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I. PORTENTS
The night shift at Gigapies had been busier than usual, the store manager told Ren. She was a white-haired, wizened little grandmother from a nearby village who had—by her own account—survived three pillager raids and two close brushes with the undead. Ren didn’t think you could call it a close brush if you actually turned into a zombie at any point, to say nothing of surviving, but he would never question her judgement. People get back from those death games, they can’t sleep, see. Come in here at ass o’ clock, want some comfort food, a hot drink they can hold.
“Pies on the house for all of them,” Ren told her.
Across the till, she gave him a look that could have blighted crops. And you wonder why we’re not turning a profit.
The games weren’t real to the townsfolk, not truly. They took place in a foreign world none of them had visited, and sure, the blood wasn’t redstone and the deaths weren’t staged. But the villagers got their Hermits back after the credits rolled—their employers, their protectors, their most faithful customers—so it’s all good, isn’t it, Dorothy, just give them the pie, and don’t stare if they have to move all the knives to the table across the aisle. Ren knew how it was with these things. Before the arena shut its doors to him, he’d been in three games, died his way to three disoriented homecomings. He’d endured his share of sleepless tossing and the full complement of nightmares—the full stable, he amended, and looked instinctively for the bright-haired, quick-tongued presence at his side who would appreciate the pun.
Boss, said Dorothy. Who’s Martyn?
Ren nearly knocked his apple juice over. “Excuse me?”
The winner. And she showed him a picture, a glossy cutout from a magazine. The man in it had a sword instead of an axe and the wild, hunted eyes of a cornered animal, but the face was still his face and the banner at his hip was their banner. Dorothy pursed her lips, disapproving. My great-niece was wondering if he’d sign her sword.
*
A few nights after everyone had been taken away, Ren wandered into Gigapies at three a.m. and found Grian at the bar, sipping iced chocolate through a twisty straw. He’d looked Ren up and down and said, “You’re late.”
This wasn’t the Grian who designed mansions and flew like a maniac, and once helped Ren fix a build that was off-centre by a hair. This was Grian from the desert: wingless, sanded down at the edges, his irises flat and black and unreadable. The café was hushed and empty, lit only by a virulent stripe of neon pink from the buzzing sign on the sidewalk. “Yeah, well,” said Ren. He moved to put the door at his back. “Might have missed the bus on that one.”
“What happened?”
“No clue. You guys went and I stayed.”
“No invitation? No pull at all?”
“Nothing.”
“Weird,” said Grian.
He slurped loudly on his chocolate. He wasn’t there, really. He was in the arena with everyone else, playing the game he’d invented. “Well, d’you still wanna come? You’ve not missed much yet.”
He held out a hand. The lines on his palm shivered and split. Ren thought about the maintenance work he had to do at the logging operation that weekend, and the soft bed waiting for him at home. He thought about the iron tang of blood behind his teeth. The weight of ill-fitting pauldrons and an imperfectly balanced sword; the way the ground still flew beneath his unenchanted boots when he coursed down his prey. He thought about Martyn.
“Sure,” he said.
He took the proffered hand. Grian gave an experimental tug. The fridge hummed behind the counter. Grian tugged again, and snatched his hand away as if scalded. “Don’t do that!”
Ren raised his eyebrows. “Performance issues?”
“What did you do? What did you break?”
“I didn’t do anything,” Ren said. “I promise.”
Grian cradled his hand against his sweater. “I can’t get a hold on you, somehow. It’s like—like our power can’t touch you. You’re untouchable.”
“Think I’ve heard that one from an ex.”
“You’re sitting out this time, mate,” said Grian. “I’m not taking you there.”
He swirled his straw around the glass with a manic clinking of ice cubes. It gave Ren a vindictive sort of satisfaction, seeing him so discomfited. Getting his head crushed in last time had hurt. “You can’t or you won’t?”
“Which,” Grian went on, ignoring the question, “is great! It’s great for you. We get to kill each other, and you’ll stay home and watch it go down on cable TV.”
