Page 166 of Kingdom of the Two Moons

“It refers to theoutcomeof the war,” he clarifies somberly.

“Are my talents the reason the Nefarians want me dead?”

“In a sense,” he admits. Ambiguously. An answer that is none. Fuck him.

I know I surprise him when I ask, “What are the relics?”

He angles his head at that while his eyes scrutinize my face, as if his decision whether to tell me more depends on something he finds or doesn’t find there. “It is bound magic. The elves bound magic to relics back then to hide it away from the world under Gatilla’s reign.”

“Why do you want them?” I ask.

He turns fully to me, a sad half smile on his lips, his eyes pitch black so his pupils are gone. There is no light left in them, not even the golden circlet that normally surrounds his irises. Briefly, the sight of him like this terrifies me. He looks like a demon. “To win this war.”

I shake my head. “No. You don’t need them to win the war.”

He takes a step towards me. “And you can suddenly predict the future?”

“No, I can just see in your aura that you don’t believe you need them.”

“Then I would have just lied to you, wouldn’t I?” His voice has dropped dangerously low; his smile tears into something lopsided.

He takes another step and I involuntarily take one back.

“Which I can’t,” he reminds me, that smile spreading into a terrifying grin as I try to read his aura, searching it for the truth, but it’s veiled again.

“It seems I’m not the only one who can shield herself,” I say, my eyes never straying from his, although everything in me locks up.

Heat enters his gaze, but for some reason it doesn’t make him look warmer, or softer, just even more frightening. Something’s wrong here.

“I learned to do that early on, in the young days of this world. I just happen to be negligent from time to time. At least where you are concerned, it seems.” he says slowly, aloofly, too lightly, as if it is all just a game we’re playing.

“How?” He must have taught Riven too.

“Oh, my little girl, I know so much more about magic than this world itself will ever understand. But I think you learned that already,” he purrs, and gods help me, his magic flares up under my skin, the same mixture of velvet and leashed lightning, as if to remind me of last night. I try my best to ignore it.

“Why do you really want them?”

“So no one else can find them.”

I shake my head. “Not true.”

He snorts incredulously. “All the things you seem to know.”

“You want all the power for yourself,” I say with cold realization.

“Do you know what happens if that power falls into the wrong hands?”

“And yours are therightones?”

He cocks his head, then straightens. “It’s an old song—history, always repeating itself. There will be war again. There will be a new king, but none of them will lead this world to glory. He will justscorch its soil again. All monarchs are blinded by their insatiable greed. All of them turn decadent, all of them fall. And people, they are like cattle. Obedient until panicked. Rabid when they turn desperate. Look at the human world, thoroughly raped and destroyed.”

“So the Nefarians want me dead to prevent you from getting thismagic.”

His eyes flash in a warning, along with his fangs when he says, “Some will want you dead to try to dethrone me. Others will hunt you down to have you find those relics for them.”

I don’t like the direction this is headed.

“I might not tell them.”

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