Sleep rolled and undulated around Armande lazily. It was not the uncertain, confusing haze of dreams, but the gradual returning to his senses that came with waking. He floated slowly to the surface of consciousness, somehow reluctant to make the journey.
It was too early to be awake; at the end of summer the sun would rise by nine in the morning, but it was still dark. He must be getting old.
No, wait. Armande remembered this masked twilight, this perpetual gloom. Even open to the sky as it was, darkness always hovered near in the Ainsi.
Dark eyes, sharp as if he had never been asleep, snapped open and Armande's fingers found the hilt of his sword-breaker. He didn't remember moving into a sitting position or drawing the knife, but there he was, sitting in an empty bed brandishing a blade at an empty room. Scanning the corners and shadows, it was clear that he was alone. The fire had long died out, and it was quite cold out of the sheets; the skin of his torso prickled in the shocking chill of a seaside morning.
Armande dropped his arm without a sound. For thirty years, this weapon had not been out of reach whilst he slept, but this was the first time in a long while that he woke ready for battle. For an ambush.
Frustrated with the cold, the Ainsi, the entire Assassin order and himself, Armande rose from the bed with a shiver and moved to coax the fire back to life. Coals still roasted under the ashes; he uncovered them and piled firewood and peat about the embers to make a flame. It had also been some time since he had had to make his own fire; Beth had always kept the hearths burning nicely at home, and on her mornings off, Armande slept in until Harold stoked the kitchen fire back to life and the heat rose through the floorboards. Briefly, Armande wondered what they were doing. If, in his absence, they were still running his house in the tidy routine of order he had gotten used to. Unknowingly, a smile touched his lips, thinking of his silly maid's eavesdropping and the housekeeper's occaisonal, unintended naps in the parlor. Thomas the groundsman was quiet, a free black man who lived in the largely empty servants' wing and did his job without comment, but the other two had rubbed off on his stoic proffesionality.
Armande wondered, with an unexpected pang of regret, if he would ever see them again.
He took his time with the fire, not completely certain what he wished to do with the day. Visit the Library again, for sure, but his curious nature demanded further stimulation. Every arm of his situation clamored for attention; there was a cowed Council, an unlikely Head Councillor, a rage-filled Eliane, and then there was Dahlia. So much to think about, and so much to do. He wanted to explore, see what was different and what was the same about his former abode, and gage what remained of the Brotherhood.
A knock came at his door. Not giving much thought to his state of undress, he moved to unbolt the locks, picking up his sword-breaker again as he went.
He cracked open the door.
It was just a servant woman, carrying a jug of water. She refused to look him in the eye, and stammered nervously her obvious intentions. An equally anxious girl, much younger, hovered in the background, and Armande realized that where he was concerned, the maids had decided to use the buddy system. How quaint.
He was not, however, much in the mood to tease. So, with a low thank you, Armande opened the door further to take the jug.
It was good that he moved quickly to catch it, because once the door was out of the way, revealing that he wore nothing, both maids stifled shocked shrieks and the first lost her grip on the water jar. It was only at this point that Armande realized the issue, and watched in amusement as the two scurried away, no doubt to tell a grand tale to the servants wing about his eccentricies. He shook his head and closed the door; even as a new hire, Beth had never been so foolish. Perhaps she was too old to give a damn; she had seen his bare ass so often, she probably knew it better than he did, and not once had she acted so childishly naive.
Finally, Armande decided to visit the practice arena. He stretched and exercised often, eager to retain all the youth he could, for as long as he could, but it had been some time since he had someone to spar with. Well, someone to spar with that didn't end up dead.
The practice hall was an arena, closed, like the rest of the complex, from the outside world. High windows caught all the light they could from the sun that filtered down through the canyon, and during midday, this was enough. For the other hours, great torches and a system of mirrors threw light into every corner. Which, of course, there were none; oval in shape, a running track ringed the inside of the wall, while a cluster of sparring circles, obstacles, and other paraphenalia occupied the internal space. Closets and racks set into the stone walls housed dulled-down blades and blunted staffs, throwing knives and weights for the ankles and wrists, and anything else that the Assassin's had developed over the past milennia to better teach their pupils to stay alive.
