Our faces are both lined now, marked with our years. He sits with me in the greensmelling darkness, holding my hand. How many have such power and leisure and defense as I do? Telemachus comes from our bed to find me. My witchcraft is as strong as ever, stronger. I create something, I transform something. How can I live on beneath such a burden of doom? I rise then and go to my herbs. If they do not fall on us in spite and malice, then they will fall by accident or whim. I do not forget either my father and his kind hanging over us, bright and sharp as swords, aimed at our tearing flesh. A breeze would blow them over, and the world is filled with more than breezes: diseases and disasters, monsters and pain in a thousand variations. Beside me, my husband's pulse beats at his throat in their beds, my children's skin shows every faintest scratch. I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life's precariousness, its thready breath. Chaol shot him a look, more amused than warning. "We certainly do not object to that," Ress crowed. "Well, as long as your men don't object to seeing you knocked on your ass." "Do we need to go to the training hall to see if you can back them up?" "Oho!" Ress cried, and Chaol's brows rose higher. "If I recall correctly, you complain about every time I wipe the floor with you when we spar." She straightened as the guards gave hesitant smiles. You moan about the cold floor more than anyone else than I know." As Celaena's chuckle faded, Chaol looked at her, his brows high. And they respected him, too-always glancing at him for approval, for confirmation, for support. Chaol seemed so comfortable with the men, his body relaxed, eyes alight. "You would be, too, if someone were dragging your naked carcass across the ice-cold floor." He smirked as Ress tried to deny it. He was shrieking like a pig the whole time."Ĭhaol leaned back in his seat, crossing his arms. And then," Ress was saying, his boyish face set with fiendish delight, "just as he got her into bed, stark naked as the day he was born, her father walked in"- winces and groans came from the guards, even Chaol himself-"and he dragged him out of bed by his feet, took him down the hall, and dumped him down the stairs.
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