"I don't understand."
Jord could feel his heart racing. He tried to read Aimeric's expression through the dark but all he could see were shadows and outlines. This has to be a mistake. He had followed Aimeric from camp out of concern, not suspicion. The boy had not been sleeping well and sometimes he would go out for walks at night around the camp. Jord told himself it was simply the stress of the campaign getting to someone unaccustomed to warfare; he told himself Aimeric's divided loyalties were making him anxious. Now it was turning out that they had not been very divided at all.
"Which part?" Aimeric shoots back, one hand on the reigns of his horse, the other one on his sword hilt. They were almost halfway to Ravenel now. It had taken him that long to decide to force a confrontation.
A different man, a slyer one, would have followed Aimeric until he reached his destination without revealing himself, then ridden back to camp and made report of what he had seen. But Jord had finally lost his composure and had caught up to Aimeric and confronted him. Some part of him had expected Aimeric to lie, but he had only made a couple of vague attempts before telling Jord everything.
Some part of Jord was sorry he had asked.
"I don't understand," he said, again. "Why? Why did you join the Prince's Guard and pretend to love the Prince? Why are you going back now? Why—" Why are you with me? But that last question was not something Jord could bring himself to ask. He feared the answer too much.
Aimeric still had one hand on his sword hilt but something had slackened in the set of his shoulders. "But I told you. I was always intending to go back. I was spying, Jord. I only pretended to care about Laurent because it would make me less suspicious." He tilted his head to the side. "I did it for my family, for the South."
"And me?" Did you pretend to care about me as well? Jord felt terribly inadequate in that moment, unable to wrap his mind around everything that had happened. He was forced to rethink everything – every moment he had known Aimeric, every second they had spent together suddenly took on a completely different light.
"No." Cautiously, Aimeric drew his horse closer to Jord's so that they were close enough to engage swords. "No. You were never part of the plan. You…you just…happened."
"Just happened," Jord said.
Aimeric was peering at him through the dark. The quarter moon was slowly sinking toward the horizon. There were only a few hours left before dawn. "I'm sorry, Jord, this was never about you."
Jord's instincts told him that he ought to do something. Certainly, Aimeric wouldn't let him go back to camp now – it would ruin his plans if Jord told the Prince. "Come back with me." He could hear the uncertainty in his voice, the plea for everything to be normal again. "No one has to know. Come back with me – it's not too late." If he could just make Aimeric change his mind, if he could only reach out and touch him…
"No." There was a humorless mirth in Aimeric's voice. "I can't go back. I won't go against my family and I won't go against my country. I can't, Jord. As much as I want to be with you, I can't." He was still holding on to his sword, ready to draw at any moment.
Jord couldn't think. Every attempt he made to put the picture together into something that made sense to him only confused him more. Aimeric thought Laurent did not deserve to rule. Aimeric had been spying on them this entire time. Aimeric was going back to Ravenel to betray them.
This was never about you.
Being with Aimeric had somehow become the truest thing Jord had ever known and every fiber of his soul was screaming to not leave, to not go back.
The horses were growing restless.
"I know you have to go back to camp," Aimeric said, suddenly looking away, leaving himself oddly vulnerable to attack. "You have a duty to report what you have seen to the Prince."
"Will you try to stop me?"
"No. It doesn't matter now."
"Come back with me."
Aimeric's expression changed into something resembling a smile. "Why don't you come with me? I could give you a recommendation. You think you owe Laurent because he made you Captain? I'm sure my father—"
"That's not it!" Confusion and a terrible feeling of doom were making Jord queasy. "I have a duty to Laurent because he is the trueborn Prince. I swore an oath! Do I appreciate what he has done for me? Yes. But he wants the best for this country and ruling is his birthright. I see that you do not have confidence in him—"
"That's putting it lightly."
"—And I know you want to help your family, but it doesn't have to be like this." It doesn't have to be without me.
Jord couldn't imagine what Aimeric was thinking but he was obviously struggling with something. He finally took his hand off his sword and ran it through his hair. "I don't want to do this," Aimeric said, his voice small and quiet, so that Jord had to strain to hear even in the earie nighttime silence. "I don't want to leave you or put you in harm's way. These past few months—damn it, Jord. I never meant to fall for you but I have and—" He caught himself and made a face, the same Jord had seen him make before when he made a mistake during drills or while putting up the tent. "I hate this, I hate having to choose."
