Valorous sat on the one chair left in the middle of the room, looking seriously at the several plates piled up on the dining table. The majority of them were still in their boxes, but he’d taken a plate out from each of the boxes so that he could look at each of their patterns, and compare and contrast them with the tablecloths on the side.

“Why the fuck do people send you dining sets, anyway?” Cecil asked as he kept sorting out one of the boxes from the kitchen, last stuff to be donated.

“Not sure,” Valorous muttered. “I guess they’re easy gift sets.”

“You know who sent you each of ‘em?”

“Yeah,” Valorous said. “I started keeping a spreadsheet the first time people started sending me gifts, what date it came in, a description who gave it to me, why, if there was a note. So I could send thank you notes and shit, but then, after a while, just to keep track. The blue ones, they’re from this woman, Agetha, she lives on Einsamal, she’s a seer. She sent me the set after I took care of this um, haunting thing, around her farm. The red ones, the purple ones, and these ones, the black, they’re from different fae princes, I can’t keep their names straight. These ones, with the gold trim, they’re from the Queen.”

“The Queen of Silence?”

“Yeah.”

“Aren’t we at war with her?”

“Yeah. She sent them after I killed King Capulet – sent them to Myrddin, with a note saying they were for whoever was responsible, so he passed them on.”

“And the tablecloths?” Cecil asked, standing up and resting his knuckles on the table, leaning against it.

“Most of them aren’t from such high-up people,” Valorous said. “These two, they’re home-made, I think.”

Cecil was looking down at Valorous with a serious expression on his face, and he murmured, “You haven’t got anything to feel guilty for, you know. People send these things as gifts – they’re meant to be fucking tokens, nice things. They’re not meant to be weights around your neck.” When Valorous didn’t say anything, Cecil cleared his throat and said, “Well. Maybe except for that one from the Queen.”

“Mm.”

“Nearly done here, lad,” Cecil said. “Dining room done, and we can start on, uh… one of the bedrooms, I guess.”

“All the other rooms are a lot worse than this.”

“We’ll get through them.”

* * *

“This way, Sir Valorous,” said Salt as they stepped over the threshold, and Valorous followed him slowly down the corridor, past the empty coat rack and through to the kitchen.

Noble and Jack had a nice house, beautifully appointed, but Uncle Jack was mainly in charge of decorating it – it had a lot of nice, modern elements, and it was sleek, although maybe not as sleek and fancy-looking as the apartments he saw the Laithes have for sale in their real estate windows, but it was sleek in line with mundie preferences. You could tell magical people lived in the house, sure, could feel the ward structure and see a few magical ornaments and art pieces on the wall, but there were no magical appliances, they used electricity more than enchantment.

Neither Aunt Noble nor Uncle Jack were big magic-users themselves, and nor were most of his cousins, so it made sense, but nowadays, when Valorous went home after being abroad somewhere, or even just having been in Camelot, he felt… out of place.

The flat on Saltpeter Street was more what he was used to, and he wondered faintly if he should feel some sort of guilt for it as he stood in the kitchen and breathed in a slow sigh of relief, running his fingers over the hardwood countertops, varnished in magical coating instead of stone or plastic, feeling the enchanted buzz of the cold cabinets, looking at the controls on the magical oven.

“This is your own kitchen,” Salt said. “The servants’ kitchen is over the dining room, adjoining a small apartment. Just two small bedrooms, a sitting room, a separate entrance – I know you said you’ve no intention of keeping staff, sir, but you’re only seventeen, and you might well live here with a family in a few more years.”

“I’m not gonna have kids, Salt,” Valorous said idly, tugging open a cupboard and looking with mild interest at all the staples inside, mostly magical products without the bright labels he saw on mundie ones – coffee, tea, sugar, different biscuits, dried herbs and spices.

“You’re as yet young, sir,” Salt said.

“You have kids, Salt?”

“No, sir, it is not my privilege.”

“How old are you?”

“Three-and-seventy this June, sir.”

“You don’t want kids the same reason I do – don’t have the time or the love to spare them. We’d only end up having to kill them anyway.”