Armande had not slept in; to the contrary, he seemed to be awake long before most of the complex. Few early-morning risers were present in the arena; they eyed him without comment as he entered, revealing neither fear nor interest. Armande ignored them.
Instead, he proceeded to stretch, easing the sleep from his muscles, soothing tight spots that had accumulated the night before with Dahlia.
Dahlia. Her face, her body, and more than anything, her motives battered at his focus as he went through the motions. What was the meaning of last night? Maybe she was just insane. Perhaps something upstairs was broken, and had been all along.
No, Armande sighed to himself as he shrugged out of his shirt; the cool morning air felt nice enough to go shirtless. There had been no insanity in her face, in her eyes. No weakness of mind, no flittering mental status. If either of them were insane, Armande reasoned, it had to be him.
By the time he had stretched his muscles to his satisfaction and warmed up, taking his time since he was in no real hurry, the arena had begun to fill with assassins coming in for their morning workouts. It was a good way to stay sharp, but Armande had few goods things to say about the methodology of some trainees. At least the sparring circles were entertaining to watch, if uninspired.
"Well, well." Armande turned to see Leverett approaching, comfortably, lightly dressed and ready to train, himself. He clapped Armande on the back; Armande just stared at him. Leverett chuckled uncomfortably. "I should have known this would be the first place I'd find you."
"What a change of heart," Armande snorted, raising an eyebrow.
Leverett sighed; it sounded forced. "I don't see any reason to hold it against you."
"Hold WHAT against me?"
With a heavy exhalation, Leverett watched Armande, perhaps looking for his usual sarcasm. "What happened in the Library?" he explained finally, as if Armande should know.
"What happened in the Library is none of your business." Armande was trying to decide if everyone in this place were mad.
"And that's why I'm not holding it against you," Leverett replied, a smidgen bitter.
"Hmph," Armande turned away, not much in the mood to talk. Leverett, however, was not prepared to let him be.
"Why don't you and I have a go?" Leverett nodded towards the sparring cirlces.
With quickly thinning patience, Armande stopped and considered the possibility. Several assassins neaby had heard Leverett's proposal, and whispering fanned out across the arena. Armande felt eyes on him; it went against his every instinct not to snarl and scare them away like a flock of pigeons. Because he knew he was stuck, now. If he refused to fight, doubts of his prowess would spread. Unless he really did want daggers sliding under his sheets with him, or worse, laughter at his back, Leverett had given him no other option.
"Dammit," he growled, striding into a suddenly empty circle. "What are we fighting with?"
"Swords?"
"If you want your head lopped off. Or something lopped off."
"Bare hands, then," Leverett replied, satisfied and smug that he had pried Armande into the duel.
"Fine."
The moment Leverett's foot left the ground outside the cirlce, Armande was on him with a roundhouse kick to the ribs. Leverett dived out of the way, rolling fo his feet lithely. Armande had already landed easily and turned to keep Leverett in sight.
"A bit underhanded," Leverett pointed out, smugness gone and replaced with focus.
Armande watched his target, unwavering, beginning to circle around to search for an opening. "The only fair opponent is a dead opponent."
Leverett bowed his head in acknowledgement. He didn't, however, take his eyes off Armande. A grin snaked over the latter's face; good, he thought to himself.
Leverett made the next move, feinting to draw Armande out of a defensive stance and proceeding to jab sporadically at the ribs. Armande avoided the body shots, catching Leverett's arm and twisting it, drawing Leverett along the natural path of his own momentum and thrusting him towards the ground. Leverett very nearly bounced back to his feet, quick to get out of Armande's range and back on the defense.
Armande made a bold strike towards Leverett's collarbone; instead of dodging it, Leverett blocked, as Armande hoped he would. Armande snatched the hand Leverett had blocked his attack with and kicked out at the side whose arm was preoccupied; the kick landed with a echoing thud, though Leverett had managed to twist away to avoid the worst of the impact.
A decent crowd had flocked about their circle, though not too close, as the two Assassins struck back and forth at each other.
"Liking the attention?" Leverett whispered nastily to Armande when they were close enough, grappling, to not be easily heard.
