The silence in the room was painful and oppressive.

It was similar to the quiet at home, at the moment – Valorous had been gone for nearly a month now, and Cecil did miss him, but it wasn’t as if Valorous wasn’t in contact like before. He’d been sending Cecil texts and pictures every day, and it was genuinely…

It would perhaps be wrong to think of it as “nice”. Cecil had read some of Valorous’ surveillance reports when he’d seen copies of them as they sorted through his things, and his text messages were written in the same tone and format. Knowing that did take some of the sweetness off it, but it still was sweet, and it was genuine, it was earnest.

It was the lad telling Cecil about his day, and yes, it was the same way he would give reports to a superior officer, but the sentiment was more important than the format.

10:40: Arrived at the station near to Llallwg.

Ate breakfast in the station café (eggs benedict with smoked salmon, photo A) before walking the twenty-five minutes up the hill into the park proper and met my cousin Vermilion (photo B). I walked with him and met some of his colleagues, other wardens, and he walked me over to his cottage where I met his cats, Marble (photo C) and Quartz (photo D).

11:30: Dropped my stuff and took the cats on a walk as well as foraging some mushrooms and herbs. They are leash-trained, but Marble spent a lot of it on my shoulders, he’s going to be twenty-two in February, so he doesn’t walk as well as he used to be able to.

12:15: Made some dishes to bring along to the park canteen – some pork belly with the mushrooms, as well as some apples and herbs (photo E), as well as some chips and salad.

Each message was the same – military time format, more practical details than emotions or feelings, each picture not just with a corresponding label, but also with included date, time, and location information, and in the same folders were maps and sketches, maps showing where he was camping and trails he’d walked, sketches of animals or plants or mushrooms he’d seen… And sketches of identifying markings on people, such as unique tattoos, scars, accessories, or jewellery.

“And these updates make you feel less lonely?” Majok had asked wryly when Cecil had shown him the fist set of messages for him to understand what he meant, and Cecil had laughed and said he knew it was strange, but yes. He gave Valorous his own details in return, told him what he’d been up to, and Valorous occasionally asked follow-up questions that were a little bit less professional.

It had only occurred to Cecil on the fourth or fifth day to ask, and Valorous had confirmed the suspicion – he’d never texted other kids growing up, almost never texted to talk to somebody. Conversations he had on the phone or face-to-face, or even via a letter: in his mind, texts and emails were hard-wired as something for work and efficiency, separate from social engagements, and that was something he was trying to undo texting Cecil.

Val had started off going up north to camp in Llallwg National Park, stayed with his cousin; he’d gone to stay with some aunts and uncles in Medalton on their farm, talked to his cousin there, and a few other cousins; he’d gone further down south, then, to London to stay with Avaricious, and then all over.

Now, he was in Wales, and his most recent report had involved Cicero Penllwynog’s horror at how well Valorous was doing at flirting with each of his parents, as well as more in-depth reports on the drills he’d been going through with the family.

It was a fascinating, but not wholly pleasant, insight into how the lad saw the world – he had offered multiple times before to let Cecil see the notes he’d made whilst watching him if Cecil wanted to read them. Cecil wasn’t fully certain that he understood Cecil’s reasons for not wanting to read a single surveillance document on his own behaviours, because Valorous still seemed to be under the impression that the issue was that his notes were in their raw, unpolished form, and not that they weren’t fully fleshed out as a report.

In the weeks without Valorous here, Cecil had a routine.

He’d been extended a job offer at the Camelot arena after one of the attendants had seen him drilling Valorous and Cicero – he knew full well that Valorous had requested the offer be extended, that it was nowhere as organic as the little prick had made it seem – and he was going to Camelot on the train three times a week to work there on the days he wasn’t working at the gym in Lashton.

It wasn’t the same as teaching in a school – fourteen was the youngest age you could fight in the arena, and until they turned eighteen, they couldn’t go up against anybody older than twenty-one, so the vast majority of the fighters he trained were already adults with a great deal of their own training already – but it was a damn sight more fucking rewarding than the gym.

Everybody called him “sir” instead of “mate” or “bro” for a fucking start.

In the course of a day, he texted Valorous, walked the dog and did some training with her – he’d been introducing her to different puzzles now that she was less anxious about her food, snuffle mats and the like – and then went to work, either at the gym in Lashton or to Camelot. On Wednesdays, he saw Doctor Majok; once or twice a week, he saw Ava the angel in the park, and they had a chat or walked together a little; on Sundays, Coshel would come back with him on the train from Camelot and they’d have a pint after walking the dog.

It was nice, actually seeing people regularly other than Valorous, but he’d come to almost dread his Wednesday evenings.

