I don’t plan on digging it out to know for sure. All I know is that it must also be spent, its energy depleted.
Milena’s head suddenly feels heavier in my lap. Her hair is draped across my leg and into the snow, her black pants and tunic are torn, and her lips have remained blue. She’s shorter than I remember, but I was only a small child when I had interacted with her.
“I wonder if Milena designed these monsters,” I say.
“If she did, her own creations turned on her.”
Just as Erik destroyed Malak.
“Then there is some justice in that,” I say quietly.
Erik considers the tree for a moment and I’m surprised when a hint of a smile lifts his lips. “You made something beautiful.”
Happiness.
My heart lifts a little. “I fed it peace.”
He reaches out his hand, palm up. I rest my free hand in it. A quiet touch as we kneel in the snow beneath this tree.
I know we need to get up, keep moving, figure out how to bind Milena before she wakes up. If she ever does. But there’s something so fragile about this moment, so delicate that I don’t want to move.
“Asha, I need to ask you something.” Erik takes a deep breath and suddenly, that’s all I hear. That single breath, as if whatever he’s going to say could break him.
At my nod, he speaks, his voice low and soft. “Do you remember when we first met?”
I could never forget. “In the throne room.”
He’s very still. “Before that.”
Before the throne room?
“Do you remember the snow?”
A sense of unease builds within me. My focus flies to our surroundings. Suddenly cold. Chilling. “We met in the throne room. You’d killed my parents. You broke down the door.”
His eyes are deep amber for a moment, then gray again, their shifting shape taking my breath away. “That’s when you first looked me in the eyes.”
I remember that moment. Erik’s gaze bored into me, as if he’d been trying to pull from me every fear and imperfection.
And then he says, “But that wasn’t the first time we met.”
“Erik, I don’t?—”
His hand closes more tightly around mine. “There are things I need to tell you and this is where I need to start.”
The shakiness in his voice, the uncertainty, keeps me frozen to the spot. There’s still so much I don’t know about him. Some of it may be too painful to speak about. The loss of his family, the pain that was inflicted on him, the rage that must have driven him after he was changed.
“The first time we met, I didn’t know who you were,” he says. “I didn’t know you were a Blacksmith. I wasn’t your enemy. You weren’t my enemy. You were just a girl in the snow. And I was?—”
Milena stirs in my lap, giving a groan.
Erik is immediately focused on her, his claws snapping out and descending to her throat.
My left hand flies to her neck, pressing to her skin, but I restrain my power.
If Milena threatens us, she doesn’t stand a chance.
But it’s not the danger she poses that worries me most in this moment.
