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They heard me though. And sometimes, when they thought nobody watched, I saw their smiles.
This was a dream, one I hadn’t had in a long while.
I knew what came next, but as a prisoner of the past, I could no more stop fate than I could force myself to wake.
A man stumbled from the procession, drawn to my voice like a moth to the flame. He probably thought himself the flame, and me the moth. “I’ll give you coin, boy.” His mouth twitched. He dragged his thick, gnarled hand down his whiskered chin.
I stopped playing, with the bow balanced in my fingers, and my song ended, half sung. I was no boy but perhaps appeared to be one in ragged clothing, bones jutting.
“Well?” he grunted. Not even the deluge could wash away the stench of mead on his breath.
The procession marched on, their umbrellas held aloft against the rain like shields. Water dripped from my hair and ran down the back of my neck. The cap would have helped, but I needed that to collect coins.
A gold coin winked from between the man’s thick fingers. I had a few silver ones in my cap, but no gold. Gold would help fill my belly for a week.
I peered through wet bangs. Raindrops on my lashes blurred any details from the man’s face. He didn’t want me to sing, didn’t care for the music, although that was probably how he’d found me.Go to the boy on the corner, he sings and plays other things for coin.
“Pretty one, aren’t you?” He thrust the shiny gold toward me. “Take it. You want it. So take it.”
What I wanted was to play my fiddle and sing, and for people to drop a few coins into my cap as they passed by. It really was that simple. But others kept making it complicated.
The man grabbed my sleeve in his fist and hauled me forward. My boot caught my cap, scattering the few coins I’d already earned. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I want, boy.”
His rank breath brought tears to my eyes.
He hauled me away from the street, away from the people, deeper into the narrow alley, where rain spilled from gutters and ran across sunken cobbles.
He was strong, stronger than me. And angry, for reasons I couldn’t fathom.
He flung me against a wall, grabbed my hand, and shoved the coin into my palm. I looked at it, at the water pooling around it. Gold never tarnished. It didn’t rust, it remained unchanged, no matter the time or trauma it endured. It could be reshaped, made into other things, but it was always gold, always bright.
“Don’t say much, do you?” He groped at his belt, unlooping it from the buckle. “Eh? You got a voice, I heard it. A sweet voice.” His voice grated, thick with greed.
All I wanted was to sing. It was all I’d ever wanted.You sing like a lark, my precious boy. One day, we’ll fly free from here, just you and I.Mother was gone now. She had freed us, but we couldn’t have known the world outside our cage was worse.
The man tore the fiddle from my hand and flung it aside. It clattered across the cobbles and came to rest in a puddle.
He reached inside his trousers. “Turn around, boy.”
All I wanted was to sing.
He wiped his hand across his mouth and stepped in.
The knife I’d taped to my back, under my shirt, slipped easily into my hand. It slipped easily into the man too, time and time again, until the rain turned red, and he lay on the ground, no longer moving. The air tasted of metal, like spilled coins in the rain.
I picked up my fiddle, shook off the water, and strode back toward the street corner. Once there, I righted my cap, collected my coins, and played the song Mother had taught me, and I sang like a—
“Lark?”
The dream vanished, swept aside in a blur. I blinked awake, looking up into Arin’s pale blue eyes. His hand burned against my chest. Sunlight poured through the chamber’s many windows. “You were thrashing,” he said, his expression so full of concern I almost believed it. “I wasn’t sure if I should wake you…”
The memories swirled, like water down a drain, water from broken gutters, bloodred…
“It’s fine,” I croaked, and reached for my head, as though to steady the stream of images, memories, dreams. “Thank you.” I wasn’t back there, back then. But I needed more, I needed my anchor to tie me down here, in the now, in this moment. I grasped Arin’s worry-filled face and pulled him into a savage kiss. His brief resistance melted away, and the prince moaned into my mouth, then brought his knee over me, mounting my hips. I was already hard: he didn’t ask how, or what I’d dreamed to make me so. Instead, he took my cock in his hand, hitching my breath and pausing my heart.
How did he know I needed this, needed to fuck, with no words, no questions? We were strangers… so how did he know my heart?
Arin moaned again, his kiss turning sloppy. He rocked, pumping my cock, while his bounced between us. His naked body gleamed in the bright golden morning light. His hair shone a messy mane of gold—never tarnished, never changing, but it could be reforged into something else, like he’d tried to reforge himself. A contradiction, a riddle. I’d begun last night hating him for his lies, but that hate had been lost among kisses and quivering thighs.
