Rook(23)

He pulled up a stool. “Are you in pain?”

“Some,” Sophia whispered, giving the word the tiniest tremble.

“Look up at me, and watch the candle.”

He held up the light and put a finger to her chin, peering down into her eyes. She watched the candle, but mostly she was watching him, trying to see any remnants of the man she thought she’d been engaged to. Even with the polish gone, René Hasard still looked more than capable of flirting with a girl at a Bann’s ball. He raised and lowered the candle, moving it from side to side, the wandering light and shadows making the fire-blue gaze into something wild. Sophia revised her earlier assessment. This René would definitely flirt with a girl, but then he might also nick her purse. He sat back suddenly, and Sophia let out the breath she’d been holding.

“You have some concussion, I think,” he said, setting the candle on the little table beside the cot. “Your eyes, they do not change quickly for the light.” He reached for the edge of her blanket, and Sophia gripped it harder. This time his smile was a little sly. “You will permit?”

She permitted. She’d thought better of it, anyway. She watched as he pulled down the blanket, bashful through her lashes. The act of being coy was costing her, but at least she wasn’t manufacturing the embarrassment; that much was real.

“And turn,” he said, adjusting her body so that she was almost completely on her unwounded side. Sophia winced, this expression also unfeigned. He lifted the end of her bloody shirt, exposing the bandage and also her skin from her breeches to about halfway up her rib cage. She concentrated on the movement of the flames in the hearth as he undid the knot in the cloth.

“Where did you get the bandage?”

“My shirt, it is not as long as it once was,” he said. “It is very sad.”

She glanced at his face, but it was inscrutable in shadow. Then the air hit her cut and she hissed. She tried to raise her head up to see, but that was painful as well. She dropped it back onto her arm, and remembered to use the tremble. “How … badly am I hurt?”

René didn’t answer, and still she could discern nothing from his face. He began probing the wound, cool air and warm fingers gently moving across her skin. His palms were calloused. She tried not to shiver. The fingers left her, and when she looked up, there, all at once, was the René she knew, the one from her Banns. If not in dress, exactly, at least in expression.

“Well, my love,” he said brightly. “I am guessing that you would like to keep this little accident to yourself, with no one the wiser, yes? Do tell me if you disagree.”

Warning bells went off in Sophia’s head. “Yes, it would be better,” she replied, casting her eyes down in a way that she hoped was demure. “My father would worry so.”

“And your brother?”

“Yes. He would worry.” What she really wanted was for Tom to come banging down those steps with his stick and tell her what to do with this enormous package of enigmatic trouble that was René Hasard.

“And what about my cousin? He comes to dine with us tonight, does he not?”

The warning bells were at full tilt now, and Sophia’s head throbbed. She had completely forgotten LeBlanc’s intended presence at their dinner table. Perhaps he would be caught up in his cross-country pursuit and not make an appearance. But that, she knew, was too much to hope for. She lifted her eyes to René. The blue was almost hidden by heavy lids.

“I do not see why this cannot be our little secret, my love.” He leaned close and gave the end of her nose a tap with his finger. “When we are married you will keep all my secrets, yes?”

Then he was on his feet. Sophia bit her lip, watching him move to one of Tom’s cabinets near the workbench. It was amazing that he could look so different, so different she was having a hard time looking elsewhere, and yet still manage to be so incredibly irritating. And dangerous. Very, very dangerous.

René was bent down now, rummaging inside the cabinets. He seemed to have already explored the place fairly well because he straightened almost immediately, emerging with a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other. He bit the cork, pulled it out with his teeth, and spat it onto the floor. Sophia felt her eyebrows rise.

“I do not share your brother’s taste in drink, I fear,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “But this should ‘do the trick.’ That is what they say in the Commonwealth, is it not?”

It certainly would “do the trick.” The bottle was one of Mr. Lostchild’s homebrews, used for cleaning the artifacts Tom dug up on the estate. Sophia had never known anyone to drink it but Mr. Lostchild, and he was no longer living.

She shook her head, meaning to refuse, and was immediately sorry. The pain in her skull quadrupled. She put a hand over her eyes. Her side burned like a hot poker had been applied, vomiting was not entirely out of the question, and her recently turned rogue fiancé was trying to get her drunk, or possibly decapitated, she wasn’t sure which. She wanted her bed.

When the wave of pain eased, she found a glass of clear golden liquid on the table beside her head, and René with his untamed hair behind an ear, hunched over the candle. He was running one end of a needle back and forth through the flame. It took a moment for the significance of the needle to set in.

“Oh, no,” she said. “No.”