Roar (Stormheart #1)(79)
“I went by your room to see if you needed help changing the bandages on your legs. And … if you wanted to talk.”
Oh heavens. She imagined what would have happened if she had been in her room, if he had come inside and sat on her bed and touched her legs. It was enough to make her shiver and pull the shawl tighter around her shoulders. She was a fool. A stupid, stupid fool.
“I changed the bandages myself.”
He said, “Earlier … at the altar—”
Roar sucked in a breath. Could this man do nothing but poke at the things that she was trying desperately to ignore?
“It was nothing,” she said quickly. “There is very little religion in Pavan. The old myths are but fairy tales there. I suppose I let myself get spooked by the idea that the storms could hear us, could listen and choose and act as a human might.”
That was a good enough reason, and might have even been the truth.
“I don’t know that they listen. But choose? Yes, they do that. You will learn quickly in the field that you can never depend upon a storm doing what it ought. The more potent a storm’s magic, the more … sentient … it seems.”
More things for her to fear, to fill the swirling mass of information in her brain that just wouldn’t stop.
“Are you superstitious?” he asked.
“Not particularly.” Though fear was its own kind of superstition.
“Then why worry so much over a bit of blood on a stone?”
“Because clearly I know scorch all about the world. About this life. Even about myself. Perhaps I should be superstitious.”
After all, hadn’t lightning flashed overhead as she spoke the invocation? Maybe it knew what she was after, that she meant to steal its heart and return home.
“Blind belief is a comfort; it is the frame that puts the rest of the world into context. It allows us to block out the things that don’t make sense, that which frightens us. It narrows our vision so that the world does not feel so large. Would it comfort you to have the frame of superstition? To believe that if you say the right words and sacrifice the right things, then your world will stay exactly as it is? Or do you wish to choose what you believe, what you trust and understand?”
“I do not wish the world to stay as it is. I do not wish to narrow anything. I spent my entire life confined in Pavan, confined in my thoughts and my actions. No. I would not wish the world small, not even to be less afraid.”
“I do not think you could be small if you tried.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” She had been poked fun at for her height before, most often by petty boys who had to look up to meet her eyes and did not know she heard their whispers. She hadn’t expected it from him, even with all the friction between them.
“I did not mean it as an offense,” he said, sitting up, his body suddenly much closer than it had been. She abandoned looking at the stars to stare at her hands, the lines on her palms and the curve of her nails. “I only meant that you are … rather impossible to ignore.”
She scoffed. “If you’re not meaning to give offense, you are spectacularly bad at giving compliments.”
“I never seem to say the right thing to you.”
“It’s just as well,” she said. “I have lost all appreciation for compliments. They’re little truths and half lies that say more about the person offering them than they do about me.”
“I don’t think I have ever met a woman who hated compliments.”
“Not hate. I just don’t trust them.”
“I’m sensing a pattern when it comes to you and trust.”
“And I’m sensing a pattern when it comes to you and saying the wrong thing.”
He laughed and held up his hands in mock surrender. “Very well. I am done pushing.”
He didn’t continue, and she didn’t know how to reply, so the night grew quiet between them. A gust of wind picked up her hair and blew it across her face. She turned to dislodge it and found him staring at her, his body leaned back and propped casually on his hands. She faced forward again, and let her hair blow as it would. She asked, “What do you believe? What frame do you choose for your world? Or do you believe in anything at all?”
“I believe in survival, which means my frame is flexible, ever changing. I believe what I must, do what I must.”
“Is that why you became a hunter?”
He asked, “Is it why you became a hunter?”
“You cannot answer a question with a question.”
“I believe I just did.”
Infuriating man. “You were young, when you met Duke. Weren’t you afraid?”
His legs moved in the corner of her vision, the heel of his boot scraping at the red sand. “By the time Duke found me, my choices were few. The number of us children on the streets had grown, and the crown saw us as a nuisance. Children began to disappear. Some likely snatched and conscripted into the military. Others were too young. There were guesses about what happened to them, most of them horrible. I would not put anything past the Lockes. By that point, I saw death as an inevitability, so if there was a way to do it outside that miserable city, that was enough for me. But, as it happens, being unafraid to die makes for a very good storm hunter.”
She glanced at him over her shoulder, not turning completely but enough to see the way the moonlight reflected off the bridge of his nose and the sharp angles of his cheekbones. “How old were you?”