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The thought first occurred to me a few days after our Winterfest celebration, the first year we spent back in Withywoods after everything had been settled and all our affairs were in order.
It was nearly midnight. Bee had long been sent to bed after a lavish dinner, everything left over from the feast. Our visitors – Lant and Molly’s son Swift – had left in the morning, and the house had settled back into its usual routine, established in the months that had followed our return from the south. Our household was larger than it had been, the price I paid for no longer being Holder Badgerlock but Prince FitzChivalry Farseer. I found it was one that I was willing to pay.
This late everyone had retired to their own quarters, as had the Fool and I. We often spent our evenings with Bee in what had once been my official study, which we’d started calling the Dreamer’s Den as it was where she stored her journals and scrolls. Her writing desk stood at the eastern wall so that she could sit by the window in the morning and pen down her dreams as I went over the accounts and did my own writing. In the evenings, all three of us gathered here for quiet conversation and companionship. Bee often fell asleep on the rug in front of the fireplace, and I then gathered her in my arms and carried her to her room to put her to bed. The Fool was never allowed to do the same.
It was an indulgence, and we knew it and did it anyway. Carrying her as she had rarely allowed me to do before Molly’s death felt like a privilege, one I was loath to give up. These moments in her room when I covered her with a quilt and kissed her good-night were precious to both of us, so I didn’t deny us that little joy.
If the Fool felt jealous, he didn’t say.
I needed less sleep than my precocious child and usually returned to the study after where the Fool and I spent some more time together. We drank brandy, we talked, and sometimes we just enjoyed each other’s company and the fact that nothing more was required of either of us.
That very evening, my thoughts circled back to the conversation that I’d had with Swift before his departure.
“There’s talk among the servants,” he had told me bluntly. So like his father, this one.
“There’s always talk among the servants.” I liked to think that I was aware of most of what was said. Where I wasn’t, Bee was: she’d made the spyways of Withywoods her own and spent more time there than I thought prudent, but I let her do if she would in turn strive to be kinder to the Fool. It was a bargain we’d struck and she kept her end, if grudgingly.
“This is a different sort.” Swift hesitated, then he turned his head to where the Fool was talking to Lant.
“Ah,” I said. “I see.”
“The servants wonder …”
I was a little amused, both at him and at myself, because he was bothered by it and I wasn’t. When had that change come to pass? When had I stopped being concerned with my reputation and lost all shame, so that the implication that I was bedding a man no longer bothered me at all? That I thought it silly that people would make something of it?
“The servants know better than that,” I said. “And so should you.” The guards were always aware of who came and went. The maids washed the sheets, stewards knew where everyone and everything was at any given moment. There is no such thing as true secrecy in an estate like Withywoods.
“Oh, they do,” Swift said. “But …”
“They do?” Now my curiosity was peaked. “But then what, precisely, is this talk about?”
He coughed. “They know you don’t, with him. It’s just that …”
I stared at him and raised my eyebrows.
He coughed again. “There seems to be a great deal of puzzlement as to why you wouldn’t.”
I gaped at him. “As to why I –“
His face was red. “I just thought you should know, is all.”
“But –“ I was at a loss for words. “How …”
He fiddled with his horse’s reins. “Look, I know you are close to him. And I know it is not like that. Everyone who saw you and our mother together knows it is not like that. But you have new folks here, servants and guards who never knew her. It’s a great mystery to them, apparently.” He laughed and scratched his bearded chin. “All right. We better be off, then.”
He'd left me standing there wondering when the world had turned upside down.
Now I was staring morosely into the fire with a glass of brandy in my hand and failed to conceive how the fact that I wasn’t bedding the Fool had become a topic of contention.
We’d always been close, him and I, and grown closer after each separation, as if the very same forces that tore us apart made us come together again in a violent clash that left the two of us damaged yet clinging to each other more fiercely.
What we’d shared, no one else could ever hope to understand. Not Bee. Certainly not Nettle. Ketttricken, maybe, had an inkling of it. What we were to each other, precisely, was a mystery to me and always had been. I had long ago given up any attempts to put a name to it. None seemed to fit. It was enough that we both felt it.
After Clerres, the fabric of our friendship, torn from long absence and neglect and stained with secrets and misunderstandings, had been mended and washed clean. Our bond was stronger than ever, purer than an outsider could possibly grasp. With that thought in mind I had accepted that the servants would speculate about the nature of our relationship, that there would be talk and raised eyebrows and murmurs behind our backs. I didn’t try to quell the rumors but decided I wasn’t going to let them bother me and was rather proud of myself for what I thought of as a sign of maturity.
Now I wondered what, precisely, Swift’s remarks had meant.
