Blades of Men (on hold - sorry!)

Chapter Thirteen: Conrad

Chapter Thirteen: Conrad

   We ate dinner quickly, tension palpably swirling through the room like a poisonous mist. I could feel Athalia’s gaze on me as aptly as if she had shone a torch in my eyes. Every now and then I caught her looking, my glances meeting an unfathomable gaze that seemed to pick out all of my faults and misgivings. From the corner of my vision I could see her push food around her plate, yet even her listless movements contrasted sharply with the acute directness she wore in a cloud around her. I couldn’t work out what she was feeling, what she was thinking. It was powerless.

   With a swill of brandy I cleared my throat, loving the spread of warmth through my abdomen after hours filled with the thump of riding and the electric brushes of careless skin against skin. It reminded me of my father, and without even a flicker of feeling, I silently toasted the flames in his memory. Accompanying the smallest of taste of the paranormal, my reactions changed. Suddenly I could almost feel the alcohol entering my blood stream as I resolved to stay cool-headed.    

   “Vingt et un?” I suggested whenever I realised Athalia wasn’t going to even make an effort to touch a morsel more to her lips. My mind ran through options, the cold logic that had seen me through a life of hunting and being hunted mechanically engineering possible outcomes. I didn’t want to play anything that was too difficult, that would require too much effort. It would take all of my tactical skills merely to formulate questions and comprehend their answers.

   With a brief bob of her head, she agreed. I watched as she looked everywhere but at me, her eyes following the curve of draperies and the harsh lines of posts.

   I dealt three cards each. With a self-satisfied smirk, I ran my eyes over the worn rectangle in front of me. A five, an eight and a six. Close enough. She picked up another from the tidy pile in front of us and winced, unable to check her facial expressions. I smiled secretly, knowing that of all the things Athalia was, she would never go back on her word.

    Perhaps that was what made a true lady – not dresses or jewels or polite manners, but honesty and dignity and inner strength. Why can we never see past the material to the things that are truly important? Why is it so hard to unveil the truth of the soul instead of cluttering our thoughts with presumptions of money and power?

   “Nineteen,” I said, no tone or inflection favouring one syllable over the next. She kept her face expressionless as she folded her cards on the table.

   “Twenty-four,” she stated simply. I grinned, taking my time and choosing my words carefully, lest she give me an answer that only satisfied my curiosity minutely.

   “Who has continuously, physically hurt you over a period of time at home?” I asked, splitting the sentence into phrases to try and spit out all the words. She sighed wearily, her eyes losing some of their sparkle. She looked lost, lonely. Like a frightened little girl rather than the woman she tried so hard to be.

   It abruptly reminded me that she was young, just brushing past adolescence and into adulthood by the skin of her teeth. She may have had to grow up quickly – I wasn’t so green to know that her life hadn’t been hard – but for a minute, she resembled a child playing dress-up, a bad imitation of the future, and forced to walk in shoes that didn’t fit.

   “My father was a mean drunk. God knows; he loved whiskey – drank it like water, like it would solve all his troubles if he could race his way to the end of a bottle.” She stuttered – perhaps flinching at the memories – before she carefully inflected a matter-of-fact tone. “Sometimes I ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.” She shrugged at my continued gaze, suddenly becoming very interested by the patterns of the rug at her feet.