Page 47 of The Villains of Winter

“James, your problem is with that asshole. You’re grieving, I get it. But we didn’t come here to hurt you.”

“Put that down–”

Elliott’s ears burned. Their voices were becoming warbled, panicked shouts to his ears beneath water. He could hardly focus, no matter how desperately he tried.

“Don’t you dare swing that axe again! Have you lost your–?”

“Put that down! You could kill us–”

“I’ll only ask one final time. After that, I won’t ask for my clothes back.”

“Fine! Take the damned clothes. After you get back to the dormitory, we will need more than an apology, Wilde.”

“James, we could die of cold before we reach the town.”

“Then you should run to keep your bodies warm.”

Elliott felt the edges of his vision tint with darkness. Every instinct in him urged to greedily gulp down air. His mind, slowly, painfully, retreated from him. He didn’t realize he’d lost consciousness, until James pulled his body out of the stark waters and into the bracing December air.

“Breathe, Elliott. They ran away.”

Elliott weakly withdrew northern boreal air in through his nostrils. His enervated body had breached the limit where everything stung so powerfully, he could no longer feel what precisely hurt any longer.

James quickly concentrated on whether Elliott would live. After all, his lungs often failed in the winter when he was young.

Elliott felt his limbs hauled near the fire, but it took several long minutes for feeling to return to his rimy skin, thawing him as snowflakes decorated his thick, long eyelashes. He gazed with frailty at James and smiled. We have blood-free clothes now.

Furtively, James smirked in return, then glanced at the Bruin Bell Tower striking eleven in the distance.

“Perfect timing.” James heaved Elliott to his feet for the second time. “Head for the train. I’ll tell Kitty everything.”

James averted his gaze from Elliott’s eyes, because he knew if Elliott was the one to say good-bye to Kitty, he’d never compose himself. Elliott would be overwhelmed with distraught emotions and remorse. He’d get himself caught, because he would stay too long with her. If only to be with her. He’d spend his last moments at her side before the law enforcement came for him.

He’d leave James behind.

ACT II

Amare et sapere vix deo conceditur.

Even a god finds it hard to love and be wise at the same time.

​​ EPIGRAPH

“The more you want, the more you stand to lose.”

– Aesop

620-564 BCE

“…There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad.”

― Homer, The Iliad

“Man is not who he thinks he is, he is who he hides.”

– André Malraux

​​ PART SIX: THE FOX AND THE SWAN