Page 22 of The Iron Dagger
Hara blinked, her reasonings and protests dying on her tongue. “You agree?”
“Yes. It’s clearly some sort of madness that’s taken hold of us. Only natural since we’ve been stuck in this cottage together for days on end. Dressing my wounds, the howling wind, the snowdrifts. It’s a recipe for disaster. But it would never work between us in the real world.”
Hara nodded as relief coursed through her, only barely tinged with disappointment. “Exactly my point.”
“So we agree. It stops here,” he said, extending his hand to shake.
“Can something stop if it hasn’t started?” said Hara. She stepped forward and took his hand. Gideon raised an eyebrow as though a sudden thought occurred to him.
“Is this magically binding? There’s no spell attached, is there?”
“All agreements have some magic in them. While our words may not be spells, we are held—”
“All right, enough. Good lord, this is why it would never work,” Gideon grumbled as he gave her hand one hard shake. “There. No words.”
Hara gave him an annoyed look. “You can rinse out the dye now.”
Gideon stood from the stool and dipped his hair in a basin close by. When the water ran clean she gave him a length of cloth. He mussed his hair through it, and when he emerged, Hara turned away.
He had looked like a vain prince before, but now he looked absolutely dashing. The dark hair suited his coloring and made his eyes glint like ice.
Hara fell into her seat, wishing to distract herself with the un-sensuous clack of the loom.
She could hear Gideon mumbling to himself as he held up Gessup’s old hand-me-downs, and she pondered if this journey was to be difficult for an entirely different reason.
Gideon
Gideon was going mad.
He was eager to get back to court to deliver his reports to his father and to finally be able to bathe all of his body at once, instead of piece by piece with a rag and a bucket of water. He itched to be back on the road, especially now that he discovered he still had his money pouch sewn into the lining of his cloak.
While Hara packed and repacked her traveling satchels with packets and clinking bottles, he used some of her paper and drew a map from his memory. From there, he plotted the best routes on foot and by horseback, with the appropriate rest stops in between.
But he was restless for another reason.
Throughout the day, he had to force himself to tear his eyes away from Hara. Ever since the night she’d dyed his hair, he was unable to stop imagining what might have happened if she hadn’t stepped away. She’d been close enough that it would havebeen nothing for him to reach out and wrap his hands around her waist, tugging her forward onto his lap. The warm, herbal scent coming off of her skin entered his mind and gave him nightmares of longing.
Now each time she was close, he would catch himself taking slow, deep inhales, as though to savor every precious pull of breath—precious because they had been warmed and perfumed by her skin. He couldn’t help himself, feeling rather like a stallion that had caught the scent of a mare in heat. It was all he could do to control the evidence of his arousal in the mornings, gritting his teeth and trying for the hundredth time not to imagine peeling off her homespun stockings to reveal her long legs. Or, better yet, leaving them on and peeling away everything else.
This was ridiculous. He was so starved for company that his herb-addled mind had decided to latch itself to the only person in the vicinity, who happened to be a dowdy hedgewitch. It was the fact that she was off-limits, he told himself. The forbidden had always been his weakness.
Gideon was reeling at the chance to leave the cottage and put this madness behind him. He had to admit, the wound looked to be healing unbelievably well. When he first saw it he thought that he would have disfiguring scars and a limp for the rest of his life. Now, there were only pink indications where the teeth marks had been, and it only became sore at the end of the day. But they could not be expected to walk the entire way to Montag.
He mentioned horses to Hara, and she had said, “Horses are costly.”
He almost laughed. “I have money.”
“What about inn fare? Do you have enough for both?”
“Yes,” he said dryly. Did she think him some penny-pinching beggar? Would she ask if he had enough for food and ale next?
“Oh. Well, I think I could find some horses in the village,” she said.
Gideon thought that was the end of it, until the day before they were to depart when Hara came back up the lane with two short, fat donkeys in tow.
“What is this?” he said.
“Donkeys!” she said. “Aren’t they lovely? They were cheap, too. Here.” She dropped eleven gold coins into his hand. “They only wanted nine for the pair of them.”
