A Suitable Bodyguard, page 24
The upper gate and portcullis were not yet closed, and several of the guards on duty there came out to greet Zelli and speak with Tahlen as Tahlen led everyone into the courtyard. Tahlen slipped gracefully from Starfall’s back the moment they were all inside, and asked about Ric and spoke with someone about the borrowed horses.
The Lyralinah guards dismounted after Zelli did, then stood about stiffly as they were observed by an increasing number of guards and servants.
Nya was probably readying for bed as well, so Zelli stopped one of her assistants to mention that the visiting guards would need beds and some food while Ric and Grandmother considered what to do with them.
He also said, to the stoically watchful guards of the Lyralinah, “Providing no one comes looking for you, you might get to stay. You will at least be fed and housed for the night. I’ll come see you in the morning.”
Then he patted Lemon Blossom, smiled somewhat tiredly at Gil, one of the stable hands, and set out with determination to get to Grandmother’s bedside before she fell asleep. Though someone had likely run to her with this information by now.
He took his pack with him. He didn’t hear footsteps at his side, only the faint jingle of mail, and turned to Tahlen in pleased surprise.
“You should go see Esrin,” Zelli whispered nonetheless, not only because he didn’t want Esrin to be angrier with him. “I can face Grandmother alone.”
Tahlen captured Zelli’s hand and kept on, leaving Zelli to stumble over his feet while staring up at him.
“All right,” Zelli allowed at last, “but I will talk first.”
“Yes, Zelli,” Tahlen agreed, not even looking at him.
Zelli’s grandmother was in her nightclothes and a long robe but very much awake, even standing, when a frowning Nya let Zelli and Tahlen into Grandmother’s room before shutting the door behind them.
A cup of tea sat on a table near Grandmother’s favorite chair by the fire. There were letters on the table as well. Zelli tried not to look at them.
Leaning on her cane, Grandmother stared hard at Zelli as though Tahlen wasn’t there. Tahlen had released Zelli’s hand upon entering the room and now stood to the side and a step behind Zelli, silent, his face probably impassive.
Zelli had forgotten the cloak he was wearing and the cloak Tahlen wasn’t wearing. His grandmother’s attention fixed on it the moment the door was closed, and then Zelli’s unbound hair, but all she said was, “Mizel.”
“I’m not sorry that I went,” Zelli said immediately. “But I am sorry that I worried you. Tahlen was with me. I hope that eased your mind, at least a little.” He did not say that this had been Tahlen’s idea because Zelli hadn’t considered it. The knowledge wouldn’t improve her mood.
She might have guessed the truth regardless, because she narrowed her eyes and directed some of her glare at Tahlen.
“I also did not mean to be gone for this long,” Zelli acknowledged. “My intention was to be seen, inspect a few waystations, and let people bring cases to me to pass on to you for your judgment. Which I have notes on!” He shook the pack to demonstrate and did not mention yet that he had issued some judgments anyway. “But then I discovered a situation and it needed dealing with. When you find dampness in the storerooms, you can’t hesitate. You have to act quickly, or at least try to discover the source and how big the problem is.”
“You don’t look well,” Grandmother remarked as if Zelli hadn’t spoken. “And Tahlen looks weary indeed. One guard was not enough, Mizel.”
“Tahlen was more than enough—oh.” Zelli ducked his head. “Yes. He needs rest.”
“He couldn’t have gotten much with no one else to relieve him,” Grandmother added.
Zelli deserved the scolding, even if Tahlen had been the one to insist on accompanying him. “That is my fault,” he admitted, glancing over to Tahlen. “I’m sorry—though you dislike me saying so.”
“Too many beat-of-fours never learn to apologize,” Tahlen said evenly. “You apologize when you’ve no need to.”
Zelli gestured wildly. “But I did keep forcing you into more adventures.”
“Hardly forced.” Tahlen’s attention on him did not waver. Gladly was unsaid but hung in the air.
Flustered, Zelli swung back around to look at his grandmother, fully aware that his face was flushed and his eyes were no doubt some outlandish color.
