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“So it’s like this,” Martyn said. “I’m at Baxter, alone, I can’t sleep. It’s late at night, wind’s howling up a shitstorm. You know how it gets in the mesa.”
“Right,” said Ren.
It got windy on the raceway, too. The stands were still littered with detritus from the Grand Prix: ticket stubs, Scarland slushie cups, banners proclaiming support for one racer or another, glinting with dew and frost among the benches. Ren had gone out with a trash bag after brunch, meaning to make a start on the clean-up, but then he and Martyn had started talking, and—as usual—he’d promptly lost track of everything else. “I hear footsteps on the cliff road,” Martyn went on. “No one ever goes up there, they’re all scared of me. At first I think it’s Tim, and then I remember Tim’s under a tree in the backyard.”
“It’s the mesa,” Ren said. “There’s no trees, dude.”
“You wouldn’t know. You weren’t there.”
Ren snuck a sideways glance at Martyn. They were leaning on the guardrail by the finish line, shoulder to shoulder except for a scrupulous inch of space between them. They’d rarely talked outside the arena of the death game. He didn’t know what rules applied. “Anyway,” Martyn said, “that’s how I pictured it when I’d lie awake thinking about y—about things. I’ll picture as many goddamn trees as I like. So I grab my sword and go to the door, right, and it’s you.”
Ren saw it clearly: the red cliffs of the badlands, the moon (full, of course) high and ornamental above the house on the plateau. A nice, normal house with no grinning dog face on the front. He refused to picture a dog face. You had to have standards about these things. “You’d think it was a trick, someone pretending to be me.”
“Of course not. I’d know you on sight.”
That was demonstrably untrue. But Martyn hadn’t believed him about Tango before, and Ren didn’t feel like pressing the point. Martyn already had more than enough to keep him awake at night. “What do I say?”
“Depends on the day,” Martyn said. “Where my head’s at.”
He stared down at his gloved hands, furled tight around the steel railing. Two weeks now since he’d shown up at Blue River looking for somewhere to stay, and this was the first time he’d talked—really talked—about the games he’d played in Ren’s absence, the one he’d won and the one he’d lost. “Good days, you’re happy to see me. You tell me I’ve fought well, that I’ve brought honour to our kingdom.”
“Oh,” said Ren. “Am I still the king in this?”
“You’re always the king to me,” Martyn said.
He hurried on before Ren could interject. “You say I’ve done such a good job with my tasks. That I’ve done the real task, to prove myself to you, and the game’s over now and I’ll be rewarded. I don’t know what the reward is, but it doesn’t matter, you’re here.”
Ren studied the scruffy curve of his cheek, ruddy from the cold; the fine lashes of his downcast eyes. Martyn had long ago proven himself in every way that mattered. He didn’t know if he could say so, if it was allowed. “What about,” he said cautiously, “the bad days?”
“Then you don’t speak to me,” Martyn said. He was still addressing the backs of his hands. “You barely recognise me. Can’t blame you, I was a mess. You—”
“I’d always recognise you!”
“You don’t even stop by the house. Or you do, you say hello and keep on walking, and I don’t want to call after you, so I just stand there and wave and try to say something witty.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Ren protested. “I’d bang on the door. I wouldn’t go away till you let me in.”
Martyn had got on a mulish scowl. Close enough to touch, and still so far away. “You didn’t see me back there. I had no allies, no supplies, couldn’t protect anyone, not even myself. Everything I did went ass-backwards. You’d have no use for me.”
“That’s not true,” Ren said. His voice was rising. The high cliffs threw it back to him, sharp and insistent. “And even if it was, I didn’t go all the way there just to—to use you, did I? What kind of king would that make me?”
He was getting worked up. Indignant on behalf of his pretend-self, of all things, stranded outside Martyn’s stupid doghouse in the scorching heat. Martyn shook his hair back from his shoulders. “Look—”
“You know me better than that.”
“All right,” said Martyn. His face was pinched and pale. “You tell me how this goes, then.”
“Tell you?” Ren said. “I’ll show you, how about that.”
He gestured around them. The snowy landscape at the finish line was pitted with booths and outbuildings he’d built for all the maintenance work that went on at the raceway. Boat sheds, boiler rooms, depots where the road crews kept their tools. The main lodge was far too grand for this. “Which of these looks like your place? Pick one and we’ll call it Baxter.”
Martyn stared at him, incredulous. “None. Have you seen—no, you know what, sure. The woodshed, that’ll do.”
“Great,” said Ren. He didn’t know what he was doing, only that it was either very smart or very stupid, and either way it beat standing around in the cold, afraid to touch Martyn. “I’m gonna get a costume change. Go in there and wait for me.”
*
It always took him by surprise, how much an outfit could change the way you thought and spoke and held yourself. He put on one of his many fur-lined capes, and the replica crown Cleo had sent him from the museum—as a joke; they’d made it very clear it was to stay a joke—and all at once he found himself standing taller, his chin higher, his spine straighter, as if drawn by marionette strings back into the posture of a king. The crown would fall off if he slouched, anyway. He took a breath of cool crisp air and imagined the dust of the mesa clinging to his clothes, drying out his lungs; the footsore weariness from the climb to Martyn’s clifftop shack. The buzzing nerves, the turn of his stomach. He had been gone so long.
