Page 126 of Winter Gods & Serpents

There was something wrong, her attention dropped down, she didn’t even glance at me or respond. I expected her to laugh, joke about what I had said and even tease me. Yet she said nothing, not even looked at me.

“The realm turned upside down and sideways to hells already?” she asked too calmly for her, taking a small sip from a flask.

“I thought you were beautiful the first moment I have laid eyes on you.”

She laughed shortly, unamused. “I think I know which moral way this is going. Facades, right? Truest evil hides in the pretties and purest of things. Caelus liber, not certain which chapter, I was terribly busy learning to become a murderer. But don’t you live vicariously through your belief, Adriatian?”

She was wrong, like many other times but a lot held me from correcting her. I didn’t have too, yet I wanted.

“What happened to calling me Kilian?”

“What happened to calling me contortion of the unnatural?”

Dahaara indeed. “I never said the contortion is ugly and it happens to almost have a soft spot for children.”

“I’ve heard they taste rank, you know, from fellow ybrises,” she said, waving her now lone dagger in the air, and I could not help but smile.

“Which taste best then?”

She peaked at me, shortly. “I’d say six and something feet, Adriatian male, silver eyes that of a snake and a penchant for annoying ybrises. But he can’t be beguiled.”

I liked that she never hid her attraction to me but didn’t enjoy it, not when it made me react. “Is that why you can’t see me in the eye, because they remind you of a snake?”

“Perhaps,” she quietly said, carving shapes with her blade in the snowy ground. “Perhaps I don’t want to look at you at all, perhaps I enjoy staring at snakes.”

I cleared my throat of tension. “Freed another bird today, which forest will you take her too?”

“Tenebrose, to honour my promise.”

“You hate to see suffering.”

Her stare turned hard as if I’d offended her. “Paint me weak Adriatian, that makes for the finest of snares.”

“It only paints you human, not weak.”

She smiled mirthlessly. “Yet your sort saw everything but that.”

She took off towards the horses, leaving me to process her words—words that I found bitter truths in. She was making me doubt myself and I did not enjoy that, not when you are taught to operate with a certain code of morality. Were ends beginning to justify retched means? Had eye for an eye, life for a life become the definition of just? It had never managed to convince me before, how was she managing to spell me onto sympathy? Had I let myself get too close to her?

Part III

Day Dream

Chapter 24

Bruises and Chaos

Snowlin

I did not land an inch of sleep all night, pacing back and forth the room, thinking, but not of my father’s reaction. My mind had been on the Adriatian who healed my hands days ago, the one who almost gave his life in exchange for mine, the one who had kept me warm, the one who had helped me, the one who called me beautiful.

I could not stand pacing by my room anymore, and thinking made me terribly hungry.

Mal and Cai stood by the door. I told them I was hungry and that I would head for the kitchen on my own, both had strongly refused and were now sat across the table from me watching me drink my milk, arms crossed over their chest, they looked like they were about to scold me.

“What…What?” I asked both of them, annoyed at their silence and endless staring.

“Nothing, just watching a heavenly being gulp on milk, it's not an everyday sight I get to witness,” Cai teased in an expressionless calm.