean, yes, but I meant the picnic.”

Kaz nods. He feels slightly less sick to his stomach now. “We could have another picnic,” he says, thinking of one of the spots he’d scoped out. “We just have to survive this first.”

The changeling laughs again. “We’re almost to the other side of the lake,” he points out.

Kaz turns in his seat to see that they are, in fact, nearing the far shore of the lake, a rocky outcropping near the base of the waterfall. He also sees the rock protruding from the water which, apparently, Specht does not.

Before he has time to call out a warning, there’s a jarring shudder as the hull of the boat scrapes the rock. The wood, not intended to have sudden, forceful contact with sharp rocks, does not hold together well. With a shrieking noise, it tears apart where some apparent seam in the woodworking was torn open by the rock, and water begins to pour into the bottom of the boat from the hole.

Kaz’s eyes widen as he watches the water bubble up into the boat, as he feels it soaking through his shoes.

The changeling and Specht are on their feet, and the boat rocks wildly around its newfound anchor point with their frantic movements. Kaz feels frozen in place by the mild water sloshing around his ankles.

“Get up!” the changeling says, grabbing Kaz by the elbow.

“We’re going to have to swim for shore,” says Specht.

Kaz shakes his head wildly. Already the water is up to his mid calf.

“Kaz,” says the changeling. “He’s right. The shore isn’t that far. Come on.” He pulls uselessly on Kaz’s elbow.

Kaz shakes his head again, feeling dizzy. The boat is sinking around them, being dragged down by the force of the water flowing into it.

The changeling succeeds in pulling Kaz to his feet, but the motion only makes the boat sink faster, and now the water is up to their thighs and rising quickly. With a crack, the part of the boat that’s stuck on the rock splinters away from the rest of it, and the three men are no longer standing in anything.

And Kaz is back in the water, the black depths pulling him down, down, down, claiming him the way it failed to last time. He didn’t have time to take in a breath before his head was underwater and his lungs burn for air even as his mind fills with the swirling shapes of the past.

He is drowning. It is dark and raining and he is going to die, like all the men around him. The wreckage of a ship fills the water around him, useless to him as it all sinks down, the same way he sinks down. He has never faced death like this before, never felt its heavy presence bearing down on him like the pressure of so much water above him.

A severed limb brushes against his arm and Kaz screams, letting the water rush in to fill his lungs as he thrashes away from the contact, toward what he thinks is the surface. More body parts litter the water, and through the water that fills his mouth, he can taste blood.

Somehow, miraculously, he breaches the surface, sputtering and coughing out lungfuls of water as he struggles to keep his head above the frothing waves. A corpse, buoyant in death, floats past and Kaz’s flailing arms find it and grab it, hauling him onto the bloated, waterlogged form. He wants to puke from the smell, from the feel of dead flesh, but all he manages is to hack up more seawater.

He floats there, in the remains of the ship, waiting, waiting for someone, anyone to come find him.

An arm grabs Kaz around the waist, pausing his descent ever downward. Kaz writhes away from the grip, from what he’s sure is just another rotting corpse, come to haunt him as he dies. The grip does not loosen for his thrashing, though. If anything, it tightens, pulling him slowly but inexorably upward.

Even when his head breaks the surface and he can breathe again, Kaz continues to lash out at the body pulling him forward and up.

“Stop…” A gurgling noise followed by coughing. “Fighting me.”

Kaz does not stop fighting, not until they’ve made it, somehow, into the shallow water and the other person lets go, leaving him to flounder on hands and knees up the rocky shore, coughing and spitting up water.

He’s shaking as he sits, huddled into himself, looking out at the lake, but seeing only flashes of dead men, of fireballs over the water, of drowning, drowning, drowning.

“Kaz. Kaz.”

Kaz’s eyes slowly focus on his surroundings.

The changeling is there, calling his name, waiting for him to respond to something.

Kaz shakes his head, then turns and throws up onto the ground beside himself.

“You’re going to catch a cold,” the changeling says, suddenly closer, kneeling beside him.

Kaz doesn’t say anything, maybe can’t say anything. The water, the drowning, the dead men, still linger.

“You need to dry off,” says the changeling, insistent.

Kaz stares at him.

The changeling sighs. “Shirt,” he commands, holding out his hand.

With numb fingers, hardly comprehending what he’s doing, Kaz pulls off first his tunic, then his undershirt and hands them to the changeling.

The changeling stares at him, at his bare torso, for a long moment. He shakes his head.

“Specht went to get dry clothes.”

Kaz lets his gaze unfocus again, staring at nothing as the changeling talks.

“He should be back shortly, he said. Said you could teleport us back if you weren’t…” He trails off. “Anyway, I don’t expect we’ll be here too long. If you’re worried about propriety. Which you probably aren’t. Saints. Are you going to be alright?”

Kaz doesn’t answer.

“Okay, that’s probably a stupid question. What—?” He cuts himself off. “Not the time,” he mutters. “Do you need anything?”

Kaz shakes his head slowly. What he needs is a way to purge the memories from his mind, a way to banish the water, the corpses for good. But the price for those spells is more than Kaz is willing to pay.

“Can I do something to help?” The changeling sounds a little desperate. He is, perhaps, the only being in the Otherworld who has ever sounded desperate to help someone else for free.

Before Kaz can respond, there’s a drop in the pressure around them, and Specht appears before them, forcing Kaz’s eyes to refocus. His arms are full of fabric. The clothes, Kaz thinks dully.

“Your majesty,” Specht says, politely averting his gaze from Kaz.

The changeling stands and grabs two bundles from him, carrying them back to Kaz, who registers distantly that he must have also removed his undershirt and tunic at some point.

“I hope the clothes fit you, sir,” Specht says to the changeling. “I borrowed them from a soldier who’s about your height.”

“Thank you, I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

The changeling holds out the obviously finer clothes to Kaz, who reaches for them instinctively.

It takes him several moments to build up the energy required to get up and follow the changeling into the small copse of trees up the shore. He feels utterly detached from himself as he pulls off his sodden trousers and redresses in the clean, dry clothes.

When he emerges from the trees, he sees the changeling talking to Specht, who is now holding the changeling’s wet clothes over his arm. Kaz walks over to them, hardly noticing their conversation stop at his approach.

Specht takes the wet trousers from Kaz’s limp grip.

“Your majesty, I’ll take these to be cleaned and dried right away,” he says. “I’m sure you can take it from here?”

Kaz nods. He can. He just needs time.

Specht bows and, with another ear-popping pressure change, he’s gone.

“Can you handle getting us back?” The changeling doesn’t sound worried about not getting back. Rather, he sounds concerned for Kaz’s well-being.

Kaz swallows and forces himself to speak. “Eventually.” His voice comes out hoarse and broken.

“Okay. What do… I mean, do you want to sit down or something while you recover? Or would walking around help? Talking?” The changeling fidgets while he talks, his hands reaching toward Kaz before evidently thinking better of it and twisting together in front of him.

In answer, Kaz stumbles a few steps back toward the trees, then sits ungracefully on the rocky ground. The changeling hesitates a moment, then follows, plopping down next to him with an “Oof”.

They sit together in silence for a while, Kaz focusing on the sound of the changeling’s breathing, on the feeling of his own breath filling his lungs. He still feels distant, pulled away from himself by the memories, but somehow the changeling’s presence is comforting.

After several long moments have passed and Kaz no longer feels the ghostly sensations of water dragging at him and dead flesh on his skin, he takes in a deep breath and gets to his feet. The changeling follows him up and Kaz holds out his arm. The changeling takes it and, after another deep breath, Kaz teleports them back to the other side of the lake.