now

Two years later

“Mr. President,” Belvedere says, coming up behind me.

I turn from the journalist interviewing me to nod at him. “Ten more minutes?”

He gives us a wincing look and glances down at his watch. “You’ve only got five, sir. I’m so sorry,” he apologizes to the journalist. “We’ll of course be happy to set up a call to pad out anything else you need for the piece.”

The journalist—a short and jowly bulldog from Time Magazine—sighs at Belvedere’s words but doesn’t push back. When the bulldog glances down at his notes, I wink at Belvedere, who gives me a little smile back. He’s my keeper—he keeps me, and most importantly, he keeps my time. He plays the bad cop whenever it’s time to bustle me away from eager crowds and curious reporters, and he’s got the “apologetic but firm” performance down pat.

I finish my five minutes with the reporter—it’s for one of those campaign profiles they will inevitably cover with a close-up shot of my face, shadowed and serious—and then Belvedere whisks me back to my office on Air Force One, expertly fending off some milling members of the press corps who are not pleased their usual time with me has been cut short because of the Time feature, and shepherding me past my personal photographer, who has been begging for more candid shots on the plane.

We end up in my office, alone, and Belvedere hands me a folder while he steps outside to order me a cold can of sparkling water and my usual lunch of grilled chicken and kale. It’s too easy to eat like shit on the campaign trail—the travel and the dashing from one place to the next—and most of my staffers have succumbed to the seductive ease of room service and greasy delivery. I refuse, as much as I refuse to curtail my morning workouts or my evenings alone with Greer, and in any case, Belvedere takes a strange delight in finding me healthy food no matter where we’re at, a trait I exploit relentlessly.

I’m flipping through the folder as he walks back in with my lunch and his own—a cup of oatmeal and a smoothie. I start eating as he talks.

“It’s the latest notes from Uri and Trieste for the debate Thursday. They’ve also asked if you want to prep one more time against someone pretending to be Mr. Moore, or if you also want to prep against someone doing Harrison Fasse.”

Fasse is the Democratic candidate facing Embry and me, and a clever young man, if sometimes hot-blooded and stubborn. But while he’s a good candidate overall, Embry and I are polling too close to each other for Fasse to be my main focus.

Embry has to be my main focus.

My fork pauses ever so slightly above my plate, and then I resume eating. You’d think after all this time that I’d be able to think of Embry without that reflexive flinch, without that cold puncture of pain in my chest, but no. Not even after all the practice I’ve had over the last seventeen years of having my heart broken by him. It never stops hurting.

“We don’t need to practice against Fasse,” I tell Belvedere. “We’ll have Uri do Embry again.”

Belvedere makes a note. “Tomorrow evening then. We could also do a practice run the day after, on the day of the debate itself?”

I finish eating and go back to the folder, skimming over the notes. This debate is focused mainly on energy and the economy—two places where my administration has excelled—and also two places where Embry and I hold only mildly different beliefs. Most of Merlin and Trieste’s debate strategy is focused on clarifying those differences, and illustrating how I’ve already implemented my ideas. As debates go, it shouldn’t be truly difficult.

The most difficult thing will be Embry himself…and the two years hanging between us.

Two years. Two years since he left my bed on a chilly October morning and never looked back, and he hasn’t so much as texted me since then, not even after the campaign began in earnest. Not a word, spoken or written, not an accidental meeting of eyes in a crowded room, because of course he’s taken great pains not to share any kind of room with me.

“That won’t be necessary,” I say. “I’m solid on the issues and on Embry’s position. The only difficult thing about the debate will be seeing him, and nothing can prepare me for that except for him.”

Belvedere nods, but I don’t miss the slight catch of his lower lip on his teeth. The mention of Embry’s name has an effect on him too.

Three times in the last two years, I’ve sent Belvedere to him, just like I did on the night of his wedding to Abilene, and three times Belvedere has returned alone. I sent Belvedere to him a fourth time, with different instructions, and was rewarded with my aide coming back rumpled and flushed, and newly freckled with bites and sucks.

