Chapter 4 #3
The laugh escaped her before she had any chance to stop it, a sharp, surprised sound, entirely involuntary, the kind of laugh that happened to people rather than being performed by them.
Her hand came up and pressed hard over her mouth, and her eyes went wide above it with the specific horror of someone who had just laughed at the wrong moment and was fully aware of it. “Oh, Great Luna, forgive me—”
“You’re laughing,” Shade said.
“I am not,” she said, muffled behind her hand, shoulders shaking in direct contradiction, “laughing at death.”
“You are.”
“I am laughing,” she managed, removing her hand once she’d constructed enough composure to continue, “because what should have been an epic and tragic warrior memory has just been fundamentally ruined by battlefield vomiting. Those are different categories of response, and I stand by the distinction.”
Against his will, something in his chest loosened. The smile arrived before he could prevent it, small, treacherous, entirely real, and vanished nearly as fast.
But not fast enough.
Myanin’s hand shot out and pointed directly at his face. “There.”
He felt the smile disappear and schooled his expression back into something reasonable. “There what?”
“That.” She gestured. “That face.”
“I don't have a face.”
“You absolutely have a face, you moron. Everyone has a face. You happen to have many faces. That one is the one where you stop looking like the world ended several years ago and never quite recovered.” She lowered her hand.
The teasing settled, and underneath it, like the floor under a rug, was something that hadn’t been performing. “You loved him.”
The answer came before he could measure it, slipping out clean and unguarded. “Yes.”
Simple. True. Heavier for being both at once, because the things that were both simple and true always were.
The silence that followed was different from the one before it, less occupied, more open.
Myanin scuffed the toe of her boot against the parchment ground in a gesture that felt almost fidgety, which was so unlike her that Shade filed it away without comment.
The pages continued their slow, purposeless circling.
“I may,” she began, in the tone of someone giving ground over significant internal protest, “have misjudged you.” She sounded like the words might choke her.
He raised one eyebrow. “Only may have?”
“Don’t get arrogant.” She shot him a look that landed somewhere between warning and admission. “I always assumed the brooding was mostly decorative. A brand decision. An aesthetic.”
The laugh that came out of him was real, low and warm and brief, and it moved across his face in a way that changed it, loosened the careful arrangement of it, let something underneath show through for a moment before the arrangement reassembled.
He felt her notice it and did not address the feeling that produced.
After a long pause, she asked quietly, “Why didn’t you ever tell anyone?”
“Tell them what?”
“That you didn’t break your oath.” She turned to look at him directly. “That what you did was the only version of keeping it that was available.”
Shade frowned. “I did lie.”
She stepped in front of him before the sentence had finished landing, placing herself squarely in his line of sight in a way that left him no clean angle of avoidance.
Up close, the gray light caught the lines of her face differently, and the expression on it was not the one she usually chose to wear in proximity to other people.
“No,” she said, and the certainty in the single word hit with the force of something considerably longer.
“You protected a mother. You kept grief from becoming something worse than it already was.” Her finger pressed against his chest, one pointed, emphatic contact.
“That is not dishonor. It is the furthest possible thing from dishonor, and whatever this book thinks it found in your history, it is working with a flawed premise.”
His eyes dropped to where her finger rested against him. Neither of them moved to address it. The pages drifted past, indifferent.
Then, quietly, almost under his breath, “You sound very certain for someone who kills council members.”
Her eyes narrowed to a degree that should have carried more threat than it did. “First of all, it was one council member. And secondly, I am trying to have a profound moment.”
“And you’re doing it aggressively.”
“I do everything aggressively. It’s my brand.
” She held the narrow-eyed expression for exactly one more beat, then something in it softened–it didn’t collapse, nor did it surrender, but it softened, the way strong things did when they decided something was safe enough to let down a single layer.
She lowered her finger from his chest as a reluctant smile moved through her expression and didn’t quite make it to her mouth, but it made it to her eyes, and that counted.