Chapter 11: Like a Book
Galadriel did not take the bait of the offer that Rhysand tossed her. 'There's someone here that wants to meet you.' Refusing to even answer him, she sat down by the window and overlooked the garden, blocking out the voices resonating from the lower floor. There were curses to High Fae hearing. It wasn't hard to narrow the guest down to the General Commander of the Night Court. The stories of him she had heard were reckoning; Beron always spoke of him with contempt. But he spoke of everybody that way.
It wasn't a disdain for Cassian's reputation that withheld her from venturing down. Or even the fact that he was a part of Rhysand's Inner circle. She had gotten along plentifully with Mor. But she knew it would be a welcoming. Not a simple greeting as they properly introduced, but a welcome to his home. The same reason she declined Rhysand's offer to see the city just yet. Going down was accepting that she was staying. Accepting the fate that she was no longer a spy.
Azriel never introduced his spies to one another, let alone to his home and his friends. It was for their own protection and his. And a boundary she had come to terms with decades ago. Now she sat in the High Lord's spare room, meeting Azriel's closest companions.
Galadriel itched. She itched for something to do, a task to be in her mind. Let it be sewing a new dress together or decoding another message sent to her. Not sitting around like a child pulled from the training rings where the males all learnt to wield their blades.
~
"You're not unpacked."
Galadriel dropped the book to her thighs. She lounged on the bed, knees pointed towards the ceiling. Indeed, her pack remained where she had left it. It had grown late, but not enough that she would need a candlelight to read. Sunset wouldn't come for another hour.
"Expecting to go somewhere?" Rhysand prodded further as he wandered into her room, toeing her pack at the foot of the bed.
"Yes," she said. "I'm only staying here a few days remember? What do you want?"
"You to come eat with me. I'm having dinner."
Galadriel slowly turned another page in her book, fingertip tracing the outline of a paragraph. "Can't I just eat up here? Or are you afraid I'll get crumbs in the carpet?"
Hands in pockets, he leant his weight against a poster of her bed. "I'd rather have company since no one else is here for the night." There he was, a High Lord, standing in her room and asking her to join him like having no company for a meal was a distress she could solve. It almost made her laugh.
"You sound as though you're expecting my company to be warm and delightful."
"I fully expect to be insulted in at least three different ways," he said with swift confidence across a grin. "But I'm finding it wildly entertaining." He nodded towards her door, sending that single strand of hanging black hair even more crooked. "Come eat." Though he turned by the time Galadriel shut her book, she could see straight through the back of his head to the upwards tilt of his victorious expression.
Dinner was already awaiting them downstairs in the dining room, two plates mounted with food upon the cherrywood table. What she found slightly bemusing was the fact that both were at a single end, yet the plates faced opposite each other. It left the end chair—the High Chair, Beron named it—unattended. Galadriel sat in the one closest to the door, albeit with her back towards it. Fortunately, she did not rely on sight alone to sense if another presence approached.
The low backing of the seat that was no doubt made to accommodate for Illyrian wings made it awkward to lean against, so she compensated with elbows driven into the wood to hold her weight. Eyeing their meals, there was little difference between hers and Rhysand's, except for one small thing.
"Am I not allowed to drink your wine?"
"Of course you are," he answered, settling into his seat with a slope in the line of his shoulders. Galadriel found herself thinking that even in the sloppy posture he looked regal. "It'd be a shame if you did not dine on my collection with me." With a hint of metallic lingering in the air, a second goblet appeared, the silver cup with an engraved rim and stem identical to his own. "However, you must earn it. Wine for your thoughts?"
Wine for her thoughts? He was a carving of arrogance cloaked in darkness is what she thought. "Are my shields so impenetrable to you that you cannot simply find the answer for yourself?"
"Where's the fun in that?"
Galadriel perched her chin on interlocked fingers and took a moment to consider the offer. She did enjoy fine wine, but she didn't enjoy giving him exactly what he wanted. Rhysand looked into her goblet with theatrical interest.
She reached out and snatched his own unattended wine. His eyes snapped to hers, glowering and all she could do was give a feline grin as she brought it to her lips. Played him at his own game. "Oh, this is exquisite," she marvelled, tipping the contents around as she matched his lazed posture. "Don't look so sour, you have wine still."
"Rest assured, I learn from my mistakes."
Galadriel placed the goblet down, half-expecting it to disappear but it remained in place. "I'm certain you do." Picking up the pristine silverware, she spent half a second appreciating their design before gorging herself on the delectable meat and potatoes. Her eyes flashed towards the empty seats as she chewed. "No guests tonight?" she remarked. "I would have thought that you would want to spend the night with your friends once you escaped that dreary mountain."
"Family," he said. Galadriel looked up for a moment, not quite catching what he meant. Rhysand smiled. "They're my family." She could admire that sentiment, even coming from him. "And if they were here, you would not have joined me."
"Is that supposed to be important? That I'm eating a meal with you?" She leant forward suddenly with narrowing eyes. "Is this some sort of ritual that you haven't told me about? Because I do not appreciate being left in the dark."
