Ronan glances at him, then starts walking away.
Undeterred, Karis follows. “What god do you serve, anyway? Are they going to be mad at you?”
Ronan stops at that, glancing over his shoulder. His face remains unreadable behind the weeks-old beard. “For what, kidnapping you?”
“Most gods probably don’t care about kidnapping,” Karis says, in a petty jab at Vara if he’s listening. “But you swore on your god’s true name that you’d let me go at the market. I remember that, and I’m sure your god remembers too.”
“Did I say that?” Ronan’s faint grin brings out the shadows under his eyes. “The Trickster doesn’t have a true name.”
“Oh.” Karis wracks his head for everything he knows about the Trickster, which isn’t a lot. The Trickster isn’t worshipped much in Charain—there’s no church established for him here. There’s no organized church for him anywhere, actually, as far as Karis is aware. Karis does know that the Trickster’s jurisdictions include luck and deceit, so even if Ronan made a meaningful oath, it wouldn’t matter if he broke it.
Do you know the Trickster, by the way?he asks.
But Vara’s still off doing whatever divine errand he left for.
“Is that all the questions?” Ronan breaks Karis out of his thoughts. The rickety wooden table is set with an incongruously wholesome tray of food. The smell of meat and pasta fills Karis’s lungs and calls directly to his stomach, drawing him another step closer. There’s enough food for two people, he’s pretty sure.
“For now.” Karis looks up—way up—at Ronan. “Are you going to untie me, or feed me by hand?”
The ensuing pause is far more heated than Karis anticipated. Like every second slows down, so Karis can observe in perfect detail the moment Ronan glances at his lips. The abrupt retraction of that glance, before Ronan grabs his shoulder and forcibly turns him around.
Everywhere they touch—and everywhere they don’t touch—burns.
A smile threatens to break Karis’s composure. No hand feeding. But Ronan apparently isn’t so cold and stoic after all. Whether he’s annoyed by Karis or attracted to him, or a little of both, it’s proof that he’s human. And humans make mistakes. Karis just has to keep goading him, keep taunting him, until he finds another, better opportunity to escape.
Third time’s the charm.
?
CHAPTER SIX
RONAN
“Wait,” Karis says, fork poised over his pasta. He prods at it suspiciously, then pushes the bowl across the table. “You taste it first.”
Ronan pushes the bowl back and tears a piece of bread to dip in the sauce of his own dish. “You don’t have to eat it.”
Karis pushes the bowl towards him again. Ronan just keeps eating as Karis’s thin fingers tap on the edge of the table. Pale eyes flick from the bowl to Ronan. “You’re probably immune to three hundred different poisons anyway,” Karis eventually mutters, retrieving the bowl once more. The motion pulls his sleeve up his arm, baring faint red marks around his thin, freckled wrist.
Ronan snorts. He’s never built up an immunity to poisons. That’s Dansa’s purview, not his. “Do you read too many books, or listen to too many bards?”
“I liked the Songbird chapel in Andell,” Karis says, a little wistfully. “Unfortunately they would never let someone like me join. The Radiant Order was my only option.”
“Someone like you?”
“I’m absolutely tonedeaf.” Karis stabs a piece of chicken from the creamy sauce and waves it around. “I know, it’s shocking, but I do have a few flaws.”
“A few,” Ronan repeats.
Karis waves the chicken once more before popping it into his mouth. When he’s done swallowing, he says, “Be nice to me. I was kidnapped today, and it was very upsetting.”
Just a few flaws. Tonedeaf, annoying. Clumsy. Ronan remembers the kid sliding halfway down the basement stairs. He glances down at Karis’s shirt and is surprised to see the sleeve torn open. Hints of bruising and blood are barely visible through the gaps in the fabric. Even as he whines about everything else, he’s never once called attention to the injury.
How much of this bratty arrogance is a mask? Is that a new thing, considering the whole kidnapping situation, or is this how he always acts? The mask is almost seamless. An uncomfortable pang of sympathy tugs at the back of Ronan’s mind, before he chases it away.
When he’s done eating, Ronan looks for the medical supplies Dansa must have stored here. He doesn’t miss the way Karis freezes when he stands up, and freezes again when he comes up behind him. Ronan leans down, nearly brushing Karis’s shoulder, and sets bandages and denseed oil on the table next to Karis’s bowl.
“Give me your arm.”
