Page 107 of The Sundered Realms

Oh, was that was this was. Liris deliberately crunched on another cracker before answering. “And you’re not trying to avoid the subject bothering you? You first, then: I assume you’re still worrying over what Jadrhun said about using me?”

Vhannor’s jaw locked for a moment, the orange in his pale eyes glinting. “Fine. Yes. Now that we’re... whatever we are—“

Liris snapped a piece of cracker and said in a deceptively mild voice, “If you’re about to say you’re worried I’m only interested in you because when I met you I had few options, I do hope you realize that first, that’s incredibly insulting, and second, that I have met other attractive and powerful men who aren’t you and didn’t make any effort to choose them.”

Vhannor blinked. “I was going to say that our being together only makes the idea of using you worse.”

“Oh.” Liris ate like an extremely normal person. “Well, good.”

“Good?“ he demanded, voice rising.

She waved a careless hand, careful to not accidentally fling any nuts. “I mean, Jadrhun wasn’t exactly wrong, was he? You did bring me here to help. But since I’m aware of how I’m being used and consent—and am, in fact, an active participant in this—it’s fine.”

“Is it?” Vhannor asked, studying her. “Liris, you were raised to believe that you needed to be of service.”

Enough. Past enough. “So what? Your obsession with work can’t have come out of nowhere either. We’re all raised to believe things. What’s the line between education and indoctrination? How do you get to decide when I’m capable of making my own decisions for myself and when I’m just following how I was raised? Because it looks to me like you only think the latter when it has to do with thinking well of you, so perhaps my education isn’t the problem here.”

Vhannor slammed his hands down on the table, rattling the plate. “I think about it when I’m requiring you to put yourself in danger!”

Liris, more deliberately, put her hands on the table and leaned forward, locking gazes with him. “I chose this fight. Do you remember that? I chose this.”

Vhannor swallowed but didn’t say anything.

Since she had his attention, Liris sat back and continued, “It’s true that once I taught an enemy genius the basics of Thyrasel, I didn’t have many options I’d have been able to live with that weren’t fighting, but you know what? I’d like to think I’m the sort of person who’d have chosen to fight regardless. Now I just have an excuse for liking who I’m becoming that coincidentally forces you to lend me your resources for my personal growth, and frankly I’m not as sorry about that as I should be.”

She waited, eyebrows arched, until Vhannor took a deep breath. When she reached across the table to snag more nuts, he intercepted her, taking her hand in his.

When Liris looked up at him, his not-so-lavender-now gaze was smoldering, but he squeezed her hand gently. “I’m not sorry about that either.”

She swallowed, ignoring her quickening heartbeat. “Okay, then?”

He smiled, finally, and if it was small that only made it more powerful. “Okay,” Vhannor agreed softly. Then added, “Now your turn.”

Ugh. Liris pulled away from him, flopping back against her chair. “Ugh.”

His smile deepened a little, and her heart turned over, and love, she decided, was very stupid.

Well, if he was going to think less of her, she’d rather know that now than later.

“I’m trying not to think,” Liris said, “that despite everything I managed to do right tonight, it didn’t matter, because I still failed the biggest test. That all I’m doing is making your work harder, and no amount of effort or skill will change that. Would Jadrhun have even opened that portal if not to make a trap for us—which he needed to do for me? Maybe it was selfish of me to choose to stay, and if I’d really cared about Serenthuar and been really committed to what I claim then I would have gone with him. And maybe my commitment is, has always been, the problem, and that’s why no matter what I do I never seem to win. And so on. You, ah, look like your brain is exploding. Is everything quite—“

Vhannor made a strangled noise and burst out, “You did not in any way fail at anything. Liris, so help the Serenthuar elders if I ever get my hands on them, this was not a test. None of this has been a test—“

“Oh, that’s not at all true, and you know it.”

He blew out a breath. “Okay. Yes, I can see what you mean. Let me rephrase: I am not testing you. You have never had to pass any tests to pass with me—or if you did, it was the first day we met.”

Liris’ eyes narrowed. He wouldn’t mean her ability to actually dispel the demon portal; he’d met other skilled casters. “You mean that I was willing to risk my safety to help? That can’t be unique.”

“No,” Vhannor said, his eyes burning, “when after everything, you emphatically wanted more.”

Okay, she could see why that would matter to him, but she was still baffled. “I honestly can’t imagine having a different response.”

Vhannor groaned, rubbing his hands over his face. “See, this is my problem. I have a hard time trusting I’m not just seeing what I desperately want to see when everything you do, are, seems like a perfect dream I must have conjured.”

Liris stared at him, this man who was slumped in a chair at her kitchen table, exhausted after giving everything he had with all the skills and resources at his considerable disposal to trying to save people, her, and was still doing it. Still here, trying inexorably to help her and what she specifically wanted, needed, like he’d been doing from the very first day they’d met.

“Do you mean to tell me,” Liris said slowly, “that we have both been thinking, this whole time, that the other one was impossibly perfect, and neither of us said anything?”

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