He was my body man in a literal sense that night, a gift to Embry, since my little prince wouldn’t come to me. I knew from my occasional conversations with Morgan that Embry has been strictly chaste since our last night together—refusing even to relieve his needs with a mistress or a lover, and as much as I wished he would come to me, I couldn’t bear the thought of him being lonely. Of his body starving for the simple touch of a bed partner. And Belvedere was willing, eager, squirming and hard when I asked him to do this thing for me, and so I sent him, and when he returned several hours later, well-used and glowing, I made him tell Greer and me every sordid detail.

It was wrong of me, I suppose, for a host of reasons. Firstly, even though I’d introduced Belvedere to Lyonesse a year before and he was training formally as a submissive, he wasn’t my submissive, and there was the small complication that I think he wanted to be. That, in addition to the yearning looks I’d seen him give Embry, meant there were enough emotional snags between us to make it a cruel thing to ask. And a cruel thing to give Embry, because I knew he wouldn’t be able to refuse. It’s one thing to hold a lover at a distance; it’s another thing when that lover comes to you already dripping with temptation. Even if that lover is using the mouth and hands and body of someone else.

It’s a testament to Belvedere’s faithfulness that our strange night never changed anything. I still treated him as fondly and respectfully as I ever had, and he never betrayed a hint of longing or frustration that none of the events had repeated themselves. I’ve asked him more than once about it, checking in with him to see if he’s grown to resent that night—or me. It’s a form of aftercare, of course, and also I do genuinely care. I wouldn’t have asked him if I wasn’t certain the task would have excited him, and he gave me clear and eager consent that night—but still. It’s not an everyday thing, fucking your boss’s old lover…and even less everyday to deliver the kind of gifts Embry and I exchange. But my instincts about Belvedere were right, and we’ve only ever been richer for the experience.

“So you’ll touch down in Portland in an hour, and then we’ll do our meeting with the fishing and game lobby right after, which means we’ll have to move fast to get you to the rally after that—” Belvedere, who was in the middle of sliding a fresh piece of paper across the desk, pauses as his phone buzzes on the table…at the same time as mine also buzzes.

There’s a knock on the door, and Greer steps into the office, closing it behind her. Even after two years of marriage, my blood still heats at the sight of her, my chest still goes tight with intense love and possession. Right now, she’s that adorably bookish and clever version of Greer that I love more than almost any other: her hair’s up in a messy bun, stabbed through with a pencil, and she’s barefoot with a highlighter still in hand. She’d taken the semester off from Georgetown to campaign with me more easily, but she’s in the final rounds of edits on her book, and she’s spent every free moment working on the manuscript.

But it’s not western concepts of kingship or power in the Dark Ages that’s driven her inside my office now.

“Angel?” I ask as she leans against the door.

“Ash,” she says quietly. “Have you seen it yet?”

I glance down to see the call I just missed from Merlin and several unread text messages. I scroll down quickly as I hear Belvedere swear under his breath.

I catch a few words:

Lyr.

Public statement.

Press.

This is bad, Maxen, really bad.

“She did it,” says Greer. “Abilene went public about Lyr.”

***

In some ways, I should be grateful that it took Abilene so long to unleash the truth. It didn’t haunt my last two years in office, and with that freedom, I managed to get almost everything on my ambitious list done. Merlin told me it wasn’t possible, practically dared me, in fact, but here I am two years later, triumphant. Even if I lose this election, there will be no undoing so much of work. This country is safer, smarter, and richer—and that would not be true if the scandal about Lyr had been hanging over my head.

In other ways, I’m not grateful at all. For this to happen two days before the first debate is not ideal timing, which is surely what Abilene intended. Wholesale destruction and distraction.

But mostly, I’m worried for Lyr. Despite the election, Morgan still hasn’t given me permission to meet my son, she still hasn’t told him the truth. I’ve begged and cajoled, reasoned and pleaded, but she’s been adamant that she doesn’t want him to know. And I recognize that it’s not only about me—if I confess my paternity to him, she’ll be forced to explain her maternity, and there’s no doubt that it will sting very much for him to learn that his mother gave him up as an infant, even if she remained nominally in his life as a cousin.

What that means now, however, is that Lyr is learning it all from the news instead of from us, publicly instead of privately, which was just as I feared.

Fuck.

