Aleksey's Kingdom (A Royal Affair #2)(40)

I believed Faelan had indeed been taken—but not by human hands.

And thus my transition from a man of science to one of faith was complete. I felt the tangible presence of the Great Spirit in that place and saw with my own eyes the evidence that he had come for one of his warriors.

For the first time ever, I saw how limited and narrow my view of the world had been. I saw a very real possibility that I would see Faelan again one day but that he would be restored and in the forests of a distant place that I could not yet comprehend. And if this applied to Faelan, did it not also apply to Aleksey? I turned and looked at him as he puzzled through my weak explanation for this great mystery. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that the Great Spirit would also come for him one day. I needed to be ready so we would be taken together.

I shivered again, and he turned and asked if I was cold—a familiar question, as I was very often cold. It turned the moment back to one of the real and present, and I answered in the affirmative, as he expected, and went to find the weapon. As I suspected, it had not been fired. I found no additional footprints in the snowy tree line, but the gun told its own tale. We were no further forward in understanding the events in which we seemed to be participating, helplessly, but we both felt glad in some way that we had untangled this small lie.

I glanced once more at the place that marked the great mystery I had witnessed. It was snowing again, settling upon the blueberries and covering them. It was fitting.




THERE APPEARED to be family discord when we rejoined our increasingly depleted companions.

The three older Wright sons had allied themselves finally to our side. I make this sound like a war, and perhaps in a small way it was, but they were now riding with us—Aleksey, myself, and the officers—for the first time, leaving the reverend alone with his wife and child on the cart. I wished him luck with that.

The young men seemed distant and silent by nature, and so although they joined us that day, I cannot say we were made merrier from their company. The three officers were naturally very grim, given what they had done that morning. Aleksey was utterly silent, which was different from his annoyed-with-me silences, which were in fact very loud. He had just withdrawn and gone elsewhere for a while, leaving only a body upon a horse riding alongside me. Faelan’s absence was so loud that to be honest I could hear little else anyway.

All told, it was a miserable day.

We camped that night, and the only glimmer of good news I could find to relay was that it would be our last night before encountering the falls. We were now on the border of our land and in the morning would cross into true wilderness—unclaimed land—until we reached the colony.

We set up tents much as we had ridden—eight men in four tents to one side of the campsite, and the reverend and his depleted flock on the other. We also set sentries—something I wished we had done earlier but had genuinely not thought we would need. I had been on my own land, after all, and did not see the enemy within until too late. We also set sentries because the child had divested itself of the bindings I had immobilized him with. I guessed he had worked out for himself that he was not actually injured much at all and that after trying to walk on his leg, he had discovered he could. So he was free again. He had taken a new habit too of studying me and… fiddling with his clothing as he watched. Aleksey told me I was imagining this last and that he was merely playing with a cloth doll his mother had made for him, but I was unconvinced. I noticed Aleksey did not deny that the child was watching me.

It made for an uneasy night. Personally I did not trust Jacob, Samuel, or Martin enough yet to leave them as my only protection, so we paired them up with one of the officers and worked out a rough sort of rota and then turned in. Aleksey and I had taken the after-midnight duty, so we had a few hours before being roused once again.

Our tent was too close to the others to do anything other than sleep, and I think we were both grateful for this, as it prevented us having to admit that we didn’t actually feel much like pleasuring our bodies. Grief can do that to you.

But although we could not join physically, I think we did emotionally, and when I thought back to our argument of the day before, I realized something had been missing from our relationship since we arrived in the New World. We had been so busy, so self-contained and glad to be here and to be free, that we had indulged the physical at the expense of the pleasures of the heart, perhaps. Perhaps, like any muscle, the heart needs to be tested and worked to grow strong, and ours had been lazy. We had not been tested at all since we’d left Hesse-Davia. We were together—what else did we need? And, of course, being men, how could we know of this? Was it not a woman who taught her husband these things? Perhaps it was just Aleksey and me—neither of us raised by women—who had never thought much beyond the physical.

I curled around Aleksey, pulling his back tight against me. His hair got in my mouth, and I put a hand up to brush it away and felt his face wet with silent tears. He pushed my hand away, as he did not want me to know that he was crying. My heart almost broke for his grief. For all the years I had known him, he had played with the belief that he could hear Faelan’s thoughts. Perhaps he could. I believed Faelan had understood his. And now there was a great silence in his head. Perhaps it would have been better that the wolf live on, despite getting sick and aged and unlike himself—it would have given Aleksey time to come to terms with his inevitable passing. As it was, it had been so sudden, so out of place, given what we had been doing and enjoying all night. Love turned to horror so quickly. I murmured something of this—saying I was wrong about his quick death and that I was sorry for ever saying such a stupid thing, but Aleksey turned in my arms so we were face-to-face on the folded jacket that served as our only pillow. I could feel his breath upon my face. He put a finger on my lips. “He was glad to go. He did not want to leave me, though.”