Page 7 of A Court of Truth and Thorns (Royal Scout #2)
KALI
L uca’s head jerks back, a bit of blood trickling from his lip. His eyes flash, his right hand cocking over his shoulder, the knuckles aimed at my lip.
I throw up my arms and—
A pair of hands grips me from behind, wiry arms hauling me away as Trace tackles Luca to the ground. I struggle to join them.
“Stop, Kal,” Wil’s voice commands in my ear.
I let my hands drop slowly, my body shaking. My breaths come in short, heaving bursts.
In front of us, Trace now straddles Luca, pinning down the man’s wrists. “You don’t raise a hand to her,” Trace shouts into Luca’s face. “Or I will rip your eyes out myself and feed them to the hogs. Understand?”
“She did strike him first,” Calvin points out, staying well away from the fray.
Trace twists toward the older man. “And you think that makes it all right? ”
“I think none of this is all right, Prince Rune,” Calvin answers calmly.
“Starting with the fact that, of the seven escaped survivors of the coup, one is blazing with fever and three are brawling like cats in heat. If you might kindly release Master Luca and explain why you will not heal the child, I believe we would all value the insight. I presume that healing does not, in fact, have anything to do with the patient’s desire to procreate. ”
Trace snarls once more at Luca, then jerks himself away and walks up to me. “Are you all right?” he asks, his fingers touching my elbow.
Wil wisely steps away.
“Of course not.” I wrap my arms around myself and glare at Luca, who is watching me warily, tugging his disheveled clothes back into place.
“Trace can’t heal Jasmine because he used all the power of his only healing crystal to save my life after Viva Sylthia captured me.
I understand that your preference would be different, but we can’t exactly change the past.”
“Captured by Viva?” Luca repeats.
“That’s what I just said. Is there a bloody echo?”
Trace touches my face, his eyes finding mine. “You don’t owe him a story,” he says softly.
“Like hells she doesn’t,” Luca says.
Calvin clears his throat. “Master Luca, what is it that has you so homicidal just now? The fact that an Everett prince concealing himself in King Firehorn’s personal guard decided against revealing his origins to you?
Or that a scout followed that same king’s orders instead of telling you who she was? ”
Luca’s jaw tightens. “They didn’t seem to have a problem sharing as much with each other.
” He sighs and slides down the wall until he’s sitting on the ground, his head in his hands.
“Bishop Bahir is a violent traitor who murdered my king. The dead Prince Rune of Everett has been protecting Prince Wil, the son of Everett’s chief enemy.
And the boy I’ve been training to fight is a girl who doesn’t need any guard training because she is a scout.
I don’t bloody know up from down anymore. ”
“You think that’s bad?” Wil says, settling beside Luca. “Try getting a throne and losing it in the same two minutes.”
Luca shuts his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Stars. Wil—”
“Don’t say it.” Wil’s words are clipped, his forearms resting on his bent knees. His gaze finds the ground, drilling into the hard-packed earth. The cave falls quiet for several heartbeats until a low sound from Wil’s throat rumbles through the air. A sound suspiciously close to laughter.
“Wil?” I say, feeling Trace’s heavy hand on my back.
The prince’s shoulders shake, his quiet laughter bouncing through the cave. “Oh, stars.”
“Your Highness?” Trace says quietly. “What—”
“Sonia.” Wil snorts, the laughter bubbling from him in earnest. “At the Wandering Dog. I was thinking of the Wandering Dog, when Luca hired a girl for Kal.”
A corner of Luca’s mouth twitches. “Kal looked like a startled rabbit. I thought I was doing a good thing, you know.” He glances at me, just a touch of the eyes, but a touch nonetheless. “What did you do with her outside?”
“A gentleman doesn’t discuss such things,” I tell Luca.
His smile widens. “Is this why Trace stopped training with Kal all of a sudden?”
Trace crosses his arms. “I don’t hit women.”
