Chapter 6

Van couldn't see, and then he could. The outline of Lorre's tent rushed in: glowing blues and violets, sage-green and snow-white samite. The heat of the fire in its gleaming bowl. The sprawl of the map, altered, flung across the marble table.

He felt his lungs fill, felt the air in them. He gazed at his magician, astounded, wordless.

"Oh, don't." Lorre put a hand to his own temple, fleetingly; pressed fingertips there. "I didn't want to be stared at. This was faster."

Van managed, because that was the easiest of his overflowing questions, "Headache?"

"No. It's only people. Humans. I'm going to be a raincloud. I want you here when I come back."

"A raincloud."

"I need…let's just say it's magic. Read a book. Nap. Whatever you'd like. I don't know how long I'll be."

Van nodded, because clearly he was not in control of any part of this conversation. Lorre shut his eyes, opened them, did a little all-over wriggle as if settling bones and muscles back into shape, or testing them for flexibility.

And then all his edges softened, blurred, faded. Dissolved, right there, like a chalk drawing under rain. Gradual but abrupt, here and gone, human body turned into a slate-dark billow of icy wind and sleet, which gathered itself up and blew out of the tent before Van could even comprehend what'd just taken place.

The heap of Lorre's robes collapsed with a small sigh, a tumble of brocade and satin, raspberries and lavender in stripes and ruffles. A clatter of pearl hair-pins landed on the top.

Van stood there and stared at satin and pins. He didn't know for how long. The day had gone from flat sun to silvery gloom, outside. The tent was firelit and snug.

He'd known Lorre wasn't fully human. He'd known. There'd been jokes about shapeshifting, earlier that morning.

He hadn't known anything, nothing at all. He hadn't understood. And he'd dared to think he could offer some assistance, to a thundercloud, a river-child, a magician.

One of Lorre's hair-pins, a knot of black pearl and thick gold, caught the light from the fire. It winked at him: encouragement, perhaps. It was here, and Van was here, and they were here, together. That was as real as anything was.

He was still armed, bow and quiver. He found a corner to set those in.

He picked up Lorre's clothing and folded it and put the folds atop a chest, in the corner, which he discovered to be holding other fabric. He put the hair-pins in a shallow seashell he found near the mysterious collection of twigs and sticks and woods. The seashell shimmered, iridescent; and for a moment Van's heart cracked open at the thought of home, the simplicity of waves on a shore, the inn's hearth and long tables, his father's gruff embrace, evenings spent learning to help his mother with the accounts.

He had written home faithfully, during the hasty weeks of training and mobilization. He had not written about Lorre; he had not had time, these last tumultuous days. He did not know what he could possibly say.

He had written about Milo. About the new friend who'd decided, that first day, that they were going to be friends; who had never cared that Van came from a tiny drowsy fishing-village and did not know about Court fashions; who was unobtrusively everyone's friend and had a reliable unhurried hand with a bow and woke up grumbling and unfocused before the first cup of strong hot tea.

They'd both volunteered. They'd both believed in this: protecting their home. They had that in common, the way they'd discovered they had other things in common: a liking for music, being fond of animals, an anchor in family and home. Milo couldn't whistle, but could play the guitar, though he hadn't brought his; Van had not ever learned an instrument, but could mimic sea-birds and song-birds and any tune he'd heard clearly enough, and Milo had laughed and applauded him for it.

Black pearl hair-pins in hand, in the Sorcerer's tent, Van wanted to whistle a little aching note; he wanted Milo with him, so intensely he thought his bones would break with the wanting. He wanted Milo's arms around him again.

He thought that maybe he knew what he wanted, now.

Except he also did want to be here. Because Lorre, he thought, needed him. Someone, at least.

That headache. Those insults, even while the magician had been trying to help. Every one of Van's instincts stiffened up in outrage at that. An abomination, indeed. Maybe Lorre was sometimes a raincloud, but the magician also liked foot-rubs and spinach tarts and saving people, because the truth of the day was that Lorre had saved people: without him a battle would've happened, and not everyone would've been safe.

Van himself, and Milo, had not had to learn how it might feel to harm another person. Because of Lorre.

He put the last hair-pins in the iridescent seashell. He made the strawberry tea. He kicked off his own boots and rolled up his sleeves and loosened the tie at the neck of his shirt. He did not have oil, nor smoothing vanilla hair-scent, today; he was just himself. But maybe that would be enough; Lorre had liked him well enough the first time.

He glanced around. No thundercloud had returned. Lorre had said to borrow a book, if he liked; Van went to look at the three in a haphazard stack by the map. He avoided touching the map itself.

