Chapter 8 — Her fear made him angry
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I spun around.
He stood in the doorway of the study — still, but something beneath it was different tonight. Something that had not settled. His eyes moved from me to the desk and back and I felt the note in my hand like a stone.
"I —" The word came out wrong. I tried again. "I came to look for you." A breath. "I am sorry. I did not think —"
"We are not meant to be here." He crossed the room and took the note from the desk without looking at it and folded it into his coat.
"Aren't you hungry?", he asked. I only nodded.
"Come."
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He had chosen a table by the stream that ran along the eastern edge of the grounds — far from the main hall, far from the court, just the sound of water and the pale evening light settling over the stone. A maid set food before us and disappeared.
I watched him from across the table.
His jaw was set. His hands, resting on either side of his plate, were too still.
I knew something was troubling him within.
I reached for my cup.
Not ready to talk about the letter, not Now.
"Who told you I was there," he said.
I looked at my water. I did not wish to give Aldric's name — did not wish to see what happened to the person who had sent me in the wrong direction tonight.
"I sought you myself," I said. "I looked until I found it."
He said nothing. Whether he believed me I could not tell.
We ate in quiet for a moment. The stream moved over its stones. Somewhere in the trees above us something called once and went silent.
I set my cup down.
*****
"The note I found upon your table —"
She let it out before her head explode into something.
"We will not speak of it."
"I think we ought to —"
"I said we will not." He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. The words landed the way it always does.
She went quiet.
The stream kept moving.
She looked at her plate. Then at him. Then somewhere between the two where it was more safe.
"What affects you," she said carefully, "affects me also. We are —"
"I said we will not speak of it."
This time it came out differently.
Not loud. But the frustration beneath it broke the surface just enough — just a crack, just enough to feel the heat of whatever burned underneath and his eyes found hers across the table and held them and she felt it move through her the way cold moves, from the outside in.
She reached for her water and drank slowly and said nothing.
He watched her.
Of course she was afraid and she had heard the stories before she had ever seen his face and some of them, she was still learning, were not stories at all.
He was thinking something.
He studied her and waited to see the fear in her, which he did. She looked scared and confused.
He got pissed.
Just 2 days ago, she thought he would kill her just because she didn't listen to him and someone provoked him. And she looked like he would hurt her.
Right, she was human and not a vampire, she wouldn't understand how things like this goes.
She looked up and could see it moving behind his eyes, something he had been carrying and had not want to put down.
He set his bread down.
"I did not bring you here for you to think much." His voice had changed, now quiet, the frustration pulled back under, something almost careful in its place. "Do you believe we will both perish. Do you believe I will do something to you."
Trying hard not to sound angry and frustrated.
She looked at him.
"Then why did you say you would burn me," She said.
Something shifted in his face.
"Because that is what you believe of me." He said it plainly. Without anger now, something rawer than anger. "You hear the stories from beyond these walls and you carry them in with you and you sit across from me and you drink your water slowly and terrified and you wait." A pause. "You believe I am a beast. That I am without restraint. That I cannot protect you from myself." His jaw tightened. "You really think I would burn you."
"I did not say —"
"You did not need to say it." He looked at her. "It is in everything you do not say."
She opened her mouth.
He stood.
His fist came down on the table not with violence, just with weight, just with the force of something that had been held too long and the cups shook.
"Human."
He said it the way one says the name of a thing that has exhausted them.
Then he turned and strode out, not wanting to see her anymore.
And the evening swallowed him and she sat alone by the stream with the food untouched and the water still trembling in the cups and the sound of him already gone.
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He walked through the palace without slowing down.
The guards at the corridor's end straightened as he passed. The two young maids near the east staircase pressed themselves to the wall, eyes down, hands folded. One of them, the younger, dark eyed one looked up just long enough.
"He is so tall" she thought.
"He is handsome too and his hair...", another said.
He could feel it without trying, the flutter of it, the wanting dressed as fear, the particular heat of someone who has decided danger is another word for something else entirely.
He had been feared and given a distance his entire life.
It had never once moved him.
He reached the study. Took the letter from his coat. Looked at what was written on it, at the words that were not ink,
Not a warning so much as a declaration.
Someone knew.
Someone always knew.
He folded it again. Thought of Maren.
He stomped out of the study.
He could sense fear from the guards through the air but the fear of Sera had done something to him than the fear of guards and maids and lords had never done.
They all looked at him with fear, it didn't affect him as much as Sera's fear did. He was used to being feared but Sera's — he didn't like it, which made him more angry.
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