“Thanks,” said Ren. “I guess.”
“Don’t thank me,” Grian said. “I didn’t do it.”
He finished his drink and pushed the glass away, staring down at his hands with a peevish frown. “Sorry,” he added, abrupt. “I know you wanted to see him.”
Ren turned away, keeping his face in shadow. He told himself that the sinking ache in his chest was relief. “Are you gonna be in trouble with your”—a nebulous gesture—“managers?”
He didn’t care. Maybe he cared a little. They’d been friends longer than they’d been enemies, him and Grian. “I’ll figure it out,” Grian said. “I gotta go. This chocolate’s real good, by the way.” He fished in his jeans pocket, then stopped, sighed. “Can I owe you? I forgot my wallet.”
“On the house,” said Ren automatically.
He went to wash the glass. When he looked back, Grian was gone. Ren wondered if he should have pressed the issue, demanded to know why he’d been left behind. Probably not. He had no right to ask Grian for favours. Between the two of them, he wasn’t the one who would die multiple deaths before the month was up.
*
Coming home was hard, Ren had learnt after the first game. Hard, but not unbearable, if you were smart about it and had good people around you.
For all his threats, Scar had been the gentlest of his killers. His arrows had pierced Ren’s chestplate to stop his heart with far less fanfare than Grian’s bomb, and certainly less blood than Martyn’s axe—though he would never, ever remind Martyn of the fact, not even if they were arguing. There was a certain pathos to dying in the home he’d failed to reclaim, his life draining away into the carrot fields he’d planted with his own hands, but at the time his mind only had room for one last lucid thought and it was that Martyn was still alive. Martyn was a survivor, clever and ruthless. He would regroup and come back and win the game for both of them. There’d been a voice sobbing his name, and Ren had reached towards it, wanting to comfort whoever was in so much pain; or at least, he thought he’d reached for it, but he might have died first. He really couldn’t remember.
He hadn’t had the heart to watch the footage later, but Doc watched it for him and assured him he’d made a very pretty corpse.
He’d had to get used to the fact that Martyn was his person to miss. No one else had known him quite the way Ren had—and no one knew where he went between games, not even Grian, though it did occur Ren that maybe he was lying. In any case, he did his missing in private, and gave all the rest of his attention to the friends he still had. He wrote letters to Skizz and Big B. He sent taxidermied creatures to Cleo. He made a point of taking Scar to lunch, and they’d had a heated debate about the decorative merits of various house plants. They're all good, Scar had said at last, as their uneaten steaks lay cooling on their plates. Except cacti. Can’t stand the sight of a cactus now, you know. And Ren had nodded sagely and said he knew, and they’d started arguing about roof styles instead.
This time, the fourth time, was different.
This time the homecoming belonged to everyone but Ren, because he hadn’t gone anywhere. This time Martyn was everyone’s demon but his. Even the townspeople were talking about him—traitor, betrayer, absolute rat bastard, the epithets they gave to the most loyal man Ren had ever known. Sometimes there was good-humoured laughter. Other times, a rude gesture. Martyn did this. Martyn did that. Martyn blew up his own birthday party. Martyn stabbed a man in the back. Martyn won, and Ren wasn’t there for it.
It was a good thing he wasn’t the possessive sort, or he might have lost his mind. He was so unpossessive, in fact, that he called Rosie and took an extended leave of absence from GigaCorp to work on the ice roads for Etho’s racecourse. Out in the tundra, the streets were quiet and cell network was spotty, and the only thing the locals cared about was whether the undead would come knocking in the night.
Ren had been a king, after all. It was his duty to protect them, even if historically, he hadn’t been very good at it.
II. VISITATION
“Look,” said Martyn. “I don’t want to explain myself, or talk to anybody, and if someone tries to take my picture I’ll kill them.”
He glanced over his shoulder, into the fir-lined drive below the ski lodge. Ren said, “Okay.”
