Chapter 46: Second Encounter.

Chapter 46: Chapter 46: Second Encounter.

The king had asked him to sit, but Khobi didn’t. He could feel Vogrid’s green eyes boring into him, ordering him to obey, but he didn’t. He’d been lulled into a false sense of security by the king’s pretty words and pretty promises, but ever since he’d heard that voice again, he’d been wound tightly on edge.

He couldn’t help it. There was something about it that he didn’t like --the hollow edge to it, maybe, the arrogant lilt that was impossible to miss.

The kind of voice that belonged to a man who was used to getting his way.

He knew the voice, couldn’t mistake it, but somehow, this man --the one strolling up and down the length of the table to the great discomfort of his family and the guards present --didn’t seem all too much like the man who had, not so long ago, managed to make his skin crawl in the corridor with one look.

And yet, looking at him, Khobi still seethed, and his skin still crawled. It itched, the way it did when he squared up for a fight. The way he felt was the way that Rogard had felt, but different.

Dangerous.

Even more so than Rogard.

And it was like the room could feel it. The effect he had on its occupants was alarming --the guards were tenser, and some of the cheeriness had melted from the princess’ face.

Loac Trent carried himself like he owned the air he breathed; his presence filling the room with a heavy shadow. He wasn’t armed, and he seemed indifferent to the proceedings, but for some reason when he looked at him, Khobi felt ill at ease.

He hated the way those eyes had looked at him before --hungry with the kind of blind desire that turns men into beasts --but this was just as unsettling.

It felt like the mountains before a storm. Not calm, but empty.

"...Loac," the princess murmured, watching her cousin roam around the table with sad eyes, "...Please." At her voice he glanced up, just briefly, and appeared to consider her request long and hard before finally slouching down into a chair.

Not the one laid out for him, and at the far end of the table, but in their company at least, and when he glanced up with a narrow glare as if to say happy now? the smile he got in return was sad, and he stopped looking.

Instead, he finally turned his attention to Khobi.

"What’s his problem?" he drawled, digging into his food with his hands and jerking a messy thumb in Khobi’s direction, a dismissive gesture that Khobi didn’t take kindly to.

"It seems he’s taken an immense and completely founded disliking to you," Gurdet explained flippantly, "I can’t say I blame him. Dogs have better table manners."

He swilled his wine and ignored the wounded look his daughter sent him. "Better trained, too." Irritation flashed through the stone in Loac’s eyes as he raised them to meet Gurdet’s.

"You’d like that, wouldn’t you."

It wasn’t even a question. It wasn’t like Gurdet had ever pretended otherwise.

"Very much so."

Loac scoffed around his mouthful and shoved another piece of meat into the side of his mouth as he nodded in Khobi’s direction, "Maybe you can train him instead. Silas did, didn’t he?"

"You shut your mouth," Khobi snapped, his fist coming down hard on the table with a heavy thud. It was shaking. What the fuck was this guy’s problem? Who did he think he was? He didn’t know shit.

Silas had dogs who worked for him, ones who begged for scraps at his table and obeyed him no matter how hard he beat them, but he had never been one of them.

"You fought in the Pit for him," pointed out, like that meant anything.

" --I didn’t do it for him," he snapped back, because no one in the Pit fought for anyone but themselves. Not really.

The Pit and those in it don’t care who you serve. Because down in the Pit, when the walls are weeping and closing in, only the last man standing climbs out.

But this guy couldn’t understand that. He didn’t know what it was like trying to hold back the world from crushing you.

"He wanted me dead," he continued, with fire in his eyes --that fire that even the shadows of Briyagi had never been able to stamp out, "But I kept winning, so he kept throwing me back."

It shouldn’t have bothered him, but it did, how little Loax reacted, chewing slowly --contemplatively, almost --like a cow chewing cud in a field, with eyes just as vacant.

"...It’s Khobi Frost, right?" he mused after a moment, but it sounded like his name didn’t matter to him either way.

"...Yeah."

Again, there was silence, and suddenly, Loac was gazing at him again, in that way that he did --like he could see right down to his skin --that way that made his blood froth and boil.

"You a fighter, Khobi?" he asked, deep and low. More than a question, it felt like a trap, and suddenly the emptiness in those eyes felt endless and dark, and not so empty --like there was something dangerous waiting in their depths. Khobi didn’t like it at all.

"When I need to," he answered flatly, with fire in his voice and his eyes to stave off the shadows in Loac’s blue gaze, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that it was a threat.

The guards shifted, edging towards their weapons, ready and alert for the first sign of an altercation. Not Loac, though. He just licked his fingers with loud, wet smacks and amended his question, "You a good fighter?"

"I’m still here aren’t I?"

Loac considered this answer, but it must not have been good enough, because his when he next looked up the vastness in his eyes was gone, shrunk back to the glassy pools they had once been, and his next question was blunt, and mocking.

