“I’m going to kick Fell for how stupid you’re being,” Dania said.
“I don’t care.”My eyes were on the flame flickering in the brazier.I’d been worn hard by her endless teasing.
“Truly, Mira.You deserve your misery.You bathe in it by your own choosing.You revel in it.I cannot have sympathy for you.”
“I’m not asking you to have sympathy?—”
“Oh, but you are!You are the whiniest, high-horsiest, most boring?—”
I turned my head to look at her, my gaze as cold as the sea in the depths of winter.“Dania, I have not once asked for your thoughts on the matter, have I?”
She smirked, I think because it was the most aggressive I’d been in her presence.
I couldn’t look more owl-faced.I was at maximum owl-face.“Why are you smiling?We are disagreeing.”
She sighed.“Mira, I’m smiling because I know something you don’t know.”She sat there, looking at me, smug and beautiful and all the more annoying for it.
Curiosity got the better of me.I held against it for several beats of my heart, staring at her.“Well?What is it you know?”
She looked pure evil as her smile widened.“Fell likes you, too.”
I didn’t breathe for a moment.I had already thought over the possibility many times since the eclipse, but I’d convinced myself I’d misunderstood him.My eyes fluttered, and I swallowed the threat of tears.“Dania, it doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters.”
Another brief staring contest.
“Mira—”
“No, Dania, you’re being cruel.Let it die.”
“Why?”
“Because there is nothing to be gained from it, whether he likes me or not.I have Loric waiting for me, and Fell has Inga?—”
She laughed.“Mira, they are only friends?—”
“They are not, and you know it.”
“Mira,youdon’t know what you’re speaking of.Inga’s lover died in a storm at sea.She and Fell keep each other company in their loneliness, but she is not interested in anything formal between them.”
“How could you know what she’s?—”
“Because I asked her, Mira.Because you are my friend, and I can see how much it would mean to you if Fell were taken.I told myself, if they were in love, I wouldn’t bring him up to you, but since they are not?—”
“They spend their evenings together?—”
“Yes, Mira, they are bed friends.When I asked her how she felt about him, she rolled her eyes and called him a black grouse.In Norsern, that means a pretty fool.It means good for a night, but not good for a lifetime.She wasn’t lying.”
I blinked, hating Inga briefly because who would say such a terrible thing about Fell?“They are not committed to one another?”
“No.”
Something collapsed in my mind.
Dania set her hands on her legs and looked at me with the utmost seriousness.“Mira, listen to me.Against my better judgement, I have come to like you.If you want to go home and be quiet and guard gold and have boring sex according to prescription and starve yourself on holy days, you are allowed to do that.But, please, for the sake of giving yourself a single happy memory to revisit on cold nights, for the sake of giving me a single evening without your constant scowl, go and have fun with Fell.You can thank me later.”
“If you liked me even the smallest amount, you wouldn’t say such things to me.”