Salt gave him a very wry look, abandoning his pretence of perfect servant’s professionalism, and he crossed his arms over his square chest, tapping the thumb of one white-gloved hand against his upper arm. “You, Sir Valorous, will not be at the king regent’s beck and call forever. As I said, you are—”

“Yet young, I heard you the first time,” Valorous said, and he laughed at the way Salt rolled his eyes, leading Valorous through the door and into the dining room, which was pretty big, had a big table. Through one door was a little wine cupboard and the spiral staircase up to the servant’s kitchen, and through another was a doorway to a guest bedroom.

“How many rooms is it?”

“Only discussing your own apartment, and not the servant’s adjoining one, of course, four bedrooms, sir; the kitchen, dining room, one central living room, a small library, another small lounge adjoining the far guest bedroom. It and the master bedroom both have modest en suites, and then there is a larger bathroom with a proper bath and shower. The master bedroom has an adjoining office. There’s not much of an entrance hall from the front door, but the lift leads into a slightly larger entrance hall with a cloak room, and whilst, alas, there is no balcony—”

“Alas,” Valorous echoed sarcastically.

“There is a garden on the roof, a patio laid out, two good greenhouses.”

“How long’d it take you?”

“Sir?”

“Come on, Salt,” said Valorous, looking out of the window of the corridor they were in and to the shop fronts below – downstairs was an aquarium shop that sold fish, a fancy tailor’s, a little bakery, and a jeweller’s. Saltpeter Street was mostly residential with big hundred-year-old houses on it, and the shops below were a little island of commercial space. “I’m no fucking architect, but I can feel where they knocked the walls through – it used to be, what, two or three floors above each of the shops, and then you knocked it all through to build me one big mansion?”

“Hardly a mansion, sir,” said Salt reproachfully. “It’s not a particularly stately residence.”

“There’s like five staircases, Salt, that’s pretty fucking stately to me.”

“As you say, sir,” Salt said snootily. “The king regent advised that I should purchase or cultivate an appropriate home for you, and I did just that.”

“Oh, I get it,” Valorous said, and laughed faintly, looking fondly at the old bastard. “This wasn’t about me at all – this was about you getting to have a project, and getting to build and decorate the whole place without Myrddin or one of the other servants interfering. How long you been working on this place?”

Salt delicately cleared his throat. If he didn’t have his gloves on, he’d probably make a show of buffing his nails.

Salt wasn’t an especially small guy – he was taller than Valorous by a head, had average, square proportions, but he had a way of disappearing into the shadows cast by bigger people – by Myrddin, by the guards, by the knights, by anybody. Valorous always liked to look for him in the gaps between other people in pictures, could almost always make out a sliver of Salt’s sleeves or his perfectly shined black bluchers, now and then a bit of his steel-grey, slicked-back hair.

Valorous was grinning at him, and when Salt finally turned his head and met Valorous’ gaze, Valorous widened it, raising his eyebrows.

“Oh, I wouldn’t care to guess, sir,” said Salt faux-casually. “Six months or so, at a generous estimate.”

“Have fun?”

Salt’s lips twitched, but he was far too good at his job to give the question any due. “I’ll show you to the garden, shall I, sir?”

“Please, Mr Salt, lead the way,” said Valorous, and traipsed up the stairs after him.

* * *

“What’s up these stairs?” Cecil asked, standing in the doorway to the wine cupboard.

“They lead up into the servants’ kitchen,” said Valorous. “It’s a bit bigger than the main one here, has bigger larders and pantries and stuff, but it’s technically part of the servants’ apartment, so I don’t really keep anything in there.”

“What, so, it’s empty?” Cecil asked incredulously, and Valorous didn’t answer as Cecil let the door swing back into place – because the stairs were enchanted to dampen the sound, he couldn’t hear Cecil’s footsteps as he ascended.

They were a few days into clearing up his flat, and the horrible weight in his chest had receded a tiny bit, but not enough that it was no longer keeping him up at night, and Cecil had been getting him to take sleeping draughts to help actually knock him out, because otherwise he wasn’t sleeping at all. He was fucking excited to go to therapy the day after tomorrow, for all the good it would do.

