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She felt nothing except another familiar pang of jealousy. Elves were more sensitive to magic than humans, who had almost no natural connection to magic at all unless they happened to be born a mage. “I do not feel anything.”

“Then you’ll just have to take my word for it, I suppose.”

“I trust you.”

His mouth twitched a little, and he looked away. He was suppressing a smile. “The water heals. We don’t know why. It’s some kind of natural magic from the mountain. It’s like a diluted panacea. I came here after your mage had her way with me.”

Zara dipped her fingers into the water. She still sensed nothing magical, but it was warm and felt good anyway.

“It works best if you get in and soak,” Nero said. “We’ve tried drinking it. It doesn’t work as well. The magic isn’t strong enough. It takes time to work.”

She didn’t need to be told twice. She was already taking off her jacket.

Nero stood up and went to the room’s entrance. “I’ll come back in an hour.”

Zara stopped, alarmed. “You are leaving?”

He paused, tilting his head. “I won’t, if you don’t want me to.”

She hesitated, embarrassed. She hated to ask him for even more when he’d already done so much. “I… would rather not be alone,” she admitted.

“No one here will hurt you.”

“I still would rather you remained here.”

“Of course. If… if that’s what you want.” He came back and leaned against the wall.

She turned her back to him and shrugged off her clothes, feeling his eyes on her. She might have enjoyed undressing in front of him if her body hadn’t been in such terrible shape. She glanced down at herself, taking in the mottled dark marks all over her ribs, legs and arms. No part of her was untouched. She took a tight breath and quickly lowered herself into the water.

The pool was only two or three feet deep. She crouched into the water, leaning against the lip of the pool. Heat billowed up from the water’s surface and hit her face. She hadn’t realized how cold she’d been until just then. The chill had sunk so deep into her that she had almost forgotten what it felt like to be warm. She closed her eyes and waited, listening to the soft trickle of water echoing through the cave.

Chapter 25

As Zara sat motionless in the water for many minutes, the aches began to leave her body. She could not have said whether it was the mysterious magic working, or just the heat relaxing her muscles.

She looked up at the faintly glowing spots on the ceiling and walls as the water lapped at her skin. It looked almost like stars in the sky.

This place was so much like Vondh Rav. The capital of Kuda Varai had been built almost entirely underground in order to preserve space and to avoid damaging the forest’s sacred flora. She hadn’t thought there was any other place like it in the world. Being here made her feel strangely nostalgic. She hadn’t thought she was homesick, but now she realized she had missed the sights and sounds and smells of home more than she’d thought.

She knew that at least part of Vondh Rav had existed before the Varai inhabited it. The city was said to have been built by the Auren-Li thousands of years ago. Perhaps this place was the same. Nero and his friends certainly couldn’t have built that village in the other cavern by themselves.

She turned to look back toward the entrance. Nero was still there, a shadow in the dark by the door. When she turned, his eyes jumped to her face, and he straightened. He’d been staring at her. She smiled a little.

“This place is just like Vondh Rav,” she said.

“The others say the same. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been there.”

She shouldn’t have been surprised. Of course there would have been problems if he’d tried to enter the city. “That is a pity. It is beautiful.”

“And terrible, I hear, for the non-Varai living there.”

“It can be both,” she agreed. “How did you find this place?”

“Sometimes elves have knowledge that humans don’t,” he said enigmatically. “There are things that the descendants of the elder elves, the longer-lived races, keep to themselves.”

She raised an eyebrow. This sort of grandiose ‘elder-elves’ talk reminded her of her priestess mother.

He smiled. “Someone in our group had obtained a very old map of what is now northern Ardani and Uulantaava, written in old elvish. We had no better options, so we followed it here. I was surprised when we actually found something. I thought it was nonsense at first.”