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In 'Sebastian,' A Gay Writer's Quest For Fame Leads Him To Sex Work
Mikko Mäkelä's film examines how sex workers are navigating the gig economy, and boasts a tender performance by actor Ruaridh Mollica - by Curtis M. Wong
…plus 23 other LGBTQ+ movies and TV shows out this month (thanks to Tara & Kris of
)This headline got my attention—the RW&RB movie was adorably silly:
Red, White & Royal Blue author’s new novel is the horniest non-binary read of the summer by Marcus Wratten
Got a big announcement, an article or event , a special offer, a new book published? DM me!
is a force of nature: over 100 books published; weekly chapters of her
series—currently, Don’t Move Your Desk; not to mention weekly marketing reports for her books; and total transparency with her advertising and marketing efforts and their results as seen in her most recent “Year in Review.” Huge respect for her prodigious creative talent and acumen in the business of writing.We hope you enjoy this bittersweet tale of an Anglo-Saxon prince struggling to find his place.
The door was locked.
Æthelhelm tried not to look at it as he knelt before the throne, knowing the magic that lay in the wish: how telling the world of your desire could just as soon rid you of it as casting it away yourself.
The gesture of kneeling was symbolic only. The throne stood empty, just as it had since his father, the great Caelhelm, had died unexpectedly months before. Æthelhelm’s black shirt, scratchy and stiff, still rubbed at the collar. He twisted his head a little, a subconscious movement to free his neck, and his eyes locked onto the door.
He stood, easing the ache in his knees that seeped through from the cold stone floor, and took his place on the dais. His chair was far less ornate than the throne, removed from it by several levels, and – this being the most important bit, as far as he was concerned – far less comfortable.
Æthelhelm settled his hands in his lap, looking up and out at the assembled nobles and ladies who thronged the room. He was not given to public attention, had never enjoyed it, and he had long learned to paste on a look of cold contentment in order to avoid starting conversations. He stared fixedly ahead, as if there was someone right at the back of the room he was studying. Meanwhile, he studiously avoided catching anyone’s eye, which would bring specificity to the look. It seemed to do the trick.
In that respect, as in almost all others, he was the polar opposite of Caelwulf, who lounged now against a pillar close by the door, unafraid to show his ambition. Æthelhelm watched him silently from under dark eyelashes, then looked away. Looking at Caelwulf for too long was dangerous.
There was magic in it, and magic in him, the dark-haired boy who controlled the room like a king already. They said his mother had laid a strong blessing on him at his birth, made him charming and devious like the faerie folk. Æthelhelm had his doubts about that, though it would have explained much; the bewitching dimple that appeared at the side of his mouth when he smiled all on the left, as he seemed to whenever he looked Æthelhelm’s way, for example.
Every day, Æthelhelm came and sat. He would have preferred a blessing from his own mother that saved him from the hard and unyielding wood of his mockery of a throne-chair, but he had none. No blessing, that was, and no mother, both. She had passed into the night when he was born, and Æthelhelm had known only the cold, distant love of his father, the busy king whose warlike passions allowed him only a short time at his own court.
How many days had Æthelhelm sat beside this empty throne? Still, it had been different then. While he was alive, the form and shape of the man who inhabited it had been visible, almost as if hanging in the air. Now it was empty, true empty: the empty of famine larders, of stillbirth cradles, of marriage-beds after a great war.
It should have been his. As the one and only heir, Æthelhelm should have sat in it already. But his father had perished on a hunt for a wild boar that was said to be a god cursed into animal form, not at war. He had perished before laying out the terms of his inheritance.
So, it fell to the elders. Æthelhelm’s uncles, old and wise men who had long served his father as his council. Men who gave up all claim to power that they might serve closest to the one who wielded it – which, conversely, now gave them power over his very life. Two long months ago they had shut themselves away inside the chamber behind the throne, admitting only daily deliveries of food and wine, to deliberate on the matter of the succession.
Caelwulf was not the only pretender, though he was the only one that Æthelhelm was afraid to look at. The others he could stare in the eye with impunity: fat Bardwalh, who could rule over nothing more important than a clutch of hens, and even then not keep them from the fox’s mouth; old Cenburh, who would last few years as king were he even able to ascend the three steps to the throne; and Oswith, whose mother was from the great city of Orléans across the water. They would never let him reign for the shame of it.
If they were all that Æthelhelm faced, he knew, he would be on the throne already. But Caelwulf.
Always Caelfwulf.
Æthelhelm dared to dart another glance under his eyelashes at the tall, black-haired boy, then away.
~
The great Caelhelm had few kind words to say to his son. That much was expected of a king; particularly when that king was a great warrior, and his son had not the inclination to fight with the sword.
Æthelhelm had some skill with the bow and arrow, but that was considered a tool for the fierce maids who fought with the warrior men, keeping them away from the dirt and blood and shit of the battlefield but still giving them their uses. It was unseemly for a prince, even one who could shoot a target while riding at a gallop from a hundred yards away.
Somehow, Æthelhelm had thought that if he could just master the weapon beyond a level seen in their times, he might win his father’s respect. All he had earned was another lecture about his place on the battlefield, and how important it was to lead the men - like a man.
