“Thank you for saving me.” I roll my shoulders, adjusting the weight of the pack on my back when I say it.
He frowns down at me. “You didn’t expect me to intervene. I saw it on your face the moment you met my eyes.”
I shake my head and look away, wishing to vanish under the weight of his stare.
“Look at me,” he demands.
I choke back a whimper as I do as he says, biting my lip to still a rising quiver, my nerves catching up to me.
“You may feel otherwise, but your lifeisworth saving, and I would take that blade again a hundred times over to see you walk away unharmed.”
“Why would you?” I don’t mean for it to sound like an accusation.
“Because that is what friends do.” He sounds so sure of himself.
“We’re not friends,” I remind him.
“You’re right,” he sighs, and I nod as if that will be the end of it. “But I would like to be your friend,” he adds.
I roll my eyes again, along with my whole head, and begin back toward the keep. “Nobody wants to be my friend.”
“I do, and who cares about anybody else? Anyone who doesn’t want to be your friend is just afraid of what you are.”
I manage three more steps before reluctantly taking the bait. “And what am I?”
“Enviable,” he says with a grin, “No one wants to spend their life alongside the sun when their own light only appears like a dull flame beside it.”
I have no idea what he means but I am done arguing. He’s probably lost too much blood and has become delusional. Hopefully he won’t remember any of this tomorrow.
It takes two hours to walk back to the keep, and I spend half that time pondering what friendship is between Drakai. It’s a foreign concept that I can’t fathom. There is too much competition, the risk of betrayal far too high, and the cost of that betrayal even higher. How then can I possibly imagine a friendship with the master of shadows, and why would he want such a thing, withme? The thought nags at me long enough that I finally give in and ask the question, not that I will ever actually consider the friendship.
“What would it mean if we were friends?”
The shadow master tries and fails to look nonchalant as he answers. I can tell he is giddy about my inquiry, and the fact that I’ve pleased him in any way chafes at me.
“Friendship is different for everyone,” he shrugs, “but I suppose what friendship looks like for me is this. I trust you and you trust me and if you need me, I’ll be there no matter what, and if I need you, I know you’ll be there for me too.”
“So, you could just summon me any time you want?” I scowl.
He chuckles. “You don’t summon your friends, but youcandepend on them.”
I hum thoughtfully, grateful he doesn’t press me as we continue on. I glance over at him every now and again to check that the bleeding hasn’t resumed. He saved my life, and I tended his wound—is that friendship? It really doesn’t sound too bad the way he explains it, and I can always change my mind when he inevitably fails to live up to the title.
Once we arrive at the edge of the deadwood surrounding the keep, I plant my feet, ignoring the anxious palpitations in my chest as I turn to him.
“I think I’d like to try and be friends,” I say, and he smiles at that, “butI don’t trust you.”
The smile stays plastered on his face. The only sign that he’s heard the last of my declaration, a small shrug. “Then let’s be friends, and we can find our way through the rest as we go.”
I nod and offer him the thing I know he wants, the thing I know he values. A smile.
If I think I have ever seen the man smile before, I am wrong. The smile he offers me in return is like coveted rays of sun on a dreary spring day, when winter left the land barren and you yearn desperately for the promise of summer. I don’t know where we go from here, but I make it my personal mission to find out how to make him smile like that again, as often as I can.
CHAPTER 3
OUT AT SEA
Present Day