That feeling Jord could understand. He was feeling it himself, doubt filling up his lungs until it was hard to breath, an icy stone of distrust and hurt chilling the warmth that spread through his chest when he saw Aimeric make a familiar face or smile, even if bitterly. Over the last couple of weeks, he had begun to dream of what life after the campaign might be like; what peace would be like – when he and Aimeric could wake up next to each other in a bed instead of a bedroll inside a tent, when they could go riding on lazy afternoons and curl up by the fire during long winter nights with nothing on their minds other than how good the wine was and how sweet the kisses.
Perhaps, he was getting old. Obviously, Aimeric had not had such delusions.
But the dream had been so sweet that Jord was loath to give up on it. His parents had died early, he did not have siblings or even cousins he was close to. He made as good of a family as he could from his comrades in the Prince's guard—they kept him going on the day to day. In the long run, he made his duty his faith and his purpose, but Jord was not a cold enough man to be satisfied with that. It wasn't the same as having someone to come home to.
Jord jumped down from the saddle and took a step toward Aimeric. "Come here." Aimeric visibly hesitated. Jord realized that he was probably thinking, it's some kind of trap. "It's not a trap."
Slowly, Aimeric dismounted as well and approached, his body language screaming wariness. Jord reached out and took his hand, pulled him forward and looked down into his face. "I'm sorry," Aimeric said. "I swear to you, everything that has happened between us was honest."
"I know."
That took him by surprise. "You…how?"
Jord sighed and shook his head. "I choose to trust you. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I don't want to believe that these few months have been a lie. I was too happy."
"I was happy too." Aimeric ran a hand over his shoulder, fingering the rough fabric of his shirt, lost in his own thoughts. "What if we were to run away, Jord? Just…go somewhere where we could be together without other people getting in the way."
"Do you want that?" It was like he was in a dream, not quite aware of what he was saying or what the implications might be. Aimeric's words sank deep into him, ignited all his dreams and fantasies. He wanted this so badly and he could see that, despite the struggle, Aimeric wanted it too – to run away, to no longer be torn by his loyalty to people who didn't seem to care nearly as much about him.
"I do. More than anything. Everyone has always expected everything from me while believing I wouldn't amount to much – my father, my brothers, the—the Regent. You're the first person to just…care about me because I'm me." There was a hidden pain in Aimeric's voice. It made Jord want to ask questions, it made him wonder what Aimeric's position in his own family was like. It made him wonder what the Regent had promised Aimeric in return for his services.
It made him want to say yes, to take Aimeric far away from all of this. He's too young. They want too much from him. For a moment, he allowed himself to indulge in the fantasy. "Where would we go, though?"
Aimeric's shoulders tensed under his hands, as though he had not been expecting this response and was now on the verge of something very important. "To Vask. We could go to Vask."
"Vask?" Jord almost laughed. "Why Vask? They would tear us to shreds there."
Aimeric looked up and Jord was startled by the sudden change in his expression. At this distance, he could finally clearly make out the emotions flickering in Aimeric's eyes and there was a feverish, delighted gleam there. "No they wouldn't. If we go on the diplomatic roads we can avoid the mountain clans and Vask-proper is not truly that scary."
"How would you know?" Jord asked, unable to suppress a smile. Aimeric's moods had a way of transferring to him. "And even if that's true, what would we do once we got there?"
"I know because I was fostered with the Prince of Vask for a few years as a child. He missed home so he talked about it a lot. We haven't…been in touch for some time now, but I'm sure he will remember me. You could be a member of his household guard, I could…do something, too." Then, in a completely different voice: "We could live."
We could live. Jord was about to reply with something whimsical when the change in Aimeric's tone caught up to him. "You're…serious," he said.
Just above a whisper: "Yes."
"What about your family?"
Aimeric bit his lip, squaring his shoulders. "My father knows what he's doing. I…" He was visibly fighting with himself, desperate pushing down instincts and years of ideals and raising to say what he wanted to say. Jord had always thought Aimeric was terrible at hiding his emotions only to now realize he was very good at pretending. So to be privy to Aimeric's internal struggle at this moment was nearly overwhelming. "I'm willing to try if you are," he said at last, a dreadful note of finality lurking at the edges of his tone.
Jord thought. He thought about the life he had built here for himself. He thought about Laurent and the vows he swore. Perhaps the Prince needed him, but he wasn't indispensable and Laurent held no personal attachments, at least not to him. And Aimeric…
He thought of Aimeric. Thought of his daydreams about the life they could have. Tried to weigh the two against each other, imagine the future if he stayed and if he went. And found that making a decision was not impossible after all.
