Shoestring Theory

THREE

Fifteen minutes later, he was pacing outside opulent double doors, running a hand through his unruly hair, rehearsing.

It was difficult to concentrate when every time a busybody servant passed him in the hall, they tittered, thinking themselves oh-so demure, hiding the maddening noise behind a polite hand over their mouth.

Gods . He couldn’t possibly have been this embarrassing in his youth. Or this obtuse .

Still rife with anxiety, Cyril wiped his hands on the bottom of his tunic and closed his left into a fist. Then, he made to knock.

Not to be outdone, at the same time Shoestring bumped his head against the door and yowled.

He heard seven quick steps, then the door his knuckles were poised to strike swung open.

“Cyril!”

Gods take him to the underworld. Bury him in the filthiest sandpit of hell and char the soil to glass. He wished the spell had failed. He wished he’d just slit his wrists open for the simple pleasure of taking his own life and never having to live through a scenario like this, because he could. Not. Do. This.

Shoestring mewled again and, for only a second, he thought he had his familiar back. But when he darted his eyes to the cat’s, they were the same hollow he’d seen in that field. He would’ve groaned if he could. He had to do this.

“I heard… you were looking for me,” he said slowly, testing the tone and timbre of his voice on his tongue.

He was a little surprised. He thought it would be harder to pretend. For all his face paint, farcical dressing and flourish, Cyril had never been a particularly gifted actor.

But as it turned out, it was easy to play the lovesick fool when he was staring at the most handsome man he’d ever seen.

The handsome man smiled so wide and with so much gentleness that Cyril would swear he could hear his own heart split open.

“I was! Did Tig tell you?”

Weakly, Cyril nodded.

“I thought I might see you at supper, actually. Though, sometimes you take meals with Auntie?” It wasn’t a question, not really, but it was the kind of tone Cyril remembered so well from him. Uncertainty and kindness. A man who was loath to tell others what to do.

A man he had once fallen deeply in love with.

Eufrates Margrave, standing before him now, was the spit of his older sister. The same rich, healthy brown skin and midnight hair, his kept short with clean edges save for a stubborn curlicue down the middle of his forehead that Cyril had spent collected hours twirling around his forefinger, equal parts fondness and tease. He was growing out a trim, sculpted beard that was fashionable for the time (which Cyril had hated) and he often wore breezy, casual dress shirts that plunged at the neckline (which Cyril had loved).

Suddenly, the string around his neck felt like a hot noose.

He shook his head, regaining composure. “Not tonight. Not with Tig back in the palace.”

“Well.” Eufrates smiled and shifted his weight to one side, inviting him into his quarters. “Why wait till the evening? Please, come in.”

Cyril peeked into the immaculately furnished bedchambers of the prince of Farsala, a place he had spent so much time in, even before any kind of blossoming romance, he could navigate the room with his eyes shut. Just over Eufrates’s shoulder, he spied a timeworn lute, sitting atop a dark wood desk. Next to it, a hunting crossbow, misplaced next to an oak chair as though recently used. Even more tell-tale was the heavy outdoor cloak hanging lazily from the seat. Tigris did mention her brother had come from a hunt in the morning.

He balled his hand into a fist over his chest and stepped backwards, shaking his head. He could not do this in his room.

“Actually. I was hoping you’d join me out of doors, if you’re not too tired from this morning.”

Eufrates cocked a brow, but then he barked into laughter so fond it made Cyril’s chest ache. “Tired! We gave chase to a hare thinking it a wolf, and Sir Tybalt shot a tree shaped like the horns of a deer. I wish you would have seen it.”

Cyril couldn’t help his own grin, infected by the good-natured cheer. “Invite me on your next hunt, then.”

“Cy. My dear friend. I’ve received a king’s ransom in rejections to know I’ll be doing no such thing.”

“Shoestring spooks easily. The crossbows frighten him.”

Eufrates shot the offending cat a glance as he shut the door to his chambers and paced next to them down the halls. “If only we mere mortals had familiars to pin our excuses on.”

Shoestring mewled.

It was easy, dangerously so, to fall back into this old routine. All the way up the steps of the palace, to the prince’s quarters tucked away in the easternmost wing that faced the gardens (and his tower), Cyril had broken into a cold, damp sweat wondering how he was going to fool Eufrates into thinking he was the same youth he had grown up with and not an old, withered facsimile. Turns out, all he had to do was talk to him to feel as though all was right in the world.

