Harbor (On the Wind #3)

21. Orestes

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

ORESTES

F or just a moment in the course of the argument with Tybalt, all I could think of was the origin of the fight at our southern border. Brett had spent weeks obsessing over it after meeting Paris, convinced that he was going to be the one to reveal our birds to Urial and start a war with a second neighboring nation, bringing ruin to Nemeda.

A feral bird, Tybalt had said, and my mind had gone blank in that moment, only able to think of that single thing.

A war with Urial over birds.

A war Nemeda could ill afford.

But no. Tybalt didn’t know about us. I hadn’t shifted a single time since coming to Urial. The feral bird comment was merely that notion all the people of Urial had that Nemedans worshipped birds in some strange cult.

And it was ridiculous, yes—Nemedans didn’t worship much of anything anymore, the gods of our past little more than memories in our history at this point. But from a distance, with the feathers in our hair and the way we didn’t tend to eat birds—the mere thought far too close to cannibalism for comfort—I could see why the people of Urial might think we worshipped all things winged.

It was a little funny if you had all the information. They thought we worshipped birds because we were birds. Because most men thought first of themselves and only later of anyone or anything else, so Nemedans concerned themselves with birds. But the truth was so far outside their sense of what was possible that us caring about birds had to mean something bigger, higher, than the mere self-interest it was.

Once I realized that the problem wasn’t Tybalt having figured out the reason for all the birds, it was a simple enough thing to figure out what was actually going on in his head.

It was the brokenness of Urial at play again.

He’d been having an emotion when I’d come in, whatever it might have been, and for some reason, the scent of me on my shirts had helped with it. But the men of Urial weren’t allowed to have emotions, so getting caught in the act of feeling something had made him lash out, trying to deflect attention from it. Even more, he’d felt a need to dismiss me, insist that my presence wasn’t any kind of comfort.

Of course, taking comfort was a weakness, so now he had to try to deprive himself of it by acting hard and cold.

Frankly, it was all incredibly sad.

Instead of allowing the disastrous conversation to continue, I took a step into his space, wrapping both arms around him and looking down into his soft eyes. “Do you want me to leave?”

In an instant, he turned into a sad little puppy, eyes going big and wet and lower lip poking out. “Do you want to leave?”

I leaned down and pressed my forehead against his, shaking my head slightly. “No, Tybalt. I’m perfectly content right where I am.” Part of me wanted to poke at his prickly demeanor, point out that in theory, he’d only invited me there in order to make his father angry, but somehow, I didn’t think that would help the situation much. I was an adult. Surely I was past the point in my life where I needlessly pressed on sore points just to get rises out of people. So instead of continuing an argument, I decided to check on his state of mind, if he’d let me. “What about you?”

With his whole body, he leaned into me, pressed against me from forehead to toes. With his voice, well... he wasn’t ready for that. “I suppose things are fine as they are.”

I couldn’t help a snort at that, but I didn’t point out how ridiculous the situation was. He, too, was an adult. Surely he could see it for himself.

“I just... don’t feel well,” Tybalt said, his voice more than a little petulant, but even as he said it, he pushed deeper into my space, shoving his face into my shoulder and clinging to me as tight as he possibly could. Muffled as he was, it wasn’t hard to make out a moment later when he asked, “Rub my shoulders?”

It was... frankly, adorable. Not the demand, but the uncertainty in his voice when he said it. As though he was trying to maintain his strength—his shell of unaffected emotionless “perfection” that men from Urial were expected to maintain, but he did, in the end, know that it was nonsense.

Or maybe he only knew that he was terrible at it.

Maybe, in fact, that was why his father despised him so much. Because unlike other men in Urial, Tybalt openly and clearly had emotions, much to society’s horror.

Funny, because it made me like him even more every time his mask slipped.

Sure, he was ridiculous about it, grumbling and trying to hide it, hissing like a feral cat who wanted to be petted but didn’t want to trust a person to do the petting. But of course he tried to hide it. He’d spent his life being taught that it was bad, so it was something that had to be hidden out of basic self-defense.

So instead of making things harder and pressing him on it, I swept him up into my arms and carried him to the bed, laying him out on his stomach and stripping his clothes off, piece by piece.

As I was finishing, he rolled over, giving me his best insouciant expression, trying to reclaim his unaffected, chilly facade, and looking down his nose at me. “Are you going to suck my cock again when you’re done?”

I grinned in response, a feral look of my own, and shook my head. Straddling his hips, I shoved him down on his back and leaned in to press a kiss to his lips. “No, Your Highness. When I’m done, I’m going to fuck you into the mattress.”

His shiver and the way he arched up into me said everything his mouth couldn’t yet find the words for.