Page 67 of A Crown of Lies

Ieduin hesitated halfway through tugging off his clothes and frowned. “I do?”

Rowan sighed and dragged the cloth off his face. Once again, he had slight bruising under his eyes and looked like he hadn’t slept in days. “Some people stomp about, shaking the ground when they walk, announcing they’re coming from half a mile away. Other people slap their feet against the ground, flat-footed. Loud. You are quiet. Careful. You don’t sound like a stampede.” He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples, wincing.

Ieduin discarded the last of his clothes and slid into the water, noting how Rowan flinched at every sound. “If you’d sleep, you wouldn’t have headaches like that, you know.”

“If this were just a run-of-the-mill headache, I might’ve been able to sleep. But when I get these…” He sighed and lowered his hands back into the water. “I’d have stayed in bed if I didn’t have a kingdom to run. And if the blankets didn’t feel like fucking sandpaper.”

“Sensitive to light?” Ieduin asked. “Dizzy? Can’t focus on small print? Feel like there’s an icepick behind your eyes?”

Rowan nodded and sighed. “Sometimes the bath helps, but today…”

Ieduin stepped closer. The bath was big enough that ten people could’ve sat in it and there would still be room, so it took quite a few steps to cross it so he could be with Rowan. He gestured to Rowan’s head. “Mind if I try something that might help?”

He closed his eyes and nodded. “I’ll try anything.”

“Turn around.”

Slowly, Ieduin lifted his hands out of the water and massaged Rowan’s face firmly from behind, resting on either side of his nose. He pressed his thumbs to the space beneath Rowan’s eyes, kneading gently before working all the way around to his temples and back again. The king’s jaw was clenched, but he released the tension when Ieduin massaged near his ear. He let out a loud groan of relief when Ieduin started in on his shoulders. The muscles there were tight too and took a good deal of pressure to get them to relax.

“Divine, where did you learn that? That feels amazing.” Rowan shifted, folding his arms on the side of the bath, and letting his head rest on his arms.

Ieduin chuckled. “Believe it or not, it’s not all erotic massages and fucking in a whorehouse. My job wasn’t just to suck men off. They could get that anywhere. I made my name famous by giving them what they didn’t know they needed. In human society, that’s often touch. Men here don’t touch one another. You treat intimate touches as if they’re inherently sexual and not an essential part of being alive, and then you wonder why you’re all angry, depressed, and miserable.”

“I imagine that took some getting used to when you came to the human lands,” Rowan said sleepily.

Ieduin nodded. “Even just outside of the Yeutlands. Not all elves are the same.”

He took his fingers lower, working out some tension in Rowan’s mid-back. Gods, for a king, he had a hell of a body. Aesthetic beauty was usually more Katyr’s thing than his, but Rowan had a rugged sort of attractiveness. Something about the way he was put together just screamed masculine power and getting to touch that… It was more a treat than he wanted to admit.

Rowan frowned and turned. “I didn’t mean to infer that.”

Ieduin shrugged. “Most humans just assume we’re all one homogeneous group, but there are all these little sub-cultures and traditions. The Runecleavers have their ways, their gods, their traditions like all the clans, for example. But the clans are all more like each other than my people are to theirs.”

“Hmm.” Rowan’s lips tilted up in the pale imitation of a smile.

He touched Ieduin’s chin and then moved his fingers into Ieduin’s hair, brushing his hands through it. His fingers snagged on a braid. Ieduin immediately reached to take the braid out. He’d have to do that to clean his hair anyway, but Rowan caught his hand.

“Let me?” Rowan asked, meeting his eyes.

Gods, he could drown in those green eyes.

Ieduin swallowed and nodded once, dropping his hand back into the water.

“Tell me about it,” Rowan said, slowly untwining the braid. “Your homeland. What’s it like there?”

Ieduin closed his eyes and inhaled as if he could small the cookfires on the air, the scent of steam and sweat everywhere. If he listened carefully, he could hear the indistinct murmur of elven voices speaking their mother tongue in the quick, lilting dialect only the Yeutish used. He could hear the steadyting-tingof the metalworker’s hammer, the soft bleating of goats, the roll of tiny pebbles under worn boots.

“It’s a lot like here in some ways,” Ieduin said at length. “Life is simple, run by seasons. There’s only one big city. Until about a generation ago, most people were semi-nomadic. We raised horses, herded goats, lived off the land. My parents put down roots with one of the first group of homesteaders about five miles outside the capital. Tried farming, but the soil was too rocky, so they became soap makers.”

He fell silent, thinking about them. He had few concrete memories of his early years. It seemed a lifetime ago that his father had taught him to string a bow and ride a horse, walking their tired old mare around in circles while his mother looked on. He barely remembered her face, but he remembered her hands. Worn, withered, thin. Tired hands she’d used to wring out laundry or knead bread.

And then there were the memories he’d rather forget. The snap of his father’s belt. The raised voices in the other room while he tried to keep his sisters from crying. Their tears would only make everything worse, only draw attention to where they hid in the dark. He thought of the time Ashryn had eaten the last bit of bread in the house, and he caught her with it. He took the beating for her, saying it was him.

He thought of the stink of dead bodies, standing over his feverish parents as they called out to spirits only they could see and begged for water they couldn’t keep down. He thought of the day they died, and he sent his sisters out to find fishing worms while he cut off their heads and burned their bodies in the firepit out back. Gods below, they’d been heavy, and the work messy.

Ieduin flinched as Rowan cupped his cheek.

“What are you thinking about that’s so sad?” he asked.

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