Page 14 of Bound to the Shadow Queen
Though I hadn’t asked my questions, she had found a way to answer me in part. She hadn’t wanted to stay away. She hadn’t wanted to leave me.
It eased something inside me, a balm over wounds that still refused to heal.
“Did you light the petals for me?” The words were a low whisper, swallowed by the wind the moment they left my lips.
Still she swallowed, turning slowly until her gaze met mine.
“All the time. To remember what I had lost.”
She didn’t say the rest, but I heard it anyway. She was still lighting that bowl for me. For the years we would never get back.
For the people we would never be again.
The days continuedin a strange holding pattern of flying and sparring and sharing my meals with a male who made every inch of my skin crawl. I was still never alone with my mother.
I still had no answers.
And Draven still hadn’t come for me, though the daytime visions had gotten nearly as visceral as the dreams. They were short, sharp blasts of feelings and images, mostly monsters and endless landscapes of snow.
So I knew that he was alive, that he was traveling, and that he was unendingly furious.
I tumbled to the ground for roughly the seventy-fourth time that hour, taken down by Zerina’s easy block of my dagger while I was even more distracted than usual.
“Your thrusts are still too weak,” Tavrik’s droll voice echoed across the training grounds.
He had barely looked up from his own sparring to offer yet another critique of mine with Zerina. My mother was with my uncle, where she was every afternoon in the few hours she let me out of her sight.
She always looked troubled when she returned, but she brushed off every question with a pointed glance toward the listening ears.
“Don’t worry,” Zerina crooned as she yanked me to my feet. “He only notices because his own thrusts are notoriously weak.”
A wicked smirk graced her lips. She wasn’t precisely friendly now, but her open hostility had died down somewhat, as her mate had predicted.
“Should I tell Alaric you noticed then?” Tavrik’s sparring partner chimed in.
Her lips twisted in disgust. “Not in my drunkest hour, single or taken, but the bath house hears all.”
Tavrik raised an eyebrow. “Did it hear you shrieking like you had caught fire the night before he left?”
Zerina chuckled as she took her fighting stance. “Is a female’s pleasure a sound you’re unfamiliar with?”
The other warrior sighed. “I want to defend you, Tav, but you walked right into that one.”
Tavrik ended their duel with a resounding blow, and Zerina laughed again.
“Guess he had to get all that pent-up frustration out somehow. Let’s switch to bow.”
“Tell the fetchers to run for cover,” Tavrik murmured.
I scowled, though I couldn’t precisely argue. Every day, Zerina or my mother trained me on daggers and bows and arrows. Though I was passable with my dagger, years away from training had left my arms weak, my ability to work around my wings clumsy.
Sure enough, I drew my elbow back, only to knock it with my wing when I inadvertently clenched those muscles too.
Zerina shot me a sideways glance. “Did you truly not train at all in the decade you were there? Weren’t you worried at all about being in enemy territory with no way to defend yourself?”
My breath stalled in my lungs, her comment touching too close to everything I tried not to think about now, like the constant fear that had loomed over every part of my life, or the brief illusion of safety in the male who had ordered his kingdom to kill my people on sight.
I pictured his face, perfectly chiseled and deadly cold. I squeezed my eyes shut against the image, only to see his fists instead, clenched into pure, unrelenting ice.
