Page 33 of Radiant

Well. A day not long after that Aswan trip, Owain and I ended up taking a walk from the orchard to the beach. I couldn’t even tell you what we were talking about or why we decided to go there. The tide was coming in, and it could be rough, the ocean pushing against the land. There was a cave, and it created an eerie sound with every rushing wave. It wasn’t exactly a pearly sanded vacation beach.

I do remember what he said to me. He said, “When you stopped the baker from beating me black and blue, I thought you were a prince, truly.”

I shook my head and rubbed the ocean’s spray from my cheek. “I am no prince.”

Owain reached for my lapel and drew me down to him. “How wrong you are, my prince.”

That was it. That was our first kiss.

In all honesty, I can say only that it was my first kiss. I did wonder, in retrospect, whether any of what we did and would end up doing was as new to Owain as it was to me.

That day, we got our shoes wet. We came back to the house, giggling, and my mother rolled her eyes, shooing us away from her workroom because childish giggles would ruin her potion. Tove caught us on the staircase, looked at our shoes, and sighed. He mumbled something in Greek that had to do with shoes and sheepskin; probably some idiom I wasn’t familiar with.

Yes, yes. He taught me Greek. Most of his papyri were in Greek. Aeolian Greek, as it so happens. Arabic he taught me to a lesser degree, but he only used Arabic for mathematics, and so it was some time before I was conversant in the actual language.

With Owain, I learned what all the poets had been so obsessed with. It was much like a game, discovering what we could get our bodies to do, what would feel good, what would feel good only after a few tries. Owain was my first love only in that teenage sense where everything is heightened because your body and brain are still working to calibrate the proper settings for high and low. He slept in my bed most nights.

Of course, those things we did, they weren’t anything we could’ve kept a secret, not from a vampire living under the same roof. You might wonder whether two boys exploring sexuality together would have raised an eyebrow, if not with Tove, then with my mother.

Our sex was never an issue. Tove told me stories of the Sacred Band of Thebes. All those soldier couples, they were known by name at one time, and people told their stories, how they fought side by side, how they loved one another. There were drawings and commemorative coins of the couples, and Tove quite prized his collection. Those who had ended their lives after their partners died in battle were spoken of in reverent tones, almost as if they had become one of the gods among the stars.

Those tales, as much as the love between Achilles and Patroclus, were the fairy-tale fodder I was raised on, among other stories of gods and mortals, and my mother’s people still told tales of Loki, who was a man sometimes, then a woman, then pregnant, then mother-father to a new age of existence.

No, that we were two boys having sex bothered no one. What would have given cause for concern was what you barely registered: that he slept in my bed most nights.

Ah, I suppose that needs explaining. You will easily forget what was a clear reality between Owain and me. He was, despite all the kindness he received from Tove, my mother, and myself, a servant. He had a bed, and it was a clean bed set up near the kitchen where it was always warm, but nowhere near as grand as my room was.

Likewise, he wore clean clothes and shoes without holes in them, but everything I wore was softer and richer. He was not my equal. I didn’t think of him as beneath me, but I was not blind to the privilege I had enjoyed since the moment I’d been born. I had been taught rhetoric and languages, natural philosophy, and he barely knew enough of reading not to create chaos in my mother’s kitchen.

He must have thought he was Cinderella. He told me as much when he called me a prince. He never rejected me and was never anything but welcoming to my advances. He was living his own personal fairy tale, and I think in his naïveté, he thought that it would be like that forever, that we would grow old together, walk to the beach hand in hand in the winter of our days and wait for the sea to take both of us into her final embrace.

Well. That was not to be. When Tove told me it was time, I did decide that I wanted the day with him, not that that made it different from most other days. But it was to be a holiday, with neither of us doing any work or studying anything, in my case.

I remember twilight, my bed smelling like sex, him lying next to me and looking into my eyes.

“What is so special about today?” Owain asked. He had a way of smiling that was wonderous to me at the time. It had an innocence to it, and it told me he felt special for the simple fact that I had chosen him. It was a magical smile. It was a smile that ignored reality and lived just for this single moment.

“Tove will share his magic with me today.”

We hadn’t ever really talked about what Tove was. Owain had readily accepted it like he had accepted so many other things, and that Tove never even raised his voice to him made Owain adore him.

Still, his smile faltered. “What does that mean?” he asked, and I wondered how to explain it to him without mentioning that Tove was a vampire who needed to drink the blood of the living in order to survive.

I settled on “You’ll see” and wiped all further questions away with a few kisses.

When night fell, my mother shared her prophecy with me, the one you know about. Owain wasn’t there, so he didn’t hear it. It unsettled me, but obviously it wasn’t going to stop me from becoming a vampire. I had been raised knowing that was what I was supposed to become. Tove had told me over and over that it was what I was supposed to become. All that to say, I had doubts. In those last moments when I went up the stairs to Tove’s room, I doubted.

And yet, despite my doubts, I took one step after another. I took them slowly, but I never stopped. I might have even asked Tove to delay, for another year perhaps, or for five. That day, after I heard my mother’s prophecy, there were so many things I could have changed about my life, but I didn’t. I never regretted that once, and that might tell you more about me than anything else.

Once I got to his rooms, Tove turned me, as you know he did. I will tell you of the act when it becomes relevant to you, which isn’t tonight.

Now, what I will tell you about, mostly because every other fiction tells it wrong, is hunger. Or, more precisely, the absence of it.

I went up the stairs to Tove’s room as human and descended as vampire. Then, did I descend upon the boy I had loved to sate my ravenous hunger after? No. Actually, I found myself walking into the kitchen where Owain was preparing the morning meal.

“Owain,” I said, and he jumped. Walking silently isn’t anything that comes as an effort, you see.

“Auris!” His surprise made his young face look wide and open. “Your eyes are silver too. Like Tove’s.”