CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX #3
The more detailed renderings of the battle between Maverick and Orthil had been lost with time.
Now it was all based on speculation and muddled stories, save for the few facts that remained constant with each retelling.
Maverick would never, ever, broach the topic.
I’d asked him to talk about it, only once.
His answering look left me avoiding him for weeks.
“You never bothered to pick up any other books on the topic since then?” Nothing malicious laced his question. He truly seemed curious.
I snorted. “The hundreds of spun falsities of Maverick’s overexaggerated valor?
No. I never saw the point. Inaccurate history isn’t my preferred genre of reading.
” I debated stopping there, but it was just the two of us here.
Our secluded little cocoon, tucked away from the rest of the world, was still intact.
“I read what was necessary during my teachings. And when my parents were killed, I spent a lot of time in the main library, the one near the night markets, reading about magic. How others wield it. How to obtain more of it.” Anything that could prove the possibility of there being the tiniest shred of magic inside of me, somewhere.
“Then I began to run out of material. And hope.” A bitter laugh.
“Now, books are more of a silent comfort. Though I must admit that I tend to reach for novels I can lose myself in. Pretend to be part of a world far better than this one. And honestly, make-believe creatures oftentimes make for better companions than real people.”
Kodhan laughed, the sound of it contagious. Enough for a smile to spread across my face.
It was my turn to pinch him. My smile widened when he half-heartedly attempted to swat my hand away.
“It’s come to a point where they know to ready a pot of chamomile tea when I arrive.
The stars only know how much I’ve depleted their reserves.
But it fills their coffers. And I never bother anyone, so the headmistress lets me stay as long as I wish.
” I’d spent more hours seated by the gargantuan hearth in the center of the building than in my own rooms in the castle.
I thought of Kassandre and what she had sacrificed by keeping what she’d seen a secret. I owed her a life debt. And having a potential Starlight Champion in one’s debt was worth more than any amount of gold. She was keen enough to know that.
“I’m sorry. About your parents,” he clarified. “He shouldn’t have used them against you.”
I could almost smell the coppery tang of their blood coating the floors of that dusty, crumbled warehouse. Could almost feel my mother’s breath fanning the shell of my ear, the lingering pain across my arm where my father sliced into my skin.
“No, he shouldn’t have.” My lungs expanded to full capacity, then quickly deflated. I swallowed hard against the rise of bile that crept up my throat.
I wasn’t in that warehouse anymore.
I wasn’t the one responsible for their deaths. Someone else had butchered them.
And there would be no true rest until their head rolled at my feet.
“If I manage to win—if I manage to break my curse with the magic contained in the Temple of Borealis, I want to find who did it.”
“I’m certain that you will.”
Kodhan held my gaze with unflinching conviction. That, and another emotion that had me looking away before the hundreds of butterflies sitting in my stomach decided to take flight. I focused on anything but his eyes—his nose, his cheekbones. His lips.
His throat worked on a swallow as both arms dropped down from behind his head, his left coming to rest at his side while his right fell directly above my head.
“There are stories whispered amongst very few about a goddess and her two lovers. Of the havoc wrought from their triangle of betrayal and heartbreak.”
My upper lip curled instantly. “I am the last person who wants to hear about the gods. What of the Sunstar? Why ask about that at all?”
“Give me a minute,” he scolded, and I flicked his arm in response.
His growing smile smoothed out the usual hardness coating his features.
He seemed content. Relaxed. It suited him.
I didn’t think it was possible, but it made him even more attractive.
Like he wasn’t already otherworldly beautiful.
“The goddess and her first lover were together for millennia. They were happy, despite being described as opposites. Where she was light and harmony, he was violence and discord. A god of chaos.”
A soft tug nagged at my scalp, as if strands of my hair had caught on something. Tilting my head up further, I noticed a lock of my hair was spun around Kodhan’s finger. He toyed with it absentmindedly, twisting and untwisting the strand while he spoke.
“It is said that her second lover won her heart with time. Their love began slowly—barely a trickle at first, spread over a thousand years. They’d known each other long before that. But he showed her that there was more—more to love than what the god of chaos ever provided her.”
“Her second lover, what god was he?” I couldn’t help wanting to know. “He must have been special, at least to some degree, to disrupt a relationship that lasted for so long. Not to mention who he was going against.”
“None of the stories say.”
The words were clipped. And surely I had to be imagining the underlying tone of evasiveness. This was a story, and nothing more. What details could possibly warrant being crossed out?
“The goddess saw her second lover in secret, their meetings innocent until suddenly they were not. Talk about their growing relations spread, fiction oftentimes overtaking facts. Her first lover heard the whispers—” He stopped abruptly, his sentence ending in a low grunt. “Eloise.”
“Yes?”
Another tug on my hair. Sharper this time.
“I won’t be able to continue the story if you keep going like that.” He ground out the warning through gritted teeth, eyes dipping to his stomach.
I followed his train of sight. My fingers flexed mid-movement where they’d been drawing non-existent shapes, poised atop the exposed skin below his navel. Any lower and they’d have disappeared underneath his pants.
I started to pull away. “Sorry. It’s a bad habit of mine when I’m concentrated. I hadn’t realized—”
He entwined his fingers with mine and brought our joined hands to rest on his chest. “There is nothing to apologize for.” His other hand sunk into my scalp, abandoning the one strand. “If things were up to me, little viper, we would not be spending this time talking.”
The thought of watching him come undone beneath my hand was enticing.
Combined with treacherous flashes of how his lips felt against mine, the throbbing between my legs became an incessant ache. I shifted, trying to offset the feeling, but since the bed was so small, all it did was grind my body against his.
Kodhan groaned. His heart thundered against my fingertips. “If these trials don’t kill me first, you might be the death of me.”
No. I refused to think of the possibility that the last trial could kill him. Kill me. The very real possibility.