Page 64 of Cinder
“I took his circlet—the same one that was feathered to frame your Plumed Menace—and absconded to the forest, alone.” He breathed in, then out, and the shadows seemed to dance menacingly across his face. “When our soldiers found me, I told them I’d been looking for Alwin—my parents even believed me, though they forbade me from leaving the castle alone again. But I… I think I was looking to die with him.”
That was such love, such terrible excruciating love, that it made Cin feel hollow, setting a yearning in his soul for something so ruthless as to be deadly. It seemed wrong to want such a thing, but Cin could find no sin in it. Maybethatwas how God smiled: with an existential merging of joy and tragedy.
“I lost myself in that forest,” Lorenz continued. “I recall only snatches, sobbing and breaking, praying to God and the trees and the fairy creatures that the grief be taken away.” He fingered the cage around his heart, his eyes closing as he traced along the top band where its ragged edge was revealed. “Finally, I stopped praying, and I demanded,” he said, flatly. “It was that or death.”
“You conducted dark magic?” Cin whispered.
“I don’t know for certain, but that was how it felt. In the center of a fairy circle, I tore my brother’s circlet apart with my bare hands, ripping long strips of metal like they were the bark of a tree, and plunged them into my chest. I cannot imagine there was any light magic in a feat like that.”
Cin edged closer, removing his hand from Lorenz’s in order to rub his back, their shoulders pressed together. “If you were the one who placed the bonds, could you not take them away again?”
“It was all a haze. I’ve tried to pull against them, to wish them away, even. After I left you the night we killed Brando Von Achenbach, I took a pair of tools to them for leverage. It’s only drawn blood.” Lorenz shook his head. “To remove them myself now, I think would kill me.”
To remove themhimself, he said, and Cin believed him.
But perhaps, someone else?
A flicker of hope sparkled in Cin’s chest, so small that he feared accepting it. Lorenz could not return to that place of grief that had allowed him to force the magic to his will the first time, but Cin had magic of his own, even if it was of a far different sort.
“What if someone else might…” Cin stumbled over the suggestion, not sure how they’d go about it, but certain there had to be something worth trying—anything for Lorenz. “I’ve found better, lighter magics, in my life, in the woods even…”
“You did go after all, didn’t you?” Lorenz seemed to really look at Cin then, perhaps for the first time since they’d absconded from the ball. A quirk came into his lips, cautious but optimistic. “You seem different.”
That brought a smile to Cin’s face, sad though it was in the midst of Lorenz’s pain. “My chest is not quite so lumpy now.”
Lorenz’s nose wrinkled. “No—well, yes—but in other ways,” he said, like he was still working it out as he spoke. “You’re less tense. You don’t flinch or brace. Your smile is softer. You’re… no longer in pain?”
Cin nodded, not sure he could put to words everything that meant to him. It was all that the prince had said and so, so much more. But just as he didn’t know how to share the full bliss of his transformation, neither could he grant that joy to Lorenz, and the knowledge hurt just as much as his pain had. He touchedgently along the edge of his prince’s metal binding. “If I could give this magic to you…”
Lorenz’s expression melted from awe to misery. His throat bobbed harshly, bitterness in his voice. “I had that chance, and look what I did with it.”
Cin tucked his hand over his prince’s. “Don’t hold it against yourself, Ren. You did nothing wrong.”
Lorenz grimaced. “But you did everything right!”
“I was lucky,” Cin insisted, gentle as he could manage. “My flock guided me to the Frog Prince, who understood my plight and granted me a trade far kinder than I could have dreamed. It was nothing I earned, and nothing I could possibly repeat.”
Slowly, Lorenz seemed to force himself to nod. Still, he looked worried. “Whatdidyou give up, my dove?”
“Nothing,” Cin reassured him. “I promised to continue caring, was all.” Specifically for the prince, but if he revealed that, Lorenz would want to know why—why was he so important, why would this monster in the woods care whetherhewas loved? And the answer that had been creeping around Cin’s heart was still too wild and whimsical to dare speak aloud. “It was a boon, really. He gave me permission to—to love the people I love.”
Lorenz wrapped his arm around Cin’s, squeezing him gently. “It is everything you deserve.”
“But this is not what you deserve.” Cin leaned against him, feeling every shudder and breath shared flesh to flesh. “What can I do to help you?”
“Find me that Frog Prince?” Lorenz gave a sad laugh, so broken that it made Cin’s heart ache.
Perhaps it might be that simple, Cin suspected, in ways Lorenz could not even fathom, but if it were, then this prince of the swamp was not simple in the slightest…
Cin tucked the thought away. There would be time for it in the morning, when the sun lit the land and monsters and magic felt a little less dangerous. Right now, he had a different prince to focus on.
Lorenz turned his face toward Cin’s, pressing his mouth to the top of Cin’s forehead. “When I’m with you, I can feel something awakening inside me, and its grown so strong that often it bleeds through the bonds. When we talk, when we touch, this curse begins to shatter for a moment. It’s painful, but it’s wonderful too.” He breathed out a shaky, hollow breath. “Then the moment you’re gone, I’m empty again. It’s why I can’t devote my life to you, you understand? Who would I be to pull you into a future where the one person who is meant to be there for you, profoundly and unconditionally, forgets he cares for you the moment you leave his sight?”
“I would still love you,” Cin whispered, almost pleading.
But it was a naive hope, he understood. Lorenz was doing for him what he had done for Dorthe just weeks earlier: stepped aside, knowing he couldn’t give her the fullness of what she deserved. He might not have agreed with Lorenz that it was what he needed, but he doubted that would reassure his prince nearly enough to convince him to be selfish in this—nothisprince: his good, kind, just prince, already more loving and lovely as a man devoid of the emotion than anyone who possessed it. Lorenz would let Cin go and think it mercy.
Unless Cin could end the need for that mercy in the first place.
