The thought arrived the way it always arrived. Without warning. Without mercy.
She is open the way things are open before they break. And it is always my hand on the thing that breaks.
He stepped back.
The movement was sudden, violent, as if he had been burned.
His hands left her. The cold of the room filled the space between them immediately, sharp and immediate, two feet of herb-room air that had not been there a moment ago. He felt the loss of her warmth like a physical wound.
She looked at him. Her eyes were wide, the pupils dilated, her breath coming in short, ragged gasps.
Her chest was rising and falling, her hair loose. Her eyes not soft, not hurt yet, still the heat of the last few minutes in them. But watching him, reading the step back, reading his face. He saw the confusion beginning to cloud the emerald of her eyes.
He looked at her. At the loosened hair and the red mouth and the woman who had ridden into his keep in his arms cursing him and had taken the boy's bad nights and Seumas's joints and Donal's ribs and Eidith's cold approval and turned them all without once asking for permission. He saw her for exactly what she was—the most dangerous thing he had ever encountered.
Who touched the scar on his face the way it had never been touched and who was looking at him right now without fear and without retreat. His heart felt as though it was being squeezed by a giant's hand.
"So the dragon tamed the fox," he said. The words felt like ash, a hollow, desperate attempt to regain his balance.
His voice came out rough. He hadn't planned the words. They arrived the way armor arrived. Fast, without elegance, because something needed covering. He saw her flinch at the tone, and he hated himself for it.
Her chin came up. The defensive reflex was instantaneous, her spine straightening with a familiar, icy pride.
"Nay dragon tames me," she said. Her voice was a low, dangerous warning.
"Nay fox fools me." He met her gaze, his expression closing over itself like a door being shut.
It landed between them. He watched it land. Watched the heat in her face shift. Not gone, but moving, changing into something else, something cooler and more deliberate. The softness he'd just seen was being replaced by a hard, brittle anger.
She was visibly hurt but she was trying so hard not to show it. He saw the way her fingers curled into her palms, her knuckles turning white.
She took a breath. Let it out. The sound was a long, shaky exhale.
"Once James is healed," she said, her voice quieter now, steadied, "I'm gone." The finality in her voice made the room feel suddenly cavernous.
He heard it for what it was. The question underneath the statement, the thing she was waiting for him to answer, the opening she was leaving. His own pride rose up to meet hers, a stubborn, self-destructive wall.
He closed it.
"Cannae wait," he said. The lie was a bitter, leaden weight on his tongue.
The words came out before the thought had finished forming, and he heard them arrive and knew immediately they were wrong. Not the truth, the opposite of the truth, the stupid reflexive answer of a man whose pride had gotten to the doorbefore his sense had. He felt his stomach drop as he watched her face take them.
He watched her face take them. It was as if he had struck her.
A small thing, what happened in her face. Easy to miss. Her chin stayed level. Her eyes stayed on him. But something went out behind them, briefly, the way a flame went out. There and then not there, and the not-there was worse than any visible wound would have been. The light in her eyes died, leaving only a cold, green glass.
She looked at him for a moment. The silence was deafening.
"So now ye want me gone?" she said. Her voice was flat, devoid of the emotion that had been there only seconds ago.
He dragged his hand down his jaw, the rasp of it loud in the small room. "I daenae ken what I was thinking." He looked away, unable to bear the sight of the emptiness he'd caused.
"Clearly," she said. Flat. Precise. The word was a scalpel, cutting him out of her life.
He almost stepped toward her.
Daenae.
