Shoestring Theory

SEVEN

He explained to her the plan, then. How, after his failed assassination attempt and discovery that he’d brought the worst version of Eufrates from the bowels of hell, he had focused his attention on keeping her safe. He was going to take care of her body, preserve it somewhere no illness could touch, at least until the summer was over and there was no danger of contagion. She was not dead, he reassured her, her body would not decay, she would just be in a state of stasis for a little while. And as there was no evidence of her demise, Eufrates could not lawfully inherit the throne for himself.

Tigris was a surprisingly good sport about listening to it all, despite her obvious misgivings. Chief among them:

“You expect me to be a cat for six months?”

He nodded. “At least, yes.”

“You’re– you– that’s– you could’ve at least let me get married first.”

“I let you have the dinner, didn’t I?”

“Cyril!”

Cyril raised his hands again. “I’m sorry. I did time it on purpose. There’s less claim to an annex when there isn’t an alliance between your and Atticus’s kingdoms to begin with.” He tried out a grin. “Think of it as being star-crossed.”

“What makes you think Eufi– my brother won’t… abuse his powers in the interim? He’s still the prince.”

His eyes lit for the first time that night. “So you do believe me!”

Tigris sauntered closer to him and gave him a facsimile of a cat’s smile. “Cy… I have known you for nearly twenty years. No offense, but you aren’t this imaginative.”

He wanted to shake and cry with relief. He had been fully prepared to prostrate himself in front of her again until she at least gave him a chance .

“None taken! Absolutely none at all. And… there is not so much power in regency as there is in kingship. He would have checks and balances. Tantie would be there, for one.”

He would not have noticed her come in if it weren’t for the look of wide-eyed alarm on Tigris’s face.

It was like he had summoned her. He was a penitent, and she was the apparition here to castigate him for his misdeeds.

Except Heléne was very real, quite solid and was standing at his doorway, which she had opened without knocking, as he’d learned any good parental figure was wont to do. Ganache was perched on her shoulder.

“Cyril, it’s the middle of the night, Ganache says you won’t stop chatter–”

“Hel–lo, Tantie!” He threw himself in front of Tigris (the cat) so she could not see her. “Great party, so exciting, I could barely sleep.”

Belatedly, he realised he’d made two grave mistakes.

The first was he still had signs of a fresh wound dappling his forehead, despite the bandage he’d hurriedly applied as a stopgap.

The second, perhaps more obvious, mistake was that he should have attempted to cover up Tigris (the human) who was still currently inert on his sofa.

His gaze pivoted from Heléne, to Tigris (human), back to his aunt again.

“She’s had such a rough night.”

“Gods, you’re terrible at this.”

“You be quiet!” he hissed back at Tigris, who was unhelpfully peeking over his shoulder to see.

“What have you done ?” Heléne said slowly, as though maybe if she had enough time to think, it would begin to make sense.

Cyril sat up to his full height, cross-legged with his hands on his knees, making himself big enough to obfuscate a cat roughly the size of a small lynx. “Tig’s quite the lightweight. We were–”

“She’s not breathing .”

Ganache squawked her agreement, which Cyril didn’t particularly think was any help.

“Oh,” he said quietly. “You can tell from that far away?”

“ Cyril! ” his aunt snapped.

He had a sudden flash of unbidden memory. The very first time he ever met Heléne, he followed her around – rather like an imprinting baby duck – for lack of a better choice in their lonely mage tower. She had indulged him the first few days. He was starting to let his guard down around her. She was a round, kind-looking old woman with big, round spectacles and a flash of silver hair pinned into a tight bun.

One day, though, apparently seeing that her new ward had begun to warm to her, she caught his attention and said to him over a breakfast of porridge and fruit.

“Duckling. I do hope you are comfortable here, as you will be staying for some time. But if I ever hear you calling me Gramma, Nana, or anything of the sort, I will have Ganache pluck your eyeballs out of your head like smooth marbles and keep them in a jar for pickling.”

He had never been more terrified of her in his life, until this very moment .

“I didn’t kill her! I swear it!”

Ganache flew to Tigris’s body, pressed her feathery head to her throat, and let out an alarmed little cluck.

“Then why does she not have a pulse ?!”

“Cy! Let me talk to her!” Tigris was scratching at the back of his tunic. He refused to turn his head to face her.

