Page 181 of Wolf Caged
I tracked her with my senses through the lightening rain, and when she did not move to follow me, I looked over my shoulder, the part of me I failed to kill fearing she might attempt to return to the wolf, abandoning me.
She stood with her back to me, gazing down at the world as the rain cleared, as the storm rolled south-west towards Belkarthen, crimson lightning striking at the sweeping farmland beyond Falkyr.
“Where are we?” She glanced over her shoulder at me, her expression soft, no trace of anger remaining in her blue eyes as they met mine.
“You stand upon Noainfir, the sacred mountain of the Shadow Court, on Dagger Overlook. This is as far as I can teleport us. We must walk down the other side until we are beyond the magic wards on the border and I can teleport us again.” I opened the pack slung over my shoulder and pulled out the one thing I knew would make her believe I had considered bringing her rather than Malachi with me, revealing I had been torn between them until the last moment.
She stared at the dagger I offered her.
Her dagger.
Her hand shook a little as she reached for it and gripped it tightly, drawing it to her and looking between me and the weapon I had made for her.
“Try not to stab me in the back with it.” I turned that back to her, heading for the path to the border.
Only she did not move to follow.
When I looked back at her this time, she clutched the dagger to her chest, her eyes on my court.
“Come,” I said, and she still did not move.
I walked back to her and came to stand beside her on the narrow plateau, studying her as she surveyed my kingdom, her lips parting as she drank it all in, from the western Wraith Wood and the mountains blazing with an orange glow beyond it, to the southern shores of Belkarthen, and then down at Falkyr where it nestled among woods and water below us.
“If you are considering traversing the mountain to reach your friend, I would advise against it. This side of the mountain is rather unforgiving,” I said.
No reaction.
I could not decipher that look in her eyes as she stood silently above the world at my side—above my world.
“Saphira.” I risked murmuring her name, one I had used so rarely, rather than calling her by a pet name I had created to keep space between us, to tease and keep her distant from me.
“It’s beautiful,” she breathed.
I looked at the Shadow Court, trying to see it through her eyes, my kingdom laid out before her, ensconced by treacherous black peaks on three sides and an ocean on the fourth, the rolling lands stretching out beneath the aurora-kissed sky.
Her gaze shifted to me, soft and warm, and filled with a light I could not name.
One I found bewitching.
“Now I understand why you built your castle on the side of this mountain.”
The wall I had been erecting around my heart crumbled a little as she said that, as she gazed at my court and called it beautiful when many in this world found it frightening and dark. But then she always had seen things differently to many in Lucia.
Things including myself. She had never truly been afraid of me.
Her gaze lowered to the dagger. “I don’t intend to stab you in the back, Kael. And Morden is just a friend.”
Kael.
The wall did not just crumble upon hearing Vyr’s name for me on her lips, it exploded into dust, leaving my heart far too exposed.
Part of me wanted to ask her what she saw me as if Morden was only her friend, if she called me by a nickname my sister had given me. Something more than a friend?
Her lover?
Or something even more than that?
I lost my nerve when she looked up at me, averting my gaze to the dagger she gripped.
