Page 30 of Deven and the Dragon
“Well?” Deven asked, trying for nonchalance. He didn’t feel that way. This was something Deven loved, sitting here by this stream and eating, drinking, and savoring the summer weather. If Fiora thought it was beneath him…well, itwasbeneath him. But Deven longed for Fiora to like it anyway. “What do you think?”
Fiora looked about him, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly, his whole body seeming to relax with it. A tentative little smile spread across his lips, so sweet it made Deven ache. “It’s lovely, but I think I may need to decline the…whatever’s in those bottles.” Fiora shuddered.
“Nope,” Deven said cheerfully, popping the top off of one and holding it out. “Not allowed. This, my dear sheltered aristocrat, is what we like to call ‘the hair of the dog that bit you.’”
“Dogs tend to avoid me,” Fiora said dubiously, wrinkling his nose in bewilderment. “Please tell me there were no dogs involved in the making of that?”
Waggling the bottle in Fiora’s direction, Deven said, “I promise there weren’t, now take it. Go on!” At last Fiora reached out and took the bottle, staring at it as if it might bite him for real. “Look, you sip that, and you eat a sandwich, and you keep sipping. If it all stays down, then you’re cured.”
“That sounds like a disgusting and highly inefficient system,” Fiora muttered.
“Well, most people don’t have the luxury of sleeping all day after they tie one on,” Deven said. “So we’ve found ways to get up and get the stables mucked out in spite of it all. Here, have a sandwich. They’re safe, I promise. My aunt made them. I had nothing to do with it, except getting interrogated while she sliced the bread.”
Deven wasn’t even sure what he’d said to get his aunt to leave him be and let him go before he was late. He had the sinking suspicion he might have given away more than he liked, even though he’d told her the barest minimum he could manage about Fiora.
Fiora took a delicate bite of his sandwich, and his eyebrows went up. His next bite was more of a ravenous gulp, and the rest of the sandwich disappeared. He washed it down with a small sip of the ale, and immediately reached for another sandwich.
Deven grinned and followed suit, and the sandwiches vanished in minutes.
Why had henever lain in grass before? It wasglorious. Soft beneath his back, but textured in his idly shifting fingers. The sun had sunk behind the trees, and the whole clearing lay in deep, blissfully cool shade. The sky spread above him like a translucent canopy, endlessly pure and clean.
Gazing at it had the added benefit of taking Fiora’s eyes away from Deven’s nearly-naked body.
“Did my books ever get there last night?” Deven asked, interrupting a silence that had stretched, uninterrupted but for the stream’s bright babbling and a few cranky squirrels in the spreading oak above them, for longer than Fiora could quantify. “I glanced in your study earlier when I came looking for you, but I didn’t see the trunk.”
“It’s on the chair by my desk,” Fiora said. “You might not have seen it from the door.”
“Good,” Deven said, with a sigh that sounded like relief. “I know they’re not much, compared to that splendid library of yours.” His voice had taken on a defensive note. “But they’remine. And I’ve read and reread every one of them.”
Fiora understood, far more than Deven could possibly imagine. The foolish, impulsive urge to spill his own greatest secret welled up, and Fiora smacked it down in horror. He couldn’t trust Deven. No matter how enticing his long, strong, tanned limbs and the soft-looking scattering of golden-brown hair on his muscled chest, and no matter that he’d taken Fiora on a picnic. And given him his clothes. And stroked his scales, and called himbeautiful…
“I promise they’re safe,” he said, his throat scratchy. “I wouldn’t let anything happen to your books.”
“Thanks. There are some really good ones in there, even though they’re a bit battered. I don’t mind that, actually. It shows they have history. Have you ever readThe Three Swordsmen?”
Deven’s words struck Fiora like a barrage of arrows to the heart; another little bit of the armor he’d tried to keep in place chipped off and fell away, revealing the tender center of him. Like he was a piece of marble at a sculptor’s mercy, he thought dreamily — only not the mad anti-genius who’d inflicted his creations on the Marlow family, and by extension on Fiora. Someone skilled. Someone who’d shape Fiora with careful, expert hands…
“Yes,” he whispered, his chest so tight it felt like it might burst. “I have.”
“I love it,” Deven said. “That part where they’re eating lunch with arrows falling all around them? Fucking wonderful. I tried to run off and join the army after I read it for the first time. Luckily I was only nine, so I didn’t get far. Actually, you know those buggering rabbits? They came from a farm a couple of miles outside of town. I made it that far, and it was that farmer who caught me sneaking through his field and loaded me in a wagon to bring me home…”
Deven went on, telling that story and then another related one in which he played a prank on the butcher, and continuing from there, with more openness than Fiora had ever heard from him. There was something guarded about Deven, despite his veneer of charming bonhomie — something that slipped away completely as he told Fiora tale after tale of his boyhood mischief.
Fiora listened, and savored the sound of Deven’s voice forming each word, even as he missed the meaning of half of them in his state of drowsy pleasure. The ale had done its work, and he was nearly boneless, melting into the lush greenery of this perfect, hidden place Deven had found for him.
He drifted, picturing a shelf bearing one more copy ofThe Three Swordsmenthan Fiora currently possessed. Would it be different, reading Deven’s? Would the echoes of Deven’s childhood excitement waft off the pages and wrap Fiora in wonder? Fiora drifted, and he smiled, and his chest ached with a pain he couldn’t bear to name.
Chapter Fourteen
Two weeks slippedby, more quickly than any in Fiora’s memory, a string of sunny afternoons and quiet evenings.
There was no more drunkenness, but Fiora returned to his own dinner table and made sure to send for the best his cellars could offer in the way of wine, just for the pleasure of seeing Deven’s face light up as he tasted it. By day Fiora let Deven drag him all over the countryside, rambling through hedgerows and climbing hills to see the view. They stayed away from other people, Deven helping Fiora hide behind trees or, once, in a blackberry bramble, both of them laughing like schoolboys. Fiora complained for days about the tiny rents in his coat left by the thorns, but he ate the berries Deven picked for him and kept it to himself that he thought they were the nicest thing he’d ever tasted, dusty and half-withered as they were.
And after dinner they retired to the library, where Fred knew, after the first day, to set extra candles. Fiora reclaimed his favorite chair; Deven occupied the matching one to its right. Sometimes they talked idly, and at other times they both buried their noses in something and didn’t surface for hours.
Fiora wished he could ask Deven to let him read Deven’s own books, rather than the library’s admittedly generous offerings, but that would have meant possibly betraying his own secret through his eagerness. The night after the picnic, Deven had come up to the study and taken his trunk away to his own room — first opening it, with uncharacteristic shyness, to allow Fiora a glimpse of the contents. Fiora bit his tongue lest he admit he’d already looked without permission. His guilt over that transgression weighed on him, but confession was beyond his courage after the golden afternoon they’d spent by the stream. Would a human look on his moment of weakness the same way a dragon would, as the worst possible invasion of privacy? Possibly not, but he couldn’t bring himself to risk ruining such a perfect day.
On the third night, as they were retiring from the library, Deven followed Fiora to the foot of his tower. “Are you flying tonight?” he asked, leaning in so closely that Fiora could feel the gust of his breath over his own face. It was scented with the sweet wine they’d had with dessert — a chocolate custard concoction Fiora loved, proving that Mrs. Pittel had forgiven him. He suspected Deven had talked her round.