Cecil was leaned right back in his seat, his hand across his mouth, one of his knuckles pressed almost painfully against his septum. They were ten minutes into the session, and beyond the basic politeness – hi, how are you this week, how’s the dog – they hadn’t said a word.

Exhaling quietly – Majok didn’t look uncomfortable at all, a consummate professional – Majok looked at him kindly and said, “Just because we discussed it last week, Cecil, doesn’t mean we—”

“I’m unfortunately not in a habit of backing down on my commitments,” Cecil muttered, tapping his thumbnail against his lower teeth, and Majok’s lips twitched, his smile widening for a moment. “I said I wanted to discuss it this week, I will.”

“Alright,” Majok said mildly, as though this was the sort of conversation one had all the time – for Majok, Cecil supposed it was more commonplace than most. “You’ve discussed this before – in prison, with other inmates, with your counsellor there. Have you discussed it with other psychotherapists, before you were inside?”

Cecil shook his head. “Too risky. That a psych wouldn’t take me, that they’d talk amongst themselves, report me for something. They shouldn’t, obviously. But I shouldn’t have nearly killed a lad’s stepfather.”

Majok quietly chuckled, because he was a good bloke, and he was not as neutral as he always ought to be.

“I wanted to keep my job, I wanted… It’s why I have so many books about sexual crime, abuse and recovery, paraphilias, paedophilia and hebephilia, trauma and post-trauma disorders, sexual compulsions and disorders… Obviously, I’m a bigger reader than most PE teachers my age – they make them do degrees now, same as any other educator, but it used to be a bit more of a doss – and a lot of that was about working with kids, recognising early signs of dysfunction, offering the best support. But it was for me, too.”

“When did you first realise that you were being abused, that what you were experiencing was unlike what most other children experienced?” Majok asked, straight as an arrow.

Cecil took a sip of the water on the side table, then averted his eyes from the glass so he didn’t have to see how his hand was shaking. “I’m not sure, exactly,” he said. “I knew that what my dad was doing to me was wrong – I’d seen cats raped by toms, had it explained to me. My mother, when she was very drunk one night, so she, um… She used pretty brutal language, and it… Looking back, I don’t know if she knew or if she didn’t. As a lad, I was certain she didn’t know. In retrospect, I sometimes wonder if she told me about it, explained rape to me, as a sort of code. If she knew, or suspected, but didn’t want to deal with the fucking hassle of it – if she wanted to tell me what rape was so that the responsibility of reporting my dad was mine.”

Majok’s smile now was pained, but full of understanding, and he slowly nodded his head. They’d talked a little already about Cecil’s mother, about the drinking, the avoidance, the distance it always felt like she kept from Cecil versus the others, especially after more of his brothers moved out.

“Have you talked about this before with a clinician or in your groups in prison? In detail, I mean?”

“No. I’ve always been… oblique. I’ve said, you know, how old I was, what he did to me, but not the surrounding…”

“Are you sure you’re ready for this now?”

“Yeah. Um— I want to keep talking.”

“Alright.”

“I knew that I was going through something most other kids my age weren’t, and especially other boys. When I was, um… It…”

“There’s no rush, Cecil,” Majok said. “It takes as long as it takes – breathe in, settle yourself. No need to hurry it out.”

Cecil nodded his head, closing his eyes a moment, and then he exhaled very slowly, blowing out air, counting one, two, three, four, five, six… He breathed in again, opened his eyes, looked into Majok’s calming, black ones, looked at his attentive expression, the easy sympathy writ in his features, easy and obvious, but not overwhelming.

“I started puberty when I was about ten. I remember being horribly aware of my body changing. We weren’t very religious, but we were fucking poor, so we went to church, and one of the priests had a quiet word with some of us boys about inappropriate touches – it wasn’t as progressive as your raised eyebrows would suggest, he was in a pissing contest with the Catholics about the football ground, and one of theirs had recently been hurriedly sent on to another parish, so it was him rubbing salt in the wound—”

Majok did laugh at that, laughed in the miserable, disgusted way that Cecil was used to, and that did make him feel at home, when he said something fucking awful about how the way things were, or the way things used to be.

“And anyway, it had made some of the other boys talk about it. Someone’s older brother, I don’t remember his name, anyway, one of these boys, a year or two younger than me, Danny something, he was fucking terrified of being molested. I don’t know why, I really don’t think anybody had ever touched him or looked at him funny – he was a bit better off than us, his dad wore a suit to work, it was one of those fears a sheltered kid develops and then really grips them, you know, when they overhear the wrong things, see the wrong news report?

“And to make him feel better, his older brother – nice lad, I remember him being nice, had this stupid little ratty moustache and greasy hair, but he cared about his brother and cared about us kids – said, “oh, Danny, don’t worry. Remember how we was talking about that hair you’re growing? Paedos can’t stand hair. They’ll take one look at your down below and go off to rape some other kid.” Well. I heard that, I thought, thank God. It’s nearly over.”