When Cyril had been sent to live with his aunt in the Mage’s Tower at age five, a nine year-old Tigris had immediately embraced him as the additional sibling she had always wanted. She had done this by, exactly one week after he’d settled into his rooms, shoving him off a metal swing built near the palace grounds so hard that he broke his arm in three places.

He couldn’t begrudge her, not even as a sobbing, wounded child, lying in a pile of sand and woodchips waiting for a caretaker to come rescue him. Tigris had always been given to roughhousing, and it was how she treated her own brother. She hadn’t expected this snivelling, flaxen-haired addition to the royal life to be quite so precious.

Tigris had never hurt him again, a fact he was very grateful for, but she still spent the better part of her carefree youth pushing and shoving and dragging him into danger like she was moulding him into her retinue. And of course, alongside Tigris was always her brother.

If the sister embraced Cyril like a sibling from the moment she had laid eyes on him, the brother cradled him like an injured baby bird he’d found beneath a broken branch of a tree. In those early days, Cyril wondered whether he was actually a friend to Eufrates or a beloved toy.

Only a year apart, the Margraves were inseparable in all aspects but Cyril. Often, Tigris and he would have to beg Eufrates to let Cyril join in on their excursions, the prince insisting he was much too young. And he had a point. Taking a six-and-a-half year-old boy spelunking into abandoned tunnels by the lake had not been Tigris’s brightest moment, but the prince did not need to baby him so.

Years later, not too long after they had said their vows in front of what seemed like the whole of Farsala, Cyril saw something that made it click.

Out on an excursion into town, he spotted a gaggle of schoolchildren, in their uniforms and summer hats, playing their recess away in the square. He had spied a boy of no more than seven lay his shirt – his shirt – down on the dusty cobblestones so a girl in twin braids who had been shadowing him could take her meal undisturbed by the filth of the city. Mesmerised, Cyril kept watch, observing as that same boy fussed over keeping his companion’s hat safe from the breeze, and plopped himself down a neat foot away from her, on the hard ground itself despite her protests. He asked if she was comfortable, if she had enough to eat, if she was getting too hot. When she grew bored and asked if he wished to play at something, he shot up like a rocket and returned with a small bag of iridescent marbles, eager to show her his treasures.

By the time Shoestring had bumped against Cyril’s leg to break him out of his stupor, the restaurant he’d intended on visiting had already closed for daytime service.

Though he feared daring to flatter himself so wildly, Eufrates had spent his childhood behaving the same as that boy, fussing and fawning over Cyril like a lovebird. Treating him as gently as a piece of seafoam that would scatter if he turned away.

As a child, Cyril found this confusing. He had craved Eufrates’s acceptance like a starving beggar. Somehow, he had convinced himself their bond would not be forged in the fires of friendship if the prince didn’t also grievously injure him in some escapade, like his sister had. So he had been both clingy to a fault and standoffishly cool, hoping something would spark feelings in the prince that made him regard Cyril as an equal.

It turned out what they both needed to break out of that awkward impasse had been time and, crucially, distance . Eufrates’s overbearing nature had cooled by the time Cyril enrolled into the Academy for Arcane Arts, urged by the king and queen and (less enthusiastically) by his aunt Heléne to mingle with other mages his age instead of listening in on old magically gifted courtiers who would spare him the time of day. The Academy was tucked in a valley three cities and one kingdom away, so Eufrates only looked a little sour when he and his sister saw him off to the boarding school. They wrote to each other at length, and it seemed the prince had a better way with words when committed to paper, at least in adolescence, because it felt like taking on a mystery correspondent.

Eufrates was witty and charming, regaling him with tales of how his own schooling was going from deep within the confines of the Margrave home. He wrote pages as though he were using Cyril as a diary, not leaving out a single detail no matter how mundane, but the exchanges were far from one-sided. In fact, if Cyril neglected to mention even a scrap of gossip from the Academy, or if he glossed over a detail too quickly, he’d be sure to receive back heated demands that he be more open in his letters.

The irony that it had taken letters to form a friendship between them was not lost on Cyril, not even as a youth, but he would not complain about it. In fact, it was the happiest he’d been. One day, when they were fourteen and seventeen, Eufrates had begun a page with ‘Dear Cy’ as opposed to the usual ‘To Cyril Laverre’ and it had made his heart thunder in his chest. He had slept with that letter under his pillow for months before Shoestring accidentally pawed down its middle finding a comfortable place in his bed, and Cyril had kept it under lock and key in his trunk instead. With the wisdom of retrospect, Cyril could pinpoint that day as the moment he’d fallen in love.

