“I—I actually don’t know the answer to that question.”
“Hmm. I’ve never heard of this type of stone before, much less seen it. And it’s one of two buildings in this city that is made of it. It’s odd, don’t you think?” she mused, intrigue lacing her tone as she muttered softly.
Her bare feet padded lightly against the black stone, her near silence an odd contrast to the echoing click of my boots in the hall. She left her shoes in my office, tucking them beneath the armchair by the fire for later. It made me inordinately happy that she’d already made herself comfortable in my space.
She’d taken to wearing the Mage blacks of the Academy, matching me nearly perfectly—minus the boots, of course. Secretly, I missed the deep earth tones that characterized her appearance when I found her in Isrun.
“Rohak?” Faylinn said, her eyes glinting with humor.
“What?” I asked gruffly, pulling my eyes from the perusal of her body.
“I asked how old the Academy was,” she supplied, her voice soft and lit with a laugh.
I cocked my head to the side, folding my arms behind my back as I thought.
“I’m rather embarrassed to say that I honestly don’t know. I know it’s old—the oldest building in Vespera. Unless you count the monolith in the square. But I don’t know the exact age.”
Faylinn chewed her lip and nodded in thought, continually dragging her fingertips lightly across the stone wall.
“I’d like to look at that obelisk at some point,” she mused more to herself than to me. I nodded anyway, in case she was searching for a response or reaction.
She stayed silent then, lost in her own thoughts, as we descended further beneath the Academy, the air cooling considerably, until we came to a floor that looked like a dead-end hallway.
I gestured for Faylinn to step off the staircase onto the landing, inhaling a whiff of eucalyptus and something inherently Faylinn, before I followed her.
“This is . . . a dead end,” Faylinn astutely observed. For such an incredibly intelligent woman, some of her observations wererather obvious. I chuckled lightly with a slight inclination of my head.
“This is it, isn’t it. This is where you kill me,” she deadpanned on a sigh with a shake of her curly head. “I should have done so much more before my death.”
While I knew she said those things in jest, I had the sudden urge to know what she would regret if she were to die.
Don’t think about Faylinn dying.
“What—” I cleared my throat. “What would you have done? If I was here to kill you, that is.”
Faylinn smiled softly before her eyes glazed, seeing something only she was privy to.
“I’d like to see my family again—my real family, though I don’t know who they are.” She smiled ruefully. “Getting my memories back would be nice.”
She thought for a moment more before continuing.
“There is just so much to read, so much to discover. I’m certain that I’ll run out of time here before I’m able to learn it all.”
I chuckled at that—Faylinn the scholar.
“But I’d like to . . . fall in love.” She mumbled the last part so low that I could barely hear it.
Fall in love?My heart beat erratically as the blood in my veins heated at the thought of Faylinn falling in love with someone,marryinghim, having his babies.
I clenched my fists to keep from reaching for her and pulling her into my chest with a growled ‘mine.’
“That would be nice,” I gritted between my teeth before striding down the hall, desperate to put some distance between myself and the intelligent and ferocious woman who kept capturing my thoughts.
She could never be mine.
“This looks like a dead end, but it’s a decoy,” I clipped, veering our conversation back to the purpose of our little jaunt downstairs and away from any topic about Faylinn that made me irrationally possessive and angry.
Faylinn, thankfully, picked up on my energy and said nothing more about her last wish. Even if, like the masochist I was, I decidedly wanted to know more.
