I Eat Monster and Gain Powers

Chapter 16: Go, Now!

Two days changed her the way two days had never changed anything before.

She woke on the second morning without the fog behind her eyes, without the ache pulling at every joint when she moved, and she knew her body well enough after eleven years of training to know what that meant. The worst of it was behind her. She could stand without the cave tilting. She could walk to the mouth of it and back without her knee buckling. She was going to live, and living meant thinking past the next hour, and thinking past the next hour meant thinking about home.

She started with the armour.

It sat where she had shed it against the cave wall, dented and torn, the leather beneath it shredded in three places by teeth that had gone through steel plate like it was cloth. She pulled it on piece by piece to test her range, the shoulder first, wincing at the pull of the healing wound, then the chest plate, and it was while she was working the straps of the chest plate that she felt it. His eyes.

He was across the cave pretending to work on a spear that did not need working on, and his eyes were not on the spear.

She had noticed it the day before too, small things, the way his gaze dropped to her chest when he thought her attention was on the fire, the way it lingered a half second too long on her hips when she crossed the cave, the way he would catch himself doing it and jerk his eyes away like they had burned him. She was a knight of Rostalio. She had spent a decade learning to read a man’s intentions off the angle of his shoulders and the set of his jaw before he had finished forming them, and she did not need a shared tongue to read what was written all over this one.

He wanted her.

That was not the frightening part. Men had wanted her before, plenty of them, and she had spent a decade learning what to do about that too. The frightening part was the way he fought it. She watched him grunt low in his throat and turn away from her sharply, watched his hand curl into a fist against his own thigh, watched the muscle in his jaw work like he was chewing on something that would not go down. He was not fighting the wanting because he lacked the strength to act on it. She had watched him tear three wolves apart with his hands. He had all the strength in the world.

He was fighting it because some part of him had decided not to use it.

That was the thing that kept her up at night more than the memory of her squad dying in the snow. Not whether she should give herself to him. That question had never once entered her mind, not for a heartbeat, not even in the quiet hour before dawn when the cave was dark and he was the only warmth in it. Her question was simpler and colder than that.

How long before he stops fighting.

He had saved her life. She held that fact carefully, turned it over, weighed it, and it did not weigh what she thought it should. He had chosen to come down out of those trees. She had not called for him, had not begged him, had not offered him anything in exchange for it. Whatever debt existed between them, if any existed at all, was his to have created, not hers to repay with her body. And even if some part of her had wanted to, even if the animal thing in him found some answer in the woman half of her that her training kept locked down tight, there was a ring on her hand and a promise made in the sight of the Torak’s own priest, and Lord Rordan Donalia was waiting for her return, and the chief of Ronta Vro almost certainly believed her dead along with the four other women of her squad.

She had a duty. She had always had a duty. It was time to get back to it.

She waited until the light was good and the fire was banked low enough that she would not have to explain leaving it, and she walked over to where he sat sharpening the horn dagger against a stone, and she knelt in front of him.

”Thank you,” she said, in Torakei, the words coming slow and careful. ”For the food. For care of me.”

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He looked up at her. Nothing in his face moved.

She tried again, gesturing this time, both hands flat against her own chest and then out toward him, the oldest gesture there was for gratitude, and his brow creased like he was trying very hard to solve something and could not find the shape of it.

She bowed. Low, from the waist, the bow she would give a lord, and she held it a long moment before straightening, and she pointed to herself and then out toward the trees, toward the direction she thought civilization might lie, and made the shape of walking with two fingers.

He watched all of it. Something was moving behind his eyes now, some machinery grinding after months of disuse, and she saw the exact moment it caught.

He pointed at his own chest.

”Me,” he said.

The word came out wrong, cracked in the middle, like something dragged up from the bottom of a well that had not been touched in years. He tried again.

”Me... ”

His jaw worked. His hand came up and pressed flat against his own chest like he needed to hold the word in place while he built the rest of it.

”Eto,” he said.

She went very still.

Keth. He was speaking Keth. Badly, brokenly, the accent all wrong in a way she had never heard before, but Keth, words she recognized, and the shock of it nearly knocked her backward onto the stone. Eto. That was his name then. She had spent three days beside this man and had not had a single sound to call him by.

”Eto,” she repeated, testing the shape of it. Then, slower, working through the unfamiliar words of a tongue she had only ever half learned in a garrison classroom a decade ago, ”I... am Freya.”

Something happened to his face that she had not seen on it before. It moved, actually moved, the corner of his mouth pulling up under all that beard, and for one moment he did not look like a thing that had crawled out of the ground of Edelmere. He looked like a man.

He pointed at her.

”Freya,” he said. Then at himself. ”Eto.”

”Yes,” she said, and pointed back the way he had, matching the rhythm of it, ”you, Eto. I, Freya.”

”Good,” he said, and the word wobbled up and down like he was not sure how loud it should be, too loud and then too soft in the same breath. ”Now... you sleep.”

She blinked. ”It is day,” she said.

”Yes,” he said, nodding hard, something lighting up behind his eyes that had nothing to do with language and everything to do with the thing he had been fighting for two days straight. ”We sleep together now.”

And then he was on his feet.

He started jumping, actual jumping, hopping in a rough circle in front of her, thumping his own chest with his fist and grunting low with each hit, and it took her a full second to understand that this was excitement, this was a man who had just found the word he wanted and had thrown every ounce of his control behind it in the same breath. Seemingly he had forgotten his leg injury his or excitement outweighed the pain.

”No. No no no no no no!” She was on her feet too, both hands crossing in front of her chest over and over, the sharpest gesture she had, the one that meant stop in every language she had ever needed to learn it in. ”I not sleep with you. I engaged.”

She held up her hand, the ring catching what little light came through the cave mouth, and then her other hand went to the gold chain at her throat, the pendant tucked under her collar, Cassian’s family crest worked into the metal.

He stopped jumping.

He stopped with his fist still pressed against his own chest, mid strike, frozen there like something had reached inside him and shut off the current, and the excitement drained out of his face so fast it left something else behind, something flat and cold and much worse.

”I sorry,” she said, and meant it, and hated that she meant it. ”This hard for you. But I took oath.”

He stared at her.

It went on long enough that she started to wonder if he had understood any of it at all, if the two words he had were the whole of what he had, and then he spoke, one word, so low and so deep it came up through the stone floor of the cave as much as through the air.

”Go.”

”I not hear you,” she said.

”Go.” Louder this time, loud enough that it hit the cave walls and came back at her from three directions. ”Now.”

Every instinct her training had ever put in her went taut at once. This was not the same hunger she had spent two days watching him fight. This was something under it, older and darker, the bloodlust of a killer who had just watched something he wanted get taken off the table by a piece of gold and a promise he could not read. She took a step back without deciding to.

”Eto, you don’t stay here,” she said quickly, the words tumbling out faster than her grasp of the language could properly shape them. ”Come with me. There is village near.”

”GO!” His voice broke the cave apart. ”PLEASE!”

The force of it staggered her, one hand shooting out to catch the wall, and in his eyes she saw all of it laid bare, the hunger and the grief and the fury at himself for wanting something he could not have, and underneath all of it the thing that frightened her most, the animal barely holding the man’s shape at all.

She dropped her head.

She turned, and she walked out of the cave, and she did not look back.