Crown of Shadows - C. S. Friedman [101]
She went.
He had gone a block by the time she caught up to him; rather than touch him, she ran up beside him and willed him to notice her. He did, and his face grew suddenly pale. He stopped walking, but she had the impression it was more because his legs had failed him than because he really wanted to talk to her.
“Why?” she demanded. “Just tell me that, all right? No pretty lies, no petty excuses. Just tell me.”
He opened his mouth, then shut it again. She could see the tension in his jaw, in the tightening of his brow. At last he turned away and whispered, almost inaudibly, “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“And what the hell do you think you’ve been doing?” There were tears coming to her eyes now; she wished she knew how to stop them. “Did you think you weren’t hurting me with your silence, back there? Did you think I wouldn’t hurt all those days that you avoided me? Was that all for my sake?”
He flinched, but didn’t turn back to her. “You don’t know my life,” he whispered hoarsely. “You don’t understand the risk involved—”
“Then explain it to me!” She reached out and grabbed him by the nearer sleeve, pulling him back to face her; her strength in doing so seemed to surprise both of them. “Let me make my own decisions, damn it! I’m a grown woman, not some empty-headed doll that can’t think for itself! Give me a little credit for intelligence, will you?”
A fruit vendor from down the street was watching them. She didn’t care. The only thing in the world that mattered to her now was the man before her, and the tear she thought she saw forming in his eye. Good, she thought fiercely, so you can hurt, too. Maybe when you’ve hurt as much as I have, then we can do something about it.
“Look.” His voice was tender as he took her by the shoulders, his fingers warm about her arms. “I’ve been ... cursed. Do you understand? Everything that I touch falls to ruin. Everyone that I love dies. I don’t want that to happen to you.”
“Andrys—”
“I can’t ask you to share in that kind of risk. I can’t let you be involved—”
“I love you.” The words came unbidden to her lips, but as soon as she spoke them she knew they were true. “Don’t push me away. Please.”
“Oh, God.” He turned from her, and lowered his head into his hand. Where his sleeve pulled back from his wrist she could see a narrow scar, freshly healed, right above the vein. “Don’t do this. You don’t want me. You don’t want my burdens.”
She put a hand on his arm, ever so gently. “You don’t have to face them alone,” she told him. A passing woman with a dog stared at them for a moment, then walked quickly past. “Not if you don’t want to.”
He drew in a deep breath, shaking, and wiped his hand across his eyes, smearing their wetness across his cheek. “You don’t know where I’m going,” he whispered hoarsely. “You don’t know what I’m doing, how dangerous it is—”
She hesitated for only a moment. “I know you want to kill the Hunter. I know he’s your own flesh and blood, the man in the painting you showed me. I know. . . .” she thought of his pain in the shop, and his panic the first time he tried on the armor. “I know it’s tearing you apart to even think about it.”
His eyes widened in surprise, and she could sense the unvoiced question behind them; How did you find that out? But instead of voicing it, he said, “Then you know the risk. You can understand that when he finds out what I’m planning, he’s sure to strike out at me, and anyone who gets in the way—”
“He can’t hurt me,” she told him. Feeling her heart pounding anew, as she sensed the power of those words.
“What? What do you mean?”
“He promised that he would never hurt me. And he keeps his word, Andrys. I know that for a fact.” There were tears in her eyes now, too; with the back of a hand she quickly wiped them away. “So you see? I’m safe.” Safer than you, my love.
“But how—?”
She told him all of it. The chance encounter on a lonely road so long ago. Her abduction from the city by men whose faces she never saw. The three nights in which she was hunted, only to find that the Hunter, once recognizing her, stood by his promise.