Cecil dug his teeth into his lower lip, worrying it for a moment, not breaking the skin, just… fiddling. He and Valorous had talked about how part of Valorous’ obsession with exercise was about having control over his body, his every muscle, and he knew his own fixation was much the same – he was very aware of that in this moment, his body trembling, different muscles flexing and twitching, compulsively swallowing spit.

“So I was properly studying myself. Every minute change, I noticed. I had a ruler by the side of my bed, same as any growing boy, but not just that. Once, just after my eleventh birthday, I tried to weigh my bollocks on the kitchen scales, to try to figure out how much they’d grown. Tracked the hair on my body obsessively. When I had a glance at the men in the skin mags that got passed around the boys, I wasn’t just having a look-see because I was queer or because I wanted to see how I compared – I was looking, you know, for mileage. What level of manhood did I need to reach, before I wasn’t fuckable anymore?

“I was always skinny, but that age, I was eating more than I wanted, would eat enough to make myself sick, and not just because the testosterone had me burning through fuel like the other boys – I wanted to grow more, grow up faster. My dad belted me across the face the first time I got hard while he was touching me. He was normally teary-eyed and quiet when he touched me, when he raped me, always apologised a lot. Said how sorry he was, how fucked up he knew it was, how he was going to kill himself, how he wished he could kill himself. He would hit me, if I said anything, but he always seemed regretful. After that, he stopped apologising. Started calling me names – whore, slut.”

“And that was when he began prostituting you to other men?”

“Not immediately,” Cecil said. “I, um… I’ve thought about it, I think…” Clearing his throat, he took another sip of his drink. “I think at first, it was just… It was that sudden justification for what he was doing, a turning of the tables in his mind. If I was getting hard, that meant I liked it, that I wanted it – that I was the real monster between us, tempting him, a grown man, into fucking a child, his son. And he did say some of those things. Called me a demon and an incubus and that sort of shit, started saying it was my fault instead of saying sorry, started saying I was making him do it, instead of apologising for not being able to resist the urge.

“And I was eleven, and still, you know. Measuring, tracking, staring at myself, touching my body – my chest, my arse, my shoulders, my hips – to figure out where it was growing fastest, where it was changing most. I saw it as this clock, you know, this… Just if I grew up enough, if enough of the puberty happened, he’d stop touching me. He did touch me less, when I turned twelve – I had a small growth spurt then, and I was starting to put on more muscle. I remember that he didn’t like that, I remember him touching me and seeing this, this look of… disdain, on his face, when he touched my arms one day and realised how muscular they were getting. I used to do push-ups in secret, doubled them, tripled them, when I saw him make that face.

“And it was round about then he first brought me to the back of the pub. Gave me my first lager, I was thirteen. I spat it out at first, and he laughed, but then made me down it. Put his hand over my mouth to “help” me not throw it up, and then, uh, then when I was drunk, he took me in to where the other lads were.”

“Did you know any of the men?”

“Not by name,” Cecil said, “not at first – I recognised a face here and there, from the steelworks or the dole office. He’d been touching me less, and I’d almost thought that night, him giving me a beer, the way he’d been talking with me, that it meant, you know, he saw me as a man. That meant he’d not touch me any longer. And he didn’t touch me much, after that, but he watched his friends do it.”

“And when did it stop?”

“When I left to join the army,” Cecil said. “I actually left on the train on the Friday morning, handed in my papers the Friday afternoon, ‘cause I knew that they wouldn’t be processed until the Tuesday, though I wasn’t turning sixteen until two days after that, on the Thursday. They put me up on the army campus in Camelot – they obviously, they couldn’t do that nowadays, but then, they turned a blind eye. Had a lot more runaways than me.”

“Were you aware, at that point, that you were aroused by boys younger than yourself?”

Cecil didn’t mean to, but he huffed out a laugh, putting his head in his hands.

Majok didn’t seem offended at all, his expression serious as a heart attack. “What’s funny about that question?”

“Please don’t be offended, Doc,” Cecil said, “but sometimes you do remind me of Valorous King.”

Majok sighed, but he did smile. “He does ask direct questions, doesn’t he?” he murmured, not without a certain acerbic tone – in all honestly, Cecil didn’t know that he’d ever want to change therapists, but if he ever did, he absolutely wanted one like Majok, who saw none of the appeal or charisma anybody else did in Valorous.

