Page 5

Chapter Five

I t was an easier walk home, because now it was mostly downhill. He had walked for four hours to reach the standing stone to Angarat and Ystrac, and while the easier walk could have meant faster as well, Tam was tired and his feet were sore, and... perhaps he did need time to think.

He stopped several times along the way, often when the road curved around a hill onto a particularly spectacular view of the countryside. He looked at the patchwork of fields laid out before him, the crops and livestock and orchards, all the abundance of Angarat. He ate the goddess’s raspberry tart, drank her elderflower cordial, and thought about what he wanted. It had been so easy to ask for his favorite foods, and she had simply given them to him like it was effortless for her. Because it was, of course—Her Abundance held nothing back in her generosity.

Apologizing to Lyford was an idea he wanted to cringe away from and spit at. But on one hand, it could be lovely to win by being the bigger person, the more mature and adult person, the more graceful person, at least for once ...

And on the other hand, Angarat had said that Tam’s leaving would hurt Lyford deeply. He had to accept that was true, for all that he didn’t understand it and didn’t see how it could be—but she wouldn’t lie to him, not to his face, not during her hours and in the presence of her standing stone and after feeding him his favorite things and embracing him like a mother.

It would hurt Lyford if Tam vanished without a word. He couldn’t make it fit in his brain. It itched at him like a burr in his shoe. And Mrs Hatter had made that comment about Lyford mooning over him—absurd suggestion.

Tam couldn’t bear to think any more of Lyford, so he took a breath and forced his attention onto his own actions from an outside perspective: The sharp remarks, the coldness, the catty comments... The way he would keep jumping on Lyford and sticking his tongue down his throat and being obviously enthusiastic about Lyford’s perfect cock.

Ugh. Tam did not like the idea of changing his mind or trying to be different. It was not comfortable, and he didn’t have the energy for it, and—and what was the point, anyway, when he’d just get his marrows smashed on the floor again?

At least Angarat had promised him a horse and a bag of gold and a handsome stranger if it didn’t go well, so perhaps it was worth... trying. Just to see what happened. There wasn’t really any way for Tam to lose, except for the towering rage he’d find himself in if Lyford decided to be a complete prick about it. Which he would. Right?

It was the end of midafternoon by the time Tam made it back to his tea shop—the cusp between Brassu’s hours and Ystrac’s hours. He was exhausted down to his bones. His feet were horribly blistered, and his ankles and knees and even his hips were hurting from the walk. His arms and back were sore from carrying his bag and box for all those miles. He was covered in road dust and sweat, and it was with anguish that he thought about the kind of bath that he was longing for, and the fact that it would involve hauling water from the pump and heating it on the stove...

And he was hungry again.

As if that were not enough troubles to have on his plate, there was Lyford. Of course. He was standing on the doorstep of Tam’s tea shop, just as Tam turned the corner onto his street. To his absolute fucking despair, Lyford was knocking on his door, holding his teapot—the one Tam had taken to the festival the day before and left behind when he’d stormed off.

Tam didn’t stop walking, because he was damn sure that if he let himself stop, he might not be able to get himself going again. He was saved the excruciation of having to call out to Lyford by the man himself turning away from the door and spotting him. “Oh—there you are. You left this at the tent yesterday.” Lyford held out the teapot. “And then you weren’t there today.” His eyes took in Tam’s clothing and baggage as Tam stomped up his steps and dug in his pockets for his key. “Are you going somewhere?”

“I am going home,” Tam said briskly, unlocking the door. “I am going to have a bath.” He regarded the teapot with total exhaustion. He could not carry it. He could get himself and his bags inside, and—fuck, he probably didn’t have the energy to get water for the bath, actually, because the thought of retracing his steps to take the teapot from Lyford made him want to scream and fall into a heap and cry. “If you can come in and put that on the table for me,” he said carefully, “that would be helpful.”

“Alright,” said Lyford. There was a frown between his eyebrows. “Since ‘where are you going’ was the wrong question... Where did you go?”

“For a walk,” Tam said peevishly, dragging himself inside and dropping his bag in the middle of the room. He set his box on the counter. He leaned heavily on said counter. That was a mistake. His momentum instantly drained to nothing. He considered the practicalities of sleeping on the floor rather than going up to bed at any point today.

“What’s in the bags?”

“All my earthly possessions that I care about,” Tam snapped as Lyford placed the teapot on the indicated table. “I walked twenty fucking miles, Lyford.”

“Brassu’s balls, Tam, what for?”

Tam drew himself up and bit his tongue on the snarls and biting comments that leapt into his mouth. “I,” he said, just as carefully as before, “am too tired to discuss it at the moment. I am ten seconds away from bursting into tears. I’m starving, and I’m thirsty, and my whole body hurts. I am going to lie flat on the floor and weep because I do not have the energy to feed myself or draw a bath, so I certainly do not have the fortitude to discuss my doings at the moment.”

“Should I fetch a doctor?”

“I’m not keeling over dead, Lyford ,” Tam shouted. “I’m sore and mad and I’ve earned the right to behave like a toddler about it!”

Lyford held up both hands. “Look, do you want me to leave, or do you want help?”

