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“Did you think I didn’t?”
“No, I know you do. Storm-Wielder. Dragons-Foe. Protector of princesses on their marriage-journeys.”
“One princess, and you were there too.”
“Every day an adventure.” Em sat up. The shirt slid enough to bare one shoulder, not the one with the bite-mark scar. “I’m not as good with a sword as you are. Knives, maybe. But I cheat.”
“I know,” Aric said. “Magic.”
“Just a little. I honestly am very good, even if you’re better.”
“I know.” He’d watched Emrys practice, over the last two years. Dedication, single-minded. Almost inhuman, or maybe exactly inhuman, focus. Em had been used to strict discipline, meditative rituals, physical work, the elements of a harsh and exacting childhood. Sleeping on stones, kneeling in silence. “I don’t want you to think you have to do this one. I don’t want to ask you to put yourself in danger when it’s not even really our job, this time.”
Em gave him the most unimpressed look Aric had seen on anyone not in feline form, and held it for an excruciatingly long wordless minute.
Aric winced. “Okay, fine, yes, you wouldn’t say yes if you weren’t fine with it…it’s your decision, I know it is….”
“Listen.” Em held out both hands; Aric took them. “Yes, this one’s personal. Your friend, injured. Your heart, wanting to save people. I love that about you. I love you. But I’m not doing it for you. Or if I am, it’s another reason. Not the main one.”
Aric nodded. Em’s fingers were more slender than his, but fierce and commanding, holding him.
“You saved me,” Emrys said, “two years ago. When I didn’t think anyone could—when I thought maybe I deserved everything they told me, that I was something so unnatural, so unclean that the fire—but you thought I was worth saving. And I thought…I want that. Well, and you, of course. But I thought…I want to do that for someone else. Not the fabulous sex life, I mean, the rescuing. Because sometimes people need that, and you and I can do that, and it means something.”
Aric nodded again, because he didn’t have words. In awe. In love.
“So I’ll fight giant snails with you, or ghosts, or my father, or whatever it is next,” Em finished. “Because it’s worth doing.” He paused, thoughtfully. “So are you. Worth doing.”
Aric, not at all expecting that, nearly fell over laughing. Em pounced on him, kissed him, stretched out atop him: smugly satisfied.
“You’re everything I could ever want.” Aric put both arms around him. “Every adventure, every day. Definitely worth…doing.”
“And you’re everything I never believed I could have. My hero.” Em said it seriously, under the teasing; his smile lit up the night, candlelight and hail and ice and all. “Let’s rescue a village from angry ghosts.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Aric agreed, and tumbled Em down beneath him into the nice big bed, grinning as his fairy reached up to pull him down.
Chapter 6
Boulders of ice and rock gloomed. The path, frozen hard, glinted like knives. Aric’s breath became a plume of dragon-smoke; Em’s did as well, but smaller, he noticed. “This might be tricky.”
“I don’t mind cold, I said.” Emrys regarded the iced-over mountain ascent as if planning a campaign, thoughts moving behind grey eyes. They’d left the horses; no reason to put Ginger and Starlight in danger. The walk up into the hills had grown increasingly uncomfortable despite layers: coats, cloaks, gloves, hoods. “I might be able to do something about the path.”
“At least it’s not raining.” It wasn’t, but only because the rain had drained itself. Snow hunched and loomed in fantastically tall shapes, smothering trees and brush and signposts. Treacherous ground promised slips and falls. The air hummed, skeletal and vicious, cold as funeral stones.
Emrys shaded his eyes, peeked into the pass. “Do you recall where the guard towers were?”
“Will it matter? According to Theo no one’s left alive.”
“I was wondering what might have brought the ghosts out of hiding. If they weren’t here even a few months ago. Some sort of disturbance, a new construction, an unearthing…”
“Makes as much sense as anything else.”
“Or it could be worse. A necromancer, a warlock, raising the dead.”
“Thank you for that.”
“I’m not sure I could do that.” Em knelt while talking, tugged off a glove, touched the frost-sparkle treachery of the path. “I’m not that strong. And I imagine it wouldn’t feel…good. I don’t know, though. There are some stories…connections, the otherworlds, the underworlds…my father’s country isn’t the same as the land of the dead. Not exactly. But there’re some…connections, I think.”
Aric looked at him for a second: outwardly unremarkable aside from the prettiness, simply a short and competent young man wrapped up against bitter cold, fingers touching the earth. “Your mother’s stories?”
