"That's not your concern."
"You're in my corridor." An obvious fact.
"Then tell me where the door is and I'll be out of your corridor." I hold his stare. He holds mine. Neither of us moves. "What do you want for it," I press. "Saving my life. Housing me. Whatever this is. I'd rather know what the ledger looks like before I owe more of it."
His expression shifts by approximately nothing. "You believe I require compensation."
"Every dark elf lord I've ever heard of requires compensation. You didn't drag me out of that forest because you were feeling generous."
"I dragged you out of that forest," he states, with a patience that feels constructed, "because the alternative was leaving you there. Which I did consider."
"And yet."
He looks at me in a flat, cataloging way. "I want nothing from you. Sit with that however you need to."
"That's what someone who wants something says while they're deciding what it is."
For a moment he simply watches me. Then: "You argued with me while barely able to stand, and your first coherent act was to attempt an escape in borrowed clothing with no shoes and a leg that doesn't work." He tilts his head by a degree. "I find I don't know whether to be irritated or impressed. Possibly both."
"You can be both from a distance."
"The grevhault," the word lands differently than anything else he's said. Deliberate. "You remember what attacked you."
My teeth press together. "Yes."
"There are more. Near your cottage. My hunters found them this morning." He analyzes my face. "They were not passing through. The area had been purposely baited."
The corridor suddenly feels narrower than it did.
"Someone drove them there?" I question.
"I don't know." He steps to the left — not toward me, just repositioning, placing himself between me and the longer stretch of hall with no drama about it. "But it means you are not returning to your cottage tonight. Or until I understand who is responsible."
"You don't get to decide that."
"I'm deciding it regardless." He reaches for my arm again — the same one, the uninjured side — to steer me back toward the room, and something in me locks up completely.
"Don't." I pull back. "Don't touch me."
He doesn't hesitate, and lets go. Hands back at his sides as though the motion never happened.
I brace myself for something — irritation, a reprimand, some assertion of the power differential that this hallway makes clear — and receive none of it. He simply waits.
And I notice, in the silence that follows, what I should have understood sooner. The arm he took hold of. The angle he chose. Every point of contact away from the shoulder, away from the stitched palm, away from the leg currently threatening to betray me again.
He knew exactly where the damage was. He avoided all of it.
I don't know how to take that so I don't do anything with it.
"I'm going. Back to the room." My voice is less dry now. "Because my leg is useless and I don't have shoes. Not because you told me to."
"Noted."
I move past him. He doesn't follow, doesn't offer assistance, doesn't say anything else. His eyes are in my back the whole length of the corridor, unreadable as the rest of him, and I keep my spine straight until I reach the door and close it behind me.
4
DRAEKIR
