Castien’s face was unreadable but his telepathic presence was tense and agitated. “I could erase your memories of this,” he said conversationally.
“You could,” Eridan said, hating himself for not even considering this as an option, hating himself for still trusting this man not to hurt him. “But why would you do this? I will be following your plan to the letter, after all. You lost nothing, Master. Nothing but my stupid affections.”
Castien’s jaw clenched. “Eridan—”
“Don’t worry, Master,” he said. “I will not disrespect you in public. You are still my Master. From now on, I promise to respect your boundaries and try to imitate the behavior of other apprentices. I will be so quiet you will barely even notice me anymore.” He smiled wanly. “You will finally get the unemotional, respectful apprentice you have always wanted.”
He got a weird, twisted kind of pleasure from seeing the shift in Castien’s expression.
Good.
This was the only weapon he had.
Eridan wasn’t sure Castien would even care if he put distance between them—in fact, it was very likely that Castien would be pleased—but this was something that he could take away. Maybe his affection and his trust didn’t matter to Castien, but they did matter to Eridan, and taking them away would at least preserve some of his pride and self-respect when his Master inevitably threw him away like a used thing.
And maybe, just maybe, the distance would help him eradicate this terrible, irrational yearning inside his heart.
Please, he thought, pleading to whatever deity might listen. Please.
Interlude
Irrene was getting desperate.
Her boss was in an absolutely foul mood.
Some people might scoff at the mere notion of Castien Idhron having moods, but Irrene knew better. Over the year since she’d become the new Grandmaster’s secretary, she’d seen Master Castien in several different moods. Roughly seventy percent of the time, he was absolutely calm and unflappable. Twenty-five percent of the time, he was mildly irritated. And five percent of the time, Irrene was scared of approaching her boss for fear of him biting her head off.
Master Castien rarely displayed his anger on his face, but when he was in a foul mood, his telepathic presence became so dark and oppressive it was hard to breathe in the same room as him.
Irrene had learned to just avoid her boss when he was angry, but unfortunately, in the past few months, the ratio of bad days to good days had become decidedly not normal. She had sensed her boss’s growing agitation for months: it had built and built and built, and she had been dreading what was going to happen when so much tension finally found an outlet.
She didn’t understand what was going on. Master Castien hadn’t been that way in the first few months after assuming the role of the Grandmaster. He had been a remarkably calm man—a freakishly calm one, even by the Order’s standards—but something must have happened, because his telepathic presence had become tenser with every month. As months passed, she noticed the visible clues, too: the growing tension around his eyes and mouth, the way he tracked his apprentice with his eyes, something dark lurking in his telepathic presence.
Speaking of his apprentice, the boy had changed his demeanor, too, and even more drastically than Master Castien had. Eridan used to come to the monastery all the time to bother his Master while he worked, but now Irrene barely saw him. When she did, he was quiet and withdrawn. The few times she’d managed to get him talking, Eridan smiled insincerely and told her that everything was fine when she asked him if anything was wrong.
The most disturbing part was when she saw Eridan interact with his Master. Eridan would barely lift his gaze, speaking very little and murmuring only “Yes, Master” or “No, Master” when he was asked something by Castien directly. It was a striking contrast to the boy who had constantly sassed and talked over his Master in the beginning of the year. It baffled Irrene immensely, and she could sense that such behavior only served to irritate Master Castien.
In fact, she was positive Castien’s foul moods were directly linked to his apprentice.
Irrene didn’t know what to think. There were all sorts of rumors about Master Castien and his apprentice, and some of them were not fit for polite company, but she had never believed that Master Castien and his apprentice were in an inappropriate relationship. Not because she thought Master Castien wasn’t capable of it—she had no delusions about him: men like that took what they wanted, and damn the morals—but because she could sense so much toxic, unresolved tension between them that it made her uncomfortable just being in the same room with those two.
As days turned into months, and months stretched into a year, she could sense that things were coming to a head. She had no idea what would happen, but she knew that when that horrible, dark tension building under Master Castien’s skin finally snapped, it would not be pretty.