Like when she suddenly threw them across the floor, scattering the rest of the strand. And then brought her wrists up to her face, a sound halfway between a sob and a curse emanating from behind them. “Auria—” Mircea said quietly.
“Get out!”
“No.”
“No?” She looked back at him, confusion and anger on her lovely face. “You dare—”
“Yes, I dare.” He tried to help her up, but she slapped his hand away.
“The arrogance of the prince!” she spat. “I suppose it’s hard to learn to take orders, after growing up in a palace!”
“I didn’t grow up in a palace.”
“Compared to where I did? Compared to where Sanuito did?” She laughed, and it was ugly. “Yes, a palace!”
“Perhaps. But we’re all the same now.”
“The same? We’ll never be the same! If you spend the rest of your life a slave, it won’t make us the same! You can’t know—”
She broke off, turning her face away. And tried to get up. But her heel caught on the edge of her gown, and she sat down on the tile rather abruptly.
And then just stayed there, staring at her hands.
And then up at him, looking strangely lost.
The antimony she’d used to outline her eyes had run, leaving what looked like dirty tracks down her face. Her lipstick was smeared; her hair in unusual disarray. But it was the eyes that caught him, large and dark and haunted.
“You can’t know,” she said again.
“Then tell me.”
She laid her head back against the carved front of a chest at the end of the bed. And stared at the boards of the ceiling above. Where the frescoed decadence of the walls gave way to the more rustic, bare bones look of the old storeroom.
“You wouldn’t understand if I did.”
Mircea looked around. There were two folding chairs under the window, but she didn’t look like she felt like moving. And neither did he.
He hadn’t fed in hours, and the small reserve he’d had had been expended on the chase. He was so tired, even the floor felt like goose down as he settled in front of her, in the small puddle he’d already managed to shed and didn’t care about since he couldn’t get any wetter. She didn’t object.
“Wouldn’t understand what?” he asked softly.
She shut her eyes. “What it’s like to be powerless. Truly powerless.”
“I think I know everything about that,” he said, thinking back over the last two years.
But Auria was shaking her head. “You know nothing about it. And if you live to be as old as that senator of yours, you’ll never really understand it. For that, you have to grow up with nothing. You have to be hungry most of the time and anxious all the time, never knowing where your next meal is coming from. Or if you’ll have a roof over your head tomorrow. You have to wear rags that get smaller as you grow because you can’t replace them, to the point that men start accosting you in the street, mistaking you for . . . something you’re not. Not then, at least. You have to have your mother sell you anyway, to the first one who offers to pay. You have to run away, and discover that it doesn’t matter, that they just drag you back, and make you . . .”
She cut off and they sat there, silently, for a long moment. Mircea wanted to say something to take that haunted look off her face. But he somehow knew it would only make things worse.
She didn’t need platitudes; she needed to be heard.
So he sat there. And dripped onto her floor. And listened.
She wrapped her arms around her knees, and then laid her head on them, looking suddenly childlike. “Do you know who Sanuito was, before he met you?” she asked, after a while.
“Bezio thinks he might have been a soldier. That he’d been traumatized in battle at some point, and that was why—”
Auria shook her head. “He was never in battle. He was never much of anything before they found him, his old ‘master,’ and that creature. You heard about the bet?”
Mircea nodded.
“That’s why they chose him. Sanuito was nobody, would be missed by nobody. He’d never been anybody, born to a whore, raised as a cut purse. At least until the smallpox, which left him too scarred to be forgettable and too weak to run away. Or to gain employment from people who only wanted strong backs. But alms, too, are hard to come by unless you’re young and attractive or old and crippled, and he was neither. Just hungry and desperate, with no one to turn to. Until he met you.”
“I didn’t do anything for him,” Mircea said harshly. Except watch him die.
She smiled wryly. “Oh, no. Nothing. Other than standing up to a room full of the Watch and Martina’s demands, with no weapons and no leverage—not even any clothes! He told me about that, in something like awe. Said he wouldn’t have done the same for you. Wouldn’t have even done it for himself.”
“I think he might have been wrong about—”
“You think that, yes!” Blue eyes flew open. “Because that’s what you would do. What you were trained to do—to stand up for yourself, to take control, to lead. We don’t think like that, Sanuito and me. Life’s taught us to keep our heads down, to stay out of trouble, to avoid making a fuss. He told me he was too afraid to move that night, like I was when—” She broke off abruptly.
And then got up and began putting her jewels back in their case.
“Like I was tonight,” she finished.
“There was nothing you could have done, Auria.”
He’d meant it to be comforting, but it seemed to have the opposite effect.
“Nothing?” She rounded on him. “I’m a century older than you! And I’m faster. Stronger. More resilient to all that fire that was being flung around. I might even have caught him! But we’ll never know now, will we? If I’d had time to think—”
She broke off, and threw the last of the precious items back into the cask. “But you didn’t need it, did you? You didn’t have to think about it.”
“There was no time, and I didn’t know what he might do—”
“No, you didn’t.” She stopped to look at him. “That’s my point, Mircea! You didn’t know what he might do, yet you went anyway. Immediately. While the rest of us stood around gaping: passive, accepting, useless. Oh, shocked, yes; horrified even. But we did nothing. Except watch the great lord go charging after him—”
“Followed closely by the blacksmith,” Mircea pointed out.
“That doesn’t count.” She brushed it away. “Bezio jumped because you did. He would have followed you into hell if you’d asked him. They all would, him, Jerome, even Sanuito. . . .”
She made a sound between disgust and distress, and got to her feet, putting the jewel cask back in place. “I’m sick of this, of being helpless. I’ve been sick of it for . . . as long as I can remember. I always thought, when I got older, when I gained power, that it would be different. That I would be different. But then tonight . . . I may be weak by vampire standards, but I had enough power to save him. I had enough to do that! And I didn’t use it. I didn’t do anything.”
Mircea watched her for a moment, torn. But he couldn’t allow her to believe something that wasn’t true. That was, in fact, pretty much the opposite of the truth.
“You were shocked and frightened, Auria,” he finally said. “And had never been trained to react in a crisis. Of course you hesitated. If I’d had more time to think about it, I . . . might have acted the same.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“You should,” he said bitterly. “Sanuito had a lead, and with the thickness of the crowd and my power level—I should have known I wouldn’t catch him. I should have stayed put. Should have remembered . . .”