He licked away between his teeth and cheeks. "You have a creative mind," he noted as though it was an incredibly interesting fact. "But no, just dinner."
"Wouldn't you have rather eaten with them? Your family."
"Why are you so insistent in demanding my reasons?" His rolling voice was enough evidence to her ears to reason with the stories she had heard of the male in front of her. How he held the power of his people and how others could be frightened of the melodic smoothness that rippled with noble bearing. There was no mistaking his heritage, title or not.
"Because I cannot find any of my own that would fit. I like knowing all the pieces of information, it's my job to know more than I should." Was, her mind bitterly reminded her. It was her job. Galadriel placed her fingertip on the rim of the goblet as she paused her eating, running it around the metallic circle. "I always ate dinner alone."
"That sounds lonely." His voice softened enough that she heard his sincerity, the belief of his own words.
"Handmaiden," she reminded him. "I was up before Amoise and went to bed hours after her. Only the other palace workers were awake as well as some guards but they were either all too tired or too busy to talk so. Except for when Lucien was very young." Her lips careened into a smile, though she aimed it at the table rather than her companion. "He'd be sleepless and sneak out. My quarters never had any guards nearby and the nobles would turn their noses up about two halls away so he knew he'd never be caught. So I suppose I wasn't always alone." At a too awkward moment of pause between them, as he registered her story, she lifted the goblet mockingly. "Enough of a thought to earn this?"
He smiled. A true, proper version of the form that she couldn't help but sketch the details of it in her mind. "I think I owe you more."
Galadriel only made an expression of agreement and took her time to relish in the sweet taste. All Fae wine was gorging-worthy, but the tastes only afforded by the affluent like what she tasted now needed to be savoured and properly admired. She wasn't sure how long it would last either; if she would be placed in a new home and forgotten about.
"You don't want to be left alone?"
Galadriel growled. "I gave you my thoughts. There's no need to be inside my head."
"No," he agreed, which caused her to blink and frown. "There isn't. You're easy to read without that power."
"No, I'm not," she hissed out, placing her goblet down so she didn't spill it by accident. "It's my job to not be readable."
"I didn't need to read your mind to know you wouldn't have joined me for dinner if I had other company." Her nose flared at his roguish arrogance the pulsated around him like a beacon of power and darkness. "I don't need to read your mind to know that you're scared of being alone."
Contrasting his blasé bearings from across the table, Galadriel sat as stiff as the mountains that windows made portraits of. "I don't believe you." She said it with so much conviction that the shallow crevice of doubt that she had remaining, melted away. "Azriel trained me himself. I was a spy for two hundred years within the heart of a court. No one second-guessed my true thoughts. Beron himself didn't suspect a thing until this letter incident, so there is no way on the blessing of the Mother, that you just read me like a book."
Rhysand only opened his arm that held the half-lifted goblet in a waving motion. "What can I say? I just see past it all."
"Or you're the lying, manipulative High Lord that they claim you to be," she shot back, admittedly testing how far she could push. "And you do read my mind but pretend not to so I start to believe that you see past all my shields and there's no point in keeping them up around you. Then you worm your way in deeper."
"And the idea that I might be able to also terrifies you," he answered with the same strength in his tone, but lacking the bite she wielded. "Let me tell you what I can see then. Something that you refuse to even admit to yourself." Galadriel clenched her jaw, refusing to accept the challenge but it was coming anyway. Rhysand lifted a finger from his wine and pointed it to her. "You have feelings for my spymaster."
A cold, rigid hand twisted her stomach which gargled audibly. You have feelings for my spymaster. Her heartbeat began to increase but the pace was strange and mismatched, making her feel all that more unsettled inside. Azriel's face was imprinted behind every blink and Galadriel was utterly humiliated at the idea that the High Lord might just be in her thoughts at that very moment.
But it also made him right. Rhysand did see straight through her because that was not a thought she had allowed herself to surface in decades. It was always there, nevertheless, wriggling around in the anticipation of his check-ins, the disappointment once he was gone. And Rhysand had seen it like she had carved his name into her forehead.
"I'm done for the night." The chair legs scraped against the polished floor. "Thank you for dinner."
Rhysand sighed. "Galadriel—"
"Goodnight, High Lord."
With no more calls of her name, Galadriel marched back to her temporary room and locked the door behind her. Her book lay open upon the bed, but her mind was reeling the events too fervently for her to even consider lazing and focusing on the inked words. Instead, she just strode up to the windows and looked down into the garden. It was beautiful under the tint of the blue hour just past the setting of the sun.
"I have no interest in learning of your death." That was all it had taken from him to agree to be here today. The thought that maybe, just maybe, he did care enough to see her alive. That maybe it wasn't just because he would lose an asset, but because he didn't want to see her dead.
Galadriel had disliked Rhysand up until that moment. There were some moments when she thought she could like him, but now she loathed him. Loathed him for bringing that piece of her life up without permission like he was asking about her trip to the markets.