"...So why did you get creamed by Vector?"

Now, Khobi was not a man without pride, and as all men know, wounded pride is not quick to heal. This in particular, was a wound that still smarted, and Loac had just gone and pressed a hot iron to it.

"I did not get creamed," he growled heatedly, jabbing a finger down the table at the accusation.

"Hah?" Loac snorted vacantly, chewing obnoxiously on a mouthful, "Not what I heard." He wiped the back of his mouth with his sleeve and leaned back in his chair enough to stick his feet up on the table. "...I heard they had to scrape you off the floor."

He smirked, then, and Khobi had had enough.

"Fuck you --" he snarled, kicking his chair out of the way with every intention of going over there and wiping that smug look off his face with the floor. "I’ll show you who --"

He made it about two feet before Bongo materialised at his side, barring his advance. He shouldered him with intent to push past, but it seemed that Bongo’s roots grew deep, and no matter the fuss he made stood firm.

"Don’t," the captain warned, grip fierce on his upper arm. It hurt, and Bongo knew it and seemed sorry for it, but didn’t let him go. "He does this," he explained for his prince, knowing it was no excuse, but it was the only explanation he had, "Just don’t --"

" --There’s a reason I made it out of the Pit, Loac. Wanna find out what that is?"

"...Antagonise him..."

"You weren’t there, Loac," the princess suddenly spoke up in Khobi’s defence, surprising her cousin, her father, and Khobi most of all. "It wasn’t a fair fight. He was outnumbered --and Lord Spidra’s guards..."

"He still lost."

Khobi gritted his teeth and Bongo reluctantly let him shrug off his grip.

"So would you," he ground out, taking another step closer and promptly causing every guard in the room enough stress to lose a good five years of their lives.

"Is that so?" Loac snorted back dismissively, gauging his approach out of the corner of his eye.

Khobi didn’t like the look of him, lounging there with his boots up on the table and his shirt buttoned incorrectly enough for all the world to see what lay beneath, but Loac obviously saw something he liked, because the smirk widened, into a different kind of dangerous. Something hungry.

Endlessly so.

"Forget marrying him," he leered, and Khobi shuddered as his eyes tracked up the length of his body with little shame, dismantling his finery with his imagination as they went. "...How ’bout we just skip right to the good stuff?"

It didn’t take much imagination to figure out what exactly he meant by that.

" --Loac!, behave yourself," the princess scolded sharply, and the red that rose in her cheeks could have been embarrassment, or anger.

On Khobi’s face, however, it was most undeniably anger.

This time, Bongo moved just a split second too late. By the time he had Khobi wrested back to a safe distance, his heavy goblet was already clattering to the floor, and the prince was drenched red with wine.

Nobody moved. And the only one who dared was by this time suitably restrained. He could see past Bongo though, could see Loac licking wine from the corners of his lips with an unreadable expression masking his thoughts.

The goblet hadn’t hit him, which was a damn shame, because Khobi had been so sure it would. He had a good arm on him, and good aim, too. But it had obviously come near enough to wash that smug look clean off his face.

"Just try it," Khobi seethed, voice dangerously devoid of the anger that was making his shoulders shake in Bongo’s grasp. "I won’t miss next time."

Loac’s feet came off the table, and made no sound as they hit the floor. He stood, then, rising up out of his chair like a lithe jungle cat woken from slumber. When he waltzed into a room he slouched, but now he drew up to his full height --considerable, even among men --and surveyed Khobi with hooded, narrowed eyes.

"...Is that a challenge?" he asked, low voice scathing, indignant --both the voice of a tyrant, and a child, denied for the first time. He towered up over the table, and a shadow rose up with him, but Khobi didn’t back down. Much to Bongo’s dismay.

"Please," he growled in hushed tones, "Don’t make it a challenge, Khobi."

Khobi jerked violently in his grip, and the table shuddered from the force of it.

If he’d been hoping for Loac to flinch he was sorely disappointed, but the cutlery shook and the crockery chattered uneasily, and where Gurdet deftly saved his wine from meeting the same fate as Khobi’s, had done, Xena’s teacup lost its balance and spilled.

Gurdet tutted at the fuss.

"That’s quite enough," he declared, as a twitchy, wide-eyed servant scuttled forward to clean up the mess.

"From both of you," he added rather pointedly, to nip the inevitable game of ’he started it’ in the bud. "As for not marrying him," he continued, voice taking on a sharpness that refused to be ignored, "That is simply not an option."

The table trembled again as Khobi once again made his opinion known. This time, vegetables danced off their plates and fled to freedom across the tablecloth, leaving damp stains in their wake.

It was nothing compared to the devastation of the courtyard in the aftermath of Lord Spidra’s affair, of course, but still a mess. Loax just wrinkled his nose in distaste and flicked a stray pea onto the floor where it withered under Vogrid’s glare.