Eona - Alison Goodman [116]
The woman left the iron soup pot on the floor and bowed out of the stable, her eyes fixed on Ido. He was slumped against the far wall, as far from the bristling distrust of the others as possible. Instead of the warden’s ill-fitting clothes, he now wore the dun trousers and tunic of a workman, but the trousers were too short, and Dela had ripped out the tunic sleeves to accommodate his shoulders. Perhaps the goggle-eyed wife was not just overwhelmed by his Dragoneye rank.
In the dim light from the courtyard lanterns, Vida stirred the soup, then ladled out two bowls and passed them to me.
“Don’t let him eat too much.” She measured a small amount between thumb and forefinger. “Otherwise he’ll just be sick.”
Ido, it seemed, had fallen into my care. Not through any desire of mine—more from the refusal of the others to interact with him. I did not blame them. Even starved and exhausted, Ido could strike with venom at any time. His insinuation that I had become ruthless, even to my friends, still pricked at me like a burr caught on my spirit.
I carried the bowls and squatted in front of the Dragoneye. His shorn head was tilted back against the rough wood wall, eyes closed against a shaft of moonlight that slanted across his face.
“Soup,” I said.
He flinched. I had obviously pulled him from the cusp of sleep. The broad planes of his face sharpened into fierce hunger. “Food?”
I held up his portion. Eagerly, he cupped his long fingers around the bowl, but his hands shook so much that he couldn’t raise it to his lips. He bent his head and sucked at the liquid.
“Vida says you should eat sparingly, or you’ll bring it back up.”
He grimaced over the rim. “Shouldn’t be a problem. I can’t even get a mouthful.”
“Here, let me hold it.” I reached for the bowl again.
“No.” He clenched his teeth and slowly raised the soup, the liquid slopping onto his fingers. Finally, he took a mouthful and smiled. Genuine pleasure. It was the first time I had seen him without the arrogance that usually hardened his features, and it stripped years from his face. I had always thought of him as being much older than I, yet Momo had said he was only twenty-four, and if I had ever counted the dragon cycles, I would have known his true age. How did someone get so old in his spirit? The easy answers were brutality and ambition. But perhaps it was impossible to know the truth of another person’s spirit.
I thought of the black gap I had seen in Ido’s crown point of power. Surely such a breach in the seat of insight and enlightenment would affect his spirit in some essential way. And his heart point had shrunk again, too. Did that mean he no longer felt the sense of compassion I had forced upon him?
I took a sip of my own soup—the thin taste almost overpowered by the stink of the sleeping pigs penned nearby—and watched Ido eat with the intensity of a starving wolf.
“Do you still feel remorse for all you have done?” I asked. “I know you felt it in the palace alleyway, and compassion, too. But do you still feel it?”
It was probably a foolish question—he had no reason to admit he was once more without conscience, and every reason to assure me that he was a reformed man.
Slowly, he looked up from his food. “After one hour in Sethon’s company, I stopped feeling anything except pain,” he said flatly. “Do not ask me about remorse or compassion. They did not exist in that cell.”
The memory of his brutalized body leaped into my mind. After what he’d suffered, no wonder his heart point had shrunk again. Perhaps Sethon’s cruelty had created the black gap as well. I watched him again over the rim of my bowl. From the slight turn of his body, it was obvious he did not want to talk of his ordeal. For a moment, I was caught between my own compassion and a sense of macabre curiosity.
“When I healed you, I saw a black gap in your crown point,” I finally said.