With another round of gratitude, the draekins disappeared in the tall grasses, and Damien and Amma went back to their disguised mounts. Kaz, who had shifted back into a dog, began to complain that Amma had given away all of their food, but she was quick to correct him that there was still at least one hunk of bread in the bag, and they needn’t worry since the apples in this part of the realm were in season. Once they were mounted back up and on their way, Kaz had not stopped complaining, but Damien insisted that if worse came to worst, imp would suffice for dinner, and that shut him up.
Amma found herself staring at Damien again, this time outwardly, and when he inquired what was on her mind, she did not look away. “You could have left them, or even killed them, but you helped them instead. That was very sweet of you.”
“Oh, Amma, thank you.”
She beamed at his sudden appreciation for the compliment, then her smile faltered. “Wait, really?”
He pressed a hand to his stomach. “Yes, of course—you’ve rectified the fact you’ve given away all of our food: I don’t think I’ll ever have an appetite again after being calledsweet.”
“Stop it—you know it was!”
“No, my actions were only prudent.” He stared forward, jaw hardening. “Draekin are good warriors when they’re in their prime. A few of them could be useful in the future, and new blood will be good for the existing clans up north, not to mention they now have a debt to me. I’ve simply grown my army, and it cost me next to nothing. You, on the other hand, have been holding out. Apparently you’re a very good thief who has been letting me pay for everything.”
Amma hadn’t counted the gold she handed over, but then she hadn’t really ever needed to keep track of a thing like that. “They needed it more,” she said quickly, then shifted the subject right back to him. “I think you did it because you have a soft spot for draekin. You like them.”
“Draekin are messy, combative, overly excitable, and the furthest from likeable as a thing can be.”
“And yet you like them anyway!” She laughed lightly. “But did you tell that one you were raised by them? I thought your parents were demons?”
“One of them is.”
“And the other’s a draekin? Okay, you definitely have a tail—”
“My mother was a human, obviously.” He gestured to his face.
And a nice-looking one, I bet, thought Amma. She smirked at herself, intrigued now that they were back on the subject. “So, where do the draekin come in?”
Damien rolled his head on his shoulders. “The ones in Aszath Koth are loyal to my father. Well, everything is, but he thought they, specifically, would make good caretakers in his stead. They very infrequently eat their young.”
Amma mulled over the hesitancy in his voice. “Was he right?”
“I’m alive, aren’t I?”
“Well, you said they aren’t very nice to things smaller than them, and you might be huge now, but I doubt you were this big when you were born.”
“Draekin are not terribly tender, and hatchlings are covered in scales, so they’re quite a bit tougher, but I wasn’t in their care until I was—” Damien stopped abruptly, turning to her. “No more questions.”
Amma pursed her lips, but swallowed down the next thing she meant to say. She would have shared with him that she too had many different people who cared for her when she was small. But then her own parents at least tried to make time for her, and she wasn’t sure that was the case for Damien.
She watched him from the corner of her eye a moment longer, vision sliding down to his hip pouch and where she now knew the scroll was. Instead of lewd plans to snatch it away, though, a ball of guilt rolled itself into her mind. Once she got the scroll and they made it into Faebarrow, she would have to get away from him. There was likely only one way to do that, and it would not go well for him in the end.
“Damien?” she finally ventured after a moment, afraid he would shout at her for so quickly asking another question when he’d told her no more.
“Yes?” he responded, perfectly pleasantly.
“Do you think the draekin will make it all the way to Aszath Koth?”
He glanced back the way they’d come, face creased with a frown. “I don’t know.”
CHAPTER 20
FEAR AND LONGING IN THE HAUNTED FOREST
Damien was loath to admit he much preferred Amma’s praise of his deeds to her complaints about their direction. Her admiration lasted the rest of the day, which he insisted was unnecessary but less adamantly than before. By the next morning, however, she once again second-guessed his desire to go after the Lux Codex that Xander had challenged him with. She asked if he was sure multiple times, and he read aloud to her from the journal he’d gotten from Anomalous to put an end to the questions. That seemed to help until her obsession with countering him shifted the following day to a new topic: the Gloomweald.
“It isnothaunted,” Damien insisted. He had never been told such a ridiculous thing—who ever heard of ahauntedforest? “I know you revere trees, but surely when they die, that’s it. They don’t come back to possess their fallen trunks.”
“It’s not the trees.” She was sitting on her masked knoggelvi with shoulders pulled in but eyes held open wide as they turned off the main road toward the edge of the wood. “It’s only a few extra days to go around,” she bargained in a small voice. “And everybody does it, so the road is well-traveled.”
