Qanath took a step back from the man glowering at her from the shadowed circles of his eyes. She snorted when she realized he had probably woken the instant she stirred and been lying there for half an hour with his eyes closed waiting for her to do something he could criticize.
Turning away from him, she sat down and reached for her pack. She pulled it onto her lap and dug after breakfast, saying over one shoulder, “Even if I wasn’t both squeamish and moral, you’ve been trained to fight while I have not. I don’t see myself managing to kill you while you lie there helpless, and I don’t have a penis. What’s left?”
“You were trained at the Collure,” he pointed out.
She whipped around, peering over her shoulder. “You actually feel threatened by me.” That, she hadn’t seen coming. She had suggested he was frightened to provoke him.
“Threatened, not necessarily. Rationally wary?” He sat up, rubbing at his face. He combed one impatient hand through his hair, then reached for his knife. Qanath’s mouth fell open, but he didn’t point the knife at her. Grabbing another fistful of hair, he began sawing it off an inch from the roots. It looked like an uncomfortable procedure, but he kept at it, slicing it away in uneven chunks and scattering the fistfuls that came free into the surrounding shrubs.
“What are you doing? Please don’t say cutting your hair, it’s not as witty as you think.”
One corner of his mouth twitched, but she couldn’t tell if it was an aborted smile or the beginning of a sneer. “The curl isn’t natural, you know, the servants put it in rollers. And he would always,” he shook the fistful of hair he was holding. Qanath had seen his master take him by the hair and didn’t ask him to explain the gesture.
Returning to her search for breakfast, she said neutrally, “You seem to be laboring under a misconception about how sorcery works. I could hurt you, sure, but not before you stuck a sword in me. It takes time to put a spell together, anything complicated enough to be worth doing. That’s why sorcery is never used directly in warfare. It’s too slow to be much of a weapon.”
“You can’t, you know, hex people?”
She very carefully didn’t glance at him. “That kind of hoodoo witchery exists only in tall tales. I could set you on fire, but to make you fall in love or suffer a string of bad luck? No way.”
“Huh.”
“You never talked about it? My first day in his house, I was served a cold beer.”
Havec shifted uncomfortably. “He had a few… things that did… stuff, but he never understood how they worked either. It’s not like they tell you, right? He told me he walked into a shop in Saintianos, told them he preferred his beer cold, and they handed him a rock.”
She grunted.
“So could you make us a fire right now?”
“Sure. Do you want me to?”
“Not really.”
She shrugged and went back to eating.
When he was done, his head had become a wild thatch that suited him better than the pretty curls. He reached into his pack and came out with a tiny mirror and slender black pencil. She watched him with her brows climbing as he reapplied his eyeliner, putting it on twice as thick. She had thought he meant to cast off all his vain trappings, but apparently he was just changing his look. When he noticed her watching, he held out the stick as if she might wish to partake.
“Thanks, but I’ll stick with being smart.”
He snorted, but this time she was sure of it: his lips twitched, edging toward a smile. “Probably wise, beauty is dangerous.”
“By which you not-very-subtly call me ugly.”
“I never have. Xar, now…”
“What, seriously?”
“‘Scrawny’ and ‘ferret-faced’ were his words.”
A high-pitched noise slipped between her lips, and she realized she was leaning back from him.
“Hey. Girl.” When their eyes met, he said, “You did not want that man to desire you, trust me. And I don’t think you look like a ferret. Scrawny, though, I have to give him. Women are supposed to be…” He made the shape of an hourglass with his hands.
“You know the first thing about how women are supposed to look?”
He made a face, conceding the point.
Planting a hand in the dirt to brace herself, she sat up on her knees and leaned forward, stabbing her forefinger into the earth between them. “I told you I can’t ‘hex’ people, but you ought to know: one very popular use of sorcery is to keep pests out of homes. If I can make insects go away…”
He stared at her from behind the mask of makeup, eyes wide. Satisfied, Qanath sat back and finishing her crackers in silence, letting him think about all the unpleasant things she might do. Prickly she would put up with – it didn’t seem like she had much choice – but there were limits to how much aggressive rudeness she would tolerate. Havec had been walking a line with her since they met. Time to put her foot down before he got the impression he could ride roughshod over her dignity whenever he felt like it.
It surprised her that he didn’t reopen the fight. After a minute, he shook his head and began stuffing his things in his pack. He vanished into the undergrowth for a few minutes, and when he came back, he picked it up and slung it onto his back. “Ready?”
Qanath had finished her breakfast by then. She donned her own bag while Havec waited with surprising patience. He had definitely changed his mind overnight about attempting to chase her away. His entire demeanor was different, and it was less the hostility that was noteworthy for its absence than the superiority. Like he thought he was twenty years older than her and had the right to tell her what to do.
“So,” she began as they set foot back on the road, “this revenge of yours.”
“You mean the revenge I mean to pursue in another country for personal reasons, none of which has anything whatsoever to do with you?”
“That revenge, yes.”
It might have been a trick of the dappled light flickering beneath a ceiling of tattered, patchy clouds, but she thought his lips twitched again. He was silent for a long time, though, eyes on the horizon. She had decided he wouldn’t answer by the time he did.
Then he drew a deep breath and said almost briskly, “My father had just died. We got home from the funeral, changed out of our things, climbed into the carriages. Mother wanted to retreat to the country for a while, find a bit of peace, but something came up, I never knew what. The grace of the gods, evidently.”
Qanath frowned.
He glanced at her. “Since she stayed behind, it was just me and a bunch of servants. There in the lake house when the bandits struck.”
