Page 39 of Unrivaled
I couldn’t tell her not to have so much love in her eyes when she looked at me.
The cobbles were damp, but not with blood.She talked before me, full of joy and life.The boy ate it up.Then he glanced over at me.Knowing I was, of course, part of her joy.Part of her interactions.
Part of her.
I looked down.
I couldn’t share in it.
He couldn’t know.
He won’t keep your secrets.She’d say she didn’t expect him to.
She believed she could manage the monster.
The trick was, no one could.
“I don’t know how you’re still alive,” Thomas had said last night, when we were three jugs deep.“Your oath should’ve burned you up by now.”
I hadn’t entirely believed it then.Even steeped in their memories of helplessly being dragged along in the wake of the Butcher, even with a belly full of cheap cider and the shadows crowding around us, I hadn’t entirely believed him.
In that moment, with the warmth of her touch on my arm, on the fringes of her hope, I did.
If I let her love me, someone would notice.
She’d bear the punishment.
I lowered my shield, stepping back quietly to stand beside Thomas.As I withdrew, her conversation didn’t even falter.It was strange to take comfort in that.
CHAPTERFOURTEEN
AUDREY
Forgive yourself for what you did to survive.
—Matri’sion lesson
18thDay of Winter’s Wife Moon,
Age of the Locways, Year 271
La’Angi Keep
“Ibelieve this deserves a celebration, my lady,” Brian said, setting a bottle down before him.“Those contracts to send out the cider?”He laughed, shaking his head.“Nasty pieces of work, they were.I say that in admiration, you understand.”He poured cider into a cup he’d brought me.“Between the two of us, we’ll get this lame horse back to its stable before sundown.”
The lame horse in question was my city.I didn’t want to know what sundown was a metaphor for.
I took the cider but didn’t stir my aching cheeks to smile, instead rubbing the ache in my forehead.“I fear I’m too tired to celebrate overlong,” I warned him, then spotted Bernadette entering with the bearing of a thundercloud.I held in a sigh, skimming my gaze back toward the cider and over Chay.
He didn’t meet my eyes.
If it’d been the first or even the third time I’d been unable to catch his attention, it wouldn’t have worried me.But there was something about the way he stared into the middle distance that was…wrong.News must have come from ’Ban, or Kaelson was in his ear to help with some new threat that may or may not be a trap to lure out the archer we were now suspected of harboring.
“Henry just shouted at me,” Bernadette said, the words level despite the vein pulsing in her temple and the taut muscles in her shoulder that threatened to rip her apron asunder.“I’ve sent Jilly to get Kael, but I thought you’d want to know he’s upset and speaking againstyou.”
The words were addressed to me, as the resident figurehead of La’Angi, but she pointed them toward Thomas and Chay.
Henry was a dab hand with a spear, but he wasn’t a threat.Chay gave the flustered cook his chair and excused himself to get her some food.I slid my cider across to her.He wasn’t so distracted that he hadn’t seen the real danger here; not Henry getting his testicles tangled over generous, if repetitive, rations, but division amongst our ranks.