Did the servants think I wanted to bed the Fool and refrained from doing so for some unfathomable reason?
Did they think the Fool wanted to bed me and wondered why I permitted him to stay?
Or was it just too improbable to them, that a friendship as close and intimate as ours could exist and not contain an element of carnal desire?
I gazed toward the Fool. Oblivious to my musings, he sat in his armchair before the fire, legs pulled up and crossed. He was reading a book that rested in his lap. Once more I was struck by the similarities between him and Bee. He’d regained his health through my healing and looked barely a day older than he had as Lord Golden. His hair was a pale blond now, much as Bee’s had been before her changing. His skin had regained a faint golden hue. My healing hadn’t purged the elderling magic from him entirely but dampened it so that his golden eyes were paler and no longer quite as disconcerting. His lean, lithe body and the clean lines of his face drew the eyes of our kitchen girls and quite a few of the stable boys.
There was no denying that he was a beautiful man.
So why wasn’t I bedding him?
The answer was what it had always been. I loved him; I didn’t desire him.
Never once in my life had I looked at another man and felt that stirring, that animal instinct to mate. That was all the answer I could give, and it was plain enough: his physical traits did not rouse me in the least. I could appreciate his beauty, but it didn’t fill me with the need to claim him in such a primal way.
That was the truth of it, and it hadn’t changed in all those years.
It should have put an end to my musings, but for some reason it didn’t.
What if the Fool were a woman, if his body had all the traits that served to kindle that base desire in me? Would I bed him then?
For a second I heard a voice in my mind, repulsive as none other. I will be to you everything that he secretly longed to be to you and could not. The Pale Woman. Drugged with her herbs, I had wanted her, so similar to him in appearance yet female where the Fool, for all his evasiveness regarding his gender, was clearly male.
How cruel that must have been for him, to see me fall prey to her seduction simply because she could offer to me the one thing that he, for chance of fate, could not.
But then I recalled other words, heard them in my mind as if he had said them just yesterday.
I told you I set no limits on my love for you. I don’t. Yet I never expected you to offer me your body. It was the whole of your heart, all for myself, that I sought. Even though I’ve never had a right to it. For you gave it away ere ever you saw me.
There it was, another truth.
A truth that I had known but preferred not to think about, if I could at all avoid it. That the Fool loved me, was as deeply in love with me as I had been with Molly.
I had known and pretended not to because facing that knowledge meant admitting how much it hurt him not to see his love returned. That I was failing him. It had been easier to be willfully blind to his suffering, the same way I closed myself to the Wit whenever animals crossed my path that appeared a little too eager to bond. It had been easier to tell myself that I was offering him all I could, that he couldn’t possibly expect more. Which then allowed me to see his decision to break our bond in Aslevjal as an abandonment of me rather than a measure of self-protection.
How torn I had felt, how terribly the severing of the bond had hurt me.
But because it had been his decision, and one that I had vehemently protested, I had been able to tell myself that he wasn’t suffering from it the way I was.
I’d only seen the rejection. Not the sacrifice.
And I hadn’t, at that time, been able to grasp the full extent of what he was giving me.
Now I knew. More than a score of years with Molly by my side. The chance to know her as a woman, not just as a girl. To become the man she deserved. To love her with all my heart and cherish her always. My Molly.
And Bee, our precious child. He’d given us Bee.
Back then on Aslevjal, he’d crippled me and himself. But what if he hadn’t?
After I had brought him back to life, we’d been so very close. The Skill bond, the Wit healing, the gift of my memories. I couldn’t have left him. Had asked him to come back to Buckkeep with me.
If he’d granted my request – what would have happened then?
Would I have gone from him to Molly and back? Would I have made him witness, in my selfishness, my pursuit and courtship of her? Would there have been room for him in my thoughts as I felt that irresistible urge to seek her out and try my hardest to fix what I had broken?
Would I have come to him, complained mournfully about her rejection, and asked his advice? When he would have been overjoyed with even a fraction of the attention I was bestowing on her? Would I have been so thoughtlessly cruel?
And what about Molly? She would hardly have rejoiced at the realization that my affection for another ran so deep. For a man who seemed to understand me so effortlessly, who knew and accepted every part of me, even those I had previously kept from her. The Fool had known me as the king’s bastard grandson and as Chade’s apprentice, as Burrich’s boy and Verity's man. He’d accepted my Wit and my Skill, he’d hunted with me and Nighteyes and shared the memories and feelings I’d once given to Girl-on-a-dragon.
No, Molly certainly would not have approved. She had been jealous of Kettricken; she would have been just as jealous of the Fool.
The Fool had known that when I hadn’t.