“I’m not sure how that can help …”

“Oh, alright. I’ll leave you to your idea, then.”

Cyril bit the inside of his cheek so hard he tasted the copper of blood. As if he needed more head injuries that evening.

Slowly, carefully , with his hands up so as to not alarm Heléne, he stood up and revealed the cat behind him. His lips were pressed into an ill-fitting, contrarian smile.

“…Where is Shoestring? Who is that?” she said immediately.

He had been right to hide the animal shadowing him from his aunt all these weeks. She knew something was wrong immediately.

“Shoestring is… not here.” He would unpack his lack of a soul with her later, perhaps over another cup of mediocre tea. “This is Tigris. If you’d like to confirm it, you can speak to her.”

He palmed the air as if pulling back a curtain and revealing a trick, and Heléne furrowed her brow. To the layman, he had done little more than swat at nothing, but to her he had revealed the exact pattern he’d used to be able to communicate with Tigris. She could read it and replicate it, which she easily did.

“Tigris?” she called out.

“Hello, Auntie.”

Heléne removed her spectacles to pinch the bridge of her nose. Her nails dug indents on her already prune-wrinkled skin.

“There are better ways to deal with cold feet before a wedding, girl.”

“I’m not scared of getting married!” Tigris snapped immediately, and, in Cyril’s opinion, much too quickly.

“Explain yourself, then.”

“Me! You should ask your ward what’s going on.”

“Wh–” Cyril snapped his head back to look at Tigris. “I thought you wanted to talk to her.”

“To tell her this is all… consensual.” She paused. “So far.”

“One of you will explain yourselves right this very moment or I will have you both hanging by your ears from my balcony.”

Cyril again looked to Tigris for some semblance of support, but she merely nodded, waiting as patiently as Heléne was growing displeased.

So he sighed, threaded a hand through his hair (now beyond repair, save for a long, hot soak) and told the entire sordid tale again, from the beginning.

He made some edits, of course. It was impossible to repeat what he’d told Tigris word for word. And by now, his throat hurt from speaking and choking up and trying his level best not to scream, so it was an abridged version of the tale. If he forgot something important, Tigris reminded him. If Heléne needed clarification on something, he gave it.

He felt he was being exceedingly calm and well-adjusted, considering he was telling them the equivalent of the ramblings of a madman.

His aunt pointed out the very same thing.

“And I suppose you’ve no proof of this, then.”

Cyril folded his arms in front of his chest. “Tig believes me.”

“Tigris is barely out of diapers.”

“I’m six-and-twenty!” she actually yowled this out at the same time as she thought it.

“That – that’s right! And I’m nearly fifty, I should hope I’ve gained enough life experience to at least be trustworthy .”

Heléne just stared at him, the very portrait of unimpressed. “Child–”

“I just said –”

“ Child .” She did not raise her voice, but it felt as though it carried throughout the entire building. “I am ninety-two years old.” (Gods, he’d been close.) “But you could tell me you are as old as the Earth itself and you would still be a century too young to measure up to me. I have been placed in this tower to protect the kingdom. Now, do you have any proof of your ridiculous claims?”

“I–” Cyril hesitated. “I’m–” He patted himself down as if a solution would present itself upon his person. Upon his jester garb and colourful silks. When he reached his chest, though, he lurched to jam a hand inside his shirt and show her the ring.

“This!” He held it triumphantly. Though not very high up, as he could not remove it from his neck. “The ring! It’s my wedding ring. Surely you can see the spell woven into it. Here, I will open up the pattern for you.”

“That won’t be necessary.” She approached him and gestured for him to lean down to her level so she could examine the band. He expected to see her open up the magic around it, pluck and strum at the weave until she was satisfied, but she only looked .

“These are the same make as Rohan and Micaela’s,” she said.

Cyril shrugged. “Well, yes. It’s tradition. Eufrates always liked the design. We didn’t see the need to change–”

“It’s timeworn. By quite some years.” He might as well have been a fly on her shoulder. “Not magically, either. It’s a deceptively simple spell to unravel.”

Once she finished her inspection, she tucked the ring back into Cyril’s shirt.

“Besides, I saw the prince wearing the same model when he took his gloves off to eat.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well. You could have… led with that.”

“So it is true…” Tigris whispered.

Cyril whirled around to her with disbelief written boldly on his face. “I thought you believed me!”

She sniffed. “It’s good to have proof.”