“I want a bath, and I want food, and I want something to drink, and at this point I do not fucking care how those things happen. I will cry on the floor for a little while, and then I’m sure I will summon the energy to grit my teeth and do it myself—” Angarat’s stupid little comment about giving Lyford clear information dropped into his head, and Tam grimaced, dropping his head onto his arms and yelling wordlessly.

In the ringing silence afterward, he took a deep breath and said with his closest attempt at calm, “If you could bring me a bucket of water. Please.”

“Where is your bucket?”

Tam pointed him to the door to the kitchen without lifting his head, and focused on just breathing and existing in his aching body while Lyford’s footsteps went in, and then out again. The bells above the front door jangled as he exited the shop and went thence, presumably, to the pump at the street corner.

The bells jangled again when he came back in a few moments later, and the bucket thumped on the floor next to Tam’s feet. “Do you want a normal cup, or do you prefer to drink out of teapots like a barbarian?”

“I drink out of pitchers these days,” Tam said, lifting his head and dragging his box toward him. He unbuckled the straps and opened it—he’d tucked Angarat’s pitcher in after he’d finished it, and he was rather thinking that he might never drink out of anything else ever again. He took it out and peered down at the bucket, contemplating whether he had the strength to bend over or if he was better off collapsing to the floor. There was also the question of whether he would be able to get back up again afterwards.

“Where did you get that?” Lyford breathed.

Tam held up one finger. “I will not be interrogated now, thank you.” He leaned down, bracing himself heavily on the counter, and scooped a little water out of the bucket with the pitcher. He supposed it did look rather eerily more-than-real, especially when compared side by side with Tam’s normal human teapots. The pitcher was crystal-clear blown glass with tiny bubbles swirling through it, and it refracted even the soft ambient light into shards of rainbows as if it were sitting in direct sunlight.

Lyford steadied him with a hand on his shoulder as he pulled himself back up with a long groan. “Can I get you a chair?”

“Yyyyes. No. I will need to eat.” He drank—the water was blessedly chilled, and he could feel every drop of it running down his throat and hitting his stomach with a blooming cold.

“What does that have to do with chairs?”

“If I sit down, I won’t be able to get up again.”

Lyford sighed. “I see.” A long silence, and then another sigh. “Would you like me to fetch you something to eat? Do you have anything in your cupboards that’s quick?”

“I most assuredly do not. I will...” Tam grimaced. “I will walk over to the festival and buy something there. My legs haven’t fallen off yet.”

“Fuck’s sake,” Lyford murmured under his breath. “Sit down. What do you use for a bathtub?”

“A laundry tub in the kitchen.”

Lyford pinched the bridge of his nose. “The one that was next to the bucket?”

“Yes.”

“The one that was barely bigger than the bucket itself? Can you even sit in it?”

“Yes,” Tam said, affronted. “If I scrunch up with my knees to my chest.”

“But the water would barely reach your navel. That’s not a bath, Tam, that’s an indoor puddle.”

Tam drew himself upright. All his bones screeched in objection. “I don’t recall asking you for your opinion, your lordship.”

Lyford gave him a look of exhausted anguish, rubbed his hand over his face, and heaved the biggest sigh of all. “Would you like to come to the manor and have a proper bath in a real bathtub?”

“I,” Tam said firmly, “am not interested in your salacious suggestions today , sirrah.”

“Right,” said Lyford, turning on his heel and striding towards the door. “Good luck with baths and food, Tam.”

Fuck. “Wait,” Tam said, slumping onto the counter. “Lyford, listen, in fairness to me—” Lyford barked a sharp laugh. “ In fairness to me, ” Tam continued doggedly, “you do frequently offer me baths in suggestive contexts.”

Lyford had stopped with his hand on the doorknob. He turned back slowly, with a painfully polite expression, and said, “Why don’t you try saying something like, ‘I’d love a bath, thanks, but just to be clear, I’m not in any kind of shape for sex today.’”

“That’s what I said.”

“No, you accused me of making salacious suggestions.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“Well, one of them hurts my feelings, so...”

Tam grimaced. “Borrowing a bath sounds nice. Don’t seduce me.”

“I wasn’t planning to.” That sounded out of character, but fine, sure. “Do you want to walk, or shall I send down the carriage? Or a horse.”

He’d spent most of his adult life attending the rites at Brasshenge, and Angarat had told him just today that Brassu was the god of slogging stubbornly onwards through the muck. Tam braced himself, drew up all his determination, and said, “What’s another mile or so? I’ll walk.”

It was a bit more than a mile, because Lyford dragged him through the festival, bought him three skewers of spiced meat, and made him eat all of them before leading him onwards to the manor house. They barely spoke until the last quarter-mile, when the food gave Tam just enough energy that he started crying from exhaustion—physical, mental, and emotional.

“We’re nearly there,” Lyford said bracingly. “Do you want to stop and rest?”

“No,” Tam said.

“Stubborn.”

Kiss my ass , Tam nearly said, but that would have opened up the opportunity for Lyford to make some kind of salacious suggestion about how he’d offered to do just that a few days before and Tam had all but thrown himself out of a window in response.