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Chapter Three

T am passed through all those hours in the tent in a daze. He had made jokes about Lyford bearing the mark of Angarat’s favor—that was the thought that kept ringing and rattling through his mind like a penny shaken in a glass jar. He’d made jokes about it. He’d made jokes.

But still, still he couldn’t believe. It couldn’t be true. Yes, the gods were real; yes, you heard stories from time to time of someone with an answered prayer, or someone who had glimpsed a god unexpectedly. There were the legends and stories of great favored ones in the past. The great bard Elouan, for example, perhaps the most famous of all the favored of Talesyn Clevertongue. Half the festival songs that the Talhenge musicians played had been composed by Elouan—there was no doubt that he had borne the Lord of Song’s radiant favor, and had earned every ray of that light.

But Lyford? Lord Lyford, Nicolau Lyford, favored of Angarat? Really ?

No. It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t. Even with his perfect, breathtaking cock, it couldn’t be true. It would be like... like knowing the king. Yes, there were people who knew the king, people who worked with the king, people who called the king a friend. But you didn’t just go around meeting people who knew the king—those people were always very far away and did not intersect with any ordinary person’s life.

Tam wanted to cry.

He couldn’t quite figure out the reason for it. It just... wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that he had tried so hard for everything in his life, and Lyford had not tried at all, ever, not even once, for anything, and yet Lyford was the one with the fancy title and the expensive clothes and the huge manor house and the favor of the Lady of Lambs.

By contrast, Tam, just as always, made do with whatever he could work for... and gritted his teeth and hoped that that thing wouldn’t be taken away from him or knocked over and smashed right before all his hard work paid off.

When lunchtime rolled around, a couple young women turned up to take over the matchmaking tent for an hour or two. Tam half expected Lyford to make some new absurd suggestion like the ones he’d made last night, but Lyford just collected his coat and walked off.

Tam shot after him, irritated up to his eyebrows. “ Why did you tell me that?” he demanded, jogging along at Lyford’s elbow. The man had objectionably long legs.

“What do you mean?”

“You said you didn’t tell me because I wouldn’t have believed you, so why tell me now?”

Lyford shrugged. “It didn’t seem like it would make any difference now.” He stopped and turned to Tam sharply, right there in the middle of the festival lane—the grass underfoot wasn’t yet worn away to bare dirt, but it was bruised and tamped down into the mud. “Why did you call me Idunet?”

“When?”

“Last night, when I asked you out dancing.”

Tam recoiled, affronted. “Because I don’t want any part of that.”

“Fine,” Lyford said flatly. “You could have just said that, though, instead of calling me names. I didn’t think it was a rude question, and it doesn’t make me feel very good to be insulted over it. I’ll be perfectly happy with a ‘no thanks’ next time.”

“What? How’s that calling you names? I thought you liked Idunet.”

“Firstly, I haven’t been to Idhenge since I was nineteen. I’ll celebrate his holy days, but I am not one of his.” Tam didn’t know what to make of that. “Secondly, I don’t think I need to explain to an adult what implications underpinned the name-calling, nor why it was hurtful. It wasn’t an accident; you knew what you were trying to say, and I understood your meaning.” Lyford’s mouth tightened and he looked away. “I’m going to get lunch and go to Anghenge. I’ll be back at the tent in a couple hours.”

And Tam, knowing himself quite firmly brushed off, just stood there staring at Lyford as he walked off with his head up and his back very straight.

He hadn’t done anything wrong. Lyford was being too sensitive— he’d known what he was doing too. It wasn’t fair to turn it on Tam and twist it around so that he was in the wrong. It was just like Lyford, anyway. Obstinate, entitled, unreliable, an absolute prick.

Tam stuck his hands in his pockets and walked off to find whatever tents were selling something edible.

He went to Brasshenge with his lunch. The henge was built in four concentric rings of standing stones, each one carved and painted with an image from one of the legends of Brassu and his gifts to the world: the crowning of the first high king of Avaris; the Battle of the Bridge, in which all the gods had heard the calls of their favored ones and come to assist in repelling the invading forces of the Lausan Empire’s army; the chiseling of the law tablets; the forging of the nine great swords; the Thrashing of Idunet...

The outermost ring of stones was open to the air, and people were strolling through it, sitting on the stone benches among the great columns and contemplating the carvings, or speaking quietly. The next two were covered and thatched, and the priests of Brassu sat under skylights to talk in small groups with the god’s followers, or to lead a teaching-game of chess or draughts or the war-table. The innermost circle was, again, open to the air, and at the center was the greatest standing-stone of all, towering over all the rest, carved on one of its faces with an image of Brassu holding his sword, the hilt gripped in two hands, the point down to his feet, his face as stern and implacable as the surface it had been worked onto.