Never before had I been capable of acknowledging just how high a price he’d paid for my happiness – not readily, not easily, but willingly.
Had I ever given him anything that could compare to that gift?
I heard the words as if he were saying them to me in his own voice. My life. I was supposed to die, and you then brought me back and changed the fate of the world once more. His life. And a daughter, because just as he’d given Bee to us, we had given her to him.
But his life had been so full of pain and suffering in those years spent apart. And I hadn’t wanted to share Bee with him, had seen his claim as a transgression. Worse, Bee ardently refused to be shared. As I had missed my chance to become Nettle’s father in all the ways that truly mattered, he’d missed his with Bee.
Now here we were, in the house I’d shared with Molly, a home built on the foundation of our love. A constant reminder of what I’d had with her. Something the Fool hadn’t had with anyone, and never would. Honesty demanded that much of me at last: the acknowledgement that there would be no other for him.
On Aslevjal, he’d said that I had taken a wolf’s life from Nighteyes, that he didn’t want to do the same thing to me. He had set me free. But where did that leave him?
I chanced another look at him. He appeared lost in thoughts, focused on the book in his lap. I kept looking at him, and he eventually lifted his head.
He stretched a little, back arched like a cat, and yawned, concealing it gracefully behind his gloved hand. “You are very quiet tonight. Do you have something on your mind?”
I shook my head, then immediately wished I hadn’t.
Since our return from Clerres, there had been no necessity to conceal my thoughts from him.
He’d come back looking to retrieve my body and found me still clinging to the last gossamer threads of my life. He’d freed me from the rubble with the tools he’d brought and carried me back to the beach. I had been very ill for very long and barely remembered our voyage. So narrowly had I escaped the Traitor’s Death that I still shuddered to think of it.
And then, after we’d gone from Kelsingra to the plaza, from there to Aslevjal and finally back to Buckkeep, he’d shed Amber’s disguise. To me, that signified that we were finally leaving all deception, all distrust and all misgivings behind us. What secrets were left I felt he had a right to keep.
I’d never officially extended an invitation to him to return with us to Withywoods. I’d simply assumed that he would and started planning accordingly. I think he only realized it as I asked him what supplies he would need to make a home here. And so we’d returned and settled in and recovered from our ordeal. I still felt Molly’s absence keenly, but the sharp pain of it was dulled. The Fool’s presence was a comfort, balm to my battered soul. And I thought that Bee felt the same, loathe as she was to admit it. He was not here to occupy the place where Molly had been but to fill the void with something new, something unique.
I’d missed him so horribly in the years he’d been gone.
Oh, the irony of fate. My time with Molly had been bought with the loss of the Fool, and my time with him was possible only now that Molly was lost to me. And just as I’d always had to conceal parts of me from Molly, the Fool had to conceal parts of himself from me, those that I had given him to understand so long ago were deeply unwelcome. An imposition, really, more of a burden than a gift because it made things so very complicated. Why couldn’t he love me just a little less?
The thought sent a hot wave of shame through me, almost nauseating in its intensity.
I couldn’t possibly tell the Fool what Swift had said to me that morning.
Oh, he would see the irony in it, certainly, and smile mockingly and make light of it. He’d tease me, knowing how easily flustered I was. Why, Fitz, this must be confounding to you, that the servants disapprove not of the things you do but of those you don’t.
But it wouldn’t be funny in the least, not for him, just another painful reminder of what he couldn’t have.
Didn’t he resent me, at least a little, for that denial? Wouldn’t the pain it caused him eventually turn into bitterness?
But it wasn’t like that. He wasn’t like that. He loved and gave so generously. And if I were the kind of man to love more than one woman in his lifetime, he’d step back again to let me have that, too. Nor would he begrudge me another Wit bond, not even one that excluded him.
What had I done to deserve this, this unwavering, selfless love that made him put my happiness before his own?
And did I really want for him to love me any less?
No. No, I didn’t. I wanted him by my side, I wanted him right where he was so I could lift my head and lay my eyes on him and know him to be safe and well. And foreign as it was, the thought that he might actually devote himself to another was in truth intolerable.
Such was the utter selfishness, the shameful truth of my love for him.
And I was suddenly sick of it.
I didn’t want to deny him any more. I didn’t want my shortcomings to be the cause of his suffering. I wanted to bring him joy, only ever joy. To do better by him.
Yet some things couldn’t be changed. I couldn’t feign a desire I didn’t feel, and to do so would require a degree of deception that was utterly unworthy of me and of him.
But certainly … certainly there was more that I could give him.
Some things might be impossible; others were not. What was it that the Fool might want from me? He enjoyed my company as I enjoyed his, our shared meals and walks and evening conversations. And there was more. Gifts, chosen for him with care, that expressed what he meant to me. I knew how much he loved beautiful things, and I could give them to him.
