AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She looked at him again, unnerved to find that he'd shifted his position. His upper body was turned toward her, his elbow up on the table in a manner that broke at least five rules of dining etiquette. His chin resting on the back of his palm, he was staring at Cera as if they were the only two people at the table.
"So, you do not fear me in this context?"
Cera found it impossible to act natural when he was staring at her like that. She didn't know what to do with her hands, though she was tempted to finish off what was left in her wine glass.
"I don't fear you because you don't want me to fear you. But I know that that could change."
"You presume to know my mind?" There was no bite to the question, only curiosity.
"I know that if your aim was to frighten me, you wouldn't have made such an effort to put me at ease."
"And have I succeeded? Do you feel at ease beside me?"
She gave in and reached for her glass, doing her best to appear contemplative as she downed the remainder of her wine. It was clearly having an adverse effect on her, what with how chatty she was being and how warm she suddenly felt.
"It's too soon to give you a definitive answer," she told him.
"Lie."
She bit down hard on her lip. She knew that she should be annoyed or offended, anything butamused.
"Are you sure?" she asked, flashing him the most challenging look she could muster while holding back laughter.
He smiled, stopping just short of showing his teeth. Cera felt a fluttering sensation in the pit of her stomach, as if her heart had dropped into her abdomen.
"Areyousure?" he asked.
"Are you trying to make me doubt my own mind? An excellent tactic, if you could not tell if I was telling the truth."
"Do you think I need to interrogate you to know that you are enjoying my company?"
No. Because I wouldn't need to interrogate you to know that you are enjoyingmycompany.
Even with the wine making her feel lightheaded and cavalier, Cera could not say something so brazen. Just the thought of it made her feel ridiculous.
She had overstepped, and now Isael was only humoring her.
"I suppose not," she said, offering him a small smile before turning her attention back to her food. She selected a halved pomegranate, setting herself to the slow, laborious task of extracting the seeds.
She felt Isael continue to stare at her for a moment longer, perhaps waiting to see if she would engage him once more. Cera resisted, and soon he was pulled into a conversation with Casean and another man at the table. Each was speaking a different dialect of the Elven language but understood one another with ease. Cera had a difficult time following the conversation, so she gave herself permission to tune them out.
Without Isael to distract her, Cera's mind wandered back to the incident with the diadem. Sometime during the walk through the gardens, she'd almost managed to convince herself that Maewyn simply hadn't realized she was holding a diamond. But she'd made such a big fuss about the diadem, it seemed unlikely that she wouldn't recognize one of the flower-shaped diamonds.
As she mulled it over, her eyes fell on the woman with the braids. On one side of her head was an ornate pin, shaped like a butterfly. Cera had no intentions toward the pin as she stared, and yet after only a few seconds she was sure that she saw its wing flicker. She looked away at once, blinked, and then looked back, relieved to see that the pin still appeared stationary. She turned her attention back to her plate, lest she turn the woman's hair to snakes.
Even her pomegranate proved troublesome. The longer she stared at it, the more the seeds appeared to pulse. When she plucked out a particularly stubborn one, it popped, and its juices looked like blood on her fingers. What remained of her appetite was gone, and she set the fruit aside and covertly wiped her fingers on a cloth. She left behind only the light pink smudges of pomegranate juice.
Beginning to feel flustered, she searched the table for something plain to focus on. The first thing she settled on was a smooth, white egg. It was small, nothing like the large hen eggs she was accustomed to. Its size made her think of a clutch of canary eggs she'd seen as a child, but the elves wouldn't eat canary eggs, would they? And weren't canary eggs speckled?
Perhaps a partridge egg? People eat partridge eggs, don't they?
By the time she realized that speculating about the contents of the egg was a very bad idea, it was already too late. She inwardly groaned when she saw the egg begin to wiggle. Blinking twice for good measure, she began searching for something else to focus on. Nothing seemed safe. Even a perfectly boring walnut seemed risky. She might turn it into a tree.
Is that egg still moving?
She blinked again, before looking at the egg. It wiggled, and then as if to taunt her, a triangle of shell gave way to a tiny beak.
Squeezing her eyes shut, she silently counted to three, and then opened them again. She caught a brief glimpse of the egg, still in the process of hatching, before a large hand came down over it.
