Chapter Text
“He would be happier with you whole than he would be with a hundred thrones,” Murdoch says to Clive.
Joshua crouches outside the armory where Clive and Murdoch disappeared an hour ago. Clive doesn't keep secrets unless they're the bad kind and never for long. Needs must. Around the door he can see Clive looking at his sword propped against the wall, and at nothing. A single glove is held in his hand, gripped tight, and his oilcloth in the other, both forgotten.
“He only needs the one,” Clive says. “If we lose Rosalith…”
“We will not lose Rosalith,” Murdoch is quick to say. “We could send for Shiva, if needs must.”
“No. The last thing we need is the Ironblood getting their hands on a Dominant. If I could send Joshua from the city, I would.” But Rosalith is safer than Eastpool. They’ve been over this. “Without Drake’s Breath, these attacks will be endless.”
Clive looks to Murdoch. A conversation happens, unspoken. Murdoch shakes his head. “It is suicide, my lord. And we haven’t the men.”
“And the Ironblood haven’t an Eikon.”
“You may hand them one if you do not take care.” Murdoch flexes his right arm. The left is in a sling, still. In three years since the Night of Flames, it’s gotten no better. The guilt for the wound is shared; they will never know if it was the fires Sanbreque set or the flames of their shared Eikons that took it. “I could ride out with you. I’m not so decrepit.”
“No. I need you here. Joshua—”
“Yes. I know.”
There is no one he trusts with Joshua’s keeping. He’s wary of all, even of the Undying. In three years, they’ve succeeded in weeding out most of those who would have taken their chance to dethrone the Rosfields, but that memory sits heavier in Clive’s heart than it does in Joshua’s. There are days Joshua doesn’t wonder if Clive distrusts even the walls of the castle.
Murdoch stands. “Swear to me you will not try to take Drake’s Breath.”
Clive does nothing of the sort. “I will do what I must. They wreak havoc. Uncle can barely hold Isolde as it is.” And trade. Trade has dried up. Nothing comes from Sanbreque by decree, and less and less from Dhalmek overland as the years pass. His tutors do not tell him this. Even the Undying obscure their situation. It’s Clive who explains these things.
For three years now, they’ve been clawing back from the brink they almost fell over on that night. Clive’s been holding them back from the edge, but only just. A tickle starts in the back of his throat and he knows it’ll be a cough, one of those uncontrollable ones that only in the last few months stopped being accompanied by the tang of blood in the back of his mouth and a week of bed rest. He ducks back away, out of the hall and toward the yard.
The day is bright and the garden is in bloom. Torgal rests in the sun on the white stone. Joshua joins him and prays no one will come across him sitting with a hound when he ought to be doing anything useful. He likes work—likes being useful. But it never feels enough when he’s meting out decrees and practicing handwriting while Clive is off making war for both their lives. Father left them a list, and this was the exchange, they decided. Clive decided.
This is how we’ll honor him, he said, with a hand on Joshua’s shoulder. You look after Rosalith and I’ll—
And you’ll look after me.
A month, this time. He's been home a month. Joshua can smell it on him now the cagey way he gets when he knows he’ll be leaving soon and cannot bear to ruin what remains of their time together. He can't keep a secret and can't tell a lie. Of course, he was going to leave again.
Clive finds him before the next bell. He squats down and ruffles Torgal’s ears and Joshua’s hair both at the same time, and Joshua pretends he did not have his face buried in the dog’s fur a moment before.
“You're leaving me again.”
Clive stares over at him. “No,” he starts, stops, and then shifts. “Not right away. The Ironblood are…”
Joshua wipes at his eye and pretends its sleep there and not something else. “I know.”
If they lose Isolde, they lose Rosalith in a fortnight—if they’re lucky. If they aren’t, then Sanbreque will see its chance, and Dhalmek will start pecking away at the south again. Rosaria will become a feasting table for three hungry nations. He is, it seems, always playing a game that no one taught him the rules to. As soon as they’ve put out one fire, another starts on the other side of the country. The roads wind; the weather is difficult. He’s memorized the distances, the times it will take Clive and his men to traverse Rosalith from one end to the other and back again. Weeks that become months. He’ll be lucky to see Clive again before winter.
“I know,” Joshua repeats, as Clive’s fingers settle deeper in his hair, carding out the apology he can’t make. “I know you have to go. If we lose Rosalith, we lose—” Rosaria, he means to say, but Clive interrupts him.
“—I lose you. There isn’t a place I could send you on Storm safer than this city.” He smiles. “Allow me to do my duty, lord marquess.” The title sounds funny on his lips.
Joshua rises and sorts himself. “I can order you to stay.” He won’t, and he wouldn’t.
Clive’s smile tugs to one side. “You can try.”
