Moira looked up, her eyes very clear. “You see my thoughts so easily.”
“I think because in your place, I’d have the same ones. You couldn’t have saved her. More—”
“Weren’t meant to,” Moira finished. “I’m coming around to that, inside my heart. But if I’d explored what I have, I might have seen something of what was coming. For whatever difference it would have made. Like Blair, I’ve seen the battleground in dreams. But unlike her, I didn’t face it. I turned away. That’s done, too. I’m not…wait.” She searched for the phrase. “Beating myself up? Right?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“I’m not beating myself up over it. I’m after changing it. So I’m asking, if you can make the time to help me hone whatever I might have, the way I’ve honed my fighting skills.”
“I can. I’d love to.”
“I’m grateful.”
“Don’t be grateful yet. It’ll be work. Magic’s an art, and a craft. And a gift. But comparing it to your physical training isn’t far off. It’s also, well, like a muscle.” Glenna tapped a hand on her biceps. “You have to exercise it, and build it. Like medicine it’s said we practice magic, so it’s never done.”
“Every weapon I take into battle is another strike against the enemy.” Brows lifted, Moira flexed her arm. “So I’ll build that muscle as I have this one, strong as I can. I want to crush her, Glenna. More than defeat her, to crush her. For so many reasons. My parents, King. Cian,” she added after a pause. “He’d dislike that, wouldn’t he, knowing I think of him as a victim?”
“He doesn’t see himself that way.”
“He doesn’t, refuses to. It’s why he thrives, in his way. He’s made his…I can’t say peace as he’s not a peaceful sort, is he? But he’s accepted his lot. I suppose, in some sort of way, he’s embraced it.”
“I’d say you have his number, as much as any could.”
Moira hesitated now, making a business of rearranging the food left on her plate. “He kissed me again.”
“Oh. Oh.” And after a pause. “Oh.”
“I made him.”
“Not to belittle your charm or powers, I don’t think anyone can make Cian do much of anything he doesn’t want to do.”
“Could be he wanted to, but he wasn’t going to until I pushed him into it. I’d had a bit to drink.”
“Hmm.”
“I wasn’t the worse for it,” Moira said with a laugh that had some nerves at the edges. “Not really. Just a little looser in my manners, so to speak, and more determined in my mind. I wanted air and some quiet, so I went up, out on one of the battlements. There he was.”
She pictured it again. “He might have gone anywhere, and sure I could have gone somewhere else. But neither of us did, so we both ended up in the same place, at the same time. In the night,” she said quietly. “With the music and the lights barely reaching us.”
“Romantic.”
“I suppose it was. With the rain that would come before dawn just beginning to scent the air, and the thin slice of moon very white against the sky. There’s a mystery to him I keep wanting to pick at until I find the pieces of it.”
“You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t find him fascinating,” Glenna said. They both knew what she hadn’t said. He wasn’t. He wasn’t human.
“He was being all stiff, the way he can be with me, and it was irritating. And well, I’ll admit, challenging. At the same time…It comes in me sometimes, when I’m with him. The way knowledge does, or magic. Something rising.”
She pressed a hand to her belly, then drew it upward toward her heart. “Just…pulling up from the center of me. I never had strong feelings, in this way, for a man. Little flutters of them, you know? Comfortable and interesting, but not strong and hot. There’s something about him that compels me. He’s so…”
“Sexy,” Glenna finished. “At the outrageous level.”
“I wanted to know if it would be like it had been the other time, the only time, when we’d both been so angry and he’d taken hold of me. I told him to do it again, and wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
She cocked her head now, as if puzzling it out. “Do you know, I think I made him nervous. Seeing him flustered a bit, and trying not to be, that was as intoxicating to me as the wine had been.”
“God yes.” On a long breath, Glenna picked up her tea. “It would be.”
“And when he kissed me it was like the other time, only more. Because I was waiting for it. For that moment, he was as much caught as I was. I knew it.”