Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

Graphic Depictions Of Violence

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Scott Hunter/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Scott Hunter (Game Changers)

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Fae, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Kidnapping, Dissociation, Non-Consensual Ritual Magic, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Grief/Mourning, Astral Projection, Sharing a Body, Hurt/Comfort, Forgiveness, Angst with a Happy Ending

Language:

English

Series:

Part 6 of Set in Heated Rivalry-verse

Stats:

Published: 2026-09-30 Words: 12,049 Chapters: 1/1

Who then devised the torment?

Summary

Shane has found a place where he cannot be hurt. There is little enough in it, but what there is is kind: warm lights, a quiet that answers to him, and, in time, a ghost who remembers stolen plums and a husband who waited up for him with the lamps lit.

Shane remembers the husband differently. He listens anyway.

Notes

You guys, this one aches.

Inspired by The Bruiseberry Crown, obviously. Check it out.

I Harvest

Nobody asks his name.

That’s what Shane will remember, later, when the rest has gone soft at the edges. Not the bag over his head, or the smell of it, or the long blank stretch after the needle. Not waking somewhere with the wrong sky. Just that nobody asks.

They talk over him. They handle him like a sack of flour: lift, turn, set down. Someone pulls his lip back to look at his teeth, pulls his hair back, pokes his ears. Someone pinches the skin of his arm and says something that makes the others laugh. He says, “Where am I?” and “What do you want?” and “Please,” and “My family has money.” Nobody answers. It isn’t cruelty, exactly. It’s the way nobody answers a goat.

Money changes hands, and so do the hands on him. The new ones are bigger. And then there’s the monster.

He fills the doorway. He’s taller than anyone Shane has ever seen, and gaunt, as if something has been eating him from the inside for a long time. His skin is grey as ash, and in places red shows through it, like embers in a fire that has almost gone out. His ears are long and pointed, his teeth too sharp. His fingers end in claws, and when he grips the doorframe they score the wood. Nothing about him is human, and nothing about him is kind. He looks at Shane for a long moment, and his face twists. He says one word. Shane doesn’t speak the language yet, but he understands that word perfectly. It means this?

He isn’t thrown away. Later, Shane will think that would have been kinder.

In the first days, they pour something down his throat, and after that he understands them. It doesn’t help. Understanding the words doesn’t make them make sense.

The monster talks about fate. About threads, and the other side, and a match, and how the ritual doesn’t lie. He talks the way people talk to themselves, fast and circling, never stopping for breath, and never once to Shane. His eyes go past Shane, or through him, to something only the monster can see. When they do land on him, it’s with that same twist of the mouth. This. As if Shane is a mess someone else made, and the monster has been left to clean it up.

I don’t know what you want, Shane says. He says it in his own language, and then in the new words, clumsy in his mouth. Please tell me what you want. I’ll do it. Whatever it is, I’ll do it.

The monster doesn’t answer. It isn’t a conversation. You don’t explain yourself to an item, a resource you acquired.

Nobody else will talk to him either. There are servants, or guards, or both: grey-skinned, soft-footed, eyes always on the floor. They bring water and take away the bucket. When he catches one by the sleeve and begs—where is this, what is he, what is he going to do to me—the servant goes very still, then very carefully pulls free, and leaves, and never comes back. The next one doesn’t come close enough to catch.

He learns the room. Stone walls. No window. A door that is always locked. A drain in the floor he doesn’t let himself think about.

There’s more. Things to drink that taste of acid and rot. Symbols painted on his skin that itch, then burn. Circles chalked on the floor around him, and chanting that goes on for hours in a language even the potion can’t unlock. Bowls under his wrists to catch the blood. Some of the potions pull the colour out of the world and tip the floor away. Some just hurt. When he screams, the monster says stop pretending, not even angry, the way you’d tell a dog off for barking.

They gag him, after that. When he’s quiet, and nothing changes, and he understands that the screaming never mattered anyway. Nobody was listening to it.

He tries everything he can think of. He’s good. He’s still. He drinks without fighting, lies down where they put him, holds out his arms. He thinks that if he’s good enough, if he does whatever it is right, they’ll stop. It doesn’t matter. Being good doesn’t count. There’s nothing he can do right, because none of it is about him.

He isn’t tortured, not the way stories mean it. Torture is goal oriented. something. Nobody wants anything from him that he could give: not a name, not a secret, not a single word. He’s worked like a field or a seam of ore, turned over, drawn from, turned over again.

He’s crafted.

The last night he doesn’t remember properly, which is a mercy. He remembers pieces. The cold of the stone platform through his back. Torchlight. The monster above him, enormous against the ceiling, talking faster than ever, almost joyful—now, it must be now—and something in his hand catching the light.

Then—click.

The scream stops. The pain doesn’t, but it goes far away, like a storm on the other side of a mountain. He isn’t on the stone anymore. He isn’t the one it’s happening to. He’s somewhere else.

It’s dark, but not the dark of the cell. It’s the dark of a winter evening in open country after snow, when everything has gone quiet and blue, and the air is so still you can hear your own heart. Except he can’t hear his heart. He doesn’t seem to have one. He doesn’t seem to have anything. When he thinks of his hands, there’s a small warmth where his hands would be, and that’s all; he finds he doesn’t mind.

Far off there are lights. Not stars; he knows stars, and these are wrong for stars, too warm, too low. They’re more like lamps in windows seen across a valley. Few, and scattered, and very far apart. Each one steady. Each one, he thinks, somebody’s house.

The nearest light isn’t far off at all. He’s inside it.

He doesn’t know how he knows. It’s the way you know your own room in the dark: where the bed is, where the wall is, how many steps to the door. The dark close around him is warmer than the dark further out, and softer, and it answers to him. Blue and violet, when he looks for colour. Quiet, when he wants quiet. It’s the first thing in a long time that he is safe, warm, untouchable.

Below, very far down, things are still happening to the body. He hears them the way you hear a quarrel in another house: a thudding, a man shouting hard enough that the dark trembles a little at its edges. Something has gone wrong down there. Someone is very angry. He can’t quite remember what it is, or why it should matter. Only that it pulls, gently, the way deep water pulls.

He doesn’t look down. He lets the quiet hold him. Nobody asks his name here either. Here, it doesn’t matter.

It must be magic that keeps him here. He’s fairly sure of it, and then he’s certain, because something like him comes looking.

He feels it before he sees it: a pressure, a wrongness, like cold wind whistling under a door. Then it’s there at the edge of his light. It isn’t a shape, exactly. It’s more like an intention, heavy and sharp, and it wants him. It reaches, and he feels the reach, a hook feeling for a place to catch and drag him back down into the meat.

It can’t. Shane knows that the way he’s begun to know everything here, without being told. This is his house. It came in uninvited. And in his own house, he says who stays.

He doesn’t even have to think. He focuses, presses, and it’s gone.

Another comes, a while later. Then another. Different hands, same hook. And each time, far below, the body is hurt again, harder, and he has the strange, clear thought that it’s being hurt so he’ll come back to it. As if it were a house on fire and he’d run in to save the furniture.