"It's just fantastic, you snarky bastard," Armande growled. Leverett was proving to be less an inexperienced boy than he had first assumed. Or maybe Armande was merely growing... old. The thought infuriated him.
"I think you have a couple admirers," Leverett teased, indicating a pair of young woman assassins, clearly teenagers, probably not even done with their journeymanship. Maybe not even started. Armande smirked.
"Tempting, but I admit my tastes have matured somewhat."
Leverett's taunting took a sharp edge. "Dahlia HAS matured, hasn't she?"
If he was expecting this to trip up Armande, it failed. Armande merely shrugged, not bothering to deny the implication.
And then it clicked; Dahlia had mentioned her other lovers. Rage boiled in the pit of his gut inexplicably; Armande swept aside several worthy strikes from Leverett, punched him twice in each shoulder, numbing his arms, and snached him by the throat.
"It was you!" Every word was stressed in a hissing whisper as he pulled Leverett close enough that the tips of their noses nearly touched. He couldn't even think.
A sound reached his ears. It was loud, sudden. And again. Armande nearly twitched; they were applauding, companionably admiring his win. Leverett forced an anxious grin. Armande threw him at the ground.
What now? Fly into a rage and beat him to death? Why? For being among the 'other men'? Armande forced his face neutral and watched Leverett get back to his feet. All he had done was sleep with an attractive young woman, who, Armande had to admit, was much closer to Leverett's age than his own. Who Leverett hadn't sexually assaulted. Leverett hadn't gotten her with child and broken her into pieces and left her as good as done for. The other assassins had begun to disperse back to their training, and still Armande stood staring at Leverett, trying to decide what he wanted to do, and why.
A door closed. The sound was out of place, and Armande instinctively turned to Eagle vision, following the sound. There was no red, to his surprise. Instead, a flickering trail of gold led from where the crowd of onlookers had been gathered to a side door.
Dahlia.
Armande took a last look at his enemy, and realized that he wasn't an enemy. He was just Leverett, just another Assassin. Just another man, who had done nothing that Armande was in any place to hate him for. Seeming to realize that he had pushed Armande too far, Leverett waited, watching cautiously.
"Do you train often?" Armande asked suddenly.
"Of course."
"In the morning?"
Leverett nodded. "Typically."
Armande walked to where he had left his shirt and pulled it back on; he was sweating. Time to visit the baths.
"Perhaps I'll be seeing you here again."
One thing that Armande had missed greatly about the Assassin complex where he had spent his boyhood was the Library. It was huge; halls of shelves upon shelves, books, scrolls, sheafs of documents on every subject, every era, every language imaginable crowded into every available space. When he had first come here as a child, it had been completely overwhelming. Now, it was exactly what he needed.
After the... interesting morning spent in the practice arena, Armande had bathed, dressed, and retired to the solitude of the massive Library. This was the reason he had come back; the Brotherhood be damned, he had knowledge to seek out.
"Excuse me?" Armande approached a scribe. Weak as the Assassins had become, at least their scholars were as he remembered. Mousy, bookish, and otherwise engaged when you needed their aid. This one was no exception; he was an older gentleman, slightly older than Armande himself, with gray speckling his neat beard and receding hairline. He looked up at Armande through well-polished, well-used spectacles, clearly unhappy at being pulled from the tiny tome he was poring over meticulously.
"Hmph." His response was simple and not very indicative of his cooperation.
With anyone else, Armande would have grown angry or belligerent; with scribes, however, there was no point. "Might I request you help, for a moment, Monsieur? It has been some time since I was here."
"Indeed," the scribe huffed. He strode out from behind his desk, unexpectedly spry. "Armande de Seville. It has been a long time since you visited."
"It has been a long time since I was able," Armande replied.
The scholar eyed him for several moments. Armande thought he caught a smirk lurking under the whiskers; then the man was speaking again. "I thought I knew why you had come back."
Startled, Armande couldn't respond. Was his search so obvious? Did everyone know?
"No need to look so guilty," the scholar waved his concern away. "Whatever it is, I don't know, and I don't think I want to."
"A scholar who doesn't want to know? Doubtful," Armande commented dryly.
For the next two hours, Armande tucked himself away in a corner of the library (a corner of shelves, at least; this hall might not even have corners, for all he knew), buried in history.