He'd stacked up the dining chairs and put them aside years ago, making more space in the dining room to move around, and Cecil had decided the dining room was their best base of operations. All the boxes and piles of shit that had been in the dining room had been put in the guest lounge, and now on the sprawling dining table were mixed piles – stuff Valorous wanted to keep, stuff he wasn’t sure how to get rid of or if he wanted to, and stuff that he definitely wanted to get rid of.

It was hard.

The kitchen hadn’t been that bad, because at least when he was sent food, it often had some sort of expiration date, and so it had an in-built date he got rid of it – the various cooking implements and vessels he didn’t use, Cecil had basically gone, “Well, what do you have more than one of that you only need one of?”, and that had thinned the herd considerably. After that, it had just been a matter of setting aside different extra tools or trays or whatever he didn’t need, and two huge crates of things had been picked up by a food bank yesterday.

The stuff in the dining room was harder – a lot of the things in here were fancy dining sets he’d been sent one time or other, serving trays, or ornate tablecloths, and Cecil said he probably only needed two or three nice tablecloths and one dining set, but how the fuck was he meant to choose?

“Lad,” said Cecil, appearing in the doorway again, and Valorous looked up from the serving trays he’d been buffing. “There’s— That’s a whole flat up there.”

“Yeah, it’s the servants’ quarters,” Valorous said, and he felt the ball of anxiety in his chest shift as Cecil stared at him, his expression blank. “Um. It’s for… Obviously I don’t have, um, staff, but Salt said I’d probably have some, eventually.”

“Yeah, no, I… Yeah,” said Cecil, and Valorous watched his nostrils flare, watched him trying hard to be patient. “My point is, there’s a whole flat up there that’s clean, empty. It’s just got furniture in it, no other crap.”

“Well, it’s not my space,” said Valorous. “Or— It is. But it’s not for my stuff – it’s for staff.”

“But we could sleep in that bed, or—”

“But it’s the servants’ quarters,” Valorous said again, not certain why it was frustrating him so much, why it was grating so much against what felt like the basic facts of life that Cecil was suggesting it.

Cecil exhaled, and then put his hands up flat in the air. “Fine, fine,” he murmured. “Any joy picking a dining set?”

“How am I meant to?”

“I don’t know. Do you need one?”

“Well, yeah,” said Valorous. “What else am I going to eat off?”

“There’s plates in the kitchen.”

“They’re not for entertaining.”

“Have you ever entertained here?”

“No.”

“Do you want to?”

“Want to?”

“Do you actually want to have a dining room, a dining table, dining sets?” Cecil pressed him, raising his eyebrows as he combed his hands back through his hair and went about retying the bun. “Just because they set it up with a dining table and shit doesn’t mean you have to have one. This is a big room – you could take the cabinets out and table out, turn it into a gym. Then, you don’t have to pick one of them dining sets – you could just get rid of them all.”

Valorous stared at the stacked boxes of fancy dining sets piled on the table and underneath it, feeling almost dizzied by the strange revelation this idea had come with, the sense that he could feel the whole fucking planet spinning very, very fast on its axis.

“Lad?” Cecil asked, sounding as if he was very far away.

“Yeah,” Valorous said faintly, and then more loudly, more quickly, “Yeah. Yeah. I don’t want a dining table, or fancy plates, or tablecloths, or gold fucking forks. I don’t want any of it. I want it all gone.”

“Okay,” said Cecil, and grinned at him. “That was easy, wasn’t it?”

“Let’s go home,” said Valorous, and Cecil laughed, catching him by the cheeks.

“Alright,” he murmured, hand sliding down to gently squeeze the side of his neck.

* * *

“Sir Valorous,” said a voice behind him, and Valorous turned in the corridor, keeping Uncle Indistinguishable’s stack of books piled up under his arm, rested against his breast to keep from dropping them to the floor.

“Mr Salt,” Valorous said as the old man bowed deeply, then stood up straight.

