Page 32 of The Veil of Hollow Gods

His features shift. I can’t tell what it means. "Come, sit," he says, gesturing to the stone bench beneath a fiery orange-blossomed tree.

"I will not."

"Why?" He seems genuinely confused.

"Oh, I don’t know, Tyr. Maybe because you rewrote my memory? Maybe because you flew into a rage when I said your full name—and earnestly scared me? Or maybe it’s because you hit Sinea." I pause, gauging his reaction.

But he doesn’t react.

"Don’t get me wrong, Sinea probably earned it. But hitting women? That’s a line, Tyr. A dangerous one. And what next? Sacrificing babies? Eating barn kittens?"

He doesn’t flinch. Just watches, like he’s measuring how much fire I have left. Doesn’t defend, doesn’t deflect. Just takes it.

"Are you finished?"

I put my hands on my hips. "Maybe."

He gives me a tight smile. "Well, if you are, then I’d like it on the record that I did not hit Sinea. Shoreena did. "

The Gloaming Room woman?

"On my orders, or course, but I don’t abuse women, Amara."

Before I can say or ask anything, he keeps talking. "And I also did not take your memory."

"You expect me to believe?—"

He cuts me off by moving into my space so quickly, it’s like the air moved with him. "I didn’t do any of the things you’ve accused me of, but make no mistake, Amara. I will do everything in my power to make you what you need to become."

The weight in his voice makes me shudder. He’s scent mingles in my nose, and a memory rises, unbidden.

Frozen, bleeding, near death at the hands of a demon guard who didn’t think enough of my life to protect me from the elements.

"What is your goal in hurting my potential Maiden, guardsman?"

Something in me uncoils at the sound of that voice.

“Is that how you treat all women, guard? Or just Maiden potentials?”

And then…

I look up at Tyr, breathless. "You…you saved me from that guard," I say as the rest of the memory plays in my mind. The guard’s freezing lashes, reddening face. The lip split just the same way as he’d split mine.

Tyr, so close now I can feel the warmth of his body, lifts the veil from my eyes. It’s gentle, slow. He carries the movement through, smoothing the hood down my hair, then to my arms. His hands are softer than I expect, warmer too.

I could almost mistake it for a human touch and relax into it.

And for a moment, I do .

"You think I saved you." His voice turns soft, almost pitying. "But you haven’t seen what it will cost you yet."

A blood-red bloom shudders in my periphery—like even the garden flinched. I stare back at Tyr, searching the molten obsidian gaze for something solid.

I find nothing.

Whatever he means, he believes it’s true with his whole being.

The bloom shrivels, turning black at the edges, curling inward.

Tyr nods, stepping away. "You’re right to fear me." He strides to the stone bench, seating himself there. He doesn’t ask me to join him. He simply sits there. Waiting.

For several moments, I wonder what might happen if I refuse. If I simply stand here until the second Trial is over. Would the sigilweave whisk me back to my chamber? Would it instantly send me to another vestige to find a husband and make a life?

I let that scenario play out in my mind for a few moments.

A quiet life with a husband and possibly children.

And maybe…

Maybe another version of me might have been content with that life. The version who hadn’t been broken by so many frozen seasons in Tiriana. She would have been happy with that.

But not me.

I hate the stink of it.

It’s not what I chose.

I didn’t take Vella’s place here to simply survive. To fall into the meaning behind the first Trial accidentally and refuse to participate in the second .

I came here to protect her from this. From ever having to do this again.

I came here to shatter the godsdamn gameboard. To salt the land and build something new. "What do I have to do? How do I become the Maiden?"

Tyr’s shoulders lower, only the smallest amount, but I notice. His voice softens with his next words. "We start with you sitting next to me."

I cross the night garden, aethermagic puffing up with each step. He doesn’t shift as I sit beside him. Our thighs touch. He doesn’t move away.

"This isn’t what you think," he says, too soft.

"How do you know what I think?"

He sighs, turning to face me better. "I know what I would think in your position."

I laugh in the king of Shadowfell’s face. "You know what you’d think," I snap, "if you were the weaker sex in a world built to break you? If you were forced into some godsdamned performance, no one believes in but still expects you to bleed for?"

Despite himself, Tyr lets a smile tug at his mouth. "I’m not pretending to understand your pain, Amara. But I know you likely think this trial is about…" He pauses, brushing a lock of hair behind my ear. "Physical intimacy."

I sigh, trying hard not to roll my eyes at the king of Shadowfell. "If not that, then what?"

