She got up, and let her skirts drop, and smoothed them down, her face to the floor. He reached for her shoulder. 'Ardee—' She shook him angrily off, and walked away. She tossed something on the floor behind her and it rattled on the carpet. The key to the door.

'You can go.'

'I can what?'

'Go! You got what you wanted, didn't you?'

He licked disbelieving at his bloody lip. 'You think this is what I wanted?' Nothing but silence. 'I love you.'

She gave a kind of cough, as if she was about to be sick, and she slowly shook her head. 'Why?'

He wasn't sure he knew. He wasn't sure what he meant, or how he felt any more. He wanted to start again, but he didn't know how. The whole thing was an inexplicable nightmare from which he hoped soon to wake. 'What do you mean, why?'

She bent over, fists clenched, and screamed at him. 'I'm fucking nothing! Everyone who knows me hates me! My own father hated me! My own brother!' Her voice cracked, and her face screwed up, and her mouth spat with anger and misery. 'Everything I touch I ruin! I'm nothing but shit! Why can't you see it?' And she put her hands over her face, and turned her back on him, and her shoulders shook.

He blinked at her, his own lip trembling. The old Jezal dan Luthar would most likely have made a quick grab for that key, sprinted from the room and off down the street, never to come back, and counted himself lucky to have got away so easily. The new one thought about it.

He thought about it hard. But he had more character than that. Or so he told himself.

'I love you.' The words tasted like lies in his bloody mouth, but he had gone far too far now to turn back. 'I still love you.' He crossed the room, and though she tried to push him off he put his arms around her. 'Nothing's changed.' He pushed his fingers into her hair, and held her head against his chest while she cried softly, sobbing snot down the front of his garish uniform.

'Nothing's changed,' he whispered. But of course it had.

Feeding Time

« ^ »

They did not sit so close that it was obvious they were together. Two men who, in the course of their daily business, happen to have placed their arses on the same piece of wood. It was early morning, and although the sun cast a stinging glare in Glokta's eyes and lent the dewy grass, the rustling trees, the shifting water in the park a golden glow, there was still a treacherous nip to the air. Lord Wetterlant was evidently an early riser. But then so am I. Nothing encourages a man to leave his bed like being kept awake all night by searing cramps.

His Lordship reached into a paper bag, drew out a pinch of bread dust between thumb and forefinger, and tossed it at his feet. A mob of self-important ducks had already gathered, and now they fussed at each other furiously in their efforts to get at the crumbs while the old nobleman watched them, his lined face a slack and emotionless mask.