Chapter Six
I had spent my entire life paying attention to those around me.
I had always thought myself decent at reading people.
I usually knew what kind of situation I was walking into.
Like two nights ago, when the “master swordsman” had initially pretended to be nice but I saw the dark coldness lurking behind his eyes.
This pirate wouldn’t hurt me. He wouldn’t get the chance if he was foolish enough to try.
No, I was worried about the kind of distraction he might be for me.
This sizzle of attraction, the pull that I felt, was ridiculous. Romantic entanglements had never dictated my life. I made the choices I wanted to make when I wanted to make them. I didn’t pine after men.
And it would be a waste if I did so with this one. I knew the kind of woman a man like him would prefer. I wasn’t like the delicate, tiny women that most men seemed to favor.
“You never told me your name,” I said.
“You’re right. I didn’t.” Another wicked grin.
“Are you going to?”
“Perhaps eventually. If I feel you’ve earned it.” He turned left.
“Where are we going?”
“I’m going to give you the tour so that you know where everything is. First stop is the laundry.”
He was my competitor. We were both here to win the grand prize. I couldn’t afford to let my guard down around him. What if he learned things about me and then used them against me? It was every man and woman for themselves and I needed to keep him at arm’s length.
There were negatives about this man. I should focus on those.
“You lie very easily,” I said.
“Thank you.”
What? “It wasn’t a compliment.”
“It should have been. I am an excellent liar and I always appreciate recognition of my skill.”
His words should have come across as arrogant, but he made them sound playful and I found myself wanting to smile.
A fact he noticed. “I will win a smile from you, Basileia.”
Ignore him. That is not endearing, I told myself.
We entered the laundry, and every woman in the room stopped what she was doing and stared at him.
A younger woman elbowed another worker out of the way and then nearly tripped over her own feet in her rush to assist him.
“How can I help you?” Her tone indicated that she already knew exactly how she’d like to help him.
He flashed her a charming smile. “We need to pick up our training tunics.”
She didn’t even acknowledge me. “I’ll just need your vouchers.”
It had to be among the papers the registrar had given me but I didn’t know which one it was.
Maybe Lia had been right and I shouldn’t have been so resistant to learning to read. This was the second time in as many days that I was embarrassed that I couldn’t.
He reached for my vouchers, knocking them out of my hands. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”
Yes, he had. Why?
He bent down to pick up my vouchers and pulled out the one I needed, handing it to the worker. “There you are.”
She looked at my voucher and said to him, “We don’t have anything in stock for women. We’ll have to special order something for her.”
Still without making eye contact with me.
“That’s fine,” he responded. He told the woman what dormitory we were staying in and our room number.
Was that solely for the clothes, or was he hoping she would pay him a visit later?
The expression on her face told me she planned for the latter.
As we walked out of the laundry, he started handing me my vouchers back. “This one is so they can add you to the dining hall, this one gives you access to the gymnasium for training, and this one will get you into the games. Where I’m fairly certain you will be the only woman in attendance.”
“Women don’t watch the tournament?”
“No.”
“Why?”
He grinned. “You’ll see.”
I glanced down at the vouchers in my hand, keeping them in the order he’d handed them to me. He’d been talking this whole time, so it hadn’t registered until now why he’d done what he did—he had realized that I couldn’t read. He’d deliberately knocked them out of my hand.
He hadn’t mentioned it, hadn’t drawn attention to it, hadn’t asked me about it. He had simply moved to help and cover for me so that I wouldn’t be embarrassed. I had always had a great deal of pride, probably more than I should, and he’d made it possible for me to keep it.
So the other competitors wouldn’t know.
My chest felt warm and I didn’t know what that meant. I decided to change the subject. “How do you know where everything is? Didn’t you just arrive as well?” Why else would he have been in the registration area?
“Before I go anywhere, I always get the lay of the land.”
There was something in the way he said it, as if there was much more behind his words.
Who was he?
I came to a stop. “Why did you help me earlier?”
