Chapter 4 #4
Elloven leaned in with a thoughtful expression. “You look at me and see a woman who’s been abused and wounded. You see the scars.”
“No, no—”
“You do. Everyone does. Maybe you see past them, but...” She breathed deep.
“I’m not my scars. I’m not what those men did to me.
What Taven did to me. What your half brother, Castien, did to me.
I’m so much more, Jesstin, but I’m tired, and I don’t have the fight left to convince others to know me for who I am.
So if this place is as you say? Somewhere I can be whomever I want to be?
That would be my very definition of good. ”
Jesstin didn’t see her for her scars, but he had no idea how to convey that in a way she’d believe. He was intrigued more by what he couldn’t see. He wished he could look at her and say honestly, I do see. I see all of it.
“Then let’s go.” He barely got the last word out before a shadow spread over the table.
Elloven’s cringe answered the question before Jesstin even looked up.
Jesstin rallied a patronizing grin. “Ah, Considine. Didn’t figure you for a purveyor of illicit experiences.”
“Get. Up.” Taven’s nose flared as he took a loud, sharp breath. His face wasn’t even red but purple, as though his anger had had more than enough time to simmer. “Ellie, not you. Him.”
“Look at you, giving orders like anyone gives a fuck.”
Taven made a sound like he was burying a grunt. “You and I are going to have a word. Outside. Now.”
With a chuckle, Jesstin looked around, taking in all the eyes turned their way. Fights were nothing unusual along the Row, though they usually started farther down the line and later in the night. He’d been in plenty himself. Started some of them. Won most of them.
It had been a while though, and there were few people he wanted to punch as much as the pathetic excuse for a man standing beside the table.
But it was the blazing panic in Elloven’s eyes that stayed him from another easy victory.
Jesstin clicked his tongue. “Nah.”
“Did you...” Taven’s cheeks puffed in fury. He whipped his gaze between Jesstin and Elloven. “You’re a bold little bastard, aren’t you? Sliding your way into Ellie’s life when the blood of her late husband hasn’t even cooled?”
“I thought we all agreed he deserved to die?” That was another thing he and Elloven had in common. Neither was afraid to take a life.
“You’re walking a fine line,” Taven said through clenched teeth. Spittle landed on the table. “We can do this outside, or we can do this here. Your choice.”
More people had turned to watch. They’d expect a fight, and Jesstin ached to give them one, but he was unsettled by what he saw in Elloven’s expression. Alarm, but not for herself.
There’s no way she thinks Considine could take me.
Then it hit him. Taven came from the same mountains as her people. His magic was unpredictable.
“Taven,” Elloven said slowly. She seemed to be working herself up to something, gathering like a storm. “You need to leave.”
“I intend to, once this illborn stands and faces me.”
Jesstin grinned at the table and pushed back, the thrill of a fight already pumping through his veins. He heard a sharp breath from Elloven and looked up just in time to dodge Taven’s sloppy swing.
He caught the man’s fist and held it. Taven tried to yank it back, but Jesstin tightened his grip. “When a woman tells you to leave, Considine, you leave.”
“You don’t speak for her.”
“Didn’t get the message when she snuck out to avoid you?”
“I know she snuck out. I watched her do it! I waited and waited and waited all day, and—”
“I’m tired of your games, Taven! I’ve hardly been home a day!” Elloven stood. “I’m asking you, as a friend, to please stop.”
“Your friend?” Taven danced his incredulous glare to Jesstin and back. “Did you not tell him we’re to be married?”
The notion made Jesstin sick to his stomach, but he could see Elloven felt the same, and he decided he would never let it happen. Everyone else had failed her, and he was suddenly aware of his own privilege of having a loving family in spite of the shade hanging over his name and reputation.
He’d only met the woman, and he was ready to die for her.
Sesto would tell him he was fixating again, that he always had to have something to obsess over. Maybe he was right. He didn’t care. He’d obsessed over far worse.
“I’m never getting married again and certainly not to you,” Elloven said with a cool laugh that made Taven’s entire face flush in defiance. “Not that you’ve ever cared about what I want.”
“Go, or I’ll get someone to help you,” Jesstin said. He moved closer to her, angling himself so that he could react if Taven did something unwise.
“Is there a problem?” A high-pitched voice sang the words.
A golden-haired Virtue stood behind Taven with a troubled look, almost childlike.
The Virtues were children, in a way, because they’d never been given freedom to grow into something more.
They would forever be the age they were when acquired, barely even of marrying age, which was the whole allure of them, he supposed.
“I don’t know, stable hand, is there?” Jesstin asked.
“Are you fucking him?” Taven demanded, turning his back on Jesstin as he towered over Elloven. “You know he has a reputation. He’ll only hurt you.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about fucking, Taven, as I’ve only been with men who chose their own needs first,” Elloven spat. She seemed to grow taller as she stood up to him. “I was fourteen when you first saw to your own.”
