Slate started laughing. She couldn’t help it.
It caught like a sob in her throat. She was going to cry again. Her hair hung in her face in damp strings, and she shoved at it futilely.Why am I crying?
I’m cold and exhausted and I don’t want to die, and someone just handed me a handkerchief.
These seemed like excellent reasons.
Caliban wrapped his arms around her and rested his chin on top of her head, murmuring all the meaningless things that people murmur to console the weeping. As any paladin could have told her, the words didn’t matter nearly so much as the voice.
The spate of tears passed off quickly. She was too tired to keep it up for long. She lay quietly, feeling his arms around her in the dark.
It was about the only way to keep them both under the cloak, and there was rather more metal that she liked, but she wouldn’t swear she didn’t enjoy it.
You’re just giddy from being near death, that’s all. You figured out you don’t want to die. It doesn’t mean anything. You’d feel the same way no matter who was in here with you.
Well…possibly not the Learned Edmund.
Still.
Her heart ached, and her head ached, and her sinuses…well, they always ached. She snuffled into the handkerchief. She tried to think of something clever to say, to deflect the fact that she was shortly going to be quite embarrassed for crying, and couldn’t find anything. Her voice, when it came out, sounded thin in her own ears.
“Caliban?”
“Mmm?”
“I don’t think I want to die.”
He chuckled. Chain clinked under her ear. “That’s good.”
“But we’re going to die.”
“Let’s try not to.”
“Okay, then.”
There was a lot more that she wanted to say, about Anuket City and what was waiting for her there. But it was all horribly complicated, and she would have had to explain what she had done and who wanted her dead, and about the Shadow Market and the Grey Church and the crow-cages. And she was very tired and the city was very far away.
The wet wool of his tabard was beginning to dry under her cheek. He’d unbuckled both shoulder guards and his gloves and either she was cold or his skin was as hot as a brand against hers.
She rather hoped he’d make a move of some sort. Hell, Brenner would have been smoking a post-coital cigarette by now, if she’d been curled up in his lap like this.
She could have used…well…something.
But Caliban was a former knight-champion, once sworn to temple service, and that meant either that he did not take advantage of mildly hysterical women who had just been dragged back from the brink of death or that he was incapable of recognizing a hint when it crawled into his lap.
One of the two, anyway.
Nothing ventured…
She stretched up a hand and touched his face in the dark. A day worth of beard stubble rasped under her fingertips.
She traced the long line of his jaw downward, then across. Her finger lay across his lower lip. She could feel his breath against her skin, sharply indrawn, and then released.
He folded his hand very gently around hers and drew it down, to lie loosely on his chest. And then, a moment later, he patted her hand, and withdrew his.
Or he’s completely uninterested. Son of a bitch.
Slate’s face burned in the dark.
