Chapter Five

The king muttered dark threats about a certain healer under his breath, only brightening when he caught sight of Mathias near the duck pond, where he was speaking with the head gardener.

"Husband of mine!" Ren called out, slipping from my arms with a sharp elbow to my stomach – deliberate or not, one could never tell with him – and wrenching his lover by the shoulders so he was turned forcibly out of his conversation. Mathias scowled. "Mat, you need more friends. I've decided to execute yours."

"Excuse me?" demanded his companion in accented Quarehian, her eyes flashing.

The king beamed. "Another fiery northerner. Perfect. Have this one!"

"Ren," Mathias said with clear exasperation. "Zovisasha is already my friend."

"That was impressively quick work, mi sol ." Ren swooped in and kissed the woman on the cheek. "Pleasure to meet you, new friend."

Zovisasha stared at him and then deliberately wiped her cheek with the back of her hand, smearing mud across it.

"For fuck's sake. You've already met her," the king consort growled out.

Ren cocked his head, looking thoughtful. "I have vague memories of that, yes. Last year? In Stavroyarsk?"

"And yesterday and the day before that and the last four months she's been in Máros," he snapped.

The king smirked at me when Mathias ran a hand over his eyes, returning his expression to eager innocence when his husband looked back at him. "Then you won't miss Starling, will you?"

And it was then that Wyatt rounded the corner of an immaculately trimmed wall of hedge, his fair hair bound into a messy plait, his trousers rolled up to his knees, and his shirt missing. I stared at the smooth, delicate planes of skin, my mouth going dry and all thoughts abruptly disappearing from my head.

Dios, he looks good enough to eat.

The boy was frowning at something in his cupped hands, and everything in me ached to fix whatever was making him sad.

"Little one," I said softly. Wyatt's head shot up, his mouth immediately curving into a smile that darted straight to my heart. I could feel the weight of it, or rather whatever was the opposite of weight, the thing that made leaves swirl into the sky and wafted delicious scents up to the king's rooms from the kitchens below. A delightful lightlessness, airy and happy and perfect, where the whole world resided in that one smile.

"Wyatt?" someone else asked, and I blinked myself back to the reality where other people existed. It was his mistress who had spoken, the head gardener, and she bowed her head of dark hair down to his blonde one as they both peered into what he held in his hands.

Then she cursed in Mazekhstani, a string of words that had erupted from Mathias' filthy mouth more than once but this time uttered in terror, and I had my hand on my sword hilt in an instant.

"No, se?or," Zovisasha chided, noticing the movement. "This is not a foe you can vanquish with a blade, sadly."

"Then you haven't seen Jiron use his weapon," Ren promptly countered. He flashed me a grin. "Go on, whip it out and show them."

I set my jaw, unable to deny my king's orders even when they were obviously spoken in jest, and yet the double meaning made me falter from the uncertainty of what he wanted from me.

"Ignore that, Jiron," Mathias said with a sigh.

Ren looked disappointed – as did Wyatt, I noticed, for I noticed everything about him, and suddenly I wished the king consort had said nothing.

"You know, when I granted your commands the same authority as mine," Ren grouched to his husband, digging a slim finger into his ribs and making the other man wince, "I didn't intend for you to abuse that power by undoing all of my orders."

"Just the so-called fun ones."

"You see?" Wyatt murmured, transferring what he held into Zovisasha's equally dirt-encrusted hands. Ren wavered up on his toes, trying to peer between their fingers. "The mould, there?"

"I see."

The Mazekhstani woman raised an eyebrow as Ren continued to...Mathias would have called it making a nuisance of himself, but my king could never be such a thing. "If you're so keen to get up close and personal with a diseased flower bud that could see our entire collection of carnations dead within the week, Your Majesty, catch."

She tossed it at him, petals cascading from the plant as it sailed directly at his head.

I intercepted it before it could hit him.

Mathias flinched, but Ren hadn't moved an inch, knowing I would always protect him. Nothing diseased was touching my king while I was on watch.

Even if I wasn't technically on watch. I'd quite forgotten that today was my day off, having settled into the familiar routine of being at Ren's side, although his other guards were hovering unobtrusively a few feet behind us.

