And then Damien did, indeed, keep his word, and he kissed her. Not quite how she’d attempted to drunkenly do to him, sloppy and urgent and barely conscious, and not at all how he’d wanted to do to her, ardent yet tender, starting at her mouth and then trailing everywhere else. The kiss Damien actually gave Amma was only a gentle press of his lips to her forehead, barely a brush at all. An accident, really. She wouldn’t know, thank the basest of infernal beasts, but he would, and that was good enough for now. Bad enough too.
And enough was enough—Damien swept out of the room, surpassed his own, and stalked down the stairs and out into the night.
CHAPTER 28
IN KNOWING NOTHING, LIFE IS MOST DELIGHTFUL, OR AT LEAST TOLERABLE
When Amma woke, she felt absolutely fantastic for about seven and a half seconds. In that short time, she blinked up at the ceiling, disorientation at her constantly changing location assuage by the last fragments of a dream, avery gooddream. Damien was in it more vividly than ever, and she had been wrapped in his arms on the verge of what she knew was about to be the most passionate night of her life. And then she sat up and laid eyes on the actual blood mage, sitting on the far side of the room, scowling at her with absolute fury.
Pain seared through her skull, the light flooding in through the window over Damien’s shoulder much too brightly. She squinted, shielding her eyes with an arm, and then that too hurt. All of her muscles ached, and her guts were roiling. That was right—she had a lot to drink the night before, and it had all been sort of a blur, just like her vision was now.
She blinked back at Damien who had sat forward in the lone chair in the room, still glaring, Kaz sitting at his feet, looking like a dog and still in his sweater but just as mad. Why was Damien so angry? Amma glanced down at herself wearing next to nothing then ripped the sheet up to her chin from where it had fallen into her lap. Oh, gods, had it not been a dream? And had it really been so bad that he was angry about it?
“Good morning, The Honorable Ammalie Avington, daughter of His Lordship Bartholomew Avington and Her Ladyship Constance Avington, Baron and Baroness of Faebarrow.”
Amma’s heart stopped beating, her lungs stopped inflating, blood stopped pumping. Every bit of her stopped working, in fact, brain included, and she simply sat there on the cot, stunned, seeing and hearing nothing until the stupidest words finally leaked out of her mouth. “That’s not me.”
Damien was holding up a piece of parchment, identical to the ones she had seen tacked up in the city’s squares the day before, the ones she had so carefully distracted him from. “Not you?” he said, incredulous, pointing to her likeness painted out on it. “These aren’t your blue eyes? And this isn’t your tiny nose covered in your freckles? And these aren’t your soft, round—you get the point!” He grunted, shaking the poster. “When, pray tell, were you going to share this minuscule detail about your life with me? Not to mention the fact that you are apparentlymissing?”
She worried the edge of the blanket, dragging aching knees up to her chest. “Maybe…never?”
Kaz growled from beside him, but he nudged the imp into silence with his boot.
“I should have known,” said Damien, pulling out a square of fabric from his pocket. “I thought you had just nicked this on your way across the realm, but, oh, no, this wasyours. Just like that fancy silver dagger and all those coins you gave away as if they meant nothing. Of course they meant nothing—you’re a fucking baroness!”
Amma blinked, the pain in her head making it difficult to focus, but eventually she could see he was holding up the handkerchief she’d wrapped around his wounded palm when they’d first met in Aszath Koth, the one she had embroidered a tree onto, roots and branches indistinguishable as they grew around the trunk into a circle, Faebarrow’s crest. “You…you kept that?”
Damien’s furrowed, irate brow relaxed, eyes darting over the cloth. “Uh, well, yes…” Then he quickly tucked it back into a pocket and huffed. “Don’t try to distract me. Tell me the truth.”
Her breath hitched, and then all at once it came out with an embarrassed rush of anger. “Oh, fine, yes, IamAmmalie Avington, the baroness of Faebarrow who’s gonemissing. Are you happy?”
“Am I happy?” He dropped the first piece of parchment to reveal a second one behind it. This had a cruder drawing of a man with dark hair and a long, ugly mark across his face. “It’s not the best likeness in the realm, they didn’t even get the scar going the right direction, but it’s got two rewards listed here: one for me, and one for just my head. I need that, you know! The rest of me doesn’t work without it, not even the magic parts!”
Amma covered her mouth. “Robert,” she whispered into her hand, remembering the man who had tried to rescue her back in Elderpass. Damien had told him to go home, after all, and apparently he had. And he’d been talkative.
“If it’s not clear, they think I’m the one who’s abducted you.” He balled up the decree and stood, throwing it into the room’s corner.
“Well, Damien, not to get all literal or anything, but you sort of did…”
“Oh, don’t you dare,” he growled, pacing the room. “You got the talisman stuck in yourself in the first place, and if I abducted anyone, it wasn’t a bloody baroness, it was just some little street urchin who no one cared about. Ammalie Avington, with an entire army looking for her, is an incredible liability to parade around the realm, not to mention ludicrous to kill to get the talisman out, unlike Amma the thief who doesn’t matter to anyone.”
Amma squeezed her knees to herself, throat clenching around the words as they came out. “You thought I didn’t matter?”
Damien stopped his pacing, eyes focused hard on the wall. “Of course you matter, Amma.” He sounded tired suddenly, as if the weight of the situation had been dropped on him all at once. “If you didn’t, we wouldn’t have even come here in the first place. I’ve been dragging you all across Eiren to—” Damien cut himself off when a growl from Kaz interrupted his thought, and then he threw his arms up, irate all over again. “None of it bloody matters now. This town is absolutely crawling with guards, and they’re not even wearing the Faebarrow crest with the liathau on it—they’re all wearing that ridiculous red catfish thing across their chests. What in the realm is going on here? Did Faebarrow hire a load of mercenaries? Do you have some sort of crime problem?”
Amma bit her lip and gestured to herself.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Damien raked a hand through his already mussed up hair.
“I know, I’m sorry, but that’s not the only reason we’re overrun with Brineberth soldiers, it’s a lot more complicated, but I did try and keep you from coming here, if you remember.” She leaned over the edge of the cot, swaying with a wave of nausea before pushing it back down, and pulled her wrinkled tunic out of the pile of clothes on the floor. “Look, you’ve got the book you wanted now, or I do, somewhere, so we can just leave, right?”
“You’ve made it back home,” he stressed, gesturing to the window and the city outside. “And you want to leave?”
She pulled her tunic over her head, mumbling into it, “I told you, it’s complicated.”
“How did any of this even happen?”
She swung her legs over the edge of the cot as she shook out her breeches. “That man in Elderpass, the one who thought he knew me? Well, that was Robert, one of my father’s most trusted knights from when they were younger. He was apparently out looking for me. He probably deserves a reward for finding me.”
