Page 141 of Ash and Feather

As suspected, she’d felt that energy, too.

“He was being foolish. And I was not in the mood for his games.”

She considered this for a long moment, a frown pulling at the corners of her lips, but didn’t ask for details.

“I’ve actually been meaning to speak with the Death Marr again,” she said.

I worked to keep the protective snarl from my tone. “Have you?”

“He gave me some advice a few weeks ago. Advice I rejected at the time, but now…” She trailed off, her focus shifting to the petals she held.

She transferred them all to a clenched fist and let them slip through her fingers one by one, using her other hand to direct little bursts of fire at them as they fell. I’d seen her practice her precision and control using similar methods in the past. Even now, as tired as she must have been, she continued her pursuit of perfection.

A slight smile curled my lips at this last thought—though it was short-lived. “Whateveradvicehe gave you, I would be wary of taking it. You know he speaks in riddles.”

“Do the Marr speak in riddles?” she deadpanned.

“Oh, you hadn’t noticed?”

She snorted. “You really think I haven’t realized by now that the gods do not always speak the whole truth?” She angled her face toward me and raised a brow. “For example, the God of Fire is known to keep his true thoughts and feelings and fears to himself, despite how it concerns the ones who love him. Did you know that?”

“I’ve heard it’s a bad habit of his,” I said, continuing onward down the winding path through the garden. “But then again, you can’t believe everything you hear.”

Though my back was to her, I suspected she rolled her eyes at this, which brought another slight smile to my face.

“I thought I would allow you a little more time to rest and recover before I dropped all of thosethoughts and feelingsand fearsupon you,” I told her as she caught up to me.

She chewed her bottom lip for a few paces before nodding, seeming to understand even if she didn’t agree.

We came to the end of the path. An elaborate fountain stood here, its trio of trickling waterfalls the only sound disrupting the heavy air. I watched the water rippling over the basin lined with colorful, decorative chips of glass while Karys continued to turn bits of flowers into piles of ash.

Finally, she spoke again, in a voice still distant and lost in thought: “I wasn’t resting particularly well.”

The weight in my stomach grew heavier. “More nightmares?”

“I keep going back to the fields outside my old home. The ones you set fire to.”

I waited for her to elaborate, but she said nothing else.

“…You’re angry about those fires?”

She considered this for another long moment. “Worried, more like. About the mortal world going up in flames. About you choosing between me and that world, and...” She trailed off, regarding me from underneath her lashes, eyes dark and troubled over questions she couldn’t seem to force through her lips.

There were no easy answers to these questions—there was only what I felt, foolish as it was. A feeling I would have buried months ago for the sake of simplicity.

There was no chance of burying it now.

“There is no otherchoicefor me, anymore,” I said. “There is only you. You’re the only thing I could think of these past five days, no matter how hard I tried to focus on anything else.”

Her reply came slowly. Quietly. Guarded, even now—even in spite of all the walls we’d already torn down to get to oneanother. “Maybe I’m just not used to people choosing me. So it feels strange.”

She lifted one shoulder and let it drop, as though she could really shrug off a lifetime of being pushed aside, lied to, manipulated by her family and allies.

I stared at her, a familiar irritation heating my blood. Not at her, but at every single being who had ever wronged her and put her second to anything. The irritation simmered into anger, and then into a flare of passion that had me reaching for her, pulling her into a kiss.

A hundred other things needed to be said and done in that moment—yet all I could think about was kissing her, finding some way to prove I would choose her above everything, over and over again, for as long as I existed.

Her guarded posture slowly collapsed, her arms lifting, wrapping around my neck. The petals in her hands fell against my back as she unclenched her fists and held more tightly to me, deepening the kiss.

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