He wasn’t in his uniform for when he was attending palace stuff – Valorous had seen him out of that uniform before, but only when he was wearing his nightclothes and had a dressing gown belted over top of it, or once or twice seeing him in clothes for the gym or the arena. He’d never seen Salt in a normal suit like this, dark blue, tailored loosely to his body, very square.

“Day off?” Valorous asked.

“No, sir, not exactly – I always meet with the university’s committee on Thursdays, go over our scholarship prospects, you know.”

“Right,” Valorous said, and Salt looked at him very seriously, his lips pressed loosely together.

“You resigned your post with the Lashton police service,” Salt said, not reproachfully, exactly, but with an air of injury that Valorous didn’t know exactly what to make of, didn’t know how to respond to. “The work wasn’t stimulating enough for you?”

“I didn’t like it,” said Valorous, and Salt blinked, as though he didn’t quite comprehend the answer.

“Like?” he repeated, tilting his head. “I did not know it was pleasure you were looking for in seeking out employment, Sir Valorous – I would have found something else for you.”

“I don’t know what I was looking for either,” Valorous said, shrugging his shoulders. “Still don’t know, I guess.”

“You’re taking employment here in the university in the meantime?”

“Just helping out today ‘cause I’m around,” Valorous said. “I’m not working for a while.”

“The devil makes work for idle hands, Sir Valorous,” said Salt.

“The devil isn’t real, Mr Salt,” Valorous said. “The angels’ll tell you so.”

That made the old man go sour, and he drew himself up to his full height, pinching his lips together. It made his jowls twitch and shift, and Valorous looked back at him placidly, feeling kind of sorry for him – he’d felt sorry for Salt most of his life, he thought, had never really understood the man, didn’t think he ever would. He still didn’t understand him now.

“Spending time with angels these days, are you, Sir Valorous?” Salt asked in quiet, severe tones, his voice absolutely dripping with disdain. “Have you abandoned your loyalty to the crown and kingdom?”

“The crown’s just a symbol, right?” Valorous asked. “Isn’t the kingdom just… just the people in it? Isn’t that what a nation is?”

Mr Salt clucked his tongue and made a sad, disapproving noise. “Is that what you think, young man?” he asked, almost sounding like this was something worth grieving over, and he shook his head as he walked down the corridor and away from Valorous without saying a word of farewell, which was grounds for discipline, given Valorous’ rank and title.

Technically. As if he gave a fuck.

* * *

“Did you meet Vernon Salt when you used to come to the palace?”

“Uh, I met him,” Cecil said. “Sure. He’s chief of staff there now, right? When I was there, when I was younger, he was the butler, some shit like that. He used to pour wine, be in charge of the wine cellar.”

“Yeah,” Valorous said. “You like him?”

“Never spoke much to him,” Cecil said. “Never got the impression he cared much for me – always had a sort of snooty, nasty look where I was concerned. You like him?”

“I don’t know,” said Valorous, which was true, because he had no fucking idea at all.

He’d known Salt since he was a kid, since he first went to the palace to recover after Myrddin took him out of the hospital, and then all the time since – Salt would bring him things, sort out his room, organise clothes for him, things for him to pick up; Valorous would eat with him sometimes, because he often took his meals at odd times, separate from the rest of the palace servants.

Salt touched him, sometimes, reached out and stroked his hair, combed it through with his fingers, or would physically adjust his posture, correct his clothes or armour. It was never sexual, exactly – it never dripped with the intent or implication Myrddin could make it drip with, didn’t make Valorous crave it or want it in the same way, but it had an intimacy to it.

Salt reached out and touched him and tidied him like Valorous was one more of his duties in the palace, pet him like he might one of the cats, pruned him like he might a plant.

“One time, when I was, um, I think I was fourteen? I was back from this lodge in West Wales, I’d been taking a lot of tutelage in spells and incantation from these druids, freaks, all of them, really powerful, but just… It was really intense. My whole body hurt, bone deep hurt from fatigue and from using up all my magic. I tripped on the stairs and I landed badly, jarred my elbow. Didn’t even break or sprain anything, but it hurt so much on top of everything else I just started crying, and Salt was the one that saw me first. I think he forgot.”