Heat burns behind his eyes, but he will not cry. It's ridiculous that he would even think to.
“I’ll write you every day," Clive goes on, trying hard to make amends for something he hasn't done wrong.
“No, you won’t.” He wipes at his eyes again. “That’s a waste. Write when you can, and I will write you in kind.”
“When you can,” Clive says. He lets his hand slide to Joshua’s shoulder. He dreads the moment he’ll pull it away; would like to reach up and hold it there and hang onto it and let him go not at all. “I have Ifrit. And I have your fire. Don’t worry so.”
He always worries so. It’s all he can do for Clive, it seems. "I won't."
Clive makes to pull away, but Joshua stills him. “Come here,” he orders, but Clive is already right there. He frowns and it scrunches between his brow. Joshua beckons him closer still, as if to whisper something in his ear and then catches his face between both hands. He’s started shaving and he’s bad at it. His face is scratchy. Joshua thinks about it only for a moment, and then kisses his cheek.
With a laugh, Clive pulls away. “What was that for?”
“For me.”
He rides in the morning, at first light with all his men behind him, Lord Commander. Joshua’s other Shields stay. Torgal stays. Murdoch will go with them as far as needed, but his place in the city now. Clive would trust his safety with no one else, as Murdoch trusts his army with no else. The Undying stay, too. They worship him, but they don’t follow his orders, or he would order them to his brother’s side.
At the gate, Joshua gives the band his blessing. His people look on him as if he's become a thing holy. They cling to that faith now, and Joshua can’t begrudge them that much. Clive and he aren’t men to them anymore. They can’t be. They’re gods, and so they share a nod across the plaza and nothing more before Clive rides off.
The first letter is a surprise. He can’t afford to send away a stolas, so this comes by way of a merchant. It’s only a few words. Please remember not to give Torgal food off the table, it will make him sick no matter what he says. Lord So-and-so cannot be trusted as far Clive could throw him let alone far as Joshua could and one of the men told him the man has been keeping a mistress in Martha’s Rest. Please remember to send flowers to Jill for her birthday, and yes, Joshua remembers what kind she prefers. All his letters are like this. Little reminders, gossip of the kind he would once have shared beneath the sheets late at night when it was the only time they could share anything with one another without someone disapproving.
Sometimes, he sends gifts. A little book no larger than Joshua’s palm full of fables and little illustrations. A flower as yellow as Joshua’s hair pressed between the pages of a letter, the color run over onto the paper. A necklace, once, an iridescent shell tied to a cord of string that he wears beneath his clothes until it starts to fray.
Joshua keeps busy. Lessons take most of his day, and training the rest, so long as he’s well enough to. It’s not lost on him that at his age Clive was already on his way to becoming one of the most skilled fighters on the continent.
He will find his own strength. He must. And he’s right, in the end. He doesn’t see Clive again before winter.
Joshua doesn’t see him again that year. By then, his last letter is months stale and creased over from the innumerable times Joshua has reread it. The whole thing only four lines that amount to no more than eat well, I miss you, give my hellos.
It’s Byron who comes at last, in person. He meets Joshua in the throne room, Joshua seated in the chair that still does not fit him and is not yet Joshua’s to sit in, and kneels before it to say that Clive sailed for Drake’s Breath with four ships and a half of a bedraggled company. A desperate, foolish move. He recalls the conversation he overheard. Swear to me you will not try. Murdoch at his shoulder curses with a depth Joshua has never heard before from the man. There is a grief in it that he cannot—cannot take in. Byron has the grace to meet his eyes when he tells them it’s been a month since they had word in Isolde.
But of course, there would be no letters, with no ships to carry them.
It’s the turn of spring before Clive comes home. The last of the snow has melted off the ground, but it’s still muddy enough that when his band rides in, they’re a day later than their runner said they would be and they are all of them and their chocobos spattered with grime up to their necks.
He picks Clive from the crowd by the white of Ambrosia—or what’s left of her that’s still white. Clive himself is hooded and cloaked and indiscernible except by the longsword strapped to his shoulder. Joshua assumed he’d ride in at the head of a victory parade but, of course, Clive was never that type.
The runner brought another piece of news. Clive took Drake’s Breath for Rosaria. It took him only eight weeks, and five days.
His head is bowed over Ambrosia’s saddle when Joshua flies down the steps to him. He hurls himself into Clive’s back, heedless of the mud and the crowd of soldiers around them. No one is focused on them in the middle of their raucous greetings and the trilling of their mounts. “Clive,” he says breathlessly and presses his face into the center of his shoulder blades—higher, he notes, than he could have reached before.
