Page 93 of A Fae in Finance
Sahir had dismounted before his horse even stopped, in a motion so swift I didn’t follow it. He was at my side in another, his form blurred against the twilight into an indefinable smudge.
This time I slid into his arms without a flicker of emotion, too dull to feel shame or embarrassment. He caught me and held me in a cradle, saying something to Sparkles in a language I didn’t understand. Both horses trotted toward a paddock situated a little way off the path, with a narrow structure jutting from one side.
I lay in Sahir’s arms like a dead fish.
He dropped me.
I stared up at him. “Ow,” I said.
Something flickered in his eyes. “Get up, mortal.”
“This was your idea,” I said. I could feel my brows furrowing. Everything felt far away, like I was watching us through a pane of glass. Like a badly directed film, where I knew the emotions I should be feeling but couldn’t connect.
“You embarrass your kind.”
I felt the smallest lick of irritation and shoved up onto my knees.
Almost like he knew what he’d done, Sahir smirked down at me. His brown eyes twinkled. I hadn’t looked at his eyes in weeks.
From a distance we must have looked a picture—a knight, supplicant, ready to receive benediction, and her lord above her.
“The Princeling did not bring you here to shame you or yours,” he added. He held out a hand to me, and I shoved it away.
“I didn’t ask to represent my kind,” I burst out, roiling up to my feet. He held his ground, so we stood nearly toe to toe on the grass. He had bags under his eyes, and his hair was a little greasy, shining in the starlight. He looked tired, hunted.
“None of us asked to be what we are.” He left his hand where I’d slapped it, at his side and palm up. I couldn’t keep looking at his face; a flicker of shame heated my cheeks. He was my knight and I definitely wasn’t making his life any easier. I stared at his hand instead. He had scars in the meat of his palm, near where it connected to his wrist. My gaze traced them, up to the first joint in his long pinky.
“What you are is probably a lot better than what I am right now.” My anger had cooled, and it sank in me like a hunk of basalt, cracked off and cooling in the embrace of the oceans.
“Do not presume to know what I am,” Sahir said.
I only stared at his hand, still open toward me. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t empathize with you.”
The silence stretched on long enough that I looked at him, not curious, exactly, but maybe a little impatient. And guilty. Definitely aware enough to feel guilty, and melodramatic, and frustrated with myself more than him.
Sahir jerked his head toward the village below us. “Let us go,” he said. “I want you to visit my hometown.”
I trailed behind him, my calves aching a bit at the slight declining slope of the path. I hadn’t moved much recently, had I?
This felt like an oversight, given I might have to run from a horde of ravening enemies at any time.
Not that any level of training would prepare me, of course. Not that any amount of human strength or human cunning could protect me from my captors. It was like putting an average adult into the Olympics.
Run this race, you’d say. So they’d try, and they’d make it, maybe—in twice or three times as long.
OrGo down this ski jump. And they’d get over the slope, to land on their neck and crack their skull open.
Ifeltthe viscera in the image, the amalgamated flash of fifteen violent movie deaths I’d witnessed coming together into splashes of red blood on white snow. My stomach roiled inside me. I missed a step and stumbled, righting myself before I fell.
“Are you all right, Miriam?” Sahir asked, looking over his shoulder.
“Yep,” I said, short with frustration and breathlessness.
We’d nearly reached the base of the hill, and the town was not far. But the crowd of people I’d seen from the top of the hill had disappeared.
The first elusive strains of some sort of music reached us, increasing in volume as we started along the straight and level part of the path. I avoided the loose stones in the road, but Sahir walked with the ease of a man used to every uneven step. The river surged closer again. Over it, the music continued, a not-quite-piano playing a not-quite-melody.
We were close enough to see the details on the doors of the houses: flowers and vines carved into wooden mantels; flaking paint in muted greens and reds.
