Page 59 of The Thief and the Traitor Bride

Gail retrieved the wine, clearly unaware of the tension between his companions. When they were moving again, Caspian took the first of the bottles. He pulled the cork out with his magic, then his teeth. He did something odd that made his hands flare pale blue for the briefest of moments, and then the bottle was frosty and cold.

“Start us off?” Caspian asked, his brow raised. A challenge.

Nore took the bottle. She held his gaze, knowing that what they were doing was not rational, was not safe. She thought of his coffee every morning, and the way he came out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam in the evening with rivulets of water running down his chest, and the way she hadn’t seen him barehanded since the ship. She thought of the urgency on his face when he begged her not to follow through with this assignment.

She thought, then, of all the ways in which he’d betrayed her.

Nore drank.

By the time they reached the inn, her head was fuzzy, as if she’d stuffed it with cotton. Gail, too, was full of a sort of mirth that kept him giggling over anything Nore said.

Either Caspian had not drunk as much as they had, or the drink had the opposite effect and made him solemn.

Gail retired to his room soon after they arrived at the inn, but Nore and Caspian lingered downstairs in the tavern. Perhaps she knew he was going to bring up the business with her assignment again, and maybe she was a little bit afraid of what could happen to her, of the softness of her body and her own mortality. Perhaps she feared what would happen when they were upstairs, behind closed doors, both drunk and familiar. Perhaps she knew she was weak, and though she hated him—she remembered.

Oh, how she remembered. Attraction had never been their problem.

Now, he nursed a pint of ale as she sipped on a glass of water. To sober up, she told herself, until she could be certain of herself.

“What do you think of our Gail?” Caspian asked, leaning back in his seat. He sat with his back to the tavern—it was not a position she would’ve put herself in, and it showed an alarming amount of confidence. The tavern was rowdy tonight, within the confines of a main trading city on the border between Eprain and Luthar.

“Why do you suddenly care?” Nore asked miserably. It was the question she’d turned over the entire ride back, the question that had probably drawn her too deeply into her cups.

“It’s both of our mission, isn’t it?” Caspian asked.

“Not this part. It’s not yours,” Nore said. After all, he didn’t even know who she was working for, and he didn’t question that whatever information she was gathering was for Celestine’s benefit. She wasn’t going to drag him into spying for Nestria without his knowledge and agreement—she had some ethics. “You’ve made it very clear that you don’t approve.”

Caspian sighed. Closed his eyes. “You’re going to do what you want to, Finch, whether I approve or not. Even if it’s going to get you killed.”

“So you’d die with me, then?” Nore asked, possibly too harshly.

“If it comes down to it,” Caspian said, looking at his hands, “I don’t suspect I’ll have much of a choice.”

She had nothing to say to that.

In the corner, a band was starting up, to much whooping and merriment from the crowd. Nore had to lean in to hear Caspian properly when he said, “I don’t see what your mission has to do with my artifact, though. Besides the fact they’re both on Locke.”

Nore ran a finger along the rim of her water glass. “Perhaps it’s merely convenience. Two birds, one stone, as it were.”

“Celestine doesn’t do anything out of convenience alone,” Caspian said. Nore wanted to probe that, to ask what Caspian actually knew of the duchess beyond the cat-and-mouse chases he kept getting into with her—and dragging Nore into. “Do you think it has anything to do with her? The High Lady?”

“The artifact?”

“It’s capable of resurrection, they say.”

“Are you asking if I think she’s dead?”

Caspian shrugged. “It wouldn’t be the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard,” he said.

Nore wasn’t sure why, but she didn’t like the path of this discussion. “I don’t know,” she said. “It seems like a hard secret to keep, if she had died. If someone resurrected her.”

Caspian’s head tipped to one side. For a second, his eyes were far away, a small smile creeping on his lips.

“What is it?” Nore asked.

“I know this song,” he said.

Nore listened in, and suddenly, the familiarity of it struck her: Caspian used to hum it when he was washing up in their tiny kitchen. She remembered, on more than one occasion, him raising the melody from a hum to a throaty song, catching her around the waist with his soapy hands, and spinning her around the room. She realized, then, how close they were to one another, both leaning in to guard their previous conversation. So close that Nore could see the shadows his lashes cast; so close she could take the image of him and superimpose it onto a thousand different nights spent like this, talking over nothing in their bed.