“I knew, yeah. It, uh… I think while I was still at school, I knew that as much as I was looking at men, and to a lesser extent, women, I was looking not just at boys my age, but younger boys. In changing rooms, when we went swimming and the year sevens were in the period after we finished, and I knew I was looking at them and that the other lads my age weren’t, but I didn’t know how much of that was, you know, being queer. Messaging was different about queerness then, and apart from that, it was, you know, was I so desperate for men to look at that I was looking at boys too? Once I enlisted, and I was only around men, really, and I found myself looking to the lads with boyish faces, or the ones that were even skinnier and smaller than I was, when I was fantasising, and I ended up thinking of…”

He had to stop talking, because the shame in his gut was threatening to make him vomit, and he had to concentrate on breathing between taking small sips of water. Majok waited with him, waited in the silence, until Cecil looked at him.

“You’re not in a habit of breaking your commitments, you said,” Majok said quietly, gently. “Was it a particular commitment, a promise to yourself, when you decided you weren’t ever going to indulge these feelings you had?”

Cecil stared at the quaking water inside his glass, the last inch or so, and then looked across at Majok, not quite able to comprehend the question, to understand what the actual answer was. “What do you mean?”

“Well, we’ve talked about your sexual preferences – older men and women when you were a young man, particularly, an attraction to authority you freely admit to; when you were initially enlisted, boys your age, sixteen, seventeen, up until you were nineteen or twenty. From then on, you’ve been rather firm about primarily pursuing sexual relationships with young men who are at least seventeen or eighteen, with a preference for twenty-somethings that look younger than they are. Valorous, of course, is a notable exception, looking as aged as he does in the wrong light.” He said this with a wryness and a familiarity, but it was good-natured, and Cecil appreciated it. “But you’ve expressed to him multiple times that the reason you wouldn’t accept his seduction when he was still your student is that no matter his appeal, it wasn’t worth becoming a rapist over. Was there a singular moment where you made that resolution to yourself, where you made that a key part of your identity, or has it simply been a consistent set of actions from you, day by day by day?”

“I’m not sure… Maybe. There was a turning point for me as a drill sergeant, where I moved away from fucking the younger lads – it wasn’t based on a particular experience. I think it was, um… The summer came, my last summer before I was discharged, and we had several new boys at once, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, all of whom’d obviously, you know, finished their last school exams, and then come to join. I remember looking at the unusually big line-up of new recruits and there was a sour taste in my mouth. Too much youthfulness at once, and abruptly, it didn’t feel right, that I should fuck any of them. I didn’t feel bad for wanting to, or finding them good to look at, you know, I didn’t feel it was inappropriate because of our ages, but… Yeah. That was when I went to train as a teacher, actually.” There was a quiet dread building up inside him, his blood feeling like it was turning to thick, uncomfortably cold sludge in his veins, his heart pounding in his fucking ears, and he didn’t actually realise why until he voiced it out loud: “And once, Wyllt made a joke to me.”

“A joke?” Majok repeated. “What, about having sex with soldiers?”

“No,” Cecil said, tasting the acrid nastiness of bile in the back of his throat and casting around for the jug of water to refill his glass, but Majok had seen his discomfort and was already passing it across to him. The lip of the jug clinked loudly against the glass as he sloshed more than poured more in, but he managed not to spill any. “No, it was, um… It was one of the last times we slept together. He, um… He’d made comments before. Telepath, you know, and not, um, not an ethical one, like one of your sisters. He’s Myrddin fucking Wyllt. And he, um, he… It was the last time we slept together.”

“We haven’t spoken in detail about your sexual relationship with Wyllt, as yet,” Majok said quietly. “Most of what we’ve discussed in the course of our professional relationship has been about the present day – your sense of lost identity, losing your teaching position, being seen as a sexual predator, as an ex-convict; your sense of power or not in your relationship with Valorous; your loneliness, and how it feels to build friendships now. Do you think it’s a coincidence, Cecil, that we’re discussing your father’s abuse of you and your relationship with Myrddin Wyllt in the same session?”

“No,” said Cecil. “No, it’s, uh. It’s not fucking coincidental, is it?”

“I’m cognizant of time,” said Majok. “There’s about ten minutes left of our scheduled session, but Ava isn’t actually coming in today. Would you like to perhaps take a break, and we’ll continue on through? It doesn’t have to be the full additional fifty minutes, but we can just see this conversation through to its natural endpoint.”

“Is Ava alright?” Cecil asked, and Majok smiled at him, genuinely, his dark eyes crinkling at their edges.

“She’s fine,” he said. “She’s not ill or anything – I’m surprised she didn’t mention it to you on one of your park meetings, it’s not a secret by any means. She got this voucher last Christmas, for—”

“Oh, for that fucking mindfulness pottery class,” Cecil said, laughing, feeling himself relax, and Majok nodded his head. “I thought she didn’t want to do it, that she thought it was stupid.”

Majok laughed as well. “My sister’s gone with her – Aluel, obviously, she’s been keeping her slot free with Sir Valorous taking his leave, and she finishes after him on a Wednesday. I don’t think she’ll find it any less stupid with Dot as company, but at least they can find it stupid together.”

