Kaya shrugged, propping her chin on her hand. With the other, she began tracing over the scratches and scuffs on the wooden table. “Do you want to get married and have children or would you rather devote yourself to your work? Where do you see yourself ten, twenty,fiftyyears from now?”
It wasn’t that he’d never thought about his future, it was that he never planned on having to discuss the things he thought about only in that late and lonely hours of the night. “I… I would like to be a father.” He found himself saying it anyway. Despite his discomfort, despite his embarrassment. “I would like to have plenty of children so that they’re never alone. I mean—I have a brother, but he was never allowed to see me until I came here to Galore. His mother was very fickle about sending him to the human realms.” He licked his lips and began to stir the stew once again. “I was a very lonely child, princess.”
When he finally turned to her, he was shocked to find her smiling. Not in a way that was taunting or that lead to teasing, but one that was understanding. “I love children.” She said softly. “I would have a whole army of them if I could.”
She understood. The loneliness. The sense of duty that was shouldered and no one to bear the weight with… she understood.
“Well, I hope you get your army.” His voice was soft, but loud enough that the shift in energies was noticeable.
Kaya’s hand found the aching spot in her chest and she rubbed at it—soothing it. Her attempt at comforting that ache was fruitless, for it continued to hurt. Even as she ate the meal he prepared for them and then scurried off to her room, ithurt.
It felt as if the wall she’d built around her heart was now cracked.
?????????
“Where are you going?” Ilias demanded.
She stayed silent, hoping that if she ignored him he would just go away. She already dressed herself for this excursion anyhow—there was no use in unloading her pack or ridding her back of the sword she brought for her protection. Kaya felt as if she were ready to set out on her own, the threat of horned beasts be damned. Ilias, on the other hand, took one look at her cloaked frame and felt a pit form in the place where his stomach had once been. She was a madwoman. Especially in this weather. For an entire week, it’d stormed. And there was no sight of it ending soon.
This high on the mountain, it wasn’t just snakes or other mountain beasts that threatened her safety. It was the gods-damnedlightening. So when she didn’t reply, Ilias groaned and grabbed his own belongings before following her out the front door of the cottage.
The trail leading to and from their abode was slicked with thick mud. He watched Kaya slip, quickly stabilizing herself on a tree before he heaved a sigh. She glared at him, as always, but kept going.
Kaya was speaking to him again. They’d made progress in the last week, but he had grown increasingly familiar with that icy stare of hers. Perhaps he would be more afraid of it if she actually did something with it.
An entire week of training her powers and the Dark Bringer was nowhere in sight. And he didn’t particularly feel as if he should traumatize the poor female in order to get her shadowy little friends to come out of hiding. They’d made absolutely no progress on that front and trying to get her to talk about it served just as useful as getting her to come to her senses about seeking out this book she’d been talking about and searching for all week.
They walked out of the golden gate, a beacon of welcome and hope, and onto the path that would lead them into the forest that was not safe to travel alone. For anyone. Much less a stubborn twenty-year-old who believed herself to be invincible.
“Remind me again why this book is so important to you.” Ilias’s rumble of a voice stilled her for just a moment.
She glanced at him over her shoulder, shuddering against the harsh winds. “It contains very useful information about what I am trying to achieve.” She shrugged, huffing at the start of an incline.
“And what is that, exactly? Because in terms of achievements, you have offered little to no evidence you are improving.”
Kaya rolled her eyes, feeling that flicker of annoyance starting to rise in her chest. “You said it, yourself. That my improvement would be internal, at first. And unless you cut me open and dissect me, I fear you wouldn’t see much at all.”
Ilias narrowed his eyes, his frustration evident. She could feel his energy darken, just slightly, enough to make her slow her determined stride. “You are the most stubborn being I have ever met, princess. Don’t you understand that I haven’t been sent here to babysit you while you go on your little side-quests,but toactuallyteach you how to hone your power?” Kaya caught him swatting at a low branch, angrily knocking it out of his way. “And I can’t do that if you don’t trust me.”
She paused, turning to face him suddenly. Ilias took one balancing step back, his hand braced upon the trunk of a tree. “I would ask you to forgive me for my rudeness, Ilias. But as you are well aware, I don’t find solace in being around someone of your…” Her hands tightened into fists, just as his stomach. He expected her to sayhuman—he expected her to say anything else other than:
“You’re aCaptain. And that title, alone, makes me absolutely terrified of you.”
There was nothing he could say to that.
He stared at her blankly, her eyes boring holes into his own. Ilias should have expected as much—that it was not what he had unknowingly done, but who she thought he was. It was so much worse than being demeaned and set apart for his humanity. It was also entirely unexpected that he felt the blow of her words so deeply. That it actuallyhurt. Despite his original plan for this job to be strictly professional, he found himself staring at her and inwardly begging that would actually see him. Not the captain that came before him, not the males that sought her attention to gain some for themselves, buthim.
“I told you,” he started, voice threatening to shake, “that I would prove to you that you could trust me. But you have to let me, Ailikaya. You cannot define me by the acts of one male, who isnotme. I am not terminology from your precious books that has one set definition.”
It came out harsher than he expected—a saltiness to his tone that seemed too robust and hard to swallow. But something in her softened. The darkness that surrounded her seemed to dissipate, the hardened shell she placed around herself splintered into an opening. A starting point.
“After we retrieve this book you are so stubbornly hell-bent on finding, I am taking you somewhere. And I want you to hold onto that anger—keep it for the male to which it belongs. Don’t put it on me.”
He lead her the rest of the way to the clearing in an uneasy silence. He could feel her thinking, could feel the chill of death on her. But, for the firsttime since he met her, it was not directed at him.
As they crested the incline, Ilias stilled. There was no book in sight. There was only the sound of low snarls and starved grumbles.
He saw the blood first—the entrails strewn across the ground like grotesque, red ribbons. And then he saw the beasts, each saddled and reigned with black leather.
