It is a lucky thing that Acton missed the new-found hunter in her gaze, the warning for him alone. Hard to say what might have come of it if he had caught it. Instead it is only the rage in her voice as he stared at the deadly blossom between them that made his skin prickle along his back.
If he looked up at her now, he would not have recognized her - she was not the thin, fearful girl from the docks, the one who forgot she bore a horn at all. This Isra knew exactly what that weapon was for.
I am only a weapon newly forged, she said, and at last Acton met her gaze again. In the darkness, in the dim moonlight and guttering candles, she looked like something that waited in the deep. She looked like something that could weigh and measure and find him wanting, and all at once Acton was terribly grateful she knew nothing of his long list of sins. Nothing of Bexley, bleeding beneath dusty rubble, the gold of her all tarnished. Nothing of Lysander, beaten unconscious and left to die in the snow, all for the jealousy of a foolish king.
If she knew - oh, Acton wondered if he would be wherever Raum had fled to.
“That makes you the sharper one,” he said, almost absently. He was looking out the window, now, where the moonlight turned the city silver and glistened off the sea. The mountains were all dark, but Acton knew them like a fox knows its thicket, like a crow its nest.
And Raum knew them, too.
Her question once more drew him back, and the flicker of magic at their feet caught him no less tightly. He watched that flower become other truths, and knew if he touched each one it would be a real thing, no illusion like what he wrought. Isra did not deal in lies, no matter how pretty. Maybe it would have always come to this, one way or another.
Acton regarded her, those ocean eyes that promised storms. “No. I figured that you could figure that one out on your own.” He ought to be calmer, now, seeing she had survived, seeing she was too strong to be made a broken, weeping girl by Raum’s attack. But the buckskin was still tight-wound, taut and grim, anxiety crawling like mites below his skin. He was worried, he was furious, he was afraid - but at who? Of what?
Yet when he spoke, his voice was measured, the consummate performer even now. “I came to - make sure you were okay, I guess. Are you?”
@Isra