“I just,” Martyn said, “need somewhere to sleep. Just for a few days.”
“Okay,” said Ren again. He would have given Martyn the world, if only it were still his to give. “I can do that.”
*
His hair was longer now. It clung to his collarbones in damp yellow coils as he stepped out of the shower, towelling at his face. Ren didn’t look away, and Martyn didn’t tell him to. When you’d lived together in wartime, it was hard to maintain any sort of modesty where each other’s bits were concerned.
“Long way here?” Ren asked, studying the vague suggestion of Martyn’s face in the fogged mirror.
“Not too bad.”
“Really?”
Martyn shrugged. “You made the roads.”
Ren hadn’t been asking about the trek from spawn, and they both knew it. Then again, there could very well have been a simple pedestrian route that took a player from a collapsing death world into an old and thriving utopia. Ren wasn’t the expert. “I would’ve worked on my paving a bit more if I’d known a celebrity would be walking on it.”
“You’ll make me blush,” Martyn said, deadpan, and let his towel fall.
A better man would have blushed. Ren cracked the window shutters open, just enough to let a breath of cool air into the overheated bathroom, and watched—not disinterestedly—as the mirror began to clear. Martyn needed a shave, badly. He could also have used several good sleeps and a week’s worth of square meals. And—
Ren took an involuntary step forward. “How’d you get that?”
Martyn looked down. “Grew it myself? Gotta be more specific, dude.”
“That,” said Ren.
He came round Martyn’s elbow and reached out to trace the long pink scar across his abdomen. A savage gash, oddly straight for a sword-cut, spanning his ribcage from one side to the other. “Oh,” said Martyn. Under Ren’s fingers he had gone very still, like a soldier on parade. “Fell on a glass pane, believe it or not. You should’ve seen it. You’d have laughed.”
Ren didn’t think he would have laughed. Now that he was looking, Martyn’s skin was littered with relics of the arena, recently healed and impossible to miss. He touched his thumb to the white weal of a sword wound under Martyn’s left pectoral. A blade, there, would have gone through the heart. “This?”
“Joel stabbed me. I deserved it, I think.”
They were in a world that cradled its players to its bosom, where death didn’t last and injuries erased themselves almost as soon as they were done hurting. Ren’s body had forgotten all its own history, even the time he’d got his head chopped off. It didn’t seem fair that Martyn got to keep his scars. “What do you mean you think?"
Martyn said nothing, reaching for the sweatshirt Ren had lent him. Ren stopped him with a hand on his arm. All down his left side, there was a meteor shower of smaller scrapes and gouges that might have stumped Ren’s autopsical eye, if he hadn’t been intimately acquainted with the fallout of shrapnel from a blast. “What about here?”
“Someone rolled a minecart from—no, can’t be, the angle’s wrong for that.”
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t remember,” said Martyn shortly. He tugged the sweatshirt over his head and pressed his thumbs into the bridge of his nose. “It’s slipping away. Days at a time. I’m not supposed to be here. If you’re going to cry, let me put on some fucking pants first.”
Ren didn’t cry. Martyn got dressed. The mirror watched, unforgivingly lucid. The clothes he’d worn in the arena lay in a bloodstained heap beneath the towel rack. Ren would scrub them in the sink himself tonight, then take them to the village seamstress to mend their rips and tears. He knew how sentimental Martyn got about such things.
“They usually fix me up before a game starts,” Martyn said at last, as if answering the unspoken question. “But I didn’t exactly leave with their permission. No new body for me, I guess.”
Ren closed the shutters again. His arms were goosebumped, though he wasn’t the one who’d just got out of the shower. “Are they—?”
“Looking for me?” Martyn suggested. “Probably. Your world’s real secure, though. They’re not getting in here.”
He smiled, with maybe too many teeth. His dripping hair had made a dark spot around the collar of his shirt. Ren had left his scars in the arena, but not his rage. “If they try, I’ll kill them.”
