The Barbarian's Mistress by Nhys Glover

laughed so much.’
    She saw him stiffen, his back becoming even straighter. ‘Yes, you made me laugh. You could always make me laugh. It’s hard to explain how I could be angry and laugh at the same time. It’s like I play-acted with you. With everyone. Put on an easy face, as if I didn’t care about anything. And I kept my fire banked. ‘
    ‘I don’t understand.’
    ‘You know how Publius wanted you to cry and plead? And you learned that the more you cried, the worse he got. So you stopped crying and made out that you didn’t care. Well I learned that was the only way to keep on top of your mother, and people like her. Bravado, pure and simple, because, if I showed them how angry I was, how they got to me, it would just make them worse.’
    Lara looked out at the flat , reclaimed marshland that seemed to go on and on forever ahead of them. The heat was stifling under the strange headdress she wore. Sweat trickled down her back, making her itchy. The mosquito bites from the night before still stung.
    ‘So you didn’t care for me. It was all an act?’ Her heart had begun to hurt her, physically hurt her. It made her other discomforts seem trifling.
    ‘I did care about you, little mistress. But I didn’t let it affect me. I kept my guard up. Like Elaeni and Herakles started to do with you after what happened to Ninia. If I’d let what was happening to you affect me, I would have been undone. I had to survive.’
    She let that sink in for a while. It was hard for her to imagine what that must feel like, to turn off your feelings. To stay hard, and yet wear a mask of playfulness. She started to realise that the warm, gentle man she had known had simply been a front. The harsh warrior she was coming to know now, had always been there, just well hidden. Now there was less need for the front. He could be himself. Tears trickled down her face, cool against her burned face.
    He looked over his shoulder and swore. ‘Why are you crying?’
    ‘Because I don’t have to keep up my act anymore. Like you, I can be the real me now that my cruel family are gone.’ She made no attempt to wipe away the tears.
    ‘But why are you sad?’
    She shrugged and looked away from him. And he drove the horses off the road until he pulled them to a halt beneath a small stand of trees. Wordlessly he unhitched the horses and led them to nearby marsh water.
    Lara knew she needed to get down and help prepare their midday meal. But she was so tired and so emotionally drained she could barely think. Her logical brain told her she was probably feeling shock, because of the rapid changes that had taken place in her life. And her body had been put under more physical strain than ever before. No wonder she felt numb, exhausted, uncaring what happened to her.
    Vali came back to the carrus and stood looking at her. They were the same height now. For once she felt his equal, not a child to his adult.
    ‘Why did you cry?’ he asked sadly, his pale blue eyes troubled.
    She wanted to look away and shrug again, but she knew he wouldn’t let her get away with that again. So she lifted her chin and tried to gather what little courage she had.
    ‘I feel like I’ve lost a friend. As if the Vali I knew died, and you’re a hard stranger whose taken his place. Maybe that other Vali wasn’t real. But he was to me, and I loved him. I cried because I lost someone I loved again.’
    He blinked rapidly for several seconds and then his eyes flamed blue fire. ‘I would have killed him for what he did to you. Is that what you wanted?’
    It was her turn to blink rapidly, in her case with shock. She knew he meant Publius. And, of course she wouldn’t have wanted him to kill her brother. He would have died too, if he had done such a thing.
    ‘No, of course not.’
    ‘If I let myself feel any more than I did for you, I would have had no choice. It is what I was bred to do. It is what my people require, my gods require. You protect what’s yours, what you love,