Page 53 of Beasts of Briar
“Bell,” Aron started, but the dream began to shift.
I felt a tug I’d never felt before.
“Aron?” I asked, panic washing over me. “What’s happening?”
I began to float away, the starlight carrying me as Aron reached for me, everything becoming distorted and blurry.
I was wrenched from his dream. My eyes popped open as I sat back on the balcony in the shadow court.
And hovering in front of me was the god of shadows.
Chapter Thirty-One
BELLAMY
“Visiting someone else’s dream?” Kairoth asked, floating down onto my balcony and sitting in the chair next to me.
“That’s none of your business,”I signed, annoyed that he yanked me out of Aron’s dream, annoyed that he possessed the kind of power to do such a thing.
“It’s my business when it’s happening in my castle. So whose dream do you have reason to be infiltrating? Visiting friends back home? It didn’t sound like you had many of those.”
I glared at him, arms crossed tight.
He just tilted his head, the movement visible beneath all the shadows whirling around him. “I wanted to show you something.”
He snapped his fingers, and on the table between us appeared a game. I gasped. It was the game I’d told Kairoth about just yesterday. The game my brothers and I used to play. Mapora.
I couldn’t believe he’d picked up that detail, that he’d even remembered the name.
I ran my finger around the edge of the X-shaped board. Checkered squares filled the inside of the X, and dice sat in the middle. On my side of the table lay six silver coins, and on Kairoth’s side lay six gold coins.
My gaze trailed up to Kairoth.“Where did you find this?”
He shrugged. “When you mentioned it, it sounded familiar. I did some digging.”
That was a vague answer, but I didn’t even care. I just wanted to play. I hadn’t played this game since before my brothers were trapped.
“We used to have tournaments.”I lifted a coin and set it back down.“Four of us would play. Then another four would play. The two best from each game would play each other in a final game. My father would sit in front of the fire and watch while he read books and smoked his favorite lavender plant from his pipe.”
He loved that plant, said it made him forget the past. I always knew he was talking about my mother. It was the most painful for him when she’d turned into the cat-like creature and left.
“I’ve never played,” Kairoth said. “So teach me.”
I couldn’t understand why he was doing this. Why he was being so nice. In this moment, it was hard to care when all I wanted to do was play this game and get lost in the past. To feel something after so long of feeling nothing.
“Take the die,”I instructed.
A shadow stretched out from his arm and lifted it, dropping it into his hand.
“Was that necessary?”I quirked a brow.“You could have just picked it up instead of using your shadows. Are you going to use them to roll it too? Because I might accuse you of cheating.”
“I don’t need to cheat” was all he said. He ignored the other part, staring at the board, and through his whirling shadows I could see his brows furrowed. He tossed out the die, and it rolled until it landed on a two.
I pointed to a gold coin, then pointed to where he should place it to begin. He placed the gold coin where I directed, then moved it two spots.
“The goal is to get all six of your coins around the X and back to the starting point first.”
“That sounds too easy,” he said.
