Page 28

28

Control

Anya

I dris did not speak much the following day.

He didn’t seem embarrassed by his drunken visit to my room, just horribly hungover, and out of pity, I let him ride Briar. I preferred to be on foot, anyhow. The events in Brine—the monster, the kiss, his visit to my room, along with the proof that I truly need not worry about his appearance in my Mirror of Death—all filled me with an excess of energy that was best walked off.

We reached a tiny village just before nightfall, no more than a cluster of homesteads among fields of agriculture. The air was still and had turned bitter, the sky clear and unforgiving. Briar’s hooves clattered on the frozen mud of the High Road, and as soon as the sun slipped behind the tree line, frost formed on the grass in a sparkling crust.

Idris wanted to pass through the village and travel through the night, to make up for our late departure from Brine—but when one of the villagers spotted us, he flagged us down and insisted we stay the night, out of the cold. Apparently, tales of Idris’s bravery had already spread ahead of us, and the folks here thought it an honor to host the famed hero of Brine.

A half hour later, we were seated on the common room floor of the village’s largest home (a modest four-room cottage) with eighteen members of their total population of twenty-five. The congregation included our host—Bren? Wren? I hadn’t caught his name—his wife Tura, their five children, their closest neighbors, and their children, along with a few stragglers.

Throughout supper, they peppered Idris with questions, which he managed to evade with varying levels of finesse. I didn’t know the exact rules of his Oath, but I knew secrecy was involved, and as the night wore on, Idris appeared more and more run-down from the tediousness of avoiding questions he couldn’t answer.

I tried to interject on his behalf when I could, but many of the questions—especially those regarding the monsters’ existence, like where they came from and why no one had ever heard of them before—were ones I harbored, myself, and I found it hard to disregard them. Idris stuck to his rabid wolf story, but even he seemed wretchedly unconvinced.

After our bowls of root vegetable stew were emptied, the neighbors had gone home, and the children had been tucked into bed in the other room, Idris and I sat across from each other at the family’s worn oak table, cradling cups of peppermint tea while our hosts prepared dessert in the conjoined kitchen.

Idris looked worse for wear. Dark circles shaded his tired eyes. His mouth drooped in a lopsided frown. His forearms rested limply on the table, candlelight catching on his knuckles and the veins in the backs of his beautiful hands like sunlight setting over rugged ridgelines.

The cheerful commotion of welcoming strangers had me feeling quite the opposite of the way he looked. I was revived, bolstered by this home away from home—but, then again, I hadn’t drunk my bodyweight in ale the previous night.

“How are you faring?” I whispered, keeping my voice low so that our hosts didn’t eavesdrop from the other room. From what I’d gathered from the story of how they’d met—the humorous tale relayed to us two hours ago—they both possessed sight magic.

Idris sighed through his nose, causing the curl of steam above his mug to scatter and reform. “It’s exhausting being a hero,” he said. “And it’s been a long time since I was this hungover.”

My mouth quirked, and without really thinking, I reached across the table to trail my fingertips along his wrist. “You poor thing,” I teased.

His attention snapped to our hands. Perhaps my consoling touch had been a mistake. I made to draw back, but Idris caught my fingers before I could, tugging at them with his own in a silent signal that the touch wasn’t entirely unwanted. When his tired eyes found mine, they were inquisitive.

But before either of us could speak, our hosts returned, and we both let go.

“What’s this?” I asked politely as they arranged four tiny plates of jam and fluffed cream on the table.

“Tura’s specialty,” the husband—I still hadn’t confirmed his name—said, pulling up a chair. “The cream’s from our beloved cow, Chicken—the kids named her that,” he added with a laugh. “And of course, Tura made the jam, too. Sweetest blackberries in all of Fenrir, I say, due to the thicket’s proximity to the Wend.”

“Wren exaggerates,” Tura said modestly, taking her seat as well.

“What a decadent treat,” I said brightly, picking up a spoon, “you’re spoiling us.”

Idris lifted a brow at my overly polite tone. The excitable energy of the last few hours was subsiding, easing into a somewhat awkward quietude in the presence of these strangers; I didn’t want them to take Idris’s weariness personally.

“I think I missed where you two were headed,” Wren said, taking a tentative sip of his own tea. “Seems a rough time of year for travel.”

“We’re heading to the capital,” I said. “We’ve some…business to attend to there.”

“Fenrir City!” Tura exclaimed. “I should’ve known the famous Hero of Brine would have important business there.”

“What sort of business?” Wren asked—an innocent question if it weren’t for his prying eyes dipping to Idris’s Oath tattoo.

“This and that,” I answered for him.

Wren didn’t even glance in my direction. He was still staring excitedly at Idris, clearly spellbound by the idea of having a knight at his table. “What sort of knight are you, anyway?” he asked, leaning his elbow on the table. “Not sure you said earlier.”

“He didn’t,” I cut in.

Idris looked up from his dessert. A bit of cream clung to the stubble on his chin, and for a moment I imagined climbing across the table and licking it off. Catching my expression, Idris cocked his head to one side, a familiar wry smile ghosting across his lips. Heat prickled across my cheeks, and—too flustered to keep looking at the man seated across from me, even after he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand—I dropped my focus to my plate, fixating on the task of spooning up the perfect bite of jam and cream.

It had been a strange twenty-four hours, filled with fateful revelations and harrowing heroics, and that kiss that made the tip of my tongue tingle even now, just thinking of it. As much as I basked in the hospitality of Brine and this small village, I found myself suddenly missing the solitude of the road, where I had Idris’s attention all to myself.

Then again, the idea of having those blue-green eyes fixed on me now, with no distractions, sounded akin to standing with my toes to a fire—too intense for more than a few seconds.

