“No,” he answered her, bald honesty for once. “Not me, personally. But all of us, all of Denocte, not just because of that damn gate but because they made no effort to listen-” that far, that much, before he caught himself, shook his head like there was a buzz between his ears.
But it was enough, not just too much to tell her but enough to get that black roiling in his stomach again, that angry flame that ate and wanted and wanted and ate. That needed somebody to blame. And the regime he’d left was good for that, yes they were, with their knowing smiles and their we know best and their disappearing behind closed doors while Isra wept and still smelled of singed hair, of burning.
They’d almost killed her, they could have killed any of them, and hung their power like a gallows over all their heads. And they hadn’t done more than pretend to listen to their people.
It was the kind of wound that stung and stung the more you worried at it, and it was back open now.
She was close to him now, but he was hardly aware of it, except when he nearly drunken-swayed into her. He was too busy being back there, in the smoke and anger of it, all action and dread. A clamor of voices that all rose together and were silenced, dismissed.
And for what? Acton couldn’t figure it, especially not now, head muddled and dizzy with music and drink.
Luckily their walking, their conversation, was a tide and it carried him on, until he blinked to find her staring at him after his careless compliment. She was right – he didn’t know the measure of it at all, what it took to rule a land. He’d never wanted that, never sought it.
Those unmatched eyes once more unsettled him, and he stopped. A cool breeze tugged at his dark hair and her bright, and pressed against his cheek like a kiss. Her words were serious (were they ever not serious? She is his opposite in more ways than one) and he listened to them with due gravity, but he could not help matching them up against what he’d seen from his own king.
“You’re right,” he said, and meant it, the same kind of open, almost angry honesty it had been before. He felt, drunk and otherwise off-kilter as he was, that he could fall into those eyes that met his own, and that if he did they would burn him alive. “You’re right,” he repeated with the listing firmness of the fairly drunk, “and that’s what makes you better than the rest of us, Seraphina.” Acton did not say it with any kind of crooked sarcasm or eye-rolling judgment. He said it and thought of his own regime, who he could not picture standing here and saying fault is irrelevant.
It was a relief when she turned away, and he could feel his body loosen when the weight of her gaze moved off of him. Suddenly the night had sound and color again, and all at once Acton felt terribly tired. Bone-weary.
At her last words he twisted an ear, dropped his chin another fraction. Before he answered her he started moving again, back to his aimless walking, tugged on by the pull of the crowd.
“I thank the gods I’ve never wanted it, then,” he said darkly, and did not laugh.
He was going to have a wicked hangover tomorrow.
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