Emyr's Smile (3 page)

Oh, someone had made a
horrible mess of this man, but Heilyn wasn’t going to let him stay
that way. He crossed the kitchen in two steps and linked his arms
around Emyr’s neck, smiling up at him. “No, with me, what you see
is all there is, ask anyone. So, to be clear, I want to paint you
and I want to kiss you, and if the kissing goes well, then I’ll
want to take your clothes off and kiss you a little more, and
then…”

He almost saw it then.
The first hint of a smile dawned on Emyr’s face, in a crinkling of
his eyes and a softening of his lips. It didn’t blossom, didn’t
even last more than a moment, but he saw it, and decided there and
then, that he had a new purpose in his life. Before he left Sirig,
he would make Emyr smile.

To stop himself
babbling, he stretched the rest of the way up and kissed Emyr. For
the first few moments, it was a very respectful kiss, soft, gentle
and careful. Even that was enough to make the hairs on the back of
Heilyn’s neck stand up. Then Emyr shifted slightly against him, his
arms coming tightly around Heilyn, and the kiss changed. Suddenly,
Emyr was kissing him as if the world was ending, his mouth hungry
and demanding. This wasn’t Heilyn’s kiss any more, he realized, his
head spinning. He wasn’t in control. This was all Emyr, and it was
amazing. He’d never been kissed like this, until his legs went weak
and his eyes fell closed and he couldn’t think, couldn’t do
anything but take it, clinging to Emyr’s shoulders because nothing
else in the world felt real any more.

He went happily when
Emyr moved them back across the room, pushing him back against the
solid side of the table. When Emyr let go of him, pulling back, he
barely had the presence of mind to catch himself on his hands. Then
Emyr’s hands landed on his bare belly, and Heilyn simply sighed and
let his head fall back, rocking his hips forward in invitation.

“Take me to bed, Emyr,”
he murmured, his skin prickling under the press of Emyr’s
fingertips. “Make love to me.”

And Emyr froze. Then
his hands slid off Heilyn to brace against the table.

Heilyn pushed himself
up a little, dismayed. What had he said? “Emyr?”

Emyr had closed his
eyes, and his arms were taut, every muscle clenched. Heilyn looked
up at him, not sure whether to reach out or not. At last, Emyr
said, his voice tired and slow, “Is it that easy for you?”

“It’s not supposed to
be difficult,” Heilyn said.

“But what about
courtship? What about being sure that it’s right? What about being
certain that you haven’t chosen someone who won’t be desperate to
get away from you? What if it all goes wrong?”

Heilyn wanted to reach
out and just hold onto him, but he wasn’t sure that Emyr wouldn’t
just turn and run if he tried. Instead, he said brightly, trying to
dispel the tension, “It’s not as if I stay anywhere very long. I
mean, I can stay, but if it turns out to be an absolute disaster, I
can just move on. There’s always some ship in port that’s willing
to let me rope onto the side, and then I just go where the wind
takes me. And I think you’re being awfully pessimistic to—”

But Emyr was recoiling
back from him, his whole face going hard and unreadable. Heilyn
stammered to a stop, not sure what he’d said to get that reaction,
and Emyr turned his back on him and said, his voice completely
flat, “Get out.”

“Emyr? I was joking! I
didn’t mean to—”

“Get out!”

Heilyn took a breath,
ready to argue, but then looked at the tight line of Emyr’s
shoulders and how his hands were clenched so hard they were white.
“I’m sorry,” he said, though he still didn’t know what he was
apologizing for. Then, before he broke Emyr completely, he
went.

He was halfway down the
lane before he realized that not only had he left his painting
behind, but he still had no shirt on.

ELIN CAUGHT him as he
came back into the inn that afternoon. She raised an eyebrow at the
ragged remains of his shirt, which he had surreptitiously rescued
from Pumpkin’s hedge, but didn’t comment. “If you fancy earning a
little bit more than just your bed and board, I need someone to
wait tables tonight. Aeddan’s wife’s in labor, and he’s needed at
home.”

“Dwynwen bring them all
safe to morning,” Heilyn said, which got him an approving sniff.
“And I’d be glad to help.” He’d planned to spent the evening in the
bar anyway, because the idea of sitting alone in his attic after
the day he’d had was unbearable, and at least this way he’d be
earning money rather than spending it.

