23. Katya
23
B y the time we find a nice little clearing to set up camp for the night, my butt hurts so much, I’m afraid I won’t be able to walk. Aemon catapults off the horse like six hours in the saddle was nothing, and I really think I kind of hate him. Hate might be the wrong word: loathe. I loathe him and his always perfectly wind-swept hair, pristine white teeth that never get food stuck in them and all those muscles. It’s like his muscles have muscles. And, of course, I had to feel every single one of them flexing every which way as we rode, which made it very hard to pretend he didn’t exist. I wouldn’t be surprised if he did it on purpose just to mess with me.
Even worse, I felt his thingy twitching against my backside the entire way. By the size of it, I’d say it has its own muscles too.
He reaches up and grabs me around the waist. I consider swatting his hands away, but I have to concede that the indignity of him helping me down doesn’t even come close to the humiliation of falling. He lifts me like I weigh nothing and sets me on my feet carefully, not releasing me until I’ve found my footing.
I really hate it when he acts all considerate. It makes me want to like him, and I really don’t want to like him. That makes sense, right?
Aemon clears his throat, and I come out of my mental fog to realize at some point I laid my palm against his chest, and I have yet to remove it. It’s deliciously warm against my numb fingers, and I can feel his heart pumping a steady beat. Is it thumping a little more rapidly than normal?
More likely, his heart always works double time to keep blood flowing through all the muscles. Reluctantly, I lift my hand and pull it back against my own chest. Now, that’s a heart that’s really chugging. My face heats. I quickly push around him and begin untying Miss Horse to hide my embarrassment, but I can feel his eyes watching me.
I glance back, and he immediately looks away and scratches at the back of his neck like a child caught at some mischief. “So, uh, I’ll go get wood for a fire. Why don’t you go through our packs and see what you can put together for dinner.”
“Why do you get to get wood, and I have to do dinner?” I say, cocking a hip and resting one hand on it. “I’m perfectly capable of collecting wood, you know. Just because I’m a female—”
He throws his hands up in surrender. “Woah, woah, woah, settle down. You want to get wood; you are more than welcome to get wood. I can cook. I’m actually a very good cook, if I do say so myself.”
I harrumph loudly. “Yeah. I’m sure you had a ton of practice living in a palace all your life, servants catering to your every whim. ”
His expression shifts from warm to ice cold in an instant. “You don’t know the first thing about me and living in that palace, so why don’t you do us both a favor and cut the jabbering and get some gods damned wood.”
“Fine,” I shout, then I spin around and stomp through the line of trees and back into the forest.
“Fine,” he snaps back.
I ignore him and keep on, the dead leaves and twigs blanketing the ground crunching beneath my feet. He’s such an utter asshole. Just when I start to think, maybe, he isn’t quite so bad, he has to go and prove me wrong by being an intolerable prick.
Whatever. He said he wants wood, so I’ll get him his damn wood. I’m afraid of going too far and getting shocked again, so I just snatch up whatever fallen limbs I can find nearby and pile them in my arms much higher than I did when I was only building fires for myself because I refuse to give him more fodder to tease me with.
A few minutes later, I return to the clearing and drop the wood into a pile in the center. Aemon’s bent over something I can’t quite make out in the dim light. “Your wood, my lord.”
He turns around, eyes my wood pile and starts laughing. Not just a little snicker either, a full-blown, belly laugh.
I look at him, then the pile and back at him again. “What?”
“I said wood, Katya. That’s not wood. Those are twigs and”—he flicks a few pieces aside—“leaves. Bac himself couldn’t get that sorry pile to light.”
“Then Bac doesn’t know how to light a fire because I built fires like this the whole time I was on my own, and it worked just fine for me. ”
Aemon pushes to his feet and wipes dirty fingers down the legs of his pants. “That may have been enough for the crickets and worms you were cooking, but I’m going to need an actual fire if you want me to cook this rabbit.”
Rabbit? I peek around him and laid out on a bed of leaves is a fully skinned and skewered rabbit. “I was right over there,” I say, pointing at the woods. “For ten minutes. How could you possibly have done all of that in such a short amount of time?”
He just shrugs and gives me that cocky smirk that makes me want to jam those twigs in his obnoxiously blue eyes. “I have many skills,” he says with a bob of his eyebrows.
Son of a—
I whirl around and stomp back the way I came to get him his stupid wood. This time, I go after the biggest, fattest branches I can find. They’re so massive, I have to jump up and down on them just to break them into manageable pieces, ripping my dress and leaving my calves scratched and bleeding. I haul as much of the pile as I can manage into my arms and slog my way back to the campsite.
My arms ache and tremble from the weight, and I barely make it inside the clearing before I dump the pile onto the ground. “You wanted wood,” I say, triumphantly. “There’s your wood.” I step away from the pile, lungs stinging from heaving the cold night air, but overall, I’m feeling pretty smug.
“That’s alright. I already got some,” he says, and I look up from my proud little pile to see him standing beside a massive stack of logs, grinning just as happy as he can be.
It’s like he struck a match to my blood, and I’m boiling on the inside. The pressure in my veins is building too near bursting and any minute I’m going to explode into tiny Katya bits all over his ridiculously beautiful face. I squeeze my hands into fists at my side, nails biting into the already ravaged flesh. “You… You…” I’m so angry I can’t even get the words out of my mouth.
He puts a hand on his chest. “Me: Aemon. You: Katya.” He chuckles, and I explode.
“You did that on purpose.” I reach down and grab the biggest branch, I can find and hurl it at his face.
He bats it away easily.
So, I throw another and another and another, and he just keeps blocking them. “Stop doing that,” I shout, reaching for another stick, and whatever I’d been standing on goes out from under me and I careen face-first into my own damn pile.
Ouch.
Aemon curses and races over to me. “Shit. Are you okay?” He grabs me under the arms and lifts me off, but right now I’d rather those sticks jabbing me all over than have his hands on me.
“Stop.” I tug at his fingers and attempt to pull them off of me, but he just sees the blood on my palms and starts cursing again.
“You’re hurt. Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt?” He’s half pushing, half dragging me to the center of the clearing where all of our things are stacked.
“Stop it,” I shout again, but he just ignores me and keeps pushing. “I said stop it, gods dammit.” I wrench myself free from his grasp, stumbling forward a few steps before I catch myself.
“I’m trying to help you.”
I whirl on him. “I don't need your help. And stop trying to play the nice guy when we both know you're taking me back to Ranook to either be killed, tortured, or made into a sex slave.”
“That last one’s my favorite.” He smirks .
“This isn’t funny.” I say, stepping up to him like I could be a threat to this male who's twice my size. “This is my life, and I’m terrified.” Tears sting my eyes, but I refuse to let them fall. I will not give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry.
His smile fades, and he looks at me seriously, for once, and says, “I told you I won't let that happen.”
I scoff. “Even if I believed you, you’re delusional if you think you have that kind of control over the king.”
He folds his arms across his chest and looks down his nose at me. “And who do you think controls him?”
“Does he not have free will?”
Aemon just sort of blinks at that. Obviously, free will is a foreign concept to him. He doesn’t respond, and after a few seconds, he turns around and starts arranging the logs for the fire. “How’d you get away?” he asks, without turning to look at me, like he’s afraid.
Right, because he thinks I have some power I’m hiding from him. Good. I can work with that. I sweep the hair back from one shoulder and give him a sassy look. “A lady doesn't tell.”