I looked at him again. He was wearing a soft blue robe, made from a fabric I’d bought in Buckkeep and sent ahead of us with the vague thought that it would compliment Bee’s coloring. His coloring. Today he’d spent a couple of hours in his work room with the wood I’d bought for him in Oaksbywater, alder and ash that had been delivered here just days ago. Tomorrow we would go for a ride. I had already instructed the new stable boy to saddle Merry for him, a fine red mare with white stockings …
The spinning wheel of my thoughts came to a sudden halt, the thread all a-tangle.
So that was that the servants had seen.
Those were courting gifts, and I had already given them to him, entirely without thought.
The Fool had accepted them with pleasure, had enjoyed and appreciated them. But he knew, as I did, that I hadn’t been trying to win his favor, just to give him what I thought he might like and what would be of use to him in the life that we built.
There could always be more of them, I thought, almost frantically exploring possibilities in my head.
Exotic wood from distant shores for him to make the most beautiful carvings. Finer tools, better paints. A new black winter coat with silver thread, woven from the finest wool. His own horse, one of Chivalry’s stock from Malta’s bloodline. I could send for rare wares from the Buckkeep markets. I could ask a silversmith to make an earring for him, similar to the one Burrich had given to me as a child –
The earring he’d kept for me and continued to wear even as it became inconvenient in his disguise as Lord Golden, for no other reason than that I’d asked him to.
For me.
How he had loved me. And for so long. So hopelessly, so desperately.
And I had forced him to bend and hammer his love into a shape that was acceptable to me. To forge it, in the way the word had come to mean making something lesser than.
My next breath was almost a sob. I put a hand to my mouth to stifle it, but he’d heard me and looked up from his book in concern.
“Fitz?” His eyes grew wide in alarm. He slid from his chair and stood in front of mine. “Fitz? What is it?”
I wouldn’t meet his gaze. I put my face in my hands and released a shaky breath. “Memories,” I said, and it wasn’t untrue. But I also said it because he, of all people, would never judge me for being overwhelmed by them in a rare moment of weakness, and that he would not ask to be privy to them just now.
But what was this? Why did I suddenly want to cry, for him, for the tragedy of it all?
So much he’d given me. And here I was, thinking to repay him in the cheapest way possible, with gold and what it might buy. As if any sort of gift could ever compare to that love, freely given with a full heart.
He brushed my shoulder. Softly. A fleeting touch, just so I would know he was there. Offering comfort.
Offering, never taking.
Never, ever, would my Fool take anything from me that I didn’t want to give.
And I wanted to give, then, so desperately that I hardly knew myself anymore.
*****
I don’t know what excuse I made that evening. I offered an explanation too vague to satisfy and hastily bade him good-night, leaving him confused and likely a little hurt as well. It always hurt him to be excluded from my thoughts.
That night I lay in my bed unable to find rest. What could I do? Gifts weren’t enough. What else, then? What more could I give him that he didn’t already have of me?
If I hadn’t been so overwrought, my common sense might have told me that the Fool did not expect me to do more than I already did. That he had accepted, long ago, my limitations even as his love for me knew none. That his love for me did not depend on seeing it returned in the same way.
In my agitated state I found that unacceptable.
What to do with a boulder that can’t be moved, can’t be carved, an obstacle in your path?
You find ways around it.
Maybe I could do that, too.
I closed my eyes and thought of him, of his face, gilded by firelight. I thought of the boy he had been when we first met and of every incarnation of him that I had gotten to know since. Of the closeness we had shared, both physical and magical.
Touch. I could give him that.
We’d slept side by side often enough. I’d kept him warm during his time of changing in the mountains. I’d carried him in my arms. He’d kissed me the day we’d woken the stone dragons, before he’d gone with Girl-on-a-dragon and my king. I’d taken him from his icy grave in the Pale Woman’s dungeon and carried him even as his body had gone through the first stages of decay. I’d held him and healed him and been one with him. But if not even his corpse had been repugnant to me, how could his healthy, strong body possibly be? He’d kissed me a second time, and I remembered all too well that the only thing that had made that kiss of agony bearable had been his love for me that bolstered its sharp edges.
After his long absence, touch had become more frequent between us. I’d offered him my arm to guide him through his perpetual night. I’d held his hands as he told me about Clerres and everything he had endured there. We’d shared Bee’s book, sitting side by side on his bunk.
And then there was the Skill bond, unbearably intimate, more so than any bedding could be. I’d found bliss in it. A lure, always, an invitation to truly become one with him not just for a moment but for all of eternity. More powerful, even, than the perpetual seduction of the Skill current.
