Page 184 of Kingdom of the Two Moons

And the rest of him…

My mouth goes dry. The rest of him is utterly beautiful too. I can’t help but stare, admire the defined muscles of his too-perfect body, no doubt honed by hundreds of years of fighting.

The sight of his naked skin changes me all over. Violently. He’s a pure angel, his absurd beauty a brute force of nature, hitting me in the back of my throat.

He catches me looking.

I feel myself blushing deeply. “I’m sorry,” I murmur and quickly look away, but the aftertaste stays, humming in my blood like a burning longing. A longing for what we did and didn’t do in that hot water. To distract myself I ask, “Where do we go from here?” I don’t dare to look at him again, afraid of what I’ll find in his eyes, what he will find in mine.

“We will try to get closer.”

“Closer to where?”

“You tell me,” he retorts, unperturbed. So sure of me I blush all over.

But this sense of surety seems to spark something in me, because suddenly, the image of that flute fills my mind again. This time it comes into clearer focus, and I can make out details. It’s frozen by eternities of snow, surrounded by relentless storms.

Instinctively, I turn my head to the mountains I glimpsed in the distance. “It’s on one of the mountains. Buried under a glacier,” I say, knowing in my blood it’s true. As true as if I placed the flute there myself, the relentless ever-cold shielding it from being tracked down, the Emerald Forest like another ring, isolating it. “Someone was very careful to hide it away from the world.”

“Clearly,” he agrees. For a moment, we just look at each other. His eyes are dangerous though.

“Why did my mother not want you to have the relics?”

“Maybe she wanted them for herself,” he offers. I watch him very closely. His aura is veiled behind that mist again.

“Why?” I ask to test him.

“Because this is what power-hungry people want—more power. Your mother, as you already know, was a very ambitious woman.”

I freeze. His face is still blank as he delivers the twisted truth.

“You said if I wanted truths you would give them to me,” I whisper, more hurt, more betrayed than I should feel. “Calianthe said my mother wanted to destroy the flute. Sono onecould have it.”

“The truth has many faces, Melody,” he retorts, not at all surprised that the relic is a flute. So he knew this already. “But did she really? Want to destroy the flute—so no one else could have it?”

“She couldn’t lie, could she?” I ask.

“No. But in order to consume the flute’s magic, she would have had to destroy the flute indeed. In one way or the other.”

“Calianthe said the magic corrupts the mind and soul with darkness.”

His eyes flash. “It’sstolenmagic. Impossibly powerful, stolen magic. Of course, it corrupts anyone who’s not its owner. Anyone who wasn’t madeto hold so much.”

I startle. “Stolen… I thought the high elves bound their magic to the artifacts. Out of their free will.”

He just looks down at the water, his eyes reflecting its milky surface like a mirror.

“So you would allow the magic to corrupt you? What does it mean? That it drives you mad? Or kills you?”

He lifts his head, but he doesn’t answer me. I scrutinize his face. It’s so dangerously blank. There’s so much he’s not telling me. I feel it.Know it.Know it from a dark thing shimmering inside me, black and velvety and streaked with starlight. Something like a ribbon of pure night. Before I know what I’m doing, I yank at it.

And tumble.

Something in me opens up then. A connection. A door to another world through which I just slipped. Purest night engulfs me, dewy on my skin.What is this?

I take another step in and a heavy weight settles on me, in me, old and archaic the further I probe into the foreign blackness. A weight amplified by the thousands of years that lay on my shoulders, so strong it takes everything to fight it.

What is this?

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