Tam sat down against one of the standing stones, facing Brassu, and ate his lunch. He was vaguely aware of people staring at him—eating was not forbidden in the henge, but it wasn’t one of Brassu’s areas of interest, and so people just... did not do it. But if Lyford could eat lunch in Anghenge, then Tam could do it here, and who was there to stop him?

“Hello, Tam,” said Geret, leaning on the standing stone next to Tam’s with his arms crossed. Geret was the only one of Tam’s friends who hadn’t gotten married and procreated, because—well, who knew why? He was a priest of Brassu, and that seemed to take up a lot of his time. His robes were white and grey, and his sandy-brown hair had been combed back and tied. “By the Lord of Gifts, what are you doing?”

“Eating,” said Tam through a mouthful of slow-roasted pork and rice. It had some kind of tangy sauce with it, which he hadn’t been sure of at the first bite, but it was growing on him. “What are you doing?”

“Wondering why you came in like you were sulking.”

“Maybe because I’m sulking.”

Geret squatted down next to him, brushed a bit of dirt and dust off of the stone step just beside Tam that led down into the low hollow making up the center of the henge, and sat properly. “Why are you sulking?”

That was an excellent question. “Brassu has favored ones, doesn’t he?”

“Of course. The kings, usually, if they’re good ones.”

And if not, then presumably he’d go and find another, and then... Well, generally there was some kind of little revolution. Tam shoveled in another mouthful, using the piece of flatbread they’d given him as a scoop. “Seems like good motivation to not be a shitty king.”

“Doesn’t it? You didn’t answer my question, though—or did you? Were you sulking because of the king?”

“No.” He wished he were one of the people who could lose his appetite when he was grouchy. “I was just wondering.”

Geret was quiet for a long moment. “You’ve been coming to Brasshenge since we were pretty young.”

“What of it?”

“You’ve never struck me as... I’m not sure how to word it tactfully...”

“A natural Brassu’s boy?” Tam said, acerbic. “Like you?”

“Well, yes. I’ve wondered about it for a long time.” Geret looked up at the giant carving of Brassu. Tam took advantage of the quiet to scarf down more of his lunch. “Which other gods do you visit? I don’t think I’ve ever asked.”

“I used to go to Mategat, back when Aunt Bez was sick and I was praying for her health. Then Nevainy? after she passed.”

Geret made a soft noise of concern. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“You used to go to Anghenge when we were kids.”

That was true, but Angarat was the goddess of the harvest, and Tam’s best harvest that he’d worked so hard on had been knocked to the floor and sadly broken in that festival competition. “Yeah, not anymore. She let me down one too many times.”

Tam finished his lunch and set the bowl aside—he’d return it to the food stall on the way back to his own tent. After another minute, Geret nudged his arm with his elbow. “Can I talk to you as a priest for a moment, as well as your friend Geret?”

Tam sighed. “Fine. No promises I’ll take it, though.”

“I worry about you. Some of the others do too—our friends, I mean. They think you’re lonely.”

“I’m not lonely, I’m just busy. Everyone’s busy.”

“You’re not as cheerful as you used to be. You don’t tell jokes like you used to, you don’t laugh as much anymore.”

“I think that’s just what happens when you grow up.”

“Or maybe it’s that you’ve been spending too much time with Brassu,” Geret said delicately. “Or at least... the wrong sort of time. Focusing on the wrong kinds of things.”

“You’re his priest, Geret, are you supposed to be talking like this?”

“Well, yes.” Geret leaned forward and picked a few little weeds out of the cracks between the flagstones. “In among everything else Brassu rules, he is also the god of balance—all things in moderation, you know. He is a pair with Idunet, who celebrates all things in excess. But forgoing all pleasures and joys, that’s an excess too. You always make those jokes about praying to Brassu in order to develop willpower and determination and staunchness of character. I think you have those things already. I think you’ve been focused on them for so long that you don’t realize you’ve gotten them.”

“I can assure you that I am still very much struggling with those things, actually.” Though perhaps not as much these days as he had before? He’d pulled away from Lyford last night, after all.

“Maybe it’s time to look for some variety? Try out something else? At the very least, you could shift your focus on what you’re asking the Lord of Gifts to give you—like setting aside staunchness and determination, and reflecting on his generosity and gift-giving instead. Or maybe a different henge entirely, to see which other gods have qualities you might find useful?”

“Variety,” Tam said. There was something to that. “I’ll have to think about that. Thanks, Geret.”

Variety, yes, that was the key. It had been years since he’d fucked anyone besides Lyford. After his aunt’s death and his inheritance of the tea shop, he just hadn’t had the energy or the time to scrounge up someone else—and it was a fairly small village, and there weren’t that many men who were inclined in Tam’s direction, available, and attractive to him.

