7. Holy Flapping Finch #2
He whirled on me. “Of all the idiotic ways to meet your end.” He stood so rigidly; the only softness came from the curl of his flaxen hair. “What could you possibly have been thinking?”
“There was a pigeon…” I could finally string multiple words together, and they sounded foolish even in my ears.
His glare went flat. “A pigeon.”
“I’ve never seen one…in person. Before. You know, like real feathers and everything…” Stop talking. Just stop talking.
“Unbelievable.” He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “You almost died. For a bird.”
When he dropped his hands and looked at me again, his eyes were cold.
“Are you trying to get us caught?” He gestured sharply toward the window as if it personally offended him. “Because clearly you don’t grasp the danger you’re in. They may already be looking for you. And if they find you, they find me.”
I grabbed the sash and pulled it down.
“No one was in the street, and I just wanted a closer look,” I reasoned, then immediately regretted it. Reasoning implied logic, and nothing about hanging out of a window and gawking at a bird suggested I possessed any.
Judging by the murderous look on his face, it wasn’t the response he was looking for anyway.
“Let’s get something straight right now.
” He stalked toward me. “I don’t care about your sheltered little life.
This isn’t the Citadel with its stars and pretty little embers.
Incompetence out here will get us killed.
Or worse, caught.” Stopping directly in front of my chair, he forced me to crane my neck to look up at him. “Use. Some. Sense.”
“Okay,” I breathed. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
“No,” he snapped, “you weren’t. And that is precisely the problem.
” He leaned down until his shadow swallowed me.
“Don’t expect me to hold your hand. Don’t slow me down.
And do exactly as I say. Because you,” he said, his voice low and threatening, “are a means to an end. Nothing more.” His glare singed my skin.
“And if your incompetence becomes a liability, deal or not, I will damn well leave you out here to fend for yourself.”
A gasp caught in my throat.
Turning, he dismissed me, strode back to the side window, and picked up a bundle from the floor. He tossed it in my direction without meeting my eyes.
“Put those on. And get your head on straight, because the next time, I’ll just let you fall.”
My chest still burned with mortification, but the heat was now traveling up my face to prickle behind my eyes.
Daft. Liability. Incompetent. He may as well have added ‘defective’ or just ‘failure at everything’.
He had known me for only a few hours and had already figured out that I couldn’t do anything right.
I sighed. It was impressive, really. Most people took at least a day or two to reach that conclusion.
He’d leave me, just as he’d promised. It was only a matter of time.
I shook my head. Maybe he was right. What kind of competent person escapes their windowless prison after nineteen years to fall out of—you guessed it—a window?
And it only took me a few hours to almost plummet to my death.
If there were an award for fastest self-sabotage, I'd be accepting it right now. Posthumously.
Swallowing my shame, I willed my glossy eyes to clear.
This feeling was familiar. I had just hoped that when I left the Citadel, everything would be different.
That I would be different. That what I was would finally be enough.
It was as if my own rain cloud of inadequacy had escaped along with me. And it just kept pouring.
Was I even going to survive out here? I didn’t know what to do out in the world. Would I have stood a better chance at the Citadel?
At least that building didn’t have any windows I could fall out of.
My eyes swept over his intimidating form.
I trusted his word when I left that cliff with him.
But there was a small part of me that wondered if he only told me those things because he wanted to sell my potens lock.
Should I have believed everything this stranger told me?
What if his intent wasn’t genuine? I could question it, but there was an even larger part of me that knew what he told me made more sense than what I’d been choosing to believe.
No one forced him to take me with him and then answer my questions.
He could have just sliced the lock from my head, pushed me off the ledge, and walked away with it.
But he didn’t. Could have let me fall out of that window.
But he caught me. Twice now, he'd had the opportunity to rid himself of me, and twice he hadn't taken it. I couldn’t seem to reconcile that fact with the man who stood in front of me right now, stewing in irritation.
I sighed, picked up the bundle and unrolled a dark cloak, revealing a pair of trousers, a linen shirt and boots.
Where did he get these? I glanced up at him to ask, but he was inspecting the dagger he’d left on the desk.
Satisfied with the absence of blood on the blade, he slid it back into the sheath along his thigh.
Then he walked back across the room and stood with his back to me.
“Thank you,” I said quietly, “for the clothes. And for…catching me.”
He stilled and, for a second, I thought he might turn around. Maybe say something less cruel. Instead, his fingers flexed on the hilt of the sheathed green dagger until his knuckles turned white.
“Get dressed,” he said, his tone flattened by something heavier than anger. “And stay away from the windows.” If I didn’t know better, I would say he almost sounded…defeated.
The trousers looked too big, but they had a drawstring around the waist. I slid them up under my shift and pulled the strings to gather the fabric. I had never worn trousers before. Robes had been the very stylish extent of my wardrobe. The gathered fabric was bulky, but it stayed up on my hips.
Glancing up at him to make sure he was still facing the other direction, I pulled off the shift and fumbled with the button-down shirt.
It fell almost to the length of the shift, so I tucked the excess fabric into the trousers.
I traded my slippers for the boots. They extended a couple of centimeters beyond my toes, but they wouldn’t fall off my feet. A small victory.
“Okay.”
When he turned, his face betrayed no emotion whatsoever. “It was the smallest I could find. Are you able to walk in those boots?” His tone was controlled now, completely detached from the last five minutes of chaos.
It wasn’t that easy for me to just shake it off, but if he wasn’t currently spewing vitriol, I could at least pretend I wasn’t internally unraveling.
Taking a few steps across the room, the soles thumped down on the floor with each step like a young one stomping around to make a point.
But hey, at least I was upright. I stopped in front of him.
The low heels heightened me enough that my line of sight was now at his shoulder, which was a pleasant change from staring at his sternum.
“I’m not sure I can run without tripping in them, but I can walk just fine.” Walking was probably generous. More like stomping, really.
“That’ll work for now,” he replied, turning away to head toward the side window. “Put the cloak on and let’s go. Soldiers are all over the city. We need to make our way to the docks and set off well before the sun comes up.”
We climbed down the drainpipe, which was easier with gravity on my side and boots on my feet, then navigated the strange, shadowy city.
I glanced up at the man leading me through the alleyways.
Because even stranger than the city was the dangerous man who threatened to leave me behind and then dressed me anyway.