Lorre put out a hand. Touched Van’s hair, ran fingers through dark waves. “Vanilla?”

  “Um. I wanted to…we thought…”

  “Ah. You wanted to impress me, or something along those lines. People do try that, on occasion.” Lorre’s fingers curled, not quite a tug. “You needn’t have bothered. But I suppose I appreciate the effort. I like touching. And I want your hands on me. Sensation. Skin. Is that acceptable?”

  Oh yes. So much yes. The arousal from earlier had come roaring back; it hammered in his pulse, between his thighs, in his cock. “Yes, please.”

  “So polite,” Lorre said, amused; and then Van’s clothing, borrowed shirt and all, had gone, and he found himself being shoved back into the bed, magician’s hands running along his biceps, chest, stomach, lower.

  Lorre was beautiful and infinite and commanding. Van got lost in feelings, glimpses, shattering star-soaked moments. Lorre’s hair brushing his skin. Lorre’s fingers wandering everyplace, as if trying to memorize him. Lorre’s slim waist and tight body and smooth skin.

  The heat of the brazier. The tastes of strawberries and tea and sugar. The scents of vanilla, honey, some sort of flower Van didn’t know, a hint of sea-salt and water. One of the rumors suggested, he recalled hazily, that Lorre’s mother was a water-spirit, one of the old elemental powers. Maybe that explained the oceans.

  He did not know where his own oil had gone, but they did not need it; Lorre conjured slickness out of the air, and his fingers were warm, and he clearly knew how to touch a man’s body. Van moaned and begged and made desperate noises, and generally forgot about coherence and sense and rationality. Those fingers, those cool blue eyes, pinning him in place. Yes, yes, please.

  Lorre took him there on the bed, sliding into him; Van remembered that the magician had asked for touch, and tried to do as requested, reaching up, holding on. Lorre said nothing, only moved, and it was good, so very good, so shimmering and wild—

  Lorre looked at him, but did not, precisely, see him. Van, on his back, and later on hands and knees, realized that.

  Lorre was considerate about mutual pleasure, and took care with him, and paid attention to his reactions, assiduously so, until Van couldn’t tell which way was up or how many hours it’d been or how many times he’d spilled himself; that was all true and ecstatic.

  But a remoteness lingered. Lorre did not talk much, and did not kiss him, not really; some exploration of lips, mouths, tongue, but Van thought that was about sensation, not intimacy. About Lorre wanting to feel, to drink the feelings in. Skin to skin. Touching.

  The labyrinthine blue of those eyes did not light up, not fully. Desire, yes—Lorre certainly found release, breathless, hips moving, climax flooding Van’s body with heat. He knew Lorre was enjoying the night.

  But he thought, again, about gemstones. Sapphires. Walls. A hardness. Never fracturing, letting nothing escape.

  And then Lorre wrapped coils of golden firelight around his cock and his wrists, and traced fingertips like feathers along his inner thigh, and Van forgot to think, shuddering with exquisite sensitivity.

  After some uncountable time, perhaps noticing that Van was wrung out and trembling with too much pleasure, Lorre kissed his shoulder and stopped teasing his cock and slid out of him, gently.

  Van moaned helplessly. Everything ached in glorious ways. His hair stuck to his face, damp with sweat. Lorre liked some uses of magic in bed, and had been playing with multiple conjured-up fingers along with his prick in Van’s body, plus some heat, cold, invisible ropes tugging Van’s legs into the air.

  Lorre sighed. “Are you quite all right?”

  Van couldn’t form words. He might’ve whimpered. Lorre’s cock was magical too, thick and heavy; Lorre’s release was dripping out of him, as he lay there sprawled atop the bed.

  Lorre sighed again. “One moment.” A little gesture, a sensation like hot water, a cloth—

  He was clean. Entirely. He moved a hand, touched his own stomach.

  “I’m useful on occasion,” Lorre said, getting up from the bed. He’d also cleaned himself up, and—despite unselfconscious nakedness—resembled precisely the sorcerer he was, powerful and unassailable and remote.

  His hair was curling from exertion, though, no longer straight and unruffled. And that’d been a hint of wryness in his tone. No: more than a hint. Proper self-deprecation.