I tried to imagine what kind of touch would make me shy away from him and failed. Because whatever touch he offered would be born from love, and never forced upon me.
And then I thought of touching him in all the ways I never had, what boundaries there were when I already knew his body as I knew my own.
Could I kiss him as he’d kissed me? I certainly could. Not as I had kissed Molly, perhaps, in the throes of passion. But with tenderness and gratitude and the wish to cherish.
Could I pull him into my arms and hold him close to me? Could I hold his hand as he fell asleep?
All that I’d already done.
What about other kinds of touch? Would I be capable of kissing his neck, his collarbone, the flat planes of his chest? What would his bare skin feel like against mine? Would I be able to accept his hands on me and let them roam as they might?
I would.
Gods help me, I would.
Could that be enough? Or would I, ultimately, just torture him more? How far could I go, how much could I give? How much would it hurt him if I had to draw back because I had chosen my path impulsively, not foreseeing what turns it might take?
Dare I take the risk of making an offer unsure of whether I could keep my side of the bargain?
Then again, if I was capable of sharing more with him than I had, wasn't the refusal to do so another act of cowardice?
If there was a chance that I could breach the wall of my own making, once so heavily guarded, maybe I owed it to him to try.
The weeks that followed were peculiar. In the light of morning, I dismissed my thoughts as a flight of fancy. But they came back to torment me.
And so began my strange and ill-advised courtship of the Fool, carried out with both determination and a great deal of anxiety.
I put the first flower on his pillow in his absence. The second I left in his work room during a visit. The third one I brought to him on a tray of ginger cakes and Bingtown coffee set aside just for him.
I gave him the fourth one as we walked in the garden in the earliest days of spring. He stopped, startled, as I offered it to him, and then carefully took it from my hand and stared at it. Slowly, he lifted his gaze to mine.
I clasped my hands behind my back to keep them from shaking and met his gaze squarely.
“Why?” he asked me. “Why are you giving me flowers?”
“Because you should have them,” I said. “And because I wanted to.”
I don’t know what he made of it, whether he considered it an apology for a slight so old it had been nearly forgotten or just a bit of silliness. “Thank you,” he said quietly, and nothing more, but he kept that tiny flower in his hand as if it were precious to him.
That very evening, I found a carving on my desk. The same flower, made from wood and painted to look like it was real. I smiled and put it in my pocket. For days, I carried it with me.
Then came the gloves. Made from buttery kid leather, so thin and soft they felt like a second skin when I first tried on a pair of them. Dyed a light grey, they were embroidered with tiny, glittering crystals, a pattern both bold and intriguing. A traveling merchant in Oaksbywater had several pairs of them on offer, but they all looked too big for the Fool’s slender hands, so I sent a letter to the leather worker who had made them and asked for a pair tailored specifically to him. I had to steal a pair of his own gloves from his chest to accomplish that, and then had to listen to his annoyance at presumably having lost them.
When I gave the gloves to him, he didn’t say anything for quite a while. His fingers traced the spirals, then he tried the gloves on. He marveled at how well they fit, then finally looked up at me. “Thank you,” he said. “They are strikingly beautiful.”
No more so than you, I could have said, or, at the very least, They suit you. I had to look away, embarrassed at the direction my thoughts were taking.
“Is the color to your liking?” I said a trifle stiffly.
He lifted his hands and admired the way the tiny crystals caught the sunlight. “Oh, yes. Very much so.” He looked at me. “Oh, Fitz, my friend, what a generous gift.” His smile was a thing to behold.
The horse was next. It had taken me weeks to arrange her delivery, and it was hard to describe the joy in the Fool’s face when he first saw her, a dappled gray with black mane and tail, young and eager to prove herself to him. She reminded me of the roan I’d ridden, Fleeter, but also of him, long-legged and elegant with mischief in her eyes.
“What a beauty she is,” he said, blinking at her. “But don’t you think she’s a little tall for Bee?”
“She’s not for Bee,” I said. I can hardly describe the nervousness, tenderness, and sheer elation that I felt in that moment. “She’s for you.”
He turned incredulous eyes toward me.
“I owed you a horse.” I thought of Myblack.
“No,” he said. “You owe me nothing, certainly not something as precious as this.”
“Maybe not. But I want you to have her.”
That evening he was unusually taciturn. After Bee had gone to bed he took a book to his favorite chair, but after a couple of minutes he suddenly set it aside. He stood and straightened as if bracing for a confrontation.
“Fitz,” he said. “I’m not certain what it is you believe you did wrong, but you need to stop atoning for it.”
“What?”
“The flowers. The gloves. The horse. Why are you giving me all these things?”
“Don’t you want them?”
