“Of course I’m mourning it. Unlike what you’re probably used to, this isn’t one of many.”
“You know I’m a vampire, and you still think I’m a wealthy prick?”
There is no concept of money in Calabaraia, she thought automatically.
Though she couldn’t bring herself to concede.
“If you don’t want me to, maybe you shouldn’t act like one.”
He spread his hands. “But when you do, you fit in. And it’s not as if I can afford to not.”
“So that’s the reason for the captaincy, and all the holding court.”
“Well, you can’t deny it makes for good cover. And Idoneed a hell of a lot of it. Doubly so, when delicious meals are suddenly on the floor in front of me, hearts beating like jackhammers, skin showing through their flimsy little blouses.”
She grabbed that split strap when he said it. Tried to pull it back over herself, so he couldn’t see. Though it wasn’t as if she’d ever actually seen him look. And he didn’t look now, either. He held her gaze, as he let his tongue curl up, over his teeth. His suddenly very sharp, very numerous teeth.
She wasn’t about to be intimidated, however.
“How do you even talk with those razor blades in your mouth?” she scoffed.
And it seemed to work. His expression went back to something less predatory.
“That’sthe question you want to ask me? The breadth of my knowledge, my skills. The fact that I am a near-mythical creature to everything you were before this. And your curiosity is about where my teeth go when I’m speaking.”
“Oh, I’m sorry I wasn’t appropriately awed, your lordship,” she said, as she doffed an imaginary cap. “Please do tell me about the time you sat on a throne of skulls in Calabaraia, as the King of the Fen handed you a giant crown made from the blood of your defeated foes.”
“There is no King of the Fen.”
“I was joking. I know hierarchies don’t exist there.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Really? And do you know why?”
“Of course I do. Because they are completely baffled by theidea of anything ruling over anything else. They can’t understand it, even when we explain. There, only a kind of chaos reigns,” she said—and now both his eyebrows were up. In something like surprised admiration, she thought it was. Though it melted down into withering so quickly, she couldn’t really claim it definitely had been.
“You should really stop reading and accepting all the unsanctioned accounts. You’re going to get yourself in trouble, bookworm,” he said, as he shook his head in this weary of her nonsense sort of way.
She had no idea why, however.
“How much trouble can that be, when those accounts are in the library?”
“The library does whatever it wants. Students do whatever they are told.”
“So everyone else just reads whatever any professor says you should.”
He spread his hands again. “Exactly so, yes.”
“But what if they’re lying? What if what they say is dusty and dry and doesn’t help you at all? I could fall into the Underneath and get melted by fen, because I thought you should bow to royalty that isn’t actually real,” she said, and though he looked annoyed, he didn’t do anything other than sigh. So she stuck it to him. “You don’t actually have an answer for that, do you?”
“Well, apart from the obvious one: that this is precisely why it’s a bad idea for someone like you to be in a place like here. I knew it as soon as I saw you. So sure of what’s right and fair, you completely forget nobody else cares, and that every one of them resent how it makes them feel to hear you do.”
“One look through a windshield couldn’t have told you that.”
“You only think that because you didn’t see the expression on your own face.”
“The expression is irrelevant when nothing I’ve done backs that assessment up. I just slink to lectures and lurk in the library and say nothing about how unjust this whole goddamn place is.”
“You say it to that little friend of yours. You’re saying itnow, to your worst fuckingenemy,” he said, half laughing with incredulity as he did. And to be fair to him, it did sound ridiculous, when he put it like that. Or at least, ridiculous enough that she could somewhat accept it.