  Van managed to sit up. His muscles protested. Lorre had handled the messy bits, but it’d been a while, and he’d never felt anything like this. “Was that…I mean, if you…want more…”

  “You look exhausted, so no.”

  “Was it…good?”

  “Yes. Thank you. I do want more tea; would you like some?”

  “Tea…I mean. Yes?”

  Lorre poured, and brought two cups, and handed Van the ruby one. Van clutched it, and tried not to leave fingerprint-smudges on priceless stone.

  Lorre went back to being quiet, sitting cross-legged on the end of the bed, staring into tea as if searching for an answer, a revelation, a secret he hadn’t found. The tent held the scents of sex, honey, vanilla, washed in firelight.

  Lorre got up, after a while, and went to stare at the map instead. He put the tea down mid-air without looking. Van almost scrambled off the bed to try to catch it, but the air supported porcelain calmly. Van stared at it. Transferred the stare to the Sorcerer, who was naked and lovely and drumming fingers over the map, across the winding blue line of the Argent.

  He ventured, “Sorcerer?”

  Lorre swung around. “You’re still here?” His eyebrows held genuine astonishment.

  “Ah…yes?”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you want me to go?”

  Big blue eyes got more perplexed. “Would you prefer to stay?”

  Van got up. He wasn’t sure why, only that it felt the thing to do. He had no clothes, so he wrapped the topmost blanket, a thick blue velvet expanse, around himself. “Do you want me to stay?”

  “I don’t mind either way.” Lorre poked the map again. “If I split this, here, and we send a tributary down…”

  “Is that what you were talking about, with the Queen?” He was taller than Lorre; he’d known that, but somehow he knew it again, just now. Standing nearer.

  It was something about Lorre’s quietness, or his startlement about Van wanting to be here. Something that made the magician, for all his maybe-eighty years, younger. With sex-rumpled hair, falling all down his back.

  “Yes. It’s perfectly possible—I’m good with water—but apparently political implications exist.” Lorre scowled at the map. “I hate thinking about implications.”

  “Isn’t that why you’re here, though?”

  Lorre sent the scowl his way, but not, Van thought, seriously. “I’m good at what I do. Doing what needs to be done. Maybe I should leave Averene. Kings and queens and rulers and politics and humans…”

  “But—” Van put out a hand, shocked; then made a grab for his blanket. He couldn’t be the one responsible for the Sorcerer leaving the kingdom. No. Fuck. As it were. “But you live here. You’re here to help us. You’re one of us.”

  “I am not, and I resent you saying so.” Lorre kicked the marble table with bare toes. And then, with mild surprise, said, “Ouch.”

  “Fucking hell,” Van said, and winced at his own mouth. “Come here. Sit down. Did you break those toes?”

  “No. Well, not anymore.” Lorre, back to sitting on the bed while Van picked up his foot, shrugged with both eyebrows. “It’s fine.”

  It was now. Van had seen the straightening, heard the sounds. Hands on Lorre’s ankle, holding on so he could check, he asked, “Does that hurt? I mean the healing of it.”

  “No. What’re you doing?”

  “Foot-rub.”

  “Oh, go away and be nice someplace else.”

  “Really?”

  “No. Tell me something about you. Not about you. About…the land. Where you’re from. Something you hold onto, when you’re here.”

  Something to hold onto, Van thought. When Lorre himself had said, I’m not one of you. And then managed to injure himself.

  He said, hands kneading the fine-boned shape of the magician’s foot, “I grew up in Baylight. Tiny village, mostly fisherfolk, you wouldn’t know it. A good stop for trading boats, though, and a good trade in boat-building. My parents run the local inn.”

  Lorre made a sound, which might’ve meant anything or nothing; but he put his other foot in Van’s lap too.

  “I always liked going down to the shore, in the morning. Early morning, with the sun coming up, and light all across the water like a giant looking-glass, catching the colors of it. Peaceful, and bright.”

  “Perhaps you should’ve been a lighthouse keeper.”