“How could I not? But …”
Touch had been third on my list.
The most difficult task of all because there were so few reasons to touch each other casually now that he’d regained his eyesight, now that we were no longer in danger or confined to a small space on board of a ship. I felt a great deal of anxiety at the thought of touching him on purpose without any outer circumstances prompting it, and so I had delayed that task. There were more gifts to give, more flowers to deliver; I hadn’t yet settled on a design for the earring I wanted to give him.
In truth, the thought of bridging the gap terrified me as little else had.
Yet in that moment, with him standing in front of me and searching my face for answers, I surprised myself by reaching out to him, almost on instinct. I took his hand in mine. “If you want them, then they are yours.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Just like that?”
“Just like that.” I kept holding his hand. It had been so long since I’d touched him.
How, I asked myself, had I failed to realize how much I’d missed it?
In that moment, I was lost, and did what I shouldn’t: I turned his hand so that I could press a gentle kiss into his palm.
He drew a sharp breath. “Fitz. What are you doing?”
I was at a loss of what to say. Nothing that came to my mind was sufficient to calm him, to calm me, to diffuse the situation lest it escalate into something neither of us could control. What was left to me was honesty. This entire endeavor was too important to lie to him, whether by omission or deflection.
“Fitz,” he said. “You may not be aware of how this looks. If I didn’t know any better …”
“It looks like I’m courting you,” I blurted out. I’m not sure whose hand was trembling worse, his or mine.
He inhaled sharply. “So you do know. Fitz, I ask again. What are you doing?”
“Well,” I said weakly. “You know how the saying goes. If it looks like a duck –“
“Do not –” His voice wavered. “Why?”
“Because –” And here everything deserted me. All my cunning, all my courage, my carefully laid plans.
He looked at me. I stared back.
“Why?” he asked again. When I said nothing, he pulled back his hand.
“No!” I held on tight. He paused, startled, and I took a deep breath. The words that came out were unpolished and rash. “I want you to have all of me. All I can give. I want you to have of me what you want, whatever you want.”
Silence. I couldn’t bear to look at him.
“I don’t think that you meant that quite the way I heard it, Fitz.” His voice was mild.
When he made another attempt to pull back his hand, I let him. But his dismissal gave me the courage needed to look up at him and meet his eyes. “But what if I did?”
“Then I would call you very foolish indeed.” His smile was likely intended to take the sting out of his words. Nevertheless I felt them as pinpricks, and had I been a porcupine, I would have looked quite the fright.
Prickly, the wolf said in reaction to my thoughts. You are a hunter, brother, not prey. If you intend to mate with him, why don’t you just say so? I sensed a hint of curiosity. How, precisely, was that done, with two males?
“Not foolish,” I said to the Fool. My face was burning. “I meant it, all of it. I mean it.”
Our eyes met. His were very wide.
And suddenly I needed to know. “If you could have all of me,” I said. “If you could have all of me you ever wanted, what would that be? You once said … you once said that you put no limits on expressing your love to me, and I wonder … if that love were to express itself in the physical act, what, exactly, would that mean? What would you have of me?”
For the longest time, he didn’t speak. He was like a statue, frozen and pale. Then he closed his eyes. “It is not fair to ask me that. Words once spoken can never be taken back. Haven’t you learned that lesson? Will you ruin us all over again?”
He was afraid of rejection. He feared, and with good reason, that if he revealed his desires to me, my love for him would not outweigh the disgust I would feel. Not after I’d insisted, for so long, that I would never bed him. He couldn’t trust me not to behave atrociously if he revealed this carefully guarded piece of himself – the exact shape his love for me might take, given space and freedom to unfold. He’d kept these desires hidden because having my heart meant more to him than bedding me, and he would bed me only if he also had my heart.
But things had changed. I had changed, and as I had finally started to acknowledge the scale of what was between us – as I had left the silly fears and constraints of my youth behind – it felt like I was finally ready to accept his love and return it with no reservations.
And, I thought in a flash of insight, it had become possible only because his enduring and unconditional love for me had allowed me to mature, to open myself to him, give more when once I’d believed that what was between us had to be kept firmly within bounds. Slowly, one piece at the time, I had become more comfortable with being who I truly was in his presence. He had never demanded more than I could give and, in doing so, allowed me to give ever more, willingly.
Now … now I finally wanted to give him everything, and I had taken the first step and could not turn back.