Heléne cleared her throat and the pair of them turned their attention back to her.

“Now, then. What would you have me do?”

“I…” He was truly speechless. “Keep it a secret, I suppose.”

She clicked her tongue in disdain and Ganache flew back to her shoulder, casting Cyril a sour eye. “You have the grand mage of Farsala at your disposal and your only instruction is not to gossip ? No wonder your kingdom fell to ruin.”

Cyril opened and closed his mouth, over and over, trying to form words, but instead a bubble of manic, shrill laughter escaped his throat.

“That really hurts my feelings, Tantie.”

“What exactly did you intend to do with this?”

Heléne, claiming the toll of the years weighed heavily upon her, had managed to shift Tigris’s body so it was curled up into itself, and sat herself down next to it, completely unfazed. Now, she was patting the corpse on the side of her leg as though it was an inconvenient piece of luggage.

Cyril cleared his throat. “Well, I’m preserving it, of course. The spell is already in place. And then I intend to… hide it?” The inflection on his tone sounded less like a certainty and more like he was taking a middling grade oral exam.

Heléne tapped her nails against the arm of the sofa, clearly unimpressed. “Either I’ve taught you nothing of causality, or you need to clean your ears, boy. What happens if she catches the disease while in this state? You wouldn’t know until it was far too late to do anything.”

“She won’t…”

“She might be meant to catch it.”

Tigris bristled. “So what? This is all for nothing?”

Heléne waved a hand in her direction as if swatting her concerns away. “It may very well be, if you take sloppy half-measures the way you’re doing now.

“Not to mention, if there was a plot to kill her, you’ve made her a sitting duck if…” she paused. “ Once her body is discovered. Or do you think you can hide the future queen for very long? Perhaps in that trunk over there.” She motioned to a large chest Cyril kept winter clothes in. “Or behind a screen. No one will find her then.”

“There wasn’t any plot to kill her,” Cyril said.

She looked past him, directly at Tigris. “We are trusting the judgement of a love-blind twenty-something on this, then?”

“Now that you mention it…”

“I was not the only one looking into it!”

“ Two love-blind twenty-somethings!” Heléne spat.

“Alright. Clearly you have this figured out.” Cyril had been standing up still, but he slumped back onto an oversized pillow like a petulant child. Tigris joined him, batting at the tassels on the corner of it like she was beginning to get a bit too used to the idea of being a cat already. “What do you propose we do, Grand Mage Laverre?”

“We do nothing. I will take care of this, duckling. Hiding her body was a preposterous idea to begin with. You came up with it while flying by the seat of your pants, I’d wager.”

Cyril went mum. He would neither confirm nor deny the accusations, but he did remember feeling particularly lightheaded throughout most of the planning phase of his hare-brained scheme.

“What are you going to do, then?” If Cyril wasn’t going to say anything, Tigris might as well speak for him. She hopped off the pillow to stalk towards Heléne and the sofa currently housing her prone figure.

In way of answer, Heléne stood up on ancient, groaning joints and took a step back to look at the body, like a sculptor examining a block of marble.

“One of you – I suggest Tigris – will just have to keep her with you at all times.”

“What, just carry a corpse on her back?” Cyril said.

“Stop calling it a corpse!”

Heléne had left the pair to argue as she approached Tigris (human) and drew long, pulling motions around the girl as if working a loom. As she threaded the pattern around her, braiding it with deceptively dexterous fingers that belied her age, the body began to vanish, yarning into itself like a ball of silk, glittering with magic in the candle and moonlight of Cyril’s apartments. It shrunk, and bundled and condensed until it was the size of a playing marble and hung in the air, an iridescent multitude of all the colours that made up the princess of Farsala.

Cyril saw it flash the midnight of her hair, the tree bark of her eyes, the brown of her skin, the golden and yellow and red of her clothes, until it finally settled on a marvellous duochrome. Maroon to orange. A sunset gemstone.

Heléne caught it in her hand with the same ease as a throwing stone and held it between her thumb and forefinger to inspect her work.

“Surely it will be no trouble to carry this on your back, child,” she said.

“Wh–” Cyril gaped at the gem, eyes so wide they might pop out of their sockets. “You can’t just do something like that! The transmutation is too complex, you need a circle to keep the pattern contained!”