In contrast, Grandmother’s dark eyes were nearly black in the fire and candlelight of the room. After a long moment, she angled her head toward Tahlen without taking her gaze from Zelli. “Tahlen, perhaps you should go reassure your sister, who, some whisper where they think I can’t hear, has been in a state these past few days. Rest, if you can, and clean up. I will speak to you when you’re finished.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Zelli saw Tahlen nod. Yet Tahlen stayed where he was. “I believed his intention to be right when he stated it to me, and I went with him without being asked or ordered.”
“Tahlen’s advice was very helpful,” Zelli added quickly.
Tahlen still had not taken a single step. “Zelli does not act as I would, or sometimes even as you would, but I would obey his orders.”
Zelli reached up to tug at his necklace without pulling it free. He let the initial sting from Tahlen’s assessment carry through him, then the warmth that followed. “I never gave you any orders.”
Tahlen held a stare with Grandmother, not looking to Zelli at all.
Zelli pursed his lips thoughtfully. “I will try to give you orders?” he suggested, only to realize that he might have issued some sort of commands when in bed with Tahlen and Tahlen would certainly remember them.
The remark earned him a sideways glance and a glimpse of a light in Tahlen’s eye.
For a moment, Zelli was no longer even remotely tired. His skin sizzled with added heat.
“All things I will consider in my own time, Tahlen,” Grandmother cut in, unimpressed. “Go see your family. Rest, eat, wash, and then return to me. I will have questions.”
She was very sure.
Tahlen offered her another respectful nod, then turned. He met Zelli’s stare with one eyebrow arched.
The look was meant to inquire about Zelli’s condition, not to imply Tahlen would obey Zelli over Grandmother, but Zelli gulped.
“Esrin’s probably worried sick,” he told Tahlen anyway. “And you barely got any sleep last night because of me.” He froze, his shoulders so tense they nearly touched his ears. He didn’t look at his grandmother as he cleared his throat. “And I’m well enough. Thank you. Go see your sister.”
“Yes, Zelli,” said Tahlen, daring to have that same light in his eyes. With a final nod, he backed out of the door and closed it silently behind him.
Zelli, who could not follow him, turned to face his grandmother.
“Mizel.” Grandmother’s tone was a warning and her eyes saw more than Zelli’s did. She held out her hand and waited until Zelli supported her arm before making her slow, shuffling way toward her bed. She sat on the edge with a heaving sigh, but yanked him down next to her with surprising strength. Her eyes remained dark.
“Now,” she didn’t let him look away, “tell me everything.”
Eighteen
Zelli bathed immediately upon returning to his room, dropping the pack and slipping off his clothes as he went to the bathing room. Someone had been instructed to ready his bedchamber for him on his arrival, because a fire was lit and there was a tray of food and tea on the little table before it. But getting clean and soaking away various aches and pains in the water were of more interest to him at present.
He had told Grandmother everything, except for details of what had happened between him and Tahlen last night. She’d interrupted him twice, first to be concerned over Zelli’s foolish wish, then to ask if any of Zelli’s other problems were affecting him.
Her shoulders had dropped with worry or exhaustion by the time he was done and she’d let him settle her into bed without much complaining.
“I couldn’t leave them there,” Zelli had finally argued, drawing her eyes to him again. “But they don’t have to stay beyond the night. Hospitality demands at least that, and no one could claim we were doing otherwise. No one should claim it.”
Grandmother was much better at hiding her feelings than Zelli was. He really needed to learn how to do that. Not even lingering in the hot water could calm some of his nerves at the memory of Grandmother’s impassive expression.
“As for the rest,” he’d gone on, wondering why Tahlen thought Zelli was persuasive when he clearly wasn’t, “I was perfectly safe. Tahlen took excellent care of me.”
Zelli, in the bath, squirmed at the way Grandmother had said nothing there so the words had seemed to echo. “The judgments went well. Most people were happy to hear from us. Oh—did outguards stop here?”
That had made Grandmother speak, at least. “No.”
