Chapter 28 #2
The arrangements were all taken care of – some small discounts thrown in for diplomacy’s sake – when the innkeeper smiled in a visible attempt to keep the spite from his face and said, ‘You’re the second Estien noble to pass through Dorraven in three days, my lord. A friend of yours, by any chance?’
I stiffened.
Durlain, of course, did not. With just the right thread of irritation in Osmont’s high, nasal voice, he snapped, ‘How would I know if you don’t give me his name?’
‘Beg your pardon. Bernot Estien, my lord.’ The innkeeper’s forced smile drew even tighter as Durlain opened his mouth again; he hurriedly added, ‘I suppose there are several of those in your family, of course. Tall, red-haired man. Earrings. He was travelling in the company of two lackeys, if I recall correctly.’
Belloc.
Jay. Rook.
I stood unbreathing and unblinking by the stairs, barely hearing Durlain’s drawled response or the feigned chuckle emerging from the innkeeper’s mouth in reply.
Prince Belloc Estien, in Garnot. Not under his own name, either, which meant this could not be an official visit, a diplomatic mission to Lesceron’s court. Which meant—
Fuck. Had they followed us to Nettle Hill? Across the Svala?
I needed—
No. No, I was not going to check my knives, for hell’s sake.
I was standing in a busy hallway, pretending to be a perfectly unremarkable servant.
And I knew I had all of the blades still on me, because I’d checked after we left the stables, and I hadn’t heard any clatter of steel against the floor – which meant I did not need to feel for Ehwaz’s heft.
I did not need to doubt myself. I was not going to imagine hearing Jay’s giggle behind me, finding the sheaths empty under my hands as I—
‘Sunna!’ an irritable voice snapped, and I jolted back into the here and now.
Durlain.
The fucking irony, that the first word he spoke to my face today wasn’t even my own name.
I followed him up the stairs with muttered apologies, head bent, face down, suppressing the desperate urge to glance over my shoulder.
Eyes seemed to be following me. Kestrel, catching up with me all over again.
Slinking into my thoughts with blood-soaked clothes and bloodstained hands, doling out agony at Aranc’s command …
My fingers brushed over Ehwaz’s hilt anyway, in a flood of guilt and sickening relief. Still there, my protectors, my partners in crime.
‘Get inside,’ Durlain said beneath his breath, holding a door for me. I slipped into the room without looking where we were going. Expensive floral wallpaper, a wide velvet couch, a canopy bed in which one could beget a king—
His bedroom.
Of course it was his bedroom. Fuck.
If he was aware of the absurdity of the situation himself, he didn’t show it as he meticulously closed the door behind him, then turned around to face me.
No more avoiding gazes, suddenly. His dark eye found me with familiar astuteness, taking stock of me with a single piercing glance; all he said, striding to the table to peel off his gloves, was, ‘Thoughts?’
It was only then that I realised I did, in fact, have thoughts.
‘They can’t have followed us.’ It came out with more certainty than I felt – but he didn’t object, so I felt free to continue.
‘If they followed us, they wouldn’t be ahead of us now, and also, I don’t believe for a minute we left that many traces behind between Brainne and Nettle Hill.
The rain should have washed everything away. ’
A small inclination of his horned head. ‘Agreed. So …’
‘They might have deduced where we’re headed?’ I suggested, feeling the hollow open in my stomach again.
‘Yes.’ He flicked the gloves aside and sat down on the edge of the table, hands planted on either side, eye narrowed in that calculating expression that was both ominous and oddly exhilarating.
The master player, moving his pieces across the board.
‘It would make some sense, of course. What they know is that you’re in dire need of protection, you’re not going to find it at Mount Estien, and you’re not moving in the direction of the Averre border.
You are also travelling with a fireborn noble who has pretended to be an Averre and therefore probably isn’t.
Not a bad guess to assume you’ve found someone from Lesceron’s court willing to offer you sanctuary in exchange for information. ’
I blinked.
How had he made that sound logical?
And more important, how in the world were we suddenly having a conversation again?
‘In any case, it sounds like they’re well ahead of us,’ I said, shoving that second question firmly aside for fear I’d accidentally refer to anyone’s hands and ruin everything again.
‘Which suggests they don’t yet know we were delayed a few days, doesn’t it?