He hadn’t got to know
many of the locals yet, but he met a few more that evening. Most of
the regulars were there, using the excuse of waiting to toast
Aeddan and his wife to justify a few extra rounds, and more
trickled in in search of news as the evening went on. Heilyn
endured plenty of good-natured heckling until he learned to balance
more than one drink on his tray, but he answered it all cheerfully
enough, and some of locals, at least, seemed to take a liking to
him.

“Traveling, are you?”
old Math demanded, draining his tankard. “When I was your age, I
was holding down a good job and had been married a year.”

“Only because his Lili
was carrying a half-claimed baby, and her da had a punch that would
sink a high island right down to sea level,” his brother Llyr, at
the next table, confided to Heilyn in a whisper Math couldn’t hear.
“Don’t let him bother you, boy.”

“Oh, I’m not easily
bothered,” Heilyn said cheerily, and swept up a few more empty cups
as he passed.

“I wouldn’t let any son
of mine go prancing about from island to island,” Math proclaimed,
as Llyr rolled his eyes. “Dangerous business.”

“Ah, people have been
taking to the ropes for centuries,” Heilyn said easily. “You can
see the world for the price of a few drinks, if your nerves will
stand it.”

“Math has a point,”
Llyr said, surprising Heilyn. He already knew that the brothers
couldn’t even agree on the direction of the wind. “Don’t forget the
poor souls on the Gwyfyn, Lady spare their souls.”

Heilyn nodded, soberly
this time. It had been almost five years since the cargo
ship Gwyfyn had crashed out of the sky in a storm, with
the loss of all hands and twelve young travelers who had paid the
captain to let them rope onto the sides so they could get to the
harvest fair on Blodyn cheaply. To this day, no one was quite sure
why the ship had failed. Some claimed that she had been too near
the end of her life to sail, and that her wood had lost its virtue
on the way across the gulf. Others blamed the storm, or said the
passengers had been roped on badly, upsetting the ship’s balance so
she couldn’t ride out the sudden squall. By the time rescuers put
out to sea on coracles, only the splintered remains of her floated
on the sea. No one would have survived the fall, and their bodies
had gone to the deep, beyond even Dwynwen’s gaze.

“My mother said the
same,” he said, “but it was one ship, and who can remember another
disaster like it? I’ll take those odds.”

Llyr shook his head,
his eyes sad, and Math added solemnly, “We lost a Sirig boy on that
ship.”

“I’m sorry,” Heilyn
said. “I didn’t know.”

“Almost lost two,” Llyr
added. “And there’d be a lot of folks my age the worse off if we
had.”

“Scroungers!” Math
proclaimed and banged his tankard on his table. “Serve ‘em right if
they were left to their own devices. Another drink, boy!”

“Lemon and tonic, was
it?” Heilyn asked, with an exaggerated wink, just for the fun of
making Math growl at him.

“Scrumpy, boy, and you
should know it! No, I’d pitch ‘em all off the side of the island,
if I were young ap Morgan. What a life, eh?”

“He’s a good boy,” Llyr
said. “You never were, so you wouldn’t recognize it.” Luckily, his
brother was mid-swallow, so Llyr had time to turn to Heilyn and
explain, “It was young Aneirin we lost, from the farm at Western
Point. He was handfasted to young ap Morgan-the-shop, of course,
and they would have both been on that ship, if old Morgan and his
wife hadn’t both died within a season and left all their troubles
to young Emyr.”

Heilyn hadn’t really
been listening until then. He’d learned that old men, no matter the
island, seemed to think that everyone who passed by knew and cared
about the same folks they did. Now, though, the pieces of the
puzzle that was Emyr were suddenly clicking together. “Handfasted?”
he asked.

“Not by the time he
left,” Math put in, putting his tankard down hard. “Broke it off,
he did, when young Emyr suddenly got landed with all those old
biddies, and that shop which was already run into nothing. Old
Morgan was useless, of course…”

“Math!” Llyr protested,
but his brother just kept going.

“…and his wife never
got over the loss of her girls in the hard spring, carrying on as
if she’d been the only woman to lose a baby that year. Couldn’t
even stand up without her husband to lean on, which was a wonder
given what a weak reed he was. Young one’s the only one in that
family who still has the spine he was born with, and that’s not
saying—”

“Math!” More than one
voice joined in that time, and Math subsided into his pint,
grumbling.

