Indeed, before I turned away to continue on, whichever of the twins was faced toward me pushed the young man sucking him back, then stroked himself as he came all over the lad’s face.
The crowd expressed their approval of the action, but I made a sound of impatience and hurried on.
“I can’t decide if I’m shocked and offended by the way those two are carrying on or if I want a private showing of the whole thing later,” I told Mara as we walked out to the outer courtyard.
Mara glanced back one more time, as if she didn’t care. “They’ll make enough money from that show to pay for their books and tuition for the rest of the course,” she said as we rounded the tree at the front of the courtyard.
I gaped at her. “Really?”
Mara nodded. “Absolutely. Didn’t you see the pot at their feet?” I hadn’t. “That’s a signal that the show is for money.”
“So all those men bringing themselves off while watching will pay them?” I asked.
“Handsomely,” Mara said with a nod. “They’ll pay them to watch more later on. Twins are a big draw.”
The last thing I saw before we left the palace grounds was that the young man who had been hanging from the tree had been taken down—but not unbound—so that a rough man who looked like a soldier could fuck him. While well-dressed people with oiled hair and wearing cosmetics looked on. This time, I noticed the painted pot sitting off to the side of the display.
“I grew up being told that the Old Realm was the height of sophistication and advancement,” I said, finally taking a deep breath once we were outside the gate and back on a normal street. “I think I’ve changed my mind.”
Mara barked a laugh and pointed me down a narrow side street. “It’s not the kingdom itself, it’s the nobility and the royal family,” she said. “The common people work hard. They have to in order to continue to survive with all that going on.” She waved back to the palace.
I huffed at her explanation, knowing what she meant. “The cities in the frontier are the same way. They continue to do exactly what they’ve always done, whether it’s destructive or not, while the people in the Wolf River Kingdom, and other parts of the frontier, are working to make a better world and a better life for themselves.”
“Maybe General Rufus saw that,” Mara said as we came out of the alley and walked along a street that was decorated with harvest greens, golds, reds, and oranges. “Maybe he saw a world he would rather be part of than what he left behind and what he’d been sent to reconquer.”
I’d never stopped to consider that. Knowing there was an army in the frontier had given me pause. I’d written to Dushka about it in the last six weeks, but I was relatively certain Dushka already knew after what we’d seen on the way to the mountain pass.
“So is General Rufus’s defection a bad thing or a good thing?” I asked, mostly because the question was rolling around inside of me and not because I thought Mara would have an opinion.
Sure enough, she shrugged. “It depends on what he does, now that he’s over on your side of the mountains,” she said. “He’s a sour bastard, but that doesn’t mean he won’t bring about something good.”
I stopped and gaped at her. When Mara turned to see what the matter was, I said, “You know General Rufus?”
“I’ve seen him at royal events,” she said. “I know most of the generals of the army and captains of the navy by name and by sight. Same with most of the senators and governors. I don’t think much of any of them.”
I wondered sometimes if Mara thought much of anyone.
I started forward with her again. She seemed drawn to a square at the end of the street that was set up with faire games.
“I wish I knew what General Rufus was doing over there,” I said, back to speaking mostly to myself. “I would give anything to talk to Dushka right now and to get his opinion. No,” I shook my head, changing my mind, “I wish I could talk to the other Sons and ask what they think.”
“The other sons?” Mara asked.
I glanced sideways at her as we walked into the square. It was packed with people—much more ordinary, common-looking people—who were playing games and dancing to a band of musicians in a much more wholesome way than anything I’d seen in the palace. I’d already decided in the last six weeks that Mara was a friend and that I could trust her, so there was no point in holding back.
“The Sons of the Cities,” I said. “They’re my friends. We call ourselves that because we were all noblemen from the frontier cities who ended up in the forest as pups and lovers of the leaders of what became the Wolf River Kingdom.”
I expected I would have to explain even more to her, but she nodded, seemingly satisfied at my explanation. “What are they like?” she asked. Her eyes lit up, and she grabbed my hand to drag me over to a game that involved tossing rings over bottles.
“They’re my best friends in the whole world,” I said, suddenly missing them terribly. “They’re like brothers to me.”
“You must miss them a lot,” Mara said, brighter than I’d ever seen her as she pulled me to stand in a queue waiting for the ring-toss game.
“More than you can possibly know,” I sighed, rubbing the sore spot over my heart.
I wished I could talk to Peter, Neil, and Jace about everything I’d overheard in the king’s chamber. They would have ideas about what it meant for the Old Realm, the frontier, and the former kingdom as a whole that one of King Julius’s top generals had defected and taken an army with him. They might know what General Rufus was up to in the frontier, whether he was a friend or a foe.
I wished I could talk to Sebald and Orel about what pulling men from the fields and farms of the Old Realm and forcing them into the army would mean. And about the strange and uneven shortages I’d experienced since coming to Royersford. They would know whether the Old Realm was in for a dying winter, like the kind that the cities had experienced the winter before. They would be able to gauge what to do about it, and maybe what sort of responsibility I had toward the people around me. I was, for all intents and purposes, a foreigner in someone else’s kingdom. I didn’t know what I owed to the Old Realm.