Page 24

When she awoke, her head and her back were throbbing with pain.

She opened her eyes, and there were tree branches high above her. The sky had gone dark blue-gray. It took her a few seconds to remember what had happened before she’d been knocked out.

She sat up with a start, expecting her bones to scream in pain as she did so, but miraculously, nothing seemed broken. She was at the bottom of a steep slope hundreds of feet high. There was no way she could climb back up. She’d have to find another way around.

She turned, searching for the half-elf, and didn’t have to look far to find him. He was sitting on a tree stump several steps from her, glaring down at her. There was a bandage wrapped tightly around his thigh, the white cloth soaked through with blood. The dagger she’d stabbed him with was back in its sheath, and he still carried his sword on his other hip, too.

The hatred in his expression deepened when she looked up at him. She met his gaze steadily, but inched backward, preparing to run. When she put her foot under her to try to stand, however, pain shot through her ankle. She couldn’t put weight on it.

Maybe the other Varai had sent him to take her, to keep her from spilling the secrets of Kuda Varai to the Ardanians. Or maybe he just wanted revenge for what Theron and Naika had done to him, just like Theron had said. She was the easiest target, wasn’t she? Maybe he intended to torture her, to make her endure what he had.

He stood and strode toward her, limping only a little. To her dismay, the injury didn’t seem like it slowed him down much.

“Don’t,”Zara said in Varai, the word coming to her lips almost without her permission.

He looked impatient with her fear. Instead of responding in Varai, he spoke Ardanian again. “What do you think I’m going to do?” he asked sarcastically. “Kill you?”

He hadn’t killed her yet, but that didn’t mean he didn’t intend to.

“Perhaps I should,” he amended, glancing down at her red cloak. Zara couldn’t tell whether he was serious.

He crouched beside her and looked her over, suddenly far too close, close enough to touch. He looked so different from the last time she’d seen him. The marks Naika had left were gone, though he had new scratches and bruises from their fall. His hair was shockingly long, reaching past his waist, and in this light, Zara could see that it was actually a very dark violet-brown, not quite black, as if it had been made to match his eyes. The elven blood seemed to be stronger in him than the human blood. His face had a distinctly elegant quality to it that was decidedly not quite human—and not in a bad way.

Kashava would have said she was an idiot to allow a man’s beauty to distract her while he still seemed to be considering murdering her.

He’d spoken perfect, unaccented Ardanian. Zara was not entirely surprised to find that it was his native language. She had hoped to remind him of their similarities by speaking to him in Varai, but she reluctantly followed him into Ardanian. “You abducted me,” she said slowly. “What should I think you are going to do?”

His glare was unyielding. “I did not abduct you in order to kill you,” he said flatly, as if it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard.

She arched an eyebrow. “Then why, if I may ask?”

“The Paladins inspired me. I have a hostage. A pretty, young, defenseless one, at that. They certainly won’t want any harm to come to you. Now maybe they’ll be inclined to do as we like.”

“I am not defenseless, as you can see,” she said, her eyes flicking toward his thigh.

His voice flattened even more, if possible. “I know.”

She wished she could say that they wouldn’t come back for her, or that they wouldn’t care about whether she was harmed, but after what Theron had said to her earlier, there could be no doubt about that anymore.

He unsheathed his dagger and held it up in front of her face. “The next time you touch this, Iwillkill you.”

For some reason, it was that sentence that broke the spell over her, and she could no longer take his threats seriously. There was something about his voice that utterly failed to convince her that he had any intention of killing her, regardless of whether she tried to take his dagger again.

“I will keep that in mind. Was the avalanche intended to kill the others, or just to cause confusion so you could take me?”

“A little of both.”

“You could have killed me.”

“And then there would be one less Paladin in the world. Tragic. Are you going to get up, or is there something wrong with your legs?”

“I did not know if you would allow me to,” she said tartly.

He stood, resting his hands on his hips, and waited. She took that as permission and cautiously climbed to her feet. Her left leg, to her relief, was uninjured, but when she tried to take a step with her right foot, she winced, suppressing a pained sound.

The half-elf frowned. “Can you walk?”

She wondered what he would do if she couldn’t. “I am not sure.”