There was another short silence. “I would like to keep talking,” Cecil said, and shoved his hands up to his face again, pushing the balls of his palms into his eyes, which were uncomfortably dry. He didn’t feel like crying, but he wished he did – crying would be a bit more comfortable than this bile-sick shite. “I’ll, um… Fuck’s sake, I’ve been doing so fucking well not smoking.”

“Fresh air will probably still help,” Majok said.

“Yeah,” said Cecil. “I might pop to the shop for some fags, if you don’t mind.”

“If that’s what you feel you need,” Majok said. “Without meaning to encourage self-destructive behaviour on your part, Cecil, of all of our sessions to justify a cigarette, I would say this one is up there.”

“Can I buy a packet, take one fag out, and give you the rest to keep back from me?”

“Would you like me to toss them once you’re gone, or keep the box on hand for emergencies?”

“Manute Majok, you’re a very good and just man,” said Cecil, “but that latter offer is not one I can accept as much as I fucking want to.” When they stood, Majok shook his hand, squeezed it, put one of his hands over Cecil’s own.

“I’ll brew some tea in the meantime,” he said quietly, “and fill up that jug with ice water.”

“Thanks,” said Cecil, and slipped outside to grab his coat.

* * *

“The cellophane is still on,” observed Majok as Cecil all but tossed the box at him, and Cecil nodded his head, picking up the cup of tea waiting for him on the side table and drinking a few gulps of it even though it was still too hot, and it burned the roof of his mouth.

Cold air had helped, heaving in lungfuls of the stuff and feeling grateful it was such a chilly day, but he’d felt horribly fucking spotlit when he was in the cornershop, felt like everyone was looking at him, staring at him too much, and he’d not wanted to stay outdoors long enough to smoke, had wanted to go inside where no one was looking at him but Majok.

“You were the last one in the house by the time you departed home,” Majok said. “John, Luther, Donald, they were all enlisted themselves, and Rob hadn’t gone to Australia yet, but he’d left that Christmas, hadn’t he, he’d left Redcar and gone to London?”

“Mm.”

“There was a sense of counting down the days until you left?”

“Yeah. At least that summer, you know, I could make my own schedule, go off and do whatever, keep out of the house. Once I was back in school, it was… He was worse, my dad. There wasn’t anybody else to watch, to notice, except my mother, and she was drinking more than she ever did – she was in hospital twice that year, and both times they brought up her liver. He had a pretty alright job by then, but when he wasn’t working, he wanted to hire me out.”

“He charged?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know how much?”

“Fifteen quid, twenty, thereabouts,” Cecil said. “D’you remember when they stopped issuing the pound note, and swapped over to the coins? That was ’83. I don’t— It was already bad, don’t get me wrong. But it fucked me up, the first time I saw a bloke count out coins instead of handing over notes. Seems like such a small fucking thing in the scheme of things, but it wasn’t, it was…” He slowly shook his head, remembering the noise the coins made when they clinked against one another on the sticky pub table. He didn’t remember how many of them there were, how many coins he paid in alongside the stack of notes, but he remembered the noise, remembered the shine of them.”

“You never engaged in sex work once you left?”

“No.”

“And never paid a sex worker?”

“No. I’ve lent lads money, but as soon as they’ve ever asked for money, I’ve, uh… Well. I’d give them the money and not touch them, you know? I couldn’t, not…” He closed his eyes, exhaling slowly.

“We talked before about your pursuit of inappropriate figures at that age – certain teachers, Mrs Lemon at the library, but you mentioned you gained confidence once you slept with some fellow soldiers. How did it come about, Wyllt picking you out?”

“I’d trained from sixteen, and by the time I was seventeen, I was marching. Fought against King Ritten’s forces, some of the attempts against Capulet and trying to hem in the Crystal expansions – Queen Mebh wasn’t as much of a target back then, but I did walk some of the borders of the queen’s lands. In 1989 – I was twenty-one, I think – I got fucking run down by this trained drake in Ala, badly dislocated my hip, so I was taken out of active service, and then for the next three years I ran drills and training, before I discharged fully to go into teaching in ’93.

“I was, I don’t know, two or three months into the position when the king regent came for this surprise… Not inspection, visit, I suppose? I remember watching him walk down by line of men, and he was like…”

Closing his eyes, Cecil sat back in the chair, tapping his fingers against the fabric of the arm. He hated himself for it in the moment, but he actually felt absurdly calm, remembering it – in his mind’s eye, Myrddin Wyllt swept by him in slow motion, because that was how it had felt that day, his robes and his hair gently picked up by the breeze, his face a cold mask of stone where everything around him seemed to sway and flow.