“I know well what it is like to long for things you believe you will never have,” I said. “So much that you never dare allow these thoughts to fully form in your mind. What use is it, after all, to torment yourself? I know. I know how impossible it seems to trust another enough to bare your soul. The fear of what you might lose, of what cruelty might, intentionally or not, be unleashed … and have I not unleashed that cruelty upon you, so long ago, and given you reason to fear? But …”
I looked up at him, at his stricken face. “There is trust between us, Fool, and always has been.” My voice gained surety. “I betrayed that trust when I was younger, and I still wish I could undo it. But we’ve come such a long way from then. We have found each other again. I have no right to ask but I’m asking anyway: Please trust me. Trust me enough to tell me … what you would have of me. What you wish, in your most private and carefully guarded thoughts, we could share.”
He closed his eyes and shook his head: no. But the impact of my words made it impossible for him to ignore them.
He’d never lied to me outright, as far as I knew. He’d spoken to me in riddles and in jests, with cutting barbs and acidic wit. He’d concealed things from me and spoken half-truths I had never been able to dismantle. But he’d never lied, and as I watched him, I saw him resign himself to telling the truth. I’d made it impossible for him to refuse.
I had asked for trust, and since that trust had been earned, he had no other choice but to grant it, afraid as he clearly was.
I waited.
“Kisses.” His quiet voice was so full of longing that I ached for him. “Your kisses, Fitz. Your hands on my body. Not just to hold or to heal. But to caress and leave warmth in their wake. To be in your arms, to breathe you in. To …” His voice broke. “To be allowed to reach for you without the fear of how it might be perceived, that my touch might be unwelcome or linger for too long.”
I tasted my own regret and guilt bitter on my tongue. I had done this to him. I had made him afraid.
“To be close to you,” he concluded in a hushed whisper. “As close as two peope could possibly be.” He opened his eyes and looked at me.
I stood up and took a step toward him. “Kisses, you say. Of what kind? Show me.”
“No.” He shook his head.
“Show me.”
“No.”
Twice he’d kissed me, but neither of these times had been just for the pleasure of it. Neither of these kisses had been enjoyed as it should have been.
I took another step toward him, half expecting him to retreat. But maybe he, too, sensed that there was no escaping what I had set in motion.
He was visibly bracing himself. For what, precisely, I don’t know. Maybe that I would kiss him and then reject him once more. Maybe that one kiss was all I intended for him to have.
But I was past all that. Past everything but the need to make this right. To give him what he wanted, not out of pity but because he deserved to have it, to have all of me if he so wished.
When I touched my lips to his, it was gentle at first, hesitant and tender. I closed my eyes, felt his shaky exhale. As I deepened the kiss, his lips parted under mine. I tasted him more thoroughly. He made a small noise in his throat, and I could sense the shiver running through him. I reached for him without opening my eyes and pulled him close. He came, slowly, and let me kiss him. But he stayed tense in my arms.
I broke the kiss to look at him. His eyes were closed. A flush covered his cheeks.
“Beloved,” I said, and his eyes opened, darker than I’d ever seen them and afraid. “Come to bed.”
*****
There were kisses, an abundance of them, and I learned that my Fool liked to be bitten some but not too much. I learned that he loved it when I cradled his head and kissed below his ear, that he could be forceful when teased to the point of desperation. And all of that while experiencing, for the first time, the incredible rush that came with giving him pleasure and seeing him fall apart under my hands.
I was careful with him at first, but he’d never been content to be led, and so, after a while, he learned to take from me, to give commands I found myself willing to follow, and after a bit of this we both learned that there was little he wanted that I wouldn’t grant, and, to both my consternation and astonished delight, that neither my mind nor my body truly cared that he was male. The pleasure I’d intended to offer was shared. I found bliss where I hadn’t expected any and realized that I could indeed love my Fool without restraint.
I had him, at last, and he was feverish and near-mindless under me, urging me to find my pleasure in the joining of our bodies – the one connection we’d never made. Now that we had it, it felt like completion.
It was then that he finally revealed himself, that I uncovered the depth of his desire for me. With every touch and every kiss and every whispered word I took down the last barriers between us and turned my Fool into a creature of naked want. He left marks of possession on my body that stoked the fire in me, made brighter by the awareness that it was I who had taken us both to that place. They were marks of my triumph, and I bore them gladly, taking a fierce pride in knowing that I gave him all he wanted and more.
More, he whispered.
More, I gave, and kissed him until he was gasping for breath, close to shattering.
He finally spent himself with a harsh cry. Still he commanded, demanded my satisfaction even after he’d found his own. I’m not sure I could have stopped if he’d wanted me to. I was too far gone, lost in him and the blaze of our mutual desire. All pretense had been stripped from me. What was left were my body’s passion and hunger, gearing inevitably toward climax.
He held onto me, a wild light in his eyes. “Beloved,” he whispered, asking nothing less than my complete surrender, and at that, I finally allowed myself to thrust deep and spill myself inside him. That, too, felt like giving: an acknowledgment that I was his even as I made him mine.