“I love when you talk dirty,” said Martyn dreamily.
III. LEDGERS
Ren had started writing things down after he’d got back from the first game. The arena had its own laws of memory, not to be relied on in other worlds. He’d been at Cleo’s, watching her work on a statue, and she’d made an offhand remark about the time she’d killed a man by setting his roof on fire. She couldn’t remember whose roof it was. Neither could Ren. Cleo had started to look up a clip, then said, “You know, it really doesn’t matter,” and gave a careful laugh, and went back to sculpting, and Ren knew her well enough not to press the subject.
He’d killed people too, a lot of them. The least he could do was remember who, and where, and why.
Scott, in the flower forest. He shot at Martyn. It was just a bullet-point list at first, scrawled on napkins and bits of scrap paper. Keeping a proper diary would have made the endeavour seem too serious, like something he ought to be doing in therapy. Joel, by the desert crater. He set his wolves on Martyn. Facts, brief and unadorned. He would save his self-justification for another time. Tango, at the battle of Dogwarts. I don’t know. He was just there.
And there were other people who’d died because of him, even if he hadn’t swung the sword himself. Cleo. Outside the Crastle. She charged at me and Skizz killed her. He needed to make sure he remembered those too, maybe even more than the others. Skizz. Inside the Crastle. He was mad for blood. None of us could stop him. And of course, most damning of all: Rendog. Me. Blackheart Altar. I had to become a weapon. I told Martyn to do it and he refused and I put his hands on the axe and commanded him and I don’t think he slept for weeks after that Martyn I’m so sorry I should have done it myself.
The bullet points burgeoned into lengthy scenes. The napkins and sticky notes took over an entire box in his attic. He wondered, sometimes, if Grian kept a list too, if he held himself culpable for the whole game. He wondered if his own name lived like a trophy among the pages of Scar’s ledgers. At some point he foisted the box of papers onto Doc for safekeeping. It was a strange comfort, the thought that someone else would remember the wrongs he’d done, even if he lost track of them between one world and the next.
“I won’t lie,” Doc said, when Ren dropped off the papers at his office. “If you leave that with me, I’m going to read it.”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t,” Ren said.
Doc fixed him with a precise, searching look. Some cybernetic part whirred in his shoulder. “Is it only the murders? Do you not write down the good things as well?”
“The good things?”
“It’s a game,” Doc said patiently. “That you keep playing.”
“I wouldn’t give it up for anything.”
It had never crossed Ren’s mind to refuse the arena’s call, even if he could. Whatever they all became when they were in that other world, it was something powerful and monstrous, something real. There, bodies broke down and fire spread and death hurt and every smallest gesture was laden with meaning, from the tilt of Martyn’s head when he was concentrating to the way he squeezed Ren’s hand before a fight. It was no wonder their own world always felt paper-thin in the first weeks after they got home from a game, their shops and skyscrapers like little painted dollhouses, holding nothing fatal, nothing consequential, until the monsters could be let back out.
“Don’t lose the good stuff with the bad, then,” said Doc. It was his mildest, most reasonable voice, as if Ren hadn’t seen him dissolve into tearful hysterics over a bit of misplaced redstone just days ago. “It should be criminal, I think, letting information get lost.”
Ren didn’t think he would ever need to write down the shapes the stars had made in the crisp nights over Dogwarts, or the red of his banners against the snow. How Martyn would grin and lean into Ren’s shoulder to share a joke with him at the campfire. The soaring warmth in his chest when he watched Martyn in action: his surefooted tread on shifting sand; the sweet, deadly arc of his arrows. Thank goodness you’re mine. Those things were etched deep in his bones; and if he did write them down, he wouldn’t give the evidence to Doc, anyway.
*
“They wanted me to kill you too, you know,” Martyn said, apropos of nothing.
