"It's fine, Thom," Alanna said, "We're almost to the top."
Alanna looked up into the branches of the tallest tree in Trebond, the one barely visible outside of her bedroom window, the one her father had expressly forbidden her from climbing ever ever ever again. She looked up, and Thom looked down.
"We're too high up," Thom said, whining.
"No, we're not," Alanna informed him. "We're fine." She reached for the next branch, testing its sturdiness. She pulled herself up, branch by branch, until she was satisfied. She could see all the way back to the castle this high up. She put one leg on each side of a thick branch and leaned forward.
"Thom?" She looked down. He was perched ten feet below, right where she had left him. "Thom, come on."
"Father will be angry," he said. "You want him to be angry, don't you?"
Alanna said nothing to that, only looked out on the open field in front of them. "I don't care if he is, or if he isn't," she said, "but either way, he can't say I can't climb trees anymore."
"I don't want Father to be angry, and I don't like heights, Alanna."
"Why don't you?" she asked.
"Because I don't want to fall," Thom said.
"If you fall, I'll catch you," she said, "I promise."
He was silent a long time, swinging his legs on either side of the branch he sat on. "You can't catch me, not now. You're too high up there."
Thom turned over in bed and faced the open window. Once again he could not sleep. As he did every sleepless night, when he feared his sanity was fraying, he chose a distant memory and focused on it completely. Climbing trees with Alanna twelve years ago. He had repeated the scene over and over in his mind.
A beam of soft moonlight fell through the open curtains. He lifted his hand up, as though he could touch the silver light. Its blurry silhouette was small and almost transparent. He turned his arm this way and that, watching the play of light and shadows, and wondered for a moment if he would dissolve into the night air right before his exhausted eyes.
The bedroom door opened and closed, ending the precious time he had alone. Thom didn't take his eyes off of his hand as Roger disrobed, his broad shoulders looming tall and solid, as if he could soak all up the light in the room.
"I wanted to never be ordinary," Thom said, as Roger climbed onto the bed beside him. "I was so worried about… dying an ordinary man when I was a child."
"After what you've done for me, no one could call you ordinary," Roger said. He took Thom's wrist and pulled him down. His hands took Thom's narrow hips in a nearly bruising grasp.
Thom wondered, and not for the first time, what it would be like to be with someone gentle. The few men he'd know had all been interested in possessing him, Roger most of all.
"I'm tired," Thom said.
"Oh, you don't have to do anything," Roger said. "You must know that." His tone was almost scolding. Roger stretched above Thom, and his hands left a path of bruises on Thom's skin as he took his pleasure. Thom did not mind. Perhaps he should have, but he was elsewhere, wondering that when he drifted apart into a thousand pieces, if it would be anyone's fault but his own.