I do the fishing talk, I do the rally. The reporters are relentless, and I can see the questions on the faces of the people I meet with. Is it true? Is it real? Can I really be Penley Luther’s son and the sister of Morgan Leffery and the father of some incestuous love child?

Merlin tells me on the phone to say nothing, as does Trieste, so I say nothing about Lyr or Morgan, I stick to the topics at hand. Belvedere hustles me through my events, and then I’m sitting next to Greer on Air Force One, clenching a warm glass of scotch in my hand as the plane streaks through the dark to Seattle.

Seattle, because I’m not waiting any more. Because I deserve to look my son in the eye and explain everything.

Not for the first time, I think of Embry and his son. Even with as little as I watch the news, there’s been no escaping the photographs of the little boy, the video clips of them playing together in the leaves or running after the family dog. And there’s every order of jealous hurt inside me as I think of Embry as a father—mostly because I’d dreamed for so many years of us being fathers together, and now here we are, each with sons we love but didn’t plan for. How much I want all those moments I missed with Lyr, and how much I want all the moments I missed watching Embry become a parent. I missed his eyes as he held his child for the first time, I missed the awe and the wild happiness and the exhaustion and the worry.

There’s now a part of Embry entirely separate from me, a part of him that was born alongside his son, and perhaps it stings so much because that part of me never had a chance to be born at all. I not only missed Embry becoming a father, but I missed it myself as well.

“Sir.” Belvedere comes up, looking apologetic. “It’s Berlin. Should I say it’s a bad time?”

Berlin. Shit.

All I want to do is drink and run my fingers through my wife’s hair. All I want is to have just an hour to think about what’s waiting for me in Seattle, to think about what I’m going to say to my son when I have the chance.

But I never say no to a call from Berlin. The calls are rare enough as they are, and the week after next will be the keystone in the plan we’ve built over the last two and a half years. And I’ve built it too fucking carefully and slowly to let something like a personal crisis tear through it now.

I hold out my hand for the phone.

“Hello?” I greet.

“Guten Abend,” goes the voice on the other end. And then we get to work.

***

“I wish you would have given me more time,” Morgan says tersely, tightening the belt on her trench coat as she, Greer, and I walk up the stairs of Vivienne Moore’s intimidating lake house. It’s near midnight, and the house gleams pale and otherworldly in the gloom, the lake behind it shimmering with secrets. “It’s a school night, and he needs his sleep.”

“Do you really think he’s sleeping?” I ask her, my voice just as short as hers. “Tonight? After what people have been saying about him online and on the news all day?”

“You don’t know a fucking thing about him,” she hisses in response, “and you have no right to tell me what you think he’s doing or why you think he’s doing it.”

Next to me, Greer stiffens in anger, but before she can defend me, the door is opening and Vivienne Moore, Governor of the state of Washington and the mother of two of my ex-lovers, is standing in the doorway. “He’s in the library,” she says, giving me a regal nod. “My sister Nimue is in there with him. They’re waiting for you.”

I let out a shaky breath, and Morgan does the same, and even though this election stretches between us, along with years of fighting and bitterness, when we look at each other all I can see is the green-eyed girl who once asked me to hold her wrist instead of her hand. The dark-haired woman who’d dragged me to Lyonesse after Jenny’s death and forced me to find myself again.

Her earlier rancor has slipped into nervousness, and she offers me an unsteady smile. “Well?”

“Yeah,” I say, with an answering unsteady smile, and then we all go inside.

Vivienne leads us to through the impressive house to the library, and there Greer stops and gives me a reassuring kiss. “I’ll be just out here,” she says softly, her hand gentle and warm against my jaw. “If you need me.”

I search her face.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come in with us?” I ask, secretly hoping she’ll say yes, even though I know it would probably less overwhelming for Lyr to have fewer people in the room. But I selfishly want my angel in there, I selfishly want her in there for me, to comfort and hold me. But we had talked about it on the plane here from Portland, after I’d made the decision that I was seeing Lyr tonight at all costs. It had been Greer’s idea to give Morgan and me privacy with our son, and it was a good one.

Just. I want her with me is all.

