tasted her salt sweet blood as she shivered with the pleasure that my feeding gave her. My own pleasure welled, spilling over in an act even more intimate than that of physical love.
I withdrew my lips from her scented skin, my hunger assuaged, content to hold her until she stirred, which she soon did. She smiled at me again, and reached for the wine. I gave her the full glass and fetched the tray, conscious as I walked that her eyes never left me. The dish held slices of rare beef and several oysters, similar to many of the meals Rózsa had fed me, in return, I suddenly realized, for my feeding her.
Sylvie took a slice of the meat and neatly ate it, not spilling a drop of the juice onto the sheets, while I sampled the wine, which I found refreshing but, as she said, not intoxicating. “These foods are good for rebuilding the blood, you see,” she told me, and tipped an oyster into her mouth. When she finished her meal she set the dishes on the floor and curled up against me.
“You were distressed earlier,” she murmured, resting her head on my chest. “Why?”
“Because I can no longer read, and writing is—was, my life. The man who did this,” I touched the patch covering my right eye-socket, “took more than my vision, and my life. He took my reasons for living,” I growled caustically.” And someday, someday I will meet with him again, and when I do—”
“I will rip his throat out, if you like,” Sylvie offered casually, and I glanced at her to see if she was serious. She was. I shook my head.
“No. No, I’d not want you to soil your teeth on him,” I said, but somehow that matter-of-fact proposition had restored my humor.
“My lord? My lord Prince Geoffrey said you would heal, did he not? And you have healed so much already, you have no reason to disbelieve him.” With a lurching in my stomach, I understood that Sylvie had seen me when I was—it could as easily have been her that I had raped and almost murdered. A shudder racked me, threatening to become a convulsion. She sat up and slapped me smartly on the cheek, replacing the horror that threatened to overwhelm me with pure astonishment. “My lord, Kit, listen to me. It was not your fault. We had no experience to guide us, and anyway, Annette could have changed her shape to escape you! She accepted that it was an accident, as much as the one that later killed her. She was born under an unlucky star,” Sylvie added sadly. “It was always so, from the time she was a child. If a tree limb was going to break it would wait until she climbed that tree, or if a horse was planning to bolt, it would always wait until she was near. It wasn’t her fault, any more than it was yours. It just happened.” I stared at her for a few seconds.
“I thank you for that,” I said.
I irritably pushed my dripping hair out of my face, glaring at the two men who had me backed against the wall, the tips of their swords dancing before my throat, my hand stinging from the forceful blow that had disarmed me. For the last two weeks I had spent as much time as possible in the salle, both in solitary drill, and in practice with Geoffrey and Nicolas, the latter being startlingly agile and deft in his movements for a man of his build. Laughing at my vexation, the two turned away. Geoffrey scooped my dropped weapon off the floor and tossed it over his shoulder to me in a single elegant movement. I caught the sword by the hilt and lowered it slowly to my side. Last week, in a similar situation, I had lost my temper and rushed Geoffrey’s back, only to have the blade knocked out of my grasp for the second time in as many minutes, and it had seemed like hours before my hand had stopped tingling. A few paces distant, Geoffrey spun on his heel. “Excellent! It took us almost twice as long to disarm you, you did not lose your composure, and you did not let our switching hands startle you!”
“I didn’t have the time to be startled!” I replied, trying to keep the annoyance out of my voice. I mopped at the sweat on my forehead with a sleeve that was itself