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Breathing heavily, Maude’s fireball flickered again and almost sputtered out. She was breathing in too much of him; the smell of rain on soil flooding her senses. She needed air.

“Having trouble concentrating,minn eldr?”

“Don’t call me that. And get off me,” Maude bucked her hips to get him to back up.

At the friction she created between them, a sound came from deep inside Herrick’s chest. A low groan traveled straight through him and deep into Maude’s core. Herrick suddenly backed up quickly, leaving Maude almostpanting against the wall. With a flick of his fingers, a stream of water lifted from behind him to extinguish her fireball lighting the dark passageway.

Smoke filled the air between them as the absence of his body made Maude flare with heat despite her already burning skin. She still slumped against the wall, attempting to slow her racing pulse. She refused to let him see how he had affected her. She refused to let herselfbeaffected.

It was just physical contact and she hadn’t laid with someone in gods knew how long, she told herself.

Herrick stood a few paces from Maude, but she couldn’t make out his face because of the sudden darkness. Finding her strength again, she pushed off the wall and headed towards the bookcase that would let them into the house, ready to forget this entire encounter.

Just as she reached the end and pressed a hand to the case to push it open, she felt Herrick press in from behind her and whisper in her ear, “One day, we’ll have our rematch. Then we’ll know,minn eldr, who walks away from that fight.”

Maude didn’t turn when she replied, forcing her voice to remain even.

“I look forward to that day.”

Then she pushed the bookcase open, walked through the hidden entrance, and did not turn to look at him once as she went up the stairs, into the bedroom she had woken in, and closed the door.

4

Herrick didn’t sleep that night. In the room he shared with Hakon, he tossed through the long, dark hours. He remembered how Maude’s breathing had changed when he had her pinned against the wall, how her skin burned, and how soft she had felt pressed up against him. He had been dying to run his hands over her curves and down to her muscled thighs that he felt beneath his.

She had been just as affected as he had been; he was sure of that much. When she had walked away from him, though, he could only watch her go. Replaying every touch and word spoken, he’d been restless enough that Hakon had blasted a cold jet of water at him and told him to take a walk.

He had silently walked down the stairs and out the back of the house toward the oasis before he realized he yearned for the sound of running water and had headed for the only body of water he had access to in this desert. He stood before the water that lapped at his bare feet for a few minutes before he reached for hisgalder.

One of the reasons he hated being in Logi, besides the cruel treatment of its citizens by the nobility and the never-ending insufferable dry heat, was his inability to use his skill in water manipulation. Veter had no such laws against its citizens havinggalder, not that any in the Kingdom of Flame knew this. Thevitkiwere only illegal in this kingdom. The term was considered a hateful slur in the Kingdom of Flame, but in Veter, it was just another way to refer to someone who had been gifted withgalderby thegods. When Herrick and his friends came to this dry and desolate place, they found themselves always drawn to thevitkicommunities, assisting them when they could.

Sitting in front of the cool water of this private oasis, Herrick ran through his mental exercises. He pushed Maude from his mind and practiced his breathing techniques, mastered his heart rate, compartmentalized his extreme feelings, and focused on the water. Being the second born in his family left him with many responsibilities that he would never have imagined would fall to him so early in his life. Herrick had learned control over himself and his emotions before anything else.

Reaching up to the necklace of runes around his neck, Herrick fingered the rune for fire. While the woven leather looked like one long necklace, each rune hung from its own thin strip of worn leather. His mother had gifted the collection of necklaces to him when he was sixteen. She had told him that they were to be a constant reminder of the balances needed in their world between the different elements. Over the years, he had begun to think of them as his source of balance as well.

Shifting his focus inward, he felt more than he saw the sphere of water rise from the pool and start to spin in place. He opened his eyes and moved the spinning sphere to rotate around his head and then morph into the shape of one of the ships from the Kingdom of Rivers' armada. The longboat, with each end carved into the shape of a dragon with its maw open as if ready to spit fire, appeared in front of him. His chest burned with longing for his home at the sight of the ship. He placed his left hand over his chest, where the tattooed dragon head rested, and thought of rolling green hills and rapid indigo rivers. He closed his eyes and thought of home.

Herrick never expected Maude’s face to flash behind his closed eyes; her angry mouth and pitch-black eyes alight with the fire that burned inside her. The fire that called to his very soul.

The water Herrick was working with flew for his face, soaking him to the bone with icy relief. It wasn’t enough. He stood, stripped to his undershorts, and dove into the water. He took a long time to resurface.

Maude sat on the flat roof of the house and watched Herrick dive into the oasis. Maybe it was his connection to water that made him have to jump into the cold water, but she tried not to think of the sight of him in his undershorts for too long. She had been twisting in her sheets most of the night, memories from her past plaguing her nightmares more than usual, with the occasional flash of icy heat coming from the memory of feeling Herrick's thigh pressed between hers.

Sweating through her clothes, she decided that she’d needed fresh air. Sitting only in her makeshift band around her chest and breezy harem pants Herrick had found for her, Maude was finally able to cool down enough to calm her racing thoughts. Her long hair was unbound and brushing against her lower back in the gentle wind, tickling the skin there. Sitting hunched forward with her arms wrapped around her knees, Maude lifted one hand to run her fingers through the thick hair hanging down her back.

The gritty feel of the charcoal that hid her true colors scraped against her fingertips as she twisted her hair and wrapped it around her wrist, pulling it over her left shoulder to hang in front of her chest. The movement caused the black, inked runes that lived in the flames twisting up her arms to dance and stretch on her skin.

She had chosen to have the flames inked onto her arms with the runes for fire, patience, and strength to remind her that she was the one in control of hergalder. Even with their constant presence permanently on her skin,Maude still struggled with her control. The constant power that boiled beneath her flesh threatened to overwhelm her when she became wrapped up in her passion, which was often.

Maude leaned back against the cool wall built around the opening in the ceiling that housed the stairs leading to the roof.

Minn eldr. My fire.

She had thought of that ridiculous nickname for most of the night, how it had sounded when Herrick breathed it into her ear. Of all the infuriating things to call her…

Maude looked out over the city again. The slums of Logi, where she usually chose to dwell, were located at the southernmost point of the city. The Palace of Wind and Embers lay at the northernmost point, and the nobles lived in the closer outskirts of the seat of power in this kingdom, so Maude avoided it entirely and found life amongst the poorer citizens andvitki. From where she sat, Maude could see all the way to the palace, which was why she had sat for so long in the same spot. Its hateful presence loomed over her like an ever-present shadow in her life, no doubt how it was designed to be.

Under the harsh light of the waning crescent moon, the red-bricked buildings and quiet streets looked like they could be part of a painting. Interspersed in the darkness, windows shone with candlelight and warmed the long alleys housing the streets of Logi. Some buildings stood four stories tall with panels of fabric over the top constructed to be a roof, while some buildings had flat rooftops perfect for thieves to maneuver. The breaks in the buildings contained small markets and shops for those who lived in the area, while the main city square, where she had been held prisoner, was a wide, open space in the shape of an oval.