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“Any favor whenever I ask for it? That’s an enormous thing to offer without caveats.”
“I am not like the other fae you’ve met because I have nothing left to lose. There is nothing you could ask of me that it would harm me to give to you. I care for nothing, therefore I have nothing I cannot give up.”
I didn’t see a reason not to, though I believed it would hurt him more than he thought to hear Nancy’s story. So, for the second time that night, I told the story. Funny how horrible images that haunt one’s head lose their power when described aloud. The tale didn’t quite drive me the way it had before, though I found myself hesitating when I got to the point where Nancy went upstairs to check on Cecily.
Fafnir had dropped his head while listening, gray hair like the shredded clouds overhead draping his severe face. He hadn’t moved or commented, keeping his thoughts very close. When I paused, though, he spoke. “Go on. Finish it.” A sound of a stone door scraping against rock.
I did, tucking my freezing fingers under my arms inside the cloak.
“She is buried there, at this inn?” he finally asked.
“I think so. Or nearby. And the favor I ask of you is that you will not take any form of reprisal against Mistress Nancy or anything she cares about.”
He studied me then. “You’d squander your favor in this way?”
“I don’t consider it a waste.”
“Keep your favor. I will visit Nancy and reward her for the care she gave Cecily.”
“She’ll be frightened to see you.”
His thin mouth twisted in a wry grimace. “That thought had occurred to me, Lady Gwynn—I shall approach the situation carefully.”
“Okay, then I’ll ask for something else.”
“You are quick to exhaust this debt. Are you sure you don’t want to save it?”
“I don’t like open-ended accounts.”
“Then what?”
“I’m taking Walter with me and will decide what to do with him. No public sentencing.”
“You’re within your rights to make Walter your slave if you wish. Keep the favor, open-ended or not. Though the crowd will be disappointed.”
“My hearts weeps.”
His brittle laugh whispered over me at that. “You remind me of Cecily. I think you would have liked each other.”
“Did you love her?” I surprised myself by asking it. My bruised heart speaking for me.
Weariness creased his face. “We are not as you are. Do not experience the world in the same way and yet…” He smiled, a heartbreaking expression crossing his distinguished face. “I think I did.”
We were quiet and I felt I should say something more. Anything. “But you don’t remember any of what happened then?”
“Pieces. Fragments. Incandescence should not have been there and yet, now that I know, I see her face, that silver-clad bitch.”
I realized then that what I’d taken for acquiescence and sorrow in him was instead a hugely bitter rage, tightly contained—and all the more explosive for it.
“Tell me.” His face looked lean and haunted in the moonlight. Maniacal laughter drifted on the wind, howling through the towers. “Do you believe I killed her? Took my sword and carved our child from her still-living belly?”
“I don’t know.” I whispered it and he nodded.
“That time you told the truth. Tell me this one—do you carry Rogue’s child?”
“No.”
He cocked his head with a shade of doubt. “If that’s so, why does he not dance attendance upon you?”