“Actually,” Wil raises a hand, “I believe you hit them just fine. Unless it was another Kal you whipped in the North Wood.”
Trace pulls his arms around himself. “I didn’t know. ”
“I believe that particular oversight has been remedied now, no?” says Luca, sending Wil into another absurd burst of maniacal and slightly infectious laughter.
At least laughter is better than murder.
We spend what’s left of the night in uncomfortable sleep, Calvin suggesting that we might wake feeling better. Stronger. I can’t help wondering whether I’ll wake up to find Trace gone.
Trace does not, in fact, disappear under the cloak of darkness. Neither does fatigue nor humiliation.
My limbs are heavy as I go through the motions of checking weapons and bootlaces and supplies, my eyes occasionally straying to Trace and never finding him looking back.
When we finally move out with the morning sun, I carve out a quiet place for myself at the head of the group, where I can look forward and see nothing but trees.
“So, what do I call you?” Luca asks, matching stride with me after two hours of silence. It’s slowly getting chillier the farther we get from Dansil, and I wager that evergreens will outnumber the other trees in a few days’ time.
I squint to block out the sun’s rays as I judge our path, calculating whether Calvin and the girls would do better with a longer, flatter trek or a shorter uphill hike. It’s easier to think about the forest than about what’s happened.
Luca clears his throat and I realize he’s still waiting for an answer.
“Kalianna,” I say, steering us toward the flatter path.
“No,” Luca drawls. “That won’t do. Too many syllables.”
“What?” I turn to face him finally. “It’s my name.”
“Don’t you have a better one?” Luca sticks his hands into his pockets. “What do your friends call you? ”
My jaw tenses. “Scouts don’t have friends, Luca. We have marks.”
Luca makes an uninterpretable sound in the back of his throat and walks beside me in silence for another dozen steps before speaking again. “What I said last night was unforgivable. But I apologize nonetheless.”
I turn my face away, my skin heating anew. Beside me, Luca kicks a flock of pebbles down the path, the small stones skipping and singing when they hit bigger ones. Scout, Luca is not.
“Stars, Kal. I’m an idiot,” he says softly. “Ten kinds of idiot. You were right to slug me. And if I were in Trace’s shoes, I’d have taken my head off for me and shoved it deep into my ass. Then again, it might be there now.”
Trace . What does it mean that Luca, not Trace, is here talking to me? Does Trace regret kissing me? Think me an added complication in an already too-complicated existence?
“How is everyone holding up?” I ask. Is Trace as aloof as I am this morning?
“As well as can be expected,” says Luca. “Jasmine is weak but Trace says this course will take us right to an Everett fighting camp. He hopes some of the men might be superstitious enough to wear healing stones. And if not, then a magic-free healer will do.”
So Trace is active and strategizing. Relief and anger hit my gut together.
For a heartbeat, I can think of nothing but how warm he tasted, how he smelled of the forest and sweat and steel.
And how small and inconsequential a kiss must be in the life of a prince, even one fallen from his kingdom’s grace.
I brace myself to ask my next question. Luca is hardly the ideal person to ask, but I’ve no one else. Never have. “Luca?”
“Mmm?”
“How many women have you kissed? ”
He looks sideways at me. “I don’t keep notches, Kal.”
My face heats but I press the point. I need to know what’s normal, what importance people who are not me place on that touch of lips. “A handful? Ten? More?”
“Stars, Kal, couldn’t you have asked me that before I knew you were a girl?” He blows a strand of hair from his face. “Dozens. Maybe more. I’m considered quite talented by most ladies.” He shifts uncomfortably. “You weren’t looking for... er... advice, were you?”
“No!” The heat beneath my cheeks turns to flame.
“I mean, I’m sure you’d have good advice but I think I’ll little need it.
” I close my eyes. “That sounded wrong. I just mean, thank you—you’ve told me what I needed to know.
” Dozens. No doubt, Trace has explored as many lips, women he’s tasted and forgotten.
A kiss is nothing to those who aren’t me.