Harbor (On the Wind #3)

19. Orestes

CHAPTER NINETEEN

ORESTES

S omehow, the discussion of only fucking each other resulted in Tybalt moving me into his rooms. We didn’t discuss it—he hadn’t mentioned it, and I hadn’t asked—but the next morning he’d told the servants to bring my trunk to his room, and it had just... been.

I didn’t want to press for another serious conversation so soon after the first. He was uncomfortable with anything resembling seriousness, and maybe I didn’t understand that, but I also didn’t have any burning need to make him more uncomfortable. The men of Urial were all terrible at dealing with serious situations, so it wouldn’t do to hold Tybalt to a standard he couldn’t hope to match.

His father’s surprise marriage started to make sense. Tybalt didn’t want to deal with serious things, so he couldn’t be dealing well with the ridiculous amount of responsibility they were threatening to heap on his shoulders as the next king of Urial. So instead of doing the sensible thing and realizing no one person should have that much power, the king had simply decided to wipe the slate clean for himself and have another child. To create a child on the presumption that the responsibility should be shoved off on them, when they hadn’t even been conceived yet, let alone born, having shown themselves capable of dealing with an impossible amount of stress.

Incredible.

One would think even Albany could see that Urial’s kingship was too much to put on a single person, when clearly the strain of it had sent him spiraling into madness. But I supposed madness wasn’t going to react rationally to itself.

Ugh.

Either way, I opted to keep my mouth shut when Tybalt sent for my things and instead of letting me go back to the quarters he’d had arranged for me, curled around me and clung to the sticks of his nest like a baby bird who didn’t yet want to fly.

That was fine. He didn’t need to know how to fly yet.

Being from Urial, he didn’t ever need to know how to fly. But I did suspect that with a little actual support, he might figure himself out well enough and become the leader his people needed. He could be a damn sight better than his father, that much was certain.

I wondered how many people had thought that of me, before the breaking of the Eagle.

No.

That was yesterday. The Eagle was no more, and I would never have to be a leader. It was for the best. I didn’t even miss most of them, the way they had backed my father’s worst ambitions for so many years and ignored how he’d treated Clio and me. No, the Eagle had never been my home. Now, the Crane, I missed.

Killian’s steady presence, always there with his spear at your back when you needed him. Never with a sharp tongue unless there was a real reason for it, and never ever there to slip a knife into your back, either literally or metaphorically.

Viola or Nia or Brett at my side, ready to face any danger with me.

Purpose.

I missed the people, yes, more than I could ever say, but more than that, I missed having a purpose. Albany had no interest in my presence. Weeks into my stay in Urial, and he hadn’t once spoken to me except to try and cut me down. No, he made a point of snubbing me whenever possible, like a spoiled child.

Lord Montague had apologized for his king before heading back to his southern home, and he’d clearly been all too happy to go back. He’d whispered to me in confidence, in that moment, that the Vulture Clan was so much easier to deal with than Urial court.

He’d pitied me.

Not that he’d said as much, but it had been clear.

I sighed as I dressed myself and left Tybalt’s lovely rooms for the day, knowing that it was another day of nothing I was facing. I could go wherever I wanted in the castle. Talk to anyone who was willing to carry on a conversation, which wasn’t many people, but it was more of them than I’d expected.

Another few every day, as they slowly realized I wasn’t a madman who was as likely to strike them as speak to them.

Did they truly think that sweet, soft Paris had run off to a hard land where the people constantly fought each other? Where any greeting was equally likely to be taken as insult or inquiry?

Every day painted a bleaker picture of Urial, for me. The people were afraid to speak. They were afraid of imagined barbarians. They were afraid of everything, it seemed, except the one thing I thought it sensible to be afraid of: the cold.

I’d stopped going up atop the wall as the weather had turned, but I still went to a large room in the corner tower that had glass windows, so I could look out. First at the turning colors of the leaves, and now... at snow. A dusting of white that covered everything the eye could see.

The people I spoke to laughed at my fascination with it, and more than one had told me it had been a “mild” year so far, because the snow was “light,” and all I could do was stare at them in shock at the idea. It was too cold inside with a blazing fire, and they thought this was mild.

I wanted to take them all down to the wall, where even now Killian and my family would be fighting, but also, they could be doing so shirtless with no ill effects besides a higher likelihood of a blade grazing skin than when they wore armor. If one went outside in Urial like that, their nipples might freeze off.

I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself, staring out at the frozen wasteland Urial had become.

“It’s not that bad, surely,” a soft voice I didn’t recognize said. I turned to find a handsome young man I’d seen a few times at court lounging in the doorway, looking amused.

He was tall with a narrow waist, but had the same strangely broad shoulders that I’d grown accustomed to amongst the Crane. If I had to guess, he knew how to use the sword belted at his hip.

I frowned at him, then motioned expansively to the window. “It’s frozen . Literally frozen. People die just because of the weather. How is it none of you understand how awful that is?”

He grinned at me, pushing off the doorway and sauntering over to sit in an adjacent chair. “Used to it, I suppose. Does it truly never snow in Nemeda?”

“It does,” I admitted, sounding like a petulant child even to myself. “Just not this much.”