None of this felt like a joke. Cleo would understand.
Light streamed from under the narrow door of the woodshed. He’d barely knocked once when it flew open, and there was Martyn on the threshold, sword pointed at his throat. He’d changed, too—shed the layers of winter clothes Ren had lent him, got back into the jeans and t-shirt he’d been wearing the day Grian knocked him out of the sky. His bare arms were pebbled with gooseflesh. He said, “Ren?”
“It’s me,” Ren said.
His mouth was dry. The blade at his jugular had awakened parts of his hindbrain that, in the long peace of a world where life was free and death was cheap, he’d forgotten he still had. “It’s safe,” he said. “You can put that down.”
The tip of the blade trembled between his collarbones. Martyn was a good actor. He was also shivering. “How—”
“I don’t know,” Ren said. He would have made something up, but his mind had gone blank. Martyn looked so genuinely shocked. “I suppose they let me back in. I—”
“That can’t be.” The sword wobbled again. Martyn’s gaze flicked past him, down the path that led to the racetrack. “They wouldn’t. They told me you were never coming back.”
Ren couldn’t tell if this was true, or if Martyn was just freewheeling. Either way it made his stomach constrict with rage. “Well, they lied,” he said. “I’m here now, Hand. Is that not enough?” And when Martyn didn’t move—”Stand down.”
It was a voice he hadn’t used in a long time. Martyn stood stock still, thunderstruck. Then—moving as if underwater—he dropped to one knee and planted the sword point-down in the dirt, his head bent, his hands curled round the hilt. It was just a wooden one. Maybe he hadn’t been able to find his own sword in such a hurry. But Ren had noticed through Tango’s eyes that he’d carried a blunt practice blade with him in the arena, for the times when the Secret Keeper made him hurt someone he didn’t want to. “I’m sorry,” Martyn said at last. “I didn’t know you were coming. I would’ve built a nicer place.”
Ren surveyed his own woodshed. It was small and stuffy, no more than a few yards across from wall to wall, with a low sloping roof and the silvery strands of a cobweb in the rafters. Martyn had pushed all the logs and crates into a corner, and stage-managed what little room he had left to look like the inside of a death-game bunker. A pile of tarps for a makeshift cot. Chests heaped high against the one window, so nothing could get in that way. A candle guttering out on the sill. It was all achingly familiar. “Could’ve planted me some carrots, at least,” Ren said.
Martyn’s mouth twitched. “Wrong climate for carrots, sire.”
People still used the royal honorifics for Ren from time to time. It was often sarcastic, mostly accidental, and always covered up with a lot of nervous laughter. Martyn said sire with no trace of self-consciousness, in the same gentle, reverent tones Ren remembered from their first life together. He was still shivering. Ren reached behind him and shut the door on the wind. “Outrageous,” he said. “Unconscionable. My loyal Hand, living in such squalour? I’ve been a terrible king.”
“Of course not, my lord—”
Ren went to the ground beside Martyn and swept the hem of the cape around his shoulders. For a moment Martyn tensed beneath the touch, his eyes wide, and Ren started to pull away. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” Martyn relaxed again, curling half-frozen fingers around Ren’s wrist to keep him close. “I—I’m covered in blood, sire. I don’t want to get it on you.”
“Ah, yes,” Ren said. “Because I’ve never covered you in blood myself.”
That silenced him. Ren pulled off his gloves and began to rub his palms along Martyn’s arms, working the warmth back into his skin. Already he was moving like a warrior king, swift, decisive, not stopping to talk himself out of things. They’d lived out of each other’s pockets, once—ate together, slept together, sluiced the battlefield muck from each other’s hair. This wasn’t new. This was a thousand times more natural than the careful distance they’d kept in the stands. “Are you hurt?” Ren asked.
“No,” said Martyn, but he gave a gallant wince.
“Is that so? Whose blood is it then?”
“All the people I’ve killed.”
“Hundreds, I’m sure,” Ren said. “Hold still and let me look at my favourite knight.”
The heat was returning to Martyn’s skin: he was flushed from cheek to clavicle. The deep shadows that ringed his eyes had been easier to ignore under the bright lights of the raceway. He hadn’t shaved since he’d arrived, but even the new beard did not mask the pronounced hollows above his jaw, the way his skin clung thin and papery to the bone beneath. Ren had noticed, too, that his fingers were tinged purple-black at the tips—a faint bruising that began under the nails and spiralled up the joints, only visible when Ren looked at them edge-on. Not frostbite, but something harder to treat. He hadn’t liked to ask before. “What happened here?”
“Oh,” said Martyn, and muttered something inaudible.
“Speak up, Hand.”
Martyn dipped his head, letting his hair slip down over his face. “Fell in the void, I said.”
“What’d you do that for?”
“Fun new battle tactic, m’lord.”
