Page 143 of Silverbow
“Where do you think you’re going?” He growled.
“To take a bath, unless you enjoy dragon breath enough to smell it all the way to where we’re going,” she snapped.
“We need to talk.”
“I thought the walls had ears here.” She pushed a loose dark ringlet behind her ear as she dug for her soap.
“They do,” he ground.
“So what’s there to talk about?” She was avoiding meeting his gaze as she fished through the bag.
He stared at her. Her face was all sharp angles from the side, regal, he realized for the first time. “What is your plan?”
“Our bargain. I presume you realize we’ll have to travel a bit further north than you were intending.”
He nodded. He would see her to the Vale. “And then?”
“And then what?” She snapped, her eyes flashing to his face. “I have nothing, Oryn. No home, no family, no future. Just an empty title that will get me killed and an hourglass that is almost out of sand. You might as well put me in the ground now.”
He flinched at the ice in her words. She rose, bundle in one hand, wine bottle in the other and raised her chin.
“You can have first watch. I’ll have dinner sent up.” With that, she shooed him aside, wrenched open the door, and stalked down the hall.
Oryn bolted the door behind her, pulled the curtains, and sank onto the foot of her unmade bed. Staring at the lumpy satchel, he might have laughed. The most wanted woman in Estryia had just pillaged Pallas Davolier’s greatest treasure. Instead, he found himself wrung of all humor in the wake of the bone deep terror he’d felt while she was in the keep.
A serving maid knocked a short time later with a tray. Enya swept in on her heels, hair piled high on her head, and tossed her soiled clothes in a heap. There was a pink flush to her cheeks and the wine was nowhere to be seen. She sat stiffly in the chair across from him, holding his gaze with a challenge.
“Are you hurt?” Oryn asked, taking in the way she perched on the edge.
“No.”
He broke the stare, dismissing it, to pour her a cup of wine from a new bottle. “You did not speak true.”
She scoffed.
“Friends are not nothing. There is a man downstairs who crossed half the world to find you and a band of misfits that I suspect will welcome you beyond the bargain, if you wish it. We don’t have much to offer, Silverbow, but we are your friends.”
Her eyebrows climbed at that. “My friends,” she mused. “My friend who fu-”
“Enya.”
She swirled her wine and chuckled. “Do I get a vote?”
“I don’t know that anyone would dare vote against Enya Dragonslayer.”
She snorted. “Hardly.”
“They’ll sing about you one day,” he said.
She shrugged. “I don’t care. It’s not a song I want.”
He thought about telling her it was already too late for that, but instead he asked, “What is it you want?”
She stared at him, expressionless. “To go home.”
Oryn studied her. “Is it betrayal you feel? Under the sadness and the guilt?” He’d been trying to place the emotion that sometimes slipped through the cracks in her anger.
“My entire life was a lie,” she said softly, running a finger along the rim of the goblet. “And now…now the lie is gone, the future and the people I loved with it, like it never happened at all. Sometimes…sometimes I feel like I’ve lost my mind.”