“Joshua,” he says, the way he always says it, but only that. Clive doesn’t turn to look at him. He stays facing Ambrosia, patting her beak and setting his fingers to loosening the straps of her saddle. Joshua releases him, brought up short.
“Clive,” he chides, as if his brother hasn’t seen him. Joshua is too old to beg for a hug and almost too proud, but only almost.
Clive pauses, but doesn’t turn. “Let me get her settled,” he says, but his voice is peculiar. “And go back inside. It’s too cold for you to be out here.”
“It’s not cold,” he says, and laughs. “Come, Clive, won’t you look at me?” Joshua takes his hand in his own and tugs him around. He gets half of Clive’s face, still hooded. His eyes are no less blue but there’s a black hollow about them that shouldn’t be there. It steals his breath. “What’s happened?”
Clive sets his jaw, and then turns in full, and Joshua sees why he was hiding. The side of his face looks as if it’s been painted red. For a moment, it’s a shadow, a trick of the torchlight because the sun has already set and it’s all they have to see by. The mark is too terrible to be what it is: a scar, lines of ruined skin crossed over his cheek and jaw. It's not fresh, but it still looks raw and angry, as if it were treated too late and too poorly. Joshua puts a hand in front of his mouth before he can stop himself. Clive's eyes go wide.
He turns away again, back to the saddle. “It's nothing,” he says.
Joshua pulls him back. “Let me see?”
Clive turns again, and lets Joshua reach up to push the hood off. “It looks worse than it is,” he says.
It looks bad enough. It looks like a burn, but not like the one that stretches up from Murdoch’s shoulder and over his neck. This one is too precise, the edges too certain. “How?”
“Ask me again later.”
Joshua considers him and then reaches up again to push the hair off Clive’s forehead, grateful for the inches he gained that let him do it without Clive having to lean down the way he would have in years past. “It only makes you more handsome, I’m afraid,” he says, trying to make light of it. He is still handsome. More handsome. It’s a thing he always thinks he’s made up in his head until he sees Clive again.
Clive snorts. Finally, a bit of the dark leaves his eyes. “Sure.”
Joshua rocks back on his heels. “You must be tired. We have a feast prepared,” he offers, trying to play the consummate host rather than the delighted little brother.
“A feast?” Clive frowns at him. The expression looks odd with the scar. “We don't need all that.”
Joshua takes his hand and pulls him toward the castle. They’ll let the grooms take care of Ambrosia. “We had a good harvest last season. What’s the point if we can't enjoy it?” He knocks his shoulder into Clive's side. “Let me spoil my big brother now and then.”
“That's my job.” Clive squeezes the hand in his. Joshua pretends, for both of them, that it isn’t shaking.
The feast starts quiet and then gets louder and louder and Clive may not be one for cakes and ale but tonight he eats. He had the cooks serve up honey cakes and roast meat and for a moment Joshua thinks he'll be scolded for the indulgence but Clive has nothing to say about it. He has nothing to say at all. He sets into his food like it’s his first time eating. He consumes everything on his plate, lets it be refilled, and eats everything on that, too. When Joshua offers him thirds, he hesitates before he shakes his head.
Joshua orders his own plate refilled and pushes it between them. Clive doesn't argue.
It's lonely to sit at the front on his own as he does most nights, so today he sits with the rest, tucked between Clive and Murdoch down in the ranks, trying to remember not to kick his feet in delight. His station dictates distance, but Clive is right there, for the first time in months and months.
Clive is alive. He never doubted, truly. Not with their shared blessing beating behind his ribs. He never doubted, but he worried. Murdoch, on Clive’s other side, is quiet. Joshua doesn’t envy Clive the apologies he’ll have to make to the man.
“We have new hatchlings in the stables, if you’d like to see them tomorrow,” Joshua offers to break the silence.
Clive turns to him. “I would. Have you named them yet?”
“No… Why don't you name them?”
“All of them? I’m terrible at naming things.”
“I don't know, I think Ambrosia is a—a lovely name—” But he can't keep a straight face and almost snorts into his soup.
Clive rolls his eyes and forks something green left on his plate over to Joshua’s. Joshua grimaces. “I hate those.”
“You don't even know what it is.”
Joshua picks it up with his bare fingers and gives Clive his most beseeching look. “Clive,” he whines. “It’s green.”
Clive grabs his hand and brings it to his mouth and eats the offending bite. His lips brush Joshua’s fingers; their touch tickles. Joshua giggles and finds another bite of something that looks dangerously healthy and holds it out for Clive who’s grinning now, for the first time since he arrived home. Under the table, Joshua knocks their knees together, and Clive knocks back. He takes that bite, too, and licks Joshua’s fingers in the doing. Joshua giggles again and Clive’s smile at last is real and full despite the new, ragged scar over his cheek. They share each other’s space, and Clive has gotten bigger in his serial absences but so has Joshua. He feels almost giddy with the closeness, as if he’ll start laughing and not be able to stop.
