“My sword?” He raised a brow. I ignored the mocking tone in his words as my scholarly curiosity won out over my fear and I took another step toward him, examining the knife.
“It’s beautiful,” I breathed.
“The dagger was made in the River Court,” he murmured, begrudgingly, as if he didn’t want to have this conversation at all. “The Salt guards don’t use these to protect the River Palace, so you might not have seen them.”
River Palace. Salt guards.
Each bit of our conversation gave me a clue to where I was and what world I had stepped into.
I didn’t understand half of what he was saying, or what palace he was talking about, but I wanted to know as much as I could. “Why do you use one, then?”
He gave a light quirk of lips. “Because I’m from here. They are not.”
I struggled to make sense of his words. “But you are hunting it... the halmasti. Are you protecting the palace too?”
His mouth tightened. “I’m not a guard. Just here to hunt the beast.”
The beast in question growled low, and we both swung our heads toward it. It had finally left the tree and had almost made it around the boulder. The fae turned to say something to me, but his gaze snagged on Queen Azari’s haath phool gleaming on my wrist.
His eyes darkened, his mouth going white with the press of his lips. I processed the shock, then anger, coming over him.
“Where did you get that?” His voice was low and urgent as he sheathed his blade an took a step toward me, his hand outstretched.
“It’s mine,” I answered, tucking my hand into the pocket of my skirt so that the haath phool disappeared from view.
“It isn’t yours,” he said with a growl. “It doesn’t belong to you in the slightest.” He reached for my arm, but at that moment the halmasti roared, the sound deafening in the forest.
The silver-haired fae didn’t even look its way, his gaze focused solely on me. His bright hair and dark eyes and skin contrasted with one another in a way that made him seem otherworldly, like a god, or demon, or something unnatural.
My breath caught in my chest, my heart hammering so loudly it nearly drowned out the sound of the beast roaring.
Hewasotherworldly, and I kept forgetting that.
I was not in my world, I was in the land of the fae. The peris, as they were once called.
And this man was not human.
“Give it to me.” His voice was as dangerous as the beast.
“No.” I wasn’t about to give up the one relic that had brought me across the River, not if I wanted a way to get back home.
He lunged for me, but at that moment the halmasti chose to do the same. We were so wrapped up in one another that we hadn’t seen how close it had gotten.
It leapt on us, barreling into our bodies and taking us to the ground. The fae landed on top of me and all the air left my lungs. He had one hand in the grass by my head, and the other pressed against the halmasti’s jaw, preventing it from coming closer.
It gnashed against his hand, and it seemed like sheer force of will alone kept the wolf from ripping his throat out.
“My blade,” he bit out, his eyes finding mine while he pushed the halmasti back. I was crushed beneath his weight and the halmasti’s and I could barely listen to what he was saying while the beast’s giant teeth were minutes away from sinking into me.
“What?” I shook my head. “What do you mean?”
“Pull out my knife. Give it to me and then slide out of my arms.” The words ground out of him, the beast pushing him further on top of me. His hand was now at the beast’s throat, his hips pressed to mine as he grunted with the force of holding it back.
I wasn’t sure how I could possibly slide out from underneath him, as pressed into the earth as I was, but as soon as I thought it, ropey green vines curled around me, sprouting from the ground, supporting his weight and easing him off me. I stared at the vines, which two seconds ago hadn’t been there at all. He grunted as the wolf lunged at us again, and the muscles in his shoulder strained.
“Hurry, I don’t have much more in me,” he said, his dark eyes finding mine.
I blinked and moved my hands as fast as I could, sliding the naga-headed dagger from the leather sheath at his waist and pulling the blade between our bodies, unsure of how to give it to him.
