Her eyes sparked. “I’mstubborn?”
“Extremely.”
She pressed her lips together. The corner of her mouth gave her away anyway. “I’m glad you chose that spot on the cliff,” she said, quieter. “My people needed someone like you here. I was too afraid to see it.”
I looked away from her, out one of the narrow windows, where I could see a strip of ocean going dark and bright in the late light.
“Your people did just fine before I arrived,” I said, turning back to her. “They’re strong and…pleasant enough.”
“I know,” she said. “And we also find you…pleasant enough.”
She was standing close enough to make it difficult to think. My body was acutely aware of the distance between us, which I found both excessive and insufficient. She smelled of the sea and of baked bread, which were two of my favorite things. I suspected she tasted just as good.
“Well.” I cleared my throat. “Thank you. For saying so.”
“You’re welcome.” Her eyes held mine with an open steadiness that I was beginning to think was just how she looked at everything. “Gilrox, you look like you’re in pain.”
“No.” I raised one brow. “This is just my face.”
“I’ve seen your face plenty of times,” she countered. “You don’t always look like you want to bolt out the door.”
“I don’t.” The problem was that I had no idea what came next. In the field, there was always a next step, a clear objective, a plan already forming. Here, in a cool stone room with Maive standing a pace away and the festival carrying on without us outside, I had nothing. Gilrox Ban-Ver-Mos, Rank V, Level Ten Mercenary, retired, should have had a solid reaction to any given situation. But standing in a room with a woman who completely hijacked my senses, and who had just told me she was glad I had moved in next door, rendered me as useless as a green mercenary on his first mission.
Her gaze slid to the box under my arm. “What is that?”
I thrust it toward her with absolutely zero grace, looking like someone who had never given a gift in their life. Both things were accurate. “For you.”
Her eyes widened as she accepted it with both hands. She glanced up at me once, then lifted the lid. The device sat in formed gray foam cut to its exact shape. This model was smaller than the unit I’d used on Tregen, but the technology was the same.
“What is it?” she asked.
“A portable healing device for treating injuries in the field,” I said. “Similar to what I used on Tregen. Adequate for wounds, infection, most of what your people are likely to encounter.” I crossed my arms. Uncrossed them. Set my hands at my sides. “I can train someone in your village to use it. In case there’s an accident and I’m unavailable.”
She said nothing.
She looked at the device in its foam casing, and she kept looking, and the silence ran past the point I was comfortable with, and then past that. Through the stone walls, the festival continued: drums, voices, that pretty instrument playing a new, but no less merry, tune. In here, nothing moved.
My gut held a meeting about this.
I thought about Pasek.Something purple, he’d said.Any shade. You’ll be fine.I cursed myself for not picking something she could wear and feel uncomplicated about. Instead, I had purchasedmedical equipmentas a gift for the most compelling person I’d spoken to in years, and now she was silent and I was standing here in new clothes I didn’t quite know how to stand in, with my hands doing nothing useful, and no plan of any kind.
I shifted my weight.
“I can find you something else,” I said. “The Durbok has other things. Jewelry, that would suit you. Pasek mentioned you like purple?—”
“No,” she said, cutting me off.
I stopped. “Okay.”
Her thumb moved across the edge of the foam casing, before she set the box on the table beside her. She turned and stepped toward me, and I went very still.
I had no name for the churn of feelings that beat through me in time with the drums outside. I had no reference for this odd, relentless pull toward her that, honestly, nothing short of a fiery explosion could have torn me from. But in the center of my chest, in a place I was generally unaccustomed to feeling things, I ached. It didn’t feel bad, exactly.
“Gilrox.” Her voice was low. “This is the most perfect gift you could have given me.”
It was?“Ah,” I said. “Good.” It was the only word I could find.
Her hand came up. Her fingers touched the back of my neck, and gently pulled. What was happening? My senses went into disarray. Did she wish to whisper something? Was this another strange Runam ritual? I had no choice but to go with it. I briefly thought—with alarm—that this woman had far too much power over me. She could knock me over with a flip of her elegant fingers. She could talk me into doing an awful lot of things I would never ordinarily do. Like attending afleckingfestival.