As if he would. They can keep the body. It was only ever a place where things were done to him.

Below, the monster’s rage comes up through the dark like weather. The monster is not happy. The monster wants to continue whatever that was.

The next one is different. It’s small, and frayed at the edges, and it flickers like a bulb about to go. It doesn’t come at him, doesn’t grab or hook or pull. It drifts to the edge of his lights, like a moth at a window, and hovers.

Below, the body is burning again. Not fire, exactly; something poured on, something that eats. Shane feels it, faint and far; a toothache in someone else’s mouth. Are they using it as bait? he wonders, almost amused. Hurt the shell badly enough and the spirit will come running home to save it? As if he’d ever go back to that. They could take knives and fire to it for a thousand years, and he’d only drift further out.

He turns to sweep the little flicker away.

—don’t—stop—please—wait—

It isn’t a voice. It’s more like a hand on his sleeve. Weak, barely there. He hesitates. Huh. What’s this, now?

—please—don’t go—don’t fade—please—

Fade? He isn’t fading. He’s floating. He’s finally, finally somewhere nothing can reach.

—you are going too far—too far—you will get lost—you won’t find the way back—

Good, Shane thinks at it.

The flicker shudders as if he’s struck it.

Why would I want the way back? Shane says, and because it doesn’t seem to understand, he shows it. The cell. The bowls. The things poured into him. The red monster that never once asked his name. That monster is down there, torturing a dead body like a lunatic. Let him. I’m done.

What comes back isn’t an argument. It’s grief. So much grief, from something so small, that for a moment Shane can’t find its edges. And under the grief, exhaustion; a tiredness older than anything he’s ever felt.

—he is upset—he doesn’t understand—he doesn’t understand humans—

Is it defending the monster? Shane banishes it on the spot.

It comes back. Not at once. He has time to settle, to let the lights smooth out again, to forget. Then there it is at the edge of his realm, the same frayed little flicker, dimmer than before, as if coming back has cost it something.

It isn’t frightened this time. It isn’t pleading. It doesn’t say anything at all. Shane waits for it to start in again about the red monster, about going back, about getting lost. It doesn’t. It just stays there at the very edge, not pushing in, the way someone sits down beside you on a bench in the dark and doesn’t ask you to talk.

He could throw it out again. It would be easy. He even gathers himself to do it. He doesn’t.

It’s so still. So tired. He has the strangest feeling that if he pushes it away again, out into the cold past the lights, it won’t have the strength to come back. And he finds, a little to his own surprise, that he doesn’t want to be the one who does that.

So he lets it stay. He doesn’t talk to it. He drifts and watches the lights and pretends it isn’t there, and the little flicker drifts beside him and pretends the same.

Time passes, or something like it. Sometimes, when the body far below is hurting, and the storm comes closer than he likes, the flicker drifts closer. Not touching, just closer. And the storm is easier, somehow, with someone nearby.

The body isn’t being hurt anymore, he thinks. Now it’s something else. Hands that stay longer. Something cool on the burns. Healing, maybe.

—he didn’t know— the flicker says one day, out of nowhere, almost hurried, as if it has been holding the words a long time. —didn’t know what it would do—he thought you were lying—a trick—now he thinks you broke—thinks if he mends the body you will come back to it—

Good luck.

Please. Nothing can make me go back.

—I know—I know—but men like him—they believe what they can hold—they can’t imagine things like us can be hurt so easily—

Us? For the first time, Shane really looks at it.

It’s smaller than him. Much smaller. And old, so old; there’s a wornness to it, a thinness, like cloth washed too many times. He can almost see through it in places. It must have been something enormous once, bright and mighty. Now it’s a scrap.

Us? he says.

—walkers—spirit walkers—souls that can leave—there are not many—and very few as strong as you—

Strong. Shane nearly laughs. A boy with a bag over his head, sold in a market like a goat. Strong. And yet. He thinks of the hooks, and how easily they came apart. How nothing here has ever been able to touch him.

And you’re like me? He can’t keep a thread of something out of it, something that might be hope. Human?

—no—no—not human—just walk—

Right. The thread goes slack. Not human. Just another one of them. Another monster, only smaller, and sadder, and kinder, and still one of them.

Shane turns away and watches the lights. But he doesn’t send it away.

II Love

Others come. They leave the sad thing alone, but they come straight at him, blunt and grasping, and he banishes them before they can say a word.

Why do they keep bothering me?

—the general—trying to get you back—they must have told him a walker can’t be forced—but he wants—

The general?

—that is what he is—what everyone calls him—first general of the Seelie host—

And his name?

A pause, and something that is almost, for the first time, a smile. —names are not given away—not by us—and not by them—

Fine.

The general, Shane concludes, with some certainty, can burn in hell.

The sad thing brightens, briefly; a gust of fondness across a deepening sadness.

—this is often felt—

Shane finds that he is not even a little suprised.

Why do you care?

A pause. —love— Another pause, heavy. —love—love—isn’t it always love?—

Not really, Shane says, confused. I’m here because of evil.

A ripple of grief. —don’t want to fight—don’t want to upset—but I love—

He’s surprised to find he can still feel shock here.

You love who? The monster?

—so much—my brave general—my love—

Shane is too stunned to banish it, and then too sad. It’s bad enough having to hate that monster. Imagine having to love him. Imagine that pain.

I’m sorry, he says, and means it.

—me too—me too—sorry—

Time passes. There’s no night here, no weather, nothing to count. Only the slow drift of the lights, and the little flicker at his side that doesn’t leave anymore.

Shane learns that the quiet place is his. Not the whole dark; that goes on forever, cold and formless, and things can get lost in it. But the part around him, the warm part with the blue and violet lights, answers to him. That’s why the hooks can’t catch him. That’s why he can throw them out. He’s safe here because it’s his.

He learns, too, that the sad thing has nothing like it.

—had one—once—when I had a body—it went out—

So it has been out there, in the cold part, for longer than it can say. Shane thinks about the first time it came, how he threw it back into the dark without a second thought, and something in him folds up small.

Come in, then, he says. Stay. Please.

It hesitates at the edge of him, then comes in, settles, and, for a long while, does nothing at all but rest. He can feel the cold leaving it, slowly, like a hand held to a stove.

He gets to know it a little. It’s sweet and kind, and the first time Shane calls it the Wanderer, it laughs: a small, startled sound, like a bell rung once in another room, then quickly hushed, as if it had forgotten it could. It’s one of them, the same as the monster: fae, Shane thinks, the word surfacing from old stories, though nothing in the stories was ever this sad. Sometimes it presses pictures of itself toward him, shyly, and they never quite hold still: skin pale as the inside of a shell, a scattering of moles; hair that won’t lie flat, long pointed ears, eyes too large and too dark, with something at the back of them that catches now and then, gold coins at the bottom of a well. Taller than any man, and restless, made to move, to change. Long hands, six fingers each, too many joints, all of them nimble.