"Alright. Let's go to Vask."
They rode hard for Vask, stopping only to change horses and to catch a meal and a few hours of sleep. They stopped at off-road establishments and used false names. When they got to the mountains on the boarder to Vask, Aimeric was careful to stay on the diplomatic roads, the location of which he knew with only a few brief glances at a map. When they were stopped at the border, he spoke in rapid, if accented, Vaskian, announcing that they had diplomatic business with the Prince of Vask.
Vaskians, suspicious by nature, ordered a convoy to ride with them all the way to Skarva.
"It's lucky my father is known as a diplomat and that my eldest brother had come here before to treat with the Prince," Aimeric told Jord in a low voice once they had cleared the border and were on their way to the capital. "Otherwise, they would have likely had us bound or made us wait at the border while a courier was sent so Aiden could vouch for us."
"I didn't know you knew Vaskian," was all Jord said, looking around the swiftly changing, unfamiliar landscape.
"Most Southerners learn Akielon—and I do know some—but I was fostered at Beauvallee with Aiden so…I suppose it was natural for me to learn Vaskian instead."
"Why was a Vaskian Prince fostered in Vere?"
Aimeric gave him an amused look. Jord was becoming more and more used to how far removed he was from the politics of the nobility, though he had spent most of his adult life in the capital and in service to the Prince. "Vaskian Empresses often send their male relatives as ambassadors to other nations – they are well aware that men would serve them better in courts of patriarchal nations, regardless of ideologies at home – so Vaskian Princes will often be sent to neighboring countries to be fostered or live in the household of the current ambassador if the target-nation does not have a custom of fostering…"
"Do you think he'll remember you?"
Aimeric thought about this for a moment, then nodded. "I think so. We were rather close."
Skarva opened up before them in a flurry of vibrant color. The slanted terem and trullo roofs, distinctive in Vaskian architecture, were a sea of multicolored tiling and flags. Where Veretian ornamentation was mostly in carving and glasswork, Vaskian flamboyance was about color, richness of fabrics and the intricacy of painted-on designs.
Jord found himself looking around in wonder while Aimeric kept his gaze completely neutral. They made their way past the bazar and the cluster of embassies in the city center. Pedestrians gazed with some interest at them: two mounted men with a small convoy headed straight for the palace. Instead of being brought to the main entrance, they were showed to a small but beautifully decorated courtyard in the left wing. "Vask has a thing about separating the genders," Aimeric explained. "The Princes have a wing to themselves. The Empress' harem have several apartments in a pavilion on the other side of the palace – it's closer to the Empress' chambers there."
Jord wasn't sure what to expect of Prince Aiden. A part of him expected to see a large, thick-boned, muscled fellow, the sort of male physic prized most by the Vaskians. The Prince, however, was nothing like that stereotype. From the top of the stairs leading down from the Prince's suit to the reception hall came a slender young man around Aimeric's age. He was a striking strawberry blonde with dark grey eyes, a girl's waist and of average height. He smiled a tentative, charming smile at his visitors and gestured in a fluid, delicate motion for his two guards – who fit Jord's ideas of Vaskian men far better than the Prince himself – to remain at the bottom of the stairs as he came forward. In Vere, he would have been called beautiful. Here, his only benefit was likely his royal blood and associated wealth.
Aimeric said, "Do you remember me, Aiden?"
For a moment, Aiden merely looked at them, then recognition lit up his expression. "Aimeric? For heaven's sake! Are you here on a diplomatique? Why did you not send word ahead of time?" Jord watched as they embraced like old friends, as though years of distance did not lay between them. Aiden stepped back but only to arm's length, keeping both hands on Aimeric's shoulders. "It's been forever, why did you stop writing?"
"I'm not here as an envoy," Aimeric started, a little uncertainly. "I didn't send word because the decision to come here was…spontaneous."
"Spontaneous," Aiden said.
Aimeric turned and gestured for Jord to come closer. "This is Jord. We're…he is my—" Aimeric flushed. "Amoureux."
"Oh!" Aiden's expression was a mixture and mild surprise and amiability as he turned to Jord.
Jord bowed, feeling self-conscious and unsure of the protocol. "Your Highness."
Aimeric said, taking Aiden's hand, "I need your help."