She killed the lamp's flame, grateful for the returning darkness and had just settled back in her original spot when the stable door opened a second time.
“Oh for gods’ sake, not again.” Serovek’s footsteps, slower and more careful now, drew closer. “If I end up pitchforking myself because I’m fumbling about blind here, I put the blame entirely on you, Anhuset.”
She scrambled to relight the lamp when he reappeared in the stall, this time carrying a handful of mint. He gestured for her to hold out her hand and dropped a small bundle of the leaves into her palm. “That ale left a sour taste on the tongue. The mint will help get rid of it.” He popped a few leaves in his mouth and chewed before spitting the pulp into a corner of the stall. “I found it growing wild along the inn’s south wall. Even old crone Winter can’t kill the stuff.”
“Thank you,” she said, pleased beyond reason he had come back, puzzled as to why. The mint was astringent on her palate but worked as he claimed.
This time she didn’t change positions when he resumed his earlier spot, and they sat together hip to hip, her legs nearly equal in length to his. He’d be even taller if he didn’t possess the horseman’s bow. Anhuset wondered from which of his parents he’d inherited his impressive height and size. Not only was he tall, he was big, with a personality to match. No one would overlook him in a crowd.
“You’re pensive tonight,” he said. “Missing Saggara already?”
He’d given her an easy excuse, one she could embrace as a perfectly reasonable explanation for her ruminating. She might be clumsy with the interplay between them, but she wasn’t dishonest, and Saggara had only crossed her thoughts once and only in terms of what she had to do there once she returned.
She forced herself to meet his inquisitive gaze. “I owe you an apology.” His blatant astonishment might have been amusing if it weren’t so irritating. “You needn’t look so shocked,” she huffed. “I overstepped the rules of civility with my insult earlier. You did nothing to deserve it.”
He tilted his head to one side, studying her. “Then why did you say it?”
I was jealous. Embarrassment locked in her throat. Relief made her lightheaded when he answered for her.
“I think you still carry a lot of anger toward me from the ritual at Saruna Tor,” he said.
That made her pause. The grim memory of Saruna Tor remained a wound on her spirit she didn’t think would ever heal, and she hadn’t been one of those made eidolon there. Even when Serovek had practically begged her to be his executioner on that hill, guilt over stabbing him still burdened her. Anger toward him did not, nor did she remember it ever being so. “What are you talking about?”
A faraway expression settled over his features. “The moments after you stabbed me, you said ‘I will never forgive you for this.’ I carried those words into battle with me so that I might return and ask that you reconsider.”
She gasped, forgetting for a moment to keep her emotional guard up around him, avoid more of the invisible grappling hooks he tossed at her every time they crossed paths that drew her inexorably to him, half step by half step no matter how hard she fought against it. She looked away from his sudden, intense scrutiny, sympathizing in that moment with Pluro Cermak's skittish wife and the desire to bolt for safety.
“I might have meant them at the time, but I shouldn’t have said those words either.” Her fingers throbbed from how tightly she’d laced them together, and her throat ached with the effort to speak. “You saved me and the hercegesé from Beladine raiders and their mage hounds, took care of my wound, gained the information we needed to find Brishen and his abductors, and risked yourself and your men to help me rescue him. Putting a sword through your belly was no way to clear such a debt. I owe you more than I can ever repay in this lifetime or a dozen more beyond it.”
Complaint or confession. If asked which it was, she’d have a hard time deciding, and it might well have been a little of both, but somehow she felt lighter by speaking aloud of this shame, no matter how ridiculous it might appear to others, that had weighed her down these many months.
Serovek snorted, mouth tight with disapproval. “You shoulder an anvil of your own making.” His lips softened with a hint of a smile at her surprise. “I asked you in particular to run me through because I knew you to be strong enough to see the deed done and not falter. I laid a terrible task at your feet, and you took up the gauntlet. Don’t think I’m unaware of what I asked of you.” His gaze flitted from her face to her hair, slowing to travel the length of her body before returning to her face. “If we were keeping a tally of who is in debt to whom, every breathing person on this side of the Ruhrin ocean would owe their lives to those of us who rode against the galla. If we were keeping tally. We aren’t. And you owe me nothing. There’s no debt between us. There never was.”
“I like strong women, soft or not.” He’d said that while they stood on the balcony of his study, overlooking the steep slopes of the mountainside. Ribbons and swords, she thought. So different yet both made admirable in his eyes by the hand that wielded them. He was a man like no other, Kai or human, she’d
