After a long look, Aryal turned away. She said simply, “They’re dead and it’s awful, and I’m done. I’m full up. I can’t feel anything for them.”
He put an arm around her shoulders and led her away.
They climbed another wide, curving staircase and explored hallways. Quentin opened the large double doors down one hallway and walked into a room that was the size of his apartment at the Tower. A massive bed dominated the room with coverlets and pillows embroidered with gold and scarlet thread.
Wide windows the height of the room looked over the city. The far one faced the white, pillared Temple of the Gods, which stood outlined against the backdrop of the blue-green sea.
There was no doubt in Quentin’s mind whose bedroom this was. He walked around the room, looking in doors. One opened to a huge bathroom, with tiled steps that led down to a walk-in tub patterned with an intricate mosaic. The tub was large enough that a troll could bathe in it. Another door opened to a wardrobe filled with sumptuous clothes that were suitable for an Elven male.
Drawn by the dramatic view, he walked back to the far window. The temple was simple and open to the elements. The side facing the palace had steps leading up to the marble-floored interior. The gigantic statues of the gods on either side, interspersed with columns, provided the main support of the plain prop-and-lintel roof. On the farthest side of the temple, a single god faced outward to the sea. Even though all Quentin could see of that statue was its back, he was certain that it was the god Taliesin, god of all the other gods, the prime mover of the universe.
The bedroom was at the same height as the enormous profiles of the two closest statues, one male and one female, their stern, strong faces looking into infinity. The male statue faced the city, and he held a book tucked under one arm. That would be Hyperion, the god of Law. The female was less easy to identify, but he thought she might be Camael, goddess of the Hearth, age and wisdom.
Aryal joined him at the window.
He said, “Camthalion put himself on the same level as the gods. Can you imagine looking out at this scene year after year for millennia, while possessing Taliesin’s Machine? After all that time I wonder if there was anything recognizable of the original man.”
He glanced at her. As spectacular as the temple was, she wasn’t looking at it. Instead her face tilted up to the wide, cloudless sky, and her expression was filled with so much anguished yearning, it cracked something inside of him.
They were perfect. Perfect, which was insanity all on its own. After hating her so vehemently, experiencing this kind of emotional turnaround was enough to give him whiplash. That issue alone should have been more than enough to deal with for, say, five or six years, but on top of that he also knew what was going on in that spiky, passionate head of hers.
She was about to go into war without having enough to live for.
Gods, he didn’t want to say the things he was about to say to her. He wanted to shut the hell up, take a bath and go to sleep. Heart-to-hearts gave him indigestion. He would do almost anything to avoid them. Hearing the words “we have to talk about our feelings” was the surest way to get him out the door fast, and he had never looked back before, never up until this point in time, with this woman.
He could walk out of this door too and find another bedroom for himself, except that meant he would leave her alone with that heartbreaking expression on her face. And he would rather die than do that, which meant that somehow he had landed himself squarely in the middle of the Deep Shit Zone for sure.
The thought that he was about to initiate a “we have to talk about our feelings” moment was laughable. But there was his internal whip again, driving him forward. With a sigh, he shut and bolted the double doors, and walked over to sit on the edge of the sumptuous bed. He started to strip off his armor.
“I think I might be getting close to mating with you,” he said flatly into the sun-drenched silence. He bent over to work off the leg pieces. “Believe me, I’m very aware of how that sounds. Feel free to laugh if you like.”
He sensed when she turned away from the window, but he didn’t look up. He started working on the other leg.
Still in that flat, matter-of-fact tone of voice, he said, “You’re nothing like anything I would have said I wanted, yet I think you might be everything I need. It’s too early to tell for sure. We’ve spent a week together. One week. Yeah, it’s been one week filled with high stress and intense exposure to each other, and I know this kind of thing can happen fast, but sunshine, we haven’t even really made love yet. All we’ve done is fool around a little. I’m sure you can understand the depth of my perplexity at finding myself in this situation.”
“Are you somehow going to make today all about you again?”
He tilted his head at her. The sun was behind her, rendering her expression unreadable. He said, “Of course.”
He bent back to his task. Elven armor was as light as it possibly could be while still being effective. Still, wearing it over jeans on a scorcher like today was a miserably hot experience, and it was a relief to strip the pieces off. After he took a bath, he was going to raid the wardrobe for something lighter to wear underneath.
She walked over and sat on the bed beside him. He thought he heard her mutter, “So that’s what the crowd in my head has been yelling about.”
He had been in the middle of pulling the breastplate over his head, so he couldn’t have heard her right. “Excuse me?”
“Never mind.” After looking undecided for a moment, she began stripping off her own armor. With her head bent to her task, she asked quietly, “If it’s too soon, why are you bringing this up now?”
Finally he was back down to his filthy jeans and boots. He took off the boots, then turned to kneel in front of her and began to work at the fastenings of her leg pieces. “You know how it goes. ‘Honey, I’m going to war, and I’ve got something I need to tell you.’ ” He leaned his elbows on her knees and looked up at her.
She stopped what she was doing and watched him with a wary, vulnerable look. He almost smiled. She handled her own vulnerability like someone else might handle dynamite, her eyes wide as if something were about to explode in her face.
He said quietly, “I want to know that you’ve got your head on straight when we go to the island tonight. I know you’re struggling with a huge amount of fear. You’ve been doing a good job, but I’ve watched it swallow you up a couple of times, and I’m concerned.”
“I won’t do anything that will get you killed,” she snapped. She yanked at the fastenings of her own breastplate and dragged it over her head.
“That’s not the point,” he said. He reached up to take her face in both hands and insisted that she look at him. “I don’t want you to do anything that will get you killed. You know as well as I do that a fighter who is struggling with despair is a danger to herself. I don’t want you to go into tonight without having considered everything—everything—there is to consider, and yes, that does include me.”
Her expression broke, and the anguish came out. She gripped his wrists. “I’m so scared.”
“I know you are,” he said. “I can’t imagine facing the kind of uncertainty you’re facing. That’s why I’m going to ask you to think outside of the box.”
She looked at him with such surprise he had to laugh. He rose up to kiss her. She put her arms around his neck to hug him with such ferocity, he wrapped her up in his arms too. They held each other tightly.
“Some people,” she said, “would say that I already think outside the box.”