“Forgot what?” Cecil asked, his hands in the pockets of his hoodie as they kept on walking together.

“That I wasn’t a kid,” Valorous said. “Or, that I wasn’t meant to be treated like one. He had hold of me and sort of pulled me up against his chest, and he was just saying, I don’t remember, the sort of comforting bullshit people say to kids, that it’s okay, that it’s fine, that it’s… That stuff. He was furious, Myrddin. He went all cold and dangerous, asked what Salt thought he was doing, coddling me like that.”

All of the magic in the air between them had throbbed and crackled, and as much as Valorous had been fucking terrified in the moment, his hair standing on end, his tears threatening to steam off his cheeks, his heart pounding in his chest, it had been a relief, that threat of magic in the air, Myrddin making all of it sing at once.

It had soothed his aching, magic-starved bones, so that he felt terror and complete, unspeakable relief at once.

“He didn’t forget again,” Valorous said.

“Jesus,” Cecil muttered, but he put his arm around Valorous and pulled him closer, curling a hand in his hair. Valorous put his forehead against Cecil’s chest for a second, smelling him, feeling the heat of his body.

“I saw him last week. He seemed disappointed that I quit.”

“So?”

“I felt sorry for him,” said Valorous.

“Yeah,” Cecil said, and nudged him forward, ahead of him and into the garden. Valorous could hear Ruby’s paws on the floor as they opened the door up, and he caught her in his arms as she jumped forward, letting out playful half-barks and jumping around for him to wrestle with her. “Coshel sent me some teaching jobs.”

“You should take one,” Valorous said, and he laughed when Ruby mouthed with soft teeth at his arm, then wrestled her onto the floor, feeling her wriggle and wag her tail and let out another playful boof of noise before collapsing bodily on top of him, and he laughed, cupping her cheeks and beginning to kiss her face, kiss her cheeks, the top of her head, as she did her best to squirm free.

She didn’t actually want to get away – once again, she dropped like dead weight on top of him, and this time he let her plaster him to the floor on his back, laughing and shoving her face away when she tried to lick his face, so she nosed into his armpit instead.

He looked up at Cecil, who was smiling faintly, looking down at them.

“You miss it?”

“Of course I fucking miss it,” Cecil muttered, shrugging off his coat. “I miss— I don’t know. I miss teaching. Miss working with people.”

“You miss being surrounded by kids you want to fuck,” Valorous said snidely, although he didn’t know why he said it – it was nasty, and it made Cecil’s lip curl, made him go stiff and shrug back just a little bit.

“I miss making kids’ lives better than mine was,” Cecil said coldly. “Even if by a little bit.”

“What’s wrong with the posts he sent you?”

“One’s in Einsamal, the other’s in Virtue.”

“Virtue’s nice,” Valorous said. “Taxes are high though.”

“It’s not for me,” Cecil murmured. “You know that girl, Ava? The little angel girl, she’s in with Majok the session after me.”

Valorous thought about her, thinking about the woman Cecil was talking about – he had seen her in the Majoks’ office, knew her by sight. They’d tried to burn her alive, centuries ago – it was fucked up, the things some angels had done to them, and went on somehow living.

“I’ve seen her,” Valorous said.

“I met her in the park,” Cecil said. “With Ruby, and she just… I don’t know, it made me miss it. Teaching.”

“Why don’t you come coach me, the next time we’re in the arena?” Valorous suggested, and Cecil sighed.

“It’s not the same,” he said.

“Didn’t say it was,” said Valorous. “But me and Cicero, you could. You’d put us through our fucking paces.”

Ruby made a grumbling noise, pawing at Valorous’ shoulder, and he laughed, catching her by her cheeks and rubbing his thumbs under her ears, petting her from one side to the other and rocking her with his knees.

“Fine,” said Cecil. “Next time you go.”

“Love you, Cecil,” Valorous murmured.

“Love the dog, not me,” Cecil told him dryly, and stepped over him on his way to the kitchen to make tea.