“Are you sure that you’re okay?” I ask so that only she can hear. “This happened too fast for—”

“I’m fine,” she says firmly. “I love you and I’m fine, and after tonight we will have plenty of time to talk. Or work through it in other ways.” The mischievous emphasis she puts on other ways almost distracts me from how her hand drops to press against her belly, which is flat, taut, and empty, and has been for two years, despite much effort on our part.

I put my hand over hers, press both into her belly.

“Whose pain is it?” I ask quietly.

She lets out a long breath, her body relaxing ever so slightly. “Yours, Mr. President.”

“Good girl,” I say. “I’ll be back, and then you will give me your pain as you’re supposed to.”

Her eyes flare with heat, and I hope for the moment her ache will be less. I hope it won’t scratch at her to think of me in a room with my son…my son who is not her son.

Morgan opens the door to the library, and together we walk inside, and even with my nerves, I notice the subdued wealth of the room. Two-storied and lined with books and fireplaces and massive, hulking chairs, and I can so easily see my Embry here as a boy, as a spoiled teenager. Reading with his legs slung carelessly over the arms of the chairs, sneaking in boys and girls to fool around with by the fire. Staring out the yawning windows and out onto the lake, cocooned in whatever rippling, dark thoughts make up Embry’s mind.

But then of course, Embry wasn’t the only little boy to have grown up wandering these halls. There was Lyr, all the while thinking Nimue was his mother and Vivienne his aunt and Morgan his cousin. And his father a ghost somewhere, a deadbeat, a spineless waste of air.

It’s hard to feel like he would have been wrong about that, as I walk to meet him for the first time in sixteen years, as I walk to meet him after my silence has destroyed his life.

It isn’t difficult to find him in the room, even as full of dancing fire-shadows and nooks as it is. It’s as if my heart is magnetized to him now, on alert, and once I catch sight of him sitting in a window seat, his head bent over a book and his profile etched by the contrast between his pale skin and the charcoal night outside, I wonder how I never saw it. All the times I saw pictures of him in passing, that massive Moore family portrait that Embry had in his Vice President’s office, random social media posts from Embry at the lake house, lounging with his family. Lyr had just been one of Embry’s tribe, just another wealthy scion that would eventually attend an expensive college, wear expensive clothes, and go on to rule the world.

But how could I not have seen it then? The black hair? The high cheeks? The nose with its slightly Roman bridge, the full mouth, the dark slashes of eyebrows over bright green eyes? He’s made so much like me he’s uncanny to look at, uncomfortable even, a reflection with the shadows and angles just different enough to make you think you’ve imagined any difference at all. Morgan is in him too: in his features, which are slightly more refined and elegant than mine—clear and angel-like—and in his hands, which are slender and delicate as he closes his book and looks up at us.

His eyes meet my own, slide over to Morgan’s. He doesn’t speak, although I can almost hear all the words pressing against the inside of his lips, all the questions he’s swallowing back down into his throat. But his expression isn’t hostile, and when he speaks, his voice is as calm as it is guarded. “Hello.”

“Hello,” I say back. Morgan just nods her greeting.

Nimue stands up from a sofa nearby, willow-thin and as tall as me. She’s only a few years older than I am, but she looks much younger, her eyes bright and her skin clear and her hair dark and tumbling over her shoulders. A crystal glints at her neck, and when she walks, she moves like a dancer—limber, lean, musical even in silence. I understand now why Merlin loves her.

“I’m going to give you privacy,” she says. She gives Lyr a small smile, one he doesn’t return, and I realize that this has been hard on Nimue too. Lyr must feel like everyone has been lying to him, everyone he’s ever cared about, and he’s not wrong.

He has been lied to.

Morgan and I take the chairs clustered around the window seat, and for a moment I think Lyr is going to stay up there, and I wouldn’t blame him. The window seat probably feels like the safest space in the room, and he’s sixteen—I can’t fault a teenage desire for seclusion. For a position that would feel strong and familiar.

But he climbs gracefully out of the window seat and finds a chair next to me, with a stoic and reserved bravery that I respect very much. It makes me proud to see how handsome he is, how strong and healthy, how sober and composed he appears. It makes me proud to see him face this like a man, even as I wish he didn’t have to.

