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As Danny glides past Rory, he murmurs dazedly, “But the queen’s always been there. How can she be dead?”
“If you hadn’t noticed, D-boy, a lot of people aren’t really into the whole Royal family thing just now. It may have passed you by when you were busy tonguing your pawns.” I glare at Rory as I pass him, and with a tired sigh, Rory ends up acquiescing. “Sorry, Danny. You know I don’t mean it.”
But his apology goes as unnoticed as his sarcasm. “What about our stamps?” Danny asks instead, an endearingly simple question, and in the silence of the chiefs’ dorm, nobody can provide an answer.
“We’re screwed,” Finlay says from his bed, his hands tucked behind his head. “If Antiro’s gone this far, then we’re utterly fuckin’ screwed.”
I curl myself on the bed opposite, beside a motionless Danny, and note the space where I remember the radio had been. Rory slumps across his bed from the middle, so that his head and feet hang off the end.
“We’ve always been screwed,” Rory mutters, his gaze stuck to the ceiling as he points languidly to himself. “Dead mum.” He raises himself slightly and points to me. “Dead dad.” He gestures to Danny. “Separated mum.” And then he points to Finlay. “Separated dad. And also a mum so sure of her political prowess that she’s absent for so much of your life that she may as well be dead.” Finlay frowns while Rory points to the ceiling, somewhere upstairs where Luke remains hidden. “Dead dadandnow a dead mum. Ding-ding, dead parent jackpot.” He shakes his head. “Allof us are utterly broken. We’re all utterly screwed to buggery.”
“Dinnae take yer shite oot on my maw when everyone in the world knows whoyou’vegot for a dad.”
“I know fine well our surviving parents have become borderline psychotic in their grief,” Rory drawls. “I firmly included myself in that. My initial hypothesis was that rich people don’t make ideal parents, but the saint ruined that by having a mother who doesn’t even write to her. At least my father — well, heusedto.”
Although I bristle, I don’t rise to the bite of his words. Instead, I note that Rory’s barbs have intensified significantly since leaving the fireplace, that his cruelty has returned like an old familiar coat.Armor, I realize. When the world falls to pieces, he grabs whatever will deflect the rage of others.
“We should sleep,” I say in a pointed tone, hoping the franticness of the past day will ease with some shut-eye. It’s been way too intense in here lately, and it’s already ramped up a notch.
As I sag next to Danny, I know that there’s no way I’m going up to the girls’ tower when Luke’s still there. I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from entering the fireplace, from curling into his arms, from trying to make the world a better place for him, even when his world has shrunk down to a tiny, almost airless alcove.
We get ready for bed. Teeth are brushed, lights are dimmed. Although every bed is open to me, the idea of sex is far, far removed from our minds. In fact, there isn’t just no interest in it: there’s negative interest, the thought so improper as to induce nausea. I sleep beside Danny, blowing a goodnight kiss to Finlay and stretching my hand out to Rory’s bed, which Rory grabs hold of like a lifeline. We say nothing, only observing each other in the dark, while Danny curls a sleepy arm across my waist.
I don’t know if I drift off or not, but I’m suddenly alert when Danny whispers, “Does this mean Luke’s king?”
I swallow, turning my face to him. My arm is hanging off the bed, cold and grazing the floor with my fingertips. “I don’t think so,” I mumble sleepily, wondering if Luke is still upstairs, whether he’s wide awake or in a disturbed sleep. “He already abdicated — remember?”
“But they said they didn’t believe it.”
There is no answer to this. How are you supposed to prove you are who they think you’re not? Virtuous, when they know you’re a fraud? In the darkness, Danny murmurs, “If Antiro’s truly behind this, then it’s scary. They’d already been acting as policy-maker, lawyer, judge and jury… and now they’re, what, executioners, too? So they’ve decided the rules, accused the Royal family of flouting them, found them guilty, and determined that their sentence should be death.”
“That’s exactly it,” I whisper, my body chilly although the chiefs’ dorm is mercifully warmer than the girls’ tower. “It’s all so unfair.”
But also there’s the whisper I try not to indulge tonight, the one that saysit’s all me, it’s all me, it’s not Antiro, it’s all meas I remember the ritual.
As I try my best to clamp down on it, I find myself craving fresh eyes and a sensible brain delivered preinstalled by morning. God knows I need them desperately. Again, I don’t realize I’ve drifted off until I feel the weight of a body sink into the other side of the bed. I’m curled on Danny’s warm bare chest, and Danny’s eyes snap open in the darkness at the newcomer.
“Cannae sleep,” Finlay says, sounding embarrassed. “I need… I need youse.”
Swallowing, Danny nods and peels back the covers. Finlay slides in, scooting closer to Danny than I’ve ever known the two of them to be.
“You could have gone over to Rory,” Danny mutters, taken aback as Finlay’s arm slides across his waist.
Finlay lightly scoffs. “He’s in some fuckin’ mood — and nae wonder. Spends the whole month paranoid about some fuckin’ ritual, and then the queen ends up deid straight after it.” He raises his head over Danny’s chest to check Rory hasn’t heard him. But Rory remains out of view, hidden beneath the large pile of blankets. “He’ll be up tae high doh — again.”
“‘High doh’?” I ask.
“Stressed oot his nut,” Finlay clarifies in a grim tone. “Again.”
I take another sad backward glance at the mountain of blankets in the bed beside us. “I don’t think he’s stressed,” I remark quietly, thinking of our conversation from earlier about grief. “I think he’s heartbroken. He pinned everything on that ritual and it’s backfired. He just wanted everything to work out, and it hasn’t.”
My words hang in the air until Finlay hums a soft noise of agreement. “Fuckin’ control-freak perfectionist leader-boys, who think they have magical powers,” he mumbles against Danny’s chest, which causes Danny to squirm. Finlay sighs. “We sure dae pick ‘em.”
I haven’t mentioned the sights at the loch, the magic that had swum in the air. And now, looking back on it, it feels like a lie — or a dream at the most. It’s something no one else would rightly believe, and even my concrete certainty that everything that night had happened — the vibrant loch, the colored stones, the return to normality as the ritual completed — is suddenly fading fast as the death of Luke’s mother balloons into a bigger, more immediate problem.
But when I fall asleep, I dream again of the running loch. I dream of sparkling crystal-blue waters and the glitter of neon stone.
When I wake again, it’s to a wall of warmth and muscle pressing insistently against my back.
Danny and Finlay are at peace in front of me, their heads bowed together contentedly in sleep, hair tangled and breaths as one. I glance over my shoulder and find Rory looking awkward as he tries to edge into bed.
“I can’t,” he whispers, sounding destroyed as his throat closes up. His eyes are underlined with smudges, his pupils surrounded with red. Again, he tries, “I need…” but his words falter.
Understanding, I gesture to the space beside me and delicately nudge Danny, who slides across to Finlay with a sleepy moan, freeing up extra space in the bed. Rory presses in closer to me, his strong arms encircling my waist as our warm skin connects all over our bodies. Flushed together, he kisses my nape tenderly. I hear the hammer of his pulse.
“I love you,” Rory says, quieter than a whisper, into the darkness, and my heart thrums like hummingbird wings. I grab hold of his hands and hold him tightly, sharing his pain, his shock, his grief, his heartache, as I lean against Danny.
And then when it’s morning, when the sun slants through the small line of windows and a cold new day dawns, I realize someone else has slipped into bed when I’d been soothed by Rory’s arms and the love from the others. On the far side, gazing up at the stone ceiling with his hands tucked behind his head, is Luke. No expression exists on his face: it’s perfectly blank as I reach across Danny and Finlay to stroke the skin of his bicep with my fingertips. But when Luke turns to me, he shoots me a small, faltering smile that doesn’t extend to his eyes, and I see that of course he remains broken, the black porcelain of his pupils chipped and cracked as water attempts to seep past the glaze.
“I love you,” I mouth over to him, and he swallows, his eyes flicking up to the ceiling once again. He doesn’t say anything in response, but he slowly takes my hand in his and entwines our fingers together.
