MARKED BY THE MONSTER

Chapter Seven: The Dinner That Hurts

The table was set for two.

She noticed it when she walked in, not the long table in the main hall, not any of the communal spaces she had been cataloguing for three days, but a smaller room off the east corridor, a room that had the quality of somewhere used regularly and privately. A fireplace. Two chairs. Two plates are already placed, the way a place is laid when someone has thought about the arrangement beforehand.

He was already there. He stood when she came in, which was an old-fashioned courtesy she noted and filed and could not entirely prevent from registering somewhere beneath her filed categories. He gestured to the chair nearer the fire. She sat in the other one.

His expression did not change. If he had a preference for the chair, he did not have it visibly.

"You've been here four days," he said. "You haven't eaten with anyone."

"I eat in my room."

"I know." He poured water into both glasses, the motion automatic, the same way people who have poured water for others their entire lives pour water, without ceremony or the performance of service. "That's why I'm asking you to eat here."

She looked at the table. Bread. Roasted vegetables. Something braised that smelled of herbs and slow heat. Someone had cooked this. Someone had thought about what she might want, which, she had been in this compound for four days and had told no one anything about herself except by implication, meant they had made assumptions based on observation.

"Who cooked?" she asked.

"Ivar," he said. "He has opinions about food. He expresses them through feeding people."

"Does he know about me?"

"He knows everything I know." A pause. "Which is not everything, but more than most."

She ate. The food was, in fact, very good, and she let herself notice that without apology. She had a policy about good food, which was that it was one of the few things in the world that couldn't be weaponized against you and could therefore be simply received, and she received it.

He ate with the same unhurried quality he brought to everything. She found herself watching his hands, she had been watching his hands from the throne room, since the specific quality of the way he moved, and she was aware she was watching and aware she was not stopping.

"The scar on your wrist," he said.

She did not stiffen. She had been doing this long enough that she did not stiffen at the things she expected. "I told you. Seventeen."

"You told me the age," he said. "I'm not asking about the age."

She looked at him across the small table in the firelight. He was looking back, not at the wrist, at her face. The silver eyes direct and calm and carrying something she was still learning the name of.

"There was a building," she said. "I burned it."

"To get out."

"Yes."

"Was there someone with you?"

She was quiet for a moment. "My sister. She was fourteen." She picked up her glass of water. "I thought she died in it. I've been, I don't know what I've been doing for eight years, actually, now that I'm looking at it from here." She said it in her flattest voice, which was the only voice she trusted herself to use for true things. "Working. That's what I've been doing."

He didn't offer her anything in response, no comfort, no consolation, no the performance of sympathy. He simply sat with what she had said, which was the thing she had been unable to find from most people for most of her adult life: the willingness to let a true thing be true without immediately trying to fix it.

"Your neck," she said.

He touched it. The same brief, unconscious gesture she had seen before. "Eighteen ninety-one," he said. "I told you that."

"You told me the year."

His mouth moved, not quite a smile, something smaller, something that recognized what she had done. "An organization like the one that sent you," he said. "But older. They've changed their name several times. Changed their methods. The mineral they're after now is different from what they wanted in eighteen ninety-one, but the interest in pack land isn't." He turned his head slightly and she could see the full shape of the scar, old, white-silver, running from the jaw toward the collarbone. "I was younger. I believed that removing the head of the organization would end the organization. I was wrong."

"Who gave it to you?"

A pause. "The man who killed my mate."

She set her fork down. She hadn't meant to, it was an involuntary thing, the body responding before the mind could moderate it. She looked at him and he was looking at the table, and his face was the same as it always was, which meant nothing and everything.

"Mara," she said. She had heard the name through walls.

"Mara." He said it as if testing the shape of it in a room he didn't usually say it in. "Eighteen fifty-four. She was human. That made her, an easier target than me." He picked up his glass. He didn't drink from it. He simply held it. "I have been hunting this network for forty years because it took me a hundred and thirty years to find enough of their trail to follow."

"And now you have me," she said.

"And now I have you." He looked up. "I want to be clear about what that means to me. What I want from you is information. Access. The operational knowledge that you have and I don't. I'm not asking you to be grateful for the fact that I didn't execute you this morning. Gratitude-based cooperation is fragile. I'm asking you to see that we have the same enemy and that I have things you need and you have things I need."

She considered this. "What do I need?"

"Your sister," he said. "If she's alive."

The room was quiet. The fire shifted behind the grate, a small collapse of wood settling into itself. She looked at him and he looked at her, and neither of them looked away, and the silence between them stopped being empty the way silences sometimes do when two people stop using them to hide in.

She could feel her pulse in her throat. She told herself it was the fire, which was warm, and she had been cold for a long time. She told herself a number of things.

"The organization took her," he said. His voice was careful now, not cautious, but precise, the way a person is precise when they are handling something breakable that belongs to someone else. "They recruit from the wreckage they create. I have reason to believe she was taken rather than killed."

"You have reason to believe," she said. "Not confirmed."

"Not confirmed." He put down the glass. "I thought you should know the possibility before you made any decisions about which side you were on."

She breathed. She breathed in the specific way she had learned in the dead zone between cameras on a grey afternoon twelve days ago, the two breaths that were the only rest she permitted herself.

"You told me about the door habit before you told me any of that," she said.

"Yes."

"Why?"

He was quiet for a moment. "Because it was true," he said, "and I thought you'd already know if I was lying."

She would have. She did know. She had known it in the throne room, in the amber firelight, when he had said it in the voice of someone reading a weather report, simply, without strategy, in the way people speak when they are telling the truth and have stopped rehearsing it.

She picked up her fork. She ate. He ate. The fire burned and the room held them in its small warm gravity, and outside the compound the pack moved through its evening routines in ways she had been mapping and had found, somewhere in the last four days, that she had stopped mapping entirely, was simply noticing instead, the way you notice things that are becoming familiar rather than things that are threats.

She noticed this. She filed it somewhere she was not ready to name.

"Tomorrow," she said.

"Tomorrow," he agreed.

She did not know what they were agreeing to. She thought he did not entirely know either. She thought that was possibly the most honest thing about the evening.