Morgan speaks first, her voice faltering. “I suppose you might have some questions for us.”

Lyr nods, his face still careful. “I do.”

I look at Morgan at the same moment she looks at me, as if we’re deciding who should speak first, and the moment is almost laughable in its parody of a real family. Two parents sitting down with their teenage son, having a family meeting. It would be funny if it weren’t so fucking sordid and terrible.

I go first. “I didn’t know my biological parents,” I say, still trying to find the right place to start. “I know now that Penley Luther had an affair with Imogen Leffey, and that she died giving birth to me. I know now that Penley Luther was too embarrassed or selfish to try to find me. But growing up, I only knew that I hadn’t been wanted, that I’d been cast off. It made me too bitter to ever try learning anything about my past.”

“And I knew that there had been a baby boy, a half-brother,” Morgan adds. “But I never knew his name, and I thought if I ever found him, it would be through years and years of searching. I didn’t think—I couldn’t have expected that I’d meet him like I met Maxen.”

Lyr listens, his face betraying nothing. “And then after I was conceived?” he asks.

“I failed your mother,” I say, to spare Morgan having to tell the story herself. “At a place called Glein. There was a battle, and she almost died. You almost died with her that day.”

“I didn’t tell your father about you,” Morgan says, lifting her head to face Lyr. “And you can hate me for that if you’d like. I was angry because I felt like…oh I don’t even know anymore. Like it would be fair if I kept him from you because he almost let the two of us burn alive. I thought I hated him for that.” She glances at me. “I lied to myself about it for a very long time. But I guess I’m old enough to understand now there are things outside any one person’s control, and a battle is almost certainly one of those things.”

I don’t know why, but I reach out to squeeze her hand. My sister and ex-lover and current political enemy…and our son. Jesus Christ. I’m surprised lightning hasn’t struck us all down.

She allows me to squeeze her hand and gives us both a thin smile. “I was young, and you know Vivienne—she was adamant that I wasn’t ready to be a mother, and even now, I think she might have been right. But it was purely my fault and mine alone that Maxen didn’t know. I accept responsibility for that.”

Lyr watches our hands meet and then part. “But you have known since before now?” he asks me. “Since before I knew?”

I want to hang my head, but I don’t. I deserve this and I’ll look him in the eye and endure whatever pain or anger spills out of him as I tell the truth. It’s the fucking least I can do. “I learned the truth two years ago. Abilene—your cousin Embry’s wife—was the one to discover the real story through her grandfather’s personal effects. She used you to blackmail Embry into dating her, and Embry did it, to keep you and Morgan safe. But he did eventually tell me.”

“Maxen wanted to tell you. Wanted to meet with you.” Morgan takes a deep breath, and I wish I could tell her right now how much I appreciate her honesty. “He wanted it right away. The moment he learned, he called me and asked to meet you. And I said no.”

Lyr flinches. It’s the first real sign of emotion he’s shown all evening. “Why?” he whispers.

“Because—” Morgan presses her lips together and looks up at the ceiling, and I see that she’s close to tears. “Because all I ever wanted was for you to grow up free from knowing the truth about your birth. Because I love you and I didn’t want to hurt you. And I know all of that wishing and wanting seems so abstract as to be meaningless right now, and I know at your age all you can see is the unequivocal truth and the too-many ways that you’ve been failed. That’s natural, to see the failures of the adults around you and call their reasons weak. Perhaps they are weak, but—and I know you might also scoff at this—when you have a child in your life, it’s like everything flips upside down and turns inside out, and reasons that seemed weak or dishonest before are suddenly so powerful. I’m not saying they were right,” she finishes, tears openly brimming at her eyes now, “but they were powerful. I love you, and I wanted to protect you from the sins your father and I had committed.”

Lyr doesn’t answer but he looks down at his feet, processing what Morgan has said.

And again, that spike of pride. I like that he thinks before he speaks, that he’d rather listen than talk. It’s exactly how I’d want my son to be if I’d raised him myself.

“We failed you, Lyr,” I say. “And maybe we still are. We didn’t tell you the truth and we didn’t protect you from Abilene and we are both ashamed. I hope you can forgive us, but you have every right not to.”

