“But you didn’t plan for this?” Willow asked, his agitation increasing. “Why did you tell me to get on this damn boat then?!”

“To see if you would.” Ny shrugged. 

Willow was tempted to strangle him. “Why?”

“You ask a lot of questions,” Ny pointed out.

“You never give me any damn answers,” Willow spat back, irritation growing.

“Why should I? We’re strangers. We have no obligation to one another. You kidnapped me too and I’ve never been a fan of compliance toward kidnappers.”

“I did not kidnap you! I was helping—”

It struck Willow that arguing semantics wouldn’t serve his purposes. Especially because he was beginning to suspect that the drunkard was purposefully agitating him.

It was something about the mischievous glimmer in his eyes. It gave Willow the same feeling he got when a particularly malicious sheep thought that it had outsmarted him.

Ny was a lot like a sheep, now that he made the comparison. Obnoxious, selfish, dirty, and incomprehensibly foolish. Sheep really were the worst.

“You’re right,” Willow said, changing gears as he got into the mindset of dealing with a sheep. “We are strangers, and it’s probably best that we part ways here.”

“Ya sure about that?”

Willow had a nasty feeling that he wouldn’t like the answer if he asked why, so he opted not to ask. Ny was mysterious and probably not human but really, was that any of his business? He just wanted to get his vengeance and then…

…What then…?

Willow shelved that unnerving thought. He didn’t have the time to answer that question quite yet.

“I’m sure,” Willow said, straightening up and glancing toward the shore with the intent to depart from the drifting boat.

The sight that he was faced with caused him to rethink matters.

Ny had mentioned that they were heading in the direction of the slums. He just hadn’t quite imagined that there was any part of the capital that was this dilapidated. Willow was again struck with just how much of the capital he had never seen.

“Change your mind?” Ny asked.

Willow puffed out his chest. He wasn’t about to be intimidated just because the area looked comparable to the ruins of the capital after that treacherous bastard completed his plans. He’d walked through those streets with real danger lurking around every corner. This was just a filthy and probably disease-ridden street.

“I’ll be going,” Willow said, waving over to the helmsman to get off at the nearest dock. He received a strange look for his request, but he ignored that as well.

He needed to recollect himself. Make a new plan with consideration for the assassins and—

“What are you doing?” Willow asked bitingly as he watched Ny get off the boat alongside him. Ny shot him a mischievous grin.

“This is my stop too.”

Willow scowled. “So you intend on stalking me?”

Ny shrugged. “Call it payback for kidnapping me.”

Really. Just like a sheep. You feed them once and then they follow you eternally. It was possibly the most obnoxious trait about sheep.

Willow wished he could understand what was going on inside that infernal head. About the only consistent trait about this obnoxious bastard was his demands for alcohol. Everything else was strangely incongruent.

He claimed to take issue with Willow’s “kidnapping,” yet he followed along as though they were good friends. It made Willow feel patronized.

Although it wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

Willow wasn’t a terribly social person. His own superiority complex had gotten in the way of many friendships from long before he even became royalty. After that point, it was a downhill landslide of this person and that person being unworthy of his time.

But it was somewhat lonely, especially upon the throne. He had thought he could rely on the traitor. He’d thought incorrectly.

He couldn’t trust Ny, but there was something comfortable about that. Ny was so deeply suspicious that there was no possibility of mistakenly trusting him or letting his guard down. Willow could mistrust him peacefully.

Just like sheep.

Willow began to walk briskly through the streets of the slums. He didn't dare look as though he didn’t know where he was going. If he waited to do that, then someone might attempt to tell him where to go. He couldn’t tolerate the indignity of that.

He simply wanted to get to a secluded place to recollect his thoughts.

“Where ya going?” Ny asked from his spot a few feet trailing behind Willow.

“We’re strangers,” Willow snapped. “I have no reason to tell you.”

Ny chuckled, a mirthful sound that Willow naturally resented. “Did that hurt your feelings?”

Willow really couldn’t tolerate that insinuation.

He whirled around at Ny, wearing his most imperious glare as he looked down at the shorter, poorer, pathetic, and insignificant man who had chosen the path of a sheep. “And what about that would possibly ‘hurt my feelings’? Do you really consider your companionship so valuable that I would desire it in the least? You’re an incomprehensible sheep that is unworthy of the effort it would take to herd you. You’re worthless to me. I have nothing to gain from spending a moment longer with an insignificant alcoholic who doesn’t know his place.”

Willow felt a bit better after saying all of the insidious feelings crawling around in his heart.

The drunkard ought to look properly chastised and slink away without another word.

So why did he look as though he wanted to laugh?

“Did you just call me a sheep?” Ny asked, laughter hanging on to his words.

“Yes.” Willow gritted his teeth. What was so laughable about that? “You’re repugnant, filthy, and foolish. Just like a sheep.”

“Baa,” Ny said, and Willow’s face reddened.

He was mocking him.

How was it that this insignificant worm didn’t know his place? If Willow still had the power of the throne, he would ensure that this worthless bug was shown just how foolish he was. Punished for his own foolish ignorance and disallowed from continuing his shocking lack of decorum.

He opened his mouth, spiteful words of reprisal building up in his throat and practically bouncing onto his tongue.

But then he saw something that caused him to rethink it.

More accurately, he actually looked at Ny carefully. He was nothing but a drunkard found at the side of the road, filthy and wrong, but the brand-new clothes that he’d acquired from Willow were already torn up from the injuries he’d acquired. He had dried blood caked onto him, scars from the assassins, and a shitty grin on his face.