One book was old-fashioned courtly poetry, one was in a language he didn't know, and one proved to be botanical, a ninety-year-old treatise on forests and folklore and the supposed individual attributes and energies of various trees and shrubs. Van picked that up, carefully because of the age, and settled into the bed. The morning folded into afternoon in a muted patter of unseasonal rain.

He was halfway through a chapter on the uses of juniper as a grounding meditation aid when a gust of cold blew open the tent-flap. Van put the book down; Lorre slid out of air and raindrops and coalesced into a person, golden-haired and blue-eyed and naked.

Van, watching, couldn't not want: the leaping power, the grace, the strength and prettiness and blatant display. His body responded.

Lorre put his head on one side. Hair tumbled down his back. "The Barrialian philosophy of trees? How are you liking it?"

"It's dense. Slow. But interesting. Learning about juniper. How's your headache?"

"You're not afraid of me." Lorre went over to collect tea. "You ought to be."

"Oh, I am. I'm just not going anywhere."

"Hmm." Lorre finished half a mug of tea in one possibly inhuman gulp. Water-drops hung diamonds in his hair; Van wasn't sure whether they were real rain-flecks, from the weather outside, or if the magician had forgotten a piece or two. "You don't need to stay."

"Do you want me to stay?"

"The Queen will send the volunteers home in the morning," Lorre informed him, not an answer, unless it was. "The regulars will stay on for support. They're working out a border zone. A new treaty. I eavesdropped, before I got bored. Maybe I should go to Penth. They have sand-cats."

"You can't—we just almost went to war with them, and you want to—"

"I don't care." Lorre put the porcelain teacup down, on the table and not on air this time. "Is that difficult to understand? I said I'm not on your side. I'm not on anyone's side. I'm on my side."

"That's not true," Van said. "That can't be true. You left breakfast for me, this morning. You stopped the war."

"I just—"

"Thought about me. Did something nice. Those breakfast rolls."

"Don't make too much out of a gesture."

"You didn't have to do it, and you did."

"I've been hungry." Lorre came over to the bed as Van got up. "Not because I couldn't find food; I could. I wanted to know what that felt like. I didn't enjoy it. I like strawberries and honey and goat's-milk cheese."

"And pearls in your hair." Van reached out, cautiously in case any lightning stopped him. It didn't, so he touched shining gold, ran his fingers through the storm-damp shimmer of Lorre's loose hair. "And silks and satins against your skin." Lorre's breathing was a bit shaky, he observed. "You like being touched."

"I want you to fuck me," Lorre said. He said it with the usual cool arrogance; but he tilted his head into the touching, too. His body was beautifully aroused, luscious as ever. The words hovered in the air, rain-splashed, drenched in want.

"Oh Goddess," Van said, accidentally aloud.

"Decidedly not. Do you mind doing that?"

"No! I mean—I want to. Whatever you want."

"Yes," Lorre said. "Whatever I want. Make it hard."

"I'm not going to hurt you."

"I wouldn't care if you did. I can heal."

"No."

"Orders, mine, following them."

"No. I'll make it harder, if you want. Rough, if you want that. But I won't hurt you."

Lorre appeared to be thinking this over, then shrugged, nodded, and said, "Go on, then," and waved a hand at Van's clothing, which vanished.

Not out of sight, this time. Van noticed that. Just over on a chair. And that recognition, Lorre listening to him, left his insides tangled up with strange yearning compassion, with desire and melancholy, with the awareness that this was what they would have, just this, one last time.

He could do this role, if Lorre wanted that; it might be only his fourth time with a man, but he did have some ideas. And his body decidedly wanted this. Craved it, even. Fucking Lorre, being inside him like that—

He put a hand on the magician's chest. Pushed Lorre back into the bed, amid cerulean and amber satin. Lorre went willingly, and spread his legs when Van leaned down over him. His hair made a gilded halo across priceless fabric.

"You want me to fuck you," Van said. "So you can feel it. Right? I can do that."

Lorre nodded again, and invisible hands trailed along Van's back, hips, cock: tugging, encouraging. His actual hands stayed put against the bed.

"This is me," Van told him, "touching you," and bent to doing that.

It was different but equally glorious, like this: glimmering, firelit, thick and rich as caramel. His hands on Lorre, callused and brown against flawless smoothness. His fingers stroking, pressing, pushing in. Lorre made a hushed sound and did something that probably was some sort of very specific shapeshift, body opening, easy, hungry against Van's exploring touch. Lorre also did the trick with pulling sweet oil out of thin air again, except he used it on himself this time, slick and ready.

