A Lily Among Thorns(89)

Her hair fell across her face and fringes rustled as she set the tray down on the table between them. She gathered her clothes off the floor. Her robe gaped a little as she bent over. Then she handed Solomon a note and walked out. He couldn’t drag his eyes away from her until she’d shut the door.

He opened the torn-off strip of paper. In the same neat hand that filled her account books, it said, A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity. He looked at Elijah, who obviously wanted to know what the note said and couldn’t bring himself to ask for fear of a refusal. Silently Solomon pushed it across the table.

Elijah read it and passed it back. “Proverbs Seventeen: Seventeen,” he said wryly. Their eyes met, and for a second Solomon could feel Elijah’s terror beating against his own ribs like a trapped bird. Then Elijah looked away and said, “I wouldn’t have thought Lady Serena even owned a Bible.”

“I said it to her father, actually,” Solomon said.

“Really?”

He nodded. “It was the best impression of Father I’ve ever done, you would have died—” He cut off abruptly. “I’ll do an encore for you sometime.”

Elijah raised his head hopefully. Solomon thought of the look in Elijah’s eyes when he’d sat up in Sacreval’s bed and seen Solomon. It was a look Solomon had seen in the mirror countless times over the last year and a half. The look of someone who has wakened into his own nightmare.

He watched Elijah now. His guilty air and the mutinous set of his mouth were familiar to Solomon from countless confrontations with their parents. The black despair in his eyes was not. If anyone else had brought that look to Elijah’s face, Solomon would have wanted to rip his throat out.

He tore up the note. Elijah stared at the pieces as if they’d been his last breath of air. “For God’s sake, Li, take that look off your face,” Solomon said. “I don’t need this note to remind me that you’re my brother. You don’t need to worry that you’ll lose me. You never did. There is no wretched thing you could ever do that would make me want to be without you.” It was true, and at that moment Solomon resented it furiously—resented that Elijah could have killed a man and Solomon would have burned him and dissolved his bones in vitriol to keep Elijah from the noose. And Elijah still didn’t trust him. Had never trusted him. Solomon had paid a heavy price for that lack of trust, this past year and a half, and yet he’d let it go by the board, had welcomed his brother back without question—and this was his reward.

“‘A brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city,’” Elijah whispered.

“I can’t do without you and you know it,” he said curtly. “You knew it a year and a half ago when you gallivanted off to France.”

“I told you, I thought you would know.”

“I didn’t know this.”

“I wanted you never to know. I tried so hard—I can’t do without you either, Sol,” Elijah said desperately. “I was so afraid I’d lose you. I’m losing you right now. That look on your face, like I’m some leper you’ve never seen before—”

Solomon tried to clear the anger from his expression. “We’ll—we’ll figure this thing out,” he offered.

The blood rushed into Elijah’s face. “There’s nothing to figure out. I like men. I always have and I can’t stop, not even for you. I’m not diseased, or mad, or wretched, and neither was what happened between me and René tonight. It was—” He looked at the mussed bed. “Well, I expect you know what it was like.”

Solomon’s eyes narrowed. How dare he make the comparison? “Sacreval is a—” Elijah shot a warning look at the door, and spy died in Solomon’s throat. “Why did you go?” he asked instead.

Elijah sighed. “Remember Alan?”

“The blacksmith’s apprentice? Of course. You lived in each other’s pockets for—” He blinked. “Wait a minute, you and he—you—?”

“Yes,” Elijah said defiantly. “We were. For years. And then he let his father marry him off, and he told me it wouldn’t change anything.”

Solomon scrubbed at his face. “He’s a drunk now, you know.”

Elijah stared at him. “Really?”

Solomon nodded. “His wife has to take in boarders because people don’t want to go to the smithy.”