Page 89 of Time's Fool

I pushed it away. I didn’t want to think anymore, didn’t want to feel. Didn’t want anything but to breathe and huddle under this tree until I felt like coming out.

Which might be a very long time.

My breath finally returned, and I sat down, although the tree’s roots were sprawling everywhere and making that uncomfortable. I searched for a better spot for a while, but didn’t find one. I decided I didn’t care.

My stomach growled at me; it was hungry, the smell of food having awakened the ever-present appetite. For once, I didn’t care about that either. My mind was a blank, except for a roaring in my ears.

Until someone sat down beside me.

It wasn’t Mircea, not that I had expected that.

It was the annoying possible liar, who had acquired a string of sausages.

He ate one, the white teeth punching through the thin casing, releasing a spirt of juices and a flood of garlic onto the air. Despite everything, that forced out a laugh out of me. “It’s an old wives’ tale,” he said.

“I know that.”

He had a great many sausages. He held out a string of the fat, meaty links, lightly smoked and still juicy, and waggled it at me. I hesitated, then took it and had a bite.

It was good. Pork and garlic, as I’d thought, and well spiced. It was also greasy, and so were all the others, enough to slick my fingers and stain my already ruined dress by the time I’d finished them.

He had also brought goat’s milk cheese, several varieties of pickles, bread and butter, and wine. And some pastries made with honey and nuts that I ate before I fully noticed much about them. But they left my fingers sticky, too, as well as my face.

I was a mess.

“How did you manage to amass all of this, and yet follow me?” I asked, when I could think again.

“I had prepared a hamper, in case you wanted to get away from the city. I did not know how you might respond to being back there again. But then your father suggested that we eat together and talk . . .”

He trailed off at my expression, and there was silence for a time.

“He has always been renowned for his diplomacy,” Louis-Cesare said, after a while. “Yet it always fails him with you.”

I had been braiding my messy hair, to get it out of the way, but at that I paused and looked at him. And really saw him for the first time since I’d woken up. I had been right before—he was handsome, with his head thrown back and his Adam’s apple working as he swallowed a mouthful of wine.

He had expended a lot of power in the fight, yet his hands didn’t shake on the wineskin. And although it had a leak around the top, he managed not to spill any on his clothes. They were pretty soiled nonetheless, probably from our trip down the mountainside, and were the same ones he’d had on in that other time: long blue trousers and a pullover shirt of a matching hue.

The latter was of the type commonly called Guernsey, after the home of the fishermen’s wives who fashioned them for their husbands out of wool, because they protected against the cold even when wet. His was thinner than I’d seen on sailors, but the same basic style. Between that and the trousers, he would have looked almost at home on any wharf.

“Did you fish?” I asked suddenly.

“Quoi?”

“Before you Changed.”

He looked perplexed. “No?”

“Oh.”

It didn’t really surprise me. There was an aristocratic air about him, something that screamed noble born regardless of what he wore. Or didn’t wear.

“I’m dirty,” he said suddenly. “I’m going to take a bath.”

And then, before I could comment, he shed his clothes and walked through the woods in the direction of a gurgling stream.

I sat there, feeling sticky and sweaty and cross, because I had almost started to like him, and then he had to do this. Just like all the others, I thought; seduce them and they’ll follow you anywhere. Mircea had probably sent him to bring me back, and this was how he intended to do it.

Was that what they’d talked about, while I was sleeping? How to get the crazy dhampir under control and keep her there? Make sure she didn’t do anything stupid?

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