Chapter 28 begins with Sage fluttering off of Merry’s hand
and landing on her breasts. Merry moves her arm to shoo him off, and he seems
offended. He asks if she will deny him “heart-blood”, like that’s an actual
thing. Isn’t all blood “heart-blood”? Merry tells him that she saw what the
demi-fey did to Galen, so she doesn’t really trust Sage to not destroy her
chest. Sage reluctantly moves back to Merry’s hand, but then he begins kissing
her hand. Merry is enjoying this, when suddenly she realizes he is using
glamour to make his kissing sensation more powerful, to make Merry enjoy it
more. She reminds him not to use glamour on her. Sage tells her that without
the glamour, his feeding will be quite painful for her. Merry thinks on this,
and realizes she is still quite sore from Kitto’s bite, so she allows Sage to
use just enough of his glamour to mask the pain, nothing more. She tells him
that if she catches him using more glamour than that, she will call the guards
on him.
Sage then asks why she’d call the guards, when she has Kitto
right there to protect her. Merry tells him that goblins fall easily to any strong
glamour. Merry does her typical “you’re wrong about that and here’s why”,
because obviously Merry knows more about anything else in her world, what with
her being the only “learned” sidhe. She tells Sage that the demi-fey actually
have incredibly strong glamour, and were well known for using their glamour to
lead people astray to their deaths. Sage argues that they only lead people who
deserved to die to their deaths, such as a butterfly collector who happens to
collect several of the demi-fey along with the butterflies. Merry tries to
argues with this, telling him there’s no harm in an entomologist collecting
butterflies, but she then realizes that Sage basically has butterfly wings, and
he’d consider the butterflies brethren.
The chapter ends with Merry deciding not to continue arguing
with him, because she couldn’t form a counter-argument that didn’t make her
sound like a hypocrite. Because this entire chapter wasn’t a huge waste of time
or anything.
Labels: book review, Caress of Twilight