The world returned to me slowly. I lay on him, but he made no complaint of my weight. His hand was in my hair, the touch a welcome one. I turned my head a little to look at him. Glistening tracks of tears marked his cheek.
I sat up in sudden alarm. “Beloved –“ Did I hurt you, was on my tongue, only he anticipated the words, shook his head and put a finger on my lips.
“Hush. Do not worry so, Fitz.”
“You are crying,” I said, stupidly.
He shook his head again. A rueful smile curved his lips. “Have you never known tears of utter joy?”
Of course. Of course I had. As I looked at him, yet another tear fell and silvered his cheek. I brushed it away with my thumb.
He closed his eyes. As he opened them again, his smile turned wistful. “I wondered what it would be like, with you, having this. For so long, I did not even permit myself to think of it. What right did I have to ask for more when I had the reward of your friendship, your caring, your regard for me even as I felt I was steering you onto the rocks where you were bound to shatter? There was never a path for me to choose where I could see this come to pass. If I had, I don’t know whether I would have had the strength to resist doing everything in my power to make it come true.” He looked into my eyes as he admitted, in a whisper, “Even if it had cost us the world.”
These last words moved me to the point where I felt tears of my own sting my eyes. I closed them and then took his hand and kissed his palm.
“Fitz,” he said. “Oh, my Fitz.” He cupped my cheek, so reverently. The smile he gave me then was one of sheer adoration.
I laid on my side and gathered him close, felt his lean body cool against mine. He sighed on a long, slow exhale and went lax in my arms. As I held him, I smiled to myself for no reason at all.
He shook me awake later that night.
“Fitz. Fitz!”
I turned my head to the side to look at him. The chamber was dark, but moonlight filtered in through the windows and let me see the outline of his face.
“This still feels like a dream,” he said in a small voice. “Fitz, has this really happened? Is it real?”
My annoyance at being woken so rudely faded. An almost unbearable tenderness replaced it. I took his hand in mine. “It has. It is real.”
“But why? Why now?”
“Because I finally understand.” And then, because he needed to hear it, “I am sorry it took me so long.”
He exhaled deeply. “You have nothing to be sorry for. Only I cannot fathom how this came to be, not truly, and still fail to grasp the full meaning of it.”
“It will become clearer in its own time,” I said and yawned. And then I kissed him so he’d stop fretting.
And kissed him some more just because I could.
*****
Much later, with the Fool sound asleep on his side of the bed, I took a brief detour to the chamber pot and drank a little water. My throat was parched. It had been quite a long night.
When I came back, he had turned to his side. Hair fell over his face in complete disarray.
I am no prophet. Yet in this moment, I saw our future emerge from our present like fabric from a loom, the weaving revealing the pattern and, through it, the finished design.
We would live in peace for many years to come. We would raise Bee together and protect our family as best as we could from hardships and the many tangles of fate and fortune.
I would spoil him, my Fool. He deserved nothing less. I would bring him the finest brandy, the most exquisite things, all that I could think of and more. He’d never be cold again if I had my say. There would be quilts for him and fur cloaks and mittens, and my arms to keep him warm during the night.
I would not be parted from him again.
And then, one day, once we were no longer needed in the Seven Duchies, we’d make our journey to the quarry and start carving our own dragon, feed it with all the memories we’d made and make it come alive under our hands.
What we’d shared tonight, we’d share again. Not necessarily every day, not always in the same fashion – it would never be the most important element of the bond between us. Not for me who’d come to him desiring not his body but his happiness. Not for him who would have gladly settled for having my heart and nothing else, only that having my heart apparently meant that I couldn’t give him less than all of me, whenever and however he wished.
Not, I had to admit in a mixture of bashfulness and guilty pleasure, that this had been a gift just for him. This night had stripped me of many misconceptions, and I suspected that my own appetites, re-awakened and whetted so thoroughly, might not as easily be appeased. I didn’t quite understand it myself, how that had happened, why now. But what I’d said to the Fool rang true: It would become clearer in its own time.
Looking down at my sleeping bedmate, I saw the jester, the sharp-tongued companion of my childhood years. I saw Lord Golden, resplendent in his finery. I saw Amber, both simple and elegant, on the deck of the liveship she’d given my face. I saw the White Prophet who had died in the Pale Woman’s halls fulfilling his destiny. I saw a man of unprecedented strength of will and perseverance, a man full of kindness and wisdom and courage. He would always remain a mystery to me, yet never again in ways that truly mattered.
I’d named him Fool. Somehow, that name had stuck through all of his disguises and all of his truths.
Beloved he was and would always be.