Shane doesn’t know what he’s done, by naming it; he won’t for a long time. Among the fae, a name offered freely and freely taken is not a nickname; it’s closer to a vow. And no one gives a name to a prince of the fae, least of all a mortal, least of all without asking. The Wanderer could have refused it. It would have been easy, and proper, and safe. He doesn’t.

It was out walking once, it tells him, when something happened to its body. When it turned back, there was nothing to go home to. It has just been around, since.

It doesn’t say what happened. It doesn’t say what it’s doing. Shane doesn’t ask. There’s a lot, he’s starting to understand, that neither of them asks.

Then one day, if there are days, Shane notices that the Wanderer is thinner. Not smaller. Thinner. Worn, like cloth held up to the light, parts of it flickering out and coming back. The warmth of his realm stopped the wearing, but it can’t undo it. It’s running out. One day it will simply thin away, and Shane will be alone out here.

He nearly comes apart.

It’s blind, total panic, bigger than anything since the stone platform and the knives. The lights go white and wild. Far down the line, he feels the body seize, hands on it, and someone shouting. He’s fairly sure it dies a few times around then and gets dragged back by force. He doesn’t care. It’s the Wanderer who calms him, pulsing at him, small and steady, until he can hear it again.

—sorry—didn’t mean to upset—calm, calm—

You calm, Shane says petulantly. How dare you threaten to leave me?

—not leave—not leave—stay—as long as you want—

For how long?

Silence. That’s the answer.

Then eat, Shane says. Take it from me. Whatever you need.

—no—you need it—you are hurt—

I don’t care. Take it.

It won’t, and he insists, and it won’t, and he doesn’t stop. He pushes himself at it, all of him, relentless, until it gives in. Not because it agrees. Because he’s frightening it. Later he’ll understand what he did. That he forced something on someone who didn’t want it, and wouldn’t stop, and wouldn’t listen, and was so sure he knew best. He’ll understand who that sounds like, and it will make him sick.

Right now he only feels the Wanderer drink, tentatively, then less so. Feels it warm, and steady. And something else, strange: it fits. Whatever he is, slides into whatever the Wanderer is, as if they were cut to the same shape or at least at a similar line. Nothing out in the dark has fed it, the Wanderer tells him afterwards, in all that time. Nothing could. It grows very quiet, after saying that, the way it does when there’s something it isn’t saying.

Shane makes it eat again after that. And again. He makes it eat whenever he remembers, paranoid, like he’s pushing food at a sick cat.

His body, he thinks, has been moved somewhere else. He doesn’t know how long it’s been. Months. A year.

III Borrowed

More magicians reach up the line from wherever the body is now, hands groping in a dark room. He doesn’t bother banishing them anymore. He lets them wear themselves out clawing at nothing. They can’t hook him. They can’t even see him.

—he won’t stop— the Wanderer says. —he can’t—he doesn’t know how—

Then he can keep trying for a thousand years.

The Wanderer isn’t so thin now. Some days it’s almost bright. And the brighter it gets, the more it says the thing Shane doesn’t want to hear.

—they can’t force you—but you can’t stay here forever—you should live—

Fuck you, Shane says sweetly. I’m never going back. Never, ever. Not if you leave me. Not if I starve out here alone. You don’t know what he did to me. No.

—it will be different now—he learned—he changed—

Monsters don’t learn. And they don’t change.

The Wanderer flinches. It’s small, and it’s the first time Shane has felt it from him: not grief, not tiredness, but something like a spark, a swipe of a tiger’s tail.

—he is not—he was not—

Not a monster? Shane says. That raving thing? That beast?

—it was not always like this— The Wanderer’s voice goes strange and far away. —he was so composed—so polished—so proper—they sang songs about him—there were plays—the Storm-lord—stern—courteous—the most elegant thing at court—he bowed to servants—he apologised to horses—

Shane tries to set that beside what he remembers. The gaunt thing in the doorway. The raving, the muttering, the hallucinations. The sharp teeth, the claws, scoring the stone.

He doesn’t think the Wanderer would lie to him. He isn’t sure it can. But people see strangely when they’re in love.

The Wanderer sighs, if a light can sigh. —we were very young then—so young—so foolish—me more than him—a summer lord and a winter prince—everyone said it would end badly—we did not care—so brave—so proud—invincible— A pause, bitter and ringing, like a struck glass. —obviously not invincible— he says. —but it felt like it, then—

The Wanderer dims all at once, and Shane flickers in distress.

Sorry. Sorry. I love you. Please calm.

—no hurt—love—all is love—

So the Wanderer tries another way. He stops arguing. He talks about the world, the one down there, and for once the words come quicker, tumbling over each other, as if they’ve been waiting a long time to be let out.

—midsummer—fires on every hill—everyone dancing—you dance until your shoes are gone and then you dance barefoot—

—the lake in winter—frozen black—I glide so fast the ice sings under you—he could never catch me—never—

—the queen’s orchard—I stole her plums—every year—she knew—she knew—she pretended not to—

—the sea in the south—the water glows green at night—you swim where you are not allowed, and the light follows you—

—the market under the hill—everyone lying—everyone laughing—you trade a secret for a song and the song for a kiss—

—his hands—so warm—he always ran warm—I would put my cold feet on him, and he would pretend to be angry—and then he would stop pretending—

It’s meant to be hope. Shane can tell. Look at everything you’re turning down. Look what’s waiting for you. All Shane hears is how carefully each memory has been kept, worn smooth from being turned over and over in the dark. Centuries of them. He hears a soul saying the world like a prayer, because it can’t have it. Not the fires, not the ice, not the stolen plums. Not his monster.

Shane doesn’t want any of it. The Wanderer wants all of it so badly it aches to be near him.

He asks about the ice again, after that. And the fires, and the plums, and the market under the hill. Not because he wants them. Because the Wanderer is happy telling it, bright and quick, and then quiet and sad at the end, every time, like a tide going out.

It’s so unfair, really. The sweetest, gentlest, most beautiful thing there is, and it has nowhere to put its feet. And far down the line, there’s a body Shane doesn’t want, that nobody is using, that’s only good for being hurt—

Hold on, he says, thrilled. Hold on, love.

—hold?—hold what?—

You can have it. The body. You love him, don’t you? Your monster?

The Wanderer goes very still. —yes—but—

Then take it. It’s just lying there. Take it, and live.

—no—no—it’s yours—you can’t—

I’m not using it.

—you might—one day—

Then I’ll take it back, won’t I? Shane says, reasonable. It’s so obviously the answer; he can’t believe it took him this long. You borrow it. That’s all. Like a coat. It isn’t doing anything else. And you can tell him to stop whatever he’s doing to it to get me back. Tell him to leave me alone.

He says it lightly. He means it lightly. It doesn’t occur to him that there’s anything heavy in it at all. The Wanderer is quiet for a long time.

Shane can feel it wanting to say yes. He can feel how much. Not just the fires and the ice and the plums: the hands. It wants the hands so badly the wanting has a shape. And under that, something else, something that turns toward the line and whatever is being done down there, and wants that to stop too. For Shane. That part it says out loud.

—if I am there—he will stop—he will leave you alone—I can make him—

See? Everyone wins.