“Cy.”

Cyril snapped out of his stupor just in time to realise he’d been staring wistfully at Eufrates’s hands, unfortunately clothed in riding gloves. He would have liked to see the ink stains blotted on the tips of his nails and the writing callous on his left middle finger he’d felt so many times when twining their hands together. He darted his gaze up, to the prince’s eyes. They were scrunched in concern.

“You seem troubled, friend.”

A gross understatement, if he’d ever heard one, but Cyril shook his head. By now, they’d reached the edge of the back foyer leading outside in companionable silence.

“It’s nothing. Auntie has been giving me grief over a new spell.” The lie flowed easily, a trivial concern for a trivial courtier.

“Nothing you will struggle with too long, I hope?”

He smiled. “Am I not the best wizard in the kingdom?”

Eufrates tilted his head. “Your aunt–”

“Is a witch .”

“They’re the same.”

“Oh, let me have this one, Eufie.”

A scowl formed on Eufrates’s perfect face. Eufie was a nickname reserved for Tigris, the king and queen, and Cyril, but only when he was being antagonistic. Normally he would keep needling, but now he tried to defuse the situation.

“You must be happy to see your sister again.”

The scowl melted off as if under a hot August sun, and Eufrates looked light as air itself. “I am. Tig torments me for the excess sentiment.”

Cyril raised a brow. “Gods, man, it’s been a month. You’ve developed a complex.”

Then, Eufrates regarded his friend as if seeing straight through him. Eyes inscrutable under the shade of the orange tree they’d just walked past. But the moment passed in a flash and once again he smiled.

“Perhaps. Perhaps I will be cured if I have to hear about the Cretian king for another second.”

“Is she very enamoured, then?”

“I couldn’t say. But she finds him exotic.”

Cyril let out a huff of air through his nose. “ Exotic ?”

Atticus Wulfsbane, with his warm golden hair and freckled complexion, seemed a perfectly ordinary man of great beauty.

“She says he enjoys the snow overmuch and keeps an iron grill in his quarters to sear his own game.”

“I should like to see a king engrossed in cookery.”

“I don’t believe my father has ever set foot in the kitchens.”

“I should love to see King Margrave fry an egg !” Cyril said.

They looked at each other and, after a moment, both burst into laughter.

By the time they reached a shaded spot in the woods ideal for repose, they were arm in arm. Eufrates regaled him with a more detailed account of the hunt. Turns out, while it had only been a hare they chased down, it was one of the biggest hares he’d ever seen, and so fast not even a hound could give chase. Cyril laughed along their wild goose chase, teasing Eufrates for his ill-luck.

All the while, his stomach hurt like he’d eaten a pile of rocks.

He had planned this all out, as paltry a plan as it has been, but Cyril was not vicious, or brave, or anything of the sort. His insides were twisted up in knots as the reality of what he needed to do sunk in.

He was going to have to kill his husband.

His future husband, but that was exactly what made it so difficult. Prince Eufrates, who had settled on a rock by a babbling stream and patted the empty space beside him for Cyril to join, was innocent. He was a charming young man of five-and-twenty, with a soft heart and a love of poetry and fine arts. Killing him here would not make him a hero bound for the history books. It would make him a common cutthroat.

But it was what he needed to do. Eufrates could not be allowed to ascend to power, even if it meant his life must be cut tragically short. He pictured King Eufrates Margrave in his mind’s eye, and it bolstered him with courage. The dagger in his vest seemed to thrum against his chest.

Cyril would take the opportunity while Eufrates had his back turned and kill him quickly. He could tamper with the pattern around the corpse, feigning accident, but Heléne would be able to see right through it. So instead, he would move the body outside the palace walls and hope the murder be deemed a vicious attack from bandits.

There was still a chance he would be caught. Cyril thought of his cottage by the sea, lonely and hopeless, and his shoulders sagged. He hoped they at least brought him something other than poorly-skinned fish in the dungeons.

With a wave of new determination, Cyril made to reach inside his vest.

“You hesitate, my love. Should I be flattered?”

Cyril’s body frosted over. His fingers paused on his lapel.

“…Pardon?” he said.

Eufrates was still looking down at the stream, pretending to count the fish that swam by, but his posture had changed. The way he held himself shifted into a predatory hunch. He brought a hand to his chin and stroked his beard.

