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"What were you thinking, trying to remove that beehive by yourself?" Dante snarled, storming into the kitchen. "You could have been stung!"
Glass clinked against the kitchen counter as Anne set down a jar. "I didn't just try to remove it. I did remove it. And I'm perfectly fine."
He rammed his hand against the counter, making her jump. "You rushed in! You should have come to me—I could have taught you spells for calming animals, sending them to sleep -- "
"I knew exactly what I was doing. I tended beehives at Montclaire, and I've foraged from wild beehives before." Anne took a deep breath, no doubt straightening with a debater's zeal. "I dressed for protection and I had smoke with me."
Dante had seen a farmer die from bee stings. The man's family had brought him to Salvador in a cart, but by then he had stopped breathing. Dante still remembered his face, pockmarked with bee stings, his mouth swollen and his tongue bulging from what Salvador had said was a reaction to the poison.
It was unthinkable that Anne had risked the same happening to her. It would have wasted the finest talent for magic that he had ever encountered and the sharp and unyielding mind that could wield it—all for the sake of doing a task that any true aristo lady would have left to her underlings.
"You still have no time for such irrelevancies," he told her, scorn dripping from his tongue. "I gave you books to read and exercises to do. You came here to study, not to play at being a farmer."
"I wasn't playing!" Her temper flared at the accusation; she drew in a breath then and let it out. He could feel her concentration as she calmed herself. "Finn needed help, and I already finished the books you gave me this morning, and I'll finish the exercises as soon as I store away the honey. We'll have it with the dinner rolls."
I really was safe. And it wouldn't have been so bad even if I had been stung. Every beekeeper is stung eventually. Her voice came through the aether,clear and close as the thoughts of his own mind.. As you are stinging me right now, which I know is because you care about me.
His face heated with the conviction of her words and her fondness; if he had irritated her, those feelings had vanished. Dante turned his face away, shutting out her warmth. He'd forgotten that Anne, too, knew how best to sting.