  “Maybe. I’ll take over the inn someday. But the Queen needed volunteers. I’m here now.” He ran a hand along Lorre’s calf. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Do you have to?” Lorre summoned tea with one lazy finger. “I don’t know you. You don’t need to know me. It doesn’t matter.”

  “You said you weren’t from Averene. Is that true? It’s just, in the stories I know, you’re part of our history.”

  Lorre snorted. And took the feet away, getting up. He collected and threw on a loose indigo robe, with ties at the waist, along the way. It had impractical beribboned sleeves. “And that’s a very stupid question you’ve chosen.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “I’m sorry, I said.”

  “If you know the stories you know the answer.” Lorre went back to the map. “Those mountains…but I can handle that…if you want the short version, the barony of Valpres is still independent, and my mother was a river, so no, I’m not one of you, on both counts. If Penth needs fresh water, the Argent’s the best option, but I could play with the ocean, also…”

  “A whole ocean?” Van was pretty sure he’d said the wrong thing; those lapidary doors had slammed shut. “You can do that?”

  “And I don’t like waiting for permission. I think I’ll go ahead and do the river, actually. I can do it from here, and it’ll make for interesting negotiations tomorrow.”

  Interesting would be one word for it. “Do you need…anything? More tea?”

  “I can make tea if I want it.”

  A hush landed, for a few implacable minutes. Van tried not to fidget. Himself, in the magician’s bed. Himself well-fucked and evidently not needed for anything else. Lorre hadn’t brought back his clothes.

  The fire, in its gleaming bowl, crackled and popped. The bed was more luxurious than any in Van’s parents’ inn. He stuck his toes under a fold of brocade. “I think I remember you were born in Valpres. From that story.” And then he remembered what else happened in that story, and very nearly buried himself in the luxurious bed to scream a bit.

  “You think you remember that.” Lorre tapped the river, on the map. “And what does that story tell you about me?”

  He couldn’t say that. He couldn’t.

  “Go on. What does the world think, about me?”

  The world. The world was upside-down and inside-out. Van didn’t know how to draw his own map for this.

  He was sitting naked in Lorre’s bed. A simple bowman, not even an officer, only a twenty-eight-year-old volunteer from a fishing village. While the magician, wearing indigo ribbons and silk, leaned over a fanciful marble table and considered a map of kingdoms and boundaries. With war, or an avoidance of war, at stake. The night couldn’t get stranger.

  On that thought, he gathered up all his courage. Lorre had asked, and it’d been practically a dare. “They say you killed your own father. Or wanted him dead, at least.”

  “Is that what they’re saying about us?” Lorre drew a line across the map with a fingertip; ink followed, formed a new experimental boundary.

  Van, unsure of the correct reply, stayed silent.

  A spike of sapphire glanced his way. “Do you believe it? Also, how much does the average person in Averene care about these canyons?”

  “Where? Oh. I don’t think anyone lives there. Is it good for farmland?”

  “No, but it’s pretty. Colorful. Friendly, if you know how to speak sandstone. That river’s a problem, of course. It’s changed course since this map was made. So I’ll have to drop in and say hello.”

  “Are you…redrawing the map of the Middle Lands?”

  “Yes. Literally. You’ll see it tomorrow. You didn’t answer me.”

  “Ah. No, I…don’t think you did?” It came out more a question than he’d meant it to be.

  Lorre laughed. “But you don’t know.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “I just think…you wouldn’t. It’d be like—how could someone even think—I mean, your own father.”

  Lorre laughed again, not out of amusement. The ink flattened into a blotch under his fingertip, a crushed star, a stain over parchment. “You have such faith in people. Touching.”

  “You don’t?”

  “As it happens, I didn’t kill him. I was a porpoise at the time. I had no idea he was even ill. His heart, was what I heard when I surfaced. I hadn’t known he had one.” Lorre blinked at the map, lifted his finger, blew a kiss at ink-stains. The ink, including the smudge on his skin, scampered back to its previous position. “Don’t bother contradicting anyone. I don’t mind the story.”

  Van caught himself about to ask, you don’t? a second time, and instead tried, “Why would you want people to think—”

  “He wasn’t very likeable,” Lorre said, “and neither am I. And stories are power. You can either leave or go to sleep; I’ll be working on the new river for a while.”

