in earnest before we’d ever left the palace. How was I to explain that there were some things that were more important than duty to me, when all I’d known my entire life was simply that? It was everything that I’d been trained for, so that in the end I was shaped as keenly as a sword built for its wielder. Like a sword, I had no other purpose in life save what my wielder gave me. To act alone was unthinkable, and yet I had done it.
“You should have controlled yourself better,” Mamoru told me, his voice slippery and filled with rebuke.
Before I could apologize, or try to put into rational speech the dilemma turning as a tempest within my head, his arms came up around my neck. It told me better than any words that he’d forgiven me.
“I know,” I said, speaking to his former scolding. “I can offer no excuse for my actions. They were inexcusable.”
“Still,” he murmured, snuffling around the word for a moment. “I suppose there is room for a certain amount of irrationality within… friendship.”
“If you are kind enough to allow it,” I acknowledged, feeling myself immeasurably lucky once again for my lord’s particular vein of kindness.
He sighed so deeply that I felt it in my bones. It was a sigh of great relief, from a man who had long been bearing a weight far too heavy for him. Perhaps my lord, too, had been in need of unburdening himself.
“Do you know, Kouje, I feel as though I’ve needed to get that out for ages.”
“We’d best be on the move,” I told him, running my hands sensibly down his back, in a movement meant to induce calm and clear-headedness. “Before the rain starts.”
My lord blinked, and cast his eyes upward to the leafy canopy hiding the clouds that had formed above our heads. To my surprise, he smiled.
“It’s been a dreadfully warm summer,” he said. His face was entirely changed when he was happy. It was all I could do not to swear then and there that happiness was all I would ever seek to bring him. “The land could do with a little rain. I believe it is dry this season. So I have overheard,” he added, and colored at his cheeks and ears.
“In that, you are correct,” I said, ignoring the rest and releasing Mamoru from my hold.
My lord was thinner than he looked, but there was a core of steel beneath all his delicacy that any man would have been proud of. Perhaps it was presumptuous of me to be proud of him, and yet I found that I was anyway, for I had played some part in his upbringing.
“Kouje,” Mamoru said, sounding almost hesitant.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Oh, well it’s nothing really. It’s only… your hair.”
“Ah,” I said, understanding at once the need for such levity. “Well, if you would be so good as to fix it for me, my friend, I would be forever in your debt.”
A smile touched my lord’s eyes at his new title, one more commonly acceptable outside the palace, and yet with a hint of the secret between us.
“You’ll have to sit,” he said, judging the distance between my height and his.
I did.
There was another rustling in the bush, some fox or badger rooting for its evening meal. Our stolen horse snorted impatiently, having finished his own rest and drunk his fill of water. If it was to be raining soon, then we would be better served to leave as quickly as we could. I felt cold dread in my stomach when I thought of what the border crossing might hold for us, but we would come to it sooner or later, and it was my firm belief that sooner was better than later.
That time, when I helped my lord back onto the horse, he smiled at me.
“It shouldn’t be long now until we are at the crossing,” he said. In his voice I could detect none of the worry I myself was feeling.
My lord was, as he’d ever been, determined to look on the future with hope. In that aspect, he was much braver than I, since it seemed far more realistic to plan for a situation that would neither be the best nor the worst possible outcome, but something closer to in between. It was far easier not to fix one’s hope to either. I didn’t understand how my lord could go on being optimistic without the disappointment of his losses eventually dragging