Chapter 13: Use Me

My hands didn't stop shaking until we were over the pass.

Torben drove.

I had handed him the keys at the white post without a word, and he had taken them without one.

Maisy slept in the back seat with her bruised cheek against the window.

At the lodge the broad woman with the gray braid took one look at Maisy's face and said something I won't repeat.

Then she marched Maisy upstairs with a cold cloth.

Then it was just the kitchen, and the stove ticking, and the dog asleep across the doorway.

Torben took his coat off and hung it on the hook.

"I owe you dinner," he said.

"It's nine at night."

"I owe you dinner."

He put a cast-iron pan on the stove and cracked six eggs into it.

He fried potatoes in the fat from the bacon his beta had left.

He did it with his sleeves pushed up and his back to me.

I sat at the table with my hands under my thighs and watched his shoulders.

He set a plate in front of me, and a fork, and sat down across the table with his own.

The eggs were overdone, and the potatoes were perfect.

"It's not the restaurant I meant," he said.

"It's better."

"It isn't."

"I've eaten at a lot of tables where somebody was performing," I said. "This is better."

He looked at his plate.

I ate everything on mine, and then I put my fork down and said the thing I had been carrying since the Great Hall.

"He said it in the voice, Torben. He said sit, and four hundred people bent, and I didn't."

"I saw."

"I'm not strong. I'm a woman who ran the linen closet. Whatever that was, it wasn't me. It was the mark."

"Margo."

"And I keep thinking that's what this is, too."

I made myself look at him.

"You and me. The Moon lit two wrists, and your body is doing what it's told."

"Margo."

"In a month you'll wonder why you wanted a woman who couldn't give her husband one child."

His fork stopped.

"Five years," I said. "Everybody knew. I knew."

I looked at my hands.

"Maybe Heath lied about everything else, but he didn't lie about that. Something's wrong with me."

"Margo."

"And I won't be what you take home out of pity, or because a mark told you to."

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