Page 10 of Hidden

Chapter Four

Calai

A few days pass and it’s calm and peaceful. I don’t bring up the weird conversation we started our stay with, and Eln doesn’t either. It feels as if we’re tiptoeing around the whole kissing thing because neither one of us wants to know how the other will react. Eln has been wonderful- attentive, sweet, understanding, everything I’ve needed.

Moods still hit me when I feel as if I need to find the comfort of the tented area, sometimes worse than others. At those times I’ve had to wrap myself up in blankets as tight as I can until the feeling passes. It almost feels as if I’m losing my mind, because I seem to be developing urges that I’ve never before experienced.

Eln always does as I request, closing the flaps, moving things that feel like they’re placed incorrectly, rubbing my back, smoothing my hair, but she also seems confused by my behavior.

Well, that makes two of us.

On the fifth day of our stay in the cabin, we get company. Someone is sent to deliver some fresh linens and a basket of food, and I’m relieved to know I am in a lucid state when Dara appears, and not in one of my manic, need-to-be-on-the-weird-bed-thing mood. She approaches me with a tight smile, looking around as if she wants to know as much about the place as she can, dropping the items on the porch for me.

“Thank you for making the trip,” I tell her. I know we both were competitors, but it seems pointless to hold a grudge or be rude to her when I already won. If the situation was reversed, I’d want to be treated with kindness.

“Yes, of course.” She peers around the cabin. “Is…Eln around?”

“She just left a few minutes ago for a walk, actually.”

Her shoulders drop and she exhales a bit sharply. “Oh. I, well, okay.” She peers past me into the cabin and her eyes widen at the bed. “What is that?”

“It’s just our bed. It’s strange, but it’s oddly comfortable.”

She takes an unwilling step forward, but immediately stops. “That looks wonderful.”

She was in that room when the god appeared, maybe I can ask her if she’s been experiencing these strange mood swings I have? Eln doesn’t understand, but maybe, justmaybe, Dara will. “This might be an unexpected question,” I start, waiting for her to tear her eyes off my lovely tent bed and look at me again. “Have you…been feeling a bit odd, since the ritual?”

She sharply turns her head towards me. “In what way?”

Did I detect a faint unsteadiness in her voice? “Like…I don’t know. Like maybe you’re going a bit mad and wanting things you don’t know how to describe?” She eyes the bed again. “Like that, right there,” I tell her. “You look at that bed as I did. I keep needing to just burrow and rearrange stuff, and I have no idea why. Sometimes I make Eln wrap me in the bedding so tight that my entire body is completely bound, but it’s the only time I feel fully comfortable.”

“Isn’t it odd for you, to be talking to the other woman?” She asks me, evading the subject.

“The other woman? That would imply that you two have a relationship.”

She opens her mouth to speak, but not a sound comes from her. “We…wait. Back up. You don’t know?”

A gross, foul-smelling feeling enters my belly. “Know what?” I ask, far breezier than I’m feeling.

“We- this is a bit awkward then, isn’t it? She’s in love with me,” Dara says matter-of-factly. I tilt my head, watching a small blue bird land on a branch behind her. “Has she spoken of me?”

“Why do you say she was in love with you?”

“Not was,is.”

“And you think this because…” I leave off, willing her to laugh and tell me she jests.

“Because of all the time we spent together, kissing and making plans? Because she told me if I was chosen we’d be-”

“Finally together?” I finish.

“How did you know?”

Fire burns in my veins. She must see something in my visage because she sucks in a breath and puts a hand over her heart. “Tell me we haven’t both been played? There’s no way she could have faked the way she felt for me.”

I want to reassure her that no, Eln couldn’t have faked it, but as I stand here and speak with this woman I thought to be my competition, I realize that maybe she gave all those longing looks to Eln because she truly thought there was something between them. Something that Eln herself cultivated, perhaps?

“Eln admitted to me when we first got here that you kissed her a few times, and I was quite angry to hear that. Are you telling me it wasn’t you that approached her?”

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