All at once, Murdoch stands from the table beside them. “This old man is tired. You,” he says to Clive specifically, “I’ll talk to you in the morning, Lord Commander.”
Clive ducks his head, suddenly shamefaced. “Good night, sir.”
He lingers, and then bumps Clive’s shoulder with his fist the way he does with no one else. “Take your ease, Clive. You’ve earned it.”
Clive stares after him, as if he doesn’t believe what he’s heard. When he’s gone, he says, “He must be in a good mood.”
“We’re all in a good mood when you’re here.” Joshua bumps into his shoulder, and then leans on it, leans into it him and rests his head there.
“You’re in a good mood, you mean. What’s gotten into you?” Clive pushes at him. “You wanted seconds. Eat your dinner.” Joshua leans harder, using his new weight to push into him. Clive buckles to the side dramatically, laughing. “Eat. Eat!”
That’s all he needed, Joshua thinks. Good food, and to smile.
When Clive is in Rosalith, they share a bed. This is a rule. Joshua feels no guilt about it because Clive is the one who started it in those first days after the Night of Flames when he was still broken in body and Clive was broken in a different way and trusted no one and nothing with their safety but his own blade and his own fire.
He slips into Clive’s room when the last of his duties are done. It’s past midnight and he expected to have to sneak his way into bed without waking Clive, but Clive is still awake and standing beside his bed. He’s oddly still, staring, it seems, at nothing but the window on the far wall. Joshua slips in the door and closes it after him, and only then does he realize what he's looking at: Clive, half bared. He's much too thin for the amount of muscle he's put on. His skin is smooth, a figure carved and far better built than Joshua’s will ever be. At the juncture of his shoulder and arm, a vein stands out. There’s a new ridge of muscle spanning from his shoulder to his neck, but at the top of his spine, bone juts out like a point of vulnerability.
This… This is new. Joshua’s stomach feels odd, almost queasy. Perhaps he ate too much.
Clive turns at his entrance and smiles, but the expression tugs at the scar on his cheek and it falls. Joshua greets him quietly and sits beside the open rucksack on the bed. “Do you want to tell me about your journey now?”
“Journey,” he quotes. The smile is gone now. “My letters weren’t enough?”
Never enough. And the letters didn’t mention a wound. The letters mentioned nothing at all for weeks and weeks. There’s another new scar on his shoulder, now that he’s turned. An odd indignance rises him him—no one asked him if they could put marks on his Shield in this way. But it’s a silly thought. “It’s okay. If you don’t want to.”
Finally, a smile for him, or the shadow of one. “Tomorrow, maybe.” It dies again. He’s staring at the bed and not at Joshua. Again, it’s as if he’s staring at nothing at all.
Joshua shifts uncomfortably. Clive looks young this way. He looks scared. Wounded, somewhere that can’t be seen or fixed. He feels again like the child he cannot be anymore, and wants to tug at Clive’s arm and poke at his cheeks until he forces a smile onto his lips and into his eyes. He doesn’t know how to fix this. Perhaps, it cannot be. He opens his arms instead, and summons, “Clive.”
Clive steps into the embrace. It’s awkward, with Joshua seated, but this way he can rest his head against Clive’s chest and hear his heartbeat. Clive’s arms come up around him. They’re muscled now—they always were, but not so much, and not so hard. Clive’s grip is tight, and then tighter still. His breaths deepen, and then get rough. He jerks in place, almost like a hiccup.
Something hits Joshua’s cheek. Something wet. Clive’s hand is on the back of his head, keeping him pressed in close, so he can’t look up, but he knows what it is. He knows, and it can’t be. Even when father died. Even at the funeral. He never—
Heat spikes behind Joshua’s eyes and he feels like he might cry, too. He’s scared. Seconds pass into minutes.
“I’m sorry,” Clive mutters and pulls away all at once. “Sorry, it’s nothing.” He busies his hands with folding the clothes he took off, though they’ll have to be washed anyway.
“It’s okay,” Joshua says, though it isn’t. Even Clive never said that. Never lied to him like that. He never said it would be all right when it wouldn't be. And it hasn't been, not for years. “Can I sleep in here tonight?” he asks, knowing what the answer will be.
“Yes,” Clive nearly gasps, still staring at his mud-stained shirt.
At least he can still do this. At least he can still guess what his brother needs. At least Joshua can be that useful.
