Page 21 of The Second Death of Locke
Grey found solace in her work. By the time everything was finally still and quiet, night was falling outside. Leonie returned to find her sitting at one of the tables at the back of the infirmary, redacting a letter to Imarta.
“I know you’re avoidingsomethingwhen you take the time to write to your mother,” Leonie said. “Anything catch on fire while I was gone?”
“Nothing to report,” Grey said, folding her letter and slipping it into her pocket.
“Good. I brought you food.”
Grey sighed as if this was an inconvenience, but in truth, shewashungry. She’d been so focused during the afternoon that she hadn’t even thought about eating.
“Come to the back,” Leonie said. “Things will be fine out here for a bit.”
Grey went to the back room while Leonie stopped to speak to one of the attendants. Alone, she pulled off the apron and put it in the wash bin with the rest, then eyed her cloak. It was a good idea to get into it, but she relished the cold for just a second. The frigid air, the icy sea—they were among the few things she still kept of Locke, that she was able to find in Scaela. She always felt more like herself with goosebumps prickling on her arms and a chill in her chest.
“How was your meeting with the master?” Leonie asked, bustling into the room and drawing the curtain. Her deep black curls were up again, gathered now in a tight bun on the back of her neck, but when her hair was released, it floated around her shoulders and face in a cloud of jet and onyx. Grey remembered the feeling of it between her fingers, Leonie’s mouth on her skin. She frowned, pushing those thoughts away.
“As well as could be expected,” she said. She had the urge, again, to throw something.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Leonie asked, hopping up onto one of the extra beds by Grey’s makeshift table. Grey forced herself to sit down, forced herself to put bread in her mouth and chew it and swallow instead of picking a fight with the wall.
“Talk about what?”
“Captain Seward.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Flynn.”The name was weary, a sigh caught on an ocean of exhaustion.
“We don’t have to talk about him,” Grey said, looking up from her tray of bread and porridge and dried fruit, gazing at Leonie through her lashes. “We could talk… about you? Aboutus?”
“Grey Flynn, you absolute rake,” Leonie said with a laugh. “There is nous. There was one time—”
“Two,” Grey corrected primly.
“Doesn’t count if it’s the same evening. One time, and we both knew what it meant before, during and after. I’m hurt, Hand— I thought you considered me a friend.”
Leonie was right, and they worked better as close confidantes. Moving between places the way they did, Grey found friendship hard to find and harder to stomach, but there was just something about Leonie that she trusted.
Leonie’s expression wasn’t hurt at all. That mischievous smile curved on her face and she looked at Grey with eyes like dark polished river stones. “I knew from the start you were not open territory.”
Grey pushed the uneaten half of her food away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re hiding in the infirmary. There are very few people here you would hide from other than Captain Seward. And don’t look at me like that—finish eating, or else I’m making you take a whole host of vitamin drafts.”
“Who said I was hiding?” Grey muttered.
Leonie shook a packet of herbs in her direction, somehow managing to make the action look threatening.
Grey groaned, but she turned back to her food. “He’s stubborn,”she said, conceding on the more obvious point. “Too stubborn sometimes.”
Leonie got up to prep the nighttime medications, dividing herbs into tiny capsules for easier consumption, cross-checking her notes. “Yes, I imagine so. But so are you.”
Grey shrugged, allowing it. “And we know each other too well, I think.”
“It’s the nature of wells and mages—you’re required to have some level of… intimacy.”
Grey wrinkled her nose. “That’s not how Kier is.” She didn’t know, exactly, what she was protesting.
“You practically live on top of each other.”
