He missed the ease of his routine, yes. He missed the people more: Celyn, Heulwen, his foster-aunt Lowri, when she was not far-flung for months or even years on end, the regular stream of faces who frequented the dim little shop, and the scents and spaces he and Celyn had made their own.
But even as he had tried to lie to himself, to bury it beneath routine and a thousand little tasks that needed him, each day the ache had only spread.
Evencontent, he had always been grieving. Alwaysmissingsomething he was not certain had a name. His parents, yes: the embrace of safety he had felt with them. But it was more than that. So very much more.
He must have shown signs of strain, because before they descended to dinner, Osian drew him aside. ‘Has something happened?’
‘Nothing, Majesty.’ But there was so much, he almost did not have the stomach to pretend. ‘Merely thinking about tonight.’
Dinner dragged. Meilyr’s nerves frayed further. Finally, Osian said, ‘Shall we?’
Meilyr leaned into him. ‘Please, My Prince.’
They bid those around them goodnight, declined Aldreda’s staunch invitation to the solar and departed arm-in-arm.
Ensconced in Osian’s rooms, Meilyr moved towards the bedchamber, but the prince paused. ‘One moment,’ he said as he went to the mantle and retrieved a belted dagger.
Not just any dagger: Meilyr’s, from the hunt.
Osian laid it in his hands. ‘Keep this with you, somewhere close.’
‘Majesty…’
A thousand questions whirled.
‘You are wondering why I would hand you something you could use against me,’ the prince said. It was not a question.
Meilyr looked at the dagger. ‘And you know why I am not asking.’
‘Do I?’
A flicker of coyness; Meilyr’s pulse responded. He tamped it down. ‘Yes. If I so much as unsheathed this in your presence, not only would you certainly overpower me but I would never leave the room alive, let alone the castle.’
Osian’s eyes strayed to the knife. ‘I do not know about that first part…’
Carefully, allowing Meilyr to withdraw if he wanted, he entwined their fingers and unsheathed the blade.
The metallic bloom of iron pressed into the roof of Meilyr’s mouth.
‘I am not foolish enough to believe you are as delicate as everyone seems to think,’ Osian said. Their eyes met. ‘I hope you never have need of it.’
He let him go, turning his back without a flicker of doubt.
The dark metal glinted with liquid midnight in the light from the fireplace.
Meilyr sheathed it and fastened the belt around his hips. The prince moved straight to the lever in the bedchamber fireplace: the earthyclunk, the rug pulled aside, the hatch lifted to expose the dark. Finally, he lit the small lantern and descended first.
Their shadows danced in the dim. It was still strange to wind through the tunnel, to clamber down the tight spiral of stairs, dark and musty from stale air, down and down through the tower, passing the outline of other doors, other boltholes in the warren of Eascild Castle.
‘There are so many of them,’ Meilyr mused aloud, one hand on the stone, the other holding his bunched tunic skirts away from his feet.
Osian hesitated before saying, ‘They were a defence mechanism of the old Cyngaleg stronghold. Not all of it was torn down, and these tunnels were secretly built into the architecture of what now stands.’
Their boots drummed a muffled, echoing rhythm.
Meilyr’s thoughts pooled, silently. The way the hatches all but disappeared, indiscernible from the stone around them…
No, any Cyngaleg weaving left here would have died with the old masters of the destroyed castle, whose blood would have wrought the secret. Clever mechanics was all this was.