Clive sleeps curled on the very edge of the bed. Joshua fills the rest of the space as best he can, tucked in behind him. He keeps a hand on Clive at all times. Clive jerks when Joshua worms his hand under the drawstring of his sleeping pants to cup at the jut of bone on his hip. He needs it, this touch of skin to skin, to feel his brother’s heat. Clive won't deny him that, and he doesn’t. He puts his hand over Joshua’s on the outside, his hand hot through the layer of thin cloth between them.
Joshua has begun to understand: no one else does this. No one else will understand this, but this is everything between them. He’s starved for it. There is no one else who would dare to share touch with him this way, and no one else he would want it from.
Clive is his the way nothing and no one else is.
All night long, Clive is restless and Joshua with him. By dawn Joshua is still tired, but settled at last, and the sun is coming in through the windows hot. The bed is hotter still with the two of them entwined so.
Joshua relishes it. The sheets smell again like Clive. When he’s gone for too long, the room loses its appeal. He watches the sun slide across the window as he drifts in and out to the sound of Clive’s breathing against the pillow.
He’s woken in full by a tentative knock on the door. Joshua sits up without jostling Clive and yawns. “Come in,” he says, though it isn’t his room to give the order. But then—maybe all the rooms are his.
The door opens, and a maidservant pauses there with a basket on her hip already half full of clothes to be washed. In her other hand is a carafe of water for washing with. When she sees him, she pauses. Her eyes take in the lines of them beneath the sheets, the way Joshua has only bothered to sit halfway up with his leg folded under him, Clive’s head pillowed in his lap. Her mouth opens, as if she’ll say something.
Joshua meets her eyes. She bows, low. The silence is tense as she fills the wash basin and picks up the muddy clothes Clive wasted time folding the night before. “Excuse my interruption, lord marquess,” she says at the door, and sees herself out.
He thinks then of making an excuse, even to himself, but if Rosaria wants him to be their god, they can at least allow him this much. He picks at Clive’s hair, dark as their father’s was. Clive belongs to him. It cannot be odd to be as they are. Everything else is for Rosaria, so can he not have this one thing for his own?
He tugs too hard, and Clive snorts in his sleep. Joshua stills, too late.
Without opening his eyes, Clive reaches up to take his hand. “What time is it?” he mumbles. He blinks blearily and winces at the brightness of the room. “We should be up.” The sun is still moving across the window, making the room yet warmer still with the fire still going in the hearth.
“No,” he says.
“Joshua…
He wiggles himself on top of Clive. Clive rolls onto his back and then Joshua is seated on his chest. “Oof. You really have grown.”
“Have I?” He knows he has, and by exactly how much.
“Yes. And you need a haircut.” He tugs at Joshua's hair as Joshua tugged at his.
Joshua grimaces. “Why? Mother isn't here to make me cut it now. And you've grown yours out.” Only a little. It touches Clive’s neck now and spills over his forehead.
“Not on purpose.” Clive closes his eyes and presses his head back into the pillows Joshua had restuffed and fluffed before his arrival. In daylight, the scar looks less scary than it did in the dark—and still terrible. What does that? he wonders. Not a sword. But then, would a sword get so close to his face? Is it possible that Clive would allow it?
He finds himself reaching out before logic intercedes and draws the tips of his fingers over the inflamed skin, trying to be tender. Clive twitches and opens his other eye, the one not nearly taken by the mark. It looks like a Bearer’s brand, he thinks.
Clive doesn't stop him, but sighs. “Come on. We need to be up. Murdoch will tan my hide.”
“I think he’s going to do that anyway.” But Joshua rolls off him. Clive rises slower, with an affected groan.
He slept without a night shirt and the pants have slipped low over his hips. Joshua blinks at him, still dozy and over-warm with something queasy rising in the pit of his stomach again.
Clive waves him off. “Go. Go on. Unless you want to watch me get dressed.”
He would like to, he finds, with a little thrill. He wants to see how Clive’s legs look bared—if they’re long and lithe or muscled, and if his own will ever be so. If he’ll ever run so fast or be so strong as his brother.
“Promise you'll eat breakfast,” Joshua says.
Clive laughs. “Are you my keeper now?”
“I must look after my Shield.”
“Yes. Yes, I’ll eat breakfast.”
The servant from that morning is the one who's set his clothes out in his room. She bows to him and still will not meet his eyes. As a child, they helped him dress, but they don't have the manpower for that nor the money to pay that many servants fair wage for their time. War is expensive, his father said once. That's why we avoid it.
But for all father’s graces, he was never successful at that particular endeavor. He led them to at least two wars, and now they are in another they cannot avoid.
It’s expensive in more than money, in more that resources, in more than life, but they have no choice and so it hurts less. Rosaria’s people are loyal to a fault. They give too much of themselves for no better reason than the Eikon he holds, and so he tries to give back what he can.
If he could give less of Clive, it would be easier.