—you are sure—truly sure—

It takes a lot of convincing that he means it. Ridiculous, since he’s fairly sure you can’t lie here. And it isn’t as if the Wanderer can’t come back. Shane is very clear about that: the line is still his, and if the monster starts torturing him, he comes straight back up, no questions asked.

—thank—thank—love—love—

The line is Shane’s, it doesn’t let go of him, and it can’t be handed over. So they go down it together, the Wanderer holding on to him like someone climbing down a rope in the dark. Near the bottom it gets warmer, and heavier, and louder, and Shane stops. He can’t go further. He can feel the stone platform down there. He can smell the knives. Burning flesh.

This is where I get off, he says. He makes it eat once more. Then he gives it a small, playful shove. Go on. Go live and love your monster. I’ll be here if you want to visit.

The Wanderer goes. Shane floats back up to the lights. It’s sad, maybe. Less than he expected. The line still runs down into the body, and through it he can feel his Wanderer, faint and far, like a voice in another room. Shock. Suspicion. Shock. Grief.

The realm is very quiet without him. Shane had forgotten how quiet.

It seems to be going well, he thinks, floating, vaguely content. Who would have guessed? But then, even a monster would have to love someone like the Wanderer. Even the worst evil would have to love something that kind.

IV Ilya

He learns the Wanderer’s name from the monster’s mouth. From up in the lights, with only the line between them, Shane gets it in pieces: the body waking, heavy and strange, and the Wanderer inside it like someone trying on a coat in the dark. Every limb is the wrong length. The hands have only five fingers each. The eyes see too few colours. And the cold. The Wanderer sends that up the line, bewildered.

—so cold—always this cold?—

Always, Shane says. Welcome.

Then the monster. He’s suspicious at first; Shane can feel the weight of it in the room. A trick. Another walker, wearing the human. He doesn’t come close. He watches from across the room the way you’d watch a snake. The Wanderer tries to speak, and the human mouth fumbles the words, and every fumble makes it worse.

So the Wanderer stops trying to speak.

Shane feels him get up. Feels bare feet on a stone floor, freezing, and the long, slow walk across it. Feels the monster go rigid. And then the Wanderer climbs, clumsy as a child, onto whatever the monster is sitting on, and presses both of those cold feet flat against him.

For a moment, nothing at all. Then the monster makes a sound Shane has never heard from anything, a sound like something tearing open. And he says a word. A name.

“Ilya.”

Ilya, Shane thinks, from very far away. It’s a soft name, a soft name for a soft soul that has finally found home.

He doesn’t understand yet what he’s just heard. Later, Ilya will explain about fae and true names, about the weight of them, the dangers. True names aren’t said aloud where others can hear; they’re treasures kept close, beating hearts given over on faith, on love.

—keep it— Ilya tells him, when Shane asks whether he should stop using it. —it is safe with you—you are the safest place I know—besides—you named me first—

The monster collapses. There’s no other word for it. He folds down around the body like a building coming down, and weeps.

Shane sends shock down the line. What comes back is grief, tired and old, and under it something he’s never felt from the Wanderer—from Ilya—before. It takes him a while to recognise it. It’s joy. It’s relief. Letting go.

The monster cradles the body’s face in his great red hands. Shane’s face. Ilya’s face now. Shane feels it faintly: the heat of those palms. The hands are trembling. They’re so careful. They’re the same hands.

The monster presses kisses to the forehead, the eyelids, the mouth, and whispers hoarse, broken things in a language Shane had poured into him and still wishes he didn’t understand. I looked. I looked everywhere. I’m sorry. I looked.

Shane sends shock, and shock, and shock. Not disgust, though he’s tempted. Ilya deserves nothing but good things, and this, whatever it is to Shane, is Ilya’s good thing. He can feel how good. He won’t spoil it.

And if the monster changes his mind, if the tenderness curdles, if the knives come out, then Ilya slips back up the line, leaves the body for the monster to ruin, and comes home to Shane, where he’s safe. Shane has it all worked out. He keeps watch, just in case.

He keeps watch for a long time.

Ilya is gone a month. A month is nothing here; Shane knows that. There’s no night to count, no weather. But he counts anyway, by the only clock he has: the body, far down the line. It sleeps, and wakes, and eats. It’s warm sometimes, which is new. It’s held a lot. Shane feels all of it faintly, like music through a wall, and floats in the lights, and doesn’t know what to do with himself.

The realm is very big with only one person in it. He hadn’t noticed that before. He catches himself turning, sometimes, to say something to someone who isn’t there.

Then a tug on the line, soft and familiar, and Ilya comes up it into the warm.

What? Shane panics, all at once, the lights going bright. What happened? What did he do? I’m sorry, love, I’m so sorry, I never should have—

—no—no hurt—nothing—love—

Then why are you here?

A pause. Shy. —missed you—

Oh. Oh, thank the heavens. Shane sends nothing but relief for a long time, and Ilya lets him, settling close the way he did in the beginning, when he was cold. Except he isn’t cold now. He’s warm. He’s bright. He carries the world on him like a smell on a coat—sun, woodsmoke, something sweet and probably stolen—and Shane breathes it in, if breathing is what he’s doing.

Tell me, Shane says.

So Ilya tells him, halting and delighted. That the body is so small, and everything is so loud, the heart especially, always going; he can’t get used to it. That it has only five fingers on each hand and he keeps reaching with the ones that aren’t there. That it’s always cold, Shane was right, and the general wraps it in furs and then worries it will overheat, and unwraps it, and wraps it again. That he ate a peach and cried, and the general thought he was dying.

—and the sea—he will take me—in spring—when your body is stronger—

My body?

—yours—only borrowing—like a coat— Something shy and warm. —it is a good coat—it smells of you—

If spirits could blush, Shane would.

—feel you watching—through the line—but it is not the same—miss your soul—around mine—safe—

<h3> </h3>Miss you too, Shane says. It comes out smaller than he means it to. Love you.

They stay like that a long time. Long enough that Shane starts to wonder whether Ilya might stay. And then something jerks at the line, hard.

Far below, the body is lying empty-eyed in a bed, and the monster has woken up beside it. Even from here Shane can feel it: the roaring, the furniture going over, the bottomless panic of someone who has lost everything once already and is watching it happen again.

—sorry—sorry—I should—

Go, Shane says, and nudges him. Go, go before he brings the house down.

—back soon—love—love—

Ilya goes down the line, and the body’s eyes open, and the monster sees.

There was no need to worry, really. Shane watches the monster weep again, crushing Ilya to his chest, rocking him, so relieved and so full of love he’s impossible to recognise. Nothing like the thing that stood over the stone platform. He’s almost beautiful like this.

Ilya sends a wave of love up the line. Maybe a little smug. Shane sends back exasperation. And then, because nobody’s watching, something softer.

The realm is quiet again. But it’s a different quiet now. It’s the quiet of someone waiting for a visit.

But he does watch now. He drifts a little further down the line than he used to, until the body’s life comes through almost clearly, like voices through a door left ajar. And he pays attention.