Van touched him, petted him, held him down and held him in place with weight and caresses, and finally slid into him, a long deep glide. Lorre moaned at the feel of it. Van nearly finished on the spot, because it felt so good, it all felt so good, that sensation—

Sensations. His grip on Lorre's legs, handling them, pushing them up. His hips rocking, pounding into Lorre. Hard, as requested.

Lorre did come first. Van, near-senseless from ecstasy, spared a second to be proud of that. He'd done that: made his magician spill all over himself, open-mouthed and quivering, from Van's cock in him and Van's hand on his prick, wringing him out.

That sight shoved him over the edge too, and he lost every thought for a moment, drowning in gold and blue and the tastes of sugar and rain.

He came back to himself breathless, shaken, aware that he was panting and sweaty and had just emptied himself out inside Lorre's enchanter's body. Lorre, for someone at least eighty years old, had recovered remarkably fast, and was gazing up at him with a tiny line between golden eyebrows.

Van managed, "…what?"

"Nothing. That was…good." Lorre paused, added swiftly, "Excellent, really, please don't take that as faint praise, it isn't, I feel much better," and waited for Van's reaction to this. His hair, no longer smooth and sleek, curled around his face in blond dandelion wisps.

"Well." Van eased out of him, rolled onto the bed beside him, stroked the closest slim thigh for more physical comfort. For them both, maybe. "I'm glad, then."

Lorre did the quick hand-wave clean-up for them. That was becoming worrisomely normal in Van's daily life: magic on him, in him, around him. "I needed that."

"Happy to help."

"I won't see you again."

"You could. If you wanted."

"You don't want that."

"I don't?"

"Not like…" Lorre sat up. Grabbed a blanket, a sea-green heavy thing. "Never mind."

"Not like what?"

"You want what you want, and I don't want you, and you don't want me."

"That," Van said, once he could talk, "was cruel."

"Was it?"

"You're trying to tell me that you don't actually care," Van said, sitting up too, both arms around his knees in the sudden iceberg freeze, "about me."

"Of course I care." Lorre made an exasperated gesture; the fire leapt higher, in its copper dish. "I care when any piece of the world gets hurt. A salmon, a fox, a blade of grass, a vein of copper, you."

"A blade of grass."

"Don't ask me to be what I'm not."

"No," Van said. "I'm not asking for that."

And, in the firelight, Lorre looked at him, and was the first to look away: down at the folds of green blanket, the tumbled bedding, the foot of the bed.

Van scooted closer. Next to him.

Lorre's voice was smaller than usual. "The general called you…Roche. Your name?"

"Evander Roche. Van. Nice to meet you."

Lorre's smile flickered, tugged at the corner of his mouth, ducked back into hiding. It was a surprisingly real smile, wry and shy and human. "Yes. I'm just Lorre. No family."

"I know who you are," Van told him, and nudged him with an elbow, companionably, the way he would've with Thom or Claudette or even Milo. "Kind of hard to miss, with that hair."

Lorre laughed. Outside the rain picked up, drumming through the afternoon.

"Can I ask a question?"

"Why not?" Lorre pulled strawberries out of the air with one hand, a glass dish out of emptiness with the other, and offered him a berry. "Go on."

"Do you collect things that're magic? Like the book about trees. Or whatever's in that purple bottle."

"The bottle's just a dye." Lorre handed him another strawberry. They were resplendent, perfectly juicy and red and ripe. "I made it accidentally out of blackberries and indigo and shadows when I was trying to make a cloak, and I can't work out how to undo it, and it turns everything that color the second it touches anything. I'm not infallible, as it happens, a fact about which I can see you're astonished."

Van snorted.

"I don't properly collect things. Sometimes. If they're dangerous and I think they're better off with me."

"Is that why you want the Fire Prince's Crown?"

"Because of that," Lorre said, "and because he and I—" He stopped, fast enough to be a confession. The dish of strawberries hopped over to the map table.

"I won't ask if you don't want me to."

"Don't."

Van set a hand on his shoulder, light enough to not take offense if Lorre pushed him away. Lorre did not, so he slid the hand up to the back of the magician's neck, under long rumpled hair, and started kneading tension away. Lorre folded up both knees, put his arms on them, hid his face in the arms, but did not move away from being soothed.

Van kneaded a bit harder, comforting. Got even closer, up against him. Bodies, bare, making contact. Touching.

"Because," Lorre said, muffled, "the folk stories say his father was the fire. All those centuries ago. My mother was a river. I don't know anyone else like me."

Van needed a second to work through those improbable statements; and then the sheer awful emptiness of it, the endless void, the infinity of no one else, horrified his soul.

"I told you not to ask," Lorre said from behind a waterfall of hair. "But you can keep doing that. Good anchor."