“This much?” he asked with a laugh. “Oh, my Nemedan friend, I have bad news for you. Winter isn’t even started yet. Wait until the drifts get so bad they cover small cottages.”

I blinked, staring at him. Waiting for him to laugh again and say he’d been joking.

Surely , he’d been joking.

But no, he simply sat there and looked at me.

“Covers cottages,” I said. “It covers cottages. Entire cottages. Snow.”

He nodded casually, reaching up to scratch his head and then looking out the window. “This is just pretty. Like a painting. Get into winter proper, and it starts to get ugly. Cold. When it snows and the wind blows, and you can get trapped in your home for weeks at a time. The people who live in the castle are lucky, because all the food for the winter is right here in the building with them.”

I stared at him, open-mouthed, for a moment, the words painting a terrifying image in my mind. In Nemeda, we brought food into Crane lands year-round. If suddenly they couldn’t move food anymore, what would we do? Stores would hold out a few weeks, maybe, but what if it were longer?

People would starve as well as freeze.

“This place is a waking nightmare,” I whispered, turning to look at the snow again. “How do any of you survive it?”

He laughed, the sound of it strangely jolly when I was sitting there worrying about death and destruction. “Practice, friend. It’s just practice. We know how to survive winter like you know how to survive those ridiculously hot summers of yours. I hear you get storms off the ocean in the summer that would wipe Urial off the map as well.”

I paused, considering. It was true, the summer rains in the east of Nemeda were awful. The Duck Clan built houses along the coast that were intended to be rebuilt regularly, with a kind of paper for walls. The Heron Clan built their homes on stilts, so that the yearly floods wouldn’t wash them away. We prepared for our own trials as much as the Urial must prepare for this horror that was their winter.

I shivered again anyway. “It’s too cold.”

“Wait till winter,” he said, this time sounding at least a little sympathetic. “It gets really bad then.”

I tried not to think about it getting worse than it was. I already didn’t want to get out of bed in the mornings, with the freezing stone floors of the castle.

Then I realized something.

I’d never seen this man in this part of the castle before. I turned to really look at him, leaning back in the warm, soft chair I’d chosen, pulling the lap blanket further around me. “You were looking for me?”

He stared at me for a moment, blinking, and then slowly, a smile spread across his face. “You are a clever one, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know about clever, but it’s obvious enough. Did you need something? I’m willing to speak of Nemeda, to a point.” When he looked me over like I was a piece of meat or a possible bed partner, I added, “But I’m not available.”

“For speaking?”

“For fucking.” When he lifted his brows in surprise, I added, “When someone looks at me like that, speaking isn’t what they want. And I’m not available for more.”

“Too busy fucking our prince, is it?”

And that... that made me pause. Because the truth was that yes, in a way, I was too busy fucking Tybalt to be taking on other lovers. I was a one lover at a time sort of fellow. But also, it had been made clear to me that in Urial, a man having a male lover was barely tolerated. Tybalt hadn’t gone to any great pains to keep me a secret, going so far as to proposition me in the middle of the throne room, but that didn’t mean he was entirely unaffected by this aspect of Urial.

“Is it a problem for you if the answer is yes?” I asked. It was technically an answer in itself, but I wanted to know as well. Needed to know if this man was offended by me being in Tybalt’s bed.

His return smile was wry, self-effacing in the way so many people were in Urial. “You mistake me, my lord. If you’re spending your nights in Prince Tybalt’s bed, it’s not that you’re doing something that offends me. It’s that you’ve taken a place there I used to occasionally inhabit.”

I stared at him a moment, trying to parse the words. He was a former lover of the prince. Of course. He was a beautiful man, so I could hardly blame either of them. Still, had my demand for a singular affair ended things for them? I hadn’t intended to make any enemies by the request.

“I apologize if that’s a problem for you,” I offered, hesitant and uncertain as I had perhaps ever been.

He waved me away, dismissing the very idea. “Tybalt and I have been occasionally falling into one another’s beds for years. If you leave, it will continue.” He leaned forward, looking me in the eye, his gaze intense. “I’m actually rather more interested in what will happen if you don’t leave. Men like us, like me and Tybalt, and maybe like you, who prefer only other men... we’re treated rather dismissively here in Urial. I understand that isn’t true in Nemeda. And I would very much like to see things change here. If that happens because our future king finds a lover he isn’t willing to let go of? That is not a loss to me. Tybalt will always be my friend, even if we’re never lovers again. A change in society? That’s a treasure beyond price.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw motion in the doorway—red hair and pale skin coming into view. Best to be clear immediately for all involved, then. “I see. I’m more than happy to help Urial in any way I can, of course. And I’m very happy to be in Tybalt’s bed, and there alone. I do not currently foresee that changing, as I quite enjoy his company. What was your name?”

“Mercutio,” he said with a smile, inclining his head and shoulders to me.

I did the same. “Orestes.”

Changing a society. No pressure there. Well, I’d been whining to myself since arriving that Urial was broken. Maybe even if I couldn’t make a peace between our peoples, I could help someone fix things here. It was certainly better than sitting around doing nothing.