He nodded. “Fair enough. I’ll arrange for additional compensation –”
“Nor can Ibuyan extra pair of hands. How about youarrangefor your men to behave like men? How about you teach your little boys to pick up after themselves?” I fumed. “To wash their own uniforms, if I’m to be changing their sheets everyday? I’mnot a fucking laundress!”
My palms stung with the bite of my nails, and my face wasburning.
“You’re upset–”
“I’mfurious.”
“Yes, I see that.” He had the nerve to allow the slightest quirk of his lips, and the good sense to flatten the smirk before it took hold.
“Oh don’t youdare. Don’t you dare reduce myextremelyjustified anger to – to –”
The words fell out over each other in a rush until tight, seething fury roped around my throat so I could barely get the full sentence out. I had to stop and drag in a breath, my chest heaving with the effort. I wanted to scream, but was worried I might cry instead. I did that, when I was angry enough. When I was little, my mother often said it was the strain of holding my Flame in place. Holding it back, when all it wanted was to erupt from my chest and light up my palms, a fiery, protective barrier between myself and whatever it was that caused me such distress. Usually Magnus when I was young, riling me up on purpose to coax out my Flame until eventually I became better at containing it than even he or my father were.
But Magnus was long gone, and still the tell-tale heat pricked at my eyes, at the back of my throat. I closed my eyes, took another shuddering breath –
And felt it seize up when an angry lick of flame enveloped my heart.
Calm, calm, calm.
My eyes flew open.
The Captain wore an unreadable frown, lips tugging against his scar and bleaching it a tense white. He hadn’t – he couldn’t have – Had heseen,somehow? The way he was watching me, his posture taut and still – it made my magic sing a low, crackling warning. My heart was a wild thing in my chest, flailing against my ribs.
But the strange moment passed, and the Captain just sighedand glanced away, a hand scrubbed over his brow.
“Alright,” he said. “You win.”
“I – what?”
My thoughts had scattered, caught on a burning wind and shrivelled up to crisp black ashes. What had I won? A pair of manacles? A carriage ride to Kingsborough and a stay in the palace dungeons?
“You win,” he said again. “I can’t promise anything this side of Yule, but once things quiet down, I’ll arrange alternative accommodation for the newcomers.”
I blinked at him, my mind struggling to keep up.
“Where? We’re Stormsby’s one and only inn —”
“Do you want them gone or not?”
“I want youallgone.”
His lips twitched, though he didn’t seem particularly amused.
“Best I can do, I’m afraid.”
I didn’t move as the Captain backed away, as he strode slowly for the door. Even as he crossed the threshold and paused, grabbing the doorway to halt his own momentum. He glanced over one shoulder at me, intensely focused for a moment, almost poised to speak. But then he just rapped his knuckles idly against the doorframe and disappeared.
My body remained a coiled spring, braced where I stood. It could have been five or fifteen minutes later that I sank to the bed and caught my breath.
The final kick in the teeth came later that afternoon.
I was checking in a sweet young newlywed couple who were passing through Stormsby to spend Yule with some of their family in Kingsborough. While they stood at the desk mooning at each other, I scrabbled eagerly through the shelves for the keys to one of our last remaining rooms, and my hands closed around a scroll of parchment that someone had shoved into a pigeon hole. A gold-sealed, crown-stamped parchment, requesting my bill for the second platoon of Kingsmen who would be arriving at the tavern ‘any day now’. In the topmost corner was a chicken scratch note.
For your records,
Lieutenant Fischer
