Page 37 of A Chill in the Flame
He reached as if to rub the back of his neck, but stopped himself before giving into the informal gesture. “I’ve been able to do this since I was young, though I supposed I discovered it when I had been shut into a pantry and needed to escape. I punched a hole through the door with the strength of a battering ram. I was ten.”
She made a show of considering his information. “Is it safe to say that you uncovered your power in a moment of distress?”
She saw his expression change the moment Harland knew where she was taking her argument, and he didn’t care for it. “If you intend to imply that you put Ophir in distress to help her uncover her ability, then your logic is flawed. Not only has she possessed flame since she was a child, but I’ve seen you react to her fire. You’ve helped her in her night terrors, and you intentionally drenched her flame on the cliff when she was distressed so that she’d be forced to find another way to survive. You know she calls to fire.”
“Fire, yes—”
“You knew, Dwyn. Somehow, you knew there was more.”
Dwyn made no attempt to deny him. “I knew that her fire was not enough to keep her alive! Our abilities are meant to aid us in distress! I had no reason to believe summoning willpower or psychological stamina would be any different from manifesting power. It’s no secret that Firi has shown very little will to live. My hope was that she’d have as much power and strength in basic survival as she might in magic. What use is fire if she possesses no reason to stay on this earth? She didn’t lack supernatural ability. Your princess had no fight left in her.”
They were performing the careful steps of an eerie dance. The music was strange, but the movements were ones she’d made before. Her words were right. Her logic was firm. She knew enough of men to spy that he saw through her impishness, and more, still, to know that he had no counterargument.
Yes, she was aware she’d entered the castle under more than mysterious circumstances. She’d greeted the guard with the sort of iconoclastic irreverence of either a dream or a nightmare, fully nude in the princess’s bedroom with a towel wrapped around her wet hair just before daybreak. She hadn’t wasted her breath on a hope that the guard would ever trust her. If he was an intelligent man, however—and she didn’t take him for a fool—she counted on Harland seeing the value she brought to Ophir’s life. The man didn’t have to like her to appreciate that Ophir was finally eating, sleeping, and healing.
Yes, she’d appeared out of nowhere and, within months, was sleeping in Ophir’s bed, whispering in her ears, and glued to her side. Yes, suspicion was natural. But Dwyn was willing to bet that Harland valued Ophir’s happiness over Dwyn’s removal.
Her gamble paid off a thousand fold
“You knew,” he repeated. It was the only point he had.
She arched a carefully manicured brow.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
The guard shook his head. “Either cut your act or join atroupe to hone your skill, Dwyn. Violence has been used to manifest abilities, not to psychologically overcome trauma. If you were searching for a new ability, nothing would have been curated as it was. You made her picture a snake for weeks. I’ve heard her mutter that beast’s description until you made her believe she’d become it. This was no mistake.”
Dwyn puckered her lip in her best gentle, disarming pout. She’d sent many men to their knees with her doe eyes and gentle smile. She was clever enough to know that beauty and charm could be used to convince one’s opponent of the inverse. If she possessed the necessary cunning, Harland might walk away from their exchange believing she truly was an innocent, pretty, simple thing.
They stared at one another for a long moment, her brows knit, his eyes calculating. She hoped it would be enough, then saw the instant her attempts fell short. It seemed Harland would not be crumpling to her wiles, but she refused to incriminate herself.
“We both want what’s best for the princess,” she said seriously. It wasn’t an answer, but she would give up nothing more today.
As he left her room and closed the door behind him, she wondered if he could feel her satisfied smile.
Nineteen
She’d done it once. She could do it again.
One week prior, Ophir had created a snake. She hadn’t created just any snake—she had manifested the very serpent she’d envisioned from its size and the color of its scales to the twinkle of its eye and the coil of its poise. The very venom she’d pictured dripping from its fangs had dripped from the points of its horrible teeth onto the lip of the cliff below.
Harland had moved with such swiftness to behead it. It had been with equal speed that he’d begun to shove its body over the edge of the bluff. Dwyn had joined him without needing to be told. They knew without words that the events of their stormy evening must remain concealed. Its enormous body plummeted to the rocks below to be smashed and battered by the waves as they broke against the shore. By the time its bloated carcass was discovered, it would be indiscernible from any of the great, mysterious beasts of the ocean’s unknowable depths.
She should be scared.
She should be shocked.
There was a host of emotions that a rational person was meant to feel. Maybe she would experience the logical gamut of feeling if her year had not been one from hell. Perhaps ifshe hadn’t suffered the brutalized, excruciating loss of her sister as a consequence of her own selfish desire for fun and experience, she’d have a heart primed for discernment and fear. If the past fourteen weeks hadn’t been spent in various gaunt states of numb, emotional paralysis, Ophir may have encountered the familiar, knowable sensations of fear or worry.
She’d been numb for so long that instead she felt the dark, blackened coal in her stomach reignite. It had been so cold, so heavy for months and months and months. Just the barest edges of it glowed with a reddened flame as it began to glow. She felt… something.
Dwyn was right, even if the woman’s methods of instruction had been somewhat barbaric. Ophir rubbed her cheek at the distant memory of Dwyn’s slap. She didn’t have to be the weak, limping deer. She was a snake, and snakes could strike.
Ophir knew that Harland would be waiting in the hall. She crept on the quiet tips of her toes to move a chair to the space beneath the door, wedging the handle into place. It wouldn’t stop the worried entrance of an angry guard, but it would at least sound an alarm if he had to smash through wood to break down her door.
She was almost disappointed that he hadn’t learned her other methods of escape. It didn’t show a lot of initiative if he hadn’t been able to assess her possible points of exit.
The window was too obvious. A castle guard was always pacing the space beneath the glass of her iron-latticed window. There had once been an adjoining door between her room and the room that had belonged to Caris, though they’d blocked off its entrance decades before Caris’s death. Ophir couldn’t be trusted with unrestricted access even to her sister’s room. The one thing they’d never discovered was the movement of her floor-length mirror.