It was a massive undertaking just to find anything in this place; it's organizational system was effective, but only if you knew how to use it. Often, it seemed to be in a language that only the scribes spoke fluently. However, Armande was able to locate an armful of tomes and scrolls that appeared promising.
So far, looks had been decieving.
"Shh, you stupid ponce, we're going to get caught!"
Armande exhaled, and snapped shut the book he was attempting to navigate. The sound of common teenage mischief sounded clearly from a bookshelf away; the perpetrators were barely visible through gaps in the books and shelves. Two adolescent boys, no older than sixteen. Armande made busy sorting through the materials piled on the table, organizing which he would pore through, and in which order.
The shuffling footsteps of the youths stopped suddenly. By the Creed, they were terrible skulkers.
"That's him!"
The hairs on the back of Armande's neck prickled, and he felt the pressure of eyes watching. He didn't react, studiously rearranging and reorganizing the papers and books. Let them stare; they would eventually leave and take their noise with them. And then he could get back to work.
"He's older than I thought."
"Yeah."
Armande grit his teeth. No need to get angry.
"He's the one who gave it to Dahlia?"
"That's what they say."
Armande's hands froze in the process of feigning preoccupation. His stalkers didn't notice.
"He doesn't look like a rapist."
"Everyone says she and him were, uh, you know." Lewd sounds and guffawing followed, and Armande's blood boiled straight into his brain. He literally remembered nothing from when he heard those words to when he had the boys cornered.
"If I ever hear you speak a word against Dahlia again," Armande's voice was like contained thunder as he loomed over his prey, "you will never see for yourself what sex with a woman is like. The last and only impression of it you will be privy to is the feeling of your genitals being violently removed and forced up the nearest orifice. Am I clear?"
Both merely nodded, wide-eyed and pale.
Armande stepped aside and made a spastic gesture for them to run. Both boys took off like rabbits from fire, not looking back and from the sound of it not stopping until they were well out of the Library.
His breath came short; Armande exhaled heavily and returned to his seat.
"Dammit!" he cursed loudly, pounding a fist into the table.
"Just make it."
"I don't have the materials."
"I don't give a damn. Make it."
So the conversation had gone between Armande and the weapons' smith for some ten minutes. The smith was a short man, lean as a wire, but he stood up to Armande's six feet something without flinching. Of course, he was nonchalantly armed with his smelting tools, including a hot iron and a small pot of molten steel only a few steps away. This, more than anything, irritated Armande.
"You say you don't have the materials, but give no answer when I ask when you will be more fully stocked."
"I have no answer to give you," the smith replied evenly. "The ore and the leather come in when they come in- it could be tomorrow or next month."
This, Armande didn't buy for a minute. As he spoke, the smith worked several different projects at once, all of them involving steel, iron, leather, or a combination of the three. "You expect me to believe that the weapons smith of an order of Assassins is out of metal?" Armande hissed.
The smith was undaunted. "Believe what you like."
White hot fury cooked in Armande's brain, giving him a migraine. Once again, a small crowd had gathered, this time outside the smith's workshop, a safe distance away to observe. Even if he had been alone, Armande knew threatening or, worse, attacking the smith would do nothing. They both knew that if he was going to get a product worth his money, Armande and the smith would have to agree. And from that knowledge sprouted the smith's uncanny resistance to Armande's worthless bullying.
He dropped his voice. "What if your payment were higher?"
The smith looked up, for the first time in several minutes. "Money won't make the goods arrive faster."
Frustration broiled up Armande's throat and fought to escape in a flurry of curses. Instead, Armande turned on his heel and left, bursting through the unprepared crowd of oglers on his way out. He felt eyes upon him; it was a feeling he was quickly growing accustomed to. A glance about with his Eagle eyes revealed another crisscrossing trail of golden footprints, their owner gone already.
All this distant watching of Dahlia's was growing tiresome. More tiresome was the notion that he couldn't even get a simple vambrace made without battling like a lion to convince the smith to make it. It would appear that some form of unofficial boycott of him, personally, was in place; he had quite practically had to duel to the death with the cook when he went in search of lunch.
Irritated, Armande stormed off to see to one other errand that he had in mind. His room was pathetically small. So what if an Assassin should live a spartan lifestyle? He didn't want to.