Clive isn’t at breakfast when he gets down to the hall, but no one is at a bell past ten. The cook sets him a plate of biscuits and leftovers from the night before. He almost orders them to send a plate to his brother’s room, but knowing Clive, he’s already off and busy being half flayed by Murdoch. What they both know but will not say is that the man loves him like a son. In the days after Phoenix Gate, it was the two of them. He passed the title of Lord Commander to Clive with grace. He remembers, too, those days in childhood when Clive was set apart from all others. Bastard, or disgrace. A lord of House Rosfield with none of the honors. When mother was cruel, when father did not defend him as he ought, Murdoch always had a place for him. It seems odd now that the commander of their army spent his days training a child, but Joshua is grateful for it now.
When he looks in the barracks, Clive isn’t there. The few men that are tell him that Murdoch let him go half past the bell, with only a slight dressing down. When he looks in the stables, he finds Torgal keeping Ambrosia company, but again no sign of his brother.
On his way back upstairs, he’s stopped in the hallway by Tyler, who was already in bed when Clive’s rode in the night before and is playing emissary for the other Shields’ questions about their commander and his exploits. And Joshua realizes that of course, they would have questions. Since Clive has returned, Joshua has spent every hour but this one monopolizing his time.
Here, Clive’s first moment to breathe without him, and what is he doing but searching the castle for him.
With a blush, he recalls dinner the night before. His childishness. Clive had not even a moment to talk to his men.
Shame wriggles through him, a dark twin to the queasiness that rises in his gut whenever he recalls Clive’s back bared before him that morning in the sun, and the maid at the door watching him with Clive’s head in his lap. Still, that small voice at the back of his mind insists: Clive is his. Everything else, everything all of them have to give, is for Rosaria.
They can have this. Surely, he can have this much.
He sends Tyler off, with an apology. When he finally runs into Clive, it’s by pure accident, in a hallway in the lower portion of the castle, off the servants’ quarters. Clive has his head down, walking slowly, as if in thought. “Where have you been?” Joshua asks, too excitedly.
Clive looks—mortified, for a moment. Terrified. Joshua stops short, and then the expression is gone, schooled back to the placid calm he always wears for Joshua. “Sorry. Were you looking for me?”
“No,” he lies. Joshua looks past him, down the hallway, and he knows suddenly where Clive has been, because it’s the place he was sent more times than he could count as a child: the infirmary, with its wall of nasty tonics and mean old medic.
“Are you ill?” he asks.
“No, of course not. Do I look ill?” He’s a terrible liar.
“But—”
Clive comes to him and half-kneels before him, though he doesn’t need to anymore to meet Joshua’s eyes. “I swear, I’m fine.” He looks Joshua over. “Gods, you really are growing like a weed.” He tugs at Joshua’s sleeve, where it’s trying valiantly to cover his wrist and failing. “Do you need new clothes? At this rate you really will be taller than me.”
“I won’t,” he argues, for the sake of arguing, though the thought is one he’s had before and enough to make him dizzy. He looks again past Clive, up the hallway. “Why were you in the infirmary? Is someone else sick?”
“I left the wounded in Isolde. I only had a question or two. Nothing to worry over.”
“Clive,” he starts, but Clive will have no more of it. He’s tugged up, into Clive’s arms, and then he’s being carried as if he were no more than a sack of vegetables. Joshua laughs despite himself, helplessly, as he’s hefted over a shoulder. “Clive wait, you can't—wait—what if someone sees?”
His grousing falls on deaf ears. Clive carries him toward the stairs. “I’ll tell them you’re helping me with my exercise.”
“Clive," he whines, wiggling in place. "I'm too big now. And your shoulder is too bony."
It's been years since Clive carried him anywhere. He grew out of it when Clive started training to become a Shield, for it would be too undignified for him to beg his Shield for a piggyback ride.
He missed it, though.
Clive hefts him higher. "Too bony? This from the boy who had his knee in my gut this morning?" But he changes his grip and lets Joshua slide back to the floor. “Come. I think my old clothes will fit you. If we wait any longer, I’m worried you’ll grow out of that shirt right in front of me."
It is, to Clive’s credit, a brilliant distraction. Clive never had to wear the red and lace and frock coats the way Joshua had to—only because mother never cared enough to make sure he was properly clothed to his station. Left to a soldier’s care, all his clothes were in muted tones and then, after he joined the ranks, made of supple leather that clung to his long figure and cast him like a hero out of one of his plays. He looked more the young duke than Joshua ever could. The allure of trying on his clothes is too attractive.
In his room, he hands Joshua one of his red shirts with the tied front and then helps fit one of his old white and black leather overshirts across it. Joshua may be taller than Clive was at thirteen, but he’s still more slight. The leather doesn’t pull across his chest in the same way.
