Healing Ties (Ties, Book 2) | ✓

Chapter 53

Yore had to leave early the next morning to talk to his grandmother while Fanner was still half asleep, but once he was awake Danya and Duran came by with eggs and thick, crusty bread for breakfast. The table in Yore's room only had two chairs, so they had a picnic on the bed.

"Have you spoken to Hamish again yet?" Fanner asked Duran as they ate.

"No," Duran said. "I don't know if I particularly plan to, either."

"Are you going to try your luck with Roope and Tris instead?"

Duran made a dismissive sound in the back of his throat. "I don't know. Maybe I'm done with the whole thing."

Danya brushed crumbs from his lips. "That was a quick change of opinion. Do you think Hamish might be right about it?"

"No, I think Hamish can go fuck himself."

Fanner let out a startled laugh.

"It's not anything personal, Duran," Danya said.

"If it were personal, I wouldn't be angry. The man's entitled to his tastes. If he simply preferred men with squarer jawlines and the ability to grow facial hair, that would be fine. It's the thinking he knows me when he doesn't that annoys me." Duran let out a long breath. "Anyway, I suppose we have more important things to worry about than my sex life. Fanner, you know about the plan Libby's been talking about, don't you? About showing the humans some of our memories to try to change their minds about murdering us?"

"Oh, um," Fanner said. "Well, yes. It was my idea, actually."

Duran patted Fanner on the back. "I'm glad you're allowed to be smart now."

"Do you think it is? Smart, I mean. Do you think it will work? You've spent more time around regular humans than most."

"Hm," Duran said. "My master has done many terrible things to me, but I have always known that if I started crying when he came to get me and begged him not to, he wouldn't have forced me. I didn't do that because I was fairly sure he'd either sell me or keep me locked in my room and never touch me again, not because I didn't think he'd listen."

Danya frowned. "You think he didn't know you didn't want to do those things?"

"Oh, no, he absolutely knew," Duran said. "I'm sure most humans understand that keeping someone as a slave isn't a very kind thing to do, too. I would guess that most of them make peace with that by simply not giving it much thought. If you force the raw brutality of it in their faces, they have to actually think about it."

"Is that what she's going to show them?" Danya asked. "Brutality?"

Duran shrugged. "I talked to her about sharing something of my own. Brutality is all I have to offer."

"I'm sorry," Fanner said.

Duran shrugged. "So anyway, I was thinking, how do we know that we can only get energy from humans and other mages when there are clearly many things out there that no mage has ever had sex with? Someone's got to test that, right?"

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Yore spent the first half of the day making plans with his grandmother that he hoped they'd have no use for. He'd helped rescue mages before and that had sometimes involved fighting humans, but to have a whole battlefield of them and know that the only chance for your people to survive was to kill as many of them as possible... that was something different entirely. That was something the mind could surely never truly recover from even if the body escaped unscathed. Not only would he have to live with it, but most of the people he loved would carry that trauma with them as well.