Page 44 of Hemlock & Silver

The intensity of his scowl surprised me. His face fell quite naturally into it, the lines bracketing his mouth deepening into canyons. I wondered what his life had been like in the palace guard, to cause such lines.

“I have no idea,” he admitted. “Damn. I hate it when you’re right.”

“Sorry.” I flopped on my back across the bed. “I just really need a nap. Right now.”

I remember him taking my sandals off and me muttering some kind of thanks, and then I was dead to all the world.

When I woke up, the sun had begun to sink. I sat up in bed, my head pounding. My mouth felt as dry as the desert outside.

“Saints. I feel hungover,” I muttered, scrubbing at my face. I’d slept in my clothes, which didn’t help.

“You look hungover,” Javier said mercilessly. “Drink some water.” He handed me a mug. The water was tepid, but slid down my throat like silk.

“Thank you. Wait… what are you doing here?” I squinted at him over the rim. “I thought you were leaving.”

“I didn’t. Obviously.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be on guard duty?”

“I’m your guard. This is my duty. The captain’s been informed.” He snorted. “The nightly patrols here are basically to justify the expense of having guards and to keep any of them from getting too drunk on shift. Well, and to watch for fires.”

“Oh.” I drank more water. My eyes felt gritty. (That’s caused by your tears evaporating while you sleep, incidentally. Tears are salty, so when your eyes dry out, tiny salt crystals get left behind. Bodies are so marvelously revolting.)

“Should I send for some dinner?” Javier asked.

“ Saints, no.” The thought of food was appalling. This really was exactly like a hangover.

I felt human enough to get to the privy, then went to the washroom.

A little water splashed on my face revived me about as much as I was going to be revived.

The face in the mirror looked better than it had the night I’d eaten the apple, but there were bodies pulled out of rivers that looked better than that, so that wasn’t saying much.

My braid was a dead loss. You could only call it a braid because there was no reason I’d have three angry snakes in a mating ball on the back of my head. I pulled out the ribbon and sat down on the bed, combing through it with my fingers.

“So what do we do now?” I asked.

Javier grimaced. “I was about to ask you that.”

“You’re the expert military person.”

“My military days are long behind me. Being a palace guard is just a lot of standing around.” He folded his arms, obviously deep in thought.

I gazed out the balcony doors at the sky, pretending to also be thinking, but mostly just admiring the sunset.

There’s a saying about red sky at night, shepherd’s delight, but it doesn’t really work here, since the sunsets are almost always red.

I suppose if there were a storm, you wouldn’t see the red, though.

“Have you tried confronting Snow?” Javier asked.

“Kings’ daughters get the same sunsets as the rest of us,” I informed him.

“What in the name of Saint Sheep’s sullen eyeballs are you talking about?”

“I…” I put a hand to my forehead. “I think I’m more tired than I thought, actually. Never mind. Confront Snow how?”

“Tell her you know about the mirror and the apples,” Javier said. “If you’re interrogating someone, showing them that you already know something about it makes them more likely to let something drop. They don’t want to be caught in a lie.”

“Interrogating someone? I thought you said that your job was just standing around.”

“Sometimes I stood around interrogation rooms. The point still stands.”

“Right.” I went back to work re-braiding my hair. “So I tell Snow I know about the mirror and apples and hope she mentions the name of the person who’s doing this.” I grimaced. “I do not like plans that rely on my skill at verbal manipulation.”

“They’re not going to let me talk to her,” Javier pointed out. “Being the healer’s bodyguard does not convey the same authority as being the healer.”

I groaned. He was right. I didn’t like that he was right, but the world had a bad habit of not taking my likes and dislikes into account. “Right. I’ll do that. Tomorrow.”

I realized at that point that my braid was badly off-center, muttered to myself, and unbraided it. I had only just started again when Javier sighed and said, “May I?”

“Sure,” I said, with absolutely no idea what he was talking about. He stood up and patted the seat of the chair. I sat down in it, still confused, and he picked up the mass of my hair and began to braid it.

Oh.

Oh, that was nice .

I’d never had a man braid my hair before. He wasn’t running his fingers through it in an erotic fashion or anything—he was, if anything, ruthlessly competent as he scraped it back—but I could feel my scalp tingling in a way that made my toes curl.

Oh Saints, I do not need another fetish right now. I particularly did not need one centered on a man who had looked at me like I was a piece of salmon left out in the sun for too long.

I was a little surprised he was even willing to touch me, given that, but it was possible that competence had overridden disgust. I should not be aroused by a man who is disgusted by me. I told my sanguine humors this. They laughed at me.

I tried to distract myself by talking. “Thirty-five years old, and I still haven’t mastered braiding my own hair.”

He grunted.

I carried on. “You’re good at this.”

“Two younger sisters.”

“Ah. I didn’t know that.”

“No reason you should.”

“Still. You know all about my family.”

“I’m a bodyguard. It’s part of my job.”

“Yes, but you’re more than a bodyguard now. You’re my… err…” I tried to think of the appropriate term. Fortunately his fingers were away from my scalp now, plaiting the hair, and coherent thought had gotten a bit easier. “Partner in crime?”

He grunted again.

“Co-conspirator?” Grunt. “Fellow victim of circumstance?”

Javier sighed, patted my shoulder as if I were a horse whose mane he’d braided, and stepped back. “That ought to hold for a bit.”

“Thank you.” I ran my hand down it. It was much better than my attempts had been, and all it had cost me was a deeply inconvenient and misplaced arousal. I made another attempt to distract myself. “So we’ve both got younger sisters, then.”

“Seems that way.” I thought for a moment that he was done, but then he added, “And a younger brother. I was the oldest.”

“Me too. Though I never braided my sisters’ hair. Our mother did Isobel’s, and Catherine used to shriek when anyone waved a hairbrush in her general direction.”

“My mother died when I was seven.”

“This is why I don’t make small talk,” I muttered, half to myself. Javier snorted. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s fine. That was a very long time ago. But that’s why I learned to braid hair.”

I wondered if it was also why he’d joined the military, to send money back home. I did not think this was a good time to ask. “Thank you,” I said, touching the tight weave of my hair.

Javier frowned. “Do you think you’ll be okay?”

“I’m fine. I feel like hell, but I’m fine.” (Also, there still wasn’t a damn thing he could do if I wasn’t, but that would probably only lead to more discussion.) I got to my feet.

Javier gave me a brooding look. An actual brooding look, not the dramatic reflecting-on-personal-woe-to-be-interesting kind.

That one only looks good on poets. This one made him look thoughtful and a little stern and altogether too handsome for a man in my bedroom whom I couldn’t do a damn thing about.

“I’ll check on you tomorrow,” he said, as I opened the door to let him out.

“I’ll try not to be dead,” I promised him, and closed the door.