Page 58 of Forged in Fading

The remaining Elan elf, blood pouring from his injured arm, now held a struggling Pyry as a desperate shield against Boden. If Pyry had actually ever agreed to try sparring with her, he would know how to wield that damn dagger or any of the weapons he obsessively collected.

She sprinted toward them just as a tumble of earth shifted Pyry’s captor off balance. Kat tossed Alvara her spear from gods knew where they had been hiding it, and Alvara blinded the Elan elf with a shower of snow.

“Get down now!” Alvara yelled, and Pyry obeyed, dropping to his knees. She whipped the shaft of her spear and bashed the Elan elf in the head, and he collapsed to the ground.

Howls of agony and what sounded eerily like the ripping of flesh erupted behind her. She did her best to block it out as she helped Pyry to his feet, who blinked rapidly, swaying as if he might faint. The punctures in his neck appeared to be his only injury other than his pride.

An unsettling quiet fell over the camp. Four bodies sprawled around them, two mangled beyond recognition. Boden, now back in his elf form, stood over one of them and panted, blood dripping from more parts of him than Alvara cared to contemplate. She was fairly confident most of it wasn’t his.

“Is everyone all right?” Kat asked, her forehead crinkled. Her light brown skin and lavender tunic were somehow spotless despite the carnage.

Alvara looked to Pyry, who nodded with wide eyes. “We’re fine.”

“We need to move.” Boden jogged toward their horses, which had escaped unscathed. “Someone must have alerted them that we were in the city.”

Logically, that should have been Alvara’s first concern, but all she could say was, “You can shift?”

He looked at her as if she had hit her head too hard in the scuffle. Gods, with the gore splattered on his face and the lethal way he moved, he might as well have been fading incarnate. “Yes?”

“You were at the Grove of Souls that day, the anniversary of Eloisa’s fading. I saw you.”

Boden winced as he untied his horse. “We’ll talk on the way, but we really need to go.”

“Here.” Alvara removed her coat, tore one of her gray sleeves off using her dagger, and wrapped the piece of cloth around a gash in his arm.

His eyes stilled on where her hands touched him. “Thank you.”

They readied themselves as quickly as they could, while Boden and Alvara decided through silent looks that Pyry would ride in the sleigh so neither of them had to converse with him on the journey back to Malva’s capital.

“So, you’re a bear,” Alvara said when they had established the fastest pace their horses could manage.

Boden cast her a long look. “I’m not a literal bear, Alvara. I just have the ability to shift.”

She coughed and wiped a hand over her own cheek, and he did the same, frowning at the ghastly remnants of the attack slathered over the back of his hand. “You looked like a bear to me. You were there. And you didn’t tell me.”

“You’re not willing to leave this alone, are you?”

“I wouldn’t hold your breath.”

He rolled his neck side to side, grimacing. “When I’m able to, I do my best to travel to the Grove of Souls to honor the ones we’ve lost. I also tend to travel through there in my bear form as a quicker way to move between kingdoms.”

Traveling through the Grove of Souls? Alvara’s superstitious father would have faded just at the very thought. She, on the other hand, had taken the dare like every other youngling to visit the elven offshoot of Lojarem near the center of the Grove. It had turned out to be rather unimpressive and disappointing for the supposed offspring of the large life tree rooted in Vitharen’s corpse—just a small tree that held leaves year round. Each of the five races had a tree in their realm born from Lojarem, and she had always assumed theirs were just as boring.

But being able to become an animal whenever you wanted? That was the furthest thing from boring, unlike some of the other rarer elven powers. Healing and illusions at least seemed more useful than absorbing magic or freezing time, but they were nothing compared to transforming into an entirely different being on a whim.

“What is shifting like?”

“It’s freedom,” Boden said. “For me, at least. Leaving my elf form behind, all of those memories, even for a little while.”

“Do you choose your shifting form?”

“No, it chooses you. Your form finds a common thread with your soul.”

What would it be like to leave herself, every worry and fear, behind and become someone different? Even for a few hours? “What do you think mine would be?”

Boden hummed to himself as if thinking long and hard about her question. “A goose.”

“A goose?”