Chapter 16 #2
At once it no longer mattered how warm the bath was, or how sweetly it smelled of roses.
I jerked forward and pulled the plug, then clambered out, grateful for the cold sting of the tiles beneath my wet feet; the sensation at least jolted me from the maze of my thoughts, blurred the sulphur-tinged images branded onto my memories.
I hastily dried myself, then dressed. Vial.
Drawers. Undershirt. Trousers. Only when I picked up my tunic did I falter again – because now that I no longer smelled of smoke and mud myself, the faint stench of burning human flesh was all too noticeable in the chestnut-brown fabric.
Fucking Valern.
Fucking Durlain and his fucking heroism.
I hesitated a moment, then unlocked the door and tiptoed back into the main room in trousers and undershirt, my hair damp around my shoulders. As little as I was looking forward to facing the bastard again, staying alone with my own thoughts in the bathroom was clearly the worse of my options.
Durlain didn’t even look up at my entrance.
He was still sitting at the table where we had eaten our evening meal; if the plates hadn’t been gone, I might have thought he hadn’t moved at all in the meantime.
In the muted candlelight, the lines of his face became so stark they nearly strayed into the territory of gauntness.
His exquisite shirt fitted loosely on his slim frame, his purple-ink hair fell soft and luscious around the cruel lines of his horns, and for a single breathless moment, he almost looked vulnerable in the near-darkness – not in the way a bruised flower might look vulnerable, but rather like a straining thorn branch about to snap under its own weight.
Then I stepped forward and saw what he was looking at so intently – a single sheet on the table before him, covered in tree-like scribbles.
Bjarte’s letter.
Death’s balls. He hadn’t given up on decoding the message?
The illusion of fragility needed no other nudge to shatter.
To hell with my understanding and ill-advised pity; I wouldn’t put it past the bastard to figure out the system behind Kjell’s cipher runes all on his own, and even I had something like a conscience left.
If there was anything I could do to prevent it, no Averre prince was going to learn about other witches’ hiding places on my watch.
I loudly cleared my throat, then held out my tunic when his head snapped up and said, ‘Do you think we could air this one out sometime soon?’
‘If you wish.’ The thread of irritation in his voice was unmistakable, but he grasped the issue within a single glance. ‘Unless you were proposing to do it at this particular establishment, of course, in which case the list of your terrible ideas has acquired an impressive new item.’
Oh, hell have mercy.
He was trying so hard to make me forget he’d cradled me in his arms like a wounded child an hour and a half ago.
Was so anxious to erase any memory of accidental kindness or decency he may have left behind.
A skilful effort, yet now that I’d worked out the game, it couldn’t be more glaringly obvious – yet another face, yet another lie.
‘Really?’ I said, widening my eyes in what I hoped would be a look of clueless bewilderment. ‘I was planning to run downstairs and tell the maids it smells unpleasantly like fried fireborn. Not good?’
He glared at me.
I blinked back even more cluelessly.
‘Astonishing,’ he said softly, pale fingers tracing absent patterns across the table surface. ‘You might just develop a feel for subterfuge yet.’
‘Conceivably.’ I dropped the tunic on his bed, then sat down on the edge myself and planted my palms into the blankets. My damp hair was cold through the linen of my undershirt. ‘Similarly, you might just develop manners someday. Not holding my breath for it, though.’
He gave me an exasperated look and aimed his gaze back at the letter in his hands. Fuck. Not good at all – if he kept studying the thing all night, who in the world knew what he would work out?
But mild provocations hadn’t been enough to distract him. Neither had the reminder of Valern’s violent death. So clearly I needed something worse – something so outrageous that even a prince who’d perfected the art of outrage would be hard-pressed to retain his concentration.
I thought of Hevaine.
The little secrets she’d slipped my way … Nuggets to use against him, she’d said.
‘Question,’ I said before I could think this through another second and choose the wiser path. ‘I feel these boring braids don’t really mesh with my new clothes. Would you mind taking a look at my hair?’
Durlain’s head jerked up.
For a year-long moment, he stared at me, face blank.
Then – shoulders loosening but expression unsoftening – he lowered the letter onto the table again and said, in a perfectly conversational tone, ‘I’m going to kill that woman.’
Ah, yes.
Definitely a weapon.
