“Yes, you can!” the Prince shot back, frustrated. For some reason the fact that she wouldn’t trust him when he was actually telling the truth blew on the banked coals of his anger and set him into full blaze.
“You’d kill us in our sleep if you could,” she spat, contemptuously.
Something in him snapped. The way she spoke, it was as if she thought that death were nothing to him. As if death itself were… nothing.
“You have no concept of what it means to kill,” he hissed through teeth clenched in a snarl. His vision had gone red around the edges, and his anxiety, frustration, and anger had formed into a hard, twisting fist in his gut. Fury like he had only felt a few times in his life took him over completely.
“You knownothingof death. You knownothingof taking a life. You perform the act, but it means nothing—to you it is no more than slicing a thread, trimming a nail. It is no more than dispatching nameless faces. If you knew what I know of death, knew the feeling of being inside a person’s mind as your sword cuts through their skin and bone and their life and mind and body go dark, as the spark that anchors them to this world is smothered and they spin endlessly into space, you would never again speak so lightly of taking a life. I have no desire toknowyou, and so have no desire tokillyou. How many of the Death Watchmen did the two of you kill? Not the constructs, but the soldiers. Twenty did you say? Such a brave Exile. I killed one and I nearly lost my mind. I did it out of need, out of base necessity, to continuing living. And even then I knew him, inside and out, as he died; I knew his hopes and dreams and fears, the way he loved his wife, the pride he had in his children—the glowing hope that, even as the steel cut through him, he would live to see them again, to make them proud of how he had served the Empire! Death is emptiness, death istaking, death is the end! So stop accusing me of the willingness to do something I understood better at the age of five then you will EVER understand in your ENTIRE LIFE!”
Somehow during the time he had been speaking he had taken several steps toward her while she stood rooted to the spot, staring at him. He took another step and came so close that he was breathing in her face, his midnight-black eyes meeting her emerald-green. Her hands grasped the hilts of her daggers, but he did not care.
“Never speak lightly to me of killing. I am the Lord of Death, for my Mother cursed me as such on the day I was born. I know it as you never shall, and my life is tied to it as you should wish yours will never be.”
He stopped talking, and then took a step back, his anger spent. He suddenly felt awkward and vulnerable, as if he had stripped and laid himself bare.
She stood staring into his eyes, her own very wide and round, and her mouth open in a small “o”, until she seemed to realize what she was doing. When she did, her eyes narrowed, and her mouth snapped closed. She held his gaze, still, though, and another minute or more passed that way, with the two of them staring at each other.
The Prince refused to look away. He had nothing to hide. He had meant every word of what he’d said, even if it made him uncomfortable to be so vulnerable in front of them.
Finally, she turned to call back over her shoulder.
“Tomaz, I think that—”
But the forest behind her was just trees. Tomaz had disappeared. The Prince didn’t know when the big man had left, but he was sure somehow that it had been after he had finished speaking.
They were silent as they absorbed Tomaz’ absence, which made as much, if not more, of a statement as anything he could have spoken aloud. The giant wasforcing the girl to deal with what he had already come to understand about the Prince.
Slowly, she turned back to him.
As one, they walked over to the tree closest to the campsite. He waited patiently for her to tied him to the trunk, then sat down as she left to get firewood. He felt a slight pang of regret that he hadn’t remained calm but was also proud that he had finally said something to which the girl had no response.
Nearly an hour passed, enough time for the sun to set completely, leaving him alone in the dark, before Tomaz returned with an enormous animal slung over his shoulders, the rack of its antlers nearly large enough to hold the Prince’s entire body. It had four legs and a heavy, deep chest covered in a thick layer of soft gray-brown fur. If the Prince had to guess, he’d say it was an elk or a deer, though since he had never seen one outside of a book or a dinner plate, he wouldn’t have staked his life on it. One of its eyes was glassy and dead, while the other one was simply missing, a thin trail of blood tracing downward from the empty socket.
It would appear the Prince had been correct—Tomaz was just as deadly with the sling as he was with his enormous greatsword.
As he walked into the clearing, the giant paused. He took in the Prince, the noticeable lack of a fire, and the absence of a certain green-eyed girl.
“Where is she?” he asked. His voice was gruff, but not unkind.
“She went to get firewood and never came back,” the Prince replied, keeping his answer simple and direct.
The big man grunted and then crossed to the fireless fire pit. With a quick shrug, he lifted the antlered creature off his shoulders and dropped it to the ground, where it landed with a heavy thud. He then crossed to where he had left his greatsword and unsheathed it. Turning, he approached the Prince.
Shocked, the Prince recoiled from the giant, but he was tethered to the tree and in the end there was nowhere to go. The giant raised the sword and the Prince closed his eyes.
Something tugged at his wrists, and with it came the snick of taunt fibers being cut, and the Prince was no longer tied to the tree. He opened his eyes just in time to see the sword flash twice more, and the Prince, too shocked to move, felt another tugging sensation on both his hands and his feet, and then the fabric parted and slid off, falling to the ground and leaving him free, completely unbound.
The giant turned away and sheathed his sword in a single, fluid motion, as effortlessly as the Prince would do up a button.
“Do you know how to dress an elk?” Tomaz asked while rummaging around in his pack.
“You mean… put clothes on it? Why would you want to do that? I was under the impression that you intended to eat it.”
Tomaz snorted and stood up, holding a long, oddly curved knife.
“Here,” he said, and tossed the knife, unsheathed, to the Prince.
Alarmed, the Prince caught the knife by the hilt, almost dropping it in surprise.
