“You…” She lowered the mug. “You’ve never loved anyone?”
“No.”
“No friends? No family?” She wet her lips with the pink tip of her tongue. “No wife?”
“No.” When she did nothing but cock her head and watch me, I found an odd claw of impatience pricking its way up the bones of my spine. Impatience and something else. Not quite shame. But the sense that I had somehow already failed her.
“I am not entirely uncaring,” I found myself saying. “And I have formed attachments to others, born of duty and trust and responsibility.” It was one of those very attachments that had brought me to Zabria Prinar One in the first place. Surely, that had to count for something in her eyes.
“But you’ve never loved someone romantically. You’ve never been struck by Cupid’s arrow, is what you’re saying.” Her softly rounded fingertip pointed at the sharp, piercing end of the arrow, jutting out the side of the heart symbol.
“Since I do not know what that means, I will answer, ‘no.’”
She snorted. “Yeah, fair. It’s part of Old-Earth mythology. The idea that there’s this god of love named Cupid zipping around, and when he shoots you with his arrow, you immediately fall in love with the next person you see.”
“Sounds violent,” I observed dryly.
She laughed at this. “Yeah, well. Sometimes it feels violent.”
Maybe this was accurate. When Shiloh first showed up, Rivven seemed to tumble, head-first and helplessly, into a white-eyed daze. Like someone had walloped him in the side of the skull so hard that his brain could no longer be relied upon to function properly. Rather alarming, in all honesty, as I’d always counted Rivven as one of the more sensible men in the province.
It shook me rather strangely to think that Lualhati might have been subjected to such a violence of her own.
Who could have inspired such a feeling in her?
“Do you have a man?”
Her red lips parted at my abrupt question.
“What was that?”
“Tasha did not say anything about you being married,” I said, “and you do not wear a ring as is customary among many humans. But perhaps you have someone waiting for you.”
And perhaps that was why she had only agreed to a temporary contract…
“No.” A harsh brittleness came into her voice, accentuated by her putting the mug down with a clinking sort of finality. “No, I don’t have a man.”
I did not like the little thread of pain that I detected running through her words.
I did not like the oddly smug sense of satisfaction that surged inside me, either.
She did not have a man.
Well.
At least now she could say that she had a warden.
7
HALLUM
Ileft Lualhati among her haphazard piles, hoping that at least some of the mess might be put away by the time I returned with the next load of boxes. Her more practical footwear had not, it turned out, been present in the first load of boxes, so she elected to stay behind and continue unpacking while I dealt with the rest back at the saloon. The trip back was shorter, as I did not have boxes to weigh the wagon down yet, but by the time I’d loaded it back up for the journey home, the moons were high in the sky.
When I returned to my station, night was well and truly underway. After getting Berta and Bart comfortably settled in their stalls to sleep, I found the kitchen fire had burned down to a flickering collection of half-logs and embers.
Lualhati was nowhere to be seen. Sadly, neither was a single boot-span of clear space on my kitchen floor. It was as if she had managed to unpack everything just fine, but the moment she’d contemplated actually organizing and putting all the items away, she’d entirely lost interest in the lot of it.
For whatever reason, this behaviour did not irk me as much as it would in someone else, like one of my men. If it had beenDorn or Xennet who’d done this to my kitchen, I’d be hauling him back in by the ear until it was rectified to my satisfaction.
