“I would call him perhaps overly direct, but an excellent executor for his people, who are orderly and reasonable.”
“That’s what I mean,” I said. “Wars that could have been avoided aren’t reasonable. Etri has got to know you can’t deal with this directly and cooperatively. It’s going to be easier and safer for you to actually go to war with him than to come out in the open and admit everything.”
Lara spread her hands. “I’d expect him to realize that, yes.”
“Then why back you into that corner?” I asked. “What’s it get him other than a conflict? The svartalves can fight. Doesn’t mean they want to.”
“If they drop it without extraordinary acts of contrition on my part,” Lara said, “then they invite more of the same disrespect from Accorded nations and non-Accorded powers alike.”
Hell’s bells, that could be true enough. “He can’t bend. And he’s got to be very clear and aboveboard with everything in this. And because you did sneaky stuff, that’s the one place you can’t go to meet him. He knows it. So why ask for it?”
Lara frowned at me and tilted her head. “You clearly think you have an insight here. What is it?”
“What if he wants to avoid conflict just as much as we do?” I asked. “But he’s signaling that he’s unable to meet us partway under the current circumstances?”
She frowned. “I’ve considered that. I reasoned that he was simply acknowledging the fact that there wasn’t a viable diplomatic solution.”
“Well, sure. But that doesn’t really help us, does it? My way, maybe we can work toward some kind of option.”
“Like what?”
I opened my mouth and then closed it helplessly. “I don’t know. But maybe we can figure out some way to satisfy both Etri’s personal pride and his people’s need for respectful treatment that isn’t emissaries and diplomats and Accorded neutral ground.”
Lara considered that for a moment and then said, “It seems…youthfully optimistic, to me.”
“Or maybe you’re getting jaded and cynical and it’s clouding your ability to consider the full range of possibility,” I said. “I spoke with Etri on several occasions. I hung out with his people most every day for a good long while. And everything I know about them tells me that they aren’t just going to glumly accept the inevitable. Neither am I. And I don’t think you’re the kind to roll over for fate, either.”
Lara’s pale eyes glowed brighter, paler, as she studied me for a silent moment.
“No,” she said very quietly. “I’m not.”
I found myself staring at the motes of silver in her eyes. Her gaze was simply intense and beautiful. I tore my eyes away as things began to get more intimate and instead turned from her to take down an oil lantern from a hook on a nearby wall. I lit it with a gesture and a couple words. Then I lifted the lantern as I descended the ladder into the lab. When I got down, I held up the lantern to light Lara’s way down.
She closed the door behind her as she descended, shutting us into the lab together.
“I’ll consider what you have to say,” she said quietly, turning slightly away from me, looking around the lab as I lit half a dozen candles. “Perhaps there’s something to it. And, as you say, it is a course of pursuit that offers at least the possibility of a solution.”
“If we can help Thomas,” I said. “If we can’t, all of this talk about Etri is academic.”
Lara turned back to me. Candlelight did incredible things to her face, her mouth, and her eyes. “That’s why I’m here,” she said. She took a slow breath. “And why I have gone Hungry an additional two weeks while exercising my demon regularly. It has not been an insignificant strain.”
“If we’re going to try to get Thomas’s Hunger fed and reintegrated with him,” I said, “I have to know how much energy I’m going to need to pour out. I need you as close to that state as we can arrange so that I can get some kind of gauge for what I’ll need for Thomas.”
Lara nodded. “Your reasoning is sound.” Her tongue, a little paler a pink than a human could have, flicked over her lips. “But you have to understand. If I allow myself to be reduced to that kind of state, I am uncertain how it might influence my behavior.”
“Meaning what?” I asked carefully.
Her eyes drew mine again and she said, slow, lips wrapping around the words, “I’m. Very. Hungry. Harry. Any hungrier and I might…lose control. Do things to you.”
I swallowed. The sound of her voice just slithered into me and made lightning flicker up and down my spine. My heart rate and respiration went up.
“Oh,” I choked. “Yeah. I’ve…thought of…Okay, look, can you stand in the circle, please?”
Lara let out a throaty chuckle. She drew her eyes away from me only at the last moment, turning and sauntering past me with a languid roll to her step, over toward the circle.
The summoning circle in my lab had been upgraded.
Significantly.
