“You don’t knowanythingabout me,” he snapped, only for a hot surge of irritation to rise in his chest, both at the anger he did feel, and at the knowing smirk that crossed her face.
“I know very little about you, Changeling King,” she agreed, nodding. “Educate me.”
The tension in Florian’s shoulders deflated. Clearly he wasn’t going to win this argument, so he might as well tell her what she wanted to hear.
“Of course I’m angry,” he muttered. “We’ve been traveling through the Blight for nearly two weeks. And then we fell into your jungle and I hurt my back and then I almost drowned. Trying to get here sucked.”
Slowly she nodded. “Yes, that would be frustrating. What else?”
Florian shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“I think you do,” she pressed.
He scowled, but considered it for a moment.
“I’m angry my dad died,” he finally said, quieter this time. “I’m more angry about it than sad. I barely got to know him. I didn’t know him at all for twenty years, and then when I finally met him he died a month later. And he was supposed to help me. This would all be a lot easier if he were still alive. But everyone else seems more sad about it than me, and that makes me... I don’t know. I guess I feel guilty I don’t really feel sad about it anymore.”
“How could you mourn someone you barely knew?” she agreed, shrugging. Her bright purple eyes remained trained on him. “But there is more you feel guilt over.”
Florian’s face burned red with embarrassment. “What, do you want my whole life story?”
Again she shrugged. “If that’s what you feel compelled to tell me.”
“I don’t feelcompelledto tell you anything,” he muttered. But she kept looking at him with the same expectant expression. “What? What do you want from me?”
“I want to know where the rest of this guilt is from,” she replied.
“My dad just died. Why wouldn’t I feel shitty about it?”
“You just said you didn’t feel sad,” she answered, and he scowled.
“That isn’t what I meant,” he started, but something in the air changed as Elodie started to speak again. The white nothingness around them seemed to almost take on a lavender tinge for only a moment as she opened her mouth.
“Tell me,” she said, and Florian could feel the magic rush through him like a wave. He couldn’t stop the words bubbling up from his throat.
“It’s my fault,” he croaked, hating her as he said it. “I didn’t listen to him—and he died—it was my fault.”
The words seemed to float through the air, a soft reddish hue against their white surroundings, like tiny threads spidering out from his mouth. Elodie reached out and grabbed the ephemeral threads. Their color became purple in her hand, and she tugged.
“And I’m s—s—”
Florian gagged, trying with every ounce of willpower to stop the words that she was pulling out from his body, but it was like trying to plug up a dam that was already overflowing. “I’m scared.”
He burst into tears as he said it, and everything came gushing out of him at once. “I didn’t ask for any of this—I just want to go home—I want to go on that trip with Nadia—and I don’t—I don’t want to die.”
Elodie’s face was unmoving as she watched him, still pulling on the threads of magic in her hands as if she were rolling up a ball of yarn, and the words kept coming out of him.
“Those shifters in the Blight,” Florian cried. He squeezed his eyes shut so he didn’t have to look at her pallid face as he spoke. “I killed—at least one of them. They weren’t monsters. The Arrow made her shift back—they were probably all shifters, and maybe we could have s-saved them. And Kade is—”
He slapped his hands to his mouth, but the words still came, muffled as they were.
“I know he’s going to leave eventually. I was so shitty to him before—I don’t even know why he likes me. He should hate me. I don’t want him to leave.” He felt the next thought bubbling up in him, and pressed his hands closer to his mouth, but he was still helpless to stop it.
“And I still haven’t told him—told anybody—how much I f-forgot—and that scares me too, I don’t know w-what it means… I don’t w-want to forget.” His voice broke into a sob, but still he spoke and cried, unintelligible.
Slowly Elodie nodded, her hands stilling. The thread coming from Florian’s mouth snapped, and in her hands was what looked like a tiny spool of glimmering red-violet thread.
“That should do it,” she said.