But the festival days were a prime opportunity to find someone. People came from other villages and towns to visit family, or they traveled in from the outlying farms to have a break from their usual work and enjoy the festivities. There would be someone. Surely there would be someone—someone nice, someone Tam could enjoy spending the evening with. The prospect of going dancing was much more appealing once it didn’t involve the inevitable risk of... well, whatever normally happened when he was within proximity to Lyford.

Returning to the matchmaking tent, he first took a blessing for himself and stuffed it in his pocket and, for the rest of the afternoon, attended to the business of the tent with a vengeance. He folded paper hearts and filled them with sweet herbs—Lyford kept folding things that weren’t hearts, including plain square envelopes on which he drew different animals. They barely spoke, which was unsettling on some level. Even during the lulls when no one was coming by and they had a moment to sit and rest, Lyford kept his eyes down and his deft fingers creasing paper, rather than saying salacious and shocking things to Tam as he usually did. It was very irritating.

“What’s the matter with you?” Tam demanded towards the end of the day.

“I’m not having a very happy festival,” Lyford said, all calm and even and informative—he didn’t even hesitate. It was as if Tam were just some stranger to him who had asked that question and whose opinion of the answer mattered not at all.

“Having a little chat with Angarat didn’t cheer you up?”

“Please don’t mock me,” Lyford said. “And don’t use that tone when you’re talking about her. It’s disrespectful.”

Tam scoffed. “Respect has to be earned.”

Lyford glanced up at him then, one grey flash of warning. “ Don’t .” He’d never used that tone with Tam before. He’d never looked at Tam like that either. It set Tam off-balance, made him angrier and more obstinate.

Favored one , Tam thought to himself resentfully. Of course it mattered to Lyford.

He was painfully good-looking when he was stern like that. Tam forced his eyes to turn away. “Fine,” he said airily. “I’d rather not talk about her at all. Happy?”

Lyford sighed and tipped his stack of folded blessings into the box. “You don’t have to be here if you’re not having a good time.”

“I’m having a fine time, thanks.” He’d found a lonely widow for Old Trac Willet, and they’d been laughing and smiling at each other within a few minutes of the introduction. He’d made two or three other possible matches, and he’d given out more paper blessings than he could count... It was fun, in a way—he did know all the gossip. “If you’re not having a good time, then you don’t have to be here either.”

“Well, no, I do. Angarat told me I should work on this.”

“What, matchmaking?”

“Something like that.”

That was a strange assignment, but then Tam wasn’t the one who was favored of Angarat, so what did he know?

“Can I—” Lyford said abruptly and snapped his mouth closed.

“Can you what?” Tam narrowed his eyes.

“Nothing.” A muscle in Lyford’s jaw clenched. “Forget it.” He looked... upset. Really upset. Underneath that strange, uncharacteristic, calm layer of formality, he looked like a man wracked with frustration.

Tam sniffed. If Lyford didn’t want to be frustrated, then he shouldn’t play games and act like Tam was a stranger just to lure him in and make him lower his guard. “Maybe I’ll just leave early, then, if you’re going to be such terrible company.”

“I wish you’d give me consistent bloody marching orders,” Lyford said sharply. “Am I supposed to be good company, or am I supposed to respect the fact that you, as you said earlier, don’t want any part of that ?”

“Fuck off,” Tam said, and he grabbed his coat and stormed out of the tent.

Variety. Variety, yes, that was it. Maybe Geret was right, and Tam had been leaning too hard on Brassu for too long.

It was convenient to have discovered Lyford wasn’t close to Idunet anymore. It made the prospect of variety so much more palatable. The only reason Tam had avoided Idhenge so carefully was that it felt like one of Lyford’s places, but if not, then—well! The world was Tam’s oyster, or at least Idhenge was.

The light was going very quickly as Idunet’s hours of twilight fell over the festival. Idhenge was directly next to Talhenge, and both were decorated in bright colors and well-lit with braziers and torches. Music came from both henges—Idhenge often borrowed musicians from Talhenge for their celebrations, as revelry was one of Idunet’s domains, and revelry often required entertainment. Tam strode across the green and through the outer ring of Idhenge’s standing stones. Unlike the other henges, these were screened off with panels of fabric on the outer rings and beautifully-decorated plank walls on the inner ones, to keep each section somewhat separate from the others. In the outer rings and on the area of the green between Idhenge and Talhenge, there were games, music, drinking, feasting, dancing. On the inner rings, there were heavier pleasures, and people draped themselves on benches and cushions and rugs, drinking wine and smoking tobacco or hashish or dreamgrass. And in the innermost ring, the very center of Idhenge, there was all the sex you could want.

