Page 46 of Silver & Smoke
‘Darian,’ Torj snapped. ‘What do you want?’
‘Besides the pleasure of your company after all this time?’
A familiar quiet settled between their barbs. A silence that hung heavy with the echo of beatings and verbal lashings long past. When they had been boys, there had always been a strange sense of calm after such things – a sick sense of relief that the worst had happened, and at last the waiting was over, at least for a little while. Slowly, they would come back to themselves with a smart-ass quip or a bad joke while they tried to suspend their reality for just a moment longer.
‘When we were boys,’ Torj said quietly, ‘at your father’s estate, training in the yard with wooden swords...’
Darian tensed beside him. ‘I remember.’
‘You told me you wanted to study music, not politics.’
‘Look how that turned out, eh?’ Darian said wryly.
‘And he punished you by punishing me,’ Torj ventured as the memory came back to him. While they trained, Darian had disarmed Torj, but Lord Lucian had forced his son to keep attacking, to keep striking while he was down.
‘Well, bruises on the local riff-raff were no concern of his. He couldn’t very well have his blue-blooded son sporting black eyes, now, could he?’ Darian’s words were flat and devoid of emotion, but his gaze was steel.
Torj remembered how Darian’s young face had turned ash-white while Lord Lucian surveyed them from the balcony above. ‘A true noble swordsman shows no mercy, right?’
‘That’s what he said, yes.’
Torj swallowed the lump in his throat. ‘I think that day hurt you more than it did me.’
‘The blood and stitches you needed said otherwise,’ Darian replied. ‘I should have gone against him. Life might have been different.’
‘It might have been. You might have wound up dead. I understood, you know... even then. What it meant to disobey a father like yours. I never held it against you.’ Torj’s hand drifted to his throat, where every now and then he could still feel the imprintof his own father’s hands. ‘Do you think we should have told someone about them? Our fathers?’
Darian gave a dark laugh. ‘Told who?’
‘Anyone.’
Shaking his head, the nobleman sighed. ‘They would have killed us.’
Torj nodded. ‘Mine killed my mother instead.’
‘That wasn’t your fault, brother,’ Darian murmured. ‘It never was.’
Torj glanced behind them to make sure he wasn’t going to be overheard. ‘Perhaps it was out of my control then... but it’s not now.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Darian looked genuinely puzzled.
‘Wren.’ Torj braced himself against the wall, sucking in a lungful of the musty air, desperation clawing at his insides. ‘You’ll look after her, won’t you? Protect her from Lucian?’
‘I thought we’d discussed this.’ Darian adopted a condescending tone. ‘Unfortunately, my engagement to the love of your life is fake. Though I daresay I’ll miss our repartee.’
‘Don’t play the fool, Darian. It doesn’t suit you.’
‘Did the mighty Bear Slayer just compliment me?’
Torj scoffed. ‘That’s a stretch.’
‘Then tell me, whatareyou saying, brother?’
Torj forged on. ‘She’ll want a workroom for her alchemy, and a library. A big one. The biggest you can afford, which should be sizable—’
‘YouknowI’m notactuallymarrying—’
‘And a garden,’ Torj continued. ‘With the best herbs you can find from all over the realms. She’ll want to tend to it herself and—’