“ Wren ,” Tura scolded, her sharp tone shaking me loose from the fantasy of my own thoughts. “You can’t ask a knight about his Order.”

“He doesn’t have to answer,” Wren argued, swiveling his arm on the table—only to knock Tura’s plate into her lap.

“ Fates ,” she swore, jumping up from her seat and sending the plate and spoon clattering across the floorboards.

A brief scramble ensued, in which Wren sprung to gather the dishes from the floor while Tura quickly wetted a napkin in her tea to dab at the jam covering the front of her pale blue dress.

“Oh, that’s going to stain,” she said miserably, rubbing furiously at the purple splotch. She was clearly trying to hold it together for our sake. “Wren, you can be such a ninny sometimes.”

My gaze shot to Idris, who promptly lifted his mug to his lips, eyes wide over the rim.

“I’m so sorry, my sweet, so sorry,” Wren kept saying, bustling around her unhelpfully.

Tura didn’t say more, but her cheeks were the bright pink of a woman truly upset. “This is my favorite dress,” she murmured, still scrubbing at the stain. Her tone was impossibly light, bemused, almost humorous—which told me she was on the verge of hysterical tears.

“I can help with that,” I said, rising from my chair, too. “We can make it like new.”

When she looked at me, tears were wobbling along her lower lashes. “Oh, you’re just saying that to make me feel better. It’s clearly ruined.”

“No, truly,” I said, laying a steadying hand on her arm. “Back in Waldron, I run an inn, so I’ve battled many a stain.” I made a cringing face, and Tura chuckled. “I have a trick I can show you. Do you happen to have any snowberries growing near here?”

Tura visibly cheered. “There are a bunch along the barn, in fact. Let me get changed and I’ll show you.”

The next hour went by in a flurry, the four of us collecting berries in the frosty dark, bringing our foraged treasures into the kitchen, and working the berries’ juice—which could be frothed into a soapy lather—into the stain in Tura’s dress.

Silly as it was to take pleasure in laundry, it felt good to remove Tura’s pain and embarrassment and turn the mishap into something sweet again. After feeling so helpless on the road, I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed bettering peoples’ lives. And given the grim uncertainty of what awaited me in Fenrir, it was nice to clean up a tangible mess, to feel accomplished .

When finally, Wren and Tura retired to their bedroom, Idris and I laid out our bedrolls on the common room floor. A faint smile played across my face as I replayed Tura’s expression in my mind, watching as the stain faded away, her whole demeanor lightening. I was still distracted by it while I blew out the candles on the table, which were no more than soft piles of wax this late into our long evening in this nameless village.

Darkness consumed the unfamiliar room, and I shuffled across the floor, feeling my way toward my makeshift bed with my feet. My toe caught on the edge of something firm, and Idris—supine already—reached out, staying me with a hand on my bare ankle.

I halted, teetering more from his touch than a lack of balance. His grip sent a pulse up my leg straight to my core.

“Please don’t step on me,” he said.

I looked down at him, unable to make out much in the dark other than the vague shape of his body blocking my path. “Please don’t trip me,” I replied.

His palm slid under the hem of my dress, cupping my calf. Fingers brushed against the back of my knee. Ever so gently, he guided my leg up and across his chest, setting my foot safely down on the other side.

For a moment, I stood over him, my ankles bracketing his waist. The air felt charged with a sudden, heady tension. As my vision adjusted to the dark, Idris’s eyes looked like the two brightest stars in the night sky, giving me the odd sense that the floor and the ceiling had switched places.

Wobbling slightly, I continued my path across the obstacle of his body and lowered myself to my bedroll a safe two feet away. Then I spent far too long folding and refolding my cloak into a pillow. By the time I rested my head atop it, I half expected— hoped , really—that Idris would be asleep; he’d had a long couple days.

But as I stilled, settling into my blankets, he piped up quietly. “I think you made Tura’s whole week.”

“Oh, please, you were the main draw this evening,” I said. “I just saved us an awkward night of listening to their hushed argument in the other room.”

He chuckled. “You really do enjoy helping people, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re good at it.”

I turned onto my side to face him. “Thank you.”

“Far more natural at it than camping,” he teased.

I chuckled. “Being useful is one of my favorite things. After feeling so useless on the road, it felt nice to turn things around tonight.”

“Why is that, do you think?”

“In Waldron,” I said wistfully, “I’m the one everyone turns to for help. I guess it gives me a sense of security. I like feeling like people need me.”

“Hmm.” His tone had a slight edge to it—judgement.

“What?”

Idris—still on his back—rolled his head to the side to appraise me. “Tonight was like watching you disappear.”

“Excuse me?”

“The helper version of you is…different. More polite. More bubbly in your response to things—like Tura bringing dessert—and more calculated with your quips, like you were trying to manipulate her feelings.”

“You take issue with my being a gracious guest?” I asked tightly. Feeling defensive, I added, “I was trying to make her feel better .”

And here I’d been proud of how I’d saved the night.

“I’m not articulating this right,” Idris said, scratching his jaw.

“Did it ever occur to you that I’m my normal self with others, and I save all my rude, sharp edges for you?”

He pinned me with his celestial stare—not cool like the river tonight, but molten. “You seemed relieved to have a role,” he said. “Relieved to lose yourself in fixing her problem.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” I snapped. “When it feels like my problems are unfixable?”

The statement was like a collapsing bridge, hard stone damming the river underneath, halting all flow of conversation. Idris didn’t speak for so long that I eventually gave up on waiting and turned over to face the opposite direction.

But before I fell asleep, his voice rasped against my senses, coarse as sand. “For the record, Anya, I like your edges, best.”