Page 3 of The Fulbourn: Pitch & Sickle

‘There you go.’ Jane was most cheery. ‘I’ll be back to check on you in a little while.’

The door shut behind Silas with a decisive clunk.

Pitch lay on his stomach, with the pillow over his head and the blankets piled over his lower body, covering it entirely. He was shirtless, a state that usually would have pleased Silas very much, but not so this day. Pitch’s back was peppered with creatures that resembled leeches. The shapes were similar, but the colouring very different. These specimens were mottled shades of oranges and reds and browns, like slug-shaped autumn leaves. And they were at least double the size of any leech Silas had had the misfortune to find in his boots. Where they sat, Pitch’s skin was the purple and yellow of fresh and old bruises.

‘Gods, you are still here, aren’t you, Silas?’

‘I am.’

‘Clearly, youhavegone deaf since I last saw you, then,’ Pitch huffed from beneath his pillow.

‘Do the akaname pain you?’

‘Of course they pain me, Silas. They have teeth like razors.’ Pitch pulled his head from beneath the pillow. The movement set the creature nearest his right shoulder blade curling in on itself, and the daemon hissed like an angry serpent. ‘Fuck.’

‘Are they helping at all?’ Silas asked, clutching his silly flowers. It struck him that no melody had erupted on seeing the prince. No musical declarationHere lies a daemon. There was every chance Silas’s new skill was as temperamental as his memory.

‘I suppose they are not making it worse.’

Silas decided to rely on Jane’s assertion that Pitchwasimproving. ‘Are these creatures from Arcadia?’

Pitch snorted. ‘Gods, no. Lucifer refused to deliver me an antidote. I was not dying, which he was no doubt disappointed about, and he didn’t wish to make another journey so soon for fear of drawing attention. So I am to suffer through, as a woman does through her morning sickness.’

His irritation caused him to move a little too much, and his groan had Silas hurrying to the bedside.

‘Try to stop moving about.’ He dropped the flowers onto the bedside table, next to the remnants of the shattered vase which Jane had piled there. There was a damp patch on the fawn-coloured rug.

‘Andyoutry to stop bloody fussing, Silas. Equally impossible tasks I’d say.’ Pitch kept his face turned towards the window. ‘I want you to go away.’

‘The problem is I don’t wish to go. So here we are, at an impasse.’ Jane had been right to push him. Silas should have shouldered his way in here before now, no matter the daemon’s tantrum. ‘I really don’t care less if you throw up on me.’

‘Well, I bloody do,’ Pitch said, a little too emphatically, twitching in pain. ‘This is not about you.’

‘It is very much about me actually.’ Silas stooped to pick up a shard of pottery that Jane had missed. ‘I fail to see why I must be banished. From my own room at that.’

‘You know why.’ So low Silas barely caught it.

‘Because you seem to think it a terrible thing if I see you in any distress, but that is exactly when I am most concerned with seeing you.’

‘Gods, you are ridiculous.’

‘Not so much as you.’

That made Pitch laugh, which was not really a good thing at all. It caused him to jolt. The akaname must have bitten in harder, for he released a furious yell.

‘Enoch’s fucking taint!’ The cursing went on for some time.

‘Easy now, stay still.’ Silas forgot his own rule about touching the daemon unless requested and laid his hand on Pitch’s bare shoulder. The prince’s ribs flared with a deep inhale. ‘I’m sorry…for what you are having to –’

‘Stop apologising,’ Pitch said, soft but curt. ‘If I have to move to slap you, I won’t be pleased.’

‘Nor will I.’

Pitch’s body shuddered with another stifled laugh. ‘Fuck. You are not helping at all.’

‘Perhaps Ishouldgo, and leave you be.’

‘You’re here now.’ He was short. ‘So you may as well be useful. You could do that…rubbing thing you do to me.’