She stared at him, open-mouthed, and then kicked him between the legs. 'Don't you dare try and weasel out of this one! Don't you dare!'
He barely heard her words. They seemed to come from a great distance away, floating through a fog of perfect agony. There was a strange, sad void in his lower belly, a grey pall of aching misery, as if his guts were attending the funeral of his reproductive system.
'Why weren't you there when I got out of that hermitage, Frey?' she demanded. 'Where was my dashing buccaneer lover waiting to sweep me off my feet? What about all those things you said?'
Frey tried to protest that she wouldn't have got out of there at all if not for him, but the only noise that emerged was a shrill whimper at a pitch audible only to bats.
'Not a word! For a year!' Amalicia shrieked. 'Don't even pretend you didn't get my letters, Frey! I sent them everywhere!'
Frey held up a hand and swallowed against a hard lump in his throat that may or may not have been one of his own testicles. 'I thought . . .' he croaked. 'I thought . . .'
'Thought what? Thought I'd forgotten your promise? Thought I'd forgotten that you said you'd marry me?'
Technically, Frey had done no such thing, but he thought it unwise to argue the point, given his present situation. 'I thought . . . you'd reject me.'
'You thought what?'
He caught his breath. The ache in his groin was a little less unbearable now, enough that he could manage a coherent sentence. 'I thought I wasn't good enough for you.'
'Oh, that's just rubbish!' Amalicia scoffed. 'What an excuse!'
'Look around you!' he said, swinging out an arm. 'You see? Look at what you have! You're a lady. Sure, you loved me when your father was alive. What better way to piss off Daddy than by hitching up with some lowlife freebooter, right? But the game's changed now. Daddy's gone. We dreamed of running away, but now there's nothing to run away from. What do you need me for, when you have all this?'
Amalicia looked shocked. 'It was never about that!'
But she was already on the back foot, and Frey kept pushing. 'Don't you think I know what would have happened next? The society balls, the dinner parties, mixing with the rich and powerful? How long would it have been before I embarrassed you? How long before you got bored of me and found someone who knew how to eat soup without slurping?'
'Darian, that's not true,' she protested, but it came out weak and unconvincing. She'd been so busy being angry and lovesick that it had probably never occurred to her until now.
'It is true, and you know it,' he said, getting delicately to his feet with the help of a nearby chair. He felt himself to be sure everything was still where it was supposed to be.
Amalicia stamped huffily over to the windows, frustrated at having her righteous wrath blunted. She crossed her arms and stared out over the lawns of her estate. Regrouping. After a moment she whirled and came back. 'So you just decided it was over?' she snapped. 'You just left without a word?'
'No,' he said. 'I always meant to come back to you. But not as some filthy pirate. I wanted to come back as a man worthy of a lady like you. I wanted to come back rich and respectable. But I failed you, Amalicia. I failed.'
The Pinn Defence. Neat, deadly, and virtually impossible to refute. Nothing cut a girl's legs out from under her like a noble justification of an apparently ignoble act. The angrier they were, the worse they felt when you sprang the trap.
Tears shimmered in his eyes, more from the pain in his pods than sorrow, but that didn't matter to Amalicia. Her anger blew out like a candle.
'You didn't think you were worthy of me?' she asked, and he knew by the tone of her voice that she'd forgiven him right then. It was that I-can't-believe-how-sweet-you-are-you-delightful-thing kind of tone that, in Frey's experience, was generally employed in response to a thoughtful and unexpected present, or one of his rare displays of tenderness.
'I've tried to go straight, tried to make my fortune by honourable means,' he said. 'I could start a business, maybe buy some land. But . . .'
'Spit and blood, Darian. All this time you've been thinking I wouldn't want you?'
Frey held his aching jaw. He could feel a bruise forming where her heel had caught him. 'You mean you do?' he asked, with the expression of a man who hardly dared to hope.
'Of course I do, Darian! Why do you think I was writing to you all this time?'
'After everything I've done, you still want me?'
'Yes!' she laughed. She took his rather damaged face in her hands and gazed up into his eyes. 'Yes! I never stopped wanting you.'
'Oh, Amalicia!' he hammed. 'I've been a fool! A damned fool!'
The melodrama was lost on her. 'Darian!' she swooned, and she kissed him with such brutal passion that he feared she'd end up swallowing one of his loosened teeth.
'Come on,' she said eagerly, as soon as they'd surfaced for breath. She tugged him towards a door. 'The bedroom's this way.'
Frey clutched at his pulverised groin. 'I'm not sure I can . . .'
'Darian,' she said, with an unmistakable warning in her voice.
Frey took a steadying breath. 'Alright,' he said. 'I suppose I'll manage.'
*
It took a while to entice his traumatised equipment into action, but once he got going, he managed a passable performance. Amalicia didn't seem to mind that he was sub-par. She detonated with a scream that had Frey hurriedly clamping a hand over her mouth in case the household guards should burst in and shoot him.
Later, they lay in bed together. She was curled up against him, he on his back, looking up at the ceiling. 'What are you thinking about?' she asked him.
'Nothing,' he replied.
What he was thinking was how fine it was to lie here in an expensive bed with a beautiful young woman beside him. They could lie here all night and all day, if they wanted. And the next night, and the next. He'd never have to go back to his mouldy bunk on the Ketty Jay, with that threadbare hammock hanging over his head, always threatening to snap and crush him beneath an avalanche of luggage. How would it be, to live this way?
That was what he was thinking, but he said none of it.
She stirred against him and raised her head. 'Why did you come back?' she murmured.
'I came back for you.'
'Darian,' she said, the word a gentle threat. 'Why now? And don't tell me it's because you couldn't stand to be without me a moment longer.'
Frey had been about to say exactly that. He had to think a moment. Eventually, too drugged by post-coital lethargy to come up with anything clever, he told her the truth. 'I need your help.'
She tensed in his arms.
'Wait, hear me out,' he said. 'I found a way to get rich. Really rich. I wanted to be worthy of you, remember?'
'I remember,' she said suspiciously. Now that the first chaos of passion had settled, she was getting sceptical.
'Thing is, I can't do it without your help.'
'You need money, then,' she guessed, icing up.
Yes. Always. 'No!' he said. 'What do you take me for?'
'I don't know, Darian. I don't know what to think.' Now she was sullen and resentful. Frey was already having trouble keeping up with her moods. He remembered why he kept leaving her. A familiar irritation crept into his thoughts, but he kept it from his voice. 'I'm trying to get something. Something very valuable that the Awakeners have.'
'Ah.'
'Your father was a great friend of the Awakeners, of course. I sort of assumed you still have connections with them, even if you don't like them much. So I wondered if—'
'What do you need?' she interrupted.
