Chapter 29
Nothing happened during dinner.
I wasn’t sure whether I ought to be relieved or disappointed – whether I’d expected anything, hoped for anything, wanted anything.
What had I thought, that he’d bend me over the table and have his wicked way with me between the veal and the mashed celeriac?
Had I become a person who wanted to be bent over tables by sneering fireborn princes, ominously beautiful though they might be?
I had no way to find out; he didn’t try.
We talked instead, a suspiciously pleasant conversation on runes and horses and meaningless court gossip – no true venom from his side, barring the occasional recreational insult that I cheerfully flung back at him.
If this was the version of him he’d held back from me since we’d escaped our Svein’s Creek cell, I wouldn’t have minded if he’d freed himself a little sooner.
Only when I was readying myself for bed in my own room did I realise it – that that might be exactly the danger he’d warned me about.
All the same, I checked my lock only twice before I went to sleep.
We rode southeast the next morning, down the road that would take us to Seidrinn’s southern coastline in two days.
It made for a significant detour – Mount Garnot lay to the northeast from Dorraven – but then again, a few extra days on the road were a much more attractive prospect than a second encounter with a vengeful Estien heir.
So seaward we went, our bags bulging with food, an extra set of blankets folded behind our saddles, riding in silence as the pounding of the paper mills slowly grew duller behind us.
The temperature was unusually mild for the time of year.
The sky was a pleasant, iridescent shade of grey.
The breeze didn’t smell of sulphur, the brook along the path was crystal clear, and I realised with a shock, half an hour into the day’s ride, that I wasn’t scared – that that constant, cagey nervousness of mine, as loyal a companion as my knives and my rune mark, was nowhere to be found.
Which seemed ridiculous. It had been a few days since I’d learned of Lark’s betrayal.
A single night since I’d informed a deathmade prince that he was welcome to declare war on me.
No one left to shield me from threats, and yet I felt bewilderingly unthreatened – there was a thought in that observation, itching to come through, scratching at the edges of my mind but not yet able to turn into words I understood.
I shrugged and let it go. We had days and days of riding ahead of us; it would crystallise at some point.
We stayed at a small inn that night, which had only one room available – two separate beds, an arm’s length away from each other.
A perfect opportunity to take risks and make some terrible decisions, yet once again, there were no scandalous propositions at nightfall; we played three games of carette on the nightstand between our pillows, which Durlain won, then got into a heated discussion on the old theory that Niflheim wasn’t the only world to exist alongside our own, an argument I won.
All the same, he looked annoyingly content with himself by the time he snuffed out the candles.
The bastard was assessing me, I realised as I lay staring into the darkness.
Like a scout sent out to take stock of an enemy army, like a general studying his battlefield, the prince of many faces was working out who I was if I wasn’t just an ally – calculating his chances before he took any risk at all.
Which was vexing, of course. And vaguely worrying, and so entirely like him I should have seen it coming from the start – but also …
Flattering?
Hell, unnervingly appealing?
No one, birds’ victims aside, had ever considered me worthy of caution, and something about it turned the nearness of his soft breathing into the world’s softest siren song.
It made me want to slip into his bed after all.
Not to kiss him, or fuck him, or whatever other options slumbered behind the bars of our cages, but just to feel that beautiful vigilance against my skin.
To find out how he held a woman he wasn’t sure he could beat.
I didn’t check the lock even once that night.
We reached the coast by the end of the second day.
It had announced itself hours before, first in whiffs of salt on the wind, then in the increasingly loud cries of seagulls in the distance.
All the same, the first glimpse of that flat, lead-grey horizon jolted something in my chest that was pleasant and painfully wistful at once – the same ocean to which I’d woken up every morning of our Hjarn Bay years, hundreds of miles away yet achingly close for a moment.
Other than the sea itself, the Garnot coast looked nothing like the west of Estien.
Hjarn Bay had had cliffs. Forests. Stretches of pale pink sand, the colour of the Dawn House’s enchanted windows at sunrise.
Here, the land was flat and desolate, yet strangely surreal in its beauty – those same lava plains again, stretches of black glass and glittering gemstones, meeting the sea in an uneven line of obsidian shards.