Zelli wondered if the outguards had gotten lost in the fog again, but that really wasn’t his concern.
“Tahlen did nothing wrong,” he had insisted to Grandmother. He thought it right that he’d said it. But the memory made him restless again.
He pulled himself from the bath before he could fall asleep, and slipped on a nightshirt and his robe without doing much more than squeezing the water from his hair and patting himself dry.
Someone had brought food into the room while he’d been bathing, which he devoured while further drying his hair and rehashing his talk with Grandmother to consider what she must have been considering while Zelli had gone on and on.
“Your current issues,” she’d begun thoughtfully. “One of which is something we hadn’t seen in months.”
“Possibly another,” Zelli had admitted, although without evidence except for his suspicions that the fae were listening or watching and doing this to him on purpose. This lust-fever felt different than before, certainly, which was probably due to Tahlen’s help. But Zelli, beneath his exhaustion and the wrongness from the wish, still felt rather… unlike himself.
Or, rather, like himself, but more aware of his body and his thoughts and his desires. His desires had surprised Tahlen. He wasn’t going to share them with his grandmother. “I feel wild, or almost so.”
“Your age, I would say,” Grandmother had answered. “My child settled into their ears at this time. Before they sliced them to look more like everyone else and hid the scars with cuffs of gold.”
Grandmother never shared much of her thoughts on her child, other than to refer to them as Zelli’s parent and to pay some of their expenses in the capital, and to sometimes remark, if Zelli’s parent was mentioned, that trying to escape the family ties to the fae by fleeing to the capital had only earned them a fae baby. Then she would sigh.
This time, she hadn’t. She’d taken Zelli’s hand, studied his flushed face and watched him absently rub his chest, then said, “Or it’s Tahlen.”
She’d probably enjoyed making Zelli jump, revenge for leaving her to worry.
“You’ve been extremely close to him for several days, and your fevers did get worse after he arrived here. I’m not exactly sure how, but I’ve always suspected things are different for the other side of our family in more ways than the obvious where romance or what-have-you is concerned. Is there anything else I should know about, Mizel? Anything you’re not telling me?”
The color that had spread through him at the touch of Tahlen’s hand had come to mind, but Zelli had stayed silent rather than try to form the words to describe it.
Grandmother had finally released him and stared thoughtfully into the distance. “I’ll speak with Tahlen tonight and then with some of these guards tomorrow. The one who arrived before them mentioned your name. Which at least meant I knew you were alive.”
Zelli drank his cold tea to help him swallow the guilty lump in his throat from the memory. But after that, Grandmother had kissed his forehead and told him to go to his room as usual for the duration of his fever, and that she’d send food. She hadn’t responded to his pressing questions about the possible fate of the guards, or to his defense of Tahlen, except to finally say, “You acted like a Tialttyrin. Now go.”
Having soaked a great deal of his pains away, and taken care of some of his lust-fever desires while trying to summon clearer memories of the night before, and with some food in him, Zelli heaved himself out of the chair by the fire, leaving the tray on the table for now so he could fall face-first onto his bed and curl up in the warm darkness behind the heavy curtains.
He moved only to scratch at an itch that wasn’t really there.
“When you ignored me, it hurt,” he said to any listening fae, family or otherwise. “But now this? You could allow me some dignity around him, you know. You answer wishes as you see best, but is this truly what’s best for me? What am I to discover this way?”
Tahlen was likely talking to Grandmother by now. He might come here afterward, if only to check on the status of Zelli’s discomfort. Or he might not, but Zelli quailed at the idea of the walk through the fortress in his condition to find Tahlen, and then, if Tahlen was less than excited about helping him, the miserable walk back.
He wriggled up to grab a pillow to bite but stopped at the gentle knock on the door.
“Zelli?” Tahlen asked, as though the door wasn’t unlocked and he couldn’t simply walk inside if he wanted to. “It’s Tahlen” he said next, leaving Zelli to boggle for a moment that Tahlen would assume Zelli didn’t know his voice when one of Zelli’s distinct memories of the night before was telling Tahlen how much he liked it.
Zelli flew off the bed and ran to the door to fling it open.
“I wasn’t sure if you…” Tahlen trailed to a stop at Zelli’s sudden, breathless appearance. Tahlen had scrubbed away some of the travel dust, although his hair looked too dry to have been washed, even if it had been combed and rebraided into one his simpler nighttime braids. He was in no armor, at least, and clean clothes, and stared as if Zelli had left him stunned.
Zelli didn’t know why; he was mostly dressed, and even if he hadn’t been, Tahlen had seen him in less.
Tahlen leaned in, evidently concerned about eavesdroppers. The family apartments were occupied by older relatives who had long since gone to bed and were several rooms away from Zelli, in any case. Any guards were stationed outside at the entrance to the corridors for their chambers rather than in the corridor itself. But Tahlen kept his voice down. “You didn’t look well when I left you with your grandmother. Do you still need me?”
Zelli gazed up at him, itching and restless, his spine liquid, his face hot.
Tahlen seemed worried, maybe because Zelli didn’t speak. “Is there anything I can do?”
“I ache even hearing you,” Zelli revealed in a daze, then recalled himself enough to straighten and add, “not like yesterday. Not to lose all reason. But I have been lying in bed thinking of you.”
“Zelli.” Tahlen shut his eyes before saying it, then opened them to give Zelli a look that should have been chiding but was so bright Zelli couldn’t be sure.
“But you must be more tired than I am.” Thinking about why that was made Zelli shift from foot to foot. “Did you eat? Did Esrin forgive you?” He poked his head out into the hall but as he’d expected, he and Tahlen were very much alone. “Would you like to come in?”
Once the invitation was extended and he’d stepped back to let Tahlen in, he remembered the last time Tahlen had been his room. Tahlen might have been remembering it too, because he made his expression blank and went to stand in front of the fire, exactly as he’d done the previous time.
Zelli nervously chewed his lip, but closed the door and then moved to follow him.
Instead of launching into a speech about courtship and admiration, Tahlen studied Zelli, starting at his bare feet and legs and ending with Zelli’s damp hair.
“You got a bath?” Zelli asked, voice high.
Tahlen darted one glance to his cloak and the trail of clothes Zelli had left on the floor. “Are you in any pain?”
So he had come here to see about Zelli’s discomfort. Zelli tried to be pleased by that and found he wasn’t.
“I bathed and that helped,” he told Tahlen anyway, then stepped closer, ignoring the crick in his neck this caused. “I was surprised to discover faint bruises from your fingers, mostly around my thighs and under my knees, where I have some memory of you holding me. Are you sore? I suppose you’re more used to bedroom exertions than I am, or maybe the acts we did don’t leave you sore in the same way?”
“I’m tired, more from lack of sleep.” Tahlen didn’t look too pleased to learn of Zelli’s bruises, although Zelli had been giddy upon finding them. “You should soak longer. Your bath is heated, isn’t it? Or is that only the family one?”
“Is yours not heated?” Zelli demanded with loud outrage. “There is a house for….”
He fell silent in confusion over Tahlen’s small, incredibly lovely smile. “There is the house for the staff and guards to bathe. I cleaned myself, but I wanted to make sure you were well and didn’t need me.”
“Well. I did.” Zelli didn’t know or care what that was in response to. He had soaked and he had needed Tahlen. He reached out and took Tahlen’s hand by the wrist, pulling it and then Tahlen closer to him while he inspected Tahlen’s fingernails. His relief at the simple touch was overwhelming. With the lust-fever slowly fading, his original problem was getting more noticeable. “Would you like to use my bath? That is the very least I can offer you. You will say I don’t owe you anything, but I would like it. To give you comfort, and also… I’m sure you’ll look pretty there.”
Tahlen laced their fingers together. “Would you like to join me?”
“In the bath?” Zelli wheezed, wondering vaguely what color his eyes had turned upon hearing that.
“People do sometimes share them,” Tahlen explained, watching Zelli’s face and apparently pleased with what he saw. “Lovers,” he added deliberately, “will sometimes share them.”