It was eerie and strange, walking into that space with the last colors of twilight vanishing from the sky overhead. The standing stones were immense, and Idunet’s carving on the central pillar flickered and shifted strangely in the torchlight, looking over the moving bodies below him and around him. Not all of them were naked, and not all of them were actively in the midst of fucking, but all of them gloried in the gifts of the Lord of Temptation, the Dream-plucker.

Variety, Tam thought to himself, regarding the statue of Idunet. Geret had made it very clear that Tam ought to go looking elsewhere. Moderation in all things—too many limitations is itself an excess. That was a weight off of Tam’s chest. He could use a little excess.

He found a nice-looking young man who had the air of a traveler. He was not as tall as Lyford, and not as broad in the shoulders, and his hair was reddish and curly and only the length of a finger, rather than blond and wavy and long enough to tie back in a ponytail as Lyford did.

Tam managed to get as far as kissing the man up against one of the standing stones when someone tapped him urgently on the shoulder. “Mr Becket!” He broke away from the kiss, blinking in confusion, and found Mrs Hatter, of all fucking people, looking at him with the sternest expression he’d ever seen on her. “What do you think you’re doing, young man?”

“I don’t understand the question,” Tam said blankly. “I feel like it should be obvious just from looking.”

“What are you doing away from the matchmaking tent?”

“Lyford told me I could leave early if I wanted. We weren’t so busy that I needed to be there. But I am busy now, so could I just...” He jerked his head pointedly towards that nice young man he’d been kissing, “...you know, get back to my personal life?”

She gave the young man a furious glance before returning her attention to Tam. “Did you quarrel with his lordship?”

“Um,” said the young man awkwardly. “Should I go?”

“Yes,” said Mrs Hatter, at the same time Tam said, “No, no, that’s not necessary—”

“Don’t do something you’ll regret, Mr Becket,” she said firmly.

“Beg your pardon, madam, but I don’t think you’re in any position to be telling me what I will or won’t regret.”

She seized him by the arm and dragged him towards the threshold of the outer rings of the henge. He allowed it only because he was too astonished to resist. “Go back to the tent,” she said firmly. “His lordship is so fond of you, you know, you ought to give him a chance—”

That was enough to break through his astonishment. Tam yanked his arm free. “I beg your pardon? What business is it of yours? No one asked you to meddle, Mrs Hatter!”

“Don’t be dramatic, Mr Becket. There’s a sweet man over there who’s been sighing and mooning over you for—oh, Angarat only knows how long, and you never seem to get around to noticing!”

Tam flushed hot with anger. “I notice plenty.”

“You don’t . You come and complain to me that he’s saying shocking things to you. He’s trying to get your attention, Mr Becket, trust me, I’ve heard all about it—we all have—”

“ We? We all? Who is we all, pray tell?”

She flapped her hands in dismissal. “What does it matter?”

The flash of hot anger transmuted instantly to cold. “Has he been talking about me behind my back?”

Mrs Hatter spluttered. “Well, don’t say it like that! There’s nothing wrong with confessing your troubles to those older and wiser than you and asking for advice, Mr Becket! That’s hardly the same thing as talking about someone behind their back.”

Tam could see what was happening. What had happened. “So he asked for advice from you and an unknown number of other people, and you took this as an invitation to follow me into Idhenge and interrupt something that had nothing to do with you. Or did it start before that? Am I stuck at that matchmaking tent with Lyford and—oh, what a coincidence!— barely any help, because you’re all conspiring to keep me near him?”

“You’re choosing to interpret this in very bad faith, Mr Becket. The henge’s festival committee is short-staffed at the moment, and you were a good choice for the matchmaking, and his lordship said that you said that you were going to volunteer. Did you not say that?”

“I said it to get him off my back,” Tam snapped. “I said it as an excuse—a made-up explanation for why I was too busy for him.”

“So you’re lying to him and stringing him along?”

Tam’s throat was closing up and his hands were shaking with adrenaline. He did not like conflict, and he did not like being confronted , and there were so many other people around... Thank the gods Mrs Hatter wasn’t raising her voice, or everyone would have known this humiliation. “I’m doing nothing of the sort,” he said coldly. “And it’s none of your business. ”

He tried to storm off, but she caught his sleeve. “Mr Becket. Mr Becket, don’t be a bloody little fool about this.”

He shook her off, his heart pounding in his throat. “Thank you, Mrs Hatter, for that advice I did not solicit. You’re right. I should stop being a fool about this. To start with, I will not be returning to the tent tomorrow, nor helping Anghenge with anything in the future. Good night.”