Lucifer’s wings cupped air, a sound like a backhanded slap. Kit flinched, but the Devil flinched moreso. And looked Kit in the eye. And nodded once, slowly, and closed his eyes that were bluer than the twilight.
And ceased to be where he had been.
Kit stood a moment in darkness, the sunset wind riffling the fine hairs on his neck, and slid down the wall until he could bury his face in his arms.
A tap on his door roused him. It seemed as if moments had passed, but as he stood the dawn air felt cold through his linen nightshirt. He limped across the chamber. The knotted red wool of the carpet pricked his bare soles and the tender flesh of his bandaged foot. He lifted the latch without asking a name, knowing from the sound whom he would see.
“My Prince.”
The Elf‑knight stepped past him and pulled the door from his grasp. “Kit, what hast done to thy fingers?”
Kit looked down, startled. “Split a nail or two,” he said. “‘Tis nothing.”
“‘Tis not nothing,” Murchaud answered, relatching the door. “Let me clean it.”
Kit followed in obedience, gasping at cold water spilled across his palms and wrists. And then marveling at the Prince‑consort of Faerie, bent over his–Kit’s–sad, calloused hands with a rag. “My Prince,” he said again.
Murchaud dabbed at a bit of blood, and looked up. He’d dressed, but his hair was still tousled from the night and his eyes were so bruised with exhaustion as to seem kohled. “Is that all I am to thee?”
“No….” Kit protested, Mehiel silent within him. Murchaud took one step away.
“I came to bring thee something. I’ll be quick. I did not mean to presume.” Murchaud cast his eyes down, and Kit’s breath snagged as he understood.
“Murchaud,” he began, and couldn’t find the next word.
The Elf‑knight dug into his sleeve, unmindful of the water pink with Kit’s blood that spotted it, and came out with a scrap of silk. He held the cloth out, and Kit numbly took it. It was like quicksilver, the highlights blue as shadows on snow and the shadows the color of twilight. Kit stared uncomprehending.
“For your cloak,” the Elf‑knight said, and turned away.
Kit’s mouth worked, his tongue dry and dumb as un‑inked paper. Murchaud crossed the room in five long strides, lifted the latch, turned the handle on the door, and opened it, unhesitating, back straight, lean and dark in the half‑light so far from the window.
He stepped into the hall.
“Wait,” Kit whispered, but the door was closing. “Wait!”he shouted, and froze, listening for the click of the latch.
Silence.
And then the door opening again, and Murchaud framed against the gold stone of the hallway. “Kit?” he asked, lifting his chin.
“Do–” Kit took up a breath, and his courage with it. “Dost love me?”
Murchaud considered the question, turning his answer over on his tongue. He dropped his eyes to his hand on the door handle, stepped back into the room, shut the door behind himself. Latched it, and leaned against the boards. “Can an elf be said to love?”
Kit nodded, his sore fingers knotted white on the bit of silk in his palm.
Murchaud did not leave the door. The air between them grew golden with the rising, indirect light. “Then as elves love, aye.”
Kit closed his eyes on the fear, closed his heart on Mehiel’s startled protest. “Wilt prove it?”
Mute, Murchaud nodded. Drew a breath and another, came one step toward Kit. “Anything.”
Kit gasped, and laughed. “Thou swearest.”
“Anything.I vow.”
And Kit felt his own heart break.
“It is not fair or just, what I will ask of thee,” he began, calm now that the die was cast. “I need thee to undo what was done.”
It was the kiss that broke Kit. Not the kisses on his mouth; he lay still, hands clenched into fists on the coverlet, through those. Murchaud lingered over them, a hand on either side of his head, all that black hair freed from its tail and tumbling down around Kit’s face, no contact between them except lips and tongue.
No, it was when Murchaud kissed his eyes closed that Kit knew he had made a mistake. “God,” Kit said, and Murchaud flinched but did not draw away. Instead, he caught Kit’s lip between his teeth, but Kit continued to speak anyway, his fingernails bloodying his palms as he struggled not to shove the Prince to the floor. “Murchaud, just finish it.”
Murchaud gnawed at his own lower lip. “I said I will unbind thy angel, though it mean thy life. Wouldst have me misuse thee, also?”
It wouldmean Kit’s life. But if the bonds that trapped the angel in his body were severed first, then Mehiel need not die with him, but–when his cage was shattered–might go free.
Kit drew breath and said, “I would it were done.”
Murchaud leaned down on an elbow, close enough that Kit could feel the heat of his body. He raised his right hand and outlined the scar over Kit’s heart. Kit gasped as that scar and its brothers flared on his skin as if freshly seared. “Is there no means to make this gentle?”
Kit swallowed and closed his eyes. “It is mine to endure.”
“If enduring is what thou chooseth.”
I cannot do this. I cannot lie still for this. I cannot bear it.
«And thou wouldst have had no choice, were it Baines.» The voice startled Kit, coming as it did with a sense of unfurling and a gazing awareness within. Eyes like a falcon’s, gold as the sun, and wings whose stunning plumage was banded in black and gold, not swan‑white at all. Mehiel.
A rape I could have endured,Kit answered. And yet my lover will be kind.“Murchaud,” he whispered.
“Kit.”
“Bind my hands.” Love?” Honest dismay. “I will not–”
“Thou must.” Kit drew a ragged breath. “I will refuse thee otherwise. I have not the strength of will for this. And I must not be permitted to refuse.”
“I would not force thee–”
“It is not force,” Kit said. “For I am begging thee.”
“Dost thou?”
“So we do,” Kit answered, and realized only after the words had left his mouth that he had spoken for himself, and for Mehiel too. “Bind my hands. And my legs. It will reinforce the sorcery in any case; cut the bonds when thou’rt done with me. If we steal those other Prometheans’ symbols to undo their black work, ‘tis no more than they deserve.”
Murchaud regarded him thoughtfully, and then nodded. “As thou wishest.”
Kit closed his eyes as Murchaud left the curtained confines of the bed. The straw tick dimpled under Murchaud when the Elf‑knight returned. Kit turned to watch him fasten a yard‑long length of silk scavenged from a drapery about Kit’s wrist and draw it outward, to one of the massive bedposts. Kit’s heart beat faster as Murchaud repeated the process on the opposite side, exquisitely gentle and completely without pity.
Every inch the Elf‑knight again.
“Do you have the knife?”
“Aye.” Murchaud covered Kit’s eyes with a blindfold and carefully tugged it down over his cheeks. “I’ll not stop thy mouth,” he said. “‘Tis thy poetry I need of thee, and all thy power. ”
Safer in the darkness, Kit nodded, and Murchaud bound his feet apart as well.
The room was warm, and yet Kit shivered at every brush of the air on his sweat‑drenched skin. If he were a horse, he thought, he would be lathered white with fear. Terror, which crystallized into something else entirely when Murchaud, without otherwise touching him, laid the ice‑cold blade of the dagger against the brand on the inside of his thigh and – cut. And moved the blade to the other thigh and cut again. And once more. And again, defacing each sigil in reverse of how they had been layered on Kit’s skin.
Kit strangled the whimper that rose in his throat, not out of pride–he was beyond pride–but out of fear for how it would sound to Murchaud. Instead he pulled against the twisted cloth that bound him, grunting like a birthing woman dragging at a knotted rope. The pain of the knife was still better than the touch of Murchaud’s hand.