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Aumerle has never known how to talk to his father. He knows in his heart that this is because his father is essentially both forthright and upright, to an infuriating degree, and he was not, but it is not a prospect he’s ever relished, regardless. He can still feel his heart in his throat when he looked at him, hear the stinging bastard-French of pardonne-moi, ‘pardon me, but I cannot do it’ – did the other traitors get even this nicety, a polite demurring to save their lives? Who intercedes for regicides whose fathers and mothers have passed away? Any day he expects them to come for him too, to be arrested and dragged away before his family’s eyes and for Bolingbroke’s curse to be borne out in action and not humiliating word. He expects what he’s done to kill him too, one way or another; if not for his mother’s fond relief at his return, he would wish his doom come sooner rather than later. Until then, he avoids his father where he can, so easily that it must be mutual, and where he can’t, he tries not to look at him.

In his father’s face he could once have seen his own – there was very little of the Duchess’ stamp about her son’s person, her face was pretty even in age and somewhat snubbed, and she was detailed very lightly, flaxy features battling against his father’s sable-and-sloe and losing. His father might have been cut from stone, for how hard-featured he was even once age had smoothed matters over for him. Enough of the father had drowned all other influences in Aumerle, or at least that seemed to be the hope with forcing them into proximity like this. He had come to look quite a bit like him, had encouraged the resemblance as the youthful brightness had begun to flee his own face; care has turned his father’s beard white and lined his face indelibly deep. Sorrow has reddened and ringed Aumerle’s eyes; his own beard is still trimmed in the courtly fashion and he’s been too wound up in himself to notice the first shock of gray in his own hair.

Grief had left no deeper scars on Richard, he had looked like himself even at the very end, but Richard has left his mark on Aumerle. The memory of the kiss still blazes in his mouth like a hot coal under his tongue.

They ride out together, past the boundary-stones and the well-worn wooded paths; they’re doing no hunting today, and York spoke only when they come to a crossing or a turn in the way, more to the horses than to his son. The rest of the party has continued on after York first motioned his son aside and afforded them both some privacy; they ride aimlessly now, and neither of them is willing to admit the pretext for their breaking away. The homely figure of his father blue-cloaked and hooded bobbing along on horseback is a familiar sight to him, but his face is turned away and the huddled pillar of his back is less than consoling.

York is the first to speak; his voice is perfectly matter-of-fact.

“Are you going to be all right? Are you going to behave? Or are you going to drag out this embarrassment even further and frighten your mother?”

He makes her sound so frail. She is anything but; to be sure she’s already noticed his avoidance of his father and may even have orchestrated this little interlude in the snow. “Somehow I’ll survive it,” he says, a little nastily. “My loyalties are nothing if not secured. What does she have to be frightened for?”

Whatever remains of his good standing, he expects to hear, or his damn-fool traitorous head. “Your life,” York says, simply. His tone suggests that Bolingbroke is not the sector from which the threat will come. Aumerle is no antique Roman; he cannot not follow his captain headlong into the grave, though he sometimes wishes he’d done it while his grief was still a frenzy and not an oppressive weight. If his father means further risky endeavors to redeem their family name, he can promise him that. He can’t promise he will ever come to love Henry and a promise to forget about Richard is more than he can give. This is the closest anyone has come to speaking of Aumerle’s affiliation with Richard now that he’s dead, except to hint that he’s got a lot of work to do to get back into the new king’s good graces.

“At Windsor I had a mind to kill King Henry myself, on the spot, I would have done it even if I died doing it, for love of Richard. Not as my king – as the man who was once my friend. I knew – I knew he might never be what he was again, but I wanted to do something for him. I should have done more. I–” He cannot say this out loud, at full volume, not even here muffled by the trees and the snow. “I had too much love for him, and I was foolish with it.”

