“Romantic love? No.” Angry energy nearly crackles in the air around Natasa Markos as she speaks. “I believe in lust and power. I believe in maintaining my people and my line. I believe that even some well-meaning, kind people delude themselves into believing that weakness and pity and submission are the same as love.” She looks back over her shoulder toward a dark-haired man in the distance who leans on a crutch as little as possible, though it’s obvious he needs it.
“I will do my duty,” she says when her gaze returns to the questioner. “Whatever he thinks of me, and me of him. But love has nothing to do with it. And never will.”
This will not end well for Thrie. How could it? She’s a servant of the sister, in love with the brother. The Baroness is jealous and grasping on a good day; the Baron is weaker than he was. And how will he deal with Thrie’s love when she sees him now as broken, diminished, ruined? Andreus Versai is a proud man, and proud men don’t get hard for pity.
Were she mine, I would treat her more kindly. But perhaps she likes looking for the little pearls of kindness from an unkind man. Treasures them, uses them as evidence supporting her own want, who can say?
He is not indifferent to her, and she’s as transparent as fresh-cleaned glass. The fools. This won’t end well for either of them.
Gentle fingertips trace the edge of the wound on her foot, testing it. It isn’t deep, so there was no need for a physician, but still it hurts – all rough edges and the aching throb of swollen skin – and because now she’s been prodding at it, it’s begun to bleed once more. Perfect. And, of course, it’s in a most unfortunate of locations – a slice across ball of her right foot, and if one were thinking the callouses she’s built up would have protected her, they would be very wrong – and every step she’s taken in the past few days has been arduous; she even bled through her socks and stained the insoles of her favorite shoes.
“Now, sister, how did you manage that?”
The voice cutting through the stark quiet startles her, as it always does. She’s known it all her life and yet, still – or perhaps, more so, now – it carries a weight with it. Has the expectation of being a parental, chastising tone, even if such gravity is not present. Perhaps it is there so often lately that she simply assumes it always will be.
Still, when she turns her head to face the speaker, he does not look angry. Nor worried, really; just the face of an elder brother, wondering why his little sister is moments away from bleeding on their mother’s fine Canthan rug. “Andreus,” she says like a sigh, like an inevitability, though curiosity colors her expression. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
His eyebrows knit and he frowns. “Can’t I just want to visit my little sister?”
She chuckles and shakes her head, as her hand goes to absently massage her toes now, perfectly lacquered but aching and slightly bent from a lifetime of walking in shoes that are fashionable, rather than sensible. No, you cannot, she thinks. Or, perhaps, does not is more apt. He could, after all. But he does not. “How I wish for such things.”
Andreus shakes his head and comes to sit on Aia’s left, upon the austere, dark colored couch in their austere, dark colored family home’s sitting room. Aia does not prefer to spend time here – her flat in the reach is lighter, airier, and helps her to feel so as well – but it is an inevitability, given the main offices of Windrider operate from the place. Still, it weighs on her shoulders, this place; she is slumped, and she swears her foot hurts worse just by virtue of her being here.
Her brother looks at her for a moment, silent, and then pulls a clean, white handkerchief from his breast pocket and offers his hand. “Come, let me clean this up before you bleed everywhere; your poor handmaid tires enough from your demands, I imagine, without having to clean your blood from the carpets.”
She crosses her right leg to sit on the left and offers her foot with all the petulant dramatics of a teenager. Her tone is accusatory, laced with venom and disapproval, when she snap replies, “I imagine my girl would tire less were she not kept up all night by–”
“Adaia,” he interrupts, warns.
She pays it no heed, insulted each time either of them think her ignorant of what goes on under her nose. The words are pent up, awaiting any slip so she may spill as many as she can, call out his hypocrisy, before she is silenced. “She cares for you and thinks you the same but you simply use her like some–”
“Enough,” he snaps, and she gasps when his grip on her foot tightens, blood beading from the pressure. His entire manner has stiffened, sharpened, and for this moment he is her superior, not her brother. And that is that – then again, that is always that, when it comes to this. It makes her feel like a child, when he does this; like a girl with her own toys and her own things and her brother comes and snatches them up anyway, makes them his and breaks them without a thought, and she is powerless to stop him.
But the storm quiets, as it always does; anger has never been a thing that has been able to linger between the two of them for long. Besides, she knows it cools so quickly now because she is right, and he knows it.
The stiffness falls from his shoulders, and his grip on her foot, the way his thumb presses against the low arch of it – flat footed little skritt her mother would tease, as she ran around barefoot as a child – loosens to something comfortable. He takes the handkerchief and uses it to clean the newly swelled beads of blood as well as old, to wrap it gently around and knot it tight. Asks, again, “How did you manage this? Were you walking barefoot in the streets?”
She chuckles as she takes her newly bandaged foot back. Her eyes stay focused on it when she asks in return, smile falling into a crooked grin, “Do you remember that time after Countess Smythe’s ball?”
And he laughs, actually laughs, low and deep. “Of course; how could I forget. You insisted on wearing those ridiculous shoes.”
“They were in fashion,” she interrupts, pleading her case.
“They were knockoffs of what was in fashion; as if you couldn’t afford to get the real thing,” he chastises, before continuing. “They hurt your feet so badly that they effectively crippled you; I had to carry you on my back like a pack mule all the way back to the house. I was sore for days.”
She swats him for implying her a heavy weight to bear, but it is in jest, as now it’s her turn to laugh, actually laugh, at the memory. “We were so very drunk, Andreus. I imagine I would not have been able to walk in any shoes.”
He gives her a conceding look, and a wide smile. “Fair enough.” Then, tips his chin towards her foot, and furrows his brow in either confusion, surprise, or reprimand – she can’t tell. “Is that what happened here?”
(Another, newer memory flashes: a touch, a glass dropped and shattered and ignored; a kiss; the press of skin against skin; the though of, how ungentlemanly, and the desire it brought; the drop of her foot off the sofa, pressing against floor, no, glass, the hissing bite of it ignored in favor of arching hips, seeking more –)
She chuckles, low, and shakes her head. “No. Not in the slightest.”
And he does not ask further, and she does not tell further – some things are best kept to oneself, after all. But the earlier memory of the two of them, of her and her brother, has made her sad, and from the look of him, he as well; the thought of them laughing together, drunk, staggering through streets, is simply so starkly different than the way they are now that it almost seems as if they are talking about two other people entirely. As if speaking about the dead.
She settles her expression into something more neutral, and gives him a pleasant, practiced smile. Frivolities must inevitably cease, after all; there is business to attend to. “Now, tell me: what is it you truly came by for, Justiciar?”
And with that his expression hardens to stone, and all returns to as it has become.
