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THE COLD HE FELT INSIDE COULD NOT BE WARMED BY bread or burning alcohol. Elo had tried both, and only felt the chill sink further.

He saw Benjen’s smile. He heard Perin’s cry as he realised his husband had died. He saw Tulenne disappear into flame and bones. He shivered with Legs’s screams as he perished in the worst way Kissen could imagine.

He hoped he would never have to tell her. He’d rather crawl back to Gefyrton on his hands and knees. He’d rather be as dead as he felt his soul had become. Frozen in ice.

But Arren had tried to warm him with his small jokes, his little mercies. Elo knew he had done it for him.

So, he brought his own offering up from the kitchens through the servants’ stairs to the study where two guards now stood on duty in the flickering torchlight. They stood to attention as Elo approached and allowed him to knock.

‘Enter.’

Arren sounded exhausted, and Elo found him just rising warily from the chaise, his hand on the sword at his waist. He dropped it with surprise. ‘Elo?’

Elogast held out to Arren the pot he had put together, covered with a thick, fluffy slice of his own herby bread, traditional to this area of Middren.

‘I …’ he began, then the door shut behind him, enclosing them together.

Alone again, for the first time since Gefyrton. ‘I guessed you would not have eaten.’

Arren opened his mouth, then closed it, glancing at the tray that had been brought to him earlier. He clearly had partaken of none of it save the wine. Someone had at least lit the candles in the room. Enough to cast a dim, flickering light.

Elo put down the pot on the table in front of the chaise, as if he was laying down a gauntlet.

Arren stared at it for a moment, then lifted its bread and lid and peered in through the fragrant steam.

Elo was happy with the stew, made from beans, fatty meat, and spiced sausages called talchet, as well as preserved lemons from the previous season.

No king’s fare, no prime cut. Soldier’s rations.

Elo bowed, his chest tight and heavy, as if ice were growing in his ribs where he could feel the scar of Hseth’s hand. He would take his leave. He must. ‘Good night, King Arren.’

‘Stay?’

Arren said it so softly that Elo wondered if he had heard. He paused, his back to him. He shouldn’t stay. He was so angry; he was so sad. His hands trembled when he did not bake, his stomach cramped and he couldn’t stop seeing the battle. Every battle. The gods, the wars, Hseth, Kissen, Canovan.

Gods, he was so lonely.

‘All right.’ Elogast turned back to the chaise. No, too close. He sat down instead on the heavy chair across from it. Arren smiled shyly in that infuriatingly boyish and attractive way he had, then went and poured a second glass of wine from his carafe, which Elo accepted. What else could he do?

‘You made this, didn’t you?’ said Arren, sitting and lifting the lid of the pot again, before ripping off a piece of the bread and dipping it in. ‘It smells like the hunting stews you used to cook.’

Elo remembered. Quick pots in lodges, shooting ducks from hides along the rivers and ponds in the north.

They had eaten similar food the day that Elo had saved Lord Yether’s prideful son from a boar’s tusk.

Arren was trying to make conversation, but Elo was worried that if he opened his mouth he would say something stupid.

Or just start screaming.

He shook his head, pressing down his fears. ‘I helped with this batch of bread,’ he said. ‘But the stew was assisted by young lady-heir Geralfi, much to the ire of the cooks.’

‘The talchet sausage was her idea?’

‘She insisted that it was the proper way.’

Elo had found the Geralfi girl, Freia, crying in one of the gardens he had hunted through for herbs. She had looked so like Inara, had watched her people strung up on cliffsides and her entire city crash into the river she had lived on her whole life.

‘She shouldn’t be working in the kitchens of another lord’s manor,’ said Arren.

‘It is better for her to be doing something,’ said Elo. ‘Pain will bind a person to their bones if they’re not careful.’ He paused. ‘I lent her a horse. My horse. And he was used at … at the west gate.’

Legs. He had promised to keep him safe. Had kept him away from the war. For nothing. All for nothing. He blinked back the hotness in his eyes, the tears. He had cried enough.

Arren paused, then sat up slowly. ‘Elo,’ he said, his eyes raking him. ‘I’m sorry.’

Elo tried to focus on the candle on the table, its flickering light, as he thumbed his wine.

What was he doing here? Why had he come?

Was it because he could not face Elseber, Ainne and Perin and the rest?

Was it because he wished he had died on the bridge so that he did not have to feel again this …

this bloodless wounding that caught his heart and seized his lungs and set his body shaking and aching?

