we talk in private? There’s… stuff I was thinking about.”
I followed him toward the middle of the plane. With a wave of his hand, magical barriers sprung up, giving us privacy.
Acubens turned to me with a sigh. “I really am kind of a brat, huh.”
I answered honestly. “Yes.”
To my surprise, Acubens smiled painedly. “When the real Cly showed up, I thought it was great at first. ‘You’ apologized for everything. ‘You’ hung onto my every word. It was everything I’d wanted, once. I enjoyed it for about two minutes, and then I wanted to claw my own skin off, because I couldn’t escape how wrong it all was.”
He sighed. “For so long, I’ve wanted to be taken seriously. You don’t get that around Arcturus. Literally no one currently alive is on his level, and it’s even weirder for me. He’s my brother, but I swear he thinks he’s my dad.”
“Believe me, I’ve noticed,” I muttered.
Acubens gave a laugh. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I owe him… everything, honestly. You haven’t met our actual parents and you don’t really want to. But he, and everyone who wants to stay on his good side, will be treating me like his helpless little baby brother when I’m fifty.”
“It helped, to make people scared of me like they’re scared of Arcturus. It felt so good to be seen, not as someone who needed to be protected, but someone whom you needed protection from. Someone who did things. Someone who could stroll over and fuck you up.”
“You sound like you miss it,” I said.
He grimaced. “I can’t enjoy it in the same way anymore, not after you came along. You made me realize that being taken seriously meant more than that. I’d thought I hated losing face, or being made fun of, but I liked it from you. Because you’d make jokes, but you’d praise me sincerely when I did something well, and more importantly you’d smack the hell out of me if I deserved it. It meant something, to be taken seriously in the sense of, I did something shitty, and you’re not going to give me a pass for that. It put everything else in context. I’m not some helpless little boy; I don’t need people to hold back around me, to shelter me from consequences.”
He gave a long sigh. “So, I guess I want to say, thank you for that. And I don’t want you to hold back in the future.”
“I’ll slap you anytime you want,” I said wryly. Then, more seriously, I said, “Thanks for today. Standing up for me. It’s… not something I’ve gotten from others often.”
“Least I could do.” Acubens looked at me with sudden fierceness. “I don’t want you to belong to anyone.”
“I don’t plan to,” I told him.
#
When we returned to the front, Arcturus had taken the opportunity to engage Darshan in conversation. “The work you did for the duel was impressive,” he acknowledged. “There would be opportunities for you in my service.”
“I’m honored, but I’m not currently looking for employment,” said Darshan politely. His dark skin didn’t quite hide his faint blush, however. His crush must be deeply inconvenient given his principles.
I shot him a sympathetic look even as Acubens groaned. “Stop trying to recruit people!” he complained.
“I merely recognize ability where I see it,” said Arcturus. “You should sleep before we arrive, in any case.”
“It’s barely nine,” said Acubens.
“The meeting is at dawn,” said Arcturus. “And we will have on-site preparations to perform.”
“I’ll go lie down,” said Darshan, clearly eager to escape further awkward conversations. With an exasperated sigh, Acubens followed.
That left me and Arcturus, in a space hewn smaller, more intimate, by the privacy partitions flickering to life for sleeping. The lights dimmed, and what room wasn’t filled by Arcturus’s mass and presence was claimed by his deepening shadows. Light and dark played across his statue-like face.
“And you?” he asked, leaning back just enough to give me breathing room. “I expect you to be alert and ready tomorrow morning.”
“I know,” I said. I’d been through the wringer today, physically and emotionally. Exhaustion loomed over me like a boulder on a cliff’s edge, ready to come crashing down at any moment.
But there was one last task left. Something I half-dreaded but knew I had to do anyway. “I’ll sleep later. First, I want to see the prisoners.”
Chapter 27
I made my way down the silent plane, down the double row of lights set into the floor. At the magical barriers in the back, I held