"I'm so sorry."

"Never mind. Go away now. Stop speaking."

"You don't mean that."

"I can turn you into a minnow. Don't pity me."

"It's not pity," Van said, hand resting over the nape of Lorre's neck. "I've got you. Anything you need."

"I don't need anything." Lorre sat back, shaking the closeness off. "Especially not from humans."

Breathing, in and out. Even and steady. Even though it hurt. "Of course you don't. So you want the Crown because it's safer with you, like you said?"

"And because I don't know how he did the perpetual fire, and I want to know." Lorre made a wry face at the strawberries from across the tent. "If someone can do something I can't, I need to learn."

"So that you can be the best? You are, I thought."

"It's not about being the best," Lorre said. "It's about being—" He stopped. Waved a hand, not magical, or not visibly so. "Never mind. You should go."

About being valuable, Van thought. About being good enough. About not being alone. "You can keep saying that, and I'll keep asking if you mean it."

"No," Lorre said. "I mean you should go because—because your friend is afraid for you, and worrying about you, and in love with you. He's thinking it very loudly. Or feeling it. He doesn't trust me with you. And he's right about that, and he does love you, and I think you should go and live utterly ordinary lives and be happy. Be in love. Someone should be."

Van couldn't think. Could barely breathe. Those words, thrown out there—Lorre thought that Milo felt—and if Lorre said so, it was true, it had to be, and that meant—

That meant Milo's grin and freckled hands and sturdy warmth at his side forever—the rightness of it, the understanding like a cloudburst, like a cleansing annealing deluge—

But he was here, too. And he could see Lorre not meeting his eyes. He got out, "Lorre—thank you, I—he and I—but he never said—"

"He's been saying it," Lorre said. "I can feel it. No, I don't know what people are thinking. I can't read minds. But I can feel…the shape of some emotions, sometimes. Especially when it's about me. Yes, self-centered, arrogant, I know, I'm all of that."

"You're not really," Van said, automatically; and then he nudged Lorre again, gently, and said, "Maybe only a little."

He got the very real smile again, for that.

"I've never seen the inside of your tent," Lorre said. "So I can't drop you inside it. Maybe over by the cooking-fire?"

"And now you're helping me."

Lorre shrugged a shoulder: naked, beautiful, hair looking exactly like he'd been recently fucked, eyes looking much older, the age he truly was. "I like being unpredictable, and everyone thinks I've kidnapped you. So I'll return you. To your true love."

"My…you think he is. You mean it." Van heard the words with wonder; breathed them again, to taste and feel them. "He loves me. I love him."

"Of course you do."

"It's real."

"You're still going to have to talk to him. I can't help you with that."

"But it's real. I mean. Him and me."

"Do you need me to say it again? It's real. I'm going to throw you out of my tent now."

"Let me get dressed first," Van said, laughing, getting up; laughing because he couldn't not, because the joy and the tenderness were bubbling up inside, because he could see his future and he wanted to dive into it and come up surfacing through sunlight.

Clothing thrown on, weapons gathered, he came back to Lorre. The magician had stayed sitting at the edge of the bed, bundled into the emerald blanket; he got up as Van came over. His eyes gave the emotion away, though he ran a hand through his hair and flattened it into behaving.

"I'm here," Van said. "I just want to tell you that. I'm here if you ever need me."

"I won't."

"We're friends, and I care that you're doing all right."

Lorre did a credible impression of complete dismay at that statement. "We're not friends."

"We are, though. And thank you. For telling me about Milo. For everything." He touched Lorre's cheek; the magician let him. "For all of it. Nothing I'd ever imagined. A dream come true. Magic."

"Of course," Lorre said. "That's me. I won't say good-bye, in the morning."

"I know. But, Lorre…" One more touch, tucking blond silk behind an ear. "You're not alone. You don't have to be. I hope you do find someone. Someone like you, or someone you like. Enough to let them stay with you, anyway. To try." He made sure Lorre was looking at him, for the next bit. "You deserve that, being happy. And, look, either way, if you ever want…you come and find us, if you're lonely, all right? You know where I'll be. In an inn. Being ordinary."

"I'm not ordinary." Lorre caught Van's hand, held it for a moment, let go. "But thank you. Evander. Van. I've stopped the rain for you, by the way."

Van grinned at him. "Thanks."

"Are you ready?"

"Yes," Van said, and he meant it. In every way, with all of himself. "Yes."

The world flowed and dissolved. Lorre's magic pushed him through space and distance like mist and clouds, a heartbeat, a pair of beats, until his boots hit the very tangible mud of the ground, and Van's next inhale held cooking-smoke and the scent of just-departed rain.