EIGHT - Luvon
"I don't know what to do with her, Fentris." We'd both been awake for too long by the time we'd gotten a chance to rest. Once the Seelie had packed up after being scared away by Hanna, we'd cleaned things up as best as we could. I'd spent the morning searching the battlefield for injured men while Fentris had gone off after the horse Hanna had lost. He figured if we had a shot at desensitizing one of the horses to lightning we might as well start with the one that had thrown her the night before. I regretted that she wouldn't be going home, but then I thought about the crumpled slip of paper in my pocket and her story about Zinvaris and regretted that I couldn't immediately rip his balls off and feed them to him.
What if she hadn't been on her toes?
But she had, thank the gods, and I'd spent the early afternoon with her asleep in my paws as proof of it.
"In what way, boss?" Fentris dragged me back into the present. The bonfire in front of us consumed most of the wreckage of broken carts and other burnable junk that had accumulated over the last several days. Most of the officers wouldn't have helped, but then again, a good portion of them had just gotten killed while the troops stood around and let it happen.
I sighed, throwing some more broken and unsalvageable cart wheels onto the pyre while I tried to sort out my brain. "She thinks someone was trying to kill her, but I think they were trying to capture her."
Fentris' eyes narrowed. "I've been wondering about that Zinvaris feller that you sent me to Jiyya with."
Fentris may as well have smacked me with some of Hanna's borrowed lightning. I'd never said anything to him about my concerns regarding Zinvaris, but he had come to the same conclusion on his own. "What do you mean?" I asked, eager to compare notes.
"He's always hangin' around, seems a little too concerned with her, if you ask me. He doesn't say anything, but he's always there at the villa, just like he was always around the office."
"Was he?" I'd always been inside the office, but Fentris had frequently been assigned to guard it from the outside. Once I started promoting him he spent less time guarding it but I asked him to try and stay close. For the most part he had, blending in seamlessly while grooming horses in the nearby stables and taking care of other messaging-related tasks that no one else paid much attention to, all the while keeping a weather eye on Hanna's guards.
"I thought, since he was a sergeant, that he'd have better things to do. But he'd always be there, sniffin' around and tryin' to look invisible. He's no good at it, that one. Loud, clumsy, of course I guess he's usually not concerned with sneaking up on his victims." Fentris laughed darkly, but his words chilled me beyond what the growing desert night had on offer.
"Hanna thinks he was in our bedroom each night I was gone." I said it quietly, unsure if anyone was near enough to hear us over the roar of the fire. Fentris looked more dangerous than I'd ever seen him. The firelight illuminated his rough features, lending them a harder edge than they normally possessed. He was half-fae and really didn't look like us, other than his size. His face was uniquely human but there was always something wolfish about him. I worried I shouldn't have said anything about Zinvaris.
"If he'd captured her-" Fentris began.
"I know," I interrupted him. I thought about the mage-rope in my pocket. I'd collected it from the Seelie warrior that had almost taken her on the battlefield the night before. I didn't want it to fall into someone else's hands in case anyone else had the same idea, nor leave it behind for the Seelie to claim it and try again. Had Zinvaris been smart enough to carry such a thing? Or had he thought he'd be the first man to have a one-on-one with a lightning-tossing tempest and win it? It was a fool's errand, and I wondered who had sent him on it.
"Until today, only you, Krana, Travaran, and those rabid puppy-killers of yours knew she was a tempest. If it wasn't for her magick, why else would he want her? Somehow word hadn't gotten out - likely due to the respect Fentris' new unit found for him almost immediately, and Hanna's gifts had remained a secret until her debut on the battlefield.
Fentris cleared his throat, left briefly, then returned to feed more trash to the fire.
"I don't know how to say this nicely, boss, so I'll just say it."
"You're the closest thing I've ever had to a real friend, Fentris. You can speak freely with me."
Fentris nodded and nibbled on his lower lip. "You know your, let's call it, intimacy issues?"
Upon swapping Fentris' conscription ribbons for his officer's ribbons I'd learned that he was the same age as me and had a wife and children. I'd confided in him that I didn't know much about women. I'd told him Hanna was afraid of me, confessed I didn't know how to avoid impregnating her, and then, after the help of lots of ale, told him I was afraid she'd roast or drown me mid-coitus. It was humiliating, but I was glad to have it off my chest at the time, and glad for the advice and instruction he'd given me in return. Now I wondered where he was taking this.
"Yes," I said as quietly as possible.