Not so foolish that he died rebuking Henry the usurper. Not so foolish that his head in a sack is cast at King Henry’s feet. Aumerle is foolish, and weak, and yielding, and he lives to see what use is such an obliging disposition in this King Bolingbroke’s court. What violets will spring up from such frozen ground, he doesn’t know. His mother knows, if not the mad depth and breadth and agony of his feelings for King Richard, at least something of their nature. He does not know if she saw fit to share this intelligence with his father. Perhaps he’s already come by it independently. He searches his father’s face for some sign of his opinion; his father’s eyes are searching the snows for something else, perhaps hoof-prints and scattered brush, or the scuffling tracks of men on foot.

“I thought loved Richard more than my own life. I thought he was in the right, and that it was my place to help him remember his rightful state. I was mistaken.” Shame and honesty make Aumerle’s voice choked, and his sentences brief, half-swallowed.

“You need not convince me of that, boy,” York says dryly, not looking at him.

He doesn’t know how to frame it. Let me be your boy again, let me be Edward and not Rutland, smile again, don’t look at me like a stranger, don’t look at me like some creature who usurped the better son that York deserved. He’s not sure if the suspicion of bastardy was a real one or if that was the first flourish of rhetoric his mother had produced from some stockpile of women’s weapons, but the idea’s been put forth, it’s passed between them all now and it can’t be taken back. His father looks at him now with candid, tired eyes.

“You’re as good as forgiven for it, Edward, if the king cannot hold it against you it’s not mine to do so either. I should have forgiven you as soon as you were pardoned, it does an old man no good to hold a grudge. But I never hoped to see Richard dead. No more than you did.”

“That’s not all – I mean, it’s worse than that. It’s more than that. You don’t understand, I –” His heart is pounding in his throat, he is not weeping (he couldn’t bear to weep) but his lungs are constricted in his chest with the effort of not doing so and he’s choking. How can his heart beat this way? How can he live to shake in his saddle like a coward when his king is dead? How can he go on like this, bowing and saluting, all the while lying? “You don’t understand. I killed him. We were there at Pomfret, I held him in my arms as he died and he saw my face as I dealt the blow. He died knowing what I did. I thought Bolingbroke of all men would say I had done well, the man who wanted it done, who had nearly said as much. He didn’t.”

Richard had embraced him, and he killed him. Richard had held him in his arms while he shook with helpless weeping, and he killed him. Better his hand than Bolingbroke’s, he’d told himself, better him than any man– he’d sought to buy back dishonor with dishonor and now he has nothing.

“Edward, is this true?”

“Someone ought to know.”

Someone who had loved Richard, who would hate his murderer and not grudgingly respect the murder’s expedience. God knows what he’s done; can even God forgive him the vast register of his sins? He thought he was better once, of some higher composition or higher degree than the other young men in Richard’s train, but he’s so much worse. In recorded history has there ever been such a betrayal – of kinsman by kinsman, ruler by subject, friend by friend, lover at his beloved’s hand? Treason, seven times worse than treason.

Aumerle dismounts, or rather slips from his horse’s back with all the dignity of a corpse and falls hard on his knees, scarcely cushioned in the trodden snow; his father’s mount startles a little and the absurd thought bounds through his mind that it’d serve him right to get kicked in the head and die.

York dismounts with more dignity in a heap of blue cloak and lifts him up from the ground. His father is not strong enough to bring him to his feet, but he holds back Aumerle’s hands from clawing at the snowy ground (he thinks of Richard saluting the ground on a Welsh beach, he thinks of Greek tragedy) and catches him by the collar.

His nose has begun to run; he bites his lip and forces his heaving shoulders to steady. He lifts his head, eyes swimming. “Father, I’m not fit to live. I’m yours to deal with as you will, whether you disown me, or–”

“For God’s sake, you damned-fool boy, if I haven’t come to disown you yet, I don’t think I’m capable of it. And I haven’t,” his father says, muffled against his neck. He grips him ruthlessly tight, and Aumerle is terrified as well as sneakingly relieved. The tears have begun to spring forth. “Who have you told besides the king? Have you made your confession since?”

Aumerle shakes his head damply.

“You must confess it; I don’t need to tell you how gravely you’ve sinned. But I can’t afford to lose you too. Get up and get back on your horse; we’ve tarried long enough, your mother’s waiting.”