“He’s very… Beautiful isn’t the right word,” he murmured, hearing the hoarseness in his voice. “But there’s an impossible, frightening grace in him. He moves like fae, feels like fae – I’d seen fae generals, and more than that, I’d seen fae royalty, the sort you can’t even fucking shoot at because there’s so much magic around them that there’d be no point even trying to shoot a bullet at them, because the laws of physics would bend. And even if it wasn’t for that, the fact that he was so powerful and that I could feel it, feel it on my teeth and inside my fucking, ears and nose and in my bollocks, when he was close to me, it was the psychological thing of it, that he was this literal legend, basically a god, right in front of me. Said he’d been watching my work, watching how well I shaped out my recruits, how impressive it was to see them whipped into shape.

“I remember he touched me, reached out and… My hair, I had it cut really fucking short then, hadn’t grown it out again yet, and he touched it, said softly that he wished I’d grow it out – he made a comment, first, about his own hair, that he had long hair, that… I don’t know, that I might not want to look old-fashioned like him. But then he said it was sometimes nice to have something to pull on.”

Majok’s expression was as serious as the grave, and he was still holding the packet of cigarettes Cecil had tossed to him, sliding one of his thumbnails down the cellophane very slowly, but not tearing it. It was quite a delicate movement, but Cecil had seen enough of Majok by now, knew him well enough, to see it for redirected temper – the flex in his jaw was almost imperceptible, but looking for it, Cecil took note of it.

Majok had to force his hand to relax when he dropped the box of cigarettes on the side table, and Cecil watched him work to make his fingers lose their tension. He still didn’t tear up, but he felt like he could cry, seeing the other man so angry on his behalf, even hiding it so well.

“Because your father pulled on your hair,” he said quietly.

“Yeah.”

“Did you know, in that moment, that he was a telepath?”

Cecil shook his head. “I was just… spellbound. Starstruck. And when he reached down and took my hand, I thought that he was just, um… Fuck’s sake, I thought he was going to read my fucking palm or something. Instead he led me by my hand into his coach, and rode me.”

“He rode you?” Majok repeated. “Did he usually bottom?”

“Mostly topped, but he bottomed sometimes,” Cecil said. “Regardless, I was unequivocally the submissive – if he did bottom, he was always riding me, or I was tied down.”

“How did it feel, being with Wyllt?”

“At first, special. Very special. Every time he came and fetched me, or had me come to the palace, it was, um, it was a real sense of privilege – especially that he brought me into places that even his favourites weren’t allowed to go. It’s Sir Serena now, and before her, it was Valorous – well, back then, his favourite of his knights were Sir Eman, who was a London lad, very tall, and Sir Lea and Leo, they were twins. He’d make a show of bringing me into the rooms where they weren’t allowed to be, or have me be visible in bed or half-undressed when they came in for meetings.

“He didn’t do that with his servants or with real politicians and ambassadors, only with his pet knights, and I could see the effect it had on them – Eman was jealous in a straightforward way, he was like Valorous, wanted to fuck the king regent himself, and he actually tried to make his case, to you know, seduce him. He was a good deal older than Val was when he was a favourite, but even still, Wyllt rebuffed him, always laughed. The twins, it was more of a jealousy at the intimacy, at the fact that Wyllt was whispering things in my ear, telling me jokes – he’d make fun of his knights to me, and I’d… I’d fucking laugh.

“I look back on it now, and it just feels like a fucking fever dream sometimes. I didn’t know any of these people, and I knew I was dirt compared to them, that I wasn’t anything – I knew that that was the point, that Wyllt was making out I was special in those moments precisely because I wasn’t, because that was what pissed them off so much.

“But I was… He taught me a lot about sex, about my own body. Helped me with the nerve pain I still had in my hip and back, taught me to meditate, to control my breaths, even fucking… Asked me about what I was reading sometimes, bought me more books. I was a fucktoy, a soldier lad to use when he wanted his rocks off, but the fact that he took any interest in me beyond that, the way he argued with me sometimes, teased me into making my arguments or expressing moral stuff, the way he pushed me toward books, it was a mentorship I’d never had in my fucking life. Not one with that sort of intimacy, that physicality.”

“That felt good?”

“Yeah,” Cecil said quietly. “I felt, um…” He pressed his hands against the denim of his jeans, feeling the resistance of the denim against his palms. Insane, that he’d spent the better part of the last year feeling vulnerable one way or another, constantly watched and interviewed and scrutinised by Valorous, and then opening himself up for the little prick, examining himself, on his own or here, with Majok.

It was funny, how much, from the lad’s perspective, Cecil had things figured out, how he knew himself – when you were a PE teacher, kids looked up to you if they cared about sport or exercise, understood you had expertise in your field, but frankly, they expected you to be thick as pig shit when it came to anything else. More students of Cecil’s had been surprised that he’d read the books they were studying, or understood something about what they were studying, than they expected him to know everything just because he was a teacher.

