Second Night

The second feast was worse than the first.

Aldric did not think that would be possible. He had spent the day preparing for it the way a soldier prepares for battle. He had eaten. He had drunk water. He had stood in his room and breathed slowly and told himself that what he was about to endure was temporary and necessary and that his lady had asked it of him and that was the end of the calculation.

He was wrong about the calculation. It was not the end. It was barely the beginning.

Caswell's men were looser tonight. The agreement had been signed that afternoon in Elara's study with Aldric standing at the door. Caswell had signed with a grin and a flourish and Elara had signed with her face empty and her hand steady and when it was done Caswell had shaken her hand and held it a moment too long and said "Pleasure doing business with you my dear" and Elara had smiled and said nothing.

Harren had not been at the signing. He had been in the courtyard drilling with Caswell's men. Aldric had watched him from the wall. The man moved like something built for violence. Not the desperate violence of a bandit or the trained violence of a household knight. Something more natural than that. Violence that lived in his bones and came out in everything he did. The way he held a sword. The way he walked. The way he looked at people.

The way he had looked at Elara.

The feast began and Aldric took his post. The hall was louder tonight. More wine had been opened. Caswell's men had brought a fiddle player from somewhere and the music filled the stone walls and bounced and clashed with the noise of drinking and laughing.

Elara wore the red dress again. She sat at the head of the table this time instead of beside it. Caswell sat at her right hand. Harren sat at her left.

Aldric watched.

Harren did not bother with whispers tonight. He spoke to Elara in a voice that carried. Not loud enough for the whole hall to hear but loud enough for Aldric to catch pieces. Compliments about the dress. Comments about her hair being down again. A joke about the quality of the wine that had nothing to do with wine. Elara responded to each with short words and a small smile that looked real and was not real. Aldric knew it was not real because he had seen her real smile. He had not seen it often. Once when the boy brought her a flower from the garden. Once when Briwer made a dry comment about the weather. Those smiles were small and brief and they reached her eyes. The smile she gave Harren stayed on her mouth and went nowhere else.

Harren put his hand on the back of her chair. Then on her shoulder. Then lower. His fingers traced the line of her dress where it met her skin and Elara did not move away. She turned her head toward him and said something and he laughed and his hand stayed where it was.

Aldric's knuckles were white inside his gauntlet. The bones of his hand ached. His jaw was clamped so tight that his teeth hurt. He stood at his post and he watched and he did not move because he had said he would not move and his word was the only thing he had that was truly his own and he could not break it even if the breaking would have felt like relief.

At one point during the feast Elara looked at him. Just once. A quick glance across the hall. Her eyes met his for less than a second and in that second he saw something that he could not name. It was not apology. It was not reassurance. It was something colder and more deliberate than that. It was the look of a person checking to see if the blade was still in the wound. Checking if it still bled.

It still bled.

She looked away and she leaned slightly toward Harren and she laughed at something he said and her hand came up and rested on his arm and Aldric felt the thing in his chest break a little further. Not all at once. Just a crack. A widening of the fissure that had started the night before.

The feast went late. Caswell drank until he could barely stand and was taken to his quarters again. His men filtered out in groups of two and three. The fiddle player packed his instrument and left. The servants cleared the tables. The fire burned low.

Harren was the last to leave. He stood and stretched and looked down at Elara and said something that Aldric could not hear. Elara did not respond. She sat very still with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the table. Harren laughed and walked out of the hall and his boots were heavy on the stones and then he was gone.

Silence.

Elara sat at the head of the table. The candles had burned down to stubs and the light was orange and unsteady. Her face was in shadow.

"Come here," she said.

He walked to her and stood before the table. She did not look up. Her hands were still in her lap. Her shoulders were rigid.

"Did you watch tonight."

"Yes my lady."

"All of it."

"And what did you feel."

He said nothing. She looked up.

"Tell me."

"I felt nothing my lady."

"Liar." Her voice was quiet. Not the rage of the night before. Something worse. Something controlled and precise. "You stood there with your hand on your sword and your jaw locked and you tell me you felt nothing. I could see it in you from across the hall. Do you think I do not know what that looks like. Do you think I cannot read you."

"What would you have me say."

"The truth."

He looked at her. She looked at him. The candlelight moved on her face.

"I wanted to kill him," he said.

The words hung in the air. She did not flinch. She did not blink. Something moved behind her eyes and it was not fear. It was satisfaction.

"Good," she said. "That is what I needed you to feel. That is what I needed to see."

She stood and came around the table and stood close to him. Close enough that he could feel her breath on the steel of his breastplate.

"Tomorrow they leave. And then you and I are going to have a conversation about what you feel and what I am going to do about it. Go to your room. Do not come to the hall until I send for you. Do you understand."

"Yes my lady."

"Good. Go."

He went. He lay in the dark and did not sleep and the words played in his head. What I am going to do about it. He did not know what that meant. He did not know if he wanted to know. But his body knew something his mind did not because his heart was beating fast and his hands were no longer shaking and there was something in him that was not dread and was not fear and was not anger. Something that pulled him toward her the way iron pulls toward a magnet. Something that would let her do whatever she wanted because she was the one doing it.

He lay in the dark and waited for morning.