She was only half-listening as she rummaged through drawers in Cyril’s room looking for something among his myriad accessories. Once she found what she was looking for – a plain choker – she strummed a quick weave to attach the gem to it, and made her way to Tigris.

Heléne knelt down and fastened it around Tigris’s neck like a fanciful collar for a favourite pet.

“Once you break this, the gem will unfurl itself back to how it was and you will be flung back into your original body, so time it wisely.”

“Further,” Cyril continued. “There would need some time to prepare the circle, even if you only envisioned it, there’s a ritualistic aspect of casting that you need to obs–” He jerked his entire body to face Heléne. “ And you messed with my pattern on her?!”

Heléne walked towards her ward with avuncular serenity. She reached up and mussed up his hair, stroking her hand through the tangle of wheat-coloured, blood-soaked locks. “I’ve said it before, Duckling. You’ve a hundred years of catching up to do.”

He was again forcefully reminded of her in the past, exasperated, helping him dress for court functions and cleaning up after his childhood messes.

On the bright side, he’d never felt younger.

He nodded at her. “Thank you, Tantie.”

She sniffed. “It is my job to guide your hand. I am well-worn to it.”

Once she pulled away, she regarded Tigris once again. Ganache, who had been perched comfortably on the upholstery of Cyril’s sofa as a spectator to the entire debacle so far, flew to her shoulder.

“You did not tell me what has happened to Shoestring,” Heléne said.

“He’s dead.”

He braced for impact. For outrage, for a lecture, for horror, for disgust, for contempt. He did his best not to betray any emotion and he held her gaze with eyes made of stone. He could not bear to disappoint her, but he knew he had.

Heléne also regarded him and, for a moment, this is how they stood. Cyril was sure she noticed the rise in his shoulders. The way the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. For a very long time, she said nothing at all, but her mouth was pressed tight into a thin, nearly invisible, line on her face. She looked directly into Cyril’s eyes with an expression that was unknowable to him. Heléne Laverre kept her cards close to her chest and, perhaps, this was preferable to the alternative. He couldn’t bear the thought of losing her if she really did now think him an abomination.

He was tense as a nocked bowstring.

“Well,” she said, finally. “It is very late. And I am a very old woman. I must have my beauty sleep.”

She turned away from Cyril with a nonchalance that startled him, and his entire body felt like melting into the floorboards. It wasn’t absolution, but he would accept it gratefully.

“I suggest you two do the same. We will, all three of us, speak later,” Heléne said from his doorway. She shut the door behind herself.

Both him and Tigris stood staring at the space she had occupied, before Tigris broke their silence.

“You say she died from grief ?”

Cyril shrugged.

As much as he would have liked to immediately collapse on his bed and sleep like the dead for the next minimum eight hours, Cyril still looked a mess. He’d slept in kohl enough times to know it would not be a comfortable day ahead of him if he did not do at least a bare minimum to clean himself up.

Tigris watched, balancing on the edge of his sink, as he performed his ablutions. After soaking the front of his hair in hot, soapy water, he had pinned it back and was now lathering his face to scrub away the flakes of old makeup and crusted, dried blood. He applied a fresh linen patch over what he knew would be a permanent scar on his forehead. At least it could easily be covered up by his hair.

“I miss having hands,” Tigris sighed as Cyril rubbed a soothing cream all over his face.

He cocked a brow at her. “You’ve been a cat for little over an hour.”

“And it is not at all practical.”

“It is safe .” It was his turn to sigh.

Tigris let out a huff of a laugh. “I never expected you to be keeping me safe.”

He turned to her, about to speak insulted words, and she caught herself.

“Not that you’re not competent, Cy. I would have liked it very much if you were my mage. I still will. But do you know why I told Atticus you were fragile?”

Cyril was thoroughly unamused. “Because I’m half a head shorter than you, and you could toss me over your shoulder like a bag of flour.”

“No – well. You were the one to say it, not I. I shall not tell you if you truly do not wish to know.” She sounded nervous.

“Out with it, then.”

He noticed that she was examining his toiletries, his sink and the open cabinet over it. The fogged mirror he had wiped clean to make sure he had scrubbed his face raw enough.

“Because, Cyril. Ever since that night you ran away, I’ve always had the feeling one day we would all wake up and you would make yourself disappear again.”