He learns the shape of their days. The general wakes early and doesn’t move, so as not to wake Ilya; he lies there, huge and still, and looks. He cuts Ilya’s food into small pieces, frowning, as if a human might choke on anything larger. He finds out which fruit Ilya likes and has baskets of it brought in, so many that most of it spoils. In the evenings he rubs Ilya’s shoulders with his enormous thumbs, so carefully it tickles, and Ilya laughs. The general goes still every time, as if the laugh is something he’s afraid to startle away.

He holds Ilya’s hands a lot. Just holds them. Turns them over, looks at the five short fingers, the pale nails, the thin skin at the wrist where the blue shows through. Shane knows what he’s looking at. He’s looking at how easily it would break.

At night, sometimes, the door closes, and the lamps go low, and they are husbands, and it is none of Shane’s business. He feels only the edge of it, a warmth coming up the line like heat off a summer road. He draws back up to the lights and leaves them their tenderness.

It’s a strange thing, being outside a window like this, seeing a warm room. Not wanting to be in it, exactly. Just seeing it, and knowing it’s there.

The grey is leaving the monster’s skin, Shane notices. Week by week the red-gold comes back up through it, like a fire someone has finally remembered to feed. His cheeks fill out. The claws, he keeps trimmed now, short and blunt, and he files them himself every morning, frowning, as if they’ve personally offended him.

It really does feel like a different man. The red-skinned monster and this devoted husband can’t be the same thing. Except they are. Shane knows it by the hands. He would know those hands anywhere.

He’d been ready for the claws to come out, ready to snatch Ilya back the second they did. They never come.

Ilya keeps visiting, and every time there’s a scene first. Shane feels it from above: Ilya explaining, gently, that he’ll be back, that it’s fine, that he has obligations other than to him. The general doesn’t understand what obligations a dead man can have. He rages. He threatens the walls, the ground, the sky. He breaks things. Once, he snaps a table in half with one hand, then stands and looks at the pieces as if someone else did it.

Never Ilya. Never even close.

The last time, he doesn’t roar at all. He gets down on his knees, down and down, shoulders curving inward, neck bent, and he begs. Please. Please don’t. I can’t again. I can’t.

Ilya puts both hands on his face. Five fingers each. Not enough to cover even one cheek. I will come back. I promise.

And then he comes to Shane anyway. Shane is, admittedly, very flattered. And under the flattery there’s something else he doesn’t look at too closely, something heavy and sore, like pity, when he thinks of the general kneeling alone in that room. Waiting. Terrified.

—sorry—sorry—too long—missed you—

Time’s not a big thing here, Shane says, and wraps around him, and sends calm. And I’ve sort of been living through you.

—I know—I feel you—close—when he holds my hands—you are with me—both of you—so nice—

Shane sends embarrassed ambivalence. He did sort of watch.

He learns the rest in pieces, over a long time, like he’s learning a song: a line here, a line there, and then one day he knows the whole thing or enough of it to count.

That Ilya and the general—a compromise, in Shane’s head, because it’s rude to call anyone’s husband monster and he sure as hell won’t name him like he had Ilya—were married. For a long time, happily. That Ilya walked the way other people breathe, and the general never minded, only waited up for him with the lamps lit.

That a lord of the Summer court and a prince of the Winter one should never have married at all. There are songs about marriages like that. None of them ends well.

That the general was once the first sword of the Seelie court. The queen’s own, bright and terrible and honourable to a fault. That a general of that court does not lie, does not break guest-right, does not take what isn’t freely given.

That one night, while the general was away and Ilya was out walking, someone they trusted came into the room where Ilya’s body lay.

That after that, the general left the court—in what state, Ilya won’t say—and in the years that followed, did all three. Lied. Broke guest-right. Took what wasn’t given, all the way down to a boy who had never given him anything at all.

Ilya doesn’t say who. Shane doesn’t ask. But he understands now what he meant, all that time ago, by there was nothing to go home to. He understands well enough: someone who knew the general’s comings and goings, who had the run of their rooms, who waited for the one night the door would be unguarded, and a body lying empty and trusting on the bed.

So Ilya died without going where the dead go. He was already out; nothing could carry him there. He drifted, lost and thinning, until he felt his husband, faint and far, like a lamp across a field. He went toward it. And he stayed.

—if I was going to die—I would die with him—watching over him—

You watched him, Shane says. All that time.

—always—

It comes up the line in pieces too, the rest of it. Ilya doesn’t want to show him and can’t help it—the general grieving, and then searching, and then not sleeping. Spirit walkers dragged in from half the world, made to try, and failing, and blamed. Books, and older books, and then the kind of books people burn. The general growing thinner and harder and stranger every year, and Ilya beside him the whole time, shouting into nothing, trying to touch his face with hands he didn’t have.

—I was there—right there—he could not hear me—I watched him crumble—piece by piece—

It’s the most heartbreaking thing Shane can imagine. Not only does his Ilya have to love a creature like that, he had to watch his husband become it, slowly, over years, and couldn’t do a single thing to stop it. He had to watch all the way to the end.

—love—sorry—sorry—sorry—

How long was he alone?

—years—so many—he went mad with it—he loves so hard—so completely—

And it’s true. Even Shane can’t deny it, much as he’d like to, not when he’s seen how the general tends to his husband, hangs on every word, treats every sigh as precious. Love like that doesn’t go anywhere when it loses what it loves. It just goes bad.

What did he want with me? Shane asks finally, because he can’t not. Not why he did what he did. Why me at all?

—madness—he wanted to find me—he looked for souls like mine—

Souls like Ilya’s. It takes a moment to land. Whatever lets Shane walk, whatever makes his soul fit Ilya’s like a key in a lock, the thing that fed Ilya when nothing else could: that’s what the ritual found. That’s why the general reached across worlds and took a boy out of his life. Not fate, not destiny. A match. A shape.

Heavens wept. How prosaic.

That’s all?

—more or less—there was love too—but mostly madness— A pause, careful. —he truly did not know—what it would do—he had never even seen a human—

Shane manages not to flee to the lights for a month, but it takes some doing.

He didn’t know? He knew because I told him. I begged for mercy up until they gagged me.

A long pause. Grief. —sorry—sorry—sorry—sorry—

It’s a lot to feel, and it doesn’t come in order. Disgust, and grief, and a terror he thought he’d left behind in the body. And love, and awe, and warmth, because whatever else is true, he met his Wanderer. If he’d stayed home, if nobody had ever come for him, he’d never have known Ilya existed. And Ilya would still be out there in the cold, thinning, alone. Maybe gone by now.

But he also wouldn’t have been kidnapped, sold, tortured and killed. So.

He can’t make the two halves fit. He turns them over and over, the way Ilya turned over his memories, until they’re worn smooth, and they still don’t fit.

He feels it for so long that he properly terrifies Ilya. When he surfaces, he finds Ilya in the middle of a furious, pointless fight with his husband—about the soup, about the curtains, about nothing—shouting in their own language, and then crying, loudly and without any dignity at all, fists knotted in the general’s shirt. The general holds him and doesn’t understand. Shane sends love down the line, and it only makes Ilya cry harder.

