Chapter 16 #5
“Oh, wonderful!” Caspian exclaimed with an equally excited clap of his hands. He proceeded to usher us out the door like we were a herd of cats and down the street to a fairly crowded tavern.
Every body in the room froze at our arrival, and I got the distinct feeling it was not their world’s leader that was the source.
“Hello,” Freya said, in her own way that was just a touch out of the norm of social convention, but often intentionally so.
“Hello,” one awestruck young man sitting at the bar said, stars already beaming in his eyes as he looked at her.
Such a simple exchange, and yet that seemed to break the tension. Even with different accents, it was hard to ignore the fact that we were tied together. Two planets with the exact same language—that had to mean some kind of divine intervention.
Caspian walked forward into the crowd with all the expectant confidence of someone used to having people move out of his way. And move they did, parting down the middle and revealing a cluster of tables set up just for us.
Ah, they’d planned this, hadn’t they?
If it wasn’t so brazen, I would think this was some grand ploy to poison us all.
My feet were slow to move under me, stuck in place by the assault of stimuli around me. Most of which, I realized, were the intense stares of everyone in the bar.
Oh, how I wanted to sprint out of there. I was far more comfortable moving in the shadows, and it was becoming woefully apparent that was not how this was going to go.
That was, until I felt the warm press of Ford’s hand in the center of my back.
The Bond yanked me back down to reality.
It took everything in me not to wrap myself around him like I was trying to crawl right into his skin. It was probably rather warm in there.
And he was really the one person I felt safe around right now.
The thought hit me with such force, I stopped walking. Only a beat, one missed step, but enough for Ford to notice and shoot me a look.
I’m fine, I told him, doing nothing more than quirking up the corner of my lip.
The whiskey Caspian poured us when we reached the table went down in one large, desperate gulp, followed quickly by another dose when Ford topped me up.
It was just my luck, really, standing in enemy territory while having an ongoing existential crisis that despite all my efforts to the contrary, Ford had still weaseled his way into a position of trust and comfort in my life.
I was supposed to be focusing on the conversation, picking up whatever Caspian and Elijah were trying to hide. I couldn’t do that while I was wondering whether it would be so bad if I just scooted over onto Ford’s lap.
It was hard not to chase comfort when your whole existence was about spiking your stress hormones at every waking moment. But it was…more than that.
Something I certainly did not have time to unpack, not when the conversation was trending dangerously towards another debate over the start of this war.
“Unless I’m mistaken,” Bellamy said, diplomatically, “None of us were around in the early days to see first hand what happened.”
“I was,” Freya said, honest and a tad unhelpfully, specifically since it seemed to suck all of the air out of the conversation for a pointed moment. She tried to backtrack, saying, “Well, I was really young, so I don’t really remember much but…”
Bless her, but that was only making things worse. Caspian seemed seconds away from making a snide comment about this affirming his less than pleasant thoughts about Vir, while Elijah was…well, Elijah was filling up his glass with an incredibly healthy pour of whiskey.
“I think it’s best that we don’t fight over history,” Bellamy cautiously continued. “I can only speak for our side, but I don’t tend to trust our historians too much. Especially when they work for my father.”
“Damn straight,” Elijah said, raising his glass in mock cheers before tossing back a large gulp.
“What my dear cousin is trying to say,” Caspian said, breezing right past that revelation with little more than a sly look at Elijah, “is that our own family tends to be rather dramatic. We can at least meet in the middle and try to start anew.”
"Good,” Bellamy said with a pleased smile.
Caspian’s grin sharpened, and a groan was working its way out of my throat before he even spoke. “I assume part of our negotiations will be a pardon for our lovely entrepreneurs at the table, yes?”
Hours later, we were standing in a comfortable room at an inn, after a little too much whiskey and a scarily lighthearted conversation about me and Ford being literal criminals—I was right, it had been Elijah and Caspian with Roger, who apparently had revealed our identities the first second he’d been asked.
I would have been a little hurt, if I wasn’t acquainted with Elijah’s charm.
I was sure he made several credible and eloquent threats against Roger’s life.
Even his parting words to us that night, burdened with the task of showing us to our accommodations seemed vaguely threatening. “Sleep well,” as if we were staring down the endless sleep of death.