The offices of the Councillors were not far from the Library. All nine of them had a private study to retreat to, take meetings in, review information in secret, or hide from their spouses. The High Councillor was no exception; at the Ainsi's construction, it had been assumed that the tradition of a Grand Master would continue. For that reason, one office in the hall, the office at the end, was quite a bit larger and more spacious than the others. Of course, this office was the one the Armande stalked to.
The door was solid oak, thick and heavily hung on massive hinges. It rattled and boomed like thunder when Armande pounded on it unceremoniously.
"What are you looking at?" he snapped at the other occupants of the hallway, some of which had stopped to stare.
As if he knew who was knocking (and he likely did), Richellou took his time responding. Never one to wait, Armande threw the office open and burst in, slamming the door shut behind him.
"No one said you could enter," Richellou reprimanded, not bothering to look up from the book he was poring over.
Armande stood beside the door. Seeing Richellou here, in his big office, with his big chair and small book provoked a morbidly humorous grin. Though still furious, Armande settled his temper down and covered the distance between himself and the High Councillor in slow, easy strides.
"Not going to ask why I'm here?"
"I assume you want something."
"Hmm," Armande replied vaguely. He stopped when he was practically standing on top of the desk, staring down at Richellou. Richellou, in turn, could no longer ignore Armande so looked up, annoyed.
The light in this chamber was better than that of the Council's meeting room. Armande could easily see the creased lines that sagged down Richellou's face, and the shock-white of his hair was somewhat of a relief; at least someone here was older than Armande himself was. Richellou had to be pushing seventy.
"I do have to wonder," Armande began idly, "how a man like you gets a title like this."
Richellou continued to glare at him, wordless. Since his teasing, testing jabs were ignored, Armande skipped straight to the point.
"I want a different room."
"Nonsense."
"Locking me away in the servant's levels is hardly an effective solution."
"Solution to what?"
"My being here," Armande answered darkly The familiar smirk that Richellou so detested appeared again.
Snapping his book shut, Richellou held back his annoyance, reluctant to give Armande the satisfaction of knowing just how trying he was. He leaned back in his desk chair, folding his hands over his stomach.
"What makes you think we have room? We haven't kept an apartment for you reserved while you were away."
"I checked; three apartments in the Master's hall alone are available."
"That hall is off limits to you," Richellou stated matter-of-factly.
Admittedly, Armande wasn't expecting such open defiance. "Let's say I don't give a damn."
"As per our agreement, you are required to keep your distance from Dahlia Touveilles. It would be impertinent to place you so near to her own personal living space."
This was funny; he probably could have held it in, but Armande let himself laugh in the High Councilllor's face. Richellou obviously saw neither the joke nor the humor in this, as his pompous expression turned sour and resolved into a glare.
"What's so funny?" he demanded, the shadow of a growl underscoring his words.
Armande snickered, "I wonder, did you consult with Dahlia lately? I think she's rescinded her wish that I stay away."
"It was Eliane's request, not Dahlia's, and I'm afraid I don't understand your meaning," Richellou replied, frustration apparent in the stressed staccato of his words and the red tinge his forehead had taken on.
Leaning on the desk so as to be as close to eye level as possible with the High Councillor, Armande took an extra minute to smirk meaningfully across the table; his insolence was met with a scowl.
"Well, let me explain it in simple terms," Armande started. "I came back to my room last night to find Dahlia waiting for me. We had a... long conversation, about some things." Armande's smirk widened. "She stayed for a decent two hours, in fact. Of course, I wasn't watching the time."
At first, it seemed that Richellou hadn't heard him. Maybe even that the old man had had a stroke and died where he sat, his stillness was so unreal. When he finally moved, it was his face that did so first, twisting into a snarl.
"I'll speak with Dahlia, but you listen here," he hissed, standing. "If word reaches me that you've been with her again-"
"You'll what?" Armande glared across the table. His smile was gone, replaced by the predatory stare that had been known to come out at times like these. There might as well have been a prowling wolf on the other side of the desk.
Richellou stared back. "Our agreement is off."