“I despise men who are cruel to women.” He reached into his tunic and pulled out something gold. After a moment I realized it was the pin the registrar had been wearing.
“You stole that? Why? It can’t be worth very much.” When had he done it? I had been there the whole time, watching them both. I hadn’t seen anything.
He placed it in a potted plant. “It isn’t valuable. I just like the idea of him spending hours looking for it.”
Laughter bubbled up out of my throat, and he looked awfully pleased with himself.
“Aiming for a smile and got a laugh. I am good.” He waited for a few beats and then said, “Are you really not going to ask me who I am? Especially after that? I spend a lot of time projecting an air of mystery so that women will be intrigued and ask me questions.”
“That is an asinine way to get women to talk to you.”
“It’s always worked until now.”
Did he want it to work on me? That shouldn’t have made my heart beat a bit faster. “Sorry for being the exception.”
His eyes lit up and he took two swaggering steps toward me. “Why do you think you’re an exception? You’ve been staring at me for the last few minutes.”
That might have been true—he was very pleasant to look at—but that arrogant grin needed to be taken down a notch. “You seem familiar. I’ve been trying to remember if you’re one of the many men I’ve had in my bed.”
His voice lowered an octave. “If I had been in your bed, I promise you, Basileia, you would remember me.”
Breathless chills. No man had ever given me chills before.
I would stay in control of myself. Even if I had to lie.
Which I did.
“Whatever it is you think you’re doing, it’s not working on me,” I said. I tried not to grimace.
“It’s working on you. You’re just choosing to not act on it.”
I wanted to tell him he was wrong, but that would require me to lie again and I’d felt ill doing it the first time.
“Where are we, exactly?” I asked.
Another grin that let me know he understood what I was doing, but he played along. “The barracks.”
This was the barracks? It was nearly as nice as the palace in Troas.
He added, “The Sagari moved their soldiers out for the week and put the competitors here.”
“Where would they move the soldiers to?” Given the size of this place, there had to be a lot of soldiers.
“They have the room.” He didn’t elaborate further. But he did show me the other points of interest, like the gymnasium, the dining hall, and the stadium where we would be competing, and he asked me questions the entire time.
“What do you know about the tournament?” he asked.
“That it exists and the prizes.”
“Ah, which of the prizes caught your fancy? The money?”
I shook my head.
He studied me, as if he could read the answer on my face. “Not the rope. That would be useless to you. Ah, you want the diviner stone. You have a question you want answered.”
When I didn’t respond, he said, “Maybe someday you’ll tell me what it is.”
That seemed highly unlikely. My business was my own.
We turned a corner and entered a large living space. There were competitors everywhere—laughing, talking, and generally being in my way. I had to throw a few elbows to keep moving.
My tour guide did not seem to have the same issue—gliding through the crowd like he was the only person in the hall. I kept him in my sights and followed. We got clear of the crowd and went down a couple of hallways until he came to a stop.
“This is our room.” He opened the door.
It was an extremely small space. It had obviously only been intended for one person. There was a bed and a trunk and not much space beyond that. A cot had been brought in for my use, and the only place to put it was alongside the bed.
He went and sat on the bed as I dropped my things next to the cot. While privacy would have been nice, I had shared rooms and tents with my siblings my entire life.
“What kind of work do you do?” he asked.
“Like a job?” I clarified as I removed my bracers. “My mother is the clan leader. War is my job.”
“Clan leader?” he repeated, and there was a strange tone to his voice that I didn’t understand. “So for all intents and purposes, that essentially makes you a princess.”
“I happen to know a handful of princesses, and I am not one of them.”
“That’s not really a choice you get to make,” he said. He stood up quickly and I found myself taking a step back. Not because I thought he would hurt me, but because the room was so tiny and I didn’t want to touch him accidentally.
“Would you like to know what it is I do for work?”
“Not really,” I said.
He laughed. “Perhaps I’ll just tell you my name and then you’ll be able to guess what it is I do.”
I dropped my scabbard and sword onto the cot. This was obviously important to him and I didn’t understand why.
“My name . . . is Autolycus.”