“He said I could marry him and he talked about my squeezing out his babes with this awful look on his face.” She shuddered.
“No,” said Dathor. “No, no, no.”
“He wasn’t serious anyway. He only said it to rattle me, which he managed very handily, I must say.”
“He was serious,” said Dathor. “And you must not consider it.”
“I am not,” she said, blinking at him.
“Good,” he said, letting out a breath. “But it will make it harder to get away. You could have simply pretended to have a train ticket otherwise. Now, the steward will get his nose into it. He won’t simply let a girl like you go off on her own somewhere.”
“He doesn’t care about me!”
“He cannot let that be known, however. He must pretend to have some kind of decency. He will want it. He’ll love it, you marrying Celedin. After all, it is not as if any of the other nearby girls like him at all. They will not dance with him, that is what you said, is it not?”
There were not a number of dances, for everyone lived very far apart, but whenever there was, Celedin was often unable to secure partners, for he was not appealing. He wore his cruelty too openly, she thought. People could smell it on him. They recoiled the way one might recoil from something poisonous.
“But here you are, now, and you have been living here forlong enough to know all about Celedin, and now you are in need of our charity, after you have been thrust upon us for all these years, and how that will please him!” Dathor shook his head. “By all the shadows of the forest, I cannot believe this is happening. How could you have told Celedin?”
“I am sorry,” she said.
“We’ll have to run,” he said.
“Run?” she said.
“Then they’ll know we’re together. They’ll send word to your family in the south, and I will have to hide myself away. Shadows cover us both.”
“I don’t know how it goes in the south now. I will not have the means to help you as I had hoped. I will not have anything at all. My mother makes it sound as if they are struggling to feed themselves.”
He looked her over. “Really?”
She drew back. “You’re pleased.”
“Pleased that somehow you’ve been knocked off your pedestal just a little bit? Why would that please me?”
She shook her head at him. “You know, sometimes, Dathor, you are the most loathsome creature I have ever met. How dare you?” She was going to start crying. She had come to him because he was supposed to be kind to her. He was supposed to soothe her, tell her that no matter what happened, they would face it together, but he was just being horrid.
She turned away and began trudging back towards Foxglove Peak.
“Creature, is it?” he called after her.
She halted and turned, exasperated. “Oh, you know I did not mean it that way. We are all creatures, after all. I did not mean—”
“You don’t mean it here.” He pointed to his temple. “But you mean it all the same. You aren’t aware that you mean it, but it doesn’t change that you do mean it. Inside, in the inner workings of you, I am below you and you are above me, and—”
“Oh, poor, poor Dathor!” she snapped. “Yes, we mustpity you, always you. You are the only one who truly suffers in all of the land and all of the sea!”
“I do not want your pity. I despise your pity. What I want is to be able to do one thing for you, once, ever. If you have need of me for the first time in all of our association, how could I not be pleased?”
“Need of you?”
“Your family is starving? You have no one and nothing? Perhaps I can be useful to you in some way. Perhaps…” His voice broke. “If you are already diminished, perhaps I do not diminish you.”
She clenched her hands in fists. “Yes, yes, you, as I have said. Your pain, your suffering, your diminishment.” Turning away again, she flounced off, leaving him there.
13
NOW, DATHOR SENTfor Aerhril to come to the master’s quarters, his uncle’s old quarters, later that night. He stood in the quarters, waiting for her, and drank in the feeling of being in there, the master of the keep.