"You have no control over me. You have no control over Dahlia," Armande taunted again, almost in a sing-song tone of mockery. "And you know it. You can do nothing to two consenting adults. You're as helpless as you were twenty-five years ago."
Memory surged to the forefront of Richellou's face. They were not pleasant memories.
"Get out."
Armande's smirk returned; he knew the sound of defeat when he heard it.
"I'll have my things moved," Armande taunted as he pulled the office door open and shut behind himself.
He waited a moment before walking away; after ten full seconds, a strangled, rumbling scream of rage echoed from within Richellou's office. Armande strolled off with a grin, always happy to make someone's day: his own.
Despite what she said, a week passed before Armande finally grew impatient enough to actively seek Dahlia out. He hadn't so much as glimpsed her since that first night at the complex. It was a vast structure, reaching deep into the cliffs beside the sea, but even so it seemed ridiculous, suspicious, that their paths would not cross. So Armande decided to look for her, beginning in the only place besides his bedroom he had seen her.
The Library was mostly empty; this was far from unusual, at nearly ten o'clock in the morning. Still, Armande scoffed, even as he scanned the many aisles for his quarry. As a disciple, he had been required to spend long hours poring over tome after tome, often arriving long before sunrise so that progress could be made before combat training commenced in the afternoon. To see few students present both dismayed and infuriated him.
Despite his distraction, Armande was lucky. It was not a long search through the silent shelves when he caught sight of Dahlia through the books.
She hadn't noticed his presence; Armande slipped down his aisle until it connected to hers, where he proceeded to observe from around the corner, half shrouded in the early-morning dimness of the library hall.
A book was open in her hands; Armande continually forgot how small Dahlia was, so substantial she appeared when in motion. The old tome was the length of her forearms and hands, though she held it in one arm easily. The fingers of her other hand traced absently down the page, turned it, traced the lines until she again was disappointed, and turned several more pages. Was she looking for something also?
Dahlia closed the book and returned it to the shelf. It's place was high above her head, and she had to reach, stretching in amusingly un-Assassin-like difficulty to put it back without climbing. Armande moved further behind the books as she straightened and re-ordered the disturbed perfection of her shirt and vest. When he looked again, she had moved closer. Now, she weaved back and forth, examining titles and spines, bending down to read those on the lower rungs and standing on tiptoe to see the higher ones.
Armande found himself watching mindlessly, pleasantly hypnoized by the innocent way she moved and the less-innocent lines and curves of her body. Not completely sexual, some bizarre contentment infected him as Dahlia pulled out another book, this one smaller, and flipped through the pages, searching. This confused him; Armande tried to figure out this alien sensation in his chest as he watched her, but came up with nothing.
Suddenly, Dahlia snapped her book shut and turned to look at him directly. "Can I help you Armande?"
His mouth hung open dumbly; she had taken him off-guard, and that didn't happen very often. He didn't have a ready response, and certainly nothing that could cover up the fact that he had been caught red-handed, skulking around like a child in Dahlia's footsteps.
"Am I not permitted to also use the Library?" he snapped, annoyed at having no better answer. Dahlia smirked.
"I suppose you are permitted," she agreed, returning to her book.
Without need for further secrecy, Armande stalked into her aisle and peered invasively over her shoulder. Whatever she was reading was in Italian; Armande hadn't read Italian in over twenty years, and recognized little. Curiosity nattered away the inside of his head, but he refused to ask.
Instead, he cut to the chase. "I haven't seen you lately."
"I have been occupied," she replied instantly.
"With what?" Armande pressed.
Dahlia glared at him incredulously. "I am a mother and an Assassin- forgive me if I don't find the time to find my way back to your bedchamber night after night!" she exclaimed, obviously trying to keep her voice down. Not that she needed bother; there were precious few potential eavesdroppers, anyway.
Armande cringed inwardly, shamed and irritated further that she inflicted him so with so little effort. He had walked right into it. Armande gritted his teeth. "I wasn't thinking." Truth, enough.
This seemed to be the last thing Dahlia expected; her fury vanished in a wave of what might have been relief. "I-It's quite alright." She stubbornly buried her nose in the book again.
In the attempt to keep her talking, Armande finally gave in to his insistent curiosity. "What are you reading?"
