Page 60 of The Thief and the Traitor Bride

“Finch—”

“I need to relieve myself,” she blurted. Before he could say anything, she was on her feet, unsteady—and lurched out of Caspian’s way as he raised a hand to steady her. “I’m fine,” she said.

“I never said you weren’t.”

Nore made her way across the pub, dodging knots of laughing patrons or dancing couples who also recognized the music. If she’d stayed at the table, drunk as they were, she had no doubt Caspian would’ve found some way to drag her out, too. She kept her head down as she wove through the smoke and dim, the mess of bodies. It was no worse than Nettlepool, she told herself.

She relieved herself and used a damp cloth to clean her hands and wash the sweat away from her forehead, her neck. Nore was overheated from the wine and the memories—she should’ve known better than to let her guard slip. She forced herself through a round of breaths and closed her eyes.

She found out early on that if she didn’t indulge in thoughts of him, they found her anyway. Her solution was to allow herself thirty seconds of memory, of fantasy and recollection, then to lock it all away.

So for thirty seconds, she imagined it: going back to the table, her hand resting on his shoulder then moving to his neck. If she pulled him up, allowed her mouth to crash against his. If she dragged him up the stairs and felt his hands on her waist, her hips, her breasts.

In contrast: if she finally found the courage. If she unsheathed her blade. If she buried it in his stomach, and his eyes found hers as he took his dying breath and realized, finally, that he had underestimated her for the last time.

Nore gripped the edge of the sink and opened her eyes. Again, she wiped the sweat from the back of her neck. Again, she breathed. And then she went out to face him.

Nore delayed her journey back by stopping at the bar. She pushed her way into the crowd, wedging in between two large men on one side, talking closely, and a group of laughing friends on the other. She quickly made eye contact with the girl behind the counter.

“Water, please?” she asked.

The barkeep turned to fetch it for her. Nore closed her eyes, elbows on the bar, face in her hands.

A hand landed on her lower back. Caspian’s voice in her ear: “Let me take you up to bed,” he said.

Nore froze at the implications—before she realized he meant it honestly. Kindly. She cursed herself for those seconds in which her first answer was yes.

Suddenly, they were jostled hard, Caspian pushed into her. He caught himself quickly, hands on the bar framing her body. Nore glanced over his arm.

The two men next to them were involved in some sort of discussion that had turned heated. Both were about twice her size. The taller of the two had bulging veins in his neck; the other was shorter, his face purpling as he stabbed a finger into the other man’s chest.

“You don’t know what it was like,” he said, deep voice incensed, spittle flying. “Protected in the west, what did you have to worry about? Storms? Crops? You don’t know how it was, to eat what was grown in blood, to watch your neighbors die.”

“We should get out of here,” Caspian said, keeping a protective arm around her, his gaze on the men, too.

“You chose to fight,” the other man said, reddening. “Just because you couldn’t give up your precious magic—”

“Come on,” Caspian said, trying to drag her toward the stairs. She couldn’t go up with him, not when her brain was still focused on things she would rather forget.

“Hang on,” Nore said, pulling out of his grasp. It was a miscalculation on her part—she spun out of Caspian’s hold just as the two men started fighting in earnest. Nore bumped into one of them, wobbled—

She didn’t even see the hit coming until the pain exploded from the middle of her face. Nore staggered back, one hand reaching for her nose and finding blood, her brain spinning. Nore’s back hit the bar and she tasted blood as it flowed down the back of her throat. Sparing little thought to her, the shorter man was on the taller, his hands around his throat.

She looked for Caspian, but he was gone.

“Oh miss, you shouldn’t have gotten in the middle of it,” an old woman said, moving from where she sat nearby to stand with Nore, taking a cloth from the bar and gripping Nore’s shoulder. She reached up to wipe away some of the blood dripping down Nore’s chin. “They can’t fight with swords anymore, but naught will stop them from fighting with fists.”

There was no point saying she hadn’t intended to get in the middle of it. Nore took a shuddering breath, realizing that some of the moisture on her face was streaming from her eyes. She heard more commotion and glanced up to see the wreckage the men were causing.

It took a full five seconds for her to realize there were now three men fighting. Another two to realize that the third was Caspian.

“Fighting” was an exaggeration: it took less than half a minute before the other two men were on their backs. Caspian moved with a speed and precision that Nore was familiar with from years of sitting in the backs of theaters, watching him dance: his fighting was just as fluid, just as precise.

It took another long, uncomfortable moment to understand that Caspian was doing this to defend her.

It was silent in the tavern when he straightened, wiping the blood off his knuckles. Neither of his opponents had landed a hit on him. She tried to reconcile the violence with the careful way he looked at her now, stalking across the room to where she stood, awestruck.

The old woman tutted and handed her the cloth. “I’ll leave you to that one, then,” she said, stepping away.