‘Well, that will have to wait,’ I said, ‘and meanwhile I’m here, utterly incapable of doing anything with my hair but the same old braid. So your help would be much appreciated.’
It wasn’t even a lie. My mother had never been able to teach me; Kjell had tried but lacked the skill himself.
If Durlain even recognised the vulnerability of my confession, though, he seemed uninclined to care – the slight narrowing of his eye was all that moved about him, and he showed not the slightest intention to rise from his chair.
More importantly, to step away from those hell-cursed cipher runes.
In for a spark, in for the fire. I threw him another impatient glare, pulled the worn leather tie from my pocket, and said, ‘So?’
He looked at me one last moment – didn’t stare, didn’t frown, just looked – and then snatched the letter from the table and folded it back into his pocket with quick, efficient movements.
There was no trace of that unpleasant little smile on his lips as he rose and made for the bed.
No anger to be found in the shard-like lines of his face.
He lowered himself onto the mattress behind me with impassive, graceful control, as if this was no different from sharing a meal together – and it was only then that I realised I’d made one fatal, horrifying mistake in my efforts to distract the bastard.
Because I was on a bed.
With him.
In my undershirt. In his bedroom. By candlelight.
Don’t tell Lark, I almost warned him – and then I realised that Durlain would ask me questions in return, about just what I was afraid of and how reasonable that would be, and swallowed my words.
Didn’t matter that his sneers were just part of his game.
Didn’t matter that his intention might very well be to make me think worse of him, not of Lark.
His venom messed with my head all the same; I’d had plenty of that for today.
The important part was that nothing about his nearness meant anything to me.
It meant this wasn’t important. It meant it wouldn’t even really be a lie, omitting the story entirely when Lark returned.
Nimble hands threaded through my hair without warning, separating the strands, combing out a last few tangles.
Locks brushed across my spine, then the side of my neck.
Through the linen of my undershirt, each of those flimsy touches was like a caress – waking up the nerve endings on my back and shoulders, making me painfully aware of Durlain’s fingers as he began weaving my hair into what felt like some sort of seven-strand braid.
The room seemed suddenly very quiet.
That nightshade scent wrapped around me again, rich and dark and oddly … soothing.
Death’s fucking arse – I was going mad. There was nothing reassuring about the deadly prince sitting behind me.
He loathed me. He detested me. He’d knocked Valern around out of general hatred for his type, not for the sake of my honour; he’d shared his secrets only in the spur of the moment and regretted it the next second.
He believed all witches ought to die. He was not a repentant sinner.
I’d be a fool to forget any of that.
All the same …
The ice-cold edge of a scar brushed across the sensitive spot beneath my ear, luring a shiver from my skin, and mists take me – it was hard to hate this.
Tug. Twist. Tug. Twist. A gentle, almost hypnotic rhythm, and under those jarringly tender ministrations, an unusual drowsiness settled over me, strangely reminiscent of Kjell reading me stories by the fire.
Of my mother tucking me in at night. A feeling like being cared for, which was ridiculous, because Lark had taken care of me, and bloody Durlain Averre would never—
‘Is that your rune mark?’ he said, voice low and close behind me.
My heart skipped a beat.
Undershirt.
Loose sleeves.
The birthmark on my shoulder, white and traitorous – that shape that could kill me so very easily, that he should never have seen, and yet the panic I should have felt refused to flare through the paralysis.
Stones and razors, some last defiant part of my mind squeaked.
You know what they do to your kind. But Durlain could have reported me to the nearest guardhouse at any moment in the last few days, and the simple fact was that he hadn’t – not even after the first knife I’d held to his throat.
My pulse wouldn’t quicken.
My legs wouldn’t move.
I sat half-stiffened, half-frozen on the edge of his bed as his hands continued their work behind me, and wondered where the hell my prey instincts had gone.
‘Yes,’ I forced out, seconds too late to pretend this was normal, casual conversation.
Twenty-three years of hiding the damn thing.
Five people in the whole cursed world who’d ever laid eyes upon it, and somehow the prince of many faces had added himself to that list as though it was nothing to linger on. ‘Yes. It … it is.’
‘Hmm.’ Only then did his fingers pause for a moment; I felt the mattress dent beneath me as his weight shifted to my left. ‘The thorn rune, isn’t it?’