“I don’t look half as good as you did,” Joshua whines, tugging at the collar and arching his neck as he inspects himself in the mirror. “Are you sure we're brothers?” He realizes what he’s said only after the fact and turns to Clive in a panic. “No, I didn’t mean…” That old rumor, that Clive was a bastard of Anabella’s poor decisions—what truth anyone found in it died that night, and in the years since when Clive all but carried the duchy on his back. He would rather cut out his tongue than remind Clive of those days before.
But Clive is smiling. “Yes, I’m sure.”
“Good,” Joshua says. He turns back to the mirror. “I’m sure, too. You look so much like father.” He tries to tug the leather back over his head, but it gets stuck around his arms. How did Clive wear this every day? With Clive’s help, it comes off, leaving Joshua in the red undershirt. It’s far more humble than anything Joshua was given to wear. “I look nothing like him.”
“Yes, you do,” Clive says, looking up from where he’s folding the leather and setting it back in its box. “It’s in your eyes. I suppose one day we’ll have to put you in his clothes, too.” Clive at Joshua, and then quickly away. “They’d suit you.”
“Then what will you wear? We still have mother’s dresses stashed away somewhere…” Clive has the waist for it, but maybe his shoulders are too wide.
Clive’s mouth falls open. “You’d better not be imagining that.”
“Imagining what? I think the blue would match your eyes. Or maybe the purple.”
“That’s it—” Clive makes a wild grab for him. Joshua dodges out of reach.
“But really, don’t you think—” Joshua backs away from him, hands outstretched to keep him at bay, “—with those little gloves she used to wear—finally your turn for some lace!” And then he’s laughing too hard to keep standing. Clive gives up his attack and sits on the carpet, leaning back against the seat of the couch set at the center of the room. He rests his arm on his knee and watches as Joshua rolls onto his back in a sprawl to catch his breath.
“Can I tell you something?” Joshua asks.
“Always.”
“I’m glad she’s gone.”
Clive doesn't reply. They don't talk about mother, not really. The Undying keep track of her, monitoring her movements as she hides away in the emperor's court. Favored, but disgraced. He wonders what they would do if she did come back, if she tried for forgiveness or made some lie of the whole thing. For a time, he was sure she would, but it didn't matter. When the anger after that night settled out, when all he had were days and weeks of lying in bed healing and thinking, he decided he was happy that she was gone. He would never have to be kept inside the castle like a porcelain doll for her to play dress up with again. The last person who would order him away from Clive was gone.
“She was terrible to you,” he says.
“Joshua…”
“Well, she was. And she didn't love me. She loved the idea of me. The Phoenix.” He eyes Clive from his position on the floor, watching him from upside down. “If you had the Phoenix, they would never have had me.”
Clive considers this, and then asks, “Can I tell you something?” Joshua nods. “I’m glad,” Clive says. “I’m glad the Phoenix passed me over. I’m glad I got to meet you.”
Joshua looks away, and down, to fiddle with the strings across his chest. The red cloth is loose on him even without them tied, the way it never was over Clive’s chest. “But it didn’t pass you over. You had Ifrit, or it would have chosen you.”
“That’s not how it works. The Phoenix chose you, before you were even born. It knew you would be perfect, the way I could never be.”
Upside down, he looks different. It lets him pretend they’re two different people, and so Joshua finds it in him to ask the question that has plagued him since Clive became his First Shield: “And what if it hadn’t chosen me?”
“It would make no matter to me. You know that.” He does. Clive’s throat bobs, and when he speaks again, his voice is rough. “...But I will always be grateful that the fire is yours. It saved you that night, and so saved us all.”
“You saved us, you mean. You would have survived.”
“No.” Clive tips his head back against the couch and eyes him from under his lashes, his eyes dark with something he doesn’t know how to name. “No, I wouldn’t have. Not without you.”
It makes no sense, because Joshua did nothing at all in those first days but lie in bed and suffer through whatever medicines the Undying foisted on him beneath Clive’s watchful eye. Yet, a warm fluttering heat beats in his chest at Clive’s admission. It’s like finding a pearl in the sand outside Isolde, something to keep all his own. They share a silence, their gazes caught fast in one another.
No. The scar hasn’t marred his face at all. He’s as beautiful as he was the day he kneeled for Joshua in the throne room. At the memory, the queasiness comes back, and a cough tickles the back of his throat.
He smothers it in his hand, but too late; Clive sees.
“Were you ill while I was gone?” he asks.
The stark question catches him off guard. “No. Not really.” A sore throat, a bloody nose. Nothing severe. “Is that what you were asking in the infirmary? I’m not lying.”
