I’m not the cause of her tears, asshole. And if more were coming, those weren’t his fault either.
“I really don’t know what to say.” Elloven turned, half of her bathed in the shadows of the curtains drawn on every window but hers. “I’m not sorry for saving your life, and I’m not clear on what the problem is.”
“The problem, Elloven, is I didn’t ask you to.”
“I know you’re worried about me, and what happens in a year?—”
“I’m not thinking about you at all.” Jesstin felt the burn of the words leaving his tongue.
She recoiled. “You’re welcome for giving you another year of life to think about nothing.”
“Let’s return to the part where I didn’t ask you to.” Jesstin’s head was splitting, for far too many reasons. “Is it true? Asterin won’t find anything at the Sepulchre?”
She shrugged. “I learned more in Mythgarde last night than my mother’s ever told me.”
“Rhiain won’t get anywhere with Pretor Ignatius. He has too much to lose.”
“His name is Ignatius? Pretor is a title?”
“A title your people use.”
Elloven fisted her hair at the nape and tugged her head back. “You know more about my own people than I do.”
“I know nothing.”
“You work with them every night. Surely you’ve learned something?”
There was no point in explaining Mythgarde to her. “Nothing useful.”
“How do you know what could be useful?”
“More than you, apparently.”
Elloven rolled her eyes and leaned into the dusty curtain. “You’d really rather be dead than bound to me?”
Jesstin realized he had no idea how to respond. “Are you saying you want this?”
“Merely trying to be reasonable about the options available to us, though I suppose reasonableness is a disposition unsuited to your constitution,” she retorted.
She may as well have called him a child, and it stung, more than it should. “What am I supposed to think when a woman I barely know throws her life away for mine?”
“That there are people who put honor above their own needs!” Elloven had the audacity to sound disgusted. “I don’t believe you when you say you wouldn’t have done the same. I saw something in you last night, same thing I saw when you escorted me home, and it’s the same thing I know you see in me. Both of us know what it’s like to be lost in the fabric of a world that seems determined to kill us. Both of us have known betrayal and pain.” She laughed bitterly. “What better way to feed the darkness than turning against each other?”
Jesstin’s cheeks prickled with rising heat. Her rationality made his retorts seem small and immature. Why couldn’t she just scream and curse at him, like a normal person? “If you have a better idea, now’s a good time to share.”
“I do, actually, but no one wants to hear it.”
Her smooth pivot from acrimony was incredible to watch. It took him far too long to move on from any anger, and now that, too, felt childish.
“You want to go to the mountains,” he surmised aloud. The suggestion left him unsettled, but he couldn’t say why.
“Which will be impossible until my mother tells me the way.”
“You familiar with maps?”
Elloven sighed. “Sure, they’d get us to the common paths. The one thing I do know about my homeland is no ordinary traveler can stumble upon the highest villages, not without the help of the locals. Whether it’s magic or... I don’t know.”
“Your mother lied to you about everything else. Why not this?”
