This Time, I Accept Your Brother's Claim novel · Chapter 15 of 32

Chapter 15: Sealed

Piers's body obeyed before his face did.

His left knee bent and hit the temple stone.

His right one wouldn't.

It was the leg that locked. It stayed straight, rigid, shaking, while the Voice pulled him down.

Then something gave with a crack I heard across the floor, and he went down on both knees in front of every pack in the kingdom.

His face was gray.

He didn't make a sound.

Nobody on the ridge breathed.

Through the bond, I felt Auden's anger go out.

What came after it was horror.

"Get up," he said.

His own voice. Just a boy's.

"Piers. Get up. I'm sorry."

Piers got up.

He did it slowly, with his weight on his left leg, and he looked at his youngest brother for a long moment.

"No, you're not," he said. "Not yet. You will be."

He limped out between the pillars, and the crowd let him through.

Then the twins started howling, and the whole ridge went with them.

The feast went on until two in the morning.

I don't remember eating.

I remember the second prince's mate fixing my comb. I remember my father dancing with the matron, badly.

I remember Auden's hand finding mine under the table every few minutes.

At two, the old King stood up.

"My son," he said, and raised his glass of Fairlie red to Auden. "Take your Queen to bed. And for the love of the Moon, take that suit off before you spill on it."

The hall roared.

Auden turned the color of the wine.

The King's chambers were at the top of the west stair.

I'd slept in them for fifty years.

Alone, mostly.

His father had moved his books to the garden rooms that morning, and the shelves were bare.

Somebody had lit a fire.

Somebody had put white flowers on every flat surface, and a bottle of champagne in a bucket, and turned down the enormous bed.

Auden shut the door.

He leaned his back on it.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay."

"So. I read a book."

I turned around.

"What book?"

"A medical one. From the infirmary library. It was not helpful."

I laughed, and then I couldn't stop, and I had to sit down on the end of the bed.

"It had diagrams," he said, wounded. "Cross sections."

"Auden."

"I've never done this. You should know that. I mean, you probably guessed."

He pulled at his cuffs.

"And you've done it for fifty years, and I don't want to be... I don't want to be worse than him."

I stopped laughing.

I looked at the room.

The bed I'd lain in, counting the ceiling beams, while a man finished with me and left.

The couch by the window where I'd sat afterward with a blanket round my shoulders until it was light.

"He never kissed me," I said.

Auden went still.

"Not once. Not on the mouth. Not in fifty years. It was a duty, and he did it like one, with the lamp off."

My hands were in my lap.

"I don't know if I'm allowed to want this. I keep waiting for somebody to tell me I'm not."

Auden came across the room.

He knelt down on the rug in front of me, in his good suit, so his eyes were level with mine.

The way he had in the herb garden.

"You're allowed," he said.

"Are you sure?"

"I'm the King. I just checked. It's the law."

He lifted his hand and touched the bite on my left shoulder.

It had already healed to a thin silver crescent.

"Tell me yes," he said. "Out loud. I want to hear it."

"Yes."

"Tell me what you want."

I took his face in my hands.

"I want you to kiss me with the lamp on."

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