Was it because he wanted to fight Arren, blame him?

Or because he needed someone who knew him?

‘You can talk to me,’ said Arren. ‘If you want.’

Elogast frowned down at his glass, then at last took a sip of Arren’s rich wine. Almost too sweet.

‘I don’t know how to mourn,’ he said at last. ‘Benjen was barely a friend any more. I ran from all my friends and shut myself away. When my mother died, I couldn’t grieve then either, I was still too buried in my own darkness.

’ He took a breath and looked at Arren, who had laid his life before a god’s blade to save him.

He had adored that face once. Studied its every detail.

Now he felt like a stranger considering a statue of someone he had known long ago.

Arren’s cheeks reddened slightly under his scrutiny, and his lips parted, as if he wanted to say something.

But Elo hadn’t finished.

‘I didn’t allow myself a life without you, you know. Not a hope. Not a breath. And I didn’t even see it.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘The cruelties of what you became. I only saw the face you showed me. And I blame myself for that. And I blame you too.’

Arren swallowed, putting a hand to his forehead as if it pained him. ‘We agreed not to speak about the things that hurt us,’ he said.

‘So, we lied to each other,’ said Elo. ‘Through silence.’ And not for the first time.

He wondered whether Skedi would have liked it, whether those lies of never speaking were a kindness or a cruelty.

‘I have never been very honest with you, Arren. Not with my love, not with my anger.’ He ran his fingers over the braids that Lotta and Benjen had made, their hands firm, deft and sure. Never again.

‘Perhaps I should have stayed with you,’ Elo continued, half to himself.

‘Perhaps I should have challenged you every day. But you held the world too tightly to see any light in it. You allowed yourself to be cruel, all in the name of doing what you “must”, not what you “should”. And little by little, you lost yourself as well. You became the thing that you hated. A god, desperate to cling to power no matter who it hurt.’

The pain was pouring out of him, and Arren took it. The king did not speak, did not move. He just … looked at Elo as he would look at a river rising, knowing nothing could be done to stop it.

‘Instead,’ Elo went on. ‘I let myself shrink to nothing. Less than nothing. Barely existing because I forgot how.’ He laughed.

‘It took a killer of gods to remind me what it was like to be alive. That it was something I deserved … something I wanted. A woman I barely knew brought me back to myself.’ He looked back at Arren, whose expression had shifted slightly into jealousy.

‘I tried,’ said Arren. ‘To involve you. To visit you. I tried to tell you I loved you, in silent little ways, over and over.’

Elo remembered him coming, sneaking out of the palace like when they were youths, sleeping, he on the floor, Arren on the bed, hand spans apart.

‘But you didn’t tell me to leave,’ Elo said. ‘You asked me to stay, “over and over”, stay in Middren, stay near you, and I couldn’t bear to leave you. Even knowing that my mothers were waiting, that I had another life I could live.’

Arren’s eyes slid off his, moving away, to the wall, the window.

You ask too much of me. Elo had said it in Gefyrton, and he had meant it.

‘I did love you,’ Elo said. He felt hot, uncertain, foolish, but sure.

‘I loved you deeply, Arren, and entirely. All those days we spent at war, all those years after. And I am sorry I wasn’t there for you in the way you wanted.

I’m sorry I wasn’t honest with you. I owed you more than that.

But I didn’t deserve what you did to me in return.

You say you love me, but you hurt me. You became obsessed with gods and power.

You broke us, and yourself. You can never take that back. ’

They had crossed swords and clasped arms on a battlefield, but now here with bread and stew, by candlelight, Elo unburdened the pains of his heart, the depths of his soul.

He could not live with them another day.

He could not choke on the burning ash of their friendship, their love. He had to let it go.

And he felt the warmer for it.

Arren stood up, angry now. He paced across the room, around the table. Back again. ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ he said to Elo’s surprise, accepting all of the other accusations but fixating on the one that stung the most. ‘You took other lovers!’

‘We both did,’ said Elo. He hadn’t seen this Arren in an age; energetic.

Wilful. Vulnerable. His eyes were bright in the candlelight, his hair shone with golden strands.

His shirt was undone from throat to belly, flames exposed to the world.

‘I’d known you since we were boys. I’d known your every pain, your every rejection.

How you longed for stable ground but never found it. ’

‘Apart from with you!’ said Arren.