So Shane puts it down. Not away; he can’t put it away. Just down, somewhere he can pick it up again later.

For Ilya.

The first time it happens, Shane almost misses it. He’s drifting near the bottom of the line, half watching. It’s early. The general is still asleep, sprawled across most of the bed, one arm flung over Ilya as if Ilya might blow away in the night. Ilya isn’t asleep. Ilya is very carefully easing out from under the arm, and there’s something coming up the line from him that Shane has never felt before.

It takes him a moment. It’s glee.

What are you doing?

—hush—

What he’s doing takes most of the morning. By the time the general wakes, every hem of every garment he owns has a row of tiny silver bells sewn into it. His cloak. His shirts. His boots, somehow. There’s a bell braided into his hair just behind one pointed ear, where he won’t find it for a week.

The general gets up. He takes one step, and jingles. He stops. He takes another step. Jingles. He turns, very slowly, and looks at the bed, where Ilya is sitting with both hands over his mouth, shaking.

And then Ilya laughs.

Not the small hushed bell from the lights. This is the real thing, and Shane feels it all the way up the line: loud and bright and helpless, a whole peal of bells, the laugh of someone who stole the queen’s plums every summer and danced the shoes off his feet. It fills the room. It comes out of Shane’s mouth, and it sounds nothing like Shane.

The general doesn’t laugh. He sits down on the floor where he stands, in a jangle of bells. And the Storm-lord of the Seelie court, once stern and courteous and composed, puts his face in his hands and sobs great, ugly, heaving sobs, the kind that come when all lights have been put out, when all hope has been lost.

Ilya stops laughing. He scrambles off the bed, frightened, and climbs into his husband’s lap, and the general holds on to him like a drowning man.

“You used to do this,” he says into Ilya’s hair. His voice is wrecked. “Every midsummer. You put bells on everything. The queen’s horses. My sword. The ambassador from the Winter Court.”

—he did not like it— Ilya sends up the line, shakily. —the ambassador—thought I was disgracing my blood—

“I thought I’d never—” the general says, and can’t finish. “I thought I would never hear it again.”

Shane watches from very far away, and something in him aches in a way he can’t name. He’s only ever known the Wanderer: the sad flicker, the scrap in the dark, the quiet one. He never knew this was underneath. He never knew there was this much of him.

The bells stay on. The general doesn’t take out a single one. He jingles through the house for weeks, up the stairs and down the halls and through the garden, a small bright racket announcing him everywhere he goes. The servants learn to smile behind their hands. Ilya is unbearably smug about it.

And Shane, drifting in the lights, finds he doesn’t mind the sound at all. It means everyone always knows where the general is.

V Down the line

It’s Ilya’s idea, of course.

—come—come see—

See what?

—the sun—it’s warm today—through the window—you would like it—come down the line—

No.

Ilya doesn’t argue. He asks again next visit, softly, and the one after that. He brings it up the line with him every time: warm stone, a breeze with salt in it, something that smells of oranges. He doesn’t push. He leaves the door open.

Shane says no for a long time. He doesn’t know how to explain it. It isn’t only the general. It’s that the body is where it happened. Down there at the bottom of the line are the stone and the knives and the smell, everything he floated away from. He’s been up in the lights so long he’s forgotten what it’s like to be heavy. He’s afraid he’ll remember.

—I will hold you— Ilya says. —the whole time—and if you want to go—you go—nobody can make you—

Nobody can make you. Shane turns that over for a long time too. Then, one afternoon, he says yes. For a moment.

They go down together, the way they did the first time, only the other way round now: Ilya leading, Shane holding on. The line gets warmer, and heavier, and louder. Near the bottom, Shane almost stops. Ilya doesn’t pull. He waits. Shane goes the rest of the way himself.

It’s like stepping into someone else’s shoes, like sinking into someone’s favourite armchair, moulded to their body over years. Ilya is there, holding the body loosely, making room, and then Shane is in it, and everything arrives at once.

Weight. So much weight, every part of him pulled toward the floor. A heartbeat, loud and close, going and going. Breath moving in and out without being asked. Sun on the skin of his arms, real sun, heat that sinks in. Something sweet and sticky in his mouth, a fruit he doesn’t know, half-eaten; Ilya must have been in the middle of it. The weave of a blanket under his fingers. Five fingers. His.

And the scars. He feels them before he sees them: thin, ridged lines along his forearms and across his ribs, pulling a little when he breathes. He knows exactly where they came from. He knows the order they came in.

He should leave. He’s going to leave.

—here—I’m here—breathe— Ilya says, from very close, from inside. —look—look at the light—

He looks. There’s a window, open, and past it a sky of a colour Earth never had. The light falls across the floor in a long gold shape. Somewhere outside a bird is saying the same two notes over and over. It’s so beautiful he doesn’t know what to do with it. He stays for three heartbeats. Four. He counts them. He’d forgotten how good it is to have something to count.

Then there are footsteps in the hall, heavy ones, and the door opens, and a red shape fills it.

The body knows before he does. It jolts as if it’s been struck—his terror and its memory, one thing—the heart slamming, the breath gone. And Shane is back up the line before he knows he’s moved, back in the lights, shaking, if spirits can shake.

Below, he feels Ilya steadying the body. Feels the general stop dead in the doorway. What is it? What’s wrong? Are you ill?

No, nothing. Only a dream.

Shane curls up small in the lights and waits for the shaking to stop. After a while, Ilya comes up to him.

—you did it—four heartbeats—you did it—

I ran.

—you went—you went first—that is the brave part—

Shane doesn’t believe him. But he keeps the four heartbeats anyway, the sun and the fruit and the bird, and turns them over, and they don’t wear smooth.

Ilya doesn’t push. The next time is longer.

He comes down more after that. Only when the general is out, only for a little while. He learns the room: the window, the blanket, the bowl of fruit, the long gold shape the sun makes on the floor in the afternoon and the slow way it moves. He learns to breathe on purpose, and then to stop needing to. Ilya stays with him every time, a warmth at his back, and never once lets go.

The general notices before anyone tells him. Shane doesn’t know what gives him away. Something in how the body holds its shoulders, maybe, a little higher, a little braced. How it watches the door. How it eats the fruit: Ilya peels everything, carefully, delighted by the peeling, and Shane just bites.

One afternoon the general comes back early. The body flinches. It can’t help it. Shane is already halfway up the line when Ilya says, very softly, —wait—wait—look—

The general has gone very still in the doorway. He looks at the body, at the half-bitten fruit, at the shoulders. Something crosses his face that Shane has never seen there. It takes him a long time to name it. It’s fear.

Then, very slowly, the general lowers himself to the floor. Down and down, the way he did when he begged Ilya to stay, until he’s sitting on the boards just inside the door with his knees drawn up, as small as something that size can be. He puts his great red hands flat on his knees, where they can be seen. He doesn’t come any closer.

“That isn’t him,” he says quietly. “Is it. It’s you.”

Shane can’t make the mouth work. His tongue is a stone. Ilya does it for him, gently, the way you’d help someone hold a cup.

