Page 23

Thirteen

CIANA

K urai lathered me with the plain soap that Joy Guardians used, helping me wash off the traces of all the sandstorms we’d been through.

“Do you want me to help you undo your hair?” he asked, lifting one of my thin braids. “I won’t be able to help you re-do it just as neatly, but maybe one braid could do for now? You have the most unusual hair color—pink. I didn’t see it on anyone before, either a fae or a human.”

“It’s not my hair,” I giggled softly.

“Whose is it?”

His shocked expression made me laugh out loud.

“Do you want the name of the person I cut it from?” I teased.

He squinted at me, sensing my humor.

“You didn’t cut it from anyone.” He waved me off, then asked hesitantly. “Did you?”

“No, Kurai.” I gave him a hug, laughing. “These are hair extensions, braided into my real hair, see?” I lifted a handful of braids over my ear, exposing the roots. “My real hair is dark brown, almost black, not pink. No human has naturally bright pink hair like this, I promise you.”

My aunt took me to get the extensions after she and my uncle had taken me away from Dylan.

I remembered choosing pink because I wanted to look in the mirror and see something bright and cheerful instead of the bruises.

I wanted to look as different as possible from Dylan’s skittish, perpetually scared wife.

I wished to be me again, and changing my hair color seemed like the first step in that direction.

As it turned out, being kidnapped by shadows was the next step. I’d been thinking less and less about Dylan. And when I did, it was without pain or sorrow but with relief that he was now securely in my past, unable to harm me.

Kurai smoothed the tight curls of the grown-out strands above my ear. “How wondrous.”

“Is it?” I smiled. His genuine interest in me had always been endearing. “How about we wash your hair now?”

I ran my fingers through his black wavy locks, freeing them from the cord that held them up.

After the bath, Kurai helped me out of the pool. I reached for my wet, dusty skirt, but he stopped me. “I have a clean one for you to wear.”

He took me to one of the niches along the wall. The space was small, holding only a round mattress on the floor with a shelf mounted in the wall around the head area and a metal rack on the opposite wall with pieces of golden fabric draped over the bars.

“Is that your room?” I asked, staying by the entrance since there wasn’t enough space for both of us inside.

“Yes. This is where I sleep.” He took a length of golden fabric from the rack and unraveled it into a skirt. “It’ll be too long for you.”

He measured the length against me, then tore off a strip from the bottom to make it fit.

“Now it will be too short for you ,” I pointed out as he wrapped the skirt around my hips then fixed it at my waist with a pin.

“You can keep it. I have more.” He took another skirt from the rack and put it on.

“These are the Joy Guardians’ clothes. Am I even allowed to wear it?”

“These are extraordinary circumstances. Besides, we’re here alone. Who is to know?” He grinned.

I stared at him, stunned by that unexpected smile. A genuine smile, not simply a mimicked expression, looked so out of place on the face of a shadow fae. A little mischievous, a little cocky, with a glint of his two sharp fangs picking between his parted lips, it took my breath away.

“You have the most amazing smile, Kurai,” I blurted out.

His eyebrows jerked up in surprise, as if he hadn’t even realized what he’d just done. His smile wavered, faltering, then sprung back to his lips again.

“It…it feels good to smile,” he said, a little hesitantly.

A flutter of attraction grew in my chest as he gazed at me. It was hard to tell what came first, my desire or his heated look, but things had been shifting between us now that we had shared both sorrow and pleasure.

I folded my arms over my chest to hide my breasts. “You wouldn’t happen to have a shirt?”

“What for?” He looked confused. “Are you cold?”

It was pleasantly warm inside the temple with the cool stone walls bringing a reprieve from the scorching desert outside.

But it wasn’t about the weather or temperature.

I simply felt awkward, having my breasts on display.

Kurai had seen all of me by now. I didn’t feel shy in his presence, but I’d never gotten used to the partial nudity that was common in Alveari Kingdom.

“It’s a habit,” I explained. “I just feel weird, running around topless.”

He tilted his head, with that expression of deep concentration he usually had when trying to comprehend the differences between us.

“Does it make you uncomfortable seeing me without a shirt too?”

“Oh no, darling,” I assured him with an ear-to-ear grin. “With a torso like yours, wearing a shirt would be a crime.”

His frown of confusion deepened. “I don’t understand.”

I slid my hand down his wide, hard chest then over the well-defined ridges of his abs.

“I enjoy seeing all this, Kurai. You certainly don’t have to cover up on my account.”

“I don’t mind seeing these too.” He lifted my breasts with his hands, making me squeak in surprise.

“You, I don’t have a problem with. But if we leave here or if anyone else comes in here, I’d rather have them covered. It’s good to have some support in this area too.”

“All right. As you wish,” he conceded. “Let’s cover them up.”

He picked up the strip of fabric he’d torn off my skirt earlier, then helped me wrap it around my chest.

“Thanks. That’s better.” I twisted to look at the back where he tied the ends of the strip in a bow between the leilathas on my spine.

The room seemed to spin, making me sway.

“Careful.” Kurai caught me under my arms. “You’re still weak. You need food for sustenance. Water alone isn’t enough.”