But there was one night, not long after Æthelhelm’s sixteenth nameday, when Caelhelm was deep in his cups and began to wax misty-eyed about his mother. He had drawn Æthelhelm under the shade of his thick bicep, close enough to smell the ale and the pig mixed on his breath, and told him how wonderful it was to have the love of a good woman.
“She had an arm like nothing else, your mother,” Caelhelm told him. “Likely that’s where you get it. She had the Sight. Could hit a crow from the air a thousand feet away, and stick a second arrow in it as it dropped. I’ve never seen anyone with the bow like that.”
“I wish I had known her,” Æthelhelm said, and his heart ached with the knowing that such a wish now spoken aloud could never become truth.
“I wish you had known her,” Caelhelm agreed, licking his lips and swigging another mouthful of ale with a look of focused concentration. “She would have known what to do about you.”
And Æthelhelm sat, rocked close against the sweat and spilled ale and battle scars that was his father, and knew he was in a prison.
~
The nobles milled across the great hall through the smoke of beeswax candles, doing their deals, pretending to like one another as they sold their children for livestock. Æthelhelm watched from his lonely position on the dais as Caelwulf shared a laugh with another young man, a hunter who was known for his strength of arm. He had lain in wait for a stag and taken it down with a knife and his bare hands, and there had been much feasting, even though the gouge he had taken to his forearm shone even now as a silvery scar in the torchlight.
Caelwulf’s gaze slipped sideways, to the door, to the thing he wanted and was not afraid to look at. His eyes moved again and found Æthelhelm’s, meeting them without shyness, and Æthelhelm blushed and looked away.
Æthelhelm had taken down stags in his time, with the bow and arrow rather than the spear. They said he was a coward for that, laughed behind his back, but they devoured his stags all the same. Æthelhelm had taken to eschewing the hunt, preferring his own company. Caelwulf, he had noticed, had removed himself from the hunt at around the same time. That was how they had first truly spoken: in the great hall, when all the bustle was gone, almost everyone out on the hunt but the two of them.
That was when, for the first time, Caelwulf had laid a bare hand on the sleeve of Aethelhelm’s tunic, and the power that was in him shot through Aethelhelm like fire through dry timber, burning and laying waste.
The memory shimmered in Æthelhelm’s mind’s eye like the scales of a fish in the river to a dying man. He looked away from the memory as well as the man, deliberately allowed himself to catch odious Bardwalh’s eye so that the other pretender would come over and converse with him.
It was dangerous to look closely at things that you treasured. Much as they could be taken from you, the magic worked the other way. They could steal you away from yourself. Give them too much power, and deep trouble could find you.
~
“It’s the matter of a consort,” Caelhelm had said, to a number of murmured and grunted assents around the hall. He was back from one of his skirmishes with the neighbouring kingdom, sporting a fresh spear wound to his left thigh, bandaged in clean white. He tore another bite from the leg of lamb in his hand, speaking through sprayed flesh and juices. “A good consort can make a good king.”
Æthelhelm’s ears and neck burned with fury and humiliation. Would he not make a good king on his own? “A consort, father?” he asked, because his father had no consort, and no one had explained this concept to him.
“A good wife, boy,” Caelhelm said, thunking the meat down onto the table to reach for his flagon. He drained it in one quaff. “A queen. Someone with a steady head on their shoulders.”
Æthelhelm couldn’t help himself. His eyes fluttered to seek out Caelwulf, of whose presence he was always acutely aware, like a rabbit watching a fox’s den. “What if I do not wish to marry?”
Caelhelm slammed his flagon down on the table, making the wooden plates and bowls jump in the air. A nearby servant stumbled close to refill it. Everyone was silent now, watching the exchange. “Every king marries, boy. Every man. Are you a man or not?”
Æthelhelm bit his tongue from the response that wished to rise to his lips. He was, at eighteen, of course a man. Not that his father ever saw fit to acknowledge it, except to embarrass him in public. “I am.”
“Then you’ll marry.” Caelhelm turned to his neighbour, the elderly Cenburh who had crept into first position next to his master in order to be as obsequious as possible. “Tell me, Cenburh. What news from the south of our kingdom and the harvest?”
Dismissed, Æthelhelm had simmered in his anger and shame, unable to leave his seat. The heat around his collar still rising, he had cast surly and hurt eyes amongst the crowd until they found Caelwulf, watching him back with a strange expression on his face.
~
Æthelhelm looked up at the empty throne, turning his head at an angle to gaze upwards. For a brief moment he fancied that he would see the shape of his father there, like some ghost waiting until his legacy was resolved. But, of course, when he looked, there was nothing. Just an empty space that he did not know if he could ever fill.
There was the sound of a key turning in a lock, and all conversation in the great hall ceased.
The uncles stepped out from behind the throne, folding their arms across their barrel chests almost as one.
The tallest, Theolred, whose long hair was braided down his back, said: “We have deliberated long, and we have chosen our next King.”
Æthelhelm looked at them, and he knew.
is an author and ghostwriter. As of April 2024, Rhiannon has had 100 books published under her own name and under others, including 19 gay romance books in the Serial Investigations and Crowhill Cove series. Her work has appeared in Devolution Z, Litro, Storgy, and Literati Magazine, amongst others. She is currently serialising a gay romance novel on Substack.
Rhiannon lives in East Sussex and is probably squirrelled away as you read this in her home office, hunched over a keyboard amidst crafting supplies and towering piles of books.
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