“Yes.”

The general looks at him for a long time. Not the way he looked from the doorway that first day, as if at something stuck to his boot. He looks at him as if he’s seeing him for the first time, and it frightens him.

“What may I call you?” he asks.

It’s the old courteous form. Ilya has told him about it: among the fae a name is never taken, only given, and what may I call you is how you ask without reaching for it. It leaves the true name where it belongs, and offers a door out. It’s what a lord of the Seelie court says to a guest. To an equal.

He never said that or anythign like it before. Nobody has asked. In all that time—the bag and the market and the stone and the knives, all that time—nobody has ever asked.

Shane could give him anything: a nickname, a word. Something to be called by that costs nothing. He doesn’t know whether names work on humans the way they work on the fae, whether handing it over gives the general anything he could use.

“Shane.”

The general repeats it. He gets it wrong, the vowel too long, too careful, like a man carrying something that might spill. He tries again. Closer. Then he understands what he’s been handed, and goes even more still.

“Shane,” he says. And then, after a moment, very low: “I didn’t ask. Before.”

“No,” Shane says.

“I should have asked.”

He doesn’t say sorry. Shane is glad. Sorry would be such a small word, set down next to all of that. It would stretch and suffer and disintegrate.

They sit like that for a long time, the general on the floor by the door and Shane on the bed with his arms around his knees. Neither of them moves. The gold shape of the sun slides slowly across the boards between them. It reaches the general’s boot. Then his knee. Shane watches it go.

When he leaves, he doesn’t run. He goes up the line slowly, on purpose, like he’s walking out of a room.

—proud— Ilya says later, up in the lights, wrapped around him. —so proud—

I didn’t do anything. I sat there.

—yes— Ilya says. —you sat there—

The next day there’s a new bowl of fruit by the bed. None of it is peeled.

It’s easier, after that, and stranger.

Shane comes down more often. Sometimes he rides along behind Ilya’s eyes; sometimes Ilya steps back and lets him have the hands, the ears, the feet on the cold floor. They share it clumsily at first, bumping into each other, both reaching for the same cup. Then less clumsily. Like two people learning to dance in a small room.

And he starts telling them things.

That the body needs water more often than that. That it can’t eat whatever that is, no, not even a little; it doesn’t matter that it’s a delicacy. That it’s cold, it’s always cold here, give it socks. That it needs to sleep every night, and yes, every night, and no, that isn’t a sign of illness. That it burns if you leave it in the sun. That it bruises if you look at it wrong, and a bruise doesn’t mean it’s dying, and neither does a nosebleed, so stop shouting.

Ilya doesn’t know any of it; he’s never been human. He laughs at most of it, delighted, the way he laughed at the peeling. The general knows even less, and takes every word like scripture. Shane finds out later that he’s been writing it down. There’s a book by the bed, and in it, in a huge careful hand, a list. Water. Socks. Sleep every night. Nosebleeds are not dangerous. Sensitive hearing.

Shane looks at that list for a long time and doesn’t know what he feels.

The general asks him questions now. Through Ilya at first, and then, haltingly, to Shane himself, when he can tell which of them is there. Is this too hot? Is that too heavy? Does it hurt when you do that? Are you cold? Small questions. Constant questions. He asks the way someone does after learning he may. Shane answers most of them. It’s strange how much easier it is to answer than to never be asked.

It took Ilya weeks to get the general to touch him with any kind of purpose at all. Shane watched from inside, half hidden: Ilya half begging, the general shaking his head, backing away. In the end Ilya took his own hand—Shane’s hand—and pressed the fingertips into the general’s palm, one by one. Pressed hard. See? See? It does not break. Then he set the general’s great thumb against the soft inside of his wrist and held it there, and let him feel the pulse go on, and on, unbroken.

Shane laughed. He couldn’t help it. The general looked so frightened, so utterly certain that breathing on the body might kill it. It came out of the mouth, his laugh, out loud, in the room. The general went very still, and looked at him, and said nothing at all.

It probably isn’t funny. Shane knows that. If they lose this body, Ilya might die for good. Shane wouldn’t survive that, he knows he wouldn’t.

The general has. The general had him, and loved him, and lost him, and lived through every single day after. Shane thinks it might be the worst suffering there is. He can almost pity him for that. Some days he does.

And some days the bird outside the window says its two notes, and they sound, for no reason at all, like someone far away calling for him to come in already, that dinner is ready. Then he has to go up the line for a while, and float in the lights, and not think about anything.

Ilya never asks where he goes on those days. He leaves the window open.

Being around the general is still hard. He doesn’t hate him anymore. He’s surprised to find that’s true. The man he hated hasn’t existed for a long time. But the body remembers what Shane has decided to forgive, and the body doesn’t take instructions.

If he isn’t braced—if the general comes round a corner too fast, or reaches past him for a cup, or stands up too suddenly from a chair—the body jumps. Flinches. Goes white and cold and shaking. At night, it screams.

It hurts all of them. It hurts the general, who goes grey and silent and stays out of the room for days. Most of all, it hurts Ilya, and Shane will never let anything hurt Ilya.

Last night was bad. A nightmare: the stone and the smell and the knives. He surfaced into the body in the dark, and there was a red shape bending over the bed—only checking, only ever checking now—and Shane screamed the house down. The general backed out of the room so fast he broke the door frame. Afterwards Ilya was loud and bright all day, teasing, laughing too much, too quick with every joke, and then quiet, after that. Slow and sluggish, eyes dull, worn to the quick.

So in the afternoon Shane marches out to the general, who is standing at the far end of the garden as if he’s been exiled there.

“We have to get over this,” he says. And then, because that isn’t right: “I have to get over this.”

The general doesn’t turn round at once. When he does, his face is tired in a way Shane hasn’t seen before.

“I don’t know what to say,” he says carefully. “Nobody has more reason to fear me than you. Whatever my intentions, my madness—I know now how gentle your body is. How beautiful and fragile and soft. Unforgivable doesn’t begin to cover it. It is a sin I can never atone for.”

Shane very carefully doesn’t say good, because it’s cruel and he mostly doesn’t mean it.

“It’s upsetting him,” he says firmly. “I won’t have it. You and I are doing exposure therapy.”

The general looks at him without much comprehension. “Is that some human healing technique?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

It goes like this. The first day, the general stands at one end of the garden, and Shane stands at the other, and they look at each other until Shane’s hands stop shaking. It takes most of an hour. The general doesn’t move once. Shane suspects he doesn’t blink. The second day it takes half an hour. The third day, the general takes one step.

They do it every afternoon. Some days it goes backwards. One day Shane gets as far as standing within arm’s reach, and then a bird bursts out of a hedge, and he’s up the line before he knows it, and Ilya has to come down and finish the afternoon for him. The general sits on the grass afterwards with his head in his hands. But the next day they go again.

And the general learns things, the way he learned water and socks. He learns never to come up from behind. He learns to keep his hands where they can be seen. He learns to move slowly, and to sit down when he can, so he isn’t so tall. And one night Shane hears something new in the hall outside the bedroom: a low, tuneless humming, getting closer. The general, announcing himself. So he’s never sudden. So he’s never a surprise in the dark.

He hums every night after that; he’s terrible at it.

VI Like this

It starts with a lamp. It’s evening, and the room is dim, and the general, without thinking, says a word, and the lamp on the table lights itself. That’s all. A small, soft word. A small, soft light.

The body goes to pieces.

Shane has the body when it happens. He’s seen magic before, more and more of it these days, and he’d thought he’d built up something of a resistance. Turns out he hasn’t. Seeing magic, the quiet, passive evidence of it, is one thing. Feeling the old, heavy crackle of the general’s magic is another.

He’s suddenly on the floor, back against the wall, knees up, hands over his mouth, and he can’t breathe, and the room is full of chanting that isn’t there and the smell of something burning. The general has gone white under the red-gold. Ilya is saying something from very close, from inside, and Shane can’t hear it.

It takes a long time to come back. When he does, the general is on the far side of the room, kneeling, as far away as the walls allow, both hands flat on the floor where Shane can see them. The lamp has been put out. There are no lamps anywhere. There won’t be, Shane learns later, for a month: the whole house goes back to candles, lit by hand with flint and steel, by a lord of the Seelie court who has to ask a servant how.

“I didn’t think,” the general says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think.”

It’s the first time he’s said it. Sorry. It doesn’t disappear, the way Shane always thought it would. It just sits there on the floor between them, small, and sad, working hard.

After that, Shane notices the whispering. Not whispering, exactly. The general and Ilya talk the way they always do, low, in their own language, heads together. But they stop when he comes down the line. Once, surfacing, he finds a book open on the table, old and heavy and written in something the potions never taught him, and the general closes it a little too quickly.

Down in the body, Ilya is very good at this. He always was, Shane suspects: a smile, a joke, a bell, and nobody looks too closely. Up in the lights, he can’t do it at all.

What are you two doing?

—nothing—

It comes out bent. Up here there’s no room for it; the not-quite-true sits between them like a stone in a stream, and the light has to go around it.

—nothing bad— And then, all at once, because he can’t hold it: —a body—for me—my own—he says it can be done—then you would not have to share—you would have it back—your life—just yours—

Under the hope there’s something sore. Shane knows its shape by now: the fear of taking up too much room in a borrowed house.

A body, Shane says. Where from?

—made—he can make one—clay and craft and—the book says—

Ilya is a prince of mischief and revelry, not a scholar, and it’s the general’s book, not his. The words come out in pieces.

Shane looks around at the lights. At their edges, where they used to be only his gold and violet, there’s a new warmth, a brighter gold that wasn’t there before Ilya came in from the cold. Everyone has a light, Ilya told him once. Fae, human, anything with a soul, though most never find the door, and only walkers ever step through it awake. Since the two of them are walkers, and Shane decided to open his, this one is theirs.

Didn’t you lose your light? he says. Does the book make you one of those too?

Silence.

A body made out of clay never had a soul in it, Shane says. Doesn’t have a light. So where does your line go?

—it—the book says—

Where does it go, Ilya?

A long pause. When the answer comes, it comes small. —nowhere—i don’t have a line—or a light—

A candle in a hollow doll, guttering. Nowhere to go home to. Again.

Or, Shane says, and he’s going very cold and very calm, the book says something else. It says you don’t make a body, you find one. One that already has a lamp, and a line, and somebody at the other end of it. And you go down and make them leave.

Ilya doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. Up here, not answering is an answer.

Shane knows what it is to be made to leave. He knows exactly what it takes. Bowls, and knives, and a stone platform, and someone who wants a body more than they care who’s in it.

No, he says.

—but—

No. Absolutely not. Where is he?

The general is in the library, with the book. He stands when Shane comes in—he always stands now, when it’s Shane—and the bells on his hem ring. For a moment he looks exactly like a man caught with his hand in the queen’s orchard.

“Ilya told you,” he says.

“Ilya can’t lie to me,” Shane says. “Up there he can’t lie at all. You should both remember that.” He sits down because his knees are shaking, and folds his arms. “Listen to me. It’s sweet. It’s flattering that you’re both worried about me. But you”—he points—“have done just about all the black magic you will ever do. You’re retired. From all of it. The evil overlording, the rituals, the twisted, forbidden arts, the lot. And he”—a jab at his own chest, where Ilya is—“is never doing a crazy arcane experiment again as long as he lives, which is going to be a very long time, because nobody is cutting anything. Nobody is making anything. We’re done.”

The general stares at him.

“We’re all going to live,” Shane says, “happily ever fucking after. Like this. Do you understand?”

A long silence. Somewhere inside, Ilya has gone very quiet, the way he does when he’s trying not to cry, or laugh, or both. Then the general bows. Not a nod: a real bow, deep and formal, one hand over his heart. The bells on his hem chime all the way down.

“I understand,” he says. And then, very quietly: “Thank you.”

Shane pushes the book across the table. “Burn that.” The general does, that night, in the kitchen hearth, with his own hands. Tears are going down his cheeks, the clear liquid looking like blood across his dark red skin. He seems the most relieved of the three.

A few nights later, Shane wakes in the dark. He has the body, and he doesn’t know why he’s awake, and then he does. Out in the hall there’s a low, tuneless humming, and the faint silver jingle of bells, coming closer, and then stopping by the door. Waiting.

The general always waits now. He’ll stand out there as long as it takes, until he’s sure.

Shane lies still and listens to his own heart. It’s going fast, but not the old way. Not the platform way. Just fast.

“I’m awake,” he says into the dark. “It’s fine.”

A pause. The humming stops.

“Come in,” Shane says. “It’s cold in here.”

The door opens slowly. The general comes in slowly, hands where they can be seen, the way he does everything now. He gets into the bed as if it might break under him and lies very still, with a careful handspan of sheet between them.

Up the line, Ilya is being unbearably smug. Shane ignores him.

After a while, he puts his cold feet on the general’s leg.

The general makes a small, surprised sound, then something else, and doesn’t move away. He runs warm. He always ran warm. Shane can feel it all the way through.

—why— Ilya asks one night, up in the lights. —why do you try so hard—for him—

Shane thinks about it. He does try, he supposes, and tries again, and tries harder after that. He needs to. Shane respects the general plenty, more than he ever wanted to. He pities him. Some nights he’s so afraid of him he can’t breathe. None of that is why.

He thinks about Ilya, crying over a peach because it reminded him of someone. Ilya cross-legged on the bed at dawn with a needle and a hundred silver bells, shaking with silent laughter. Ilya stealing the last candied plum off his husband’s plate and eating it in front of him, slowly, eyes hooded, taunting. Ilya shaking the general awake for no reason at all, to show him the sun on the water in the garden trough. The clear ring of his laugh, the gold at the edges of Shane’s lights, that wasn't there before.

A scrap in the dark, once, with barely enough left of him to beg Shane not to fade. And now this: this bright, loud, impossible thing, coming back to life a little more every day, in Shane’s own soul.

Isn’t it always love? he says.