Page 47 of Beasts of Briar
“No”was her short reply.
I lifted a brow. “It seems like you might.”
She responded with a rude gesture that made me chuckle as I floated down next to her and landed on the branch where she sat. I dropped down, letting my legs hang over.
“How does one get stuck in a tree in the middle of the jungle?” I asked. “What are you doing out here? Not trying to run away?”
She looked over at me, not moving. She had secrets. That was clear. Secrets I wanted to know. But more than that, I was starting to realize I wanted to know more about her. Just her.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll make you a deal. Five questions. I get to ask five questions, and you must give me five truthful answers. If you do, I’ll fly you back to the castle.”
Her eyes widened. She looked at the jungle ground far, far below, then back at her hands, her fingers barely visible beneath the puckered wounds and swollen skin.
“You’re in the middle of the jungle, at least an hour away from my castle. No one will be able to find you, if that’s what you’re thinking. And it will take days for your hands to heal. Days that you’ll be stuck here with no food or water.” I tilted my head. “You could jump, but you’d likely break a leg or an arm or your back.”
Her scowl deepened.
“You could wait for your friends to fall asleep, maybe enter their dreams, ask them for help, but I don’t know if they’ll be able to find you. I don’t even know if you know the way back to the castle from here.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, then her jaw locked.“I answer five questions and so do you.”
Now that was intriguing. She wanted to know about me. Likely for her own nefarious purposes, but somehow I didn’t care. Because I liked the idea of sharing parts of myself with this mysterious fierce woman.
“Okay,” I said. “I get to go first.”
She gestured.
I thought for a moment. I could ask her why she was here. I could ask her why she was knitting those sweaters. But I suspected she wouldn’t tell me. And besides, those weren’t the things I was burning to know right now. I wanted to knowher.
I wanted to know what had hardened those edges, what had driven up those walls. I didn’t know why yet. Just that this woman intrigued me in a way nothing had for a long, long time.
“Did you grow up in the star court?” I asked.
She stiffened at the question. “Kind of.”
“Now that’s not a very good answer,” I chided. “Definitely not an answer worthy of being flown back to the castle.”
She rolled her eyes.“After you escaped and destroyed my home, it wasn’t the star court anymore. A... curse of some kind was cast over the land by the frost queen. She used a magical item to warp the land, transform the few star elementals who survived your onslaught into monstrous creatures. We called it the Wilds. That was what I was born into. Not the star court.”She paused, the moonlight slashing over her pale cheeks, illuminating her thick black hair. She looked up at me, fire in her brown eyes.“Why?”She signed.
“Why what?” I asked.
“Why did you do it? Why did you destroy the star court?”
I winced at her words. I’d known what had happened to the star court, but after all these years I still hadn’t managed to face it. Blood. Screams. Carnage. I placed my hands over my ears, cradling my head and trying to push away the memories. So many people dead. And I couldn’t save them.
I felt her hand gripping my arm, and I jolted, looking down. She’d reached right through my shadows and... touched me. No fear in her eyes as the shadows slinked up her hand, tightening around her wrist. She was comforting me.
Our eyes locked for a moment, and she quickly snatched back her hand.
I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry about what happened to your home. I didn’t kill anyone on purpose. I wasn’t in my right mind when I was freed. I didn’t have control over my magic. It’s still all a haze, and I regret... Well, I regret a lot from that time.”
It was as much of the truth as I could tell her about what had happened.
She stared at me, gaze boring into me like she was trying to decipher if I was telling the truth or not. Then she gave a firm nod and looked back out at the jungle around us.
“My turn.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “You just asked a question, and I answered it. My turn again.”