He did not grasp her meaning until he realised what she was looking at. A razor, languishing in disuse from how infrequently his whiskers came in, a vial of sleeping drought he used on difficult evenings. Most damning: a tell-tale crack in his mirror, chalked up to carelessness, actually from when, in a moment of airless neurosis, he had slammed his head so hard against it he truly thought he might not survive.

Cyril’s tongue tasted chalk.

“I would not…” His tone was level. “Would not do something so foolish.”

“I know,” she said primly. “I do not suffer fools. But…”

But.

“But you just… you remind me of the magic you talk about. The weave, the pattern, how they… how you can unravel it. It feels like you are unravelling. Like you are a bundle of string, and no one can quite touch the whole of you.”

His laughter sounded tinny. “I’m not sure I want people touching me–”

“Oh, shut up.”

He shut up.

Tigris mewled in frustration. A rare sound from her, unlike the original host of her new body, and jumped from one end of the sink to the other, where Cyril had paused towelling his face.

“I am not your damsel. I am not a pawn in a plan . I am helping you as much as you are helping me. Have I made myself clear?”

Cyril nodded, slowly. Almost afraid nodding was the wrong move.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. You ought to have come to me with all this to begin with. Idiot.”

“I thought you did not suffer fools.”

“Not the same.”

“Mm.”

He took a moment to brush his teeth and recentre himself as he spat remnants of a herbal paste into the running sink.

“Did he think the same? That I was string?”

“Who?”

Cyril narrowed his eyes at her. “You know who.”

“Oh. Cyril, you don’t dominate my brother’s and my every conversation.”

“Humour me.”

“…He thinks – he thought he could weave you back into a real boy.”

The mint on his lips took on a sudden, bitter aftertaste. He laughed and it came out wrong, throaty.

“Like a fairy tale.”

“Let’s get some rest, Cy.”

Later, tossing and turning in his bed as Tigris slept beside him, cast in the milk light of the full moon, he thought about the events of the evening. They had all gone entirely wrong, wholly unpredictably, but he felt a sense of security bubble in his gut that he’d not felt in years.

Heléne, Tigris and him. They had hatched this foundation for a plan. They were all in on the secret. Ganache too, if he was feeling generous.

It was unfamiliar to him.

Cyril was suddenly overwhelmed by heady self-assuredness. He could see why Tigris thrived in her own confidence. It was intoxicating.

For once, sleep came to him very much bidden. He was exhausted, and he wasn’t as afraid of what anxious night terrors might plague him as he usually was.

Cyril felt good. He felt optimistic.

This feeling would be fleeting.

Unsurprisingly, the queen-to-be’s disappearance was the talk of all the palace within a single day after her wedding dinner. There were swaths of knights patrolling the palace and all its surroundings, in search of the missing princess.

For her part in their plotting, Heléne had seemingly started her own little homespun rumour mill, which she was enjoying a bit too much (so Tigris had told him). From the newest scullery maid to the most established duke, all knew of Tigris’s sudden vanishing, but the chief theory behind it went from a roguish kidnapping to what the courtiers had begun to call “wedding jitters”.

It would have been funny (it was, perhaps, a little funny, still) if it had not left the kingdom in arrears.

Cyril couldn’t believe he ever thought he could hide Tigris’s body. They did not suspect him of foul play, he was the least of their worries, but if the princess had indeed absconded from her duties by her own volition, who better than a trusted friend to conceal her? Within half a day after the dinner, there were guards and even a knight apologetically ransacking his quarters for any sign of the missing Tigris. All the while she lounged at the top of a bookshelf right under their noses.

Overall, while there was growing unrest over the entire sordid matter, somehow Cyril felt it could have been much worse. There was a certainty that hung in the air that, sooner or later, the princess would be found alive and hale as ever. He marvelled at what one bit of gossip mongering could do.

He only truly felt bad for Atticus.

The King of Cretea seemed utterly dejected. His bride-to-be had run away a mere week before their nuptials, and he was left with nil explanation as to where or why. Especially when she had been in such high spirits when he last saw her.

Cyril was sure the man felt he had caused this, somehow. He had chosen to stay in Farsala to help with the search, offering up his retinue in aid. Every time he passed him in the halls, he had dark rings under his eyes, and he looked positively haggard . Cyril wanted desperately to say something to him. Perhaps he could be something of an ally to his growing resistance against the doomed future that encroached ever closer, but even he was not so stupid as to think it would be good to share such an important secret with yet another person. Perhaps if Tigris herself wished for the help of her fiancé, he would personally take her to him and explain everything, but she had barely mentioned him at all since the dinner, save for an agreement that she, too, was regretful they were causing Atticus so much grief.

