A tentative tapping sounded at the door. Uachi woke with his hand already under his pillow, his fingers sliding over the cool sheets and finding nothing there.

He opened his eyes. The faint light of dawn was just beginning to filter in through the curtains, illuminating unfamiliar shapes. He stiffened, braced for attack, but even as he was counting the intruders—four, perhaps a crouched fifth man—he realized they were nothing more than the stationary forms of bedroom furniture and the gentle drape of the curtains.

He sat up. The sheet fell away from him, and chill air raised gooseflesh over his naked arms and chest.

He turned his head to see Diarmán, awake, still curled in the blankets but looking up at him. It was hard to make out the details of his face in the gloom. "You scared me," he whispered.

"I'm sorry," Uachi replied, equally soft.

"Are you—?" Diarmán gathered the sheet in one hand, drawing it up to his chest as he propped himself up on his elbow. His hair was loose over his brow, and he sounded uncharacteristically hesitant. "Are you okay? Are you troubled?"

Uachi frowned, confused. "Troubled?" he echoed. He did not have to be able to see the finer details of Diarmán's features to understand him. He reached out, brushing his hair back from his brow, and leaned in to kiss his forehead. "No. Of course not."

Diarmán tilted his head up, and Uachi responded naturally to the invitation with a warm, soft kiss to his lips. Diarmán exhaled softly through his nose, a silent sigh of relief. Memories of the night they shared flooded Uachi's mind, awakening his senses—perhaps a precursor to other invitations that could be made. But he remembered that something had woken him, and—

The gentle tap came again, a knock at the door.

Diarmán broke away, looking over his shoulder. He sighed and fell back onto the bed, burying his face into his pillow. "What do they want?" he moaned quietly.

"Shall I open it?" Uachi asked.

"What?" Diarmán dragged himself fully upright this time. "Honestly?"

"Well, you aren't exactly springing out of bed."

"If you go to the door, they'll know we..."

Uachi raised his eyebrows, waiting, but Diarmán did not finish his thought, so he slid to the edge of the bed and searched for what clothing he could find. After the silence had stretched on for a moment longer, he said, "Unless it bothers you, it does not bother me. You are nothing to be ashamed of."

"Oh."

"If it will cause you trouble with your family—with your grandfather—"

Diarmán's voice was shaped by his grin. "You'd be my hidden mistress?"

Uachi snorted. "I'll be nobody's mistress. But I will hide out of sight, if you wish it."

There was another silence as Uachi dragged on his trousers and stood. As he was pulling on his tunic, another gentle rap sounded at the door. "Lord Diarmán? I'm sorry, my lord, but you must wake up. It's important."

"I don't want you to hide." Diarmán was up now, gathering his own clothes. His search brought him to the end of the bed, where he encountered Uachi, reaching for his cowl. He did not wear it when they were alone together, but he kept it on him at all times, stuffed in his pocket as it had been last night or draped around his neck like a scarf.

Diarmán put his hand over Uachi's. He took the cowl, pulling it away, and threw it onto the bed, meeting Uachi's eye as he raised his voice. "Just a moment!"

"Diarmán—"

"I don't want you to hide," said Diarmán. He reached up, brushing his fingers over Uachi's scarred jawline, light and soft. Uachi felt the pressure of his fingertips, although it was a dull and distant sensation, different than the usual feeling of skin against skin—an echo, no more. "Not anything. Forgive me, Uachi. It's only that I've never had...this...before."

He raised up onto his toes and kissed Uachi again, lightly. He broke away and had opened the door before Uachi could decide how to feel or whether to search through the rumpled sheets for his cowl.

On the other side of the door was the cook, looking exhausted and anxious. Her hands were trembling, clasped at her waist.

"Brente? What are you doing out of bed at this hour of the morning?" Diarmán asked. His tone was one of astonished concern, not chastisement. He wasn't as compassionate toward his servingmen and women as some—Empress Mhera, for example, who never had grown used to having servants at all—but he had the positive quality in a nobleman of viewing them as people, and he had seemed particularly attentive to Brente, who was frail and, as far as Uachi had seen, the only household staff member remaining if Aerte could not be counted. "You're shivering. Gods below, it's freezing. I'll get you my cloak."

"Oh, no, Lord Diarmán, please. I'll only be a minute. It's just—your family. They need you." Her gaze drifted past Diarmán to where Uachi stood behind him in the room. The ranger did not move, and he met her eye calmly. He would rather fluster her than let anyone think he was ashamed.

