"It was not my lips you kissed but my soul."—Judy Garland
Exist in Silence
"I just tipped back a hogshead's worth of wine," announced a blotched-faced and bleary-eyed Sir Myles, belching and pounding his bulging beer belly enthusiastically for the benefit of his fellow diners, who were studying him with wary distaste, simultaneously contemptuous of his inebriated state and worried that he would vomit all over their fine brocades and silks.
Standing behind him bearing a pitcher of wine and a heart beating with a peculiar blend of pity and revulsion, Alex, who had been assigned to wait on Sir Myles since he had arrived at the palace as a page, suggested in a tone he hoped was loud enough for Sir Myles to hear but soft enough for none of the nearby nobles to overhear his words with one-hundred percent precision, "Perhaps you've had enough to drink now, sir. Maybe it would be best if you retire for the evening."
"Better try to sleep this off," Myles agreed, all affability as he patted his stomach, which Alex regarded as nothing more than a wine cellar at this rate. "There'll be more wine for me tomorrow."
With that, Myles attempted to rise and nearly performed a faceplant a Player would have been proud of into the platter of marzipan he was sharing with his less intoxicated neighbors. His cheeks becoming a deeper puce with what Alex hoped was a shame that would finally sober his drunken rascal of a history teacher, Myles asked, slurring several syllables, "Would you mind es-es-escorting me back to my ch-cha-chambers, Alex?"
Keeping his face a blank slate rather than writing on it how pathetic it was to see a supposedly intelligent knight get drunk out of his wits every night, Alex bowed. "Of course, sir. Consider it done."
He grasped Sir Myles' elbow and helped him to his feet, wincing as the stench of alcohol flooded his nostrils so completely that he could practically taste it. His stomach knotting as he tried not to imagine the perpetually worsening condition of Sir Myles' constantly besieged liver, Alex maintained a firm grip on Sir Myles' arm as he guided the knight back to his quarters through the palace's cold and crowded corridors.
When they reached Sir Myles' rooms, Alex helped the knight's fumbling fingers the silver key in his pocket and then turned the key in the lock, because he knew that Sir Myles' fingers were too far beyond his brain's control to manage such a simple yet complex task.
"Put those on my table, would you?" asked Sir Myles, as he stumbled out of Alex's clasp into his chambers.
"Yes, sir," Alex responded, stepping into Sir Myles' quarters and wanting to leave within a second of doing so, since being alone with a drunk teacher made his skin crawl as if a thousand ants were exploring it.
He had just finished putting the key down on a maple table and was pivoting to make his exit when he felt hands creeping across his face like spiders. His first overwhelming instinct was to slap them away-to beat them out like fire-but he wasn't allowed to hit his teachers unless it was part of some training exercise.
Swallowing to bring moisture to a throat that had suddenly gone as dry as the desert inhabited by the Bazhir, Alex choked out, feeling as if he were being strangled by a rope of stroking fingers, "What are you doing, sir?"
"You're such a cat." Sir Myles' fingers were coiled in Alex's hair and tangled behind his ears now, while his borderline incoherent answer suggested that he couldn't hear Alex, who might have been no more than an animal to be petted in the midst of a stupor brought on by an excess of wine. "So secretive and dark."
Fires blazed in Alex's swarthy cheeks and in the shadows lurking behind his ears. He was aware that his midnight skin made him an animal, because it marked him as the bastard of a noble woman who had gone to bed with a soot-skinned Carthaki ambassador too many times and a son who had only been accepted by a cuckold because the cuckold in question was too impotent to produce heirs of his own. When your very birth was a shame, Alex often thought, you had a lot of secrets to keep.
"Don't worry." Sir Myles' hands yanked on Alex's chin, and the next second his lips were brushing against Alex's. Alex wanted to scream as he tasted the wine in his mouth and felt the bristles on Myles' chin scrape against his smooth skin. "I love cats."
Feeling dirtier and more desperate than he did when his father decided to thrash him for being a black bastard, Alex spun out of Sir Myles' grip just as the knight, snoring heavily, collapsed onto his bed.
Every muscle in his body trembling like pudding, Alex wobbled out of the room, wondering if what had just been done to him was some dreadful sleepwalking, since he thought Gary—probably being serious and not sarcastic, though it was always a challenge to tell—had told him once that sleepwalkers could eat and drink. Reasoning that unasked for kisses were like unwanted beating in that honor demanded that you suffer them in silence, Alex returned to his room and resolved to keep his mouth shit about Sir Myles' assault on his lips.
Falling into his own bed, Alex massaged lips that felt bruised from the knight's bristles. As tears stung his eyes with salt, Alex discovered that he couldn't close them because he kept imagining a dark form-in the shape of Sir Myles—pouncing out of the shadows to kiss him again and again the moment he lowered his guard and shut his eyes to sleep. Remaining awake until the bell tolled his signal to arise, he had a long time to reflect on the bitter injustice that allowed Sir Myles to sleep off his wine and prevented Alex from sleeping off his attack.
This resentment came storming out of him in a lightning bolt in history class that morning when Sir Myles started casting aspersions on the Code of Chivalry, as was his penchant, as if it was somehow harder to live a life of debauchery than honor.
"You just don't like the Code of Chivalry because it holds knights to a higher standard than you can attain," Alex burst out in a pause during Sir Myles' customary rant about the rules that governed all their lives like the rising and setting of the sun controlled days and nights.
"A higher standard than anyone can attain, Alex," corrected Sir Myles, massaging his temples at his desk in a way that made it clear he was still impacted by last evening's wine indulgence.
