Waldegrave looks up and opens his mouth as Harry makes his way over. Thomas Howland tries to shush him, but Waldegrave bats him away and says in his high, screeching voice, ‘What I want to know is if Lyon is fucking that squire of his because, God’s breath, that boy’s pretty.’
‘No,’ Harry splutters, angry and incredulous.
‘Pity,’ Waldegrave shrugs. ‘That’s what they’re there for. Of course, pages are even better, but I’d make an exception for that boy of Lyon’s.’
Harry thinks of Waldegrave’s squire running out into the mêlée, of the boy’s blind affection for such a repulsive man, and feels sick.
‘That savage?’ one of the other knights says, snatching the jug of brandy out of Waldegrave’s hand. He was one of the twelve who rode to Scotland, Guy d’Audley, a big olive-skinned man with a scarred cheek. ‘You know he’s the one we captured, right? Be worried he’d slit my throat in my sleep. Somewhat surprised he hasn’t cut Harry’s.’
Montagu watches them all with hooded eyes, over a cup of small beer.
‘Oh no,’ Waldegrave says, leaning back and patting his expansive stomach. ‘I bet he’s the kind that would beg for it. Those tough-acting ones always are. Spreading his cheeks, crying out to be filled up … with that long hair and fine features, he’s halfway to being a woman anyway.’
Colin Crocker shakes his head and snickers. ‘If that’s how your Yorkshire women are built, Waldegrave, no wonder you go for the pages.’
Waldegrave gestures with one of his little hands. ‘Still. Imagine bending that over a table … How tight he’d be. Bet he’s loud too.’ He turns to Harry and licks his lips. ‘What’s fuck me harder in Scots?’
Harry stands up so sharply that the bench he’s sitting on clatters onto its side. His wound sends hot bolts of pain throughout his body but he clenches his jaw, not letting it show in his face. He’s learned from the best.
‘Yes?’ Montagu says, raising an eyebrow.
‘If you touch my squire,’ Harry says to Waldegrave, low and threatening, ‘the only moaning and crying to be heard will be your own, as he rips your guts out of your belly with his bare hands and then chokes you to death with them.’ He throws his cup onto the ground. ‘Good night, gentlemen,’ he says as he leaves.
Harry hears Colin Crocker’s mocking kissing noises and the laughter and whistles of Montagu’s men as he storms off, but he doesn’t care. He stalks out of the castle into the night, not caring where he ends up, until he finds himself quite alone in the middle of a copse, as far as he can tell in the opposite direction from the tournament fields.
He sinks down against a birch tree and lets the tears come, an ugly tangle of rage and frustration and fear.
And then he reaches down and presses against his shame.
Because that was the worst part of listening to Waldegrave’s filth.
It made him hard.
Images of Iain come into his mind, unbidden and unwelcome. Iain in the rain, bare-chested, swinging the practice broadsword. Iain in Harry’s armour, the knight’s belt low on his hips. Iain in the tack room at Dartington, leaning against the saddle, legs spread in invitation. Iain on his knees, attaching the straps of Harry’s chausses before a tournament, looking up at him, those plush lips parted in question.
Harry pulls his straining dick out of his breeches and strokes himself, imagining Iain’s hands moving from the leather straps at his thigh to his cock, freeing it from the linen folds of his braies and tilting his head as he gazes up at Harry the same way he does when attaching Harry’s armour, Is this right? Is this what I do next? And then taking Harry in his mouth, those bowed lips that could go from savage to spoilt over the course of a breath now stretched over Harry’s cock, taking it in all the way, fast and sloppy as Iain comes off him and moans and begs Harry to fuck him, and Harry says they can’t, they’re in the pavilion and due out in a few minutes, and anyone could hear, but he fucks his release into Iain’s mouth and Iain’s so eager, letting himself be used, savage for everyone except his Harry, Harry who loves him—
He comes shatteringly hard, so hard he gasps as pain floods his chest from the lance wound, so hard he’s dizzy with it. And then he sits there and lets the hot tears run down his cheeks as his dick softens and the seed on his hands cools into an unpleasant, sticky mess.
Because he loves Iain.
His strong, brave, wild Iain, who charms the bitchy old heraldry clerks with Latin insults and has Annie wrapped around his little finger and who knocked Rabbie Ufford into a pile of horseshit because winning a tournament mattered to Harry.
He knows now the word for the soaring feeling he gets in his chest every time he looks at his squire. He knows now the name of the song his body sings when he touches his friend.
It is love.
And it is impossible.
He is brought back to the present by a rustle of leaves. For a lucky man, it would be a fieldmouse or a squirrel, going about its nocturnal business.
But Harry is not a lucky man.
Montagu steps out of the shadows in front of him. ‘Well,’ says the Baron, cocking an eyebrow at Harry’s disarray, ‘I see he managed to seduce you.’
Harry shoves his dick back in his breeches and stands, wiping his hand on the tree trunk. ‘I like to think it was mutual,’ he says.
Montagu snorts in amusement. ‘Harry. He’s from a family that have been playing games with the fates of nations since both our forefathers were simple Norman spear-chuckers. Honestly, my only regret in this whole endeavour is I’ll never get to match up directly against him, see what he could do if given some power.’ He
