Before he could let her go entirely, Herrick spun her to face him and leaned forward, kissing her gently. It was quick and soft, but all the words he could not vocalize were present in the action. It was over before Maude could stop it. Things between them weren't back to what they had been before, but she'd shown her hand with her explosion of anger, and Herrick was glad for it.
Someone cleared their throat loudly, and Herrick finally pulled back enough to give Maude some air. The King of Shadow was watching them closely, but he couldn't tell what the male was thinking.
"Did your spy know this about Helvig? Did he know and do nothing?" Maude asked Aeric, her voice low.
The close acceptance that had radiated in her eyes earlier was gone. In its place was the flatness of mistrust he had become so familiar with when they met. It was how she distanced herself, he realized. Aeric only looked over to the healer, the similar flat look on his face making it clear that he expected Dahlia to answer.
"What are you asking, Maude?" she said evenly from the other side of the room.
Maude glanced at him, her eyes flashing with what looked like an apology before she straightened her spine.
"Your spy," Maude repeated slowly as her eyes narrowed on the healer. "Baldr. Did he know about what they were doing in the dungeons?"
Everything Herrick thought he understood about their situation went out the window with the shadows that exploded out of Maude earlier. She seemed to wait and see if her guess was correct. He knew her well enough to know when she was bluffing, and at that moment, he knew she was throwing out her suspicions with the expectation of being correct. So why hadn't she told him about this?
Because you don't trust her, the voice in his mind whispered. Its voice was clearer now, its sentience more separate from his own now.She is a liar.You only have yourself… and me.
Everyone in the room held their breath as Maude and Dahlia held each other's stares, the standoff that was brewing making him dizzy.
"Okay, now I need a drink," Herrick muttered as he returned to his seat.
The Shadow King nodded and pulled a clear bottle of brown liquor out from a compartment under his chair along with two glasses. He poured out two fingers worth of whiskey into one of the glasses and handed it to him without a word.
"Good man," Herrick said as he toasted to his lover's father and tipped it back into his mouth, swallowing the whiskey in one burning gulp.
Meanwhile, Maude waited for Dahlia to answer the question. Just when it seemed like neither woman would back down, Dahlia conceded. The Elven deflated into her chair, shaking her head.
"I know Baldr well," she said quietly, her eyes softening slightly.
Herrick thought he was going to be sick.
"If he knows, he is doing all he can to stop it," she finally said before she met his hateful stare. "Just like he helped you."
Herrick stood, his fist slamming into the table hard enough that it almost cracked. His other hand went to the iron around his throat.
"He helped me? Is that what he told you?" Herrick replied, his voice so low that he only knew the Elven heard him because of their enhanced senses. "Leaving meto hang by my wrists for days while he burned me was helping me? Ordering his soldiers to rip the air from my lungs until I passed out just to revive me and do it all over again washelpingme? Demanding information heknewI didn't have was helping me?"
"General," Dahlia started to say, but he cut her off.
"No. Whatever information he has passed to you, whatever he did to help get me out, does not erase everything else he did," Herrick whispered. Behind him, he could feel Maude hovering closer but never coming close enough to touch. She didn't know the full extent of what he remembered from his time in Logi.
"He clamped this on my neck and proceeded to try and strip everything that I was away," he went on. "I don't care if he is a double agent or a spy or whatever you want to call him. Tell me how any of that makes up for what he did to me?"
The silence of the room was deafening, but the look on Gunnar and Maude's faces were enough to level him. He collapsed into his chair, the world seeming to tip on the edge of whatever was going to be said next. Would it make him feel better? Or would it finally destroy the last of his strength even as it waned a little more every day?
"There is nothing that will fix what you have gone through, General," Dahlia finally uttered into the painfully silent room. "He was only doing his duty."
There were only two other times in his life when he was struck silent like this. The first time was when his mother caught him in a lie when he skipped his duties to go sailing. The second time was when he had seen Maude enter Hakon's Betrothal Ball in that devastating dress.
This time, it was because of the sudden clear understanding of what Maude and Hakon had been fighting against all this time. For weeks and months, he struggled to understand why the two most important people in his life rebelled against their fate and their duty. He could never fathom why they fought against it so hard when his entire being had been molded to his duty.
His every interest, his every decision-making process, was in the name of his duty. His rigid way of living, of looking at the world, had stemmed from his responsibility. When Maude had crashed into his life and upended everything he knew, he hadstruggled when his closest friend had told him to go with it. But he understood now that Gunnar had been trying to save him.
Because duty for the sake of duty was poisonous.
At his side, Maude crouched and cradled the side of his face, turning it so he was forced to look at her. When all he could see was a sparkling green so dark it reminded him of the moss that grew in the Lamenting Woods, Herrick finally focused on what was right in front of him.
"Listen to me, beast," Maude said, her words sounding like she was speaking underwater. "No one is asking you to forgive the prick. While he should have handled things differently, he did what he had to do."