Waves crashed into that unrelenting shore over and over, sending plumes of white spray into the air and gurgling with every retreat.
Rocks emerged from the churning grey beyond, black as well, sharp and jagged like broken teeth.
It was terrifying. It was beautiful.
If Durlain had been a landscape, this would have been exactly what he’d look like – and then I heard my own thoughts and snorted out loud, earning myself a puzzled one-eyed glance from the object of my musings.
‘Nothing,’ I said, biting away my grin. ‘Let’s ride on.’
He lifted an eyebrow in a way that reminded me of his aunt. ‘Plotting my violent death?’
‘This is going to be a confusing piece of information for you,’ I said, turning Pain back onto the path that ran along the coastline, ‘but I don’t really plot. If I wanted to kill you, I’d probably just do it.’
‘Which sounds like something someone plotting my violent death would say,’ he pointed out.
I snorted. ‘It sounds like something you would say if you were plotting a murder. Not the same thing.’
The twitch of his lips was all the victory I needed. It gave the vague impression he was adding a new observation to a file somewhere.
We rode for another hour before we reached a flood hut – one of the many erected along this coastline.
Highwater came fast here when the winds were strong, and the flatness of the land meant the water could easily rush in for miles.
These huts were the only refuge the area offered: simple wooden buildings on stilts, equipped with the bare necessities to survive for a few days.
In Estien, they were maintained by local villagers and fishermen keeping an eye out for one another.
The same was likely the case here; I doubted Lesceron had anything to do with it, sitting high and dry in his palace days away from here.
I wanted to mention it to Durlain, but when I climbed up the ladder after him, I found he had already slipped a piece of silver into the food chest – more than enough to compensate for the bag of wheat bran we took down for the horses.
Bad person. Good reasons.
It sang in my mind all night as we dined on figs and cheese and bread that we roasted over the little iron stove.
We played another game of carette. I scratched a few spells against the cold into the thin wooden walls.
Outside, the ocean never stopped crashing into the jagged cliffs – a soothing roar, a slumbering threat.
No lingering hands. No suggestive glances.
It was only when we were spreading out our blankets to sleep, when I knelt by the little furnace to put a few more logs on the fire, that Durlain softly said, ‘It’s a pleasure to watch you do that, you know.’
I stiffened.
Then turned.
He was sitting beneath the ruffled mess of his blankets, coat gone, shirt a fraction skewed to reveal a pale collarbone and half a glittering scar.
His gaze was intent on me. Dark as his hair, sharp as his horns – that deliberate, lockpicking look that for one stuttering heartbeat made me forget anything else existed in the world.
A pleasure.
‘What?’ I stammered, then wanted to kick myself for bloody stammering – for walking straight into whatever trap he’d set for me.
‘The way you handle fire.’ A small tilt of his head. ‘You shrink away from it just a little whenever you start, and then you do it anyway. I’m watching you win a battle every time you add another log to the flames.’
I’d stopped breathing.
Even when I noticed, I could not quite convince myself to start again.
Was it a compliment? It didn’t even matter.
The observation alone was shockingly intimate, as if his fingers had been on my wrists to feel that involuntarily flinch whenever a flame licked too close to my hand – a stupid little weakness, or perhaps a lingering scar, yet with a few words, he’d managed to twist it into something … heroic?
Was this how it began, then? Would he reach for me next, fingertips warm but scars cold against my skin – would he—
He wasn’t moving.
The realisation dripped into my dazed mind like thick honey.
He sat still in that same spot on the floor, knees pulled up, arms loosely draped over them – holding my gaze as if he’d never said anything even remotely out of the ordinary.
The gleam in his eye slowly shifted to amusement, to almost-innocence.
It would have been convincing if it hadn’t been his, that virtuous expression – if it hadn’t been written on the sharp-edged, sin-drenched features I’d already spent far too many hours looking at.
His mouth quirked, or maybe it was just a flicker of shadows. ‘Is anything the matter, Thraga?’
Oh, hell.
The bastard.