He and Ren were trekking through a shadowed gully in the forest bordering the tundra. Raiders had been harassing the nearby towns, and the culprits had an outpost somewhere in the shelter of the towering spruces, the villagers said. Ren had promised to protect them, and Martyn had invited himself along, and so there they were. “You mean,” Ren said, “apart from the time when you did?”
“You love being funny, don’t you?”
When he was already a blood-crowned king, Martyn meant, one misstep away from the end. Somewhere in the trees, a brook babbled unseen. Ren needed to refill his flasks. He stopped and surveyed the path they’d taken, trampled mud behind, trackless underbrush ahead. No one had come this way in months.
“They told me I had to turn on you,” Martyn said, more insistently. “Stab you in the back like I did to Scott. Take the kingdom for myself. Red Spring, or whatever.”
“In the back?” said Ren, offended. “Surely you’d do better than that. I gave you my neck, once.”
He crouched down to examine a fallen log in the brush, where a colony of spindly brown mushrooms had taken root in the rotting wood. He hadn’t had a good mushroom stew in a while. “I doubt they were concerned with where I stabbed you,” said Martyn. “Are you listening to me?”
“Where, then?”
Ren tapped the scabbard at Martyn’s side, belted snugly next to the knot of the Dogwarts sash. The banner, of course, was old. The sword was new: Ren had commissioned it from the local blacksmith, reinforced it with netherite, worked it full of enchantments from his own bookshelves. Martyn didn’t like to carry an axe these days. “Demonstrate, if you will.”
Martyn gave him a blistering look. He pulled the flasks from Ren’s backpack and stomped off through the knee-high grass without a word, heading for the brook. A startled blackbird flurried from its nest. He was back with the water in a minute, long enough for Ren to start feeling contrite. “Sorry.”
“I’d stab you through the heart,” Martyn said, and thumped his fist carelessly into Ren’s chest. “Right there.”
"But you didn’t.”
Martyn ignored him. They sat down at the foot of an old spruce, and Ren plucked a mushroom and handed it to him, a peace offering. “No pillagers here. We’re going the wrong way.”
“We’ve been going the wrong way for three hours,” said Martyn.
“I know.”
The bird, reassured, settled down again. The sky was turning red and orange. They ought to start a fire, find somewhere to shelter for the night. Ren wasn’t worried. They were probably the worst thing in these woods, the two of them.
“You should be angrier,” Martyn said. “Hurt.”
“Over something you didn’t do?”
“You always let people get away with too much.”
“Right,” said Ren. “I’ll bust out the old king, shall I, so you can grovel to him.” He still had the throneroom voice he’d put on for the cameras, all low and gravelly. The villagers had loved it so much they’d tried to make him king again. “What’s this I hear? A conspiracy?”
Martyn rolled his eyes, but Ren didn’t miss the way he’d brightened at the prospect of grovelling. “Oh, here we go.”
“A plot, against mine own royal person? Heads will roll!”
“Yours,” Martyn said, and then he smiled helplessly, the same fiendish smile Ren remembered so well. “I’m all treachery, my liege.”
“Are you now?”
“You should watch the last game, if you don’t believe me. See for yourself what I did.” Martyn scuffed his shoe through the grass. A strategic lock of hair had fallen across his eyes, obscuring his expression. “Then you can decide if you want someone like me in your house.”
“I’ve already decided,” said Ren.
They didn’t speak for a while. In the deepening night, the crickets screamed, filling the silence for them. Ren reached an arm out, and after an excruciating hesitation Martyn came closer, resting his head on Ren’s shoulder with a sharp exhale. “I’m not the same guy that died for you all tragic and pretty, is all.”
“Still pretty, though,” Ren said, and he could have pointed out that he’d never asked Martyn to die for him, but it was too much effort to argue.
IV. LEARNING
“Hey, help me out here,” Martyn said, tossing a razor at Ren.
He had a towel around his neck, and shaving cream all down his jaw. Ren caught the razor with reflexes he didn’t know he still had. He’d been sorting through cabinets in the kitchen of the ski lodge, trying to find a spot for all the tomato-based slime Doc kept sending him. “Can’t you do it yourself?”
