Aleksey's Kingdom (A Royal Affair #2)(62)

I bit down as hard as I could upon the arm. I tasted blood, and the foulness of this almost undid me. I did not want that covenant, that communion with this abomination of darkness.

I fell back once more, a few steps.

The roaring in my ears seemed to increase—a natural thing when the body knows it is dying, this rushing and pounding of the blood in warning and fury.

I heard a shout. I would know that voice anywhere. I heard it in my dreams. But why was Aleksey telling me not to step back more?

I glanced sideward. It was all I could do.

My heels were over the edge of the cliff.

I believe to this day that I saw the rocky pit of hell beneath me at that moment. The demon had backed me to it deliberately.

What I did then was fitting.

I found a last remnant of strength and pulled at the limpet upon my face. He came loose with a sucking sound as his filthy fist withdrew from my throat and mouth, and then he was free in my arms. Light and almost buoyant after such attachment. I swept him up in my arms as a father might a son to lunge him joyously into the air, both of them laughing at the sport of such activity. My lunge, however, took him tumbling through the air, and not into the water of the falls where I had sent his mother. I threw him off that cliff and down upon the rocks two hundred feet or more below. I had risen whole from the sacrifice of the falls, and I did not want him to.

I could see him when I peered over. I had no fear of this great height now. I was beyond all that.

He was dead.

There was no doubt about it.

His tiny body lay broken and spread upon the glistening rocks until the mist closed like curtains upon it, and he was lost to view.




OTHER THAN his final few moments of torment with the poking stick, my beautiful boy had been relatively unharmed. They had fed him again; they had prayed over him; they had treated him… well, like a precious sacrifice. I was even amused to see he was covered in adornment—only leaves and twisted vines, as it was winter, but pretty, nonetheless.

Unharmed except, of course, that I had said farewell to him, and he had thought that I was dead.

We did not speak much about this until later, until we could speak of it without the complete unmanning it would have occasioned us there on the island, for I could not afford to be less than I needed to be nor have him so. We had to return beneath the falls once more, and I had to face what was waiting for me on the other side: my horses. I could not bear to think of it, and yet it had to be faced.

I was a little short with Aleksey then, I confess, when he refused to step down the tiny chinks of rocks and enter the path beneath the falls. I stood with my hands upon my naked hips (I had divested myself of the scalps and was feeling a little ashamed over them, but excess was ever my way when roused in most things). “Are you going to fly?” This was painfully croaked. It was many days before the physical effects of the boy’s fist in my throat would go. I am not sure the emotional scars have healed yet.

Aleksey winced. “I do not know. But I am not going in there. I will tell you that for free.” This was my expression. He had picked it up from me. I had to laugh; I could not help it. I stood there naked, caked with clay and blood, with smears of sweet and sticky blue upon me, laughing at my beautiful boy with his pretty leaves and vines, which he began to tear from himself with great annoyance at my amusement, but then he could not help himself and began to laugh, too, complaining at the same time about it not being funny, for he was hungry and cold and had been poked most rudely with a little stick, and was he not a king who should not have to suffer such indignity?

He cleverly brought us to the heart of all things, and I could see in his eyes his genuine dismay that he had unwittingly brought this down upon us by his beauty, his royal blood, and his—“Wait a minute. You told them you were a virgin?”

“Oh, I did no such—”

“He said it! I heard him! A virgin!”

He came closer and began to descend the steps, arguing and very annoyed with me. “Technically, I am a virgin.” He entered the tunnel and even twisted around to face me, walking backward as he argued his case. I confess I did not know whether to be impressed by this or horrified, which upon reflection is another feature of our relationship in all things. “I have not known a woman, so I am a virgin, am I not?”

“I do not think what you do inside my arse can count as virginal!”

“Oh, semen and semantics, Nikolai.” He turned and marched on and then… even now, sitting securely in my chair, I find this hard to write… he stuck his hand into the tumult of water passing by us. The entire span of the oceans and all the lakes and all the rivers of the world pouring cold and green and remorseless past us, and that foolish boy stuck his hand into it and commented upon the flow or the current or the coldness. I know not what. Upon reflection, perhaps this is why I still hear the roar of the water. I thought that it had finally found its sacrifice and that, far from being sent over on his back, strapped as I was to a log, he would just volunteer himself and be sucked by his hand into the maw of the beast.

“Why do you press so hard into the rock face, Niko? That is not going to get us to the other side, and it is awfully loud in here. Do you think the way the rock bends in like this increases the volume of the noise of the falls? That would be interesting if we could prove it, like blowing into a shell or a bottle and making that—why are you looking at me like that? I must say you do look horrible. What is that all over your face, and why do you have blueberries on your—” He chuckled and began to walk once more. “If I do call Boudica’s foal Blueberry, I shall never be able to say his name without thinking of your cock painted blue. It is very unusual.” He continued to babble inanely in this way until we had made it out of the tunnel and up the rocky steps to the grass of the promontory.