“I know you’re not. I did ask. I’m glad you’ve been better.” Clive stretches his long arms. “It’s all that sun,” he says with a yawn. “No more of those stuffy audiences and galas.”
“I still do audiences,” Joshua says, almost offended that Clive would think he’s anything but suffering in his absence.
“Yes, but I’m sure you don’t make them take three hours. Gods, that woman could talk.”
“You didn’t even have to go to most of them.”
“Can’t argue with that.”
He still looks tired. It’s around his eyes. His skin is pale. And the way he’s sitting is tense, as if he’s in pain—but he only had the one mark on his back. Joshua rolls and scoots over on his hands and knees. Clive watches his approach, and he’s smiling when he says, “Doesn’t the archduke have work to do today?”
“I’m not the archduke,” Joshua says, “yet,” as he reaches out and touches Clive’s face to feel the heat of his skin. “It’s scratchy,” he exclaims.
“Yes. I forgot to shave because someone wouldn’t let me out of bed this morning.”
Joshua slides his finger over Clive’s cheek, and the scar. “Does it hurt?”
“No.”
“How old is it?”
“A few weeks. They treated it in Port Isolde.”
“Is that the reason you were in the infirmary?” he asks, for the last time.
This time, Clive answers him. “Part of it.”
He doesn’t know what that means, but he can see the edges of it. Something bad. Something Clive doesn’t want to share with him, for the depth of it. “I can heal it for you,” he offers, summoning the flame to his hand even as he says it.
Clive catches his hand and shakes his head. “No. I’ve made my peace with it.” And of course, he knows what to say. He knows that his peace is the one thing Joshua wants most for him, and could not bear to take from him.
“It looks like a Bearer’s brand,” Joshua says, voicing the thought that’s been with him since Clive first turned to him down in the yard, mud-spattered and hollow-eyed.
“That’s the point they were trying to make, I think.”
Joshua swallows. He knew that. He knew someone did it—someone made that mark. It had to be so. “Will you tell me what happened?” Joshua rises, and braces himself above Clive, straddling his lap. “Was it Imreann?”
“No. His men, I think. I was caught out; they had their fun, and I came out of it in one piece. And then,” he leans close, and imparts as if it’s a secret, “I took Drake’s Breath from them.”
This seems to mean something to him, this, as if it were a fair exchange, or the exacting of some justice. Joshua’s world tilts, and the breath he tries to draw into his lungs to speak won’t come. Caught out. Caught out, the way Joshua was caught out at Phoenix Gate, with father’s blood on his face and a sword through his chest before he could summon Phoenix. But Clive is a soldier, a warrior—he would never be caught by surprise. He would be caught only if he were too exhausted to call on Ifrit, too tired to lift his blade.
And he—he was their prisoner, and they didn’t kill him outright, only because he was too valuable to keep alive. No. Fun, he said.
They had their fun.
Their cruelty is the only reason Clive is still here. Had they been any smarter they would have killed him while he was weak. Perhaps they intended to. No; of course, they intended to. Ifrit isn’t an Eikon to be tamed or used.
“Joshua,” Clive is saying, voice steady. “Look at me.”
He scrambles to suck air into his lungs. Clive presses a palm to the center of his chest. “Easy,” he murmurs. “I’m here.”
He is. He is there, right there, warm beneath him, warm against him, breathing softly against Joshua’s cheek as if to show him how it’s done. When he was very young and first trying to learn his way around the Phoenix’s power, Clive would do this for him, when he needed it, anchoring him.
It takes him a minute to gather himself. “This is why you didn’t want to tell me,” he says when he’s caught enough breath to get the words out. “They—they did—to you—”
Clive shushes him, but he won’t meet Joshua’s eyes. He says only, “I would never have let them take me from you.”
He means it. That’s the worst part—Clive believes it. “You promise,” Joshua says, though it’s not a question. He knows Clive will promise him this.
“I promise.”
It’s hollow, because Clive has no say in keeping it. There isn’t an enemy he won’t throw himself at if he thinks it will preserve Rosaria, will preserve the throne and the Phoenix both. Joshua rests his head against Clive’s shoulder, suddenly exhausted. One day, he’ll be too big to do this, he thinks, if they’re both lucky. Maybe then Clive will have to rest on him instead.
He swallows and asks what he has not wanted to ask since Clive arrived. “When are you going back?”
Clive tenses. “Soon,” he says after a time.
Joshua knew, somewhere in the back of his mind. It was a hard-won victory, and it will be harder still to keep. He feels hollow already, as if there is something within him tied to Clive that he tugs out the gate after him when he goes, stretching to the point of agony.
“I must do my duty,” Clive says. There is perhaps no word he hates more than duty, but he sits back and studies Clive’s face. “I know,” he says.
And I must do mine by you.