“I could,” Martyn agreed.
He was already arranging himself on the kitchen island, one foot propped up on the chair where Snowy was dozing, and of course Ren abandoned his packing to go over to him. “Feel like being pampered, huh.”
“I’ve earned it,” said Martyn. “I used to do this for you, didn’t I?”
They hadn’t always had a mirror during the war. “Not my fault you love being useful,” Ren said.
“That and you’re stupid vain, yeah.”
Standing between Martyn’s knees, Ren drew the razor along his jaw. The blade glided smoothly over his skin, picking up dustings of dirty-blond scruff. Martyn was wearing his own clothes again, washed and mended, and the rings of sleeplessness around his eyes were less pronounced than before. “Gonna cut your hair too?” Ren asked.
“Haven’t decided,” said Martyn. “Maybe.”
Ren thought the longer hair suited him in a rakish, feckless sort of way. He didn’t say so. Martyn might have been brilliant and resourceful and dangerous, but he wasn’t always good at distinguishing other people’s wants from his own. Ren had grown to be careful. “Look up for me.”
Martyn obliged him, tilting his head back so Ren could get under his chin. In that other place, he’d smelled of soot and gunpowder just like everyone else; here, he’d taken a liking to Ren’s bath foam, all lavender and patchouli. Ren tried not to look at the long line of his throat, the unprotected ridge of his clavicles. You could kill someone with a drugstore razor if you tried hard enough. It had been a year or more since his last game in the arena, but the things he’d learned there couldn’t be unlearned.
“I should get a move on,” Martyn said, addressing the ceiling. “Can’t be a stowaway in your world forever.”
Maybe this was a test. Ren lowered the razor. “I told you, no one minds.”
It had become an open secret among Ren’s friends that he was harbouring a squatter in his ski lodge. He’d told Doc, of course. He’d had to let Etho know as well, since the racecourse belonged to him, and Grian had come by once or twice when Ren was out. Whatever they’d discussed in his absence, Martyn hadn’t said. “I mind.”
“Fine,” said Ren. “Do you want to leave?”
Instead of a reply, Martyn leaned back against the kitchen cabinets and undid the top button of his shirt, a pointed invitation for Ren to carry on with his work. Ren hadn’t wanted to hear the answer, anyway. The one time Martyn had put down roots and stayed somewhere with him, they’d both died for it. Small wonder he preferred flitting in and out of people’s worlds these days. It was Ren who made things complicated, who got big ideas about flags and kingdoms and places to come home to, and had to get the nonsense beaten out of him every few lives or so.
Martyn’s breathing had gone slow and measured. Ren thought he might be falling asleep, but then he looked down and saw Martyn’s fingers curled round the edge of the counter, rigid and bone-white.
“Hey,” said Ren softly, touching the back of his hand. “Wanna do the rest yourself?”
Martyn studied him through heavy-lidded eyes. “There’s plenty of safe worlds like yours, where the Watchers can’t get me,” he said. “I can go anywhere. Don’t have to be in your hair.”
Ren knew that if he asked—if he cried and pleaded and looked tragic enough—Martyn would stay. Stay in a guest room in the ski lodge, assume a false name, put on a disguise; disappear too easily into the prosperous streets of Ren’s world with nothing to call his own. He would stay till he was miserable, till he frothed at the mouth to die for the cameras again. Ren had to be careful, so careful.
“You’ve always been a wanderer,” he said.
Martyn sighed. “Give that here.”
He palmed the razor back and swung down from the kitchen island. Snowy erupted from her chair in a flurry of white, disgusted by this interruption, and fled the room to nap somewhere else. Ren watched—at a loss—as Martyn dragged the razor along his neck in quick, careless stripes, going by touch alone, then ducked his head into the sink to wash off. If it was a test, he’d plainly failed. Maybe Martyn had wanted to be hurt. Maybe Martyn had just wanted to be touched.
