Adrian Silvercrest's Arc

Chapter 4 of 23

Three days passed. Adrian did not sleep well. He worked the forge in the mornings and Dan's fence in the afternoons, and every night he lay on the cot in Elara's back room and turned the question over. He had kissed Aldric to stop a mouth. Aldric had kissed him back like a man answering a letter. Elara still set three bowls at supper. She still passed him the bread. She did not meet his eyes. On the fourth morning he walked out to the swing. He and Aldric had built it together the summer before Adrian left the palace, two boards and four chains hung under an arch of old wood. Vines had climbed the posts since. Small flowers sat in the joints. Adrian had asked Aldric to meet him there at first light. Aldric came up the path in his star-stitched robe, dark hair still flat from sleep. He stopped a pace short of the swing. "You said come. I came." Adrian put his hand on Aldric's cheek. The wizard's pale skin went warm under his palm. "I have feelings for you," Adrian said. "I wasn't sure. I am now." Aldric's blue eyes did not move. "Say the rest." "Two men in a village like this. They'd run us out by the next market day. I can't give you a house and a name over the door. Not here. Not anywhere I know." "I know that." Aldric's voice stayed level. "I have known that for six years." Adrian dropped his hand. "Elara still sits with us. She still cooks for both of us. She hasn't told a soul." "She hasn't spoken to you either." "She cares. About us both. I've watched her." Adrian sat on the swing. The chains creaked. "I want to keep her. I want to keep you. I think there is a shape for that if the three of us agree to it." Aldric did not sit. "Say the shape." "I marry her, if she'll have me. In the village's eyes that is the picture they want. You stay. You live at the cottage. You are my old friend, her friend, under the same roof. What we are the three of us is ours. No one else's." Aldric was quiet for a long time. "You are asking her to carry the front of it." "I am asking her. Not telling her. If she says no, it's no." "And if she says yes and later hates it?" "Then she leaves and I let her." Aldric sat down beside him. The swing took his weight. He looked at his hands. "All right. Ask her." Adrian nodded once. His chest hurt in a new place. He had a plan now, and a partner in it, and one more person to face before any of it was real. Elara had not looked at him in four days. He would have to make her.