Taven glowed with shame and anger. The Virtue whispered something that sounded like oh dear, and two others appeared, mumbling questions to each other. “You’re misremembering things, Ellie.”
“Or you’re remembering them as it suits you, as you always have.”
“Enough.” Jesstin slid between them. “I won’t ask again. Go home.”
Taven rolled his eyes and threw a wild punch that hit Jesstin square in the jaw.
“You’re going to regret that.” Jesstin rubbed his chin, winced, and threw his weight into the man, knocking him to the floor. Elloven screamed, and so did the Virtues standing nearby, amid sliding chairs and gasps.
Jesstin wedged a hand over Taven’s neck, pushing on the center of his throat. Taven thrashed and sputtered underneath him. “Are you done?”
Taven spat in his face.
The rest was a blur.
The next thing Jesstin remembered was a man pulling him away and looking down to see Taven gurgling blood, glaring at him through the eye not swelling shut.
Elloven’s hands were on his back, his shoulders.
She was trembling and breathing hard, her hair lifting and falling like a wind had swept through the tavern.
He had the overpowering urge to get her away from the tavern, the town, the world.
He saw himself turning toward her and proposing exactly that, but when he did turn, he realized she required a different kind of calming.
Elloven looked positively, indisputably murderous.
“It’s all right.” Jesstin stumbled into the table. She caught him, but her eyes followed Taven as the men helped him to the door. His head ached from the one good hit Taven had gotten in, but he’d been hit harder.
“It’s not all right, Jesstin. It’s never been all right,” Elloven said, low and tense. She waited for him to sit upright before taking her own seat again. “Did he hurt you?”
When Jesstin grinned, he tasted a tinge of his own blood. “Ask him the same question.”
She didn’t smile back. “He’s not a man who lets things go.”
“You think I’m afraid of a man like him?” Jesstin grabbed his mug and pressed it to his throbbing temple. The ale was no longer cool though, so he shoved it across the table in annoyance.
“No,” she said, her tone smooth and calm.
Too calm. Her hair seemed to move again on its own, but that couldn’t have been right.
“But you underestimate him. He can’t match you for strength, but he’ll find another way.
” She leaned her head back with a fractured gulp.
“It was a bad idea coming here. I should have known. I should have known he would do this.”
Jesstin slid his bruised hand across the table and wrapped it around one of hers. “I’m glad you came. Even if it meant I had to deliver Considine’s ass to him in front of all these people.”
She eyed his gesture with a solemn, sorrowful gaze, but when she looked up, her rage was back, and he wondered how her late husband had ever thought he would survive what he’d done to her. “Broken people can’t always resist breaking others.”
Jesstin ruminated a moment. “Don’t make excuses for him. You and I have been through our own hell, and we don’t break people who don’t deserve it.” His mouth hitched in a humorless half grin. “Other than ourselves.”
Elloven’s smile was just as halfhearted. “If only it were so tidy.”
He didn’t know where the feeling had come from, but he had the gutting sense he would never again see her in Mythgarde, or anywhere. That whatever happened next, for him or for her, would set them on courses with no intersection.
As awful as that was, he was not sorry their paths had crossed.
Commotion drew their attention toward the door. Six guards stormed in, followed by a smug, seething Taven and a Virtue he didn’t recognize. She pointed right at Jesstin.
She mouthed the words. That’s him.
The guards started toward them.
Elloven looked to Jesstin for answers, but he had none. Only a terrible suspicion. You underestimate him.
“Jesstin Skylark, you are being detained for violation of the One Sacred Law of the Ivory Rogue, the mishandling of an Ivory Virtue. You will be imprisoned until the hour of your death and may request the presence of family to make your final amends to this life.”
Dizziness swept over him; the room turned hazy, a dreamlike version of the reality he’d been a part of only moments before. He knew exactly what had happened. Taven had swayed the Virtue to lie, through money or some other coercion, and her word would be taken as the only truth.
“What a bald-faced lie!” Elloven declared, but no one was listening. She might have been invisible for all they cared about her thoughts on the matter. “He didn’t go anywhere near her. She wasn’t even here!”
Taven’s eyes narrowed as he watched Jesstin accosted and bound, the message living in his arrogant, vindicated gaze.
“Will you listen? I was with him the whole time, and he didn’t touch her!” Elloven cried. Her voice dissolved into a sea of disorder. “Take your hands off of him and listen to me!”
“It’s all right, Elloven,” Jesstin lied. It was the last kindness he could do her.
“What can I do?” she pleaded.
Jesstin’s arms were snapped tight behind his back. “Send for Asterin.”