Ren went up behind him, bracketing his hips with his hands. Martyn didn’t flinch, didn’t even seem to breathe, so Ren wrapped his arms all the way around his chest. “All right?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t lie to your king.”
“I’m not.”
“Not all right, or not lying?”
“Does it matter?”
“It does to me,” said Ren.
He dipped his face into the join between Martyn’s neck and shoulder. Lavender and patchouli, blood and smoke. Ren could still pass the test. He’d been brave once, brave enough to climb naked and barefoot onto an altar, and wait open-eyed for the singing blow of the axe.
He said, “I don’t want you to go anywhere.”
Martyn released a long, shuddering breath. “I don’t want to go, either.”
“You could’ve just said.”
“I can’t stay forever. I’m not made for that. You know.”
“You can stay a while,” said Ren. “I’ll build you a house here if you want.”
He’d build Martyn a thousand houses. Cottages, bungalows, caravans; hell, a stable full of pack mules—something in every world he wandered to, so he’d always have a place to go. “I can build my own damn house,” said Martyn.
“I’ll help.”
“It’ll have a roof and everything. It’ll be nice. You’ll see.”
“I can’t wait.”
“I might even live in it sometimes,” said Martyn, like it was a threat.
“You can do anything you want,” said Ren.
Martyn shifted in his arms, drumming the razor against the bottom of the sink. “That’s kind of a scary thought.”
“I know,” Ren said.
*
That night, he watched the game that Martyn won.
He’d put it off long enough: not from any sort of squeamishness, but because he didn’t want to see his Hand in the arena without him. But he owed Martyn this much. So he waited till Martyn had gone to bed, then locked himself into the woodshed with his laptop and headphones and a box of tissues, just in case, and hit play.
The show had always been an uneasy marriage of cinematic panoramas and shaky battlefield footage. Ren watched it from start to finish. Whenever the cameras were on Martyn he stopped, sat up, scrubbed the scene back until he’d memorised every word Martyn said, every minute expression that flickered across his face. He let himself admire the bow work and the swordplay. He watched his own banner flutter at Martyn’s side. He didn’t even skip past the deaths.
It was almost dawn by the time he reached the end. He hadn’t touched the tissues at all. His head hurt, and his legs were cramping, and his face was numb and tired, and after a moment he realised he’d been grinning like a clown.
Martyn was asleep when he went back into the house. Not just pretending, but truly asleep, starlight spilling through a gap in the blinds to blanket him in pools of silver. Ren went to the bed and knelt by his side. He was careful not to make a sound, but of course Martyn came awake at once, reaching under the pillow for his knife. “M’lord? You okay?”
The old title, after all this time. “Yeah,” Ren said. “Yeah.”
Martyn freed an arm from the blankets to cup his cheek, smoothing a callused thumb across the skin beneath Ren’s eyes. “Couldn’t sleep?”
“Not really.”
Ren thought about how the hand holding his face was the same hand that had wired up delicate traps; that had shoved people from bridges and out of buildings and set carts full of explosives into motion. It was true that Martyn’s eyes were harder and colder now, that his laugh had the same coruscating quality as the edge of a rapier. He was clever, cunning, brutal, violent. He was every bit as awful as the game had made him, and Ren loved it, and Ren loved him.
He turned his head just enough to press his lips against Martyn’s palm. Up to the pulse point at the wrist, then along the fine bones of his forearm. Martyn grinned, delighted. “What’s up with you?”
“You know. The usual.”
“S’okay.” Martyn gave an enormous yawn. “Don’t gotta sleep if you can’t. Just close your eyes. Scientists say it still counts.”
“Okay.” Ren rested his chin on the edge of the mattress. “If you say so.”
“I’ll be here.”
“You will?”
“Yeah,” Martyn said, “of course,” and he brushed his knuckles over the corner of Ren’s lower lip, and they stayed that way till morning.