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And still,stillhe wouldn’t meet my gaze. Watching Lyn and Valdora a few feet away, he absently gathered some loose documents from the marble surface, adjusted the buckle of his sheath belt, raked a hand through his tousled blond locks. Busying himself with absolutely nothing at all. Avoiding me sopointedly he may as well have told me to bugger off and leave him alone.
‘Tared,’ I hissed.
He stiffened.
‘For hell’s sake, Tared, could you justtellme what you’re playing at, rather than—’
And just like that, he was gone – vanished into thin air like a maddening, cowardly puff of smoke.
Chapter 4
It turned out Iwasn’t so tired after all.
Who needed sleep when there was plenty of anger to keep me going? I could feel it sizzling in my veins as I marched through the now deserted Underground corridors, the culmination of weeks and weeks of worries and annoyances boiling to the surface.Go to hell, Emelin– did he really think he could brush me off so spinelessly after that? If he never wanted to see me again, the very damn least he could do was tell me straight to my face.
And if this was how he intended to play the game, I’dmakehim give me my answers, if need be.
But he wasn’t in his bedroom, that sparsely furnished, almost austere room which whispered that its owner had already lost allhe possessed once and would be damned if he suffered a similar loss ever again. He wasn’t in the quiet living room or in the equally empty cesspit Edored called his bedroom. He wasn’t in the kitchen, stuffing his face with bread or drinking himself to death on Hallthor’s home-brewed honey mead.
Which didn’t leave that many options. Really, assuming he hadn't faded into the world outside in some dramatic attempt to avoid every single person he knew for the rest of the night, it left only one.
The same place where we’d grown from wary allies into friends, all those months ago, where he’d grown from a stranger into the patient teacher proud of even my clumsiest stumbling. The same place where he’d called me a little fae brat for the first time, with that wry grin that somehow turned the insult into a brotherly show of affection I had clung to with every fibre of my being.
The bloodynerve.
I spun on my heel and sprinted towards the training hall, Alyra fluttering in wide circles around me like some feathery little moon.
‘You might want to get out of here,’ I muttered, teeth gritted. Something told me she’d try to dig her claws into Tared’s face the moment we found him, and if anyone were to gouge out his eyes tonight, I’d bloody well do it myself. ‘I’ll manage this on my own.’
She did not seem particularly impressed by that argument.
‘There are gardens around here,’ I added, more hastily now, slowing my steps as we approached the last corner before the training hall. ‘There’s plenty of rooms to fly there. Some nice trees to take a nap. Doesn’t that sound much better than this dark, stuffy place?’
I wasn’t even fully surewhyI wanted to face this fight alone so badly – why even the staunchly supportive, inhuman eyes of my own familiar felt like too much scrutiny. But it ran deep,the anger blazing in my chest. It seeped into parts of me evenIbarely dared to look at closely, and whatever I might end up saying, whatever I might end up doing …
It wasmine.
‘Lots of worms too, probably,’ I added, throwing every bit of persuasion I possessed into my voice. ‘You must be hungry, after all the excitement of the night.’
That seemed to hit the mark. She wavered, then fluttered down to perch on my shoulder, peering at me as if to determine whether I could still be considered entirely sound of mind and whether I might be joking about the worms.
‘I’ll be fine’, I muttered, and forced a smile. ‘Go get dinner.’
She huffed, ruffled her feathers one last time, but flew off in a storm of silvery white down, vanishing around the corner in the blink of an eye. I waited another few heartbeats, then drew in a resolute breath and marched on – rounding that last corner, finally, behind which the rune-covered gate to the training hall was waiting for me.
It stood ajar.
I didn’t pause to knock, didn’t check whether anyone else might be using the hall at this time of the night. Not even alves were generally mad enough to get up for sword training at two in the morning, after all. Barely slowing down, I flung the door the rest of the way open and stamped inside.
In the dim light, it took me a moment to make out the familiar outlines of the room, the high ceiling and the chests and benches along the smooth black walls. And, sitting on one of those benches in the most shadowy corner of the hall …
Tared.
I skidded to a standstill five steps into the hall, breath shallow, as my mind adjusted to align the sight of him with whatever I had expected. He’d been fleeing me, I’d thought. Had cowardly tried to avoid me, either because he had something to say Iwould not want to hear, or because he had something to say he did not want to speak out loud.
But the male lounging on that narrow wooden bench, long legs crossed and sword bared next to him, looked like he had been waiting for me.
My eloquent, furious thoughts crashed to a befuddled halt.
