NOVGO.NET Movement Two — The Face She Refused to Show Him
He turned his head further into her lap instead of answering, the particular, deliberate way a much younger creature buries itself deeper into a hiding place the moment the hiding place is threatened. She felt the shift of it against her thigh — the small, stubborn weight of him refusing, quite plainly, to look up.
Ilyrisse's expression did not do what most faces do when they are annoyed. It went still first — a very particular kind of stillness, the kind a queen wears when she has decided, deliberately, not to let an emotion move any further across her features than it absolutely has to. That was the easy part, the part she'd had centuries to practice, the part that came to her now the way breathing comes to the living, without needing to be summoned.
What was harder, underneath it, was the specific shape of what the stillness was holding down. It was not effort in the way holding back real fury might have been effort; she had not felt real fury in longer than either of them could measure, not since long before this room existed, back when fury had still seemed to her like the only currency worth spending on anyone who crossed her. What she was holding down now was smaller than fury and, in its own way, considerably harder to spend gracefully — the particular labor of a woman who had built her whole long reign on never once being caught wanting something out loud, forced now to sit very still and want, quite badly, for a single stubborn boy to simply look at her.
There was an older shape underneath that wanting, if you looked closely enough, and I don't think Ilyrisse looked closely at it often, not even now, not even with the boy in question pressed warm and unmoving against her lap. Centuries before this room existed, before this castle, before there was anyone in her life patient enough to be ignored by on purpose, she had been the kind of soul no one dared to keep waiting. Armies had waited on her word. Whole courts had learned to read the set of her shoulders the way sailors read weather, adjusting their entire day around whichever way the wind of her mood seemed to be blowing. She had never once, in all that long reign, had to ask twice for anyone's attention.
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Being made to wait now — by someone she had chosen herself, someone under no obligation at all to fear her, someone who could ignore her for the simple, unglamorous reason that he trusted the ground under both of them wouldn't crack open just because he'd made her wait a few extra seconds — was not an injury. If anything it was closer to a gift, and she knew it was a gift even while she sat there wanting to close her fingers around his ear and make him look at her regardless. But even gifts leave a mark on the hand that isn't used to receiving them, and her stillness, just then, was that mark showing: the specific, quiet vertigo of a woman discovering, this many centuries into her own existence, that she still didn't fully know what to do with being loved by someone who wasn't afraid of her.
She reached down. Not gently — or gently in the particular way that isn't soft at all — and closed two fingers around the edge of his ear.
He made a sound against her lap that was not quite a protest.
"Look at me," she said, "when I am talking to you."