They ate in the same strangled silence. Something was different, that was for sure, but he wasn’t sure an outsider to the situation would see it. Acantha was still keeping her silent guard vigil at his side, methodically eating her meal with her gaze fixed on nothing in particular. If not for the fact that he could see the slightest shadow of a bruise swelling on the line of her throat, he’d have been giving serious consideration to the idea that he really had dreamed what had happened between them. But he hadn’t. He couldn’t have.
He busied himself with his meal instead, unable to keep his eyes on her a moment longer. Maybe if he stared down at his plate for long enough, all of this would vanish—or at the very least, he’d be struck with inspiration about what he could possibly say to her. The plate remained stubbornly blank behind the food scraps he was pushing at. And when Acantha’s voice sounded, the surprise of it sent his fork flying across the room. He stumbled to retrieve it, adrenalin charging through him, and by the time he’d returned to his seat Acantha was looking at him expectantly. And finally, he found his voice again.
“Sorry?”
“I said, I’ve agreed to escort my sister and the archivists on a field trip tomorrow. You’ll be accompanying us.”
“Oh,” he said faintly. “Good. Great. Yes, sure, that sounds—thank you, and—great.”
Her expression didn’t flicker, but did she hold his eyes for a fraction longer than necessary before returning her gaze to her plate? He had no idea. His heart was pounding as though he’d just narrowly escaped a battle to the death. So she was talking to him now? Were they moving into a talking-to-each-other phase now? Or had he failed her test and been doomed to silence again? For someone who so prided himself on being quick-witted, he’d done a pretty poor job there. She’d be within her rights to return to the silent treatment.
They wandered out of the Palace after dinner, as had become their habit—or his habit, at least, with Acantha patiently dogging his steps with one hand always close to the hilt of her sword as a reminder that she wouldn’t hesitate to stop him from doing anything she didn’t approve of. Today had been more than sufficient proof of that, he thought—then realized to his surprise that his head didn’t hurt at all where she’d struck him. Luck, maybe. Or the healing power of—
Cato’s face flushed and he lengthened his stride a little, not wanting Acantha to see his discomfiture. This was worse than the silent treatment, he decided faintly. This was at least a thousand times worse. He’d been working on the assumption that her bristling silence was an interrogation tactic, one which he had to admit had worked wonders—but surely this wasn’t part of it. If it was… well, if it was, she was an evil genius. That was all there was to it.
He wandered down the rocky steps to the Palace and along the uneven stonework before it, scratched and pockmarked by thousands of dragon talons over the centuries since the cavern had been carved into the heart of the mountain. There was a place, a little farther up, where a sliver of the sky was just visible through the mountain peak, thousands of feet above. If he’d counted correctly, then tonight, he should be able to see… a few minutes spent pacing back and forth with his eyes on the distant tunnel, and a smile spread across his face. There. A sliver of moonlight.
He became aware of Acantha standing beside him. Something unusual about that—he’d gotten so used to her being always three steps away, why was she drawing his attention now? Because she wasn’t three steps away. She was one step away, arms folded, but her eyes were following his, a slight crease between her brows.
“The moon,” he explained, almost convinced he was imagining the unspoken query. “The moon is full tonight.”
She nodded, just once, her gaze lingering on the fraction of moon above them. Maybe he was losing his mind after the stress he’d been under this last week, but for a moment Cato almost felt like putting his arm around her shoulders. How romantic, thought a part of his mind that definitely belonged to madness. Just a couple of lovers, enjoying the moonlight…
Cato headed inside not long after that, not sure whether the wild feeling he was holding back was a burst of laughter, a burst of tears or something even stranger. Acantha stayed at his heels as always, followed him silently down the Palace hallways. Nobody they passed even spared them a second glance. He quietly suspected that Acantha had discouraged the Palace staff from speaking to him, though he had no evidence. This was miserable. He needed to think, needed to be alone… and as Acantha was clearly not going to let that happen, he’d have to settle for burying his head under his blankets and pretending she wasn’t there by the door.
“Sleep well,” he said, once they’d reached his room. He’d said it to her every night, occasionally accompanied by a silly little bow. It amused him to bid her goodnight when he knew full well she was going to stand by the door like a statue until morning.
But this time, something was different. This time, she met his gaze squarely when he spoke instead of staring out into the middle distance. And this time—his heart jumped into his throat—she reached out and slowly, pointedly, pushed the door shut behind him, and locked it.
“What—”
But there was no time for the rest of the question. Because Acantha was on top of him again, and Cato knew better by now than to keep the Captain waiting.
