"If going on without you was best, I'd have left you here unconscious and taken our charges without ever looking back," she said, the frustration spilling into her voice. Vera was more than capable of that coldness, if she thought it was best. He had to know that. Eragos was always offering to leave whenever she became angry with him, expecting her to banish him at a moment's notice. Vera leaned forward in her chair instead of backward, her elbow resting just on the edge of the table.
"I don't want you to leave. I just..."
She shook her head. There was anger and then there was honesty. She wondered if she could speak with both without becoming completely inarticulate. Vera was not the lady her mother was by any stretch of the imagination. Her diplomatic missions were full of give and take; she had been terrible her first time out. Sometimes she didn't believe she was improving.
"It is my mission. And it's hard enough for me to decide what's right. What's going to work. Those dead knights might cost me the negotiations in the capitol, which are the entire reason we're here. Or maybe not. What happened to Barada might have happened to Galatin, but then maybe Barada was marked because of who he dealt with. I don't know which road was better, I just picked what I thought was best. And then you went down the opposite way."
Vera picked up one of her knives when the healer peered out at them from the room. She set it down when the door closed. Eragos still refused to sit. She wondered if he believed there was a knife here for him. Her temper had been legendary lately. Vera kept her eyes on the knives, still having to struggle with her own frustrations.
"I don't care that they died. I'll care if I can't see this through because I killed when I shouldn't have. Because I didn't see something. I'm not used to working with other people, Eragos. I usually don't trust anyone else."