He had strongly urged her to stay in his chambers. Cyril without Shoestring would be of little notice in the midst of all the commotion in court, but Shoestring with a fancy, opulent new collar, while not completely unusual to the passing servant or courtier, would doubtless strike a chord of suspicion with Eufrates, who had all but openly declared he was observing Cyril’s every move. It was, perhaps, an overzealous precaution over something that could easily be excused, but Tigris put up little fight. She complained frequently that the cat shape was uncomfortable ( “Like an ill-fitting dress, Cy. It’s driving me mad.” ), and so preferred to spend her time sleeping under a sunlit window in his bedroom.

As the days passed, he also made a valiant, incredible effort to avoid Eufrates at every turn and every corner.

He knew the sound of the prince’s footfalls by heart, so he could always hear him coming from half a mile away if he kept himself on high alert (which he always did). Then he would pull a vanishing trick of his own, hiding in shadows or in corners. If there were others around, he would grasp an unwitting courtier by the arm and chatter on about the weather and the princess and King Atticus and fashion and whatever other gossip came to mind until Eufrates gave up his pursuit entirely.

He slipped up only once.

It was high evening and he became careless leaving his rooms in search of a fresh pitcher of cream for Tigris’s delicate kitty-cat sensibilities. There was no cream in the tower kitchen, so he had to go into the palace.

When he reached the garden path leading to the back entrance of the palace, he felt a leathered hand grab him by the back of the neck as though a cub, and pin him against the nearest wall.

Cyril blinked rapidly, refocusing his vision to the dim evening light, and the haunting face of Eufrates Margrave became clear before him.

“What have you done with her?” he growled.

There was a sense of urgency here that Cyril had not heard yet from him. Before, Eufrates had been languid, teasing. A cat playing with its food. He called him pet names and made sure to humiliate him in every conceivable way, reminding him with every honeyed word that they had once been in love. Making a mockery of it, as though it had meant nothing to him but a way to pass the time.

Not this. This was an act of desperation. Eufrates had been hunting for him, and now he caught him, he had no intention of toying with him further.

Still, Cyril did not care to be prey.

“I can’t imagine who you mean, Your Highness.”

“ Cyril ,” he said his name so forcefully it felt like a curse. “You know who I am . You have seen what I am capable of. I can make you talk.”

The hand on his chest keeping him pinned slid its way up to his throat, wrapping dexterous fingers around a too-thin neck. It was all very familiar. Briefly, he thought Eufrates should diversify his methods of intimidation.

“I assure you I won’t say a word if I am found here in the morrow, laid out on the grass, strangled.”

Eufrates scrunched his entire face. He almost looked confused. Still, the grip on Cyril’s neck may as well have been iron.

“I know you… you did something to her.”

“I still don’t–”

“ Tig! ” Surely he had not meant for the desperation in his voice to be quite so loud, but Cyril heard it. It nearly overpowered the anger, the venom he had been spewing moments before. But why would he care?

He should have made himself disappear again. He should have made Eufrates disappear. Sent him to the dungeons, or the middle of the woods. Somewhere he’d have a hard time crawling out of to ruin Cyril’s life.

Instead, he relaxed his shoulders and murmured, “The princess is quite safe.” After a moment he added, “I have heard.”

To his great confusion, the hand wringing his neck slacked a bit.

“Just tell me what you’ve done, Cyril. I know you’ve got some new, imbecile plan. What are you even attempting at?” He sobered and pulled away. Not to give Cyril room, but to loom overhead. “I am to be regent. The court is discussing it now.”

He did not sound happy, but, then again, Cyril had not heard his husband sound truly happy in many years. And he was a consummate performer.

“Congratulations.” His affect was flat.

“You are not going to tell me, then?”

Cyril pursed his lips. “There is nothing to tell.”

Eufrates regarded him for a long while, inscrutable, and his hand loosened altogether from his neck. It traced the centre of Cyril’s chest until it found the ring beneath his tunic. The two bands were so close together now, it almost stung. He looked rueful.

As rough as he had been gentle a mere moment ago, Eufrates shoved Cyril against the wall and stalked away, turning his back to him.

“So be it, my love.”