Page 76 of Grim and Oro
But I grieve her loss all the same.
“No.” That isn’t our way.
There it is. The sadness. “That sounds ... very lonely.”
Does she pity me?
A wave of defensiveness crests.
“I’ve never felt lonely in my life,” I say, and it is alie.
If I haven’t felt lonely in centuries, it’s because I haven’t allowed myself to feel anything at all. Not since I lost Laila.
Now she’s awakened my emotions again, and I’m not sure if it’s the best or worst thing that could have happened to me.
I don’t know if she’s a cure or curse.
Her voice is gentle. Quiet. “Maybe you just don’t know what it’s like to miss someone, then. Because you don’t open yourself up long enough to let them in.”
The way she says it is almost like a beckoning.
I can almost feel it in her emotions, I can almost read her mind.
Let me in, is what they both seem to say.
No, I want to reply. Everything I care about ends in ruin.
I think about Laila. How shetrusted me, and I killed her.
I killed her.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say, my voice rougher than I intended. “Love is for fools, anyway. It makes people do foolish things.” I look at her very closely, as if to ensure her very soul and essence understand perfectly what I’m about to say. “I do not intend to become a fool.”
I say it as though I haven’t already become one for her.
SHE THINKS OF ME
For more than a month, we’ve tried to get past the dragon, with various degrees of failure. Every step means a new challenge, a new obstacle, set up by a thief with clearly too much access to enchantments. Some of these barriers I recognize from my owncastle.
The slow process would bother me more if it didn’t mean spending more time with her. We enter the cave each time, side by side. I’ve always fought at the front of battles, leading them, being the first one charging forward. I’ve never had anyone beside me, until her. I can’t use my powers. We’re on even footing. We both take down each obstacle, one by one. But—more times than not, I’m the one who ends up injured.
I have become her shield.
I’m stitching a wound I got myself, from an arrow I didn’t avoid because I was too busy making sure she wasn’t getting stabbed through by a pike. She didn’t, of course. But I did.
She’s watching me far too carefully. I tear the stitch with my teeth, and a flash of emotion curls in the air. Desire.
At my teeth?
I wonder if she could possibly know how many times I’ve imagined those teeth running over every inch of her, biting places that might scare her.
“Emotions,” she says, her voice soft and raspy. “What do they feel like?”
She’s asking what it’s like to feel other people’s, of course. I used to hate her questions, like scalpels, poking at the most sensitive partsof me, but now I treasure them, because they mean she cares. She wants to know more about me. Or perhaps she’s just curious.
Either way, I tell her almost everything now.
“They feel ... well, they feel ...” I say, struggling for the right words. For centuries, no one has dared ask me anything so personal. It’s a muscle I’m still training, still getting used to, to even talk this much to anyone at all. It’s work to lower my defenses, to make a pathway through the wall I’ve been forced to build around myself as ruler.