Wyatt clapped happily for me, and then spun to face his mistress. "Do you want me to prune-"

"I'll deal with it," Zovisasha said, waving away his offer of help. How anyone could deny that eager face and the way he was earnestly bouncing on his toes as if ready to set off that instant, I didn't know, but if it meant he wasn't going near any more sick plants, I was happy. Dios knew what they'd do to his skin or...

"Wash your hands," I urged him before I could rein in that protective part of me that apparently thought it had the right to tell him what to do.

Wyatt grinned, blinking up at me with those delicate eyelashes of his. Was it my imagination, or had they fluttered?

Ren snickered, and Zovisasha frowned.

"This is a plant fungal disease. It is not contagious to humans, se?or."

"Please," I said, unable to bear the thought of it touching his perfect hands. The head gardener stalked off with an exasperated shake of her head, muttering under her breath in her native language.

"Sure," Wyatt agreed, his smile even wider now. His green eyes sparkled in the sunlight. "If you do as well, Jiron."

He reached out to take the affected flower from my hand and I snatched it away out of his reach.

I cleared my throat as everyone stared at me. "Uh. Show me where I should put it," I said, and Wyatt gestured for me to follow him.

When I did, the king fell into step beside me.

"Ren," Mathias chided in a low hiss. "That was not an open invitation, you idiot."

Ren beamed. "A king doesn't need invitations . Besides, Jiron wants me to accompany them, don't you?"

I faltered, caught between my loyalty to my charge and my own want – closer to a burning need – to spend time alone with Wyatt. The boy often found himself in my thoughts, but when he was this close, he damn near consumed them. It was hard to look at anything else but him; his broad smile that showed perfectly white teeth, his green eyes, permanently crinkled in good humour and soft empathy, his slender but toned body that I longed to run my hands over and discover its secrets.

But I was so many years older than him, and he wouldn't want…wouldn't want me .

So I forced my gaze back to the man I'd sworn my life to since I was eighteen, and bowed deeply. "Of course, Your Majesty. Anything you wish."

Ren latched onto that with a wolfish grin, looking expectantly between me and the boy at my side.

"Come back inside, asshole," Mathias muttered under his breath at him.

"Nah. I'd rather stay and watch Wyatt show Jiron where to put it ."

"I'll let you do that thing to me that you threatened this morning," his husband casually offered.

Ren's gaze snapped to his, his face lighting up with savage glee. "You mean the..."

"Yeah."

Without even a moment's hesitation, Ren grabbed Mathias' shirt and began to drag him by it back to the palace at a punishing pace. The king consort glanced over his shoulder as he was hauled away, and mouthed you owe me one back at us.

Wyatt's eyebrows crinkled in adorable concern as he stared after them both. "Is he...?"

"His Highness will be fine," I assured him. The pleased little smile on Mathias' face told me that he didn't consider what was about to happen to him to be a hardship at all, although I was sure he'd make his husband work for it. "Now let's make sure you are."

The way Wyatt's expression shifted from worried to mischievous made my heart stutter. "In the same way?" he asked coyly, his tongue flicking out across his bottom lip, and I choked on the implication.

"Uh," I said incoherently, trying to remember what I'd been talking about. "Hands. Wash."

Wyatt was too positive a person to look dejected, but it was a close thing.

"Right," he said, spinning on his heel and sashaying over to the tap set into the nearby wall. He waved a hand at a bin and I tossed the remnants of the plant inside before joining him.

The boy had his back to me, the tap gushing water over hands callused by his work in the gardens. I watched as he grabbed a sliver of soap from the little alcove in the stone wall and ran it under his fingernails and across his palms, but when he was still seemingly rinsing it off after over a minute, I began to worry that the contact with the diseased flora had been more concerning than either of the gardeners had made it out to be.

"Aren't you going to join me?" Wyatt asked without turning around, and I jolted when I realised I'd been staring at the way his bare shoulders rippled with the movement of his arms.

Staring and damn near salivating.

" Sí ," I murmured, and moved in behind him to cage him against the wall, tucking the boy's head under my chin.

*