Ny didn’t make sense.

Among all of the deeply suspicious contradictions that piled up, there was the nagging sense of guilt and responsibility.

This was why Willow hated sheep. They were wretched creatures that only ever managed to look properly pitiful when you were well and truly fed up with cleaning up after them and managing their infernal coats.

Ny was an existence who he’d never encountered on his first go-around. This could have been for any number of reasons. Because he had been royalty and Ny was a forgettable drunkard at the side of the road. Because Ny had truly managed to drink himself to death before Willow had ever made it to the capital. Because Ny wasn’t important.

Yet as a new existence to him, that made Ny unique. His injuries were directly caused by Willow’s interference in his life. Whether or not they healed at an inhuman rate was irrelevant, and Ny didn’t seem to have any proper malice inside of him.

That was strange.

For everything he tried to see looking down at this frustrating person, he couldn’t find anything at all that he expected. Amusement but no anger. No malice. No hatred. But the further he looked, the more apparent it was that he couldn’t see what this person was thinking at all.

It made him want to get under Ny’s skin. To cause that composure to break down.

“Why are you following me?” Willow demanded. “Aren’t you just a pathetic drunk who’s desperate for company?” he added snidely, still smarting from the insinuation that he was lonely.

Ny contemplated his answer while glancing over Willow’s shoulder thoughtfully. “You’re really sensitive, huh.”

Willow bristled.

The sheer gall of this drunkard. Willow clenched his teeth. He didn’t entirely lack spatial awareness despite his growing agitation, and he had long since begun to notice a certain interest that the slums were taking in the interlopers. Eyes from various dark corners had begun to rest on the arguing pair, and he knew that some of those eyes wouldn’t be benign in nature.

He could continue to argue and make an easy target of himself, even risk the assassins catching up to him, or he could swallow his pride and move on.

Swallowing his pride had never been an easy task. In truth he was “sensitive” and perhaps even “lonely,” and that was part of the reason he took such an affront to the accusations leveled against him.

Willow was not prone to the sort of self-reflection that would welcome an unfairly accurate assessment of his shortcomings.

He had a sheeplike bastard following him around and that meant one thing for certain. He had to accept the circumstances and move forward. Willow was prideful to a fault, painfully ambitious, and terribly stubborn, but he wasn’t actually a fool.

Fools refused to accept reality as it is. Bastards chose to change reality at their whims.

He was the third sort. The one who chose to accept the circumstances of their lives but refused to allow it to remain that way. And the way he did so was through a certain keenness of mind and a manipulative streak. He would need to ease himself back into the mindset of a prince rather than a shepherd but that was easy enough because he’d never much liked being a shepherd.

Willow prided himself in his political finesse as a prince. Whether or not that pride was warranted was an entirely different question.

“Come, follow me then,” Willow said, turning back to face forward and march through the slums. Instead of fighting this obnoxious sheep, he ought to be asking himself just how to effectively use the man to his advantage. While a disrespectful drunkard, he was also oddly knowledgeable, suspiciously strong, and had inhuman healing abilities. While all of those traits made him untrustworthy as can be, they also made him potentially useful. Wasn’t that exactly how he’d handled his political opponents? Used them for all they were worth and then abandoned them when they’d lost that very worth?

Somehow it didn’t feel right to treat Ny the same way he would a snotty nobleman who had never known a true day of hardship in his life, but the familiarity helped to stabilize Willow’s unease.

He knew where he stood when using others and manipulating them to work as his hands and feet. He didn’t quite know what to do about actual charity or kindness toward his fellow man. One was just significantly less appealing than the other.

“That’s quite a change in tune.” Ny let out a whistle, sidling up beside Willow. “What changed your mind?”

Willow reminded himself once more to act with the grace and elegance that befitted his position. Or his previous position. He honeyed his tone as he built up a sentence designed to appease his target. To be persuasive, he couldn’t change his attitude too drastically, but it would be necessary to lure him into a new perspective. “I just realized that arguing with a drunk is pointless,” he replied.

Ny cracked a grin. “You’re full of shit.”

It was such an abrupt observation that it almost caught Willow off balance again. It was true, but it hardly made any sense for Ny to know that. Willow had fooled sharper people before him.

“And you’re still a worthless sheep.” Willow repeated the insult, although he was sure to put less bite into his tone to make it appear as though he was warming up to him, perhaps leaning into his misguided belief that Willow was lonely.

How ridiculous and infuriating. Willow had lived alone with those damn sheep for years and dealt with the solitude of the throne. How could anyone presume to think that he was lonely?

And he certainly didn’t enjoy the company of an obnoxious punk like Ny.

“Baa,” Ny said once more. It was absurd. The corner of Willow’s lip twitched, but he couldn’t at all figure out as to why.

Why should he smile at anything this worthless drunk had to say? Even if the expression of nonchalance while he bleated was momentarily amusing.

“You’re ridiculous.” Willow scoffed in disdain, keeping his eyes peeled along the dilapidated streets for any signs of danger or safety.

“That’s true,” Ny said. “I don’t have the energy to be sensible. I’m definitely not drunk enough for that.”

“I’m not going to buy you peach wine.”

“I’ll settle for grape. It’d make me leave ya alone,” Ny cajoled.

Willow clicked his tongue distastefully. “Even then.”

He might dislike the freakish sheep man but he had no desire to help facilitate his descent into death via drink. His sense of responsibility burned inside of him, regardless of the circumstances.

Ny laughed. “You’re the one that’s ridiculous.”

Willow chose not to acknowledge the insult.