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I tilted my head to the side in acknowledgement that he had a good point. While Magnus searched for a rag to wipe the box off with, I grabbed a hand towel and went to work rubbing soot off Peter’s hands and arms, then his face.
“I think a nice, long bath is in order for us later,” I told him with a flirtatious wink.
“You don’t look like you need one,” Peter said with a smug grin, then wiped the hand that I wasn’t toweling off across my face. “Oh! Now you do.”
I jumped a little at the unexpected action, then touched a hand to my face. It came away sooty.
“You little prick,” I laughed, trying to grab at his hands with the towel.
Peter dodged out of my reach, laughing. “Very big prick, you mean,” he said, slipping to the side as I chased him.
“If you want to call yourself a very big prick, I won’t argue with you,” I laughed as well.
I caught him, which turned out to be bad for me as it meant Peter could throw his sooty arms around me, smearing black stuff all over my jacket. He leaned in to kiss me as well, rubbing his dirty face against mine even as he invaded my mouth.
I didn’t realize how much I needed the release of being silly and hot with Peter until our arms were around each other and we were both moaning with joy. I pushed him against the kitchen counter, grinding my growing erection against his hips and gripping the back of his head so that I could hold him to me for an even more ferocious kiss.
We pawed and groped at each other until Magnus interrupted with, “As much as I adore watching the two of you maul each other, you may want to drag your eyes this way for a moment.”
Peter and I broke apart, panting heavily, and found Magnus with the metal box cleaned off and open on the counter not far from us. He held a small, leather-bound journal of some sort that seemed to have made him extraordinarily happy.
“What is it?” I asked, panting. I kept my arms around Peter and my body leaning into his so he couldn’t move freely.
Magnus turned the journal so that the pages faced me and Peter. I squinted to read it. As far as I could see, it was a list of names and cities.
“That isn’t a list of other spies on the frontier, is it?” Peter asked, tensing against me, his breath short with more than one kind of excitement.
“It’s a list of something,” Magnus said. “The only way to discover for certain would be to investigate each of the names in this book.”
“Is there anything else in the box?” I asked, moving away from Peter.
I peered into the box and saw a few leather pouches that appeared to hold coins. One was opened, showing coinage that I’d never seen before. I picked one up and frowned at it.
“It’s a poor likeness of my brother,” Magnus said, unable to wipe the smile off his face, “but it would appear Julius has taken to minting his own coins now.”
“Should we do that too?” Peter asked, moving so that he could pick up a coin to examine as well. “Coins with Magnus’s image on them,” he said to me as though that were a joke.
I laughed. “More likely he’d put our images on the coins.”
“Your faces on the front and renderings of your erect cocks on the back,” Magnus said, then breezed right on to, “Between this book, the stamp Hadrian wore around his neck—which I still have in my pocket, by the way—and new coins from the Old Realm, I think we have everything we came here for.”
“Should we look around a bit more?” I asked as Magnus tucked the journal and bag of coins bearing King Julius’s face into his jacket, then closed up the singed box, looking around for a place to deposit it. “In case there’s something else of value in the house?”
“We should at least tidy up what we’ve already gone through,” Peter said.
“This from the man who looks as though he’s been cleaning chimneys,” Magnus said, one eyebrow raised. He gathered up the box, the rag he’d cleaned it with, and the towel I’d started cleaning Peter off with and gestured for us to return to the main room.
“I can take off my jacket and look reasonably clean until we get back to the cottages,” Peter said.
“That might be wise,” Magnus agreed with a nod.
We set to work tidying the main room of Hadrian’s house until it looked almost exactly as we’d found it. Magnus did one final check upstairs as Peter gingerly returned the box to its hiding place in the chimney and I swept up the soot. We did the best job we could making sure the house appeared untouched—and really, if Hadrian did have a maid who came by now and then, how would they know what had been touched by us or touched by Hadrian?—then we climbed out through the window again.
“We could have used the back door and made sure it locked after us,” I pointed out once we were well away from Hadrian’s house.
“What if it didn’t lock from the outside?” Peter asked, brushing off his jacket with one hand while he held it in the other. He still looked a mess, but not so much that anyone on the streets paid us any mind.
No one in Hedeon paid anyone else any mind in the best of times, I realized the farther we walked. I wondered if that were new since the Dying Winter or if people in Hedeon had always been that way. The only thing of any interest that I saw on our way to the cottages was some sort of commotion near one of the shops. That had me wondering if the shop in question was the one that Sebald’s friends owned and if word had spread that Barthold was dead. Perhaps his shop and its contents were up for grabs now? But no, it was too soon for people to know Barthold was dead. Maybe they were upset because the shop hadn’t opened that day.