Luckily, at that
moment, Aeddan’s brother burst in to tell the gathered village that
it was a girl, a beautiful girl, and the next round was on him, and
so Heilyn had time to breathe deeply and hide the sudden clenching
of his heart.

HE WAS STILL thinking
about it when he woke up: orphaned, left by his lover, who then
died, and all after losing not just all his cousins, but sisters
too. It made Heilyn’s heart ache so hard that he kept thinking it
should be raining, even though the dawn was shining palely through
the thatch. No wonder Emyr didn’t smile.

And Heilyn had joked
about taking to the ropes again.

He was distracted all
through breakfast, even when Elin first teased and then fussed at
him. He carried it back up to his attic after breakfast. He had the
place to himself again, so he sat in a patch of feeble sunshine and
doodled with plain pen and ink, trying to find the enthusiasm to
step outside.

Knowing what he now
knew, he felt guilty, and it came out of his fingers, as most
things did, and appeared on the paper as a caricature of himself
looking grotesquely apologetic. It wasn’t much, but he
scribbled, Sorry! Didn’t mean to rub salt in your
wounds across the bottom and summoned the energy to go
out.

He was certain that
Emyr didn’t want to see him, so he just slipped it under the front
door and walked back down the lane. There were blackberries growing
in the hedges, and after a while he started picking them as he
passed, staining his fingers purple. That improved his mood a
little, until he glanced back at Emyr’s house and saw again how all
the seaward shutters were closed.

He imagined walking
into his parents’ kitchen and suddenly finding himself the only one
there, everyone else lost to time and the sky, and shuddered.

It was a gray day, with
the light only breaking intermittently through the clouds, and his
mind was still tangled in both Emyr and the painting of the meadow.
He sat himself on the edge of the market wharf and spent the day
sketching, trying to capture the lines of the ships at the quay and
the ones coming in from the sky, their tiers of sails turning and
sloping into the wind. He drew people in too, just odd curves and
lines to suggest movement, trying to find a scene he could capture
in full and finding nothing quite to his liking.

A little before noon,
Emyr arrived, emerging from the office beside the shop with a
canvas wrapped painting under his arm. He stopped, and Heilyn could
see him taking a deliberate breath from the other side of the
market wharf. Then he strode towards Heilyn, his face grim with
determination.

“I got your note and
brought your painting back,” he said abruptly.

“Keep it,” Heilyn said,
surprising himself. It felt right, though, so he didn’t change his
mind.

Emyr blinked at him.
“But it’s your work. Your trade.”

“Consider it thanks for
the use of your field.”

“But…” Emyr started and
then trailed off, frowning down at him. There was no hint of a
smile on his face today, but he was looking mildly less purposeful
than he had a few moments ago. “Someone told you about everything
and about Aneirin. That’s why you left the note.”

“I didn’t ask,” Heilyn
said, because that seemed important. “Some of the old men were
gossiping in the pub. I’m sorry for your loss.”

Emyr’s expression went
bleak again, and he looked like only dignity stopped him from
bolting. Heilyn had never seen anyone who needed to be held so
badly. “If I hug you,” he asked, “will you try to run away?”

The corner of Emyr’s
mouth twitched ruefully. “It’s quite possible. I don’t mean to.
It’s just… I’m not very good at this kind of thing.”

“Want lessons?” Heilyn
asked, and waggled his eyebrows.

Emyr’s mouth did an odd
twist, and then he said, that ripple of amusement back in his
voice, “You’re too kind.”

“I just can’t help
myself,” Heilyn said, grinning up at him. “It’s all about other
people’s pleasure for me. It’s hard. My life, I mean, though other
things could be.”

Emyr blushed and took a
nervous step back. “I have to get back to the office. There’s three
trade ships in and I have packing manifests and things to sign
and…Thank you for the painting.”

“My pleasure,” Heilyn
said and picked up his pen again. His mood was lifting, and he
thought he could see the beginnings of something worth painting in
these sketches.

“Heilyn, are you
planning on staying on Sirig long?” It was said with such careful
nonchalance that Heilyn had to bite his laughter back.