Chapter 15 - Acantha
This was fine, Acantha told herself as the days inched by. This was all fine. She was doing a good job, here. She was guarding the prisoner, she was keeping him away from the artifacts in the Archives, and she was making sure he shared his knowledge as promised. Those were her tasks, and she was achieving all of them. No need to worry about what else she was doing. A case could even be made that she was doing an even better job of guarding him, now that she was spending every night in his bed. If he was going to get up to anything sneaky, it would be at night, when she was asleep on her feet by the door. She’d be much more alert to his tricks if she was close to him.
Very close to him. As close as it was possible to get, in fact.
She eased up on the silent treatment when they were in public, at least a little. It had been becoming hard to bear even before they’d started spending every night in bed together… though she doubled down on keeping a professional distance between them when they were out in the Palace together. If anyone suspected anything was going on, they didn’t say so. It would have been absurd for anyone to guess at what was going on, at any rate. Acantha had always prided herself on her reputation as a driven, dependable Captain, committed mind, body and soul to the protection of the realm and the Palace—
She was doing her best not to think about that right now, though.
Cato, for his part, was being surprisingly tolerable about the whole situation. Part of that, she was gratified to note, was that he was absolutely terrified of putting a foot wrong around her. For the first few days, he seemed frightened to speak at all, which made a refreshing change. And as they gradually warmed into conversations, the side she saw of him was surprising and new.
It helped, of course, that they were spending a lot of time in the company of others. The archivists Arric and Hartwell, now that they’d gotten a taste of what Cato knew about the world, were absolutely relentless in their pursuit of more information. And Cato, for his part, seemed happy to provide it. They took to spending most days accompanying the little research group, either holed up in the Palace poring over records, or making journeys out to the Fog to study it firsthand. After some deliberation, Acantha decided to permit Cato to ride on the back of one of the dragons on these little trips, instead of carrying him in her talons. That first frightening trip had been more than enough for him, it seemed.
And every night, once they’d said their goodbyes to Morgan and the archivists, she and Cato would retire to his chambers, and a very different dynamic would emerge once the door was shut. After their explosive first night together, Acantha hadn’t imagined that much would transcend that peak—the built-up tension and frustration had to have been why the release was so powerful. But she was shocked to find that if anything, their passion grew only more intense as their familiarity with each other’s bodies deepened and evolved. Cato seemed to have committed himself with a single-minded determination to cataloging every single one of her most sensitive places, and she in turn was growing rapidly adept at making him forget his own name with a single touch.
She’d never felt anything like this before. It was dizzying, and addictive, and intoxicating… and it made absolutely no sense. She wasn’t completely naive. She knew what it was supposed to mean, when you found this kind of physical compatibility with a person. That magnetic draw she’d felt to him ever since they’d met, the way the air seemed to crackle between them in the seconds before they fell into each other’s arms, even the tingle of the shifting magic in her body when he touched her. All of this should have been a textbook indication that he was her soulmate.
But that was impossible, wasn’t it? The soulmate connection sprang directly from the magic that allowed them to shift, everybody knew that. Humans didn’t have that magic, and they didn’t have soulmates, from what Lana had told them—some of them even had dozens of romantic relationships throughout their short lives. Cato could use magic, true, but he didn’t possess any innate magic of his own, only the ability to borrow power from enchanted artifacts. He explained as much to the group one afternoon, on a carefully supervised trip into one of the upper floors of the Archives.
They’d spent the past week doing fieldwork, and Acantha was a little tired of spending long afternoons trudging around in the trees. Maybe that was why she’d finally acquiesced to the scholars’ increasingly strident requests that Cato be allowed to pass his knowledgeable eye over a few of the artifacts in the Archives to assess their magical qualities. She’d been resisting for a while, but the Queen had made it clear that these insights were part of the deal of Cato staying here. And he’d been a model guest so far, with none of his behavior so much as hinting that he’d told them anything but the honest truth.
Still, to make herself feel better, Acantha was standing by with her sword unsheathed and her eyes locked on Cato’s every movement. If he doubted her willingness to strike him down if she felt the need, the nervous expression on his face didn’t show it. Would she do it, she wondered as she watched him. She’d knocked him out a few times, sure, but that had been different. She wasn’t sure she knew how to deal a non-fatal blow to his fragile human frame. The more she learned about his kind and their weaknesses, the more she was surprised any of them had survived in the first place.
He turned over the rusted metal cuffs in his hands, his eyes closed as he focused his attention on what Acantha had always suspected was rubbish that had been kept accidentally. When he opened his eyes again, she could see traces of the paler gray color that clouded his irises when he used magic—something she’d asked him about once, curious about what she’d observed that day in the prison when he’d escaped her.