  “You disappeared my clothes.”

  “Oh. Do you want them?”

  “Yes!”

  “Oh. One second.” Lorre got a tiny line of concentration between portrait-frame eyebrows. “I’m not sure where I sent them. All right, here you are.” The heap of fabric—including the oil-vial, and Van’s sheathed knife—hit him in the chest.

  “I’m sorry,” Van tried, clinging to shirt and trousers. The night had spun into an abyss. An arrow gone wide of its target. Wild uncontrolled flight. He knew he’d done something wrong; he didn’t know how to fix it. “I didn’t mean—I’ll stay, if you want company—”

  “I told you, I don’t mind either way. But be quiet.”

  He almost got up and left. Sitting there with the bundle of clothing, loneliness a vicious spike through his chest even though Lorre remained present, awareness that he’d been dismissed—

  If he went back now, he’d wake up Milo. And Milo would fuss over him, and worry about him, and hold him, if he asked for that.

  He wanted that, abruptly; he wanted that so badly he thought it must be visible beneath his skin. He wanted to see those blue eyes, lighter and kinder than Lorre’s. He wanted Milo to put a hand on his arm again, so he could feel warmth, not magical, purely human.

  Milo would fuss over him, and care for him.

  Because they were friends. Because Milo cared about him, as a friend. Had said so, those exact words. While helping Van get ready to be a magician’s plaything for the night.

  He put down the shirt and trousers. He curled up into the extravagant bed. It was richly comfortable, a miracle of bed, a perfection of bed. His body hurt; his heart hurt, confused.

  He wasn’t sure he could sleep. He wanted to, and needed to, for the morning; but his head buzzed with emotions. He shut his eyes, though, and after a while knew that he was drifting, in and out.

  Eventually, after some time, he heard an almost inaudible sigh. Felt a shift in the air, a presence.

  Lorre said nothing, only tugged a thick blanket more closely up over him, and tucked him in, and patted his shoulder, once. Then moved away.

  It was too big and too complicated and Van couldn’t think about it. The blanket was heavy, and the bed was sympathetic. He let that be all that mattered, for now, and slid into dreamless sleep.

  Chapter 4

  Van woke up snug and cozy and alone. The pillows and blankets had become a fortress of brocade and velvet and fine linen. They hugged him as if making up for the Sorcerer’s absence.

  He extracted an arm. Nudged a pillow away from his face. Stretched, cautiously. The soreness had gone. Some very specific spots reminded him of how well-used they’d been, but not in a bad way.

  He’d slept later than usual. He could tell as much from the light, the gilded dust-flecks, the temperature. No one had woken him. The air held murmurs of strawberry-lemongrass tea.

  Maybe Lorre wanted him to stay. Maybe no one had come to get him because they assumed he was Lorre’s, now. Nobody wanted to upset a magician who could redirect rivers.

  He would’ve liked to wake up with Lorre. Even if this hadn’t meant a promise or a permanence, even if it’d only been a release, a diversion.

  He’d given himself to Lorre because he’d chosen to. He didn’t regret it.

  But he was still naked, and his backside felt tender, and that was only the third time he’d ever been in a man’s bed.

  He wished, for an instant, that he could’ve woken with someone there to hold him. That someone—Lorre—would have cared.

  Of course that was ridiculous. Lorre had better things to do. Like stopping a war. An evening’s plaything was nothing, next to that.

  He wondered suddenly whether Lorre even knew his name. He didn’t think he’d said it. Lorre hadn’t ever asked.

  Sitting up against a heap of the magician’s pillows, Van put both hands over his face and pushed back unruly emotion, until he was sure he wasn’t going to cry. And then he got up, because he was a bowman in Her Majesty’s army, and he had joined up because their home needed protecting, and he was here to do what he could.

  His clothes were on the floor where he’d left them. Van pulled them on, gingerly, and ran a hand through his hair. The colors of Lorre’s world—striped tent, flamboyant rainbowed bed-linens, that pink marble—wreathed him in unsettling decadence. The morning was quiet as a theatre the moment before a curtain, nothing visible, no actors on the stage.