It was different, with Valorous. Valorous, fucking fixated on him, looking up to him, wanting Cecil’s approval, wanting Cecil to fix him, wanting Cecil to explain things – explain how to feel his fucking feelings, how to understand them, how to digest them, how to get over them.

Well, what the fuck was Cecil over?

If he was over anything, would he be fucking Valorous King in the first place? Would he be in what amounted to a relationship with a living, breathing, unstable bomb – and wanting it to go on?

“I felt important,” he said quietly. “Not the most important, don’t get me wrong. If Wyllt had tried to put that across, I’d never have believed it. But like I had a value. When I’d enlisted, I felt a lot more secure than I ever had – I was good at school when I was there, when I wasn’t bunking off, and when I could, you know, focus… but that was fucking rare. I always had to go home, you know. I didn’t always get to sleep. That kind of— Well, I mean, I don’t have to fucking tell you, that domination of your mind and your body and your time, the fear, the anticipation, the bruises and the pain and the slow recovery after, lying about it all the time. It’s a terrorism, that you’re living under.

“And so I enlisted, and there was… Rules, structure, discipline. Lots of shouting, lots of stress on the body, but none of the men that trained me ever hit me, beat me, raped me.”

“Do you think any of them wanted to? Officers, superiors?”

“Yeah, a few looked my way, flirted a little – women, mostly, one or two male officers. But I was shy, I was nervous, on top of being, you know, a scrawny little cunt, and it’s not like I’m handsome, you know? I wasn’t then, either, I was plain – I was smart, you know, I was competent, there are things about me that are attractive, but I don’t turn heads, never did, never will. I was good in the field, and the ones that flirted with me, once they got closer, I couldn’t deal with it. I got twitchy, I stammered and I flinched if they moved too close, stiffened when they touched me.”

“You were a dog that might have bitten,” Majok offered, and Cecil nodded his head. “Do you think you could have said no, would have said no, if Wyllt had approached you then, or another superior within the Lluoedd Arfog?”

“Wyllt, no,” Cecil said. “Somebody else, maybe – it wouldn’t have been, you know. Polite, even-toned. I think if someone had tried to rape me by force, if they’d grabbed me by my clothes or went to hit me, I trained up pretty quickly, I’d have fought back, and I was, you know, scrappy. I think if someone had been subtler about it, worked up to it and coaxed me closer, I’m not sure.

“I’m glad nobody did – I know it wasn’t, you know, ‘cause everyone was fucking noble or whatever. I was just a bad target, no one took the risk on me, so I got lucky. I was able to lean into the structure in the force, and I thrived in it. I was sleeping well, and sleeping enough; I was exercising all day and reading in my free time instead of drinking or fucking about, which the officers liked; I was obedient, desperate to fucking please, I was clean, I was orderly. Obsessively so, but, hey. That makes a good soldier.

“So yeah, I didn’t sleep with anybody until after I’d fought a few battles, and I gained confidence, you know, ‘cause… Well. I’d killed other men – Ritten’s soldiers, mostly fae, and they were the same as us, you know, a lot of them were little more than kids.

“By the time I was drilling as a sergeant, I was a lot more confident in myself, in my body, in my ability to say no – I had read up a little on education because I was vaguely interested in going into teaching, and from there, I had read a little bit on abuse and the effects of it on kids, on adults. I felt a little more empowered… Ha, fuck that.” Shaking his head, he murmured, “No, I felt a lot empowered. When Wyllt picked me out, I felt very lucky, but I felt like I’d earned it, too. I knew he wouldn’t have picked me out if I was still the twitchy thing I’d been when I first joined up, and I was more honed, then. Fitter, smarter. I thought I knew everything at that age – knew I had some work to do, but I thought I was on top of it.

“And with him, it was like… I felt like I was learning a lot, that I was being given a privilege, and that I wanted to make the most of it. I knew I was being used for something, and I liked that, because it felt secure – transactional felt more secure than, you know. Something else.”

“Did he feel like a father figure?”

“Only when he was fucking me,” Cecil muttered, and Majok gave him a look. “I don’t know,” he said more seriously. “I don’t think so. I’d never… Well, like I told you, my dad wasn’t very active with us – and even when he got into sports and that, it was always with the others, never me. He wasn’t a reader at all, didn’t give a fuck about any of us getting any grades, knew none of us was going to get into a university. I never learned anything from him, and he never asked about fucking… Hell. His friends would ask more about school or what I was up to than he ever did.

“Wyllt would ask what I was reading, ask about new recruits, the ones I liked, or the ones I thought wouldn’t make it. Asked which ones I was fucking. Asked what my plans were, what I was doing to improve myself, would nudge me toward different things.”