“I mean, if your plan is to lure me out far enough to slit my throat, you are taking your sweet time. The anticipation is maddening.”

“I…” Cyril’s voice was much too small for his liking. “I had actually meant to stab you in the back.”

Finally , Eufrates turned to look at him, with a grimace so familiar it made his head spin. “Of course you did.”

“Why are you here ?” he blurted.

Cyril may not have been much of an actor, but he’d unfortunately forgotten that his husband was as much a practitioner of the arts as he was a patron. The man was a bard , weaving honeyed words with the same expertise Cyril wove his magic. He wrote, he acted, he told stories, he played. The only thing he couldn’t do was carry a tune, which was a talent peculiarly wasted on Cyril himself.

All this to say, Eufrates had him utterly fooled.

“I asked myself the same thing. One moment I was in my chambers, taking care of state matters–”

“Is that what you’re calling it?”

Eufrates ignored the interruption. “And the next I was among my old hunting party, listening to Lady Oriana describe a beast she’d seen in the woods yesternight that we must track down.”

Cyril stood gobsmacked before taking a cautious step back. “You were not meant to be here, I assure you.”

“Alas.” Eufrates pushed himself off the rock and to his feet, stalking closer as though approaching a frightened animal. “I am here. I gather it’s to do with the curse you’ve laid upon the both of us.”

He tugged off his right riding glove and immediately Cyril saw the glowing golden band upon his ring finger, weathered by time. An accessory Eufrates was not meant to have in this life or the next.

Cyril wanted to scream. Apparently, this had been the best, most potent, most revolutionary and magnificent spell he’d ever woven in his life. He’d done it at three-and-twenty years old, and it was wasted on making Eufrates Margrave a permanent rock in his shoe.

The wording had been unfortunately vague, more lyrical romance than anything descriptively firm. May we never be parted, may our bond be eternal. May we share our joys and griefs and let not even the hand of the Undertaker split our paths. A silly, desperate weave borne of first love and dire circumstances. Cyril did not realise the repercussions would be so wide-reaching.

“A curse you begged me for,” he spat.

Eufrates rolled his eyes dismissively. “The follies of youth.”

He reached into his vest and Eufrates was upon him immediately, gripping his bird bone wrist so hard he could snap it in twain with the right amount of pressure. Cyril could see Eufrates spy the dagger tucked in his vest through his long, dark lashes.

Eufrates let out a huff of derision. “What did you think? That you’d be able to overwhelm me by force? It is not like in your adventure novels. It takes more than a single stab in the back to kill a man, my love.”

If he called Cyril that again, his head was going to split.

Cyril winced from the pressure on his wrist, but he squared his shoulders, forcing himself not to shrink back against the solid mass of the prince.

“Truly? I thought you would have let me.” He dared to let a smile play upon his lips. “You were besotted. I think you would have gladly died by my hand.”

He knew he’d pushed too far when a growl escaped Eufrates’s throat and he was shoved against the bark of a tree, hard enough to knock the breath from his lungs.

The duality of man meant even as a youth prince, Margrave was a gentle, poetic soul and a beast in combat. The unfairness of it stung in a very real way now.

“So that was your brilliant plan? Nip me in the bud?” Eufrates said. “What about preventing me from taking the crown to begin with? What about preventing my sister’s death ?”

“I thought you’d relished in that.” The words tumbled out of Cyril’s lips before he could stop himself.

Eufrates gave him an acrid and, if Cyril didn’t know better, heartbroken stare. He regarded him for a long while before clapping a large hand on the bone of his shoulder.

“I’ve misjudged you. Your devotion to us must be strong indeed if you’d choose to lie in the bed of a regicide, my love.”

Cyril glared up, defensive. “It was not an immediate conclusion.”

“Oh, no, no.” Eufrates clicked his tongue. “You must have conjured it up in that seaside hovel while plotting how to kill me.”

His eyes widened, throat cotton dry. “…You knew where I was.”

“Of course I knew where you were!” There was a glint of madness in Eufrates’s eye. He looked on the verge of shaking with laughter. Suddenly, his hand darted from Cyril’s shoulder up to his throat, simultaneously cupping it dearly and holding him in place against that tree like quarry. “My love, we are bonded . You have given yourself to me, you are mine .” His other hand snaked inside Cyril’s shirt until it finally grasped at the ring hidden within. “There isn’t a single corner of the universe you could hide in where I would not find you.”