But at some point they’ll realise we haven’t passed through any of these towns before them, and then—’
‘—they’ll wait,’ Durlain finished, lip curling a fraction. ‘Yes. Of course, Belloc doesn’t have the authority here that he does in Estien, but if he has the birds with him now …’
His sentence died away.
I knew the thought that had struck him before he parted his lips again.
‘Yes,’ I said before he could point it out, fighting the urge to flinch. ‘The innkeeper mentioned there were two lackeys.’
‘Yes. Rather than three.’ He cocked his head as he leaned back a fraction. ‘Who did we lose – Jay, Rook, or Kestrel?’
The urge to wince became almost unbearable, tightening my gut as if to draw my shoulders down with it.
I should have been honest right from the start.
Should have told him the full story, every jagged, painful, bile-inducing bit of it – but he hadn’t talked to me for days, and surely I wouldn’t make anything better by confessing to all the truths I hadn’t told him …
‘Jay and Rook aren’t going to be separated if they can help it,’ I muttered instead. Facts. Clear, simple facts – I couldn’t go wrong with those. ‘So either you killed Rook with that geyser in the Brainne marshes, or Kestrel isn’t with them.’
‘I see.’ His eyes were so very intent on my face. Seeing me so very clearly. ‘Is there any reason why he would no longer be with them, then?’
‘No one ever really wanted to work with Kestrel. Ugly stories.’ I managed a shrug, or something like it; they were hard to forget, those whispers in the hallways, spreading gruesome detail after gruesome detail.
‘So it wouldn’t be uncommon for others to travel separately, even after the same target. ’
Durlain arched a dark eyebrow. ‘Even Belloc would be that uncomfortable?’
‘Well. Yes.’ There was no lie in the bitter laugh that escaped me. ‘Alternatively, Belloc doesn’t want anyone to one-up him once he’s found me. He probably has his own creative plans.’
No questions followed on that point. We both knew it was true.
A fragile, unsteady silence descended over the room in the wake of his unspoken agreement, our words echoing with faint menace between the walls.
More words than we’d spoken to each other in the last four days together, and in the sudden familiarity, the horrible ease of this discussion, it was impossible to not be aware of the fact – to not look at each other and see the memories crackle back to life, jokes unwillingly shared, support unwillingly extended.
A single flickering candle. A thumb brushing over skin and glass-edged scars.
Not your ally.
Oh, damn it – to the misty halls of hell with that.
‘So what do we do now?’ I said, holding his gaze.
‘In the short term, I’d suggest we get a good night of sleep.
’ His voice was so flat that he must have heard the underlying question.
But he didn’t back down, a spark of a challenge in his eye – shoulders straight and chin lifted at that angle that suggested moats and fortified walls.
‘They’re not in Dorraven, so we should be safe enough for tonight.
In the middle-to-long-term, we might want to move away from the original itinerary and travel down to the coast a little earlier than planned. ’
‘Mm-hmm,’ I said.
The silence was significantly more charged this time.
His eyebrow quirked higher with every moment it lasted, until he finally uncrossed his long legs, planted his palms back on the table, and tilted his head at me with the air of a man studying a venomous snake.
‘If you’re trying to make a point, I’m going to once more suggest the use of verbs and nouns, Thraga. ’
‘That’s a little hypocritical, isn’t it?’ I said pleasantly.
His jaw tightened. ‘There is no need to—’
‘Oh, there is in fact every need in the world to have this conversation,’ I interrupted even more pleasantly, and somehow it barely felt rude to talk over him.
I’ve seen how you fight back. ‘I have quite a few burning questions for you, the first of which is, what the everlasting fuck are you thinking? With the second being, are you thinking?’
His mouth opened.
Then didn’t move.
He did have an infuriatingly pretty way of parting his lips, a flicker of spite in their movement but an invitation in the curve of them, and seeing them stilted in that shape for even a single moment of surprise was an unexpected boon to my little victory.
I dropped myself onto his plush couch, sick of standing, sick of battling my own aching exhaustion.
By the time I’d settled in and looked up, he had already pulled himself together again.
‘Rune of attack, wasn’t it?’ he enquired with that mild politeness that, coming from him, suggested a scathing insult.
‘One must lean into their strengths,’ I shot back. ‘Which means you’ll try to talk your way out of this, I suppose, but then again, at least you’ll be talking, which is an improvement in and of itself. Any answers to add, or are you going to stick with the witty insults for the rest of the night?’
His mouth quirked; it looked feigned. ‘You think I’m witty?’