GENRE: Gay / Nonbinary Fantasy Spicy Romance
LENGTH: 12,181 words
RATING:

Swordsman Aric and his half-fairy partner Emrys need to lie low for a while. They’ve been attracting attention, and not just from very human kings and merchants -- Em’s powerful fairy-lord father is looking for his lost heir. So Aric and Em have taken some time off from heroic adventures to visit Aric’s brother Berd, an architect who’s helping build the brand-new king’s city of Ambrosium.

But the construction seems cursed. Collapsing walls, accidents, spoiled provisions -- there’s dark magic at work. And Aric and Emrys find themselves drawn into a tangle of family, politics, and hidden ancient hexes.

EXCERPT:
Note: may contain sexually explicit scenes of a homoerotic nature.

Aric wandered over to the low table. Swung a leg over the closest bench; Em perched beside him, with more economy of motion and somehow also more flair. “We’re not in your way, are we?”

“No.” Berd came back from the pantry with tea and bread, butter and honey, and sat down with them. He was almost Aric’s height -- that Northern stature -- but with the build, and the hands, of an architect rather than a swordsman. Outside the spring weather dripped damply, green and grey and wet in this new world of stone and record-keeping and carefully designed, presently half-finished, streets. “You’re always welcome, you know that. If you need someplace to stay between jobs, or you’ve angered a sorcerer, or made an enemy out of an army of ghosts, or whatever that ridiculous story is.”

“We’re all right.” More or less true. Hiding, in a sense. People who knew the Storm-Wielder and the Shadow, and who knew enough to know that Aric’s younger brother was one of King Alfred’s favorite well-paid architects, could find them. But those sorts of people were only human. Not the problem, at the moment. “And both Caris Ayling and Duke Arthur paid us more than enough, so if you could use the money -- you did say it wasn’t the best time --”

“No, that’s fine.” A wave indicated that, yes, it was; Berd was doing well. He also stared at bread and honeyed butter with the expression of a man facing immense frustrations, presumably not related to the butter. “Stay as long as you’d like; I’ve got the space. I need to go out to Belin’s Gate tomorrow, though, even if it’s pouring like the ancestors dumping their wash-basins on us ... that entire section of city wall collapsed, and it shouldn’t’ve done that, and I have no idea why it did. The anchor-stones were secure.”

This particular day happened to be one of the multitude of holy days belonging to the Church of the One-in-Three, hence the lack of work being done this precise second. Aric and Em, as, respectively, a Northern barbarian and a half-fairy shapeshifter, cheerfully refused to care about the day, and had decided it’d be a good moment to come and interrupt Aric’s brother at home. They’d been right, at least in terms of arrival.

“Do your walls collapse often?” Em inquired, and licked honey from a fingertip, cat-like. At the moment he wore the shape of the slender young man he generally put on when arriving in a town: short, petite, but with a quiet matter-of-fact competence that made pickpockets and troublemakers veer away. That wasn’t even magic, just Emrys. Most of the knives were even hidden, most of the time.

Berd scowled more at the defenseless butter. “No, they don’t. I’m good at my job. Our masons are good at theirs. The weather’s not great, but not more than we expected. I’ll try to find out tomorrow -- maybe someone got a measurement wrong, maybe we hit an old underground barrow or vault from the old Winter Empire outpost ... those should’ve been surveyed, though ... and we’ve had six workmen come down with fevers, not to mention two with broken arms, and how that ladder broke when I looked at it only that morning, I don’t know.”

Em’s glance crossed Aric’s, over wild plum tea. His eyebrows had drawn together, thoughtful dark lines.

“We could come with you,” Aric said. “If you could use a hand.”