She didn’t watch him leave through his ice wall, didn’t dare take her eyes off Dae. If she gave into the urge to drop her gaze, he’d vanish into a flow before she could work up the nerve to say something. Anything.
Or apparently he’d just shake his head and spin on his heel, stalk off like a normal person.
“Dae, wait!” Flames, she sounded like the girl she’d once been, desperate for approval from a boy who’d never given her a second glance. “It’s not what you think.”
He stopped at least. Turned, though given the fury on his face—worse, the betrayal—she almost wished he hadn’t. He wore the leathers he always did, black and fitted and flame-resistant, showcasing the form he’d chiseled from countless years spent wrestling an angry mountain into submission.
What had he looked like before? When he walked the surface like any man, clothed in wool and cotton, and tilled the land with his family? With sunlight glinting off his blond hair instead of lava-light?
It shouldn’t matter, any more than his beauty did now. But she always had to find something to argue with him about, to remind herself of that. Remind herself of where her heart belonged.
Not with the king, no. But not down here either. Her heart still beat Above, in the dome that had once been home.
“Not what I think?” He made a show of looking past her, to the ice wall. “The tyrant-king of flaming Fjordlandi wasn’t just kissing you?”
She winced, even as she cursed herself for it. “That part was what you think. But I wasn’t kissing him back.”
He spread his arms wide. “Why would it matter to me if you were?” Lowered them to his sides again. Spat a laugh that sounded more like accusation than amusement. “In fact, this makes sense. All those secret trysts over the years—”
“It’s not like that!” Tears clogged her throat, stung her eyes. She tried to turn away before he could see them, tried to obey the unwritten rule of life Below, a life carved out by this man before her and the four soul-brothers who followed, long before the first female joined them.No crying. No emotional manipulation. Nothing soft, nothing weak.
Clearly she failed, because when he said her name, there was apology in it. Regret. Not over his anger, no doubt, just over her reaction to it.
His fingers landed on her shoulder a moment later. “All right. I’m sorry.”
But he wasn’t. Couldn’t be. He hated the king, she knew he did, so why would he be sorry about his reaction to finding her with him? He was only sorry that, yet again, in one more thing, she wasn’t strong enough to be one of his people.
Maybe it was time to explain why. Maybe…maybe it was time to ask for help. She gathered what breath she could past the rockin her throat and let her knees buckle. Let the basalt of the floor welcome her.
Dae lowered himself gracefully down beside her. Waited.
She’d never told him her story—never told any of them, even Ember, though she’d wondered if the only other woman like them had a story similar to hers. Wondered if the king…but Ember had been a revolutionary, she’d made no secret about that. She and her husband had been condemned together for their crimes.
He had been dead before the lava swallowed him whole. She had swum to the rocky ledge, confused but unharmed, where Daemon and his brethren had met her with her new truth.
Elianne’s gaze dropped to Dae’s shoulder, where a few strands of hair had snagged on his leathers. “I was not thrown into the volcano in punishment, like the rest of you. I…” She knew the story, had lived the story, had replayed it in her mind hundreds of times. So why didn’t the words want to come? She had to squeeze her eyes shut, measure another breath in…out…in.
In a move as shocking as the king’s kiss, Dae picked up her hand where it rested against her knee and held her fingers tenderly in his. “Take your time.”
She could withstand his gruff moods, his demands to be better, his constant irritation with her—earned, granted, by her own constant snapping at him. But gentleness? That could be her undoing. She swallowed, tried again.
“I was unwell.” Not the most accurate choice of word, but the simplest explanation. The only one she could make herself say. “There was a team of doctors in the dome from the capital—inoculation time. My case was troubling enough that my healer referred me to them.” She focused on the water trickling by in its channel, reflecting the light from the slow-moving lava on the opposite wall. “I thought I was lucky, that they had time tosee me. But they took blood from me—standard, they said. For a normal battery of tests to help them understand what was wrong with me.”
Dae’s fingers tightened around hers, and she could feel the heat of his Cursed mark on his palm—the circle of flames, white against his skin. “Like the Test?”
“I didn’t think so—why would it be? There had been no call for one. No Fjorders selected for a Blessed Union at the time. The king had been married for almost three decades already, and to my best friend’s cousin, no less. I knew Andresa when I was a girl, though I scarcely remembered her. She’d babysat us a few times. I thought they were just normal tests, for illness. For answers. They kept me in their hospital while they ran them, and then…”
She could still see the doctor’s face. How it had gone from easy, indifferent care to pinched concern when he walked back into her little curtained room. She’d been alone when he came—it was spring, planting season, and no one could stay with her while she waited. She hadn’t minded, not until that moment.
“I thought, when the doctor came in, that he was going to tell me I was dying. The look on his face…” She shook her head, the fear still so close to the surface, no matter how many times over how many years she’d forced it down. “He told me there was an anomaly in my blood. That he needed to do another test. I expected a needle, but that’s not what he pulled out.”
Dae sucked in a breath. “A flint blade. Like the others in that, I assume.”
She nodded and made herself meet his gaze. “A flint blade, a drop of blood in a basin of water, and he watched it as if all the answers to the universe swirled inside it.” She turned her right hand, the one he wasn’t holding, over revealing her own Cursed mark. A double ring of white, flames dancing between the two edges. Just like his. Just like Ember’s and Logi’s and Eldrid’s.
The same, exactly the same—so how could the king claim she was anything but a daemon, if they were?
Dae’s thumb moved over her knuckle, back again. “Not the answers to the universe. But the answers to you. He was priming your blood for the Awakening of the Curse. Just as they do the Blessing, but with flint instead of titanium. It’s what our blood responds to.”