“Did you suspect the telepathy then?”

“Yes and no. After the first year, when the spell had worn off a bit, he definitely provoked me more, tried to get me angry with him, and I was a little less, you know, starry-eyed. I didn’t really know much about that sort of magic yet, though – I’d seen battle mages in the field, but them, the witch knights, the strong magic users, they were never anywhere near our unit. But I knew he knew more than I did – knew more about me than I did. I mostly figured it was just that he was older and wiser – and well-connected, well-informed.”

“What was the joke about?” Majok asked.

Cecil swallowed, because he’d almost forgotten about it, and his eyes flitted to the packet of cigarettes on the table. Majok watched him, and Cecil focused his gaze on Majok’s chest instead, on the slow rise and fall of it as he breathed, his breathing calm where Cecil’s was a little more stuttered.

“He’d ask me about cadets I slept with. When we were fucking, sometimes – ask if I ever bottomed for any of them, which I didn’t. Ask about what I found attractive about them, or point out the new recruits that were interested in me, but that I wasn’t, you know. And then, uh… He’d ask more charged questions – you know, tease me about abusing my authority, asking where my line was. In the last few months, he was, uh… He took the piss out of me about not fucking anybody from that new line-up – that was when I knew that he was telepathic, because he picked up immediately on my, you know, distaste for it. And he knew that I knew. And he got… He got sly, and smirked, and asked these questions that were deniable, but were still, you know, pinpoint. Razor-sharp. And when I said I was being discharged, that I was taking this PE job, he looked right at me and he smiled, and said, “Your youngest charges will be eleven. Will they suit your tastes more? What will you hone those little boys into – what will you train them for? Will you teach them as your father taught you?” And it was…

“I threw up, after. It wasn’t… Like I said, it was deniable – we’d had conversations that evening about what we learned from our ancestors, our mothers and fathers, how we teach from generation to generation. So he could have just been saying it because we were talking about it – but he wasn’t.

“When I was in the bathroom, retching, I thought about, um… What he’d said. If he meant what I thought he meant by it. And I’d kind of— It’s not like I’d been thinking about teaching with that in mind, that I was like, oh, free crop of kids. It was the same satisfaction I was looking for that I had in the army, drilling new recruits – I wanted to train people, I wanted to give them skills. I wanted to give kids in schools the same confidence I got in the army, the same sense of security, discipline, if they wanted it. But that moment, it was certain. I was never gonna fucking… I was never gonna do that to a child. I wasn’t going to become like my father, that was certain anyway, but I was never going to let myself, you know, sidle into it either, let myself justify it by grooming someone, let myself think of it as a relationship, call it that.”

“Do you think that was his intention?” Majok asked.

“What, he said it out of a sense of public-mindedness?”

“Do you think that’s a possibility?”

“No,” Cecil whispered. “No, he said it, um… To be cruel. To get a reaction out of me. We’d talked before about how he didn’t believe in ages of consent at all, and those conversations had always unsettled me, but I’d never really gotten into it with him, even though he wanted me to. He knew the thoughts I had, knew more than me, at that point, and he thought it was funny, me going into a school. And it— I don’t know, that comment, that moment, it recontextualised our relationship, him picking me out of the line-up, how much it had felt like a privilege to me, and the…”

Oh, there were tears, now.

It took him by surprise, crept up on him suddenly, the thickness in his throat and the burn in his eyes and the way they were watering, the way his breaths were hitching as he tried to inhale, exhale. It was shaky.

“And I was a young man,” Cecil said slowly, “I was twenty-something, so it wasn’t a matter of exploiting a child, but I was cognizant of the parallel. He was a teacher, a mentor, far older and more experienced than I was, and I was much younger, psychologically vulnerable, quite sheltered in many ways – it was very easy for me to go into that situation thinking we were on some kind of equal footing, and to realise over time how much more power he had that I didn’t, that I couldn’t see… And then at the end, realising he knew everything in my head, that he could… I didn’t want to become my father, but I didn’t want to become like Wyllt, either.”

The sob wracks his body in a sudden, rough, harsh movement – it feels like he’s been shot in the fucking chest, and he wheezes at the intensity of it, and when he sobs, it’s loud in the plush, warm room. There’s no fucking silence any longer, not with the way that he’s crying, the soft wails coming out of his throat, the way his shoulders are moving up and down.

“Is it alright if I touch you, Cecil?” Majok asked quietly, and Cecil nodded – it was just a hand on his shoulder, still professionally distant even though it was comforting, and he leaned into Majok’s palm and kept on sobbing.

Before he left that night, Majok did offer him the cigarettes.

Cecil was very proud of himself, when he shook his head no, and went without.