I finally lifted my head to regard him, feeling his magic begin to fade. It whispered over my skin until I could no longer find the traces of it. And I worried how easily I was getting used to it. Would I be so familiar with it that soon I no longer felt it? Would Alaryk keep his word and not use it against me?
So far he had kept his promise.
“That’s what you do for others,” he murmured. “You just did it for yourself, finally.”
“I don’t know anyone else who has heartstone magic,” I confessed. “Only you.”
He made a sound in the back of his throat, his arm flexing beneath my head. My cheek was cushioned against the rock of muscle there. Not entirely comfortable, but I didn’t want to move away. His body, pressed against mine, his warmth, his smell were entirely too tantalizing.
I liked him too much already—even when he made me angry. I’d found him sinking into my thoughts at all moments of the day, making for distracting work in the hatchery.
But he was still a puzzle to me.
Moving my hand between us, I drifted it up the wall of his bare chest. His skin was smooth and searing. He looked as cold as ice sometimes, but really he was roaring like a forge, making me sweat beneath the furs. He was naked too, I could feel the bare stretch of his leg against mine.
His pupils were dilated in the low light, watching me. My thumb dragged just beneath his pectoral, and the pad of it met the steady beat of his heart. I rested my palm there, and the strong thud felt comforting.
Our faces were so close that we were sharing the same breath, and it felt intimate and strange but…right. I didn’t pull away and neither did he. We only looked at each other. His gaze was soft, running over my features as if he had all the time in the world, settling on my lips before flicking back to my eyes.
“Tell me what happened to Samryn,” I said, the words tumbling from me, quiet and hushed, as if someone else was in the room and I didn’t want them to overhear us. “Please.”
His heart skipped. A little stutter that he knew I felt.
He blew out a rough exhale. “To understand what happened to Samryn, you would have to understand…everything. And that’s a long story.”
“Then tell me everything,” I said simply.
I thought I deserved to know, didn’t I? I was the only one who’d felt what wasreallyroving inside the poor beast. And it wasan awful thing. For someone to do that to an Elthika…they’d wanted to make Alaryk suffer too.
For a moment, I thought he wouldn’t tell me. In fact, I expected it. The silence stretched so long that I felt a stab of disappointment.
But then he surprised me. In the warm quietness of his bed, he said, “I was born and raised in Harta, as I’m sure you’ve heard. My mother was Karag, though, and we crossed over the border back to her homeland when I was a young boy. But it was difficult for us to make a new home. From nothing and with nothing.”
I listened, rapt, his voice almost trancelike.
“There was once a village. Close to Grym’s borders. A couple decades ago, it was a busy, growing town, where Karag and Hartans both lived. Not particularly savory, I’ll admit. But my mother found a job working at a tavern there, and I would forage for edibles to sell at the market in the nearby forest. We lived there for nearly a decade. Until I came of age.”
Oddly, I could picture him as a wild boy, spending his days in the woods.
“You…you weren’t in rider training during that time?” I asked, only knowing what I knew from talk around the village. Most riders came from a lineage of it. They were called blood borns, and they usually entered training as young as twelve or thirteen. Most blood borns had claimed Elthika by the time they entered adulthood.
A small huff of a laugh fell from him. “No, I didn’t enter rider training until I was nineteen. After my mother had died.”
“Oh,” I breathed, feeling my expression pull. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“She’d been sick for a while,” he told me. “It finally caught up with her. The village was called Gryloth. It doesn’t exist now—most of it burned down during the war. But during the last year of my mother’s life, and shortly before I left, there was a Hartanwitch who came to live there. Her name was Kamora. My mother befriended her, brought her into our home for a while.”
I heard a sharp edge of bitterness in his tone.
“She was my first love, I suppose you could say,” he admitted to me, a curl of resentment on his lips. “My first everything. But what I thought was love at the time was really only obsession and lust and heartstone magic, all fueled by pain.”
“She had heartstone magic?” I whispered.
“Yes,” he told me. “She was my tutor.”
Dawning realization spread through me.
“She was older than me, by nearly a decade,” he continued. “She had lived all her life in Harta, but as a nomad. Traveling from place to place, making a living giving prophecies and using her magic to…persuade people away from their coins and jewels.”