Normally, I would get lightheaded even from skipping a meal or two. With the support of his tendrils, I’d lasted for over two weeks without food. I felt much better with plenty of water sloshing inside my belly now, but my limbs still seemed heavy, weighted down by exhaustion I couldn’t shake off.

“Maybe I should take a nap?” I eyed his bed with longing.

He gave me a concerned look. “Let me find something for you to eat first, then you can rest.”

Since he refused to remove his tendrils from my leilathas , afraid that I would collapse without the support of his magic, we had to search for food together.

“What’s this room for?” I asked as we approached the wide archway at the bottom of the stairs.

“That’s our study. We spend most of our time in it and often take our midnight meal here too. There may be some food left. Let’s see.”

I followed him into a space that was more than just a room as it was a combination of several caves and niches of various sizes. They branched off each other and interconnected with a net of short corridors and arched walkways.

Embroidered floor cushions marked the reading areas, with trays of books or baskets of scrolls standing nearby.

Wooden shelves lined the walls all the way up to the high vaulted ceiling.

The shelves held stacks of books in thick leather bindings.

Metal racks between the rooms had parchment sheets draped over them.

I lifted a corner of one parchment, finding a hand-drawn map on the inside.

“Are these all maps?”

“Maps, garden layouts, or building plans.” Kurai inspected the trays with books, then rummaged through a basket with a lid next to a sitting pillow, searching for food.

“Who drew them? The Joy Guardians?”

“Yes. Some, like the plans of the temple and the nearby caves. But most came from other temples.”

“Are there more temples like this one?”

“There is only one Temple of the First Priestess with the Source of Joy. But other priests and priestesses serve other gods, who have their own temples.”

He moved on to the next room, then the next, as I followed, trying to learn more about the temple, the people who lived here, and the shadow fae society in general. I lifted scrolls, opened an occasional book, and asked questions.

“How many Joy Guardians live here?”

“Twelve. ”

“That’s not that many.”

“There can only ever be twelve of us—two for each corner of the hexagon.”

“Why hexagon and not triangle or square, for example? Circle is as good a shape as any, too.” I shrugged.

He gazed at me with amusement, propping his hands on his hips.

“The hexagon is the shape of a honeycomb cell that holds the sweet nectar. Sweetness brings joy. Just like you.” He smiled gently, pausing to caress my cheek with his fingers before continuing his search for food.

“But you don’t enjoy sweet things anyway.

To you, it’s like any other taste. Why worship it?

” I gestured at the spines of the books, most of which had some kind of hexagonal design imprinted into the binding.

Many of the maps had honeycomb frames. The hexagon shapes were also carved into the edges of the shelves and over the walkway entrances.

The elaborate mosaic in the queen’s palace often had patterns with hexagonal shapes, but their significance wasn’t as apparent there as it was here where the hexagons were the only shapes in any trim or decoration.

“Because Joy is divine, my sweet Ciana. For us, it’s extremely rare. Maybe that’s why we treasure it more than you ever could. Well…” He ran a hand through his unbound, still damp locks. “It looks like no one was planning to take their meal here today. No one brought any food in here.”

“Where do you usually store it?”

“There is an ice chest upstairs where the nightly offerings from the pilgrims are stored. Most of our food comes from the people who visit the temple. We’ll have to go back up there.”

Ready to follow him upstairs, I was about to close the book I held when a strip of paper slipped out from between its pages and flattered to the floor.

“What’s this?” I bent over and picked it up.

The honeycomb frame on the paper was hand-drawn, but the writing inside seemed to be an imprint of an engraving.

Kurai craned his neck to take a better look. “This is a bookmark with the words by the First Priestess. It’s a copy. We make them to give out to the pilgrims in memory of their visit here.”

I started reading the words on the bookmark, “Don’t be afraid ? —“

“…of the dawn, after a storm always comes peace,” Kurai finished for me, reciting it by heart. “These are the words of comfort left to us by the First Priestess of Joy. They’re carved in stone over the front doors to the temple too.”

“That was nice of her,” I mumbled, inspecting the bookmark. “Only it isn’t written in the language you speak, and it doesn’t say what you think it does. There is a comma here, see? And the ‘d’ in ‘dawn’ is capitalized.”

“What do you mean?” He stepped closer for a better look at the bookmark. “This is the ancient language that the First Priestess spoke. Many of her writings are in it, signed with this word right here.” He pointed at the end of the quote.

“And what do you think this word means?”

“We have decrypted it as ‘dark’ or ‘darkness.’ The different spelling is because the Priestess used it as her signature, not to be confused with the regular word ‘darkness’ used in her language.”

“Well, I have to say it, Kurai…” I twisted the bookmark in my fingers, trying and failing to make any sense of it or even of how it could’ve possibly gotten here.

“This ‘ancient language’ as you call it looks very much like English to me, and I’m not even talking about some old, Shakespearian version of it.

Just the plain modern English, the language I spoke back home.

And this mysterious signature word reads as ‘Melanie,’ which is a very common name for a woman where I come from.

I even have a younger cousin with that name… ”