Those mirrored black eyes take me in, seeming to pierce through not just the sharp edges I’ve armed myself with, not only the lace they’ve wrapped me in, but all the way to the thoughts I keep buried beneath.

It’s hard not to flinch under that level of scrutiny. At being seen so thoroughly .

"Would you like me to show you?" His voice is soft, barely more than a whisper.

But it lands in me like molten lead, like all the obsidian walls of Shadowfell herself crashing into me at once.

I swallow. Hard. "Will it hurt?"

His dark brows pull together, searching my face. "Not in the way you fear," he finally says, and I don’t know what to make of that.

"All right," I whisper.

He goes still for several moments before taking my hand in his.

The air between us hums, buds and blossoms shiver like he’d reached out and touched them as well.

"Try to relax," he murmurs, still peering deep into my soul.

He’s so close, I smell that sweet aroma from the first time we met…

And the world blurs away.

The smell of cold stone and fresh embers hits me first.

I’m back in that cave.

Except…

I’m not me. I’m watching—no, I’m inside?—

"Shhh. Be still," Tyr says from some place outside this memory.

I jerk back, the cold stone bench biting into my spine. "What…" I shake my head, and the memory—if that’s even what it was—dissipates. Tyr’s face comes back into focus, along with the rest of the night garden. His lip is slightly curled as if…

"What in the shattered fucking realms was that?"

He presses a finger to his temple lightly. "It was my memory of the cave. And when you rip yourself from the cradle of my mind like that, your claws leave marks. "

I still.

"If you had told me what you were doing instead of dropping me into the worst day of my life from the outside, I wouldn’t have fought so hard to get out."

He nods, letting go of my hand. After a moment, he asks to try again with a single brow raise. I take a breath, remind myself why I’m allowing this, and brace for what’s to come.

Again, the garden fades, the world floats away. Easier this time. Softer. The way he should’ve done it the first time.

I slip into his mind gently, feeling the texture, the vibration of his thoughts first— tense, steady, determined, under which runs a current of ? —

The image of the cave focuses in front of me.

I lay on the ground he must have cleared for me, wrapped in his cloak, unconscious, looking about a hair’s breadth away from death. Dama’s hand, my lip hadn’t just been split—the ice mangled it, black and rotting.

I can’t quite hear Tyr’s thoughts, but I can feel them, the edges of them, anyway. He watches me, and there’s something so?—

Mournful. Longing even in his thoughts.

But the moment I feel the shape of those emotions, he locks them down.

He waves a hand, and the rot and freeze disappear from my face, along with the death pallor. In an instant I went from grey-skinned and near death to rosy-cheeked and whole.

I stir, bolting upright and give him the sourest expression I’ve ever seen on a human face. Like I can’t even stand the look of him.

Except I know that’s not true. I was cataloguing his features and trying to work out why I was so warm with such a meager fire.

"Dama’s fucking hand, you kept me warm. Not just the fire or your cloak, but that—that whole time. You kept me warm with your magic?"

Tyr answers outside the memory. "I did. What of it?"

I don’t answer, pulled instead back to the memory where cave-Tyr’s thrum of emotion—or rather what he lets me see of it—changes shape.

He’s amused.

"See something you like, Maiden?"

I hold his gaze, anger and vitriol burning bright in my gaze, before asking, "Where am I?"

I don’t hear the rest. I’m too focused on Tyr’s experience of me. So guarded, so angry, and cold and?—

And I fought hard for every ounce of that hardness. It was frozen into me, year after desolate, windburned year in Tiriana.

Tyr’s thoughts take a different shape, though. My sharp edges don’t make him contract.

They make him expand, as if to be a soft place for my edges to rest.

The memory shifts, blurring, smearing away like rain from a pane of glass. I’m dislodged from that version of Tyr and inserted into another.

"For the love of the fucking Dama!" I yell outside the memory. "Cinderballs!"

The giant ghost-faced horse nickers at me—I mean Tyr—and now I have both the shape of Tyr’s emotions in my mind and?—

The bloody horse’s?

Tyr asks the horse where his brother is.

He’s off giving you and the human female privacy .

I shake my head. "Get me out, Tyr. This-this is too much."

Gently, as though he’s scooped me up in both hands, Tyr nestles me back in my own mind.

I stare at him, those mirrored eyes saying nothing and everything at once.

I cross my arms. "Your horse really does speak to you, then?"

Tyr lets out a single ha. A moment passes, and he says nothing, simply holding my gaze steady.

"That’s not why you pulled out of the memory, is it? A talking horse?"

His words are a thread lacing my ribs tight, stitching me in with all the disquiet they uncover.