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Nylah shrugged and pushed herself up from her desk as if she couldn’t sit down any longer. She walked to a tall window and looked out over the gardens, her eyes flitting about like she saw everything and nothing at the same time.
“I don’t know how to explain it, Dex. Sometimes, these things are just too complicated to put into words. I am busy, though. I don’t have time to chit-chat.”
She turned around to look at me, those golden eyes boring into my soul for a moment before she forced herself to look away.
She was distant from me, as though a whole world lay between us, and we weren’t standing in the same room.
Something was up, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. Nylah’s attitude was strange. She wasn’t usually this secretive, this distant from me. We were closer than this. Hell, when Ellie had left Ren a few years ago, trying to save us all, Nylah had turned to me with her worries and her fears.
When Palgia had waged war against us, we’d spent nights together, reminiscing about the past in case one of us didn’t make it, telling each other how glad we were to be in each other’s lives—that all of it had been worth it.
Nylah and I weren’t like this.
“What are you hiding from me?” I asked.
Nyla looked at me, shaking her head quickly. “Nothing.”
I didn’t believe her, but if she didn’t want to talk to me, I wasn’t going to push it. Far be it from me to demand her attention. If she didn’t want to give it to me…
“Fine,” I said. “I have training to do. I guess I’ll see you around.”
Nylah nodded curtly without looking at me, and I turned on my heel and marched away.
A part of me wanted to turn around and ask her what was going on. It felt different between us, and I didn’t like it. I tried to talk to her. She could reach out to me if she needed me, she knew she always could.
I huffed. Nylah’s distance put me in a bad mood.
I walked to the warrior quarters and let myself out through the door that led onto the training arena where I would work with the new recruits today.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The clouds above were pregnant with more rain. It had been raining for days on end, and we had a welcome break, but it was far from over.
The training grounds were like a second home to me. I felt the most comfortable here. The warriors’ windows looked down on the large, sanded training area, where we trained for hand-to-hand combat and where Nylah taught the warriors to fight with their magic. The sand was wet, making it muddy.
Training was going to get messy today.
Next to it, we had a training arena with all kinds of weapons, shields, and dummies, and behind that, a well with water. A running track led around the compound, stretching for a couple of miles. The grass was long with the rain. The gardening team would have to do something about it, but the long grass would be hard on the warriors’ legs, and they could do with the extra push.
When we’d gone to war against Palgia, we’d had to train in the fields beyond the palace to accommodate all the other Fae soldiers who had joined us from the cities and villages in Jasfin, but when we were at peace, we trained within the palace walls.
I turned to look at the sky. My warriors were late. I scowled.
A moment later, the door banged open, and the new warriors walked out of the door talking and laughing, bumping each other.
“Get your asses in line!” I barked and crossed my arms. “Is this how you treat your superiors? By arriving late?”
They all stared ahead, standing at attention, their mouths finally shut.
I walked up to one of them. He was a young, snotnosed Fae, still wet behind his pointed ears. His pale face was blemish-free. He hadn’t yet seen the horrors of war, and he hadn’t felt the pain of loss.
“What’s your excuse?”
“We were getting ready. We weren’t sure if there was training with the rain threatening, so—”
“You don’t get to decide if you train or not. Only I decide that. And we’re training, whether it rains or not. Got it?”
They all nodded.
“Do you think a war will wait for us? Do you think if it rains, the enemy will turn around and say, ‘oh, the weather is bad, we’ll attack you another day’?”
