Penryn did not immediately oblige, instead her head hanging low as she sat, her shoulders shaking lightly. Should he feel guilty for her upset? He did not know any longer.
He also knew that there was no possibility of his tunic ever fully coming clean. The garment was a deep green, nearly black when sodden as it was, but in certain angles he could see the outline of where the marks had been. Still were.
He had killed a man. His body still lay behind them.
What would his parents say?
His hands shook as he scrubbed, wanting the evidence to disappear, bothered more than he should. Not at the loss of the man himself, in all his strangeness and Penryn’s insistence that he did not belong.
But the act of killing itself, on a Journey that did not matter in the way that he thought...
That he could not stand.
He could see that Penryn had finally decided to dress, although she struggled with the clasp on her cloak. Rather than ask for help, she simply left it hanging, supported only by her shoulders as she stared at him.
He ignored it and kept scrubbing, kept working at the fabric, desperate that it should yield. That all evidence of this day might be expunged, that he could go back, that he could look at Penryn and feel that softness that had become such a part of him. Of them.
A hand reached out, stilling his movements as it settled on his forearm. “You have done the best you can,” Penryn murmured. “Let that be enough.”
How could he? When all had gone wrong in the span of an hour.
“How could you have lied to me for so long?” Grimult asked her, his throat strangely tight. “How could you have allowed me to believe what you knew to be false?”
Her thumb moved against his skin, soothing. Gentle. And the bitterness in him said to jerk away, to remove himself from her as she had no right to touch him with all that had been lost between them.
“I thought it was better for you,” Penryn answered, her voice strangely calm. “I told you that from the beginning. That I wanted you to be able to return home, to live a good life. To not worry about all of this.” She made a vague gesture, but her eyes drifted to where the body remained, and he knew her full meaning. She wanted him to enjoy the same privilege as the rest of his people, full of ignorance of the world beyond their borders.
Borders that were arbitrary, or so it seemed to him now, rather than mystical.
“You did tell me that,” Grimult acknowledged, trying to quell the sudden dryness of his throat with a firm swallow. There was more he should say, allowances that he should extend. He did not think her malicious, even now. Her intention was likely not to hurt him, to throw answers at him before laughing at his gullibility and disappearing behind the Wall itself.
But still, the pieces would not settle, the ease between them would not return. His trust in her had been badly shaken, and he supposed time was what was most needed.
Which was precisely what was running short between them. Most especially if their pace had to quicken.
“But you are not ready to forgive me, yet,” Penryn finished for him. That was not what he was going to say, although he was not certain he was going to be able to muster anything at all. She said it with such resignation, as if the answer was already known rather than simply assumed.
He did not correct her, but he did not provide confirmation either.
“Do you think me a very great fool?” he asked quietly, deciding to allow the most pertinent question to finally have voice.
He glanced at her, trying to ascertain her answer from her first reaction to his query. Her eyes widened, and she shook her head even before she seemed capable of finding words for a proper response. “Of course not,” she told him firmly when her tongue seemed to catch up to her actions. “You had faith. I would never mock that, or think less of you for that.” A heaving sigh that made her wince as her ribs protested the action. He wondered if they hurt terribly. He had been taught how to give support, how to mend them the best as possible, but they had not discussed the pain of it. Was it a burn that spread, or a stabbing that occurred over and over until suddenly, one day, the bone smoothed over and all was right again?
He grimaced, thinking his accord with Penryn might be similar.
“It does make me angry on your behalf. At the people who feel such deceit necessary.” She peeked at him, something in her eyes suggesting she was looking for a scrap of their old camaraderie. “But I had many reasons to be angry with them already.”
She did. They took her wings from her. Made her...
Like the body cooling behind them.
Realisation came slowly, a settling over him that assured him that he had discovered at least one of the great secrets that plagued him. They expected her to go beyond the Wall, to seem as if she was one of the land-dwellers that must reside there.
For what purpose, he could not fathom.
She was giving him a wary look, and he schooled his features, recognising that some of his revelation must have seeped into his expression.
He did not wish to discuss it with her. Not now. He wanted to mull it over, to see how it fit with all the rest of what he knew of her. Thought he knew.
And what he knew of the sages themselves.
He did not know if they were evil, hidden away in their keep sewing mischief and lies. Penryn acted as if that was true a great deal of the time, but in this...
She wanted to move more
