He squinted at the door. “Where are we?”
“Maid’s room.”
“Can we break down the door?”
“No.” I couldn’t, and I was pretty sure Javier shouldn’t be slamming into doors with potentially damaged ribs. “The hinges aren’t coming unscrewed anytime soon either.”
He grunted. It was the resignedwell, shitgrunt. That seemed to pretty well cover the situation.
I fussed with my outer robe and Javier’s padded jacket, trying to make something for him to lie on so that he didn’t keep losing heat to the mattress. Also, if I was fussing over that, I wasn’t thinking about the fact that Javier had come after me and now he was probably going to die along with me. All because he’d walked in on me being careless with the mirror.
No, I definitely didn’t want to think about that. If I did, I might start crying again, and that would be utterly humiliating, so Iwasn’tgoing to do it, and that wasfinal.
“Anja?” said Javier. “Anja, it’s all right. I’m not going to die of this. I’ve been hurt a lot worse. I’ll be fine. Don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying,” I informed him, my voice thick with tears. “I never cry in front of strangers.”
“I’m not a stranger,” he pointed out, quite unfairly reasonably.
“Yes, but you shouldn’tbehere. The king made you, and I know how you feel about me, and this is all my fault.” I couldn’t stop the sob at the end of the sentence, so I turned away and bit the side of my hand so I didn’t wail like an infant.
Blessed Saint Adder, was this man doomed to be present at every humiliating moment of my life?Retching and sick and sobbing… Maybe I can get explosive diarrhea and round out the set.
I took a deep breath and shook myself mentally. My chime-adder wouldn’t do this. Chime-adders were slow and calm and deliberate, and as patient as the grave. Utterly unhampered by sentiment. If our souls come back in other bodies, as some followers of Saint Bird believe, I really hoped that next time, I’d get to be a chime-adder.
I wiped my eyes, feeling a little more centered, and then Javier said, “You know how I feel about you?” and blew that all to hell.
“I saw how you looked at me through the mirror, that first day,” I said dully, carefully not looking at him. “You were utterly revolted when I took your hand. I’m sure you forgot I could see you. It’s not how we expect mirrors to work.”
The silence on the other side of the bed got very loud. I scrubbed my sleeve across my cheeks, feeling the brocade scratch against puffy skin. “Look, it’s fine. How you feel is how you feel. You’ve been completely professional the whole time regardless. I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m just sorry you got dragged into this.”
“I was revolted,” said Javier carefully, “because when you took my hand, your reflection reached out onmyside and actually shoved its fingersthroughmy wrist. I could feel each one going into my skin and passing through the layers of meat and then hitting the bone. It didn’t hurt, but it felt disgusting.”
“… Oh.”
My sister Catherine had hit me on the side of the face with a bowl once. (It wasn’t intentional, she was getting it down from the shelf and didn’t see me, and I stepped right into it.) What I remember is a bright flash in my vision and then a moment when the whole world slewed sideways and then snapped back into the proper configuration.
This was like that, only without the flash or the headache. I felt the world shift around me. Javier hadn’t been looking at me at all. Why had I believed that he was?
Because it was easy. Because it was what the voice of despair whispered all the time, whenever my guard slipped enough to listen. I was too big, too loud, cared too intensely about things that no one else did. Of course he’d find me revolting. Some days I found myself revolting.
“Have you been thinking that all this time?”
I blinked. “Ah—what?”
“That I thought that about you.”
“Allwhattime?” I muttered. “It’s been what, four days?” Granted, those four days had felt like forty years, but still.
I heard a long sigh from behind me and turned around. He had propped himself up slightly, his arms folded rakishly behind his head. “Is this why you’re always so grumpy with me?”
“No! Well… maybe a little. But mostly I’m just like that. Mostly.”
“Uh-huh.” He grinned. Javier actuallygrinned. I’d never seen such a broad expression on his face. “Meanwhile, I’ve spent the last four days assuming you resented being shackled with a guard who wasn’t nearly as clever as you.”
“What? No! You’re plenty clever. And you know all sorts of things about… I don’t know… this kind of thing. Tracking people and dealing with people with swords and all.”
His face fell like a rooster launched off a cliff. “For all the good it’s done us, since we’re currently prisoners of a woman we didn’t realize existed.”
