Blood. She claimed it was for blood, but he wondered - would she feel so deeply that she gave herself away? When she listed the names of those brothers who had passed on, he could not help but smile. Gaius had been a fine fighter until he crossed the wrong warrior. Or so the stories went. Yet it was telling that there was nothing of love in her voice, or of good humor for the good brother. Only a sort of scorn that he could feel in the air despite her attempts to mask it. A sort of challenging abyssal despair. He wondered if he'd ever felt anything like that, or had any experience with which to compare it. Those I loved are dead, is what he heard her say, and so this is all that I have left. Yes, it would be. Yet he didn't imagine it so coldly as that when he imagined it. In his mind her calculation was as much to do with her opportunistic nature - assumed, not demonstrated - as it was to do with ... well, anything. He hadn't expected her to say without saying that the family she cared for the most was gone, retired from this world in the main by Eibhear's son. Ha. Now there was an example of a son who let down the father.
It was present in the way she moved. In the way she dressed, and spoke, this perpetual mourning that she wore privately as well as publicly - demonstrated, not assumed - she made evident the fact that she felt the house had fallen far. Everything short of outright treachery that she could do to shame and embarrass Alvir. The lordling had a great deal to learn, true - and he was not fit to rule a house as he was. Then again, Fenrir did not know of a lord or lady who was fit to run a noble house. Even Eibhear for all that he'd worn the badge of the populist demagogue on his sleeve was not a man of the people. He had never lived hand to mouth, never wondered where his next meal would come from, and only ate hard bread and sour milk because he lived the life of a soldier. He still had the finest tent in the field, and if his men believed he cared for them those same men watched him go into the gilded tent and sleep among his riches, peaceful and rested. Fenrir thought Eibhear was entertaining in a way that Alvir was not, but they both had that in common. Neither one of them should control the fates of others.
No one should.
"Perhaps," Fenrir began - and then stopped.
Again the urge to force himself on her was strong. He did not - because ... he did not think that he would need to? Because it was wrong? The question he could not answer lingered in his mind until he dismissed it without cause. In the fabric that clung to her skin she seemed an invitation given flesh. Soft pale flesh that had not been kissed in far too long. What man could see that and despair? It was a transitory pleasure, half as likely to happen the second time as it had been to happen the first. Yet he still found himself wondering what she would do if he threw her onto the bed.
Fight?
Kill him?
"Perhaps the more interesting question," and he paused here to sip his wine again. "Is why you don't care if he lives or dies."