A long fall into emptiness, burned into the skin. Martyn had been so careful once. The sneak, the survivor, the one who buried the bodies after. Ren slid a thumb along his jaw, tilting his chin back up so Martyn couldn’t avoid his gaze. “Were you trying to get yourself killed?”
“‘Course not,” Martyn said. To Ren’s surprise, he drew back sharply and dragged his sleeve across his eyes. “Doesn’t matter now. He died anyway.”
He’d always been able to cry on command, but these tears seemed to embarrass him. Ren put his hands over Martyn’s, gently peeling them away from his face. “It’s all right. Don’t hide from me.”
“M’not hiding.”
He tried to squirm away. Ren tightened his grip. “Hand. Obey me.”
Martyn went still, then. He let out a shaky breath, but didn’t object when Ren smoothed the hair from his face, tucking it behind his ears. Touched the pads of his own fingers to Martyn’s lidded eyes, brushing the tears away; let his hands drift, closing over imaginary wounds on Martyn’s chest and back. “All good now,” he murmured. “You’re going to be just fine.”
He thought he felt Martyn shiver again. He opened his arms, and after a minute hesitation Martyn shuffled closer, leaning his forehead on Ren’s shoulder. “Wasn’t trying to die,” he said, voice muffled in the folds of the cape. “Just—to break a curse.”
“By carrying it yourself?”
Martyn shrugged. “You weren’t there. I needed something to matter.”
The sun was going down beyond the window, glimmering red on the frost. They might have sat that way for five, ten, twenty minutes, while Ren tried to commit to memory the feathery tickle of Martyn’s hair, the faint woodsy musk of his cologne. The crown was starting to weigh lopsidedly on his head, but he kept it on. Martyn wouldn’t have let himself be held like this if it wasn’t for a bit.
“I didn’t want you to see me like this,” Martyn said at last. “My liege.”
“What did you want?”
“Dunno.” Martyn sighed. “Before, I thought—if I did everything right, played by their rules, fed them well—they’d let me see you again. But I did, I won, and you still weren’t there. So I figured it was all the same, whatever I did.”
He looked round his shabby setpiece of a home, cramped and musty and cold. “Still wish I could’ve done right by you, though. I wanted to fight the whole world for you. Wanted to lay it at your feet.”
Ren thought about Martyn standing alone at the foot of a clocktower, blood on his upraised sword, the colours of their old kingdom fluttering bravely at his hip. To his alarm, heat was prickling at the corners of his eyes. “You already did,” he said. “You did it so well, Martyn, for gods’ sakes. You can stop now.”
Martyn looked up at him. Between candlelight and shadow it was impossible to read his expression, to tell how much of it was an act. In a hoarse whisper—”Does my king command it?”
“I do,” said Ren. “I do command it. Your king is pleased, Hand. Your king would like to take you home.”
He brushed his mouth to Martyn’s temple. It felt right. It felt only fitting, both for the Ren who had been king and the Ren who raced boats down the blue ice of the tundra, as though he could go fast enough to leave that other him behind. Martyn’s breath hitched. Then there was a callused hand at the nape of Ren’s neck, stroking over the old scar there, holding on to him with a sort of feverish hunger. “Don’t play with me, m’lord. Don’t say things that can’t be true.”
“I’m not playing.”
“I mean it. It’s too much. Seeing you as the king—it does something to me.”
Very softly, Ren said, “Yeah?”
“Makes it go quiet up here.” Martyn pressed his thumbs into the ridge of his browbone, right between his eyes. “Makes it so I can’t hear them any more.”
Makes it safe, Ren thought. “I’ll stop if you want.”
“Don’t,” said Martyn.
He buried his face in Ren’s cape with a full-bodied shudder. “I never imagined it going this way. I didn’t think it could. Not even on the best days.”
“Shows what you know,” Ren said. He heaved a theatrical sigh, all sorrowful reproach. There was a strange tightness behind his ribs that was only now starting to ease. “You’re better at the acting than the imagining.”
“I haven’t been acting,” Martyn said.
“I know,” said Ren.
*
Slowly, they picked themselves up and moved the chests and boxes back where they belonged. Ren found Martyn’s coat discarded among the tarpaulins and made him put it on. Then he pulled back his cape, and Martyn slipped easily under its fleece lining, shoulder snug against Ren’s chest. His headband was askew, his lips a soft red. In a minute they would walk back to the lodge in the falling dusk, and instead of shutting themselves into their separate rooms they would climb beneath the covers of Ren’s bed together, with Snowy purring on the window seat. Tomorrow Ren would make breakfast. Tomorrow he would ask Martyn to stay. Not just for the racing season, or till spring came, but for good.
His crown was teetering perilously on his head. Martyn laughed, straightening it for him. “Keep it on a while longer.”
Ren grimaced. “Cleo might kill me.”
“It’s just a costume,” Martyn said. “You’re only king of me, anyway.”
He smiled up at Ren. His eyes were still puffy, but it was his old sunny smile, as contagious as ever. Ren laughed too, unlatching the door of the shed. “That’s enough of a kingdom for anyone.”