“Creatures like me grow up faster than soft little milk-blooded things like you.”
“Don’t call me milk-blooded,” she said.
“Fine,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s what Celedin says.”
“I know,” he said.
“Don’t make me hate you,” she said. “I want one person in this whole keep who I don’t have to hate.”
He let out a pained noise, and he reached for her. He seized her hand. “I’d like that, too.” His voice wasn’t strong. He squeezed her fingers. “Friends, Aerhril.”
“But you just said we couldn’t.”
“Let’s try,” he said.
SHE SNEAKED OUTto see him often. Not every night, but lots of nights. It grew colder, and she would find him shivering in the barn loft, and she would slip under the blankets with him, and he would pull them over their heads and they would warm each other with the heat of their breath.
They talked.
“Celedin locked me outside on the turret yesterday, and I banged on the door and begged him to let me back in, and he just stood on the other side of the door and laughed,” she would say. “He said it would show me that I wasn’t any better than anyone in the Silvarenna, but I think it is all an excuse, because I don’t act better than him.”
“You’re a symbol to them, a symbol of the fact they were crushed by your superior armies,” he said to her. “That’s all it is.”
“But I am not a symbol, I’m just a girl,” she said. “And if I tell anyone, if I go to your uncle, he stops it, but then Celedin does something worse and it all simply escalates.”
“When do you go home?” he said. “The wards aren’t sent back when they come of age at thirteen?”
“No, at sixteen,” she said. “Two more years.”
“You’ll be glad to leave this place behind.”
“I’ll miss you.”
“Yes, you’ll miss watching me stack barrels by the house,” he said. “You’ll miss watching me fight with the horses when they won’t take the bit or the bridle.”
“I’ll miss watching you split wood,” she said, smiling, teasing, and thinking of the way he moved when he swung an ax over his head, the way his muscles rippled, the way his entire body was lethal grace.
He chuckled. “You’ll miss watching me get whipped.”
She went still next to him. “I do not enjoy that.” Why did he always say things like this?
“I think you do,” he said. “I think you like it becausethere’s someone treated worse than you in this place—”
She sat up, throwing the covers askew, stopping his words. She glared down at him.
He sucked in breath through his nose and held her gaze. “And I think you like feeling sorry for me.”
“You know,” she said, “I do not know why I come out here at all. I do not know why I am kind to you. I do not know why I—”
“But we’ve just gotten done explaining that. It’s because you like watching me chop wood.” His smile was so smug she wanted to slap it off of his face.
Her nostrils flared. “You know what I think?”
“Oh, I suppose you’re going to tell me, no matter if I want to know or not.”
“I think you think no one likes you at all,” she said. “I think you are so used to people being cruel to you that you have decided to give them a reason to be cruel. Then you’ll feel as if you are in control of it, as you have the power to make them treat you that way. But you don’t have that power, and I am the one person here who won’t be cruel to you and you simply want to throw me away, and—”