He'd been ashamed before of taking a lover, but she had been a prisoner and he'd had reason to hang his head. Diarmán was a free man. They had done nothing wrong, and he would not give Diarmán the slightest cause to doubt him. For all his bravado, he was a man of enough doubts and secret shames.

"The family? What's happened?" Diarmán asked.

Brente looked at him, her brow shadowed, her eyes glassy. "They need you," she said, and then it was obvious.

The only reason a servant would knock in the middle of the night, having not been called, would be an emergency. Brente had come to collect Diarmán to bring him to his grandfather's deathbed.

Had the old man already died, Uachi wondered, or did he linger on? He'd never attended a death himself, but he knew there were signs; for experienced death-nurses, it was usually clear when the family should be called.

"Do you want me to come with you?" Uachi asked.

"What for? Why do they need me?" Diarmán asked, directing the question to Brente. He ran his hand back through his hair, shaking out the curls and leaving them messier than they had been. "It's the middle of the night."

"My lord—"

"Whatever it is can wait until morning."

Uachi wasn't a terribly sensitive man, but he was perceptive, even around strangers, and Diarmán was not a stranger. He knew him well, knew his shifting moods. He could feel a knife's edge in a joke or taste the bitterness in a self-deprecating comment.

Now, he heard the tinny vibration of panic just under that careless dismissal. Diarmán's laugh was almost harsh. "Waking me in the dead of night—and you quaking from the cold. I'll have a word with them in the morning, Brente, you can be sure of that. Good night."

"My lord," she pleaded.

Uachi put a hand on Diarmán's shoulder. "We should—"

Diarmán shook him off, turning toward him with a frown. "We? We should do nothing. Whatever my family wishes to discuss, you can be certain it doesn't concern you."

It was the prick of a needle: a sharp, bright red pain. Uachi stared at Diarmán, and when anger swelled in his chest, he took a slow breath instead of speaking, cooling the heat of it. Then he put his hand on Diarmán's shoulder again, firmly. "You know what this is, Diarmán," he said. "If fighting with me will make it any better, do as you will. Either way, you cannot push me out. Try, if you must; I'm twice your size."

For a moment, it was as if the anger Uachi had refused to feel had flooded Diarmán instead. He glared at Uachi, his jaw and his shoulders tight. He tried to shake his hand off again; when he failed, he twisted away, turning his back.

Uachi looked at Brente. "Thank you," he said. "He'll come when he's ready."

Exhausted gratitude shone in her eyes for a moment. Then she dropped her gaze, gave a creaky half-curtsy, and turned away. Uachi pushed the door nearly closed; a shaft of greasy yellow light from the hall slanted into the shadowed room, slicing Diarmán in half.

The young lord stepped forward, picking up a half-drunk glass cup of mead one of them had left on the sideboard the evening prior, before they had lost all sense of time or place. He drained the mead in two swallows, then stared at the empty glass in his hand.

Uachi drew a breath to speak, but before he could, Diarmán slammed his fist onto the sideboard, glass and all. It broke, splinters tinkling onto the floor. His face twisted in a snarl, Diarmán tightened his fist, then opened it with a hiss. In the darkness, his palm dripped black with blood.

Biting back a curse, Uachi took Diarmán's wrist, tugging him around toward him roughly. With his thumbs, he spread his fingers open. Smeared blood obscured the wounds, pooling in the creases of Diarmán's hand.

Without speaking, Uachi turned back to the bed. He found his cowl in the sheets, and then he tugged Diarmán into the hallway, where the poor light of the oil lamp and a few gentle brushes with the pad of his thumb were all he could use to search for embedded pieces of glass. He found none, which did not mean that there were none, but they would need to be dealt with later. He tore his cowl into strips, using one to bind Diarmán's hand. Diarmán grimaced in pain. Uachi could not quite muster an apology, but he managed to hold back a sarcastic comment.

Just as they both knew what Brente's arrival had signaled, Uachi knew what this was. It was grief and guilt in anger's clothing. They had spoken of venturing to make amends, and they had gone to bed instead, and the moment was gone forever.

Finally, staring down at his bandaged hand, Diarmán said, "We should go down." He sounded calm, but when he looked up at Uachi, his expression was bleak.

Uachi met his lover's eyes. "Okay. Let me get your coat; it's cold."