“Both of you did lie…for a long time. And so did Aunt Vivienne and my mother.” A slight hitch in the word mother, as he remembers how that word is now complicated for him. “And Embry. And I wish you hadn’t. I wish you hadn’t lied. I wish—” and my heart breaks watching his face fracture into feelings he can’t control. “I wish I’d never been born.”

The fire crackles behind us, and outside the moon glimmers on the lake for a watery moment before it disappears back behind the clouds. And Lyr’s words are worse than any screed, any insult, anything else that could have been flung my way. I had been prepared for his anger, but I had never thought to prepare myself for this—that he would transmute his anger into something so painful for a parent to hear.

“I’ve thanked God for you every day since I learned the truth,” I tell him softly. “Yes, it’s unusual—all of it is unusual—but that doesn’t make it bad. It doesn’t make you bad.”

He rubs his thumb across his forehead in a gesture so like my own that my heart twists. “But now everyone thinks I’m bad. That I have…I don’t know, that I have webbed toes or something.” He moves his hand away from his face to gesture vaguely, and the movement is so aristocratic, so disdainful, and he goes from looking like me to being all Morgan. “Inbred. That’s what they were saying online. That I’m inbred.”

I can feel Morgan glance at me and I know exactly what she’s thinking, because I’m thinking the same thing. That I don’t know how to fix this for him, that I brought him into this world and now I’ve exposed him to every kind of judgment and insult simply by creating him. It’s a gross feeling to have failed my child so utterly, and I mean gross in both ways—viscerally disgusting and also large, huge, occupying the center of my chest and my major muscle groups. My shame has never been thicker, never been so viscous inside my mouth and heavy in my lungs.

“Egyptian pharaohs married their sisters for centuries,” Morgan says. “And they didn’t have webbed toes. Same with the Incas and Hawaiian royalty. Taboos are social constructs that vary from culture to culture and are created to reinforce selective behaviors—you should know that from watching Nimue do her sociology work. Just because your parentage is considered taboo doesn’t mean you are defective as a human or worth less than anyone else. You are worth everything to me.”

The naked emotion in her voice is plain to hear, and Lyr looks down at the carpet again, as if trying not to cry.

“And I’ve seen your toes,” she says, clearing her throat and trying to sound composed once more. “They’re fine. You’re fine. You’re a straight-A student, completely healthy, completely normal. You get to choose what this means about you and how this defines you, and I don’t care if you hate me forever, as long as you promise never, ever to hate yourself.”

He peers up at both of us through his long eyelashes, eyes green and wet. “I don’t know what I can promise right now,” he says after a minute, his voice both vulnerable and guarded all at once. “But I suppose I can promise to try.”

“Thank you,” Morgan replies thickly, carefully wiping the tears away from her eyes so she doesn’t smudge her mascara. “That would be enough.”

“Will I—I mean…” He chews on the inside of his lip a moment. “Are you going to try to be my parents now? Am I going to see you again, President Colchester?”

I grimace a little at the title. “Call me whatever you like, Lyr, but please don’t call me that.”

“So I should call you dad?” I hear the defensive note in his voice, the bitterness threatening to break through its trammels.

“I would never ask that of you, as much as it would make me happy. But you can call me Maxen, if you’d like, or Ash. Ash is what the people closest to me use.”

“Ash,” he says slowly. “I think I can do that.”

“And I’ll be around as much as you want me. I’ll talk about you as much as you’ll let me. You can move into the White House tomorrow with me as far as I’m concerned. I’m not ashamed of you, Lyr.”

My words stir up something potent and artlessly emotional in him; he finally does start crying.

“I’m here as much or as little as you want me,” I finish. “I’m yours as much or as little as you want me. We’ve taken so many choices from you, but this is one you get back.”

He swallows, still crying, and stands up, and I know exactly what he wants. I stand up too, and for the first time in his life, I pull my son into my arms and hug him. For every milestone and year I missed, for every other person’s arms he’s felt holding and carrying him, for every empty, bitter moment he felt today when he learned the truth and had to endure it alone.

I hug him. I close my eyes, press my face into his already strong and heavy shoulder, and I thank God for this unexpected grace. This undeserved mercy.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.