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Then Mattias was wet to the knees, and it was time.
“Are you ready, my lord?”
Mattias had asked that same question every time, all the way back to the first time, as a smooth-faced boy with an as-of-yet unbroken voice. Only a lad, and already stronger than anyone else in the Keep; strong enough to brave the waters of the well for his master, the boy who couldn’t stand under his own power.
Yes, Náli ought to say. But the answer was no. No, no, no. He was never ready.
He gathered a breath–
And the air was split by a loud, bugling cry, one that echoed off the smooth, stone walls of the cavern and momentarily silenced the screams of the dead.
Náli knew that cry. He turned his head, and then blinked to ensure he wasn’t hallucinating. On the far side of the pool, pale blue eyes glowing, as white as the water itself, Valgrind stood, shaking out his ruff and chittering unhappily.
“He’s been kept down here since we arrived,” Mattias said, voice full of apology. “We’ve fed and watered him. We would have taken him out on the slopes to play. But. Your mother–”
“Ah. Of course,” Náli said.
“She was concerned about the Keep’s…reaction to him. Given drakes are thought extinct.”
“Well, we couldn’t have the maids swooning in the corridors, could we? Valgrind,” he called, not very loudly, because he couldn’t, but the drake snapped his jaws shut and cocked his head like a curious dog. “Stop all that bleating, you great lug. Have some respect for the dead.”
“Not that they’ve ever had any respect for you,” Mattias muttered in a rare show of sourness.
It startled a laugh out of Náli, who tipped his head back into the crook of his captain’s arm and gazed up at him, affection offering a fleeting warmth, a push-back against the chill of his magic. “They haven’t, have they? But I’m their servant, not the other way around.”
Mattias looked pained. Quietly, a soft plea: “Náli.”
He was too drained to shiver in pleasure at the sound of his name. “Put me down, Matti,” he said, and Mattias’s throat jumped as he swallowed, though his gaze never wavered.
A low grumble issued from beneath their feet; the surface of the pool rippled and splashed at the edges. A tremor from the mountain, its hot magma boiling, sending shudders through the earth.
Valgrind bleated out another distressed cry.
They were out of time.
Expression still wounded, Mattias lowered him slowly. His slippers had come off, somewhere along the way, and his bare toes hit the icy water with a shock.
Náli gasped – but the tremors stopped immediately. The water gave one last shudder and lay smooth, the last ripples dying away at the banks.
Arms still tight around him, Mattias stood him upright, until the soles of his feet kissed the cold, cold granite of the stair beneath him. Submerged to mid-shin, the icy chill of the water wrapped around him – and fused with him. He stopped shivering; his teeth no longer chattered. He and the cold were one. His vision turned strange, and he knew his eyes had gone the same cool-cream color as the water, the blue of his rises and black of his pupils lost behind the veil of the dead.
Dread lingered, but it had become a distant sensation, a suggestion of disquiet at his periphery. It was perhaps one of the worst aspects of all this: the way that, in the grip of the water, he forgot how to hate it. How easy it would be to slip fully over, and never come back: nothing but a cold corpse bobbing to the surface for Mattias to fish out.
No, he thought, fear spiking, one hot pulse before peace settled again. He rested his hands over Mattias’s much-warmer ones where they perched at his sides. Fitted their fingers together, small to large, rough to rough. If nothing else, Náli hadn’t gone quietly to his doom like his father had, soft-handed and perfumed and untrained. He’d fought, and he had the bruises and sword-calluses to prove it.
“Matti,” he whispered. “It’s time to let go.”
Across the water, Valgrind paced, tossing his head, grumbling deep in his throat. Náli could swear he’d grown since he met him. Gods knew he ate enough.
Behind him, Mattias made a low, pained sound. A touch at the back of Nail’s neck, brief – Mattias’s forehead, he thought, as warm breath tickled at his collar. But then he murmured, “Yes, my lord,” and released him. Gripped the shoulders of his robe.
Náli untied the laces in front, and let his arms fall to his sides, so Mattias could draw the silk down and off of his body. He heard the whisper of the material as Mattias folded it over his arm, and then silence, save the throb of his own pulse in his ears, and Mattias’s quiet, rough breaths. This was the part when the Guard captain was supposed to step up out of the pool, and leave the water free of all outside influence.
But Mattias never had. Not even when Náli was a boy, when Mother had harped on him in her shrill voice.
How did he gaze at him in these moments? Náli had always wondered. With longing? With revulsion, because Náli was only a half-dead thing, after all, and not a warm-blooded, vital boy like he ought to have been?
Náli took one step, and then another, water lapping up his calves, covering his knees. He walked down the centuries’ old stairs carved into the stone of his ancestral home, the cold suffusing his lungs, filling his throat like Valgrind’s ice-fire.
