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Days of bliss. I’d like to say we were dignified, but I’d be lying.

We couldn’t keep our hands to ourselves, even while training, while I spun away from him, dodging the lash of his sword. I had yet to play offensive. I’d yet to learn how, but I did learn how block him with my axes, in spite of them being smaller than his mode of defense.

With our weapons crossed between us, both of us pushing our weight against each other, I’d make a heady remark. He’d kiss me swiftly over the blades.

Sometimes Nicu and Lyrik would join the practice. The squatter used his rondel dagger while Nicu observed, uncomfortable around weapons. Yet Aire insisted he be capable of other protective methods, so the Royal accepted an offer to learn hand-to-hand combat. Aire made no secret that it would take a great feat for Nicu to progress, to understand the bare minimum of orientation and where to aim his fists during a quick-motion sequence, but he would find his own footing with the passage of time.

Aside from the glade, Nicu and Lyrik retreated into separate corners. Since Hallo Fest, Nicu had been stony, whereas Lyrik fluctuated between grimaces and sarcasm—along with occasional slips wherein I’d catch his eyes flitting to Nicu’s tart profile, scavenging for something that had lost its color and dried up. There and gone.

It meant that Aire and I became the buffers in conversations around the fire pit.

Once, misled to believe they could handle it, Aire paired off Lyrik and Nicu during training. At the onset, Lyrik complained, calling it an unfair fight.

“Come on,” he sneered. “I can’t bash in the songbird’s fac—”

Nicu’s right hook landed. It knocked the prick square off his feet.

Shaking out his hand, Nicu stared down at the squatter with unbridled glee. Furious, Lyrik scrambled off the grass and vaulted forward, but Aire got there first, shackling the young man’s shoulders to hold him back.

Would Lyrik have actually hurt Nicu? I seriously doubted it.

From the way Lyrik’s eyes burned, I had a feeling the rogue would have done something entirely different if he’d he gotten his hands on the Royal.

The treehouse became one giant arena, with us romping through unsupervised, hunting each other with swords and hatchets. We turned the place into a battlefield and then a playhouse. When not brandishing blades, Aire and I rested on the roof of a lookout point, watching the stars with Punk and Nicu.

We swung on the swings. We ate and drank.

Oftentimes, Aire and Nicu exercised the horse and mule. Lyrik potioned and brooded. I drafted weaponry and chopped firewood.

During one particular sunset, Aire and I rode his courser into a brighter spot of this fabled woodland, where we explored the outcroppings and then groped each other atop a picnic blanket.

We’d taken to training at dawn, our nights claimed by other activities. The kind that had my golden knight clasping my thighs and charging at me until I chanted his name. The kind of nights in which I watched his naked ass flex as he walked to the hearth, stoking the flames for us.

The intimacies multiplied, him brushing my hair, me watching him bathe, us dressing together in comfortable silence. Us talking of our families and childhoods.

It should have been enough, and it was for a while, and then it wasn’t.

He still wore his ring.

The longer this went on, the more I felt the cut of it as he kissed me, or as he clung to my waist, or as he held my hand during walks.

The jewelry glared in the light. A sliver of his past, eternally strapped to him.

I was his. But was he mine?

He had said that I’d restored his heart. But had I won it?

What would happen at the end of the month? Would he report me to the Crown for trespassing?

How would this dishonest story end?

***

I chomped on a persimmon, the sweetness spilling over my tongue as the door to my bungalow creaked open and footsteps approached. I rolled my eyes. Lyrik had been grumbling about me hogging the fruit. He’d taken to keeping count of the bushel, although there was plenty.

I spoke with my mouth full. “I’m eating my designated portion, Lyrik—”

A pair of hands whirled me around, the persimmon slipping from my fingers as predatory blue eyes filled my vision. “It’s not Lyrik,” he said before hoisting me into a kiss.