"Just because you can't abide by the rules set out in the Code of Chivalry, that's no reason to paint us all with the same black brush," argued Alex, as pages in the rows in front whirled around to stare at him as though he were a dragon flown down from the Immortal Realms, and Gary nudged him in the ribs in a silent but fierce command to snap his over-sized mouth shut before it landed him up to his ears in excrement. "Claiming that none of us can follow the Code of Chivalry perfectly is only an excuse so that you don't even have to try to do the right thing, and so you don't feel guilty about the consequences of your actions, since honor, according to you, isn't real anyway."
"You're welcome to debate with me, Alexander." Sir Myles's forehead furrowed. "However, you will desist with the attacks on my character at once."
"You're a drunkard," hissed Alex, his words striking with all the venom of a cobra's fangs piercing into the delicate flesh of a baby's heel. "I don't need to attack your character. You do enough of that yourself every night in the banquet hall. You're an embarrassment to any notion of nobility, and I've no idea why Duke Gareth puts up with your endless drunkenness."
"I've had enough of this insolence." Sir Myles scribbled a hasty note on a piece of parchment and then marched down the aisle between the rows of pages to thrust it into Alex's hand. "I won't have you disrupting my lesson further with your impertinence. Take this letter to His Grace, and he will deal with your insubordination."
Not willing to give Sir Myles the satisfaction of an assent that would feel too much like a surrender, Alex strode out of the classroom with the parchment clenched between his fest and his nose tilted in the air haughtily. His pride still warring with his shame, he knocked on the door to Duke Gareth's study and entered when he was ordered to do so.
"Yes?" Duke Gareth cracked a nut from a bowl on his desk and popped it between his teeth as he considered Alex with brown eyes that, as always, were disconcertingly similar to Gary's.
"I have a letter for you from Sir Myles, Your Grace," answered Alex, placing the note on Duke Gareth's desk and thinking that he wouldn't bother to explain the mess his mouth had gotten him into, because there would be plenty of time for the training master to yell at him once he read the letter. Alex might as well cherish his few remaining seconds of relative peace.
"Humph." Duke Gareth scowled at the note as he finished reading it and folded it once again. "Sir Myles claims you were extremely disrespectful to him, telling him in front of the whole class that he is a drunkard with no sense of honor."
"I spoke only the truth, Your Grace." Alex's chin lifted. "His legendary tirades against the Code of Chivalry are a daily occurrence, as is his drinking more than his weight in wine."
"He's your teacher, and you'll treat him with every courtesy regardless of what you think of his drinking habits," commanded Duke Garethy, his eyes slicing into Alex's face like the switches his father had wielded to punish him for a million envisioned or actual offenses.
"I will, Your Grace." Alex inclined his head. "Only if I'm assigned to wait on someone else at table, of course."
"Are you trying to make demands of me, boy?" Duke Gareth's dangerously low voice, which was offset by him rising abruptly out of his chair, made it plain that attempting to do such a thing was a bleak and imprudent prospect.
"No, Your Grace." Feeling a fear that he tried to prevent from reaching his face swelling like a tidal wave in his chest, Alex shook his head and took a step back to put extra distance between himself and an irate King's Champion. "Just making an appeal that I hope you, being the personification of mercy, will grant."
"Don't beg, don't flatter, and, by all the gods, don't flinch from me like a whipped dog." His lips pursed, Duke Gareth scrutinized Alex in a way that made him ponder with a churning stomach how much Gary had confided with the duke about his suspicions regarding the scars marring Alex's back. "I'm a man, not a monster, and so is Sir Myles."
"I don't trust him." Alex forced his gaze to remain level when really he wanted nothing more than to sink into the shadows of his shame at what he had allowed Myles to do to him forever.
"He would never hurt a student," Duke Gareth said, and Alex took a grim amusement in the fact that there were secrets even Duke Gareth didn't know or couldn't bring himself to acknowledge.
"I don't trust him," repeated Alex tightly, thinking that was easier than admitting that Sir Myles already had hurt him.
"You trust me, though." Duke Gareth arched an eyebrow. "That is, at least enough to share with me the fact that you don't trust him."
"I trust you enough to share with you information you would have gleaned just by piecing together everything I've told you and that your son has told you, Your Grace." Alex nodded, noting inwardly that he wasn't stupid enough to believe that any secret he shared with Gary wouldn't find its way back to Duke Gareth whether Gary intended to spill the beans or not, since the training master was a shrewd man who needed only the tiniest hint to solve a massive mystery. As something of an enigma himself, Alex both respected and feared him for that brilliance.
"Well said, Alexander." Duke Gareth offered a slight smile that could not have been much more of a contrast to his son's broad beam if he had tried. "I will find you a new noble to serve at table, and you will treat Sir Myles with the respect befitting a knight of this realm. As a punishment for your impertinence, you will receive an extra hour of mathematics and an extra hour of etiquette."
"Understood, Your Grace." Alex bowed, reflecting that the mathematics wouldn't be so bad and might even be fun, but the etiquette—reviewing various addresses for foreign nobility or something equally dull—would probably reduce him to ruminating on the benefits of living as a hermit in a forest.
"You may go." Duke Gareth's hand jerked in a dismissive gesture, and, as Alex, with one final bow, turned toward the door to comply, the training master added in a voice just soft enough for Alex to pretend he didn't hear it, "If there's anything you need to tell me, I'm here."
That was an offer that made Alex's heart feel warm and free as a summer's day, but it was one he already knew he would never accept, because once he started sharing his secrets, everything from his bastard birth to his kiss from Sir Myles would come spilling out of him, and his whole life would be ruined. After all, the shame of his existence could only be sustained by silence.