Dahlia paused. Her eyes strayed from the pages and she glanced up at Armande. "Claudia Auditore's diary."
"Vraiment?" Immediately interested, Armande forgot his irritation. "I had assumed it was lost in the siege of Monteriggioni."
"One would think," Dahlia agreed with a small smile. "I assume it was recovered from the rubble. It isn't a copy; see the damage to the cover? It went through some rough action before it found its way here."
Armande watched her spectulatively, folding his hands passively behind his back. "Light reading?"
"Hmm," Dahlia avoided answering, again with a tiny coy smile.
"And that one?" Armande jerked his chin in the direction of her previous selection. "And the other volume?"
"The record book she kept for those twenty years whilst Ezio hunted the Spaniard," she replied quietly.
The book sat innoculously where she had returned it to the shelf. Armande raised an eyebrow, still peering over her shoulder at the diary. Dahlia ignored him and put up a convincing facade of returning to her reading. He leaned closer again, chin almost resting on her shoulder. "I see a pattern," he breathed into her ear.
"Don't try to bully me," Dahlia snapped, waving him away.
He caught her hand. "Who says I was trying to bully you?"
Dahlia finally looked up at him again, closing the book. She replied in such a matter-of-fact tone, like what she said should be obvious. "Because its all you know how to do."
"Is that why you've been following me? So I can't bully you?"
Dahlia frowned. "I haven't been following you."
"Don't try to lie to me."
"Don't try to bully me," she repeated.
Armande dropped her hand.
She dropped her eyes.
Dahlia put the book back.
"I told you that you have nothing to fear from me."
"And I'm supposed to just believe you?"
"You believed me the other night," Armande replied fiercely.
"I'm beginning to think that the other night was the biggest mistake of my life!" Dahlia replied heatedly.
Armande didn't answer. Dahlia didn't continue. He pulled his hand away, folding it again behind his back.
"Do you really think so?"
Dahlia refused to look away, stubbornly meeting his eyes. She didn't, however, offer a response. Armande scoffed under his breath.
Without another word, Armande left the Library. He didn't know what he had been expecting; what, was he thinking she would wantonly fall into his arms and confess that she had dreamt of him every night? Not dreams, surely. Nightmares. Was he expecting to find that she had wanted to come to him all along? Foolishly, yes.
Some hours later, just as Armande was considering leaving his new, larger rooms to hunt down something for supper, there was a soft knock on the door, almost too soft to hear. Even he had trouble percieving it; not sure that it had happened at all, he crept across the room, hand securely on his dagger.
Dahlia waited outside. Admittedly, Armande had no idea whether this was good or devastating; regardless, he opened his door a fraction wider.
"To what do I owe the honor?" he asked dryly. He stepped back, allowing her in.
She didn't move. "You may well have been the worst thing that happened to me, ever," she confessed. Armande's heart sank, and he considered slamming the door shut; something kept it open. Continuing, Dahlia's eyes defiantly held his. "But I'm not the same person I was. You are not the same man you were. What's done is over; it was wrong of me to judge my actions today by yesterday's standards."
Wary, Armande unconsciously pulled the door closer. "It is common knowledge that learning from the past is wise."
"Learning to fish by remembering how to sew will only get you so far," she replied.
He grinned, though it was half-hearted. "You may be so changed, but I'm afraid if you knew me well, you'd find that I am not as different as I seem."
Dahlia shrugged, finally dropping her eyes in thought. "Peut-etre." She looked up again. "But having seen you at your worst, I would wager that there has been some small difference made." Almost too subtle to see, a smile turned up the corners of her lips; her face seemed suited for it, but the muscles themselves unused to the expression, as if she had had not nearly enough practice.
Armande leaned against the frame, not sure what to make of her presence here. She came in peace, that much was certain. Where she couldn't see, he tucked his dagger into his belt using the door for cover. Armande was still trying to make heads or tails of why both of them were standing at his door, saying nothing, when she surprised him yet again.
"In truth, what happened between us the other night might be the biggest mistake of my life," Dahlia admitted. As she spoke, her hand came to rest on his arm, which she squeezed lightly. Her smile widened, by a margin that no measurement could follow, it was so minute. "And in truth, I came here hoping to repeat it."