Page 60 of The Sorcerer's Alpha

They lay holding each other as the warm air dried the sweat from their skin. Sycamore rested his head on Marut’s chest as Marut drew invisible lines across his back. He was half asleep when Marut said, “I love you more than I knew I could.”

Sycamore pressed himself up on one elbow to look down at Marut’s face. He stroked his fingers over Marut’s cheekbone and deliberately opened the bond to share everything he was feeling: his crushing sorrow, his resignation, his love that the ancient poets would have wept to speak of. His joy for the months they’d had together. He would cherish these memories for the rest of his life.

Marut reached up to touch his chin. “Your heat will come soon. We could stay here until it’s passed.”

Sycamore scraped his teeth over his bottom lip. He was due any day, in fact, and had privately hoped it would come over him while they were still on the road, so that they would have an excuse to stop for a while. But he had delayed for long enough. “We had better not. I’ll do well enough in the palace, with servants to tend to me.”

“All right. Tomorrow, then.”

Sycamore lay down again and closed his eyes. The breeze drifted through the open tent flap and stirred his hair. Marut’s heart beat beneath his ear, slow and strong.

* * *

They didn’t speakin the morning as they dressed and broke camp. The morning dawned bright and dewy, full of singing birds, and the horses walked with lively steps and snorted to each other as they climbed to the pass, undaunted by the slow cart traffic headed into the city. Marut couldn’t resent Bunny’s good spirits, but they served as a stark counterpoint to his own bleak mood. He was hollow inside, not despairing but simply numb.

At midday, they stopped on the far side of the pass to take their meal. From the roadside berm where they sat shaded by a cedar tree, Marut could see Banuri in the distance, the bright houses strewn over the hillside and the palace rising above the city on its bare outcrop. Despite the dark cloud hanging over him, his heart lifted to see the city once more. He had missed Chedi.

“The palace looks so big from here,” Sycamore said, following Marut’s gaze. “I haven’t seen it like this since I first came to Banuri. I thought it was its own separate city. It doesn’t seem so large when you live inside it.”

“No? I get lost every time I leave the cantonment.”

Sycamore managed a lopsided smile. “I suppose it’s true I don’t leave the upper palace much. Well, at any rate.” He turned his attention back to his meal. They finished eating in silence and mounted again, and went down into the valley.

The road split as they approached the city, one branch continuing west along the river and the other turning to climb the hillside to the palace. At that busy crossroads, noisy with hawkers calling out their prices and oxen lowing, Sycamore abruptly turned Rhododendron off the track and brought her to a stop some distance from the road, away from the clamor. She dropped her head and began grazing in the clover.

Marut guided Bunny to follow. He could sense Sycamore’s inner turmoil and could guess at its cause. No one in Banuri knew they had survived the disaster in the badlands. They could turn the horses around and ride back toward Seoni and over the mountains again, back to Twin Rams, and live there together in happiness. Every wistful dream they had shared could become a reality. But he also knew that Sycamore had already made his decision, and that he had made his own in not pressing Sycamore to change his mind.

Sycamore turned his eyes from the road leading up into the city and looked at Marut. “I’ll love you,” he said, “until the seas rise to cover the land at the end of the world.”

Marut’s eyes watered immediately. He couldn’t speak, only stare at Sycamore with his lips compressed in an effort to hold back his emotions.

“Forgive me,” Sycamore said. He tugged at Rhododendron’s reins and led her back to the road.

Hot, silent tears streamed down Marut’s face as they ascended the road into the city. He had passed this way hundreds of times, as a child let loose on festival days, an eager trainee leaving for his first week alone in the hills, and a full-fledged scout returning to the cantonment after months out on assignment. He knew every smell of the city, every landmark, every shop that sold good food. And yet Banuri had never seemed more crowded or less familiar.

He wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his tunic as they came into the shadow of the palace walls. One of the guards standing at the Firebird Gate recognized Marut and waved them through. The great wooden doors were open. Sycamore turned back to look at Marut as he passed through, bathed in the afternoon light filling the courtyard. Marut would think of him every day forever.

“So,” Sycamore said, as Marut drew Bunny alongside Rhododendron. “Here we are.”

“I’ll have your belongings sent up to your rooms. I imagine you’ll need to go speak with the king.”

“Yes,” Sycamore said. He dismounted and passed the reins up into Marut’s hand. But he didn’t turn toward the palace doors; he stayed where he was, gazing up at Marut.

The courtyard was empty for the moment. Marut lifted his hand to touch Sycamore’s cheek. Sycamore closed his eyes.

“Be well,” Marut said.

Sycamore covered Marut’s hand with his own for one brief moment. Then he turned and walked toward the passageway that led into the palace. Marut took the horses into the stables instead of watching him go.

CHAPTER22

Sycamore’s rooms were just as they had been last winter. His books had been dusted but were otherwise piled in the same precarious manner as always. His trees had been watered over-generously if anything. He could pretend, almost, that he had never left.

He went into his bedchamber and sat down on the edge of the bed. He wanted to lie down and sleep for a long time, or at least take a bath and shave. But he had no water and didn’t want to flag down a passing servant to request some. The first person who learned of his return should be King Aditya.

He stood in front of his wardrobe, studying the contents. He remembered wearing these clothes, the elaborately embroidered silk tunics, the shirts in finest cotton. He took hold of the sleeve of one tunic, dyed in a rich vermillion, to examine the pattern along the hem. It seemed like a relic from a different life, but it was his own life, the life he would have to inhabit again now.

He closed the wardrobe again without removing anything. What he was wearing was good enough: the worn, simple clothing he and Marut had traded for in Seoni. The king wouldn’t turn him away.