He was, at once, jocular and dead-serious. Cyril recognized the musicality of the speech, an improvised soliloquy. When the words hit his ears, they were sharp as blades, mocking their betrothal as a sham that ended in discord.

But at the same time Cyril’s blood chilled in his veins. The best a playwright can do is romanticise what they know. He was no longer Eufrates’s love, but it did not mean that, in the eyes of the prince, he was not Eufrates’s property.

Eufrates rolled his eyes. “Besides, it is not as though you ran very far. You could have at least made it to Cretea.”

“I did ,” Cyril tried his best not to swallow, worried Eufrates would feel it in his grip. He felt his throat bob against the gloved fist around his neck when he spoke.

“Oh, yes! The annex. It was so long ago, forgive an old man’s memory.”

The prince regarded him a while longer, smoothing his thumb against the underside of his cheek. He pursed his lips in rapt contemplation.

“It truly is a shame. I had held hope that perhaps I’d been sent back in time on the whims of a trickster god. I should have liked to meet you as you were again, sweet and soft. Ripe.”

He narrowed his eyes into slits, refusing to cower. “What gave it away?”

Eufrates finally let go of his throat to trace a semicircle under his eyes, so tender it almost had Cyril fooled. He leaned in close enough; for a moment all Cyril could smell was sandalwood and musk. And then Eufrates’s lips split into a mocking smile.

“Your eyeliner is crooked.”

“You’re obsessed with me.”

“You are mine ,” Eufrates repeated, so low it rumbled in Cyril’s ears like the growl of a monster. His fist closed around the ring and tugged the string taut around Cyril’s neck, drawing him closer.

Cyril wondered what would happen if the Mage’s Ward died by the prince’s hand. Perhaps Eufrates would receive a hard slap on the wrist. But Eufrates was clever enough not to implicate himself. He’d play the grieving, lovestruck innocent so well that Cyril almost longed to see it.

A ruffle in the grass snapped them both out of their standstill. Eufrates took half a step back, but he did not let go of Cyril’s wrist, by now bloodless in its lack of circulation.

Moments later, a young guard burst running in through the trees, windswept and breathless. Cyril had watched her train before. She was younger than him by a year and her name was Marta. She had a scar on her cheek from a hazardous drill.

She looked at the pair of them, wrapped up in apparent intimacy, but did not balk or look at all ashamed. A desperate glint in her eye hinted that whatever it was she’d run into the woods for superseded any need for propriety.

“His Highness needs to come with me. It is urgent,” she gasped, and flicked the sweat off her slicked brow to look at Eufrates.

Everything about this seemed awfully familiar to Cyril in a way he couldn’t quite put a finger on.

Until he did.

As Eufrates fully let go of him to turn to Marta, looking the picture of curiously concerned, Cyril tasted the cloying bile making its way up his throat.

“What is the matter?” he said evenly.

“It’s – Your Highness, I can’t–” Marta covered her mouth with one hand as though it was information she was unworthy of delivering. Cyril realised she was.

“It’s today ?” he whispered to himself, so low and so small no one could have possibly heard him.

But Eufrates did.

He glanced quickly at Cyril before nodding his head towards Marta. “Go on, sir. I will be right behind you.”

“But–”

“I swear it.”

Once the young guard was out of sight, returning to them their privacy, Eufrates turned and looked at Cyril as if he were considering whether to squash a bug under his shoe.

“I had hoped near half a century alive would have sharpened your wit.” His voice was sour, dripping with contempt. “You did not even bother to ask for the date, then?”

Cyril looked steadfast at the ground. He was so stupid. He was so stupid. He shook his head.

“Ah. Well, my love. It is the sixth of April.” Eufrates’s words were clipped and slow, like talking to a child. He clapped a hand on Cyril’s shoulder and drew close to his ear. “I will see you at the wake.”

With this, he turned and left. Cyril did not see him go, because he was preoccupied vacating the excess contents of his stomach onto the grass.

It had been like a wall of dominoes, one after the other. That was the most apt description of the events following his twenty-second year.

The first tragedy had actually been the king and queen.

Because of how close and how real Tigris Margrave’s death had been to him, Cyril was ashamed to admit the exact timing of the rulers of Farsala’s deaths had slipped his mind. It had been so, so long ago, he forgot that they had been so close together.

On April fifth of that year, Rohan and Micaela Margrave died on a ship headed to a standard diplomatic enterprise, alongside a retinue of other foreign dignitaries sharing the same voyage. The news reached their surviving heirs and, subsequently, everyone else in the palace, merely a day later.

After a few months, it was Tigris’s turn. She had not even begun to don the lavenders and slate greys of late mourning when disease overcame her, quickly after her rushed, ascetic wedding. The people needed some good tidings, after all.

Cyril truly believed Queen Tigris, despite her temper and her flaws, would have been one of Farsala’s golden rulers, ushering it into a new age of prosperity. Remembering how she looked on her sickbed, a steadfast refusal to even entertain the idea of death by disease of all things, did nothing to prove him wrong.

The final death of the year, natural amidst a wave of inexorable tragedies, was no easier to swallow. In November, a serving maid found Aunt Hel – Grand Mage Heléne – dead in her bed, peaceful. A physician said the toll of misfortune had been too much for such an elderly heart to bear. On her chest was a spotted, moulting old crow, more salt and pepper than black by this point. His aunt’s familiar.

Cyril saw to it that they were interred in the same casket.

And then it was just the two of them. Cyril and Eufrates, alone, together, surrounded by servants and courtiers and guards and knights and nobles and lords and cutthroats and peasants. Each and every one wanting something from their new king and his positively juvenile new grand mage.

It had felt like drowning, and while he wished to say the new king and he were each other’s life rafts, it was more like they were taking turns pushing each other under so, one at a time, they could draw a gasp of air. There was no malice in the exchange. They were boys, and they were desperate, and Cyril remembered gladly ducking his head underwater so Eufrates had time to breathe.

All the while, they danced around each other. Simultaneously falling asleep in the same bed after long nights of statecraft and jolting away from each other in the halls if a single pinky brushed against the back of a hand. It was agony. To cool his heart, he read the letters Eufrates had sent him during school, over and over, obsessively, but it did little to quell the ache.

The alliance with Atticus, a kind and understanding man near a decade older than the two of them, was strong, and Cretea vowed its help in whatever matters possible. But soon Cyril could overhear the whispers in Eufrates’s ear urging him to choose a spouse. To form new bonds. To assure the kingdom an heir.

Cyril had shut himself in his tower after that. Dedicating himself to alchemy and sorcery and potions and poultices, pouring over his aunt’s notes because they were the only sense of purpose he had now. Like a scorned child, he refused to leave, sending his reports by either carrier pigeon or in the hands of the more competent valets who brought up his meals. If there was a knock at the door, he dismissed it. His chambers became a whirlwind of disarray. He was quite sure at some point his hair had grown so unruly were he not gifted with magic he would have had to shave it off completely.

Then, one day, the king himself knocked at his door.

Well. Cyril was being gracious. Eufrates burst the lock on his door open with the back of a sword and kicked his way into his apartments. He found Cyril lying in a nest of blankets a foot away from his bed, which he had fallen from due to feverish night terrors and been too lazy to get back up into several hours before.

“Cy,” Eufrates had declared as he scooped him by his arms off the floor. It was like Cyril was weightless in his embrace. “I’ve decided to marry.”

Cyril blinked slowly, wondering why such a true friend would willingly choose to torment him so horribly. “Oh,” he said.

“You are my dearest friend and most trusted companion.” It was unlike Eufrates to speak so quickly, so awkwardly. “There is no one else I would have beside me upon that altar. Upon – upon that throne . No one else has my ear, my hand, my entire being.”

So , Cyril thought, the king needed a best man. Perhaps he would need to do something about his hair after all. He nodded and cracked a facsimile of a smile. “So, is it Baroness Marguerite? I think it would be cute. Marguerite Margrave.” He rolled the alliteration on his tongue. “And she is a very nice woman. Very decent.” Cyril wondered if his late aunt had left any liquor in her rooms.

Eufrates had looked truly, deeply wounded, which wasn’t fair, because the only person who had the right to be hurt right now was Cyril himself. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Shoestring, whose expressive eyes seemed to be expressing that he was a fool.

Yes, I know that, stupid cat.

Cautiously, Eufrates’s hands had roamed from Cyril’s limp shoulders to his chest. He gripped him by the lapels of his nightshirt (the only thing he’d worn during those days) and looked deep into Cyril’s eyes with a touch of madness that almost made him flinch.

He opened and closed his mouth, as if to speak. Then, thinking better of it, he